Principled Resistance to the West's Cultural Meltdown

Plato’s Republic became the keystone of Wells’ spiritual universe. The book, which he had read for the first time at Up Park, in the meadow where stood the little ruined tower, one of those artificial ruins of the eighteenth century, was to be his companion for the rest of his life. ~ Antonina Vallentin [i]

To Herbert George Wells (1866 – 1946), while remembering him “always with respect,” the namesake-persona of Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1969) applies the off-putting but not entirely untrue description of “a horny man of labyrinthine extraordinary sensuality,”[ii] perpetually on the prowl for liaison. By his ubiquity in the text, which he haunts like a specter, Wells nearly qualifies as a character in Bellow’s tale. The eponymous Sammler, who combines features of Leo Strauss and Isaiah Berlin, occupies himself during the playing-out of novelistic events in the contemplation, if never quite in the execution, of a biographical memoir about Wells, whom the fiction contrives that he once knew. At key points in Bellow’s story, Sammler engages in extended meditations on Wells as a formative influence on, and as a mirror of, the Twentieth Century. These souvenirs differ markedly from, but never contradict, one another. Sammler, who appears to speak for his author, can thus conjure what possesses all the ire of a damning impression:

As a biologist, as a social thinker concerned with power and world projects, the molding of world order, as a furnisher of interpretation and opinion to the educated masses – as all of these [Wells] appeared to need a great amount of copulation. Nowadays, Sammler would recall him as a little lower-class Limey, and as an aging man of declining ability and appeal. And in the agony of parting with the breasts, the mouths, and the precious sexual fluids of women, poor Wells, the natural teacher, the sex emancipator, the explainer, the humane blesser of mankind, could only in the end blast and curse everyone. Of course, he wrote such things in his final sickness, horribly depressed by World War II.[iii]

Wells’ actual biographers affirm his descent in 1945 and 46 into symptoms of aged weariness, exacerbated by terrific despondency related to the war, the violence of which validated the worst fears while it also blasted the best hopes of the prophet.[iv] If, as Bellow-Sammler says from his late-1960s perspective, “it is in the air now that things are falling apart,”[v] perhaps Wells anticipated the collapse, not merely through his explicit diagnosis of social dissolution, but also in subtler ways. Wells would have been, as Bellow hints, one of those confused souls of a derailed modernity who experienced difficulty in distinguishing edification from destruction or liberation from enthrallment, but who was sensitive to, just as he was involved in, the disintegration. Wells’ philandering would itself have constituted a foretaste of more dire things to come of a perversely sexual or even Dionysiac cast. A Cockney Wells remained all his life, with Cockney resentments and a poor undergraduate’s itch for women, but may one justly reduce him to “a little lower-class Limey”?

One hardly excuses the bad behavior by saying that such a reduction would transgress beyond the frontier of admissible parody, on account of which therefore Bellow-Sammler must elsewhere in fairness concede to a positive value in Wells. In surveying a gaggle of sexually undifferentiated youths of the 1960s flower-child variety, Sammler struggles to find a fitting description of them. An image from Wells’ earliest literary success, The Time Machine (1895), occurs to him. The young social dropouts, easy prey for New York City hustlers and assaulters, resemble none other than Wells’ “Eloi,” the far-futural decadents of his scientific romance. The Bohemians become for Sammler in Wellsian terms “lovely young human cattle herded by the cannibalistic Morlocks who lived a subterranean life and feared light and fire.”[vi] The conceit forces Sammler to conclude that, “yes, that tough brave little fellow Wells had had prophetic visions after all.”[vii]

While Sammler, in one moment, lumps Wells with “people like Marx, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marat, [and] Saint-Just,” he just as swiftly recalls that, unlike those others, the author of The Time Machine, The Open Conspiracy, and so much else “did not demand the sacrifice of civilization.”[viii] Nor did Wells “become a cult-figure, a royal personality, a grand art-hero or activist leader.”[ix] Sammler, a skeptic, “would not swear that mankind is governable.”[x] Wells thought with enduring conviction that:

The minority civilization could be transmitted to the great masses, and that orderly conditions for this transmission were possible. [He was] decent, British, Victorian-Edwardian, nonoutcast, nonlunatic… But in World War Two he despaired. He compared humankind to rats in a sack, desperately struggling and biting. Indeed it was ratlike and sacklike, indeed so.[xi]

Bellow puts Wells somewhere between the two extremes of “a little lower-class Limey,” with the sexual mores of a spiv, and a genuine vates, a self-made “tough brave little fellow,” who experienced “prophetic visions after all.” Bellow also praises Wells for his critical attitude to Marxism, contrasting him in this matter with George Bernard Shaw.

In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), Wells himself, while arguing for what he calls socialism, stresses his antipathy for Marx, whom he describes significantly as “an uninventive man with… a subconscious knowledge of his own uninventiveness.”[xii] Wells’ case against Marx turns on the latter’s deficiency of intuition, a correlate of his pedantic empiricism: “He lacked the imaginative power necessary to synthesize a project” and, by “his pose of scientific necessitarianism,” at last “he fostered among his associates a real jealousy of the creative imagination.”[xiii] Opposed to Marx in Wells’ account of how his own utopian leanings emerged, one discovers Plato, whom he had read in his teens in the manor-library at Up Park, where his mother kept scullery for a largely absentee aristocratic family alarmingly into its decline. A son of late-Victorian poverty and disadvantage, Wells might readily have cleaved to the urgency and rebuke of The Communist Manifesto. Many did. Yet Wells early identified and decisively rejected the underlying resentment and crudity in the Communist appeal: “Marx offered to the cheapest and basest impulses the poses of a pretentious philosophy” while being “in no sense creative.”[xiv] The student of Socrates, on the other hand, “was like the hand of a strong brother taking hold of me and raising me up.”[xv]

