Anthony Burgess, ABBA ABBA (1977)

Octave
1.
This wonderful novella is much concerned with recirculations. Eighty pages tell the story of the death of Keats; then we get sixty more in which Burgess translates about seventy of Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli's 2,279 wittily blasphemous sonnets into good Manchester English. Those sonnets keep returning to the same themes, the same images: souls and arseholes. Spirit and pricks. The title of Burgess's novel notates one formula common in rhymed verse, characteristic of the octave of some varieties of sonnet, as also of Tennyson's In Memoriam stanza, where rhyme steps away to link a couplet and then steps back to the original rhyme. It's also, the books tells us, the Hebrew for 'father' (which, via Latin, is why an Abbot is called an Abbot), and accordingly it records Christ's last Hebrew/Aramaic words on the Cross: because the book is also to do with painful early death, with figures whose words reach far beyond their death, and with the rationale of the Eternal City, Rome. AB are the initials of 'Anthony Burgess'; and 'ABBA ABBA' is inscribed on the novelist's own tombstone. The AB sets out, and the BA reverses the direction of travel. It goes one way, then it goes the other. Life is like this, and art, and history too. The history book on the shelf/Just keeps on repeating itself. Who said that? Was it ABBA? ABBA, yes.

2.
As well as recirculation, the book is also much concerned with cocks, pricks, willies, knobs, schlongs, male-members, with what Roman slang, the book informs us, calls the dumpennente, from the Latin meaning something hanging down, also used of Christ on the Cross: 'Stabat mater dolorosa,' Keats quotes, delighted with the blasphemy: 'Apud lignum lachrymosa/Dum pendebat filius' ('"An unholy reference, if I may say so," Severn said, unwontedly assertive' [15]). 'This is the good groiny iron', says Keats, rather splendidly. Belli writes a Roman sonnet about this particular organ, and in chapter 3 Keats translates it:

Here are some names, my son, we call the prick:
The chair, the yard, the nail, the kit, the cock,
The holofernes, rod, the sugar rock,
The dickory dickory dock, the liquorice stick,
The lusty Richard or the listless Dick,
The old blind man, the jump on twelve o'clock,
Mercurial finger, or the lead-fill'd sock,
The monkey, or the mule with latent kick. 

The squib, the rocket, or the roman candle,
The dumpendebat or the shagging shad,
The love-lump or the hump or the pump-handle,
The tap of venery, the leering lad,
The handy dandy, stiff-proud or a-dandle,
But most of all our Sad Glad Bad Mad Dad.

Sad Glad Bad Mad Dad draws our attention to the fact that the title ABBA ABBA, alongside all its other significations, proclaims the male member, too. It means Dad, Dad, cried out from the cross. Slang terms for the penis include 'the old feller' and 'the old man'. Indeed, I wonder if John ('John Thomas', clothed in a 'Johnny' to prevent conception) Wilson ('Willie') didn't have in mind a particular rebus of A and B, the 'A' a cazzo, the 'B' on its side two coglioni. This grafitto from the end-papers of my edition shows what I mean:

Vulgar, but there you are. Graffiti often are. We get speculation on the state of ill Keats's cazzo, or Ceats's kazzo, and memories of Fanny Brawne cause Keats to have erotic dreams and nocturnal emission. Prongs and poetry elide. The pen is a penis, or vice versa. Keats himself jokes with Belli that he himself translates into Italian as 'Signore Cock' ('as in cazzo, as in cazzica' [43]). Keats ought to be writing, as it were, with his fertile cock, but the only fluid he can summon is pulmonary blood, the emission of which is literally killing him: 'scarlet gushed out and John moaned, choking. He tried madly to use his manuscript as a cup. The inky quill fell from the knee desk and wrote briefly on the coverlet' [55]. This horrible admixture writes nothing but death. Or perhaps it brings poetry back to the swamp of individuality from which Keats's gift, at its finest, releases us. The fountain outside Keats' apartment gurgles through Burgess's novel, to remind us of his autoepitaph, remind us that his name was writ in water. His body, he tells Severn, was nothing but

a clever machine, with the tongue and the teeth and the lips clacking and cooing most clever clusters of noises, and the noises long by common acceptance attached to things and thoughts and eager to be juggled in pretty poesy. But at the end there is only this I, shapeless and without memory or intelligence unless I consign it elsewhere. So for the moment I join it to the I of that singing water in the piazza and lose even my name. Or, if you will, write that name on water and hear the water gurgle on uncaring singing I, I, I. [60]

That 'I' has the look of an upright cock too, though, don't you think? Without memory or intelligence. Down wanton down.

3.
Keats's death was recorded by his friend Joseph Severn as follows:

Keats raves till I am in a complete tremble for him ... about four, the approaches of death came on. [Keats said] 'Severn—I—lift me up—I am dying—I shall die easy; don't be frightened—be firm, and thank God it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seem'd boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that I still thought he slept.

Here's Burgess's version of the scene:

John knew his dying day had come, yet to achieve death might be a day's hard labour. Severn held him, as it were carrying him to the gate, but he could not bear Severn's laboured breathing, for it struck like ice. To put off the world outside – the children's cries, snatches of song, a cheeping sparrow, the walls and the wallpaper and the chairs that thought they would outlast him but would not, the sunlight streaking the door – was not over-difficult. A bigger problem was to separate himself from his body – the hand worn to nothing, the lock of hair that fell into his eye, even the brain that scurried with thoughts and words and images. It took long hours to die.

"I'm. Sorry. Severn. My weight."

"Nothing, it's nothing, rest now."

He tried to give up breathing, to yield to the breathless gods, but his body, worn out as it was, would not have that. It pumped in its feeble eggspoons of Roman air, motes in the sun and all, but there seemed to be nothing in his body to engage the air. The afternoon wore on to evening and his brain was fuddled and he groped for the essence he had called I. It fell through his fingers.

"John. John."

There was nothing there to make any answer. [82]

That penile I (that Sad Mad Dad, that AB, that John) loses its stiffness and slips through the once warm and capable hand as the trope of masculine death. I'm melting! I'm melting! Oh, what a world, what a world.

4.
Burgess's Keats is a vivid creation: believable, eloquent and, in his death, actually touching. He is, perhaps, a little fonder of the Joycean pun, the promiscuous riffing on overlapping meanings and inferences, than was the actual Keats (so far as we can tell from the letters and so on), but it doesn't seem to misrepresent the figure. The only piece of echt Keats the book includes is his sonnet 'To Mrs Reynolds's Cat', which Giovanni Gulielmi (= 'John Wilson', a purely fictional character) reads out to his friend Belli. Belli is unimpressed: '"It is nothing but noise" ... Belli made a cabbage of his face, as though, for a large audience, enacting nausea. "Such noises. Th and tch and rdst and glsbtld. English has no music' [22]. Gulielmi points out that they are good cat noises, those; but beyond this one poem is the larger debate staged in the novel, as to whether poetry should concern itself with elevated and idealised matters or dabble with the mundane and even the debased. Actually it's hard not to admire the pleasant perversity of Burgess's characterising John Keats, the single most mellifluous, prosodically harmonious and beautiful poet English has ever known, via this charming but atypical sonnet full of tch and rdst and glsbtld. Compared to Burgess's Keats, Burgess's Belli is a lesser piece of characterisation; a little stiffly caught between his priggish and his earthy-raucous selves. But the minor characters are deftly and cannily drawn, and the whole 1821 Roman scene comes alive on the page.

5.
This is how the novel opens, and it gives a flavour of the sprightliness of the dialogue, and the delicately on-edge-of-kitsch touches of description ('the dome of San Pietro grape-hued in the citron twilight'; Burgess knowingly repeats this phrase again on p.26) that speak to a writer carefully refusing to challenge Keats on the grounds of his own descriptive genius.

"Isaac," he said. "Marmaduke. Which of the two do you more seem to yourself to be?" He mused smiling among the ilex trees. The dome of San Pietro down there in the city was grape-hued in the citron twilight.

"I have never much cared for either name," said Lieutenant Elton of the Royal Engineers. "At school they called me Ikey Marmalade."

"We're both edibles then. Junkets, me."

"Junkets? Oh yes. Jun Kets."

"To be eaten by Fairy Mab."

Elton did not catch the reference. He took out his handkerchief, coughed harshly into it, then examined the sputum in the lemon dusk. Satisfied with what he saw, he wrapped it and stowed it in his pocket. He said:

"It's the mildness here that is good. The winter will be very mild, you will see. Extremes are bad. On St Helena a raging summer is ready to begin. Not good for the lungs, that climate. Not good for the liver. Not good for anything."

"You spoke with Bony at all?"

"He waved his arms and said something about earthquakes or it may have been earthworks. Or earthworms, for that matter. I could not understand his French very well. I saw him digging a lot. Il faut cultiver notre jardin, he shouted at me. That's from the atheist Voltaire."

"You don't admire Voltaire?"

"A damned atheist."

"Here comes his sister."

"Voltaire's?"

"No, no, no. God in heaven, here truly comes his sister. To us."

Pauline Bonaparte glided in the dimming light, a couple of servants behind her, taking her evening walk on the Pincio. Elegant, lovely, with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort, fine-nostrilled, fine-eyed, she peered with fine eyes at the taller and more handsome of the two young men, gliding closer to peer better. Elton stood stiffly as though on adjutant's parade, suffering the inspection. She smiled and nodded and glided on. [8]

Junkets are a type of food made of sweetened curds or rennet, I don't think it stretches things to follow the association with 'sputum' in the sixth paragraph through to the textural similarity of junkets to the seminal emission that enforcedly celibate Keats later experiences, and which is related, I'm arguing, to the novel's deliberately disreputable interest in pricks, cocks, cazzi. Otherwise the layered-over citron tartness (grapes, citron, marmalade) offsets this potentially cloying sweetness; and we move effortlessly via earthworks, with its hint of Keats's waiting grave in the Protestant cemetery at Rome into which his corpse goes before the end of the book (cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth) to the earthworms that will eat him. The tyrant's beautiful sister, gliding through twilight, is both sex and death in a single feline form.

