Reflections of a stormy petrel
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Fabio Paolo Barbieri's LiveJournal:
[ << Previous 20 ]
| Friday, May 18th, 2012 | | 7:40 am |
Sometimes the collective unconscious thinks more clearly than we do
Has anyone noticed that, in spite of the massed ranks of propaganda for the sexual revolution and its results, vulgar language continues to use "F***" and "Screw" exclusively in a bad way? The unconscious mind that dominates vulgar language experiences "f***ing" and "screwing" exclusively as negative things, malicious exploitation without any advantage to its victims ("they screwed us") and utter ruin ("We're screwed") and damnation ("Screw them!"). Fifty years of propaganda haven't managed to convince the human unconscious that being sexually exploited is anything but an unmixed evil. | | Thursday, May 17th, 2012 | | 8:14 am |
Tribble trubble...
I am being driven to conclusions I could not publish without serious trouble. Or, as the great Italian cartoonist Altan put it, "I find myself having opinions I disagree with." | | Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 | | 4:15 am |
A thought
Always tell the truth. If not out of principle, then at least out of precaution. The day might come when being believed on your word might make the difference between success and failure, or between life and death. | | Sunday, May 13th, 2012 | | 1:17 pm |
Scholars' incredible inability to add two and two
125 years ago, Theodor Mommsen gave crushing evidence to prove that no piece of Roman history - meaning the traditional history, as told by Livy, Appian, Polybius and the other ancient historians - before 380 BC, and few before 275 BC, were reliable. Theodor Mommsen was not only one of the greatest historians of ancient Rome who ever lived, but one of the most widely read. Every specialist since is familiar with his work. And in fact his powerful argument - first set out in an article in a magazine called Hermes in 1886 - has been expanded and proved again and again by many other scholars, in particular the Italian Ettore Pais. Get it? No story told about Rome before 380 BC, and precious few before 275 BC, are reliable history. The matter is complicated by the fact that, while the stories are certainly unhistorical, the stages in political evolution they describe do seem to have happened as they are described. Rome started out as a monarchy of sorts; it was ruled by Etruscan kings for about a century; when the Etruscans were driven out, it became a republic. And there seems to be a basic reliability, in spite of numerous variants, about the lists of consuls and other officials that were handed down. But the history, the history itself, is not history. It is a bunch of stories. It is a vast, indeed amazing, body of legends. This is perhaps more significant to me than to many of my readers, because, being Italian - and with family connections with the city of Rome itself - these are my heroic past. Italian children learn stories about Romulus, Numa, Tarquinius the Proud, or Furius Camillus, at school, like American children learn about Washington and Lincoln and Irish children about Brian Boruma and Daniel O'Connell. But the fact that these stories are all just stories struck me very forcefully. Now when the Greeks came to look at the Romans, the one thing they did not find was a large body of stories such as they had, about various gods and their interactions with each other and with heroes who were themselves sons of gods and often hardly to be distinguished from gods. (Herakles, Helen, Menelaus and Diomedes, to mention only a few, received divine as well as heroic cult.) And not seeing the kind of mythology they were familiar with, they concluded that the Romans - these people with their enormous amount of "historical" stories and heroes - had no mythology. The Greeks could be excused for this gross category mistake. Scholars ever since Mommsen cannot. That textbooks, and indeed scholarly investigations, about Roman origins, continue to be produced, in which "the problem of Roman mythology" is seriously argued and repeated, is inexcusable and an intellectual scandal. | | 12:11 pm |
The law and its officers
Point one: Mr Eric Holder, the United States' chief law enforcement officer, has announced that his department will not defend lawsuits involving the Defence of Marriage Act, a federal law duly passed by Congress and signed by (a Democrat) President. Point two: In Italian law there is a crime called omission of an official duty, which carries, I believe, a jail term. | | Thursday, May 10th, 2012 | | 2:43 pm |
| | Tuesday, May 8th, 2012 | | 6:00 am |
The only possible choice in today's Europe
There is an alternative to the hopeless policy of cuts-cuts-cuts with no light at the end of the tunnel, and I suspect that the evident anger of the voters in Greece, France, Italy and Britain (the coalition did what at last Thursday's election?) will begin to prod it over the horizon of things that politicians don't want to see. It is called bankruptcy, and it is what businesses and people naturally do when they cannot pay their debts. We need to go into bankruptcy, and in a few years the USA will be there as well. This will have one silver lining: those banks that survive the earthquake (and I am at the point where I would not mind if most bankers died of cancer) will never lend to sovereign authorities, leaving the states to use only taxation to pay for expenditure. It would be an unprecedented experiment in cutting our clothes according to our cloth, and I can't think it would be bad. | | Sunday, May 6th, 2012 | | 7:27 pm |