Plato fired young George’s imagination and taught him the discipline of putting received notions under the severest critical interrogation; the ideal city-state of The Republic, that great first project of speculative civics, stands prototype to the dozen or so of imaginary societies in Wells’ fiction. As Jorge Luis Borges has written in his essay of the early 1940s on “The First Wells,” the man who wrote A Modern Utopia (1905) “bestowed sociological parables with a lavish hand.”[xvi] In the utopias invoked by these parables, as one notes, failure occurs at least as commonly as success. The sealed city of When the Sleeper Wakes (1898), while technically dazzling, has degenerated into a totalitarian nightmare; the technocratic-Puritan regime in both The Shape of Things to Come (1933) and its cinematic adaptation, Things to Come (1935), is--fully under Wells’ control--grim and ambiguous. This realism about the prospect of civilizational reform affirms that Wells had assimilated the Socratic insight of both The Republic and The Laws that all things in the mortal realm fall subject to perversion and deliquescence. Wells grasped that a vigilant conservation belongs quite as essentially to any healthy polity as does periodic review with an eye to adaptation. Whatever men might build up or whatever they have built up, they would need perpetually to cherish and renew, as Bellow hints when he calls Wells (conjuring up Plato’s image of Socrates) a “teacher.”

The discussion having so far dealt in generalities, the moment has come to turn to cases. The War in the Air (1908) has attracted less interest from Wells’ critics than its precursor-texts in the first phase of his literary activity, possibly because they exceed it in pure fantasy. The War of the Worlds brings to earth rampaging aliens from Mars; First Men in the Moon takes an absent-minded professor and his creditor-dodging chance-companion to the terrestrial satellite, where they confront the ant-like Selenites in the setting of their formicary civilization. These unprecedented literary inventions always imply a human meaning, but they do so by means of imagery at once exotic and alluring.[xvii] In The War in the Air, by contrast, the action remains entirely earth-bound; in it humanity faces a nemesis in none other than itself. Yet The War operates on a larger scale and draws its animation from a greater prophetic urgency than those earlier items from Wells’ pen. It also trumps James Joyce by more than a decade in being the first modern Anglophone novel to borrow its plot and its political-anthropological analysis from Homer’s Odyssey, a noteworthy literary-historical fact rather unappreciated by its readers hitherto.

Like Homer’s Odyssey, where the background is the deliquescence of the heroic order, Wells’ War in the Air concerns a universal conflict, sprung from an inapposite complaint, which destroys the existing political and economic arrangements and precipitates the world into a dark age. “The world passed at a stride,” says the narrator of The War from his futuristic perspective, “from a unity and simplicity broader than that of the Roman Empire at its best, to a social fragmentation as complete as the robber-baron period of the Middle Ages.”[xviii] The novel’s climax, a real paroxysm, consists in the destruction of New York City in a terror-bombing raid by the Imperial German Air Fleet. Much of the long but meritorious denouement occurs subsequently in Upstate New York, in and around Niagara Falls. The novel indeed makes a definite particular appeal to North American readers. On the basis of Wells’ own explicit analogy, Patrick Parrinder plausibly invokes Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) as The War’s master-pattern; but the ultimate model remains the Homeric one, seen through the glass of Platonic political realism and incorporating a motif or two from The Republic's “Parable of the Cave.” Wells supplies his unlikely Odysseus in the form of young Albert Peter Smallways (“Bert”) of Bun Hill, once a medieval estate in Kentshire but now in the first decade of the Twentieth Century a disorganized and rather seedy suburb of London that is slowly merging with the formless expanse of the metropolis. Smallways, a bicycle mechanic and latterly a traveling comedian, boasts the virtues of vivacity and robustness, but suffers from the intellectual parochialism that Wells knew at first hand from his own “downstairs” origins and which he regularly deplored in his social commentary.

Wells paints Smallways as the representative “very image of the democratic mind confronted with the problems too complicated for its apprehension.”[xix] In the novel’s global milieu, Wells supposes this “democratic”--or rather demotic--mentality to be repeated by the million-fold and ubiquitously deformed by chauvinism and superstition. The common assumption about existence amounts to “a web of wisdom and error” that engenders a “hallucination of security.”[xx]

Emancipated from traditional hierarchy, badly educated, but decent in his vestigial chivalry, Smallways possesses a “strain of poetry in his nature.”[xxi] Like his author-creator, if in his limited way, Smallways enjoys the gift of imagination and can thus adapt himself, within boundaries, to the disaster in which he participates, as others fatally cannot. The theme qualifies less as Darwinian or biological than as Platonic or epistemological. Smallways can and does experience something on the order of Plato’s periagogé, or “turning around,” when once, after having been pitched, as Wells puts it, “into the hot focus of Weltpolitik”[xxii] on the eve of the war, he can no longer conduct himself by his quaint assumptions or refer to the static opinions of others as authoritative. The exclamations “Cor!” and “Crikey!” mark vocally his confrontations with and passages through the ordeals of his adaptability. To position his protagonist in the observational center of events, Wells must call on the deus ex machine of a stray balloon, which carries Smallways from Brighton Beach and his career as a strand-side vaudevillian to the Franconian aerodrome where the Imperial air fleet prepares for action.[xxiii] Yet Wells recounts his story so skillfully that no one, in reading the book, will balk too much at the contrivance. Aerial viewpoints function importantly in The War's symbolic structure; they do so initially by the literalism of abruptly lifting the intellectually restricted Smallways up and out of his familiar surroundings, and starting him on his Odysseus-like itinerary-cum-learning curve.