6.
The quality of light, so finely evoked in that opening passage, is very much to the point. The Rome of Burgess's 1976 novel Beard's Roman Women is continually being drenched by rain. The Rome of ABBA ABBA is rain-free and gloriously lit. Giovanni Gulielmi sits down 'with Endymion and the 1820 poems of John Keats and the fine-eyed, wavy-maned Guiseppe Gioacchino Belli one forenoon of November sunlight and intense blue Roman sky' [19]; Keats himself contemplates writing a long poem about Rome: 'light flooding his eyes as his eyes further widened' [40]; the last thing dying Keats sees is 'the sunlight streaking the door' [82]. But Rome, bathed in light, is still dark. Belli converses with a senior prelate (the latter is offering him the office of censor in the city). He tells the Cardinal 'our drains are bad, our streets carry no name plaques, we lack light—' The Cardinal scoffs at this: 'So the Urbs Lucis lacks light, does it?' and Belli struggles to articulate his point: 'I am talking of the physical city, your eminence. In London they now have gas lighting, so a London visitor told me' [64]. But it's not about gas lighting. The last scene in the novel's octave is Keats's funeral and Belli arguing with a corpulent priest called Don Benedetto, who deprecates the Protestant's darkness: 'What, Belli demands, 'do you mean by that?'. The priest means that the Englishman was 'the unenlightened ... all those nations that have turned their backs on the light. The novel closes with: '"He had," Belli said, "more light in his little toe than you have in your entire fat carcase" [83].  Indeed.

7.
A S Byatt wrote an introduction to a 1989 reissue of the novel (it was later collected in her On Histories and Stories) in which she expresses the view that 'Burgess's novel—like all his novels—is about body and soul', a remark that approaches a fatuity not common in her criticism. After all, in one sense every novel is about these two quantities. Every work of human art. Not merely fatuous, but wrong. Byatt says so because she wants to stress the importance of ghosts to ABBA ABBA. For instance, she reproduces the story Burgess tells in You've Had Your Time that 'making a television film for Canada, [Burgess] recited Keats's sonnet When I have fears that I may cease to be on the steps outside that house. During the fourteen lines a clear sky became stormy, rain poured, thunder drowned the words. Burgess says he is not "imputing a demonic vindictiveness" to the soul of John Keats, but believes that his fierce creative energy, frustrated by death, haunts the house where he died.' It's a nice story, though I don't believe it for a minute; and more to the point it has very little relevance to this novel. This is a text about the physicality of Keats, the bodily suffering he endured, what his body hungered for, and it's very well rendered. It's not about Keats's evanescent ghostliness then or now. In chapter 6, based on an actual incident, Severn takes away Keats's laudanum for fear that the poet will overdose of it and so commit the suicide that his devout carers considers a terrible sin. As a result, Keats goes through long-drawn-out death agonies without pain relief of any kind. The novel's interest is in the body rather than the soul, or perhaps it would be better to say: in the way the soul actualises bodily, materially, in the world ('God is in cabbage patches and beer-stains on a tavern table' is how Belli puts it). The novel is cats, and food, and cocks and cunts. Recalling his shocking cazzo sonnet Belli declares 'I was really proclaiming the glory of God' [79]. It's an unghostly book. It's resolutely bodily.

8.
This penis thematic might prompt us to read the titular 'ABBA' in more straightforwardly bawdy terms. It goes forward, and it goes back. Or we could say: it goes in, it comes out again. Who else but AB coined the phrase 'the old in-out, in-out' for shagging? It's perversely fitting that a novel named with such a rebus involves a procession of men (and one gliding woman) who are not getting any. Keats is too ill; handsome Lieutenant Elton is too loyal to his fiancée in England to take the sultry Pauline Bonaparte up on her offer; Severn is too devout; even Belli seems caught between his carnal impulses and his spiritual self-disgust. And so the sexily feline Mme Bonaparte must glide off into the twilight with no-one to share her bed.


Sestet

9.
As intimated at the beginning of this blogpost (and, really, it's a pretty obvious point to make) Burgess has structured his short novel according to the logic of the sonnet. The octave: eighty pages, give or take, of continuous narrative. The sestet: sixty pages (exactly!) of metafictional conceit about an alt-historical John Wilson, born a year before our lad, different life trajectory, killed in New York by (we assume, droog-style) thugs in 1959; and then the run of Belli sonnets. The 'turn' is from history to fiction, from a low-key and touching death story to the ribald, blasphemous life of Belli's reimagining of various Biblical moments. But the 'turn' in the sonnet is a recirculation, not a new departure; it is supposed to make us see the matter of the octave in a new light. Keats, near death, dreams a dream that curls back and bites the fiction in which is appears on the tail.

He had one dream or vision that shocked him at first with a sense of blasphemy, though it must be a sense borrowed from Severn, since he who did not believe could not well blaspheme. Christ pendebat from his cross and cried ABBA ABBA. Now John knew that this was the Aramaic for father father, but he knew better that it was the rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet octave. It came to him thus that the sonnet form might subsist above language, but he did not see how this was possible. Language itself was perhaps only a ghost of the things in the outer world to which it adhered, and a ghost of a ghost was a notion untenable totally. And yet it seemed that two men, of language mutually unintelligible, might in a sense achieve communication through recognition of what a sonnet was. [81-2]

He rejects the ghostly quasi-Platonic interpretation of this, and rightly so: the book we hold in our hands is a physical, material object after all (or was, in the 1977 pre-ebook days in which Burgess worked). The two men referred to, there, are Belli and Keats; and what this dream points to is the sonnet as pure form, something akin to the logic of music. It's a form that combines divergence with coming-together, as does the story of Keats and Belli. This is where it dawns on the reader that the story here follows a together, apart, together, apart trajectory: friendly connection, broken by Belli's crossness that Keats has been given a copy of his scandalous cazzi sonnet (rudely, he rips Keats's translation to pieces and storms out), followed by reconciliation broken again by death. And this marks out Keats, Shelley's 'Adonais' (A) and Belli (B) as AB, BA then again AB and BA. It's proper too: Belli is an interesting poet for sure, but he's very much a 'B' grade writer compared with the incomparable A-star Keats.

10.
One thing the sestet does is throw an new an achronological light upon the presence of Giovanni Gulielmi in the narrative. Pages 86-91 trace the family tree of this figure down to 'John Wilson' in a way that alerts those of us too dense to notice before the way AB has inserted himself into the time-frame of ABBA ABBA, in effect going backwards (BA) through time. And since were not sestetting our way through a series of intertextualities we can note that Burgess telegraphs this too. Burgess knows about the historical figure of Charles Wells, a 'a bouncing, red-haired youth of seventeen, addicted to practical jokes, and a former schoolfellow of Tom Keats' (I'm quoting Walter Jackson Bate). "There was a fool, his name was Wells, not that it matters,' Keats tells Elton, before he returns home. 'No, it does. Wells of stupidity, of malice, wells of the rank stinking water of inhumanity. He convinced poor Tom that a foreign lady was madly in love with him. She did not, I may say, exist. But Tom in his fever cried out for her. I should have thrashed Wells before I left England.' Elton is properly outraged. 'I had a corporal named Wells. He was a corrupt man and a drinker. No, his name was Willis. But it is near enough. I'll thrash this Wells for you when I reach home.' [31] This 'Wells' comes back to haunt Keats, mingling in his imagination with the water running outside his room. Babbling, he tells Severn: 'I dreamed just now of that water outside, and there was a grinning man poisoning it. Wells poisoning wells. ... He is clever. All the way from London he sends his poison.' [60] Burgess is slyly pointing to a different Wells, initials H.G., whose clever device inaugurated a new kind of story in which people might traverse time itself, and a man called Wilson might appear (his name suitable Italianised) in 1821 Rome. And Wells's machine can take us in both directions. As the Cardinal tells us in chapter 7, 'the future exists' [63]. ABBA ABBA is also a sciencefictional story. But then, everything is.

11.
Abbaabba might sound babbly (babbabbaly, perhaps), but we have seen how many puns Burgess contrives to fold into it that titular pattern of two repeated letters. In this he is being as Wakey as Finnegans, and he is doing so not only because Joyce works its way into most everything he does, but because he know how thoroughly Joyce's great punnovel is suffused with the flavours of the English Romantics:

Methought as I was dropping asleep somepart in nonland of where’s please (and it was when you and they were we) I heard at zero hour as ‘twere the peal of vixen’s laughter among midnight’s chimes from out the belfry of the cute old speckled church tolling so faint a goodmantrue as nighthood’s un seen violet rendered all animated greatbritish and Irish objects nonviewalbe to human warchers save ‘twere perchance anon some glistery gleam darkling adown surface of affluvial flowandflow as again might seem garments of laundry reposing a leasward close at hand in full expectation. [Finnegans Wake, 403-04]

There's a good deal of babbabbaling in Joyce's final work, too. Of Anna Livia we learn that 'she’d neb in her culdee sacco of wabbash she raabed ... a thousand and one of them, and wickerpotluck for each of them.' Wabba a sort of womanly-ABBA; or from near the end of the novel we learn of 'Hellig Babbau, whom certayn orbits assertant'. That might be a Burgessy-ABBA. We are growing fanciful, though. Back to earth.

12.
Back, in fact, to Shakespeare. Of course Shakespeare. Elton gives Keats his English-Italian dictionary as a parting gift.

The book was intolerably heavy in his hands. He brought up his knees and made a lectern of them. LONDON, Printed by Melch. Bradwood, for Edw. Blount and William Barret. ANNO 1611. Year of the King James Bible. Shakespeare was how old? Forty-seven. With five years of life yet to run, he might have held this book, this very copy, in his hands, also finding it heavy. John's lectern-knees became Shakespeare's. John Florio had been Shakespeare's friend. At least he had been secretary to Shakespeare's noble dearmylove and patron. [37]

This is a real book, by the way: Queen Anna’s New World of Words, Or Dictionary of the Italian and English tongues, collected and newly much augmented by Iohn Florio, Reader of the Italian unto the Soueraigne Maiestie of Anna (1611). Keats turns first, of course, to the prickwords, the cockwords, the MadSadBadAbbawords: 'Cazzo, a man's priuie member. Also as Cazzica. Cazzolata, a ladle-full. Also a musical instrument without strings. Cazzo marino, a Pintle-fish. Cazzo ritto, a stiffe standing pricke. Cazzuto, a man that hath a pricke.' Keats finds this last comical, because prick is such a synecdoche for 'man' that a man without one is hardly even a man. But, reading over the pronunciation guide he discovers that Shakespearean English was far from 'correct' posho English. 'It began to sunrise upon him slowly what this meant. It meant that he was being granted a vision (not the just word. Audition?) of how Shakespeare spoke. He spoke like an Irishman, cazzica. He said not flea but flay. He pronounced reason as raisin. And now it flashed in where the joke was in Falstaff's words: "reasons are as plentiful as blackberries." Of course, raisins. With awe and something of fear, John felt as if he were being instructed by the dead in person, souls of poets dead and gone. Doors were being opened' [38]. When Gulielmi comes to visit Keats is excited:

"Mr Keats," Gulielmi greeted, "I see the rose of health on thy cheek."

"Master Kates, Shakespeare would call me. I have had the revelation this morning of hearing Shakespeare's voice. Florio's Dictionary. I have learned that Shakespeare said têle for tail and mêde for maid ... I wonder if Shakespeare was ever in Rome." [39]

The force of this has to do with provincialism, Burgess's non-London, unsouthern provenance, his Manchester accent, his sense of coming from the peripheries, consoled by the realisation that Shakespeare was a provincial and spoke like one too. And in a larger sense, we are all provincials from the perspective of the Eternal City ('I wonder if Shakespeare was ever in Rome'). Rome marginalises us all, and so unites us all in our existential centrality. Burgess follows this through with his Manchester-flavoured translations of Belli, anticipating the aesthetic strategy of Simon Armitage's splendid Gawain and the Green Knight translation by a quarter century.

13.
And following on from Pappa, or Abba, Shakespeare, there's the Italian John Florio. He shares Burgess's first name, and his passion for languages, and his interest in all things Anglo-Itaian. Perhaps in his more fruity stylistic moments Burgess wouldn't have rejected the title 'John the Florid'. But here's a strange point that brings us back to ABBA ABBA. The dedicatory epistle to Florio's Italian-English dictionary, the one Keats possesses in this novel, addresses Queen ANNA ANNA in conventionally  fulsome manner:

I like 'braine-babe', as a way of describing a book; not least because it returns me to this book, this Burgess brain-babe, this B-abba B-abba. Babba is a north-country rather than southern way of saying 'baby', of course; and that is what this book is. It babbles as infants do, because it is finding its way to the true speech. Or as Keats himself says at the end of chapter 1, in nicely merde-delighted baby tones: 'By the waters of babble on there we shat down and flung our arses on the pillows.'

14. Keats must be the last word, the last intertextual referent, the last name adduced, of course. Belli's sonnets, Burgess's authorial busy-ness everywhere present, the sexual allure of Pauline Bonaparte, the fate of Bonaparte himself, discussed variously by the various characters, fat Don Benedetto the priest, all these 'B's are arranged around the central 'A'. A is Keats, our alpha. Weep for Adonais, the book says, he is dead. But the book also says: the (arse)soul of Adonais, like a star/be-cocks from the abode where the arseternal are. Options

Google Translate's Sermon on the Mount

Another exercise after the manner of this. Since Matthew chs 5-7 are amongst the most famous in the entire New Testament, I might have expected there to be many-many online renderings of them out of which Google Translate could confect a smooth and recognisable English version. Apparently not. Still: there's quite a lot in this that's interestingly estranging. I like 5:14 and 5:27, and that thou hast cast upon thy right jaw, turn it up, and thou shalt be glorious is surely good advice. The Greek text I used is here.

-------

1 And when he came to him, he came to him: and these were his disciples.

2 And when he had spoken this word, he said,

3 Blessed are the poor of the spirit, that these are the kingdoms of the heavens.

4 Blessed are the martyrs that they are called.

5 Blessed are the hands that they inherit these things.

6 Blessed are the hungers, and they are afraid of the righteousness, that they are satisfied.

7 Blessed are the wives, that they are worshiped.

8 Blessed are the pure ones, that they are seen.

9 Blessed are the sworn men, that they are called unto thee.

10 Blessed are the founders of righteousness, that these are the kingdoms of the heavens.

11 Blessed are ye, when ye reproach, and forgiveness, and forgiveness, for the wickedness of their foolishness;

12 rejoice, and magnify, that the wages of many of those who are in the flesh have done their prophets to the earth.

13 And thou shalt be the glory of thy womb, and shalt thou go down to thee; it is true that they are being abused and abused by human beings.

14 Thou art the sons of the world. that the city may be hiding above the text;

15 which shall be lighted, and shall be upon them, in the light of the lamps, and shall shine upon them in the earth.

16 And I will shine upon the faces of the people before men, as the work of the good works, and the glory of the fathers of them that are in those overseers.

17 Do you think that you are the law of the prophet? You have come to be fulfilled.

18 And I say unto you, By the passage of the Oranas, and by the presence of an ear that passeth from the law, until it is ever glorified.

19 But if these wicked men are wounded, and they have taught these men, at least they are called into the kingdom of the nations, and they do not teach, nor teach, which is called unto the kingdom of the nations.

20 I say to you, that there is a surrender to the righteousness of the secretaries and the Pharisees, that you have come to the kingdom of the heavens.

21 Thou hast heard that the wicked is come, thou hast killed; that thou wilt not kill, that thou art judged.

22 I say to you that the fallen brother of this fellow is judged; for he does not know his brother, and he is the judge of the congregation, and he is blameless, he is blamed for him in the time of the fire.

23 Thou shalt offer thy servant for the altar, that thy brother hath whatsoever he hath done;

24 Thou hast done this thing before the altar, and thou hast first changed thy brother, and thou hast offered thy servant.

25 Wherefore thou art contrary to thee, that thou art with him in the throne, that thou shalt not go to the strange tribe, and that thou hast judged the servant, and that thou hast taken prisoner;

26 I say unto thee, Thou shalt be said, Thou shalt take away thee Kojan.

27 You heard that it was, You adulterated.

28 I say that the woman of the sight of whom thou hast said, that she hath already done this unto her heart.

29 If thou hast the right eye, thou shalt scourge thyself, and thou shalt make thyself good: thou shalt make good unto thy brethren, and with all thy souls thou hast come to pass.

30 And if your right hand chasten to them, cut them off and set them up for good; and your members shall be with you, and all your souls shall come to pass.

31 And it came to pass, that this woman rescued it, and gave it to me.

32 I say that the wife of the woman who has been disobedient to this prostitution is forgiven, and that the woman who is forgiven is baptized.

33 Thou didst say that the wicked was come, Oec, the rebuke, and the reward of thy rulers.

34 I say that I am exceedingly worthy of thee, neither of the throne of the god:

35 nor of the throne of his feet, nor of the city of the great king,

36 nor of thy head that you can have a white hair that was left over.

37 Let the word of the wrath be unto them, which hath more than these of the wicked one.

38 Thou hast heard that he was come, and that he looked upon the eye of the eye, and of the diadem.

39 But I say that I am defiant of the wicked, but that thou hast cast upon thy right jaw, turn it up, and thou shalt be glorious;

40 and thou shalt be judged, and thou hast taken away thy daughters, as thou hast, and thou hast;

41 he loves you a mile, and then he goes with that two.

42 Thou hast done unto thee, and whosoever will, he shall dare thyself uproare.

43 Thou hast heard that it is gone, that thou hast loved thee, and hate thee thine enemy.

44 I do not say unto you, love enemies you and pray for you: the persecutors,

45 genisthe as sons of the Father of you in heaven, that the sun rises over this evil and the good, and rains on the righteous and unjust.

46 Do you love that which thou hast loved? and shall they be finished?

47 And if you abhor the cousin of the wisdom only, what more are you? whiskey and its nationalities?

48 Thou art as perfect as the father of the righteous.

From Wagner to Tolkien

A few years ago I wrote this, on the subject of Wagner and Tolkien:

One reason Tolkien’s imaginary realm has proved so successful is precisely its structural non-specificity. What I mean is: Tolkien treats material that has deep roots in, and deep appeal to, various cultural traditions; but he does so in a way—as fictionalised worldbuilding rather than denominated myth—that drains away much of the poisonous nationalist, racist and belligerent associations those traditions have accumulated over the centuries. A thumbnail history would go like this: in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries, Wagner’s Ring melodramas spoke to a great many people about a particular northern-European cultural identity; about a group of linked, potent emotional attachments to history, landscape, to the numinous and the divine, to matters of heroism and everyday life. I am trying not to sound sneery as I say this (I mean melodrama in the strict sense of the word), because these things did, and do, matter intensely and genuinely to many people. But there is a reason, a room-filling elephant of a reason, why Der Ring des Nibelungen no longer has this general resonance. It is because the cultural reservoir from which it draws much of its power also supplied cultural capital to the worst regime ever to take charge in Germany, and therefore lubricated the most catastrophically destructive war ever to be waged in the world.

In saying this I am not, of course, blaming Wagner for the Nazis. Indeed, the endless debates about Wagner’s own ideological ‘purity’ (‘was Wagner an anti-Semite?’ Short answer: yes. Long answer: yes, like just about every other gentile in 19th-century Europe) seem to me to miss the point. The restless churning through this question happens because we're desperate to acquit Wagner so that we can enjoy his music with a clean conscience. We ask the question, get the uncomfortable answer, and ask it again. In our guts resides the queasy comprehension that Wagner can’t be acquitted. Politics can’t be neatly separated out from the Ring cycle, leaving only a washed-and-scrubbed sequence of pretty orchestral tone poems behind. I love the Ring cycle, and listen to it regularly; but I would never try to deny that it is political all the way through, down to its very marrow. It is, to be precise, about the notion that history and myth are in some sense the same thing—a very dangerous notion indeed.

Tolkien’s story is not the same as the Ring cycle; his ‘ring’ (as he crossly reminded correspondents) not the same as Alberich’s ring. But a considerable amount of the heft and force of Lord of the Rings derives from the way Tolkien draws on the same broader cultural, mythic, northern-European heritage. What saves Lord of the Rings is that it is not about Germany, or about England; or to be more precise, that it is about England and Germany only secondarily, in an eloquently oblique (a cynic might say: in a plausibly deniable) manner. Tolkien found a way of articulating the same deep-rooted cultural concerns in a way that avoids being poisoned by the cultural specificity of European Fascism. This doesn’t let Tolkien off the hook, as far as racial and ideological content goes, of course. Indeed, I offer my thoughts here not as a value judgement of his fiction, so much as an explanation for why Lord of the Rings has done so extraordinarily well—resonated so powerfully with so many people—in the postwar period. It rushed in to fill the gap that more culturally-specific art had supplied before that kind of art was discredited by the 1940s.

I come back to this argument because I'm now trying to get my Tolkien-and-post-Tolkien-Fantasy ducks in a row, prior to writing, with a friend, something on the history of Fantasy as a mode. Hopefully. At some point.

So: there were lots of iterations of what we might want to call ‘Fantasy’ published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a comprehensive history of the mode might want to discuss all of them. But a leaner account of the main currents of the growth of this mode would, I think, be entitled to pick out a cleaner through-line. There's just no denying the impact of Tolkien, not so much from the original publication dates (1937 for The Hobbit, 1952-53 for Lord of the Rings) as from the start of the great cult of Middle Earth that dates from when the mass-market paperback of LotR became a campus darling and then an international bestseller in the 1960s. The 1970s were full of direct, sometimes slavish imitations of Tolkien like Terry Brooks's execrable Shannara series (1977 and ongoing) and Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (1977-2013). By the 80s bookshop shelves groaned with fat fantasy novels, and the genre had finally coalesced as a commercial genre in its own right. And whilst connoisseurs of the mode might sometimes make noises about the importance of William Morris, Dunsany or Hope Mirrlees in the pedigree of Fantasy as such (all three fine and important writers, of course), the brute fact remains that this was a mode that came out of Tolkien. For although the reaction against Tolkien began early—Moorcock's sneer that LofT was ‘Winnnie-the-Pooh posing as Epic’ dates to 1987—books written in reaction were very much written in reaction: they bracketed the book's emphasis on nobility, service, loyalty, bravery, its pre-raphaelite colour-scheme and general uplift with its dodgy racial and sexual politics and took the sledgehammer to the lot: voilà, Grimdark. We're still being offered a basically medievalised, feudal or otherwise pre-Industrial world threaded with magic, elves, dwarfs, dragons and all that; but now the emphasis is on rape and slaughter, on betrayal and realpolitik (narrowly, indeed adolescently, conceived) and a general horribleness. This is a mode marked by Tolkien even as it shouts its antagonism for everything Tolkien represents.

This, of course, isn't the whole story. We need also to factor in the Fritz Leiber US sword-and-sorcery tradition (novels and stories, but also Dungeons and Dragons), and also the smaller but not negligible tradition of Robert Howard's Conan and its muscly imitators, which predates LotR. In particular, Leiber's more knowing, knockabout tales not only feed into myriad direct imitations, but also lie largely behind Pratchett's Discworld, one of the most important Fantasy worlds of the last quarter century (it's not surprising, I think, that Leiber's cool-kids sharpness, his uninterest in Fantasies of dignity or elevation, can be reworked so brilliantly into out-and-out comedy). But the step-up from sword-and-sorcery as a relatively small-scale interest of dedicated fans to something much bigger happened, as it were, on the coat-tails of Tolkien's global success, 1960s-and-after, and something similar is true of the nerd-compensatory-fantasy muscle-and-sword variety most particularly associated with Howard, which came to broader notice only with the 1982 Schwarzenegger movie, which was in turn an attempt to tap-into the boom in ‘Fantasy’ as a mode. Luckily for me, though, I'm not attempting here to tell the whole story. All I'm doing is recording some of the things that occurred to me as I read Adorno's In Search of Wagner (1952).

I'm a little ashamed I hadn't read this particular Adorno before, actually. It is a remarkable book, dense with ideas. But I read it in an, as it were, bifocal manner, both for what it was specifically saying about Wagner and for what its approach to Wagner might say about Tolkien (a writer I'm not sure Adorno had ever heard of, and whom I am sure he never discussed). This is, I think, more than me being merely adventitious. Adorno builds much of his analysis around the insight that Wagner's appeal to a timeless, mythic, Fantasy realm of gods and heroes is not something separate from his bourgeois German respectability, but precisely an iteration of it. ‘The power of the bourgeoisie over Wagner is so absolute that as a bourgeois he finds himself unable to satisfy the requirements of bourgeois respectability’ [Adorno, 7]. He embodies ‘an early example of the changing function of the bourgeois category of the individual’:

In his hopeless struggle with the power of society, the individual seeks to avert his own destruction by identifying with that power and then rationalizing the change of direction as authentic individual fulfilment ... the focal points of decay in the bourgeois character, in terms of its own morality, are the prototypes of its subsequent transformation in the age of totalitarianism.

This interrelation between the bourgeois and the mythic-legendary is, of course, the most prominent feature of Tolkien's worldbuilding, where Middle Earth is literally divided between the bourgeois hobbits of the north west and the feudal horselords and medieval city-states of the South. Beorn may spend half his time as a bear, but he keeps as tidy a little bourgeois house, with all the creature comforts, as any hobbit, and bourgeois possessiveness for material objects (Wemmick's ‘portable property’) is shown, through Gollum's longevity and through the fundamental, stubborn toughness of his Being-in-the-World, to be superior to Boromir's feudal puissance in terms of holding out against the Ring. Tom Shippey has interesting things to say about the etymological connections—the sorts of connections that particularly appealed to Tolkien, of course—between the word burglar, Bilbo's dwarf-assisting career, and bourgeois, Bilbo's social identity. I could insert a 2000-word excursus on the conceptual synergies of these two terms here, but I'll spare you. For now.

One of the threads that particularly interests me, in tracing the Tolkien and C S Lewis pedigree of Fantasy from the 1950s into the 21st-century, is the way two Christian writers, writing tacictly (or in Lewis's cases allegorically-explicitly) Christian Fantasy, came to influence a whole tradition that wasn't in itself particularly Christian—or indeed was, in some cases, quite assertively atheist. For many fans I daresay the Christian element is something they simply handwave away: easy enough to do with Tolkien, I suppose. But the fact that these two, arguably the two writers of ‘Fantasy’ most influential on the postwar development of the mode, were so very Christian interests me. We could frame it as the Beowulf problem, since that's a poem that parses pre-Christian, pagan and monstrous-magical story material through a notionally Christian frame.

Remembering how central Beowulf was to Tolkien's own imaginative development, and just (you know) looking at the great mass of commercial Fantasy, I wonder if we can see the tension between the pagan-mythic and the Christian-allegorical in Fantasy in terms of this more strictly social-historical—or, I suppose I'm saying, really, this ideological—tension. Professing a Christian faith may be a bold thing to do on an individual level, depending on the situation, but for most of the 20th-C and for many parts of the world in this, our benighted 21st, Christianity is the orthodox and conventional worldview. I don't say so to snark. Indeed on the contrary, and speaking personally, I'm persuaded by the argument Chesterton makes in his Orthodoxy book that ordinary things are not only more valuable than extraordinary things, they are, actually, more extraordinary—that orthodoxy has a glamour and danger that heresy never can. But saying so is only to restate the legendary-mythic/bourgeois dynamic that is as much as feature of Wagner as it is of Tolkien. The Ring is all Germanic legend and no Christianity but Wagner not only wanted to express his grandiose mythic pagan-Nativism, he wanted to pay the bills. “Yet” [Adorno is quoting Hildebrandt, about Wagner and Nietzsche holidaying in Sorrento] “there was one particular remark which cut Nietzsche to the quick.”

The conversation had turned to the poor attendance of the Bayreuth Festival. Nietzsche's sister reports that Wagner had once observed angrily. “The Germans no longer wished to have anything to do with heathen Gods and herooes; what they wanted was something Christian.” [Adorno, 12]

Parsifal swiftly followed, to supply this market need; not only the most explicitly Christian of Wagner's operas, but, in its portrait of its villain Klingsor, the most nakedly anti-Semitic. Poor old Nietzsche. So much for Gott ist tot.

Still it is strange (that is to say: I'm suggesting it's structurally or formally strange) that Modern Fantasy emerges out of an emulsion of Pagan and Christian in the way that it does. It's not that a large audience are clamouring for specifically Christianised mythic legend, I'd say; but slice it and dice it howsoever we want, it is the bourgeois Christianity of Bunyan, Idylls of the King and Wagner's final compromise with his audience, through Tolkien and Lewis, that feeds the river that becomes the delta of the modern genre. In my time I have wondered if this has something to do with ‘magic’—that necessary component of Fantasy worldbuilding, and which we might want to understand this as a broad-brush attempt to capture something of the spiritually transcendent, the numinous, in the reified logic of magical systems, spells, wizards and so on. Adorno had a different angle, and I wonder if he isn't righter than I:

A contradiction of all autonomous art is the concealment of the labor that went into it, but in high capitalism, with the complete hegemony of exchange-value and with the contradictions arising out of that hegemony, autonomous art becomes both problematic and programmatic at the same time. This is the objective explanation for what is generally thought of in psychological terms as Wagner's mendacity. To make works of art into magical objects means that men worship their own labour because they are unable to recognize it as such. ... The work of art endorses the sentiment normally denied by ideology: work is degrading. [Adorno, 72]

This is why Fantasy is filled with aristocrats and warriors, or at the least of hobbits of independent means: with travellers and questers (which is to say: with holidaymakers) and so on—as, also, with rascals, thieves, rogues etc. And I suppose sometimes with students, at Hogwarts' or the Unseen University and whatnot. The point is that Fantasy cannot be written in the John Berger, or even the Zola mode: not because of the generic mismatch of Fantasy as le naturalisme, or not only for that reason, but because Fantasy is a realm where work as such is always transmuted magically into magic.

There's also the prominence given to swords in this mode. Not, except in rare and marginal cases, to rapiers or xiphoi; but to Excaliburs and Glamdrings and Terminus Ests (Termini Sunt, I suppose)—to, that is, big swords, mighty swords, claymores and broadswords (swords that functioned as much as clubs to smash bones as they did blades to cut flesh). This is to say nothing of all those axes, those hammers, all those battles, all that bashing and crashing. It's a way of externalising the genre's rationale of force, the emblematic articulation of forcefulness as such. Adorno:

Wagner not only took up the bourgeois profession of conductor, he was also the first composer to write conductor's music in the grand style. This is not said with the intention of echoing the threadbare reproaches of unoriginality, of with the design of unduly emphasising mere orchestral skill—something that pales by the side of Wagner's overwhelming art of instrumentation. What it alludes to is the fact that his music is conceived in terms of the gesture of striking a blow and that the whole idea of beating is fundamental to it. [Adorno, 20]

Adorno doesn't specifically mention, although presumably he has in mind, the music that famously accompanies the descent to Nibelheim in Das Rheingold, scored for not one but eighteen anvils (tuned to F three octaves apart). There's something here, I feel, to do with Robert Graves's distinction between the mediterranean oarstroke of long-short Greek and Latin prosody and the anvil-blow stressed-unstressed northern European metrical ictus. A related point has to do with the sheer fuck-off size of many of these Fantasy texts.

Compared to Viennese classicism, Wagner's music reckons with people who listen to it from a great distance, much as Impressionist paintings require to be viewed from a greater distance than earlier paintings. To listen from a greater distance also means listening less attentively. The audience of these giant works lasting many hours is thought of an unable to concentrate—something not unconnected with the fatigue of the citizen in his leisure time. [Adorno, 22]

Something similar may be true of the manifest textual bloat of modern Fantasy: not only the shelf-sagging bulk, but its stasis, the narrative inertia of Robert Jordan, George R R Martin and their ilk. This is literature not written to be consumed on the level of individual, marvellous sentences, but by the metric tonne. Afficionados may feel such bulk only appropriate to the epic heft and scope of their favourite stories, but I wonder if the point is not heft, for which one needs density (contemporary Fantasy novels may spread over thousands of pages, but many have the texture of expanded polystyrene) so much as a kind of defocusing, an attempt at blurring the focus on the specificities of the whole. Fantasy plays with history, as with myth, as it plays with an ethos simultaneously bourgeois and feudal. Too close an attentiveness to these contradictions is to be discouraged.

Wagner showed himself to be bourgeois through and through in his conviction that poetic depth is synonymous with the omission of historical specificity. His image of the universally human requires the dismantling of what he supposes to be relative and contingent in favour of the idea of an unvarying human nature. What is actually substantial appears to him as a residue. He therefore finds himself reduced to a stratum of subject-matter that acknowledges neither history nor the supernatural nor even the natural, but which lies beyond all such categories. Essence is drawn into an omnisignificant immanence; the immanent is held in thrall by symbol. This stratum, where all is undifferentiated, is that of myth. Its sign is ambiguity; its twilight is a standing invitation to merge irreconcilables—the positivistic with the metaphysical — because it firmly rejects both the transcendental and the factual. [Adorno, 104]

With this, I think, we approach something really key about the post-Tolkienian Fantasy tradition. The ‘universally human’ becomes, in these kinds of books, pseudo-ethicised, narratively situated in a Cosmic drama of Good versus Evil, where the only important things are to show that you're on Team Good and to screw your courage to that sticking point. Actual moral choice, and the more destabilising moral complexity of actual life, is not the currency of these sorts of tales. And it's surely the case that Commericial Fantasy does indeed reject both the transcendental and the factual. In the case of JRRT the absense of gods (except, in the deep background of of the text, and Silmarilic exegesis) and the absence of ‘actual’ England, Germany, ‘Northern Europe’ and so on, are revealed as versions of one another. I suppose the problem with this as a reading of Wagner, though, is precisely the problem of the actual political—which is to say, historical—uses to which the Nazis put his art (uses to which JRRT really can't be recruited). Adorno's ‘authentic historical conflict’ actually only describes one kind of pseduo-historical, or Scottian, mode; where history-as-ideology is immanent throughout Wagner. Is that true of Tolkien as well, though? Or of Fantasy more generally?

If in the Ring mythic violence and legal contract are confounded, this not only confirms an intuition about the origins of legality, it also articulates the experience of the lawlessness of a society dominated in the name of law by contract and property. [Adorno, 108]

If the lawlessness of Westeros is, as seems plausible, part of its popular appeal (as an imaginative release for those times when Civilisation and its Discontents chafe against our senses of self: ‘in such a place I can kill who I like and fuck who I like ...’) then that very lawlessness is, as Adorno suggests here, grounded in a minutely and even pettifogging sense of contract law as such: the precise nature of the bloodline of the individual ‘rightfully’ king, the minute particulars of the magical prophesy that must be proved true, albeit in surprising ways. Indeed I wonder if we can go further, and say that the copresence of Might-is-Right mythic violence with a universe magically structured by bourgeois contract law (the way the witches' prophesies in Macbeth are precisely honoured in their contract with Macbeth, the contract lawyer ‘I am no man’ gloating of Eowyn discovering a loophole in the Nazgul's magic charm anbd so on) is foundational for the genre as such. Nor is this an arbitrary feature of the genre. It's how Fantasy links itself back to life:

The opacity and omnipotence of the social process is then celebrated as a metaphysical mystery by the individual who becomes conscious of it and yet ranges himself on the side of its dominant forces. Wagner has devised the ritual of permanent catastrophe. [Adorno, 108]

One final thing that struck me in The Search for Wagner is the moment when Adorno says of Wagner's music that ‘each listener has the feeling that it belongs to him alone’. That was exactly my childhood response to reading Tolkien: as if the book, and the world it revealed, was uniquely mine, that it spoke to me with an uncanny specificity that surely couldn't be true of other readers. The irony of course is that all true fans feel that way, that the individuation here is ersatz, or if that looks too judgmental then just a sort of the trick of the fictive light. Here's the whole quotation from Adorno:

Each listener has the feeling that it belongs to him alone, that it is a communication from his long-forgotten childhood, and from this shared déjà vu the phantasmagoria of the collective is constructed. Nowhere is Wagner more mythological than in the modernity of such pleasures. [Adorno, 109]

Nowhere, perhaps, is post-Tolkienian Fantasy more mythological than in the modernity of such pleasures.

Google Translate's Version of Genesis ch. 1's Hebrew.

1: 1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth

1: 2 And the land was dull, and darkness and darkness were upon the face of the abyss, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the water.

1: 3 And God said, Let there be light, and there will be light

1: 4 And God saw the light, for it was good, and God separated between the light and the darkness.

1: 5 And God called on the light of day, and the darkness was called night, and there was evening, and there was morning one day.

1: : 6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters;

1: 7 And God made the firmament, and made a distinction between the waters which were under the firmament, and the waters that were above the firmament, and so it was.

1: 8 And God called heaven heaven, and there was evening, and there was morning.

1: 9 And God said, Let the water under the heaven be gathered to one place, and the land shall appear, and it shall be so.

1:10 And God called the land dry, and to the waters of the waters he called, and God saw that it was good.

1:11 And God said, Let the earth grow on the grass, Grass that sows seed, A tree of fruit, Make fruit for his wine, which they sow on the land, and it is so.

1:12 And the earth brought forth grass, grass that sowed seed into its kind, and a tree that made fruit, which they sown in its kind, and God saw that it was good.

1:13 And it was evening, and there was morning morning.

1:14 And God said, Let there be light in the firmament of the heaven, to distinguish between the day and the night, and be for the dead, and the seasons, and the days, and the years.

1:15 And they became a den in the firmament of heaven, to shine upon the earth, and it was so.

1:16 And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the little light to rule the night, and the stars.

1:17 And God put them in the firmament of heaven to shine upon the earth.

1:18 And for instance by day and by night, and to distinguish between light and darkness, and God saw that it was good.

1:19 And there was evening, and there was morning, Wednesday.

1:20 And God said, The waters shall flow forth, that a living soul shall flow, and a bird shall fly upon the earth upon the firmament of heaven.

1:21 And God created their great things, and all the living souls that were thirsty, which the water desired for their kind, and every winged bird of its kind, and God saw that it was good.

1:22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the water with the days, and the birds shall multiply in the land.

1:23 And there was evening, and there was morning, Thursday.

1:24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth a living soul, a kind of beast, and a herd, and make a land for its kind, and it shall be.

1:25 And God made the beast of the land for her kind, and the cattle for her own kind, and all the sheaf of the earth for its kind, and God saw that it was good.

1:26 And God said, Let us become a man in our image as our figure, and go down in the fish of the sea, and in the birds of the heavens, and in the cattle, and in all the earth,

1:27 And God created man in his image in the image of God;

1:28 And God blessed them; and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the land, and conquer it, and go down in the fish of the sea, and in the bird of the heavens

1:29 And God said, Behold, I have given you all the seed of seed, which is on the face of all the earth, and all the tree wherein is the fruit of a tree;

1:30 And to every beast of the earth, and to all the birds of the air, and to every rosette on the ground, wherewith a living soul liveth every herb of grass, to eat it, and it shall be so.

1:31 And God saw all that He had done, and behold, it was very good, and it was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day.

Bunyan's Allegory

“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.” Tolkien, preface to Lord of the Rings

:1:

Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory. That is to say, it superposes two ways of understanding reality: a chronological lived-experience way and an allegorical spiritual way. Various things happen in the story of The Pilgrim's Progress, people are encountered, places are visited and so on, and all of these are “allegorical” representations of various things that are happening in another story, which we can intuit from what we read but which is not specifically told: the story of a person trying to live a life true to their Christian faith in “our” world. The book is about this balance, or tension, between the allegorical and the real. So far, so bleeding obvious.

We all know this doubled story of course. A man called Christian, who previously went by the name Graceless, is an inhabitant of the City of Destruction. As the narrative opens he is reading a book—the Bible, we presume, though it's not specifically spelled out—and realising he must be saved. By reading he has acquired a gigantic pack on his back that weighs him down: an allegorical representation of his awakened conscience or his consciousness of sin. Resolving to go on pilgrimage, he abandons his wife and four sons and soon meets a man called Evangelist, “walking out in the fields”, who directs him to the “Wicket Gate” through which he has to pass, and so begin his trek to the “Cœlestial City” of Zion, which is heaven.

On the way to this gate Christian falls into the Slough of Despond, a boggy mire that is the sink of all the sins of his city's inhabitants, but he is pulled out by Help, and he gets to the Wicket Gate and through it onto the road of Salvation. One of the first things he comes to is a Cross standing over an open sepulchre, at which sight “his burden loosed from off his Shoulders” and rolled down into the open grave “where it fell and I saw it no more” [32; my page refs are all to this edition].

Christian's journey, though, is only just beginning, and each subsequent stage has its double signification, an in-text worldbuilding meaning and an allegorical outwardly-referring meaning. Often the latter is indicated by a marginal gloss attached to the appearance of the former: Christian is directed to a “high hill”, and the note says “Mount Sinai”; the topography of the gate is described (“a little distance from this Gate” stands “a strong Castle” and “them that are within Shoot Arrows at those that come up to this Gate”—Christian only escapes being shot because the Gatekeeper, Goodwill, pulls him suddenly inside) and glossed (“Satan envies those that enter the straight Gate”).

Indeed, in an intriguingly meta-move, Bunyan builds this hermeneutic, these pointers to the meanings of the allegory, actually into the in-text logic of the world he is describing. Christian spends some time in the house of a man called Interpreter, who shows him a number of pictures and artefacts and explains their meaning. To recap: Bunyan starts his book with a poem explaining that it is an allegory; he gives his places and characters transparently allegorical names, and adds marginal glosses at various places decoding the text's references. And he includes an in-text character whose whole purpose is showing allegorical representations to other in-text characters and explaining what they are allegorical of. We take the point.

Moving on, Christian climbs a hill called Difficulty, and meets naysayers and wicked people with names like Mistrust and Timorous, as well as encouragers with names like Piety and Prudence. When he passes through the Valley of Humiliation he battles with a winged demon-monster called Apollyon (spiritual destruction) whom he defeats. He meets and befriends a fellow Pilgrim called Faithful, and the two of them pass through Vanity Fair (the secular world) where they are arrested and tried and Faithful is executed. Christian, though, escapes (we're not told how) and falls in with another companion, Hopeful. These two resist the monetary temptations of a character called Demas, who tries to entice them from the true path so that they can visit “a little Hill called Lucre, and in that Hill a Silver Mine” [83]; but after avoiding that one temptation they fall prey to another. They stray from the true path and end up in the gaol cells of Doubting Castle, prisoners of the monstrous Giant Despair. This Giant beats them Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and his wife urges him to kill them both; but on Sunday Christian suddenly remembers he has a key in his breast “called Promise” that “opens any lock in Doubting Castle”. As they escape the Giant comes after them, but he is subject to strange epileptic seizures and has one before he can recover his former prisoners.

Free again, the two pilgrims make their way to the Delectable Mountains, where shepherds restore and entertain them. From the peak of these mountains they get a clear sight of the Celestial City, their destination, but also various other dangers still before them. They press on, but are caught in one of the devil's snares, an actual net (they are released by a passing “Shining one”, or angel, who whips them for good measure to teach them a lesson) and then they meet a man called Atheist who is walking the wrong way, and who assures them “there is no such place” as the Celestial City. Finally, passing Pope, Pagan and Ignorance, they get to their destination, and swim through the river of death to take their place in Zion.

The first thing to say about this is that some of its oddnesses resolve themselves when we understand that this is not the account of a life as such, but very specifically an account of a spiritual journey. The man called Christian in this spiritual realm is presumably called something quite different in our material realm: John, say. Paul, George, Adam who knows. It looks odd that Christian simply abandons his wife and four children to go on his pilgrimage, never to return (scripturally, of course, Christ enjoins his faithful to abandon their earthly duties and follow him, to “let the dead bury their dead” as he puts it). But we have to presume that this abandonment only happens, as it were, in the spiritual realm; that in the material realm he continues living with his family and materially-supporting them as was his duty. The point is, Bunyan's story is not focused on that material life. It is allegorising the spiritual separation that must grow between a husband who has been born again and a wife who hasn't, even if they're still living in the same house.

Indeed, we must assume that this peripatetic narrative describes the actual life of a man called John (or whatever) who himself has most likely never travelled anywhere—who stays all his life in the same town or village where he was born, as almost everybody did in the seventeenth-century. Indeed it's really quite important that the “actual” person Bunyan is writing about doesn't travel, even though his allegorical avatar, Christian, does. That's because one of the things Bunyan is striving for is a clear separation between his story and the (as he saw it) wicked old Catholic rituals of literal pilgrimages. To distinguish between his book and all those dodgy medieval Catholic allegorical romances. As Alec Ryrie argues in his book Protestants: the Radicals who Made the Modern World (2017), Protestants like Bunyan had a complicated relationship to the idea of pilgrimage: on the one hand a Catholic and suspect notion, on the other one that expressed their sense of faith as a journey—‘Protestantism was and is a religion of progress, of restless, relentless advance towards holiness, not of stagnation’ [132-33] is how Ryrie puts it. Bunyan is not saying Christians have actually to schlep to Canterbury, or Rheims, or Jerusalem, the way a Muslim actually must travel to Mecca. He is saying that Christians must undergo spiritual pilgrimages, journeys of faith.

Some oddnesses remain, mind you. Once through the wicket gate, and especially when Christian has passed the Cross and been relieved of his oppressive burden, the spacious country over which he then passes is presumably a Christian land. And indeed, the people he then meets, though many of them are wicked, are all notionally Christians, a fact about which some of them even boast. Bunyan's point is that the outward profession of Christianity is not enough, and nor is the sincere adoption of tenets of faith if those tenets are wrongheaded or heretical. So it is that he meets people called things like Simple, Sloth, Presumption and (more pointedly) Formalist and Hypocrisy, not to mention ‘my Lord Turn-about, my Lord Time-server, my Lord Fair-speech, Mr Smooth-man, Mr Facing-bothways, Mr Any-thing; and the parson of our Parish, Mr Two-tongues’. The 1558 Act of Uniformity was still in force, and people were fined twelvepence for non-attendance of Church on any given Sunday, and liable to be imprisoned if they persisted, it's not surprising that everyone in Bunyan's England put on the outward show of Christianity. Bunyan's point is how rarely outward show reflects inward reality.

Nonetheless it's a puzzle that, late on in his pilgrimage, Christian encounters a character called Atheist (“I laugh to see what ignorant persons you are, to take upon you so tedious a journey, and you are like to have nothing but your travel for your pains ... There is no such [heavenly] place as you dream of in all this world” [104]). We are entitled to wonder: what is an atheist doing this side of the wicket gate? There are only two ways into the main territory of Bunyan's story: through the strait gate (which doesn't guarantee salvation, since you still need to stay true to the path on the far side) or clambering illicitly over the wall, which is how Ignorance, Formalist and Hypocrisy get in (and which guarantees damnation at the end of the journey: indeed the very last thing that happens in The Pilgrim's Progress, after Christian has gone to heaven, is Ignorance being bound hand and foot and dragged away to Hell, despite having made it all the way to Zion, because he didn't come into the path the proper way). It's hard to see an actual Atheist coming in through either route. Wouldn't it make more sense to have Christian meet Atheist before he comes through the Wicket Gate?

You might object that this is to apply a hobgoblin-of-little-minds version of consistency to Bunyan's allegorical progress, but in fact Bunyan took great pains to render his worldbuilding consistent. Quite a large portion of the second part of the Pilgrim's Progress (which tells of Christian's wife Christiana belatedly waking up to her need for salvation and treading the same path as her now dead husband) is given over to revisiting moments in the first part to explain them at greater length, or rationalise their place in the allegory.

So for example: in Part 1 Christian fights the demon Apollyon in the “Valley of Humiliation”, and the fight does indeed humiliate him, in the sense of throwing him in the dirt, wounded and weakened, for his enemy to crow over. But at some point between writing the first part in 1678 and the second in 1684 Bunyan recalled that the root of the word humilation is humble, a state a good Christian ought gladly to embrace rather than a miserable condition imposed upon him by his enemies (Christian himself later tells Ignorance that to “agree with the judgment of the Word of God” a pilgrim needs to “thinketh of his ways ... sensibly, and with heart-humiliation”). So in the Second Part we are told that the Valley of Humiliation is actually “the best and most fruitful piece of ground in all those parts”, that it has “a very fruitful soil, and doth bring forth by handfuls”: “I have known many laboring men that have got good estates in this Valley of Humiliation; for God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble. [James 4:6; 1 Pet. 5:5.]”.

Alright. But what, then, was Apollyon doing todding around this fine place, and why was it here that he nearly hacked Christian to death with his diabolic sword? Ah, well (Christiana is told) the “valley is large” and Christian's battle happened at a remote and lesser part of it: “in a narrow passage, just beyond Forgetful Green. And indeed that place is the most dangerous place in all these parts. For if at any time Pilgrims meet with any brunt, it is when they forget what favours they have received, and how unworthy they are of them” [187]. This is what science fiction fans call a ret-con, and like many such it isn't terribly convincing; but it does at least show that Bunyan cares whether his allegory is internally consistent or not.

Still: the closer you look at it, the odder Bunyan's allegory gets. The underlying logic of the exercise is that figures and places in Bunyan's story represent spiritual embodiments or externalisation of key qualities in our “real” world. But some of the things in Bunyan's allegorical land are actual things from our land. For example, when Christiana visits the House Beautiful she is shown various allegorical things, and even actually given a golden anchor representing the steadfastness and hopefulness of her faith. But she is also shown the actual artefacts by which Abraham so nearly sacrificed his son Isaac—not an allegorical representative of those things, but the actual things themselves, “the altar, the wood, the fire, and the knife, for they remain to be seen to this very day” [183]. Say what? Some of the characters in this novel have names like Envy, Superstition, Mr Dare-not-ly and Mr Worldly-Wiseman, but some of them have names like James, Matthew, Gaius and Mnason, and some have names (such as Mercy or indeed Christian) that are both nominative and denotative. At one point Great-Heart greets a fellow on the road that he recognises:

Greath. Well, now we are so happily met, pray let me crave your Name, and the name of the Place you came from.

Hon. My Name I cannot, but I came from the Town of Stupidity: it lieth about four Degrees beyond the city of Destruction.

Greath. Oh, Are you that countryman? Then I deem I have half a guess of you: your name is Old Honesty, is it not? So the old gentleman blushed, and said, Not Honesty in the Abstract, but Honest is my name; and I wish that my nature may agree to what I am called. [194]

I wish that my nature may agree to what I am called. Edinburgh is four degrees of latitude north of London, so perhaps Bunyan is styling Honest as a Scot (of his hometown he says “we lie more off from the sun, and so are more cold and senseless”), and if so he's probably doing it as a coded reference to the Scots Covenanters, nonconformists and former allies with the English Parliamentarian army in which Bunyan had served, and implacable opponents of the established Church of Scotland and its bishops. But what's interesting to me is how his character, Honest, is so honest that he cannot simply nod-past the notion that these actors only exist on an abstracted or allegorical level.

Or consider Little-faith, who is robbed on his pilgrimage by “three sturdy rogues, and their names were Faint-heart, Mistrust, and Guilt, three brothers” [97]. The allegory here is that an insufficiency of faith leaves a Christian prey to these debilitating qualities; and indeed Guilt strikes Little-faith on the head with a huge club “and with that blow felled him flat to the ground, where he lay bleeding as one that would bleed to death”. But though the thieves take his money, they don't take his “jewels”, which allegorically represent his remaining possibility of salvation. So “those he kept still”, but he “was much afflicted for his loss, for the thieves got most of his spending-money”. So, Bunyan's imaginary world includes some valuables that function as currency and exchange within the in-text economic logic of this land, and also includes valuables that function as allegorical representations of purely spiritual truths, outwith the logic of fiduciary exchange. In other words, it's not that Bunyansland is a place inside which everything stands for something else, it's that it is both real and allegorical at the same time. Sometimes wealth allegorically represents purely spiritual riches, and sometimes, as with Demas's silver mine, or the energetic moneymaking of Vanity Fair, it represents only itself. Metaphor and semiotic identity tangle with one another.

I'm not saying this is a flaw. On the contrary, I think it is at the heart of what gives Bunyan's text its richness and multi-dimensionality, rather than leaving it as merely a one-dimensional exercise religious polemic. So the novel works because the directness of Bunyan's gorgeously idiomatic and expressive prose evokes a world of lived experience, and prevents the whole from sliding into theological abstractions; but it also works because on the level of worldbuilding it is able to hold its actual and its spiritual worlds in a close and productive tension. One small example, from Christian's encounter with Apollyon.

So he went on, and Apollyon met him; now the monster was hidious to behold, he was cloathed with scales like a Fish, (and they are his pride) he had Wings like a Dragon, and out of his belly came Fire and Smoak, and his mouth was as the mouth of a Lion. [46]

I love the way that parenthetical “and they are his pride” functions on both levels of the novel at once. On the one hand it means “these monstrous and conspicuous scales allegorically represent his sinful pride” and on the other “he was proud of his shiny fish-scales”:—that he preens himself over them as he goes about, which says something about his character as well as his appearance. There are a great many moments in the work that generate real heft and power out of the folding an allegorical spiritual numinousness out of the precisely observed and vividly evoked quiddities of actual life.

At the other end are the counter-intuitive topographies of Bunyan's allegory on its largest scale. Consider Vanity Fair. On the one hand, according to the cartography of Christian's journey this place is one city among many, alongside such places as the City of Destruction, the Town of Carnal-Policy (“a very great Town” we are told [17]), the Town of Stupidity and so on. But in another sense, Vanity Fair is not a town in the world, but rather the world itself inside which all towns are contained: as old as the world (Bunyan specifies 5000 years) and containing within it every material thing, “all such Merchandize sold, As Houses, Lands, Trades, Places, Honours, Preferments, Titles, Countries, Kingdoms, Lusts, Pleasures, and Delights of all sorts, as Whores, Bawds, Wives, Husbands, Children, Masters, Servants, Lives, Blood, Bodies, Souls, Silver, Gold, Pearls, precious Stones, and what not” [70]. Within Vanity Fair are all the world's countries. something Bunyan parenthetically indicates in case we miss his allegorical point:

So here likewise, you have the proper Places, Rows, Streets, (viz. Countreys and Kingdoms), where the Wares of this Fair are soonest to be found. Here is the Brittain Row, the French Row, the Italian Row, the Spanish Row, the German Row, where several sorts of Vanities are to be sold. But, as in other fairs, some one Commodity is as the chief of all the fair, so the Ware of Rome and her Merchandize is greatly promoted in this fair; only our English nation, with some others, have taken a dislike thereat. [70]

We can ask the question (unanswered in Bunyan's narrative) “how does Christian escape from the prison at Vanity Fair?” (after all, the townsfolk put his friend Faithful to death and declare their intention to do the same to him). But in another sense, he can't escape Vanity Fair, since Vanity Fair is everywhere: “as I said, the way to the Celestial City lies just through this town where this lusty fair is kept; and he that will go to the city, and yet not go through this town, must needs go out of the world.” Materially speaking he is still there, as are we all; and the only escape possible is spiritual. That a small section of Bunyan's imaginary topography can, in one sense, contain the whole landscape of which it is a part only appears paradoxical; because, in a spiritual sense, the whole vast material cosmos is an insignificant portion of the spiritual infinitude of the divine.

:2:

One of the things I don't think Bunyan gets enough credit for is the depth and nuance of his characterisation. Christian, it seems to me, is a very impressively rounded creation: not an Everyman, or blank allegorical signifier onto which the reader can project themselves, but a distinct individual. This comes into particularly sharp focus when you read Part 2, and not only note that the frequently uncertain, stumbling and doubtful Christian is now remembered as “a lion-like man” [213], a peerless warrior and straight-arrow—and so are invited to reflect upon the difference between this report and the rather more flawed character we had actually encountered in Part 1—but you also see how very different Christiana is to her husband. Though her husband's epigone in terms of spiritual awakening, she is by far the more sensible and grounded human being: practical, determined and immune to the more voltaile and psychologically melodramatic moods that govern Christian. Her distinguishing feature is that she has visions, where Christian's distinguishing feature (and, really, this is so central to Bunyan's characterisation in Pilgrim's Progress that I'm amazed more critics don't discuss it) is his depression. I'll say it again: Pilgrim's Progress is a portrait of depression more compelling, nuanced, and powerful than Styron's Darkness Visible.

In all sorts of situations Christian reverts to his signature move: he despairs. The book starts with him depressed at home (“when the morning was come, they would know how he did; he told them worse and worse”) and before he even gets to the wicket gate, Christian falls into the allegorical swamp of despond (“he wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with the dirt ... but could not get out, because of the burden that was upon his back”). As at the beginning, so at the end: at the culmination of his pilgrimage, with his eternal celestial reward directly in front of him, what does Christian do? He despairs.

They then addressed themselves to the Water; and entring, Christian began to sink, and crying out to his good Friend Hopeful, he said, I sink in deep waters, the Billows go over my head, all his Waves go over me! Selah.

Then said the other, Be of good chear, my Brother, I feel the bottom, and it is good. Then said Christian, Ah my friend, the sorrows of death hath compassed me about; I shall not see the Land that flows with Milk and Honey; and with that a great darkness and horror fell upon Christian, so that he could not see before him; also here he in great measure lost his senses, so that he could neither remember nor orderly talk of any of those sweet refreshments that he had met with in the way of his Pilgrimage ... Twas also observed that he was troubled with apparitions of Hobgoblins and Evil Spirits, for ever and anon he would intimate so much by words. Hopeful therefore here had much adoe to keep his Brothers head above water, yea sometimes he would be quite gone down, and then ere a while he would rise up again half dead. Hopeful also would endeavour to comfort him, saying, Brother, I see the Gate, and men standing by to receive us: but Christian would answer, It is you, it is you they wait for; you have been Hopeful ever since I knew you. [121]

This final act in Christian's life recalls us to the main events of his pilgrimage, and two major ones in particular: falling into the Slough of Despond, becoming imprisoned by Giant Despair. In both cases he manages to drag another into despair/despond with him, as is often the way with this malign pathology. At most of his setbacks, despair nips at Christian's metaphorical heels: when fighting with Apollyon Bunyan says “Christian began to despair of life”. Variants of the phrase “the Pilgrims then, especially Christian, began to despond in their minds” appear and reappear during Christian's journey, though there's nothing like them in Christiana's.

When he is through the Wicket Gate the Interpreter shows Christian a man in a cage (“he sat with his eyes looking down to the ground, his hands folded together, and he sighed as if he would break his heart”) and encourages him to interrogate the fellow:

Then said Christian to the man, What art thou? The Man answered, I am what I was not once.

Chr. What wast thou once?

Man. The Man said, I was once a fair and flourishing Professor, both in mine own eyes, and also in the eyes of others; I once was, as I thought, fair for the Cœlestial City, and had then even joy at the thoughts that I should get thither.

Chr. Well, but what art thou now?

Man. I am now a Man of Despair, and am shut up in it, as in this Iron Cage. I cannot get out. Oh, now I cannot! ...

Chr. Then said Christian, Is there no hope, but you must be kept in the Iron Cage of Despair?

Man. No, none at all. [30]

This is a targeted warning for Christian (“then said the Interpreter to Christian, Let this man's misery be remembred by thee, and be an everlasting caution to thee”). Of course Bunyan has theological reasons for seeing despair as a terrible sin, and we can believe he had personal experience when it came to clinical depression; but it's the psychological acuity of this that is so impressive. Take the episode of Christian in Giant Despair's castle. Christian leads his companion, Hopeful, from the proper road because the side-path looks more attractive, but soon enough they're lost and in the ground of Doubting Castle. It strikes me as the sort of insight a depressed person can offer about depression. You might think depression is hard to endure, and so it is; but falling into depression is lamentably easy to do, and getting out of it extremely diffcult. Facilis descensus dejecto.

Now: I appreciate it might look eccentric to praise Bunyan for his characterisation. It's not the usual ground on which the novel is discussed. Certainly, this novel (if we want to call it a novel) is pre-Bildungsroman, and as such has a much more static and inertial conception of “character” than is true of most fiction nowadays (as Franco Moretti argues: Goethe more-or-less invented the Bildungsroman out of whole cloth with Wilhelm Meister in 1795-6; it didn't exist before as a form, and only starts to disseminate with novels like Emma and David Copperfield—although its pretty ubiquitous now as a way of thinking about character).

In Part 2, Christiana’s companion Mercy is propositioned by a bad fellow called Mr Brisk, “a man of some breeding, and that pretended to Religion” who “offered love her”. He is quickly discouraged by her piety, which he finds unable to wear down, and goes off complaining that “mercy was a pretty lass but troubled with ill conditions” [178]. Talking afterward with her friends Mercy says that plenty of men have wooed her, but “they were such as did not like my Conditions”—her religious convictions, that is. But what if she never finds a husband?

Well if no body will have me, I will dye a Maid, or my Conditions shall be to me as a Husband. For I cannot change my Nature. [179]

We’re invited to applaud her fortitude I suppose, although we might also wonder whether a world in nobody can change their nature isn't a rather unpropitious sort of place in which to stage a conversion narrative, of all things. What hope Mr Worldly Wiseman becoming less worldly-wise, Mr Mony-love loving money a little less or Timorous managing, like the Cowardly Lion, finally to locate his courage if their natures are so fixed?

To be clear: I’m not suggesting this is unrealistic qua characterisation. On the contrary, the older I get, the more I find myself thinking how rarely it is that people fundamentally change who they are. And I can, I think, see the theological, or life-under-the-aegis-of-Faith logic of what Bunyan is doing: the world of PP is a world that reveals the spiritual substance of its characters, not their material accidents. Souls stripped bare are less mutable than ‘personalities’ or ‘subjectivities’ because, so far as Bunyan is concerned, the soul is created by God, infinite and whole. Such a thing can hardly admit of radical change or it would be subject to the same logic of decay as non-spiritual things. Or to be more precise there is one axis of change—from unsaved to saved, or from saved to unsaved—something that, in the idiom of the novel, is marked by the fact that characters literally change their name, as from “Graceless” to “Christian”. Something similar could, in theory, happen to these other characters too: Timorous could in theory deed-poll his name and therefore his nature to Brave (say) and go off on a pilgrimage of his own.

Yet, in practice, somehow, he doesn’t. And to think of character in terms of ‘immortal souls’ is, inevitably, to touch on the sorts of questions theologians have argued over for, literally, millennia. If our ‘character’ is an edifice built on our natures, or souls—and those souls are created by God—then why are some people wicked? Surely God didn’t create wicked souls. The catechism suggests that God made us good but that some of us choose to do evil—indeed, it says that Adam’s original sin disposes all of us to choose evil, such that we have to make an elective choice to do good instead (in fact, Bunyan's position is that we are all simply too weak to make this choice unless we first accept the grace of Christ into our hearts to help us). But to read PP as an exercise in novelistic characterisation, as I am doing here, puts this famous explanation in question. I suppose people do indeed have the choice to steal or not to steal, to lie or not to lie and so on. But in what sense has Bunyan’s “Mr Feeble-mind” [216] chosen his mental feebleness? Can Timorous really be said to have exercised his free will and chosen pusillinamity? What chance does a pilgrim have if his name is “Not-right”? (He is “struck dead” with a Thunderbolt, no less, in Part 2). The character called Little-faith is invoked to illustrate the dangers of living life with too little faith, but consider his circumstance as a character in this novel. I mean to say: it’s an almost Zizekian paradox, that Little-faith be condemned to Hell for lacking the faith to address, precisely, his littleness of faith.

If we want to argue that all these peripheral characters are there to embroider the salvation narrative of Christian rather than to stand as separate characters—then I think we're underestimating the richness of Pilgrim's Progress precisely as a novel. It is, in other words, a work on the cusp of what we might call a modern characterisation, where the motion of psychological growth and development is externalised into an actual progress across an actual landscape (just as the internal process of becoming depressed is externalised into a hideous giant and a castle dungeon)—is at the same time engaging the older, static model of personality as a kind of cage for subjectivity that cannot be discarded no matter how one might. That's a pretty useful thumbnail definition of depression as such, right there, actually.

If one happens to have been gifted by God with a static nature that is faithful or hopeful then well and good, but what if one's essential nature manifests that sense of the withdrawal of Divine favour that somebody like Bunyan would call despair? “Canst thou not now repent and turn?” Christian asks the man in the cage inside the Interpreter's house, but the answer to his question is not of the sort to console a person whose birth name is Graceless: “Man. God hath denied me repentance. His Word gives me no encouragement to believe; yea, himself hath shut me up in this iron cage” [30].

What this does, I think, is revert back upon Bunyan's vehicle for the whole novel—I mean his allegory. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) Benjamin seeks to distinguish tragedy in the Classical sense (as valorized by Nietzsche) from the dramatisation of sorrow or mourning (Trauer) that happens in the work of a group of minor 16th/17thC German playwrights who wrote the Trauerspiele that give the book its title (in German: Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels) This kind of grief, Benjamin says, is the predominant mood inherent to a particular, 17th-century metaphysical structure, and needs to be distinguishged from the elevated or dignified suffering of classical tragedy. According to Benjamin, it is the “comprehensive secularization of the historical” that leads to a situation in which “History merges into the setting” to become natural history [OGT, 92], whose affective correlative is a “melancholic contemplation of things which derives enigmatic satisfaction from its very recognition of their transience and emptiness” [OGT, 139]:

For all the wisdom of the melancholic is subject to the nether world ... it is secured by immersion in the life of creaturely things, and it hears nothing of the voice of revelation. Everything saturnine points down into the depths of the earth.” [OGT, 152].

I've been thinking about this in relation to Bunyan's representations of despair in this book: how earthy and downward they are, a fecal swamp that sucks you down, a dungeon in the depths of an old castle and so on. How vividly that captures the quiddity of the experience.

For Benjamin this particular melancholy awareness of the distance from sad earth to transcendent heaven is unlocked by allegory as form, or more specifically the way allegory developed in the 17th-century (in other words at the time of Bunyan's intuitive deployment of the mode). He is dismissive of the later Romantic tendency to elevate the “aestheticized symbol” at the expense of degrading the concept of allegory. Origins of Tragic German Drama is in large measure an attempt to recover what Benjamin thinks of as the core theological concept of the symbol that underpins authentic allegory: “a profound but paradoxical religious unity of material and transcendental”. To read Bunyan under this aegis is not to focus on Pilgrim's Progress as “Fantasy”, the relation of a journey through a luminously transcendent (though still dangerous) land, so much as it is to insist, as Bunyan himself repeatedly does, that the text be redirected back to the real world, to compel a particular sort of hard-labour upon its reader: awareness of death and sin, mortality and despair. “This Book will make a Travailer of thee,” Bunyan declares in his dedicatory poem, “If by its counsel thou wilt ruled be” Travailer hangs nicely between traveller and labourer/worker: somebody setting out hopefully, yes; but also somebody under Adam's curse, eating their textual bread in the sweat of their face. Bunyan's novel presents itself not as a diversion but as something to be experienced, as lived-through, and to that end it recruits allegory in just the way Benjamin thinks of the mode:

In Benjamin's analysis, allegory is pre-eminently a kind of experience. A paraphrase of his exposition might begin by stating that allegory arises from an apprehension of the world as no longer permanent, as passing out of being: a sense of its transitoriness, an intimation of mortality, or a conviction, as in Dickinson, that “this world is not conclusion.” Allegory would then be the expression of this sudden intuition. But allegory is more than an outward form of expression; it is also the intuition, the inner experience itself. The form such an experience of the world takes is fragmentary and enigmatic; in it the world ceases to be purely physical and becomes an aggregation of signs ... Transforming things into signs is both what allegory does - its technique—and what it is about—its content. Nor is this transformation exclusively an intellectual one: the signs perceived strike notes at the depths of one's being, regardless of whether they point to heaven, to an irretrievable past, or to the grave. [Bainard Cowan, “Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory”, New German Critique 22 (1981), 110]

Negotiating a world in which everything is a sign, everything has a meaning and means intensely (means in an eternal-life-or-death way) is ... exhausting. Debilitating. Depressing. On the level of didacticism, Bunyan's allegory carries a particular content; but on the level of form it is doing somehting rather more theologically complex and ambitious, Benjaminianly fusing material and transcendental elements to ironize the “relationship between appearance and essence”, and working a nuanced and potent version of characterisation as evolution, as progress, in such a way that it rubs sparks of sadness from the unyielding, careceral model of character as a static, Godly given. Bunyan's allegory is powerful sad stuff.