An unpleasant duty
A person who was on my friends list made me the offensive "gift" of an "I stand with Planned Parenthood" tag. The only occasion I would stand with Planned Parenthood would be if I were a cop and I had the pleasure to take the members of that murderous organization to jail. I defriended the person concerned. Current Mood:  tired | | 12:36 am |
What is dead can never die
Some damned fanatic went and added some insults (and no intelligent response) to a post I made FOUR YEARS AGO and which some other filth had, at the time, mischaracterized as racist. Lies never die, especially when people have an interest in believing, and are too stupid to work up a coherent response other than that which other and more wicked hands have prepared for them. I may be getting old, but I have no mind to try and convince the moron in question of his folly, and so I banned him and screened the article in question. I have to say that that "bullying be gone" community that the Livejournal creeps are pushing so hard - in the intervals of trying to make us give our money to Planned Parenthood, who don't need it - is a bad joke. The Internet is the biggest field for cowardly bullying there is, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Current Mood:  guess? | | Friday, May 4th, 2012 | | 7:38 am |
Advice to young lawyers, by a successful lawyer
I am not an accomplished lawyer. I find quite as much material for a lecture in those points wherein I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful. The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence. Leave nothing for to-morrow which can be done to-day. Never let your correspondence fall behind. Whatever piece of business you have in hand, before stopping, do all the labor pertaining to it which can then be done. When you bring a common-law suit, if you have the facts for doing so, write the declaration at once. If a law point be involved, examine the books, and note the authority you rely on upon the declaration itself, where you are sure to find it when wanted. The same of defenses and pleas. In business not likely to be litigated, — ordinary collection cases, foreclosures, partitions, and the like, — make all examinations of titles, and note them, and even draft orders and decrees in advance. This course has a triple advantage; it avoids omissions and neglect, saves your labor when once done, performs the labor out of court when you have leisure, rather than in court when you have not. Extemporaneous speaking should be practised and cultivated. It is the lawyer’s avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech. And yet there is not a more fatal error to young lawyers than relying too much on speech-making. If any one, upon his rare powers of speaking, shall claim an exemption from the drudgery of the law, his case is a failure in advance. Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser — in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough. Never stir up litigation. A worse man can scarcely be found than one who does this. Who can be more nearly a fiend than he who habitually overhauls the register of deeds in search of defects in titles, whereon to stir up strife, and put money in his pocket? A moral tone ought to be infused into the profession which should drive such men out of it. The matter of fees is important, far beyond the mere question of bread and butter involved. Properly attended to, fuller justice is done to both lawyer and client. An exorbitant fee should never be claimed. As a general rule never take your whole fee in advance, nor any more than a small retainer. When fully paid beforehand, you are more than a common mortal if you can feel the same interest in the case, as if something was still in prospect for you, as well as for your client. And when you lack interest in the case the job will very likely lack skill and diligence in the performance. Settle the amount of fee and take a note in advance. Then you will feel that you are working for something, and you are sure to do your work faithfully and well. Never sell a fee note — at least not before the consideration service is performed. It leads to negligence and dishonesty — negligence by losing interest in the case, and dishonesty in refusing to refund when you have allowed the consideration to fail. There is a vague popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest. I say vague, because when we consider to what extent confidence and honors are reposed in and conferred upon lawyers by the people, it appears improbable that their impression of dishonesty is very distinct and vivid. Yet the impression is common, almost universal. Let no young man choosing the law for a calling for a moment yield to the popular belief — resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation, rather than one in the choosing of which you do, in advance, consent to be a knave. Abraham Lincoln, 1850 | | Monday, April 30th, 2012 | | 6:33 pm |
When Earth's last picture is painted
When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted When Earth's last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried, When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died, We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it -- lie down for an aeon or two, Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew. And those that were good shall be happy; they shall sit in a golden chair; They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comets' hair. They shall find real saints to draw from -- Magdalene, Peter, and Paul; They shall work for an age at a sitting and never be tired at all! And only The Master shall praise us, and only The Master shall blame; And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame, But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star, Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They are! - Rudyard Kipling | | Sunday, April 29th, 2012 | | 11:03 pm |
| | Saturday, April 28th, 2012 | | 9:59 pm |
The pre-history of the Declaration of Independence
To be honest, this post ought to be made on July 4; but if I waited that long, I would probably have forgotten all about it by then. I have repeatedly said that I regard the Declaration of Independence as just one step below the Sacred Scriptures, and its central statement - "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain [and] inalienable rights; that among these rights are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness..." - as words to live and die by. However, while these words last for ever, there is a danger that the rest of the sentiments of the Declaration - a work very much of its time, after all, intended to bring about action and change then and there - can be misunderstood when not only the circumstances, not even the laws, but the very meaning of words have changed. The danger, in particular, is that our ignorance of the meaning of facts, laws and terms of language in the eighteenth century should give King George more credit than he deserves, and make the Founders, in spite of the nobility of their ideals, sound rather more sophistical in their political arguments than they actually were. In point of fact, once things are understood in their own contemporary colours, it will be seen that the case of Jefferson and Congress was literally unanswerable, because it was based on established law. First and foremost, the meaning of the word colony has changed in the last two hundred years. To us, a colony is a distant territory ruled and administered from a distance, for whose governance it is the mother country - or colonial overlord - that is responsible. But that is by no means what a colony was in Jefferson's time. In effect, imperial oversight and direct rule only became the norm after the shock of the great Indian war of 1858. The British government concluded, rightly or wrongly, that it had been caused by the maladministration of the East India Company, the private body that ruled India; and decided, even more arguably, that the answer was to dispossess the Company altogether and make the governance of India its own direct responsibility. This is in general the default reaction of the London government down the century to any crisis - take control from Westminster. But that the enormous Indian colony, much larger than the Thirteen Colonies had ever been, could have been administered until 1858 by a private corporation ought to show that direct control from the central government was, to say the least, not the universal rule of colonial governance. In actual fact, the law and legal precedent under which the American colonies organized themselves has a surprisingly long prehistory. It begins with the huge legal difficulties experienced through the middle ages by the merchants who came from the Christian West to trade with the Muslim powers of Mediterranean Asia and Africa. To trade was indispensable to both parties, but neither would allow its citizens to be under the power of the other. A practice evolved - independently, to the best of my knowledge, from the temporary formation of crusader kingdoms that imported Western feudal law to Palestine, Syria and Anatolia - whereby Western merchants, mostly Italian, would settle closely together in single areas of Eastern harbour and trading cities, often a single street separated from the rest. These quarters were legally treated like independent Italian city states - their chief magistrates being called Consuls - even when they only amounted to a few families living in a Muslim and Eastern Christian sea of people. They were responsible for their own administration and justice, in so far as it didn't clash with the larger government. At the same time they were regarded as colonies of the European mother countries from which the merchants came. I am not quite clear how this link worked in practice, but an offence made against a colony in Aleppo or Gaza would be felt as an act of war against the mother country. The largest number of these merchant settlements were Italian, but there were also quite a few from France, Aragon, and so on, and the principles on which they were based were universally understood in Europe. As time went on, especially because of the destructive Turkish attitude to trade, the colonies withered; but they left behind a curious legal fact. Successive treaties between the Turkish Empire and France, as well as other European trading powers, allowed the Western party to keep "Consuls" as civil representatives in Turkish trading cities, for the benefit of Western merchants and travellers. The title of Consul for the legal authority of a country in an alien land remained as a kind of ghost, even when the settlements of which the Consul was meant to be the head no longer existed; and this is the beginning of the modern institution of the Consul, a diplomat who does not represent his government to a foreign government but rather guarantees its legal and other services to fellow-citizens in its territory. Now my point is that the English colonies in America, and especially on the American mainland, were built on this precedent. In fact, their original mission was not necessarily mass settlement so much as trade with the natives, which brings them even closer to the medieval merchant colonies in the East Mediterranean. As with the merchant colonies, they were associated with the mother country, but they had their own civil - and increasingly military - authorities. Virginia, the first North American colony, set up its own legislature on the English model practically as soon as it began to exist, and all the others followed suit. What this means is that, in modern terms, these were not colonies at all. They did not depend from a Ministry of Colonies in London - which at any rate did not exist; most of them had been set up by private companies chartered by the King. It was the King's Charter that established them as political entities, and to it was the King, not any other authority, that they vested with sovereignty. Legally, they were free states sharing one King or Queen with England; like Ireland, and, until 1707, Scotland. (And as for anyone who wants to sneer at the independence of Ireland from England in the age of Cromwell and of the broken treaty of Limerick - I said legally.) This places the Declaration in its proper context. From beginning to end, it is addressed to the King alone, because the King is the one authority the colonists' law recognized. It is not easy to understand today, but the most savagely contemptous passage in the whole document is aimed at the Parliament in London: they are the "others" with whom the King "has combined... to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws". The give-away is in the words that follow - "...giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation". What else is Jefferson speaking here, except of the Royal Assent given to the Acts of a Parliament? His language is technical and precise, and thus his avoidance of the very word "Parliament" is the more telling. By giving the Royal Assent to Acts enacted by the Parliament in London pretending to legislate over countries on which they had never had any legal power, the King had connived at their usurpation. The contempt of Jefferson for the mighty assembly in Westminster is supreme; they barely deserve mention as a group - they are simply a mob of "others" whose "acts of pretended legislation" have the value of hot air. Jefferson's argument is unanswerable, because it is correct. The Colonies had been chartered by the King, and their authority was involved with him, not with the Parliament of one - if much the largest - of his other dominions. They had always legislated by themselves, and on occasion carried on war (in particular King Philip's War) on their own authority and independently of London. There was no valid precedent for Parliament or the Government of England/Great Britain to intervene in their affairs. The King alone, and his appointees and officials, had that right - a right he had, in the colonists' view, abused with a view to making himself their absolute lord rather than king under law. And that is why, from beginning to end, the issue is what the King has done, the wrongs he has committed, against his own dominions and their laws. The point is not to be free of the government of London; as far as the colonists and Congress were concerned, they had never been anything but. The point was to uncrown the King; to show that his own steps had made it intolerable and positively dangerous for them to acknowledge his authority. That is what the Declaration of Independence does, and does it supremely well. | | Tuesday, April 24th, 2012 | | 11:43 pm |
Venticinque Aprile
The Italian partisan resistance against Nazi occupiers and Fascist collaborationists began officially on September 28, 1943, when the great city of Naples rose in unplanned revolt. Nineteen years later, director Nanni Loy celebrated Naples' heroic and victorious insurrection with one of the greatest Italian movies ever made - every one of the actors played anonymously and for free, as a homage to the real heroes, the people of Naples. This is the scene of the start of the revolt: | | 7:42 pm |
A story from today's MercatorNet
As always, I walked with hundreds of others through the dark to the Cenotaph on a frosty morning. There was silence as people listened respectfully to a memorial service delivered by an elderly Protestant minister. He gave a short and eloquent address about the heroes who had died for Australia which managed to make everyone, both religious and secular, happy.
There was something quite eccentric about his delivery, though. Every couple of paragraphs there was an pause. It only lasted long enough to remind all of us how cold we were, but it was slightly embarrassing. Then he would embark upon another burst before lapsing into silence again. Finally, he concluded with an Amen and a reverent silence.
He added a personal note. In a quavering voice he said that this had been his last Anzac Day service. He was 85 now and had done it for 30-odd years. Time to pass the baton on to someone else. And then he apologised for those pauses. "It was so cold," he said, "I had to blow on my fingers so that I could keep on reading." Suddenly it dawned on me: the old man was blind and had been reading in Braille with his frozen fingers... | | Monday, April 23rd, 2012 | | 5:40 am |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) stigandnasty919 has a birthday coming ...and as he is one of the finest human beings I have the honour of knowing, I hope he has the best possible HAPPY BIRTHDAY and many wonderful years to follow. | | Friday, April 20th, 2012 | | 8:52 am |
Personal mythology
Everything I find written about practicing homosexuals intimates that they were aware of their "difference" from an early age, and certainly from their teens. But in my own experience, the two homosexual men I knew best only turned to their own sex in their mid-twenties, after considerable experience with women. And I would like to be sure that this business of young teens being already gay is not a matter of retrojection and personal mythology. After all, there has hardly ever been a teen-ager who did not feel "different". | | Tuesday, April 17th, 2012 | | 9:48 am |
The worst thing Alan Moore ever did: The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Alan Moore, like Jack Kirby before him, was capable, when not at the top of his game, of being quite extraordinarily bad - not just, like the King, bad out of tiredness and lack of interest, but out of complete wrong-headedness, out of taking the wrong approach and insisting with it. A lot of his worst stuff is to do with sex. Moore is not really any good with pornography; even if you take the view, as I do, that achievement in pornography is intrinsically the lowest kind of artistic achievement and barely excuses the waste of talent, nonetheless there are several authors, from Crepax to Manara and to Eleutieri Serpieri, who have done better, much better than Moore. Lost Girls is shamefully bad, and it has in common with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that Moore gets literary characters from earlier writers embarrassingly wrong - his Dorothy Gale, with her cliched and insulting American accent, makes L. Frank Baum's sweet little dreamer into a vulgar slut, and his Alice is little better. The reason why Crepax and Eleutieri Serpieri's best pornography works, is that their "heroines" don't have that ultimately depressing kind of vulgarity that makes it unimaginable that Dorothy should ever have dreamed of Oz or Alice ever seen a rabbit with a pocket-watch. Bad though Lost Girls is, though, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is worse. It is the nadir of Moore's writing, and the nemesis, alas, of his justifiable ambition to rethink and rewrite the basics of popular literature. At the heart of the failure is one simple fact: Moore gets every single character wrong, and, I think it may be said, does so for a reason. Mycroft Holmes is not, and cannot be, a spymaster, an executive, a man in charge. And the reason is obvious: his indolence and lack of ambition. His enormously fat body is the token of a mind that will not bother, will not shift, even though its natural talent still takes pleasure in feeding on and understanding millions of facts. Holmes is an infallible adviser when his advice is sought, but he does not bother even to straighten out someone's course if he knows that someone is moving to disaster - unless the someone asks for his advice. The notion of Holmes searching out and organizing an elite squad of adventurers, like Nick Fury does in the forthcoming Avengers movie, is as absurd - as his brother Sherlock would put it - as to find a London tram in a country lane. Now this kind of learned indolence was perfectly understandable to an English reader of the 1890s. It was natural - if extreme - to the more intelligent members of an upper middle class that lived largely on inherited income and saw no great need to work for a living. It is quite clear that Sherlock Holmes, as much as his brother, sought out his job not to make a living but because it pleased and fulfilled him. Moore got Mycroft Holmes wrong, as he would have Sherlock, because he missed his whole social background. The mistakes about Captain Nemo are of another order. First, he is way out of his time. In 1890 Captain Nemo, a veteran of the 1858 Indian war, would be dead, or at least too old to feature actively in any adventure. It is also unimaginable that this man, who experienced the English as a destructive swarm of enemies across his beloved land, committing any amount of war crimes, would ever collaborate with them on anything; his whole purpose was to become what we now call a terrorist, driving the then dominant British marine from the seas with his submarine. And the heavy Indian costume in which Kevin O'Neill dresses him is also wrong: in the Verne novel, the French adventurers don't know the Captain's nationality till he tells them, for he has adopted a wholly Western mode of dress and behaviour. I think it would be impossible for anyone but an Englishman to imagine a man who has suffered at the hands of the English as Nemo has suffered, and whose nation has suffered as India has, has being reconciled with them; as well imagine Giuseppe Mazzini entering the Austrian service, or the exiles of modern Poland shaking hands with General Jaruzelski. (Yes, some people would do such a thing - but why call them heroes?) In using Nemo, Moore is simply being self-indulgent, or rather nationally indulgent, allowing himself the kind of fantasy that belongs in bad fanfic. The same, from a slightly different viewpoint, may be said of his treatment of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde. Mr.Hyde is not the Hulk. He is not actually stronger or in any way more powerful than Dr.Jekyll; in fact, he is shorter, and so stupid in any way that matters that he makes himself noticed and eventually hunted by common citizens. His difference is quite simply his total unconcern with others. He is defined by the fact that if he wants to go in one direction and there is a little girl in his way, he will simply trample the little girl and go on, barely thinking of what he has done. He is the ultimate psychopath, and that is what makes the scenes featuring him so memorable. Moore should have left hims strictly alone: the notion of Mr.Hyde as part of any team is as preposterous as taming a man-eating tiger. The question is, how can such an obvious mistake have been made? Apart, of course, from the same bad fanfic reflex I spoke of about Captain Nemo. And the answer is, in this case, difficult to get. The closest I can come, I think, is to suggest that Moore underestimates evil itself. Not that he can't do memorable villains; his TAO, from his run on WildC.A.T.s, may just be the best supervillain ever conceived, and many others make you shiver with horror and disgust. But he underrates evil in the abstract. In Swamp Thing #50, he inexcusably claimed to be able to carry out a Hegelian synthesis of good and evil, something that denies the very definition of evil. And the characteristic of Mr.Hyde is quite simply that he is evil; perhaps Moore hasn't taken his complete disregard for others seriously enough. Or perhaps he just wanted to have another big character in his roster, fanboy style. edited in: Allan Quartermain, the South African bush hunter, is found in an opium den in Egypt, smoking his life away. Well, I suppose anyone can become an addict, but of all people, Quartermain is the least likely. He is a staunch, enduring man, of very modest background and endless endurance, a working-class, salt-of-the-earth type displaced to the frontier of the British Empire and enduring an extraordinary series of adventures just because they are the kind of things a man is apt to endure in that kind of part. He is, in fact, a British Imperial version of the slow-talking heroes of the classic American western, and must reflect Rider Haggard's own experience of frontier people. Now the point is whether you can imagine a John Wayne hero - or Henry Fonda's Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine - wasting his life away in an alien big city's opium dens. I can't - he wouldn't even enter the city in question. And one detail suggests that Moore doesn't know Haggard's character very well: the raving of Moore's Quartermain in the opium den suggests that he has been permanently traumatized by the adventure of King Solomon's Mines - "he keeps raving about someone called Umsloplogaas". However, Quartermain was the protagonist of a whole series of novels, and of adventures quite as harrowing as that of KSM, and I fail to see why, even granting his opium self-destruction, he would focus on only one of them. As I never read The Invisible Man, I won't deal with this character, save to say that a character who uses invisibility for nothing better than to tup a number of dubious maidens does not strike me as very interesting. Invisible and not much of a person. Plus, we are once again faced with the fact that Moore is no good with sex. Bad though the treatment of all these characters is, much the worst - and, in my view, the reason for the failure of the whole mini-series - is Mina Harker. It is bad enough that Moore has completely destroyed the central point of Bram Stoker's masterpiece. So Mina was not saved after all, and she is a vampire; just another victim of Dracula's, like so many before, and probably so many afterwards. The whole point of the story was to oppose, to resist, to fight, and to destroy, this ancient and apparently ineradicable evil; and to save Mina. And here is the second and worse point. This Mina is a bitch, pure and simple. She belongs with the woman-hating products of writers far, far below Alan Moore, and strongly suggests that you cannot have a woman in authority without her behaving like a victim of permanent PMS. This is the exact opposite of what the real Mina was about. Part of the greatness of Dracula, a great masterpiece by a writer of no great talent, is that he completely solves the conundrum at the heart of much Victorian fiction: if you are fighting for a woman's sake, then the woman must be worth fighting for. Mina is emphatically a woman worth living and dying for. She is loving, warm-hearted, intelligent, quick to understand and to adapt, physically and mentally fearless, and has an absolutely colossal moral courage. She deliberately dives into Dracula's darkness, risking her life and soul, so that her friends can pursue and destroy the monster. From about half-way through the novel, she is their real leader, much more than Van Helsing; and there is nothing strange or excessive about the fact that one of the heroes is relieved, as he dies, to see the physical sign that the menace has passed from her. For this they all had fought, and evidently even to die in this cause was good enough. Clearly the idea of men defending women is out of fashion, but unless you understand it you will not understand any amount of fiction from the Iliad to Snow-White and the Seven Dwarves ( in which Disney and his team of geniuses comprehensively failed to do what Bram Stoker had achieved). A man must be willing to die for his woman; or, if he obeys the Western notion of chivalry, for any woman who is not demonstrably guilty or treacherous. (Even the obvious instance doesn't follow. In La Traviata, Violetta is a high-class tart, and Germont senior despises her lifestyle, but he is revolted when his son treats her roughly in public, and upbraids him before a crowd of his friends: women, all women, are to be treated with respect.) Dracula is one of the most successful avatars of the concept: a handful of brave and upright men gather together to save one woman and avenge another (Lucy Westenra). That is the story, that is the concept, that is the core of values at the heart of Dracula; and because Moore did not understand it, he was unable to render any of Mina's interest. Just as, because he did not understand the world of the Victorian upper middle classes, he miscast that idle and unclubbable fellow, Mycroft Holmes, as a hard-driving modern executive. The error is the same: provinciality, possibly compounded with Moore's well-known political beliefs, leading to distorted and ultimately uninteresting versions of characters that only made sense in their own background. | | Sunday, April 15th, 2012 | | 8:51 pm |
A very important piece of historical interpretation
The change in political thought - or at least in political sentiment - which was beginning in the sixteenth century was stealthier. It has left its mark on some purely literary texts. In Malory Sir Mador says to Arthur, Though ye be our king in that degree, yet ye are but a knight as we are (xviii. iv). The slaying of a bad king like Mark excites nobody's disapproval (xix. xi). Lancelot spares Arthur in battle, not because he is a king simply, but because he is that most noble king that made me knight (xx. xiii). In Jacobean drama we find a very different tone. Amintor, on learning that the man who has injured him is the king, says that that very name wipes away all thoughts revengefull, and has in it a terror which paralyses mortal arms ( Maid's Tragedy, II. i). Camillo cannot find in all history a single instance of a man who has struck an anointed king and flourished after ( Winter's Tale, I. ii. 358). No doubt allowance should be made for court patronage in these dramatic examples, and for the French origin in Malory. But there is no question that in these quotations we hear the echo of a very important change in men's attitude to the royal power. The doctrine of Divine Right has risen above the horizon. During the following century it will reach its full blaze of paradox in Filmer’s Patriarchia, Hobbes's Leviathan, and Bossuet's Politique tirée de l'Escriture Sainte. It would, however, be easy to exaggerate the adherence to this doctrine in sixteenth-century England. Emphasis on the sacred authority of the Prince does not necessarily mean that the Crown is being exalted against Parliament or the Common Law. "Prince" could often be translated "government" or "State". It would also be easy to miss the true and permanent significance of what was happening if we overstressed its connexion with one particular form of government, the monarchical. That connexion (as Hobbes knew) was temporary and largely accidental. The Divine Right of Kings is best understood as the first form of something which has continued to affect our lives ever since - the modern theory of sovereignty. It is often called Austinian, but might just as well be called Johnsonian, for it is very clearly stated in Taxation No Tyranny; all government is ultimately and essentially absolute. On this view, total freedom to make what laws it pleases, superiority to law because it is the source of Iaw, is the characteristic of every state; of democratic states no less than of monarchical. That doctrine has proved so popular that it now seems to many a mere tautology. We conceive with difficulty that it was ever new because we imagine with difficulty how political life can ever have gone on without it. We take it for granted that the highest power in the State, whether that power is a despot or a democratically elected assembly, will be wholly free to legislate and incessantly engaged in legislation. It seems, however, quite certain that many ages (not barbarous) believed nothing of the sort. Aristotle ( Politics, 1282b) explicitly ruled that the highest power should hardly legislate at all. Its function was to administer a pre-existing law. Any legislation there was should be directed to supplementing and particularizing that law where its necessary generality failed to meet some concrete situation. The main outlines of the law must be preserved. It creates, and is not created by, the State. I do not know that Aristotle ever tells us where this original and immutable law came from; but, whether derived from our ancestors or from a philosophical constitution-maker, it must be accepted by the State as a datum. There is no sovereign in the Johnsonian sense. Roman practice and Roman jurisprudence took a very different view, but the Middle Ages (at first unconsciously) reverted to Aristotle. Two factors worked against the emergence of a theory of sovereignty. One was the actual dominance of custom in medieval communities. England, says Bracton, uses unwritten law and custom ( De Legibus, I. i) - speaking truly about England, though wrongly thinking that this was peculiar to her. A. J. Carlyle quotes coronation oaths (not English) in which the king swears to keep les ancienes costumes. Pleas are to be decided selonc les costumes: custom is to be determined either by the previous decision of a court, or, significantly, by the fact that no one can remember when it was not so. This law or custom is the real sovereign. The King is under the Law for it is the Law that maketh him a King (Bracton, I. viii). It is true that Bracton often exalts the power of the king, but he is thinking of it as an executive power. The other factor was the doctrine of Natural Law. God, as we know from Scripture (Rom. i.15), has written the law of just and reasonable behaviour in the human heart. The civil law of this or that community is derived from the natural by way of particular determination' (Aquinas, Summa Theol. 1a. 2ae. xcv. iv). If it is not, if it contains anything contrary to Natural Law, then it is unjust and we are not, in principle, obliged to obey it ( ibid. 2a. 2ae. LX. v). Sedition is, of course, a sin; but then the perturbatio of a tyrant (defined, from Aristotle, as one who rules in his own interest) is not sedition, for his rule is unjust ( ibid. 2a. 2ae XLIi. ii). Thus for Aquinas, as for Bracton, political power (whether assigned to king, barons, or the people) is never free and never originates. Its business is to enforce something that is already there, something given in the divine reason or in the existing custom. By its fidelity in reproducing that model it is to bejudged. If it tries to be original, to produce new wrongs and rights in independence of the archetype, it becomes unjust and forfeits its claim to obedience. It would be quite impossible here to suggest the causes, or even to trace the process, of the change which introduced the concept of sovereignty. Wycliffe, a pioneer of the new theory, was exceptional in his own age. The years 1445 and 1446 are important: in the first the Cortes of Olmedo announced that it was contrary to divine law to touch the Lord's Anointed, and the second saw the publication of Aeneas Sylvius' De Ortu Imperii Romani in which he declares the emperor to be legibus solutus. Nor can I here deal with works which attacked the novelty. Its naturalization in England may be seen in Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), where we are told that The King is in this world without lawe and may at his owne lust do right and wrong and shall give accounts to God only. It is true that this quotation gives (by itself) a false impression of Tyndale's character and of that strange treatise in which he flings such appalling power to Henry VIII almost scornfully, like a bone to a dog; but it is a fair illustration of Tyndale's political theory. The First Book of Homilies (or, to give it its true title, Certain Sermons or Homilies) (1547) substantially agrees with him: rebellion is in all circumstances sinful. (C.S.Lewis, History of sixteenth-century English literature, excluding drama, Oxford 1957, pages 46-50) | | 8:49 am |
|
[ << Previous 20 ]
|