In describing Bun Hill in The War’s opening chapters, Wells confronts his “idyllic Kentish village” with the onset of “progress and petrol,” the encroachments of “the Brennan monorail system” whose towers and lines mar the diminishing countryside, and “the flood of novel things [that] had poured over its devoted rusticity.”[xxiv] From Bun Hill, the locals can see the Crystal Palace, that image of a capital Progress, in the distance; they witness the developments in aerial navigation, especially in heavier-than-air flight, that take place in the vicinity of the Palace and are demonstrated for the public using the Palace grounds for a runway. Grandfather Smallways, once the deferential coachman of the local squire, says of it all with a naivety nevertheless instinct with prescience: “The dratted country sims [sic] flying to pieces.”[xxv]

In The War, as elsewhere in his early and middle authorship, Wells keenly feels the passing of the pastoral landscape and intact life of the Seventeenth Century. His positive utopias all entail a restoration of the countryside, as in Men Like Gods. The traditional social-environmental dispensation appropriately fitted its own pre-technical conditions of a people “rooted in the soil.”[xxvi] The prevailing character of turn-of-the-century civilization, Wells implies, is one of general deracination and of shocks so powerful that they afflict the victims with a stultified obliviousness of their own damaged health. Old expectations no longer apply. Life baffles and mocks, as when anonymous balloonists passing over Bun Hill drop loads of gravel-ballast into the Smallways vegetable garden. Smallways himself shocks his rather staid elder brother when he buys a motorcycle to zoom about on the new macadamized roads and when he wears outrageous neckties of new artificial colors. In the upsurge of industry and innovation following the Eighteenth Century, as Wells writes, “all the faiths” of the Smallways ancestry “had been taken by surprise, and startled into the strangest forms and reactions.”[xxvii] In an analysis that remains valid whatever ex post facto interpretation one puts on it, Wells remarks: “The development of science had altered the scale of human affairs.”[xxviii] Science-based industry has meanwhile conjured a “flimsy fabric of credit that had grown with no man foreseeing,” which grips the mass of humanity “in an economic interdependence that no man clearly understood.”[xxix] The spark waiting to spring the powder-mixture and shatter the daydream of security is “the fine old tradition of patriotism,” now “distorted in the rush of new times.”[xxx]

If Smallways served his author for a Cockney-fashion Odysseus, then the Agamemnon, but also the Paris and then again the Polyphemus, of The War in the Air would take the person of Prince Karl Albert, the strutting Hohenzollern Feldmarschal whose egomania unleashes the tempest and so initiates the great collapse.[xxxi] In Experiment in Autobiography, looking back on the great conflict of 1914 - 1918, which The War anticipates by six years, Wells would put it this way: “People forget nowadays how the personal imperialism of the Hohenzollerns dominated the opening phase of the war.”[xxxii] In the novel, Wells reports how Karl Albert, the hale image of the actual Wilhelm II, first impressed public awareness by “his abduction of the Princess Helena of Norway and his blunt refusal to marry her,” a transgression that “almost brought about a new Trojan War.”[xxxiii] In The War erotic imbroglios kick the situation along in its disastrous course at several key points, just as they do in The Odyssey, where Homer makes it clear that the supremely destructive Greek-Asian conflict cannot be derived rationally from its ostensible cause. Labeling Karl Albert “the ideal of the new aristocratic feeling,” journalism compares him “to the Black Prince, to Alcibiades, to the young Caesar,” and in a spasm of ideological jargon to “Nietzsche’s Overman revealed.”[xxxiv] Like the vulgar misapprehension of the Zarathustra-author’s Übermensch, Karl Albert “dominate[s] minds” by incessant propaganda including a much-reproduced full portrait that depicts him as a “war god” complete with “Viking helmet.”[xxxv]

The Prince gives form to the dehumanized animus of technological combat conducted from remote heights against noncombatants. His descent from Napoleonic to Cyclopean status reveals his essentially savage nature. Smallways, marooned with the Prince on Goat Island just above the American side of the falls, finally does to him what Odysseus does to Polyphemus: he dispatches the monster with perfect justice.[xxxvi] His verdict, muttered to himself, is “Dem that Prince.”[xxxvii] To the charge that Karl Albert represents an anti-German stereotype, one might reply that Wells’ novel of the Great War, Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1918), shows no vindictiveness and even mourns the death of its sample German, who has been studying literature at Oxford before the outbreak of hostilities and is markedly Anglophile.

The heart of The War is the prose-theater of enormous destruction in the program of Napoleonic world-conquest launched by the Prince. Wells works on two themes in executing the panorama of a catastrophe entirely manmade: the theme of the automatic character of technical warfare; and the theme of distancing, or of how remote destruction gradually alienates the combatant from the moral precept that however warranted his cause his enemies remain human beings. In the first of these Wells anticipates by fifty years what Herman Kahn called escalation and what Richard Weaver, in Visions of Order (1957), called “The Dialectic of Total War.” Weaver argues that war in the Twentieth Century “has lost its character,” such that it has ceased to operate as an “institution,” as once it did, and has thus devolved to “pure and ultimate unreason.”[xxxviii] Weaver points to the Allied aerial attacks on German cities that, despite various arguments, look not at all different from earlier German aerial attacks on Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, or Coventry. In Experiment in Autobiography, Wells reminisces about The War: “I had reasoned that air warfare, by making warfare three dimensional, would abolish the war front and with that the possibility of distinguishing between civilian and combatant or of bringing a war to a conclusive end.”[xxxix]

In The War itself, Wells appropriately shrinks the internal logic of such conflict to a bare logarithm:

A having outnumbered and overwhelmed B, hovers, a thousand airships strong, over his capital, threatening to bombard it unless B submits. B replies by wireless telegraphy that he is now in the act of bombarding the chief manufacturing city of A by means of three raider airships. A denounces B’s raiders as pirates and so forth, bombards B’s capital and sets off to hunt down B’s airships, while B in a state of passionate emotion and heroic unconquerableness, sets to work amidst his ruins, making fresh airships and explosives for the benefit of A.[xl]

As for the theme of distancing, the spectacle that Smallways witnesses during his quasi-captivity on the German airship Vaterland furnishes its serial illustration. The enormity of that to which Smallways can testify constitutes his brutal periagogé, reminding readers that Wells deftly weaves his Homer with his Plato. After a naval battle in the North Atlantic, during which the Prince’s airships rescue the German dreadnoughts by obliterating the American dreadnoughts from high above, Smallways sees, from the Vaterland’s observation gallery, the floating hulk of the Susquehanna looking like “a mere metal-worker’s fantasy of frozen metal writhing.”[xli] In the wake of the burning Theodore Roosevelt, “a number of minute, convulsively active animalculae” become visible, “scorched and struggling” in the fatal waters.[xlii] The onlooker wonders momentarily whether these could be men, but they are, of course, and the sight of them, as Wells says, “tore… with clutching fingers at Bert’s soul.”[xliii] Lieutenant Kurt, who has befriended Smallways as best as circumstances allow, says to his companion, in response to the mayhem, “We’re tame, civilized men [who have] got to get blooded.”[xliv] They must overcome the fact, says Kurt, of their being the “nice, quiet, law-abiding Germans that they’ve been so far.”[xlv]

The ruddy opportunity offers itself when the fleet arrives over New York City. By the time the wanton onslaught has burnt itself out, Smallways has recorded the memory of “great buildings, suddenly red-lit amidst the shadows, crumpling at the smashing impact of bombs… the grotesque, swift onset of insatiable conflagration.”[xlvi] The massacre is “the logical outcome… of the application of science to warfare.”[xlvii] As a providential storm blows the invaders towards Canada, a German officer tells Smallways, “All the vorlt is at vor.”[xlviii]

The Chinese and Japanese have entered the lists and even the Arab world has risen up in “Jehad.”[xlix] Precipitously, the fabric of civilization unravels; finance vanishes overnight and along with it money. With major cities smashed and burnt, life has reverted to the countryside and to the poverty of salvage and subsistence. When Smallways at long last contrives his return to England by unscheduled sail rather than by scheduled steam, for that is no more, he returns to a recrudescence of Eighth Century Dane-law brigandage. He must, like Odysseus coming home to Ithaca, deal decisively with the squatters who have beset Bun Hill gangster-fashion and by so doing ransom his patient fiancée from her subjugation. Smallways’ heroism is genuine, but it is also pathetic given the circumstances in which it occurs: “Everywhere there are ruins and unburied dead, and shrunken, yellow-faced survivors in a mortal apathy… The fine order and welfare of the earth have crumpled like an exploded bladder.”[l] While Wells spoke truly when he declared “a disposition to believe in… spontaneous bouts of sanity may be one of my besetting weaknesses,” The War shows him less so disposed. The narrator, writing from a future some centuries after the “universal social collapse,” seems to live in a time of recovered and even of perfected civilization, but his treatment of the war as something in the deep past implies a long interregnum of “civilization borne down.”[li]

Wells would rewrite The War more than once. In The World Set Free (1914), he marries efficient airplanes with the application of atomic research to explosive weaponry. Despite the destruction once war gets loose, vividly and terrifically described, one of those “spontaneous bouts of sanity” manages to prevail; Men Like Gods (1921) deals less with the war itself, remembered by the future humanity only as the long-ago “time of troubles” in reaction to which the utopian new order came into being, than in the details of that new order. In The Shape of Things to Come (1933), however, Wells returns in a comprehensive manner to representing the pattern of convulsive total war leading to a new dark age; a global polity does gradually emerge, but for the first time since When the Sleeper Awakes Wells endows his world state with a coercive and puritanical character, so that its status in the reader’s moral reception is ambiguous. All of these books, as West says of them, have “the character of… the awful warning that my father was fond of producing.”[lii] One might add: fond of producing with great good cause--as the two world wars and the nuclear-armed Cold War proved, and as the current war against the Jihad sadly proves yet again.

The year before he turned his hand to The War, Wells wrote the social novel that most commentary nominates for his best contribution to Twentieth Century letters, Tono-Bungay (1907). Norman and Jeanne McKenzie remark typically, “With Tono-Bungay Wells reached the peak of his career as a novelist. All the earlier books led up to it and the later ones away from it.”[liii] The War and Tono-Bungay overlap one another in peculiar ways, just as Tono-Bungay itself shows surprising affiliations with the odd but characteristic early-modernist critique of emergent modernity. It would not be farfetched therefore to triangulate the vision of Tono-Bungay with, say, that of Joseph Conrad in the mood that yielded Heart of Darkness (1901) and with, say, that of T. S. Eliot in the mood that yielded The Waste Land (1920). Book Three of Tono-Bungay indeed concerns the narrator’s Conrad-like expedition to the West African coast for a nefarious murder-tainted end; Wells’ entire story exhibits everywhere what one can only call anticipatory Eliot-like “Waste Land” imagery. There is the Waste Land afflicted on Mordet Island by the radioactive mineral that Wells names “Quap.” The protagonist-narrator proposes to ship Quap back to England to use as electric light-bulb filaments or perhaps as an added ingredient in the patent medicine--on whose manufacture and distribution has arisen the entrepreneurial fortune in which he shares. The all-purpose potable tonic, the resonantly named “Tono-Bungay” itself, affects most of its users innocuously, but Quap, a deadly poison, imparts its toxic nature to everything in its propinquity by direct disintegrative metastasis. The concern with radioactivity, unprecedented in Tono-Bungay, would reappear in The World Set Free. Yet in Tono-Bungay, radioactivity is profoundly metaphorical, not merely denotative or extrapolative. As the central carcinogenic symbol of the tale, the phenomenon of radiant decay charges the novel with much of its considerable esthetic coherency.

Metastatic, too, and harmful to the spiritual rather than to the bodily part of civilization, is (as West writes) “the wild growth and proliferation of the new super-businesses and conglomerates” of the Edwardian Age, abetted as they are by “the general acceptance,” among a gullible and avaricious people, “of the principle doctrine of market-place capital that profit justified all things.”[liv] This type of Waste Land stands distinguished from the chemically polluted one, but it presents a vista just as dolorous; from the insipidity of it, indeed, the Western world has not yet extricated itself. The apostle of super-business and the counterpart in Tono-Bungay of The War’s Prince is the narrator’s uncle, Edward Ponderevo, a fellow whom on the face of things one instinctively likes as much as he reflexively despises Karl Albert; Uncle Ponderevo enters the story, after all, as the narrator’s providential savior from a probable life of soul-killing drudgery. In Platonic fashion, however, Tono-Bungay consistently differentiates between appearance and reality: beneath the affable exterior, Ponderevo qualifies as a force for destruction quite as obnoxious as Quap.

Now young George Ponderevo, for his part, resembles Wells, despite the author’s irate denial that Tono-Bungay sprang in any way from autobiography. Like Wells, Ponderevo grows up with a mother in service and spends part of his childhood in the precincts of etiolated aristocracy consisting mostly of title-bearing widows with a few spoiled nieces and nephews now and then on visit. For Wells it was the actual Up Park and for Ponderevo it is the fictional Bladesover House and the adjunct villages of Ashborough and Ropedean. The young Wells exploited his access to an Eighteenth Century library; so does Ponderevo, for whom Plutarch replaces the Wellsian-autobiographical Plato. “It seems queer to me,” George says, “that I acquired pride and self-respect, the idea of the state and the germ of public spirit [from] an old Greek, dead these eighteen hundred years.”[lv]

On the basis of Plutarch’s republican ethos, George can evaluate, not only “the British social organism” in “cross-section,”[lvi] but also his own complicity in the rise and debacle of the Tono-Bungay enterprise, when his uncle “flashed athwart the empty heavens… and overawed investors spoke of his star.”[lvii] From the crash of Edward Ponderevo, who thought of himself as a “Napoleon,” George records that he himself has emerged as “the sole scorched survivor.”[lviii] In this first-person tale, Wells puts readers in another of his meticulous scenarios of disaster, vivid precisely for being so intimate, yet related to and anticipatory of the bellicose disaster of The War in the Air. Uncle Edward’s chafing ambition, his “dinginess,”[lix] and his “constant, violent motion,”[lx] have a relation in the novel’s cataclysmic scheme all at once to the breakdown of those social principles represented by “the seventeenth-century system of Bladesover”[lxi] and to the “cancerous” nature of Quap, which “creeps and lives as a disease lives by destroying” and which, as the text puts it, “spreads.”[lxii] Quap, says the narrator, “is in matter exactly what the decay of our old culture is in society, a loss of traditions and distinctions and assured reactions”[lxiii] to “great new forces, blind forces of invasion, of growth.”[lxiv]

As its library suggests, Bladesover House once represented an intact system in which knowledge and truth had an honored place; on the shelves one still finds Plutarch and Xenophon but also Rasselas, Candide, Vathek and books of anatomy and astronomy. The old ladies Drew and Somerville of George’s youth take interest only in a peerage and a clerical directory. The appearance remains but, “just as in that sort of lantern show that used to be known in the village as ‘Dissolving Views,’ the scene that is going remains upon the mind, traceable and evident,” while “the newer picture is yet enigmatical.”[lxv]

Bladesover in its corruption offers to George “the clue to almost all that is distinctively British and perplexing to the foreign inquirer in England and the English-speaking peoples.”[lxvi] He sees Bladesover in London when he goes there in his late teens to study science, as Wells himself did. London strikes George as full of “vast irrelevant movement”; it comprises “a chaos of streets and people and buildings and reasonless going to and fro.”[lxvii] He believes that he detects “lines of an ordered structure out of which [the disorder] has grown [in] a process that is something more than a confusion of casual accidents, although it may be no more than a process of disease.”[lxviii] If “the fine gentry have gone,” then nevertheless “the shape is still Bladesover.”[lxix] Readers will note the relation of the fickle temporal appearance to the fixed trans-temporal idea, one of those threads leading back to Wells’ encounter with Plato’s Republic; reason entails the perpetual struggle to sustain ideas of order against their decay. The metaphors of illness, hypertrophy, rot, and wasting thus permeate Tono-Bungay’s prose, as they do Eliot’s much later poem. The name of Tono-Bungay--redolent of advertising and significative of the huckster’s corruption of language--spills itself into the story for the first time when George finds his way to the avuncular Ponderevo’s raggedly unimpressive premises in Raggett Street, where he manufactures the liquid commodity.

Here too, Wells offers up his anticipatory Waste Land imagery: the shop-floor “was covered by street mud that had been brought in on dirty boots, and three energetic young men of the hooligan type, in neck-wraps and caps, were packing wooden cases with… papered-up bottles, amidst much straw and confusion.”[lxx] As the Tono-Bungay enterprise grows--and grow it does into “a swelling, thinning bubble of assurances”[lxxi]--what spreads from the Raggett Street “nucleus”[lxxii] through incessant advertising and hooligan-like high-pressure hawking is finally that selfsame street mud that resembles the cancerous and radioactive Quap-rich slag of Mordet Island. Uncle Edward’s health-restorer, already capitally touted in many hoardings or billboards across London, is, as George instantly grasps, nothing but “a damned swindle.”[lxxiii] The effusively entrepreneurial Ponderevo responds that it is merely “fair trading” and “giving people confidence.”[lxxiv] Justifying hyperbolic promotion as “the modern way,” he argues that the sloganeering style of selling stimulates a kind of faith,” against which by such a name none could argue, and he compares his plans to increase the market for Tono-Bungay to “Christian Science.”[lxxv]

Finally--the arbitrariness of his rationalizations being characteristic--he invokes economic utilitarianism. If, as George says, useless stuff ought not to be the product of a sound business arrangement, then, counters Edward:

‘Mong other things, all our people would be out of work. Unemployed! I grant you Tono-Bungay may be – not quite so good a find for the world as Peruvian bark, but the point is, George, it makes trade! And the world lives on trade. Commerce! A romantic exchange of commodities and property.[lxxvi]

The industrial pornographers of Southern California no doubt employ a similar forensic style. Once George allows himself be drawn in, his Uncle reverts to his true type with the exclamatory expectation of “Argosies! Venice! Empire!”[lxxvii] As does the Prince in The War in the Air, Edward will see himself reflected in the “Overman Idee” of Nietzsche.[lxxviii] Both are cases of psychopathological inflation; but criticism must find Edward the more serious one as his cigar-smoking congeniality so readily seduces the tolerant and unwary to his side.

Advertising distinguishes itself only a little from political demagoguery. Soon, in a Caesarian campaign of “conquest… province by province,” the uncle and his nephew have “subjugated England and Wales… rolled over the Cheviots” and have begun the expansive habit of “taking subsidiary specialties into action.”[lxxix] Agglomerating cheap businesses in a horizontal trust leads to the establishment of fronts or “general trading companies,” with echoes of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which yearly conclude the business-calendar “by selling great holdings of shares to one or the other of [their] sisters [and] paying a dividend out of the proceeds… That was the method of our equilibrium at the iridescent climax of the bubble.”[lxxx] Uncle Edward tries to sweeten a nasty reality by his formula, “we mint faith,” but George grasps in hindsight that “‘coining’ would have been a better word.”[lxxxi] In The War in the Air, annihilation rains down from above in the form of airships and their armaments in deadly earnestness. In Tono-Bungay, destruction works its malice from within, Quap-like, under the guise of economic productivity and the increase of the common weal.

Both The War in the Air and Tono-Bungay feature an island-sequence. The pelagic detour permits Wells to present a microcosm of the global mess that proliferates in the story-at-large. In The War, borrowing from the Cyclops-interlude of Homer’s Odyssey, Wells helps his readers to understand that the worldwide conflict stems from the regress rather than the progress of civilization. Technology is not a necessary correlate of morality or of rationality. The Prince, marooned, reverts to his basic Vandal self and Smallways must put him paid at last. In Tono-Bungay, Ponderevo proposes the Mordet-Island expedition to his nephew when it dawns on him that he has spread himself too thin and that his financial house of cards has commenced its tumble; he dreams that Quap will give him one of those corners, or monopolies, on an item for which advertising can make a demand. The sally itself, in a half-seaworthy hulk with a fully dubious crew, is a piratical raid. Mordet Island belongs to a foreign government, which forbids admittance. Anthony West has described Mordet Island as “one of those pieces of expository writing that bring something new forward from the realm of the recondite and into that of general consciousness… mark[ing] the opening of a new horizon.”[lxxxii]

Coming in Book Four of Tono-Bungay, the portrait of the blighted landscape, the ultimate Waste Land, asks to be superimposed on earlier scenes, in Wells’ own manner of one lantern-slide projected over another in a “Dissolving View.” Thus George sees “a lifeless beach--lifeless as I could have imagined no tropical mud could ever be, and all the dead branches and leaves and rotting fish and so forth that drifted ashore became presently shriveled and white.”[lxxxiii]

In this morass, with only the barest existential justification, George kills a man, in fear that the fellow will give away his snatch-and-grab to the colonial authorities. It is doubly vain. Quap disintegrates the brig on its return voyage, annulling the whole foray. The financial collapse follows; Ponderevo flees his creditors and dies ignominiously in exile in a shabby French pension. Earlier, pondering the madness of Tono-Bungay, George has addressed to readers this eloquent soliloquy:

The whole of this modern mercantile investing civilization is indeed such stuff as dreams are made of. A mass of people swelters and toils, great railway systems grow, cities arise to the skies and spread wide and far, mines are opened, factories hum, foundries roar, ships plough the seas, countries are settled; about this busy striving world the rich owners go, controlling all, enjoying all, confident and creating the confidence that draws us all together into a reluctant, nearly unconscious brotherhood…. It seems to me indeed at times that all this present commercial civilization is no more than my poor uncle’s career writ large… that all drifts on perhaps to some tremendous parallel to his individual disaster.[lxxxiv]

There is no “Science” in the scramble for bigger, better, more profitable, George argues, using science in its root-sense of knowledge about the structure of reality, physical, moral, or economic. Such a consciousness he sees “as austerity, as beauty,” and of it he says, “It is the one enduring thing.”[lxxxv]

The Wellsian view is a Platonism of “beauty” as “the one enduring thing,” whose manifestations in the social realm must be guarded against the forces of disintegration and decay. It hardly comes as a surprise then that the collision of barbarism with civilization supplies the repeated story in Wells’ copious oeuvre, just as it supplies the repeated motif of the recently closed century. A dramatic instance springs from the screen in Things to Come, the 1936 Alexander Korda film for which Wells supplied the screenplay and in whose production he collaborated actively with Korda and director William Cameron Menzies. A world war having knocked the mid-century civilization flat, fifty years later Vandal-style warlord districts have shot up like mushrooms in the ruins. Actor Ralph Richardson is the Boss or Chief of one such cantonment, to whose petty domain comes the black-garbed airman, John Cabal (actor Raymond Massey). Cabal represents a revival of industry and order based in Basra and calling itself “Wings over the World.” He proposes to reconnoiter conditions in the northwest of Europe. Placing Cabal under arrest, the Richardson character, who bears no little resemblance to the German Prince of The War in the Air, interrogates him. “Who do you represent,” demands the Boss in his gruffest, most Napoleonic voice. “I represent law and sanity,” replies Cabal. The Boss thumps his fist on the table behind which he sits, as it were enthroned. “I’m the law here,” he dictates. “I said, law and sanity,” Cabal replies with cool emphasis. The Boss, taken aback by Cabal’s serenity, wants to know what this “Wings over the World” is. “Who runs you,” he asks, on the crude assumption that everyone is footman to someone. Says Cabal, with infinite calmness: “We just run ourselves.”

Cabal, as his name indicates, embodies a much-circulated Wellsian idea, that of the “Open Conspiracy,” which first appears as the brainchild of the businessman-protagonist of Wells’ most ambitious social novel, The World of William Clissold (1926). The Open Conspiracy is open in two ways at least: first, as Clissold puts it in Volume Two of his first-person narrative, it aims not at a Hegelian crystallization that would bring history to a stop but rather at alterations in the existing order “provisional” and “experimental”[lxxxvi] and therefore also themselves amenable to falsification and new adjustment; second, as Wells says directly in the book that bears the title The Open Conspiracy (1928), the movement, “unlike conspiracies in general… would, by its very nature, go on in daylight.”[lxxxvii] The Open Conspiracy also incorporates a religious element in the sense it aims at a “happiness of magnanimity” through “disentangle[ment] of the will from egotistical preoccupations.”[lxxxviii] In fairness one should note that other features of the Open Conspiracy are moderately alarming to people of a thematically conservative temperament, especially those who maintain their ancestral faith. As in the related God the Invisible King (1923), Wells recreates Ludwig Feuerbach’s thesis of the 1840s that divinity is a mere projection of human possibility. The religiosity invoked by Wells might have its roots, as some critics suggest, in the childhood Methodism that he had already renounced in his early teens but which shaped him formidably; but while the peculiar Wellsian religiosity shares some traits of Biblical religion, it is not quite Christianity.

Yet in equal fairness, students of Wells, especially the ones who bring an initial hostile bias to their dialogue with him, should never forget the provocation behind his hortatory style: his having sensed the cataclysms of two world wars before either began and his more-than-a-little-justified disgruntlement over the character of the democratic century, with its dissolution of structure, its profiteering, its disfigurement of the landscape, and its debasement of genuine values. Bringing order to a disordered society

... must lead us inevitably to face such problems as the hypertrophy of the motive for Profit into a social ideal, the distinction between the use of natural resources and their exploitation, the advantages unfairly accruing to the trader in contrast to the primary producer, the misdirection of the financial machine, the iniquity of usury, and other features of a commercialized society.

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.[lxxxix]

A host of authors and thinkers in the sixty years since Wells’ death have made the identical argument in nearly the identical terms. Some of them, like Wells, lean in the direction of socialism and the political left, but many of them identify themselves as traditionalists or conservatives. I speak not of Party conservatives of a narrowly Tory or Republican sort, but of republicans with a small r, of the Platonic or Plutarchic variety. The critique of “Profit” as a primary or a sole motive might have been quoted from any number of British Laborite MPs or American Democratic congressmen, or from one of the European advocates of the Kyoto Protocols for dealing with so-called global warming. But the same words could just as easily be drawn from an essay by Wendell Berry (a Democrat) or from any of his precursors among the Southern Agrarians, who belonged as he does to the conservative trend in modern American politics; one might find congruent formulations in the essays of Russell Kirk or Thomas Fleming or Roger Scruton. This is a peculiar feature of Wellsian liberalism-progressivism not much commented on by the generality of his liberal-progressive admirers.

Now I have, in fact, pulled a small prank, which I hereby confess. The words set forth en bloc directly above (the “problems of hypertrophy” passage) come not from Wells, as the context deliberately but misleadingly implies; they come rather from T. S. Eliot, writing in The Idea of a Christian Society (1939). If one slipped them into a discursive sequence in The War in the Air or Tono-Bungay, however, no one would take them amiss; they would seem quite proper to the text. I would guess indeed that readers of this essay will take them naturally and casually as Wells, not thinking of Eliot until my words of confession. How complicated these issues are! Eliot, the modern man of faith, shares a theme with Wells, the modern materialist, the one so vehemently chastised by Hillaire Belloc in a not-quite-forgotten journalistic debate over Darwinism. Marxist and other leftwing critics meanwhile habitually discount Wells because of his supposed fascist tendencies or his naïve utopianism. Feminists denounce him for his philandering and bourgeois types for his commitment to that quaint and rather Fabian idea of Free Love. This ability of Wells to make both Left and Right averse to him suggests something basically healthy and independent in his outlook. As for the Eliotic Christian Society, so oddly similar to the Wellsian utopia in its basic aversions, it would, like Plato’s ideal polis, quite simply run itself; it would not permit itself to be run by inhuman autonomous processes or institutionalized egomania, nor could it possibly stem from the Marxist class-warfare--that eruption of nihilistic resentment which Wells, for his part, never ceased to denounce even in his least irate moments. I hope that my prank, my having introduced Eliot as though he were Wells, has made a valid point and that the point mitigates its mischievousness.

Wells could fulminate about organized religion (especially about Catholicism: hence Belloc’s animosity), but he always envisioned his utopias as emerging from something akin to religious revival. In The World Set Free, the narrator says: “It would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former time that it should be an open question, as it is today, whether the world is wholly Christian or not Christian at all. The common sense of Mankind has toiled through two thousand years of chastening experience, to find at last how sound a meaning attaches to the familiar phrases of the Christian faith.”[xc] As all honest people, conservative or liberal, need partners in dialogue, and not merely cheerleaders who agree with them a priori; as those who emerge from the Twentieth Century require desperately to understand it, both at its best and at its worst; as the small-town landscape of the United States is swallowed up by the hypermarkets of the mega-chains, with their spreading acres of blacktopped parking; and as what remains of Western Civilization--or even of Christendom--needs to be reminded of itself while it faces the resurgence of barbarism in the form of a soon-to-be nuclear-armed Jihad: as these things happen, clear-sighted people need H. G. Wells, himself mainly clear-sighted and a colossus of Twentieth-Century letters in danger of being forgotten today because he belongs to sixty years ago, while contemporary people are stubbornly immersed in the obsessions of their all-too-Philistine, cell-phone-dominated presentism.

Irascible Wells might be. A socialist, of a kind, he might be. A little lower-class Limey he might be. Even an advocate of Realpolitik not averse to the use of force in the cause of civilized order he might sometimes be. Yet he is in many ways one of the most incisive, most insistent critics of modernity. As such, he is a necessary figure for the understanding of the great social and political deformations, not only of the just-completed century, but also of the daunting near future that looms as the new century enters its neurotic teens.

Notes

[i] Antonina Vallentin (translated by D. Woodward). H. G. Wells: Prophet of Our Day. New York: The John Day Company, 1950. 42.

[ii] Saul Bellow. Mr. Sammler’s Planet. New York: Penguin, 1983. 29.

[iii] 29 – 30.

[iv] “That autumn [of 1944] Wells was in a state of deep pessimism. It was as if he had once again carried himself forward to the ultimate dark prospect of The Time Machine in which all life, not only that of the human species, tends to darkness and extinction.” (Norman and Jean Mackenzie, in H. G. Wells: A Biography, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973, 444.) Wells’ son by Rebecca West, Anthony West, reports in his biography of his father how the rigors of an Australian trip and a lecture-tour in America in 1939 and 40 badly damaged the septuagenarian’s health, accelerating his diabetes and bringing on the cancer, from which he died a bit more than five years later: “He was worn and emaciated, and his hands had become those of a very old man. He no longer filled his clothes, which hung on him like reach-me-downs. He had undergone an abrupt diminishing and no longer had the physical presence of an important man.” (In Aspects of a Life, New York: Random House, 1984, 151.)

[v] 277.

[vi] 99.

[vii] 99.

[viii] 193 & 194.

[ix] 194.

[x] 195.

[xi] 195.

[xii] Herbert George Wells. Experiment in Autobiography. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934. 214. West. Aspects of a Life. 316.

[xiii] 214.

[xiv] 143.

[xv] 141.

[xvi] Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Simms and Irby). Other Inquisitions 1937 – 1952. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1864. 88.

[xvii] Thus the Martians, with their disproportion of brain to body, their encasement in their fighting and handling machines, represent a possible destination of human biological and technical development, one from which Wells would warn us; and the Selenites, fantastically physiologically specialized and governed by a hive-mentality, likewise foreshadow a tendency in modern political and technical activity, into which, paying no critical heed to ourselves, we are ever in danger of bringing about – which, in the dictatorships, Twentieth Century humanity did bring about. These conceits of Wells’ stories function as prognosticative metaphors. Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, E. M. Forster in The Machine Stops, and George Orwell in 1984 are all followers and imitators of Wells, borrowing generic innovations that are his.

[xviii] H. G. Wells. The War in the Air, in Three Science Fiction Novels by H. G. Wells, New York: Dover, 1963. 226.

[xix] 126.

[xx] 220.

[xxi] 8.

[xxii] 60.

[xxiii] The balloon belongs to one Arthur Butteridge, inventor of a fully controllable heavier-than-air vehicle of much interest both to the British and German governments. Butteridge, who refers to himself as an “Imperial Englishman” (25), is actually an egoist and publicity-hound whose umbrage at English social disapproval of his love affair with a lady has inclined him to betray his country by offering his engineering secrets for sale to the Kaiser. Smallways for a time masquerades – or attempts to masquerade – as Butteridge; his German hosts soon discover the imposture. But Smallways has copied Butteridge’s blueprints and, after his tribulations, succeeds in actually influencing the war by putting them in the hands of the American government.

[xxiv] 6, 7, & 65.

[xxv] 9.

[xxvi] 65.

[xxvii] 65.

[xxviii] 66.

[xxix] 160.

[xxx] 65.

[xxxi] It seems worth noting that in the novel’s nomenclature, Peter Albert Smallways and Prince Karl Albert appear to be Doppelgängers, as though the Prince were the primitive nature that Smallways at last, and always with qualifications, out-competes.

[xxxii] Experiment, 569.

[xxxiii] The War in the Air, 71.

[xxxiv] 71.

[xxxv] 94.

[xxxvi] In The Odyssey, Homer associates the Island of the Cyclopes with goats, which Polyphemus and his brethren herd: Homer says of the Cyclopes, who live in caves, that they neither meet in assemblies nor sow nor plant nor build ships to make commerce on the sea. Their contrast with civilized people could not be more emphatic, although of course they are also cannibals who flout that litmus of decency, the all-important Zeus-guaranteed laws of guest-host relations.

[xxxvii] 132.

[xxxviii] Richard Weaver. Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Times. Washington, Delaware: ISI, 1995. 101.

[xxxix] Wells. Experiment, 569.

[xl] The War, 159.

[xli] 100.

[xlii] 107.

[xliii] 107.

[xliv] 113.

[xlv] 113.

[xlvi] 125 – 126.

[xlvii] 133.

[xlviii] