From Chalcedon to Colvin

Martin Luther King, Jr. From the March on Washington, 1963.
Government photo: public domain.
Colorized photography (2016).
Wikimedia Commons.

NOW my reading on the U-Bahn — which, as it strikes me now, is taking up a strangely large part of recent blog posts — has turned from Voltaire to Henri Troyat and Martin Luther King, Jr. To begin with the second book:

In 1958 King published Stride Toward Freedom, where he describes himself leaving university and deciding where to become a minister, and why, and how he changes the Alabamian church where he and Coretta Scott King decided to begin his ministerial life at the birth of the civil rights movement.

A peculiar phenomenon is that things progress, regress and stay the same in an inconsistent way, all at once. It isn't just the decade that matters, but also the generation. Martin Luther King, Jr. mentions young African Americans rebelling against racist society at a time where African American adults who were educated and well-off sometimes did not want to do anything to risk their jobs or status in society. Years ago the Guardian ran an article ("She would not be moved," Gary Younge) about Claudette Colvin, who remained sitting in the 'wrong' seat of a bus when she was fifteen years old, before Rosa Parks did the same. He mentions her, too. Of course, the right of African American children to attend schools that white children attended had also been recognized in the Supreme Court 5 years before the book was published; girls had walked to school past crowds of rabid adults. Emmett Till was killed around that time. But the bus boycotts, the Greensboro lunch sit-ins, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Supreme Court's recognition of the right to mixed-race marriage had not happened yet; and churches were bombed later, Medgar Evers assassinated later, and voting rights proponents who were registering African American voters were murdered into the 1960s.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s writing at that time is self-conscious, I think. Part of it is I think a carefulness not to say anything jarring that can undermine one's public standing or one's 'message.' Whether I think this carefulness should be necessary is another question. But to be wildly optimistic maybe it has more to do with being a political figure in the public eye, than with being the potential target of racists who are eager to find excuses to criticize any African Americans in the public eye.

Ta-Nehisi Coates's article "My President Was Black"* about President Obama for the Atlantic, published in January before the inauguration of Donald Trump, is relevant to that issue, too. I think it's called 'respectability politics,' and the Nation of Islam was a strange example of it in a broader sense; in order to be equal to white men, you had to be rigidly well conducted and attired in suits at all times or in general act like a respectable 1950s paterfamilias. (In the end I think the Atlantic article reflects its writer more than it does the subject, because I think he wants to understand himself through President Obama. Besides, I don't remember if there was anything specifically about feeling the need to be exceptionally self-censoring in the article, except perhaps on Michelle Obama's part, because of the fear that arose in white quarters in 2008 that she was 'too angry.' But I found it absorbing to read anyway.)

* You will probably have to un-block the advertising to read it.

***

Next: Henri Troyat's Les Désordres secrets (1974). I find the level of precision in his language to be far behind Molière and Voltaire; it's not that he tried to compete with them at all, it's only that I read them recently so that I see a contrast. I think he has also read too much Tolstoy; an author is far more endurable when he is the Narcissus and not the Echo. But I feel a bit mean in saying this, because his own family escaped the 20th century Russian revolution, and clearly Russian literature, history and society were a highly personal matter to him.

Troyat's tale, a fragment of the Muscovite series, begins during the retreat of Napoléon's French army from Moscow, felt through the eyes of an aristocrat(?). Hailing from Gaul, he had been raised in a noble Russian family, so he feels goodwill toward both sides. Part of the aristocrat's cortège, as he is a French soldier retreating from Moscow, is an actress who has become his mistress. Like her theatrical colleagues, Paulette finds the company's programme far more absorbing than the actions and plans of the Russian or French armies or their leaders, or the risk of attack by Russian pursuers. There is a lack of relevance of her thespian concerns to his emotional rift between upbringing and adulthood, etc.

Of course I don't admire the idea of men taking women as companions whom they don't see as mental equals and whom they cannot speak with frankly and fully about important matters. But at least it's funny if one remembers Jane Austen's passage characterizing the phenomenon:

The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance. But Catherine did not know her own advantages [...]

I also guess (so far) that Troyat-the-narrator is a more advanced, nicer dinosaur than many others.

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To Disquiet On The Western Front

The Munich Security Conference creeps me out every year; I find it anachronistic and vaguely threatening, and also mainly an opportunity self-righteously to offer arms and military technology to governments that 1. are marginally more morally corrupt and far less trustworthy than ours, 2. should be spending that money on worthier causes. As a resident of Germany I feel accordingly embarrassed.

But this speech from John McCain — he appears, I will say, far more in his element there than in the dispiriting environment of American punditry — brings a whisper of fresh life into perhaps an old-fashioned idea that through a restrained, diplomatically enhanced militarism we can mitigate wars rather than proliferate wars.

A Discursion on Zaire and Simplicity

Lately I've pestered my parents and siblings with the theory that the 'worldview' that we have with regard to the Middle East is inherited from the time of the Crusades. Firstly, the idea that we have a right to invade it at any time in order to 'set things straight.' (Regardless of the repeated historical proof that this invariably goes wrong.) Secondly, the idea of Muslims as a threatening armed force. Thirdly, I now realize, the idea that there is a competition of morality — or a one-upmanship of religions, in the case of the US, and that our secular ethics/religion are better than their morality.

With much fresher incursions of armed Muslim armies into Europe — and by 'fresher' I mean the Battle of Vienna in 1683 —, the rhetoric of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the hijackings of planes, and warfare along religious or ethnic boundaries in Britain's Commonwealth like the Siege of Khartoum in 1884-5 or the Indian Rebellion of 1857, there are of course far more recent events that prop up the set pieces for a stage of enmity. As Islam postdates Jesus Christ and the other events in the Bible by at least 500 to 600 years, the Bible itself clearly has nothing in particular to say about this religion. Admittedly, to be pragmatic, as a competitor to various Christian churches I am sure it has rarely been held in good odour even by modern religious authorities.

At any rate, the grounds for mentioning these Wikipedia'd findings are that I have been reading extracts from an early play by Voltaire: Zaïre. I suspect that it is almost entirely obsolete; but after running across it in an English novel from the dawn of the 19th century, I was very happy to find it in our bookshelves, and I am in fact re-reading it. As I reread it, its resemblance to a cross (pun unintended) between Othello and Lessing's Nathan der Weise grows.

Its heroine is enslaved under a Turkish sultan. She is a Christian who survived a fictional massacre in Jerusalem during the Crusades, when she was a baby, to be raised amongst Muslims in the harem. Many years later, she and the sultan Orosmane have fallen in love and are about to be married, permitting her to attain the rank of Queen. But, unfortunately, her duty as a Christian-born child enters galumphing into the plot like an elephant — an elephas ex machina if you will — trampling beneath it the vestiges of her innocent happiness. (Although I wonder whether Voltaire wasn't setting her up for a fall from hubris anyway.) No sooner have she and her long-lost father been reunited — he being an aged Christian prince and warrior who ruled Jerusalem until the massacre, whom the sultan had imprisoned due to the political threat he represented — than her father and brother are shocked at and insulted by her profession of the Muslim faith. That's as far as I've read.

The melodrama of the play — I am tempted to call it a soap opera — is (purposely) gripping and amusing. But the understanding of religious faith that Voltaire describes makes me wince — as if religion can be reduced to the physical act of baptism, as well as a willingness to designate one's self Christian and to vituperate any other religion. He casts the dogmatic nature of the Church on these kinds of points in an unflattering light, I think; in his second preface, he also mentions the unamiable habit of denying actors a burial in a Christian graveyard unless they recant their profession.

It is hard for me to reconcile the picture of early Islamic history that I received in university with the events of the play, by the way, although Voltaire (per the footnotes) did read up on the history of that period and place, and I don't doubt that he did it well.

Back to the religious aspects, as well as political: I do think that it's easy to read the play and to interpret into it criticism of more recent French politics. The King Louis of France in the drama is named as a saintly figure, but from a humanitarian perspective I wonder why. If we nonetheless do accept his virtues as given, there is at least an unflattering implicit contrast between the King Louis of the 12th century, the prolific warrior, and the King Louis of the 17th18th century, the prolific skirt-chaser. (Who did also half-empty the French coffers of state to support optimistic foreign ventures like the American War of Independence Seven Years' War, but I don't remember Voltaire making any reflections on that in Zaïre itself [N.B.: which would make sense since the Seven Years' War took place two decades after the play was written; please excuse my egregious error]; and, to be fair, he was also notable for nice things like patronage of the arts.)

[Reinforcing the contemporary political dimension, I do wonder whether Voltaire had already been locked up in the Bastille when he wrote Zaïre, because then it would raise the question whether he was reflecting on his own imprisonment as he detailed the imprisonment of the Christian crusaders. (I still haven't bothered to look that up, unfortunately.)

The prisoners of war are, by the way, I think a poignant element of the surviving legends of the Crusades — Richard the Lionheart, for example, in Ivanhoe, even if he was actually kept in prison by Christian kings rather nearer home than Jerusalem. The murders and general carnage of the imaginary massacre in Voltaire's play are also fiercely alive, but he does have a long tradition in classical tragedies to draw upon even in absence of personal experience.]

Anyway, mentioning the play beside Othello and Nathan der Weise is unfair. I think that both of the other plays are far better. Zaïre was speedily written and, especially once it caught on, more of a 'crowd pleaser.' (It was written in order to satisfy the need for romantic plots in his feminine fandom.) A dashing Orosmane and an endearing, ingénue-like Zaïre were cast to bring his roles to life in France as well as in Britain, writes the French scholar in the introductory notes for the edition I'm reading. After the play had overcome a rough start, the 18th-century audience that flocked to its presentations in France and in Britain was frequently in tears.

A passage in Maria Edgeworth's romance Patronage describes a private theatrical: an unsympathetic, social climbing character plays Zaïre; the amateur actress is hedged about not by the latticed windows and armed guards of the harem, but rather by envious and critical ranks of young ladies who are her social competitors. The higher-minded protagonists of the book hold a conversation about the play's purposeful simplicity. (In general it's also strange to read things from Voltaire's less sexist phase, also in Patronage, for example this epigraph on Cupid: "Qui que tu sois voici ton maître. Il l'est, le fut—ou le doit être."*) But it has the same effect on the audience as the better professional performances.

(The fact that this play would feel so fresh and immediate to characters in a novel that was written in the first two decades of the 19th century, reminds me that the scholarly introduction in the edition that I'm reading also posits that Voltaire's use of the theme of the Crusades in fact anticipates elements of the Romantic period — seventy years in advance of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. Combined with this ideal of 'simplicity' of style, I think he is quite right.)

Voltaire wrote two prefaces to Zaïre. In the later preface, added after his play had reached the British stage, he dissects the way Aaron Hill translated Zaïre into English. I think that, like modesty, 'simplicity' is a virtue that is dangerous to describe in one's self; it is contradictory. So I did smirk when he took up the discussion about his own play's 'simplicity,' and enclosed a brief list of the most 'simple' verses in it. As he used high-flown language and circular phrases to fit the dramatic quality and the verse lengths of his play — for example, nobody in his drama ever travels to/from plain France, but always hails to or from the rives de la France — his threshold for simplicity is not terribly high. I was also amused when he took issue with Aaron Hill's stage directions. One of the 'simple' highlights of Zaïre's dialogue comes as the sultan repudiates his beloved, and she begins to weep. 'Zaïre, you weep!' he observes in the French original, fairly and simply enough. In the English, she flings herself to the floor, and weeps there, and then he exclaims the same thing. That's ridiculous, declares Voltaire. Her flinging of self is far stranger than her crying, so if that horrendous stage direction must needs be kept in the play, at least it would make more sense for her beloved to exclaim, 'Zaïre, you are rolling on the ground!'

*It's apparently taken from his poetic works. Here it is on Bartleby.
The passage in Maria Edgeworth's Patronage is available here on Project Gutenberg.

A Farewell to Decency?

In the past, I've often wished that I kept a sober record of the zeitgeist at particular political stages in time, so that it's easier to separate out what happened when and why we felt what and when what changed.

Despite the needless complexity of that last sentence, I think I'll begin straightforwardly enough with President Obama's final week, ending in President Trump's inauguration. I was blissfully uninformed the entire week, busy with work and also basking in the crepuscular glow of the last days of what felt like if not a golden era, at least a fair silver or brazen one. Then, during the Friday company meeting, an American colleague informed us with what I thought was lurid cheer that the inauguration was taking place; another, who had taken pains to vote against a certain presidential candidate, had watched part of it but couldn't — if I remember correctly — endure her new president's speech. It sounds almost hyperbolical to say so, but it is touching how dignified and deep the grief and sense of responsibility of some of my American colleagues are about the state of politics in their country — not party politics, but real feeling. That weekend there was much dismay amongst the lefties whom I follow on Twitter about the barely conciliatory spirit of the new president's inaugural address, and specifically also dismay about the adoption of the slogan 'America First,' which had been used to justify exclusionist policies during the Nazi era.

I didn't think it was fair to want a head of government to fail. After thinking that he was a terrible person in terms of his treatment of his fellow human beings, whether family or no relations to him at all — I also thought that this that was no guarantee that he would be a bad president. But I had no enthusiasm for his impending regime, and felt that it was best not to immerse myself in ungratifying details.

But after thinking about it on Friday evening, on Saturday morning I went to the Women's March on Washington sister demonstration at the Brandenburger Tor in solidarity with American protestors. For one thing I wanted to help prove that even though President Trump himself was endorsed for the presidency by a majority of the Electoral College, not everyone endorses his style of sexist behaviour or his opinions. But while the others — I felt quite shy — shouted slogans like 'Show me a feminist! — I am a feminist!', I was also happy with messages at the protest that were about broader social justice and rights issues like, 'No hate; no fear; immigrants are welcome here," which were as significant for Germany as they can be to the United States. Human Rights Watch was also there.

There were roughly 500 people there, I read on the news — over 2,000 people officially attended it per the Facebook page — and while there were also French accents and doubtless German people there (like me, I suppose), many protestors were by their accents American; and after all the Democrats Abroad organized the event. There were lights on in two or three rooms in the American Embassy but otherwise no evidence that anyone was 'at home,' a pair of police officers in dark blue standing at the bollards in what was otherwise pretty much a dead zone, and few tourists photographing the protest or the Brandenburger Tor, and then the din of music from a stage at the other side of the Tor that was probably set up for the demonstration against 'big agriculture' in Germany that also took place that day. The tractor cavalcade that was organized for that demonstration incidentally also made me a bit later than I already was to the protest.

It is hard to exaggerate how happy I felt as I came home and gradually read about the enormous protests in London and in the United States as they happened, and that they were all pretty much as free from rancour and as festive as the one I had joined. The inertia and self-doubt and repression of disagreement that I felt had to be overcome during the Iraq War and the Bush years were entirely absent. I felt that any reasonably decent person across the mainstream political spectrum would feel that aspects of the Trump presidency needed protesting against.

In the next week, after the early attempts of Congress to dismantle the Affordable Care Act that tried to make health care available to most Americans, etc. it was the most painful to read about the ban on refugees and partial ban on immigrants that were signed on Friday. I happened to be reading news on Twitter as the Customs and Border Patrol began to apply it. I was on the verge of tears when it became clear what the effects were. I remember feeling unhappy at borders when I was a child, when the customs officials were being apparently disagreeable and pedantic about the tiniest things, when we were tired and bored and tense, and being afraid of being separated from one home or the other. The idea of leaving Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, the Sudan, Somalia, or Yemen, and feeling the same thing in an acuter way, was awful. Then the taxi driver's union in New York City released its statement mentioning that policies like this lead to violent attacks on their employees. Then I did feel a sense of hopelessness.

But I've resolved during this presidency to read in detail about issues and also read more longer-form news, like the PBS News Hour clips on YouTube. As a result, I also kept track of official reactions to the Ban — even Republican senators sent out weak announcements at least nitpicking the Muslim Ban, and the Democratic establishment and experienced public officials as well as groups like the ACLU have expressed such effective opposition. I think, in fact, that some Republicans should receive more credit than they have been getting. But what cheered me the most were the anti-Trump administration protests in Britain; and — because I am childish — the public's online petition to refuse President Trump the formalities of a state visit to the UK because he was 'too misogynistic and vulgar,' which would 'embarrass the Queen.'

Brexit is (I think) a terrible event, too — an example of the movements that led to the right-wing meeting in Koblenz on the weekend of the Women's March, and bound to bring harm especially to politically and economically vulnerable people. Thanks perhaps to these anti-Trump administration protests, the apparent resurgence of the protesting ethos in Britain (which was changed, I felt, into impotent shock after the result of the referendum) was also bearing fruit in the House of Commons, in the debate on whether to begin using Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to leave the EU.

I watched a few parliamentarians speak on Thursday. While 'remainer' legislators who were representing 'remainer' constituencies attempted to justify their 'yes' vote using their idea of democracy — i.e. voting along the lines of a slender majority — this argument failed to fill me with thrilling conviction. But then, after reading Polly Toynbee's praise on the Guardian's website, I watched the former Justice Minister Ken Clarke's speech. I thought his speech had a depth of emotional interest, reflected political experience, and wealth of parliamentarian tradition, together with his old-fashioned though jovial statesmanliness of air, that 'blew my socks off.' And that praise is although I had no particular or high opinion of him beforehand.

So I alternate between feelings of optimism and bearing an influence, and of despair and a complete lack of hope.

But the quandary of where to help still puzzles me. I want to throw more money at things, but at present I have to budget it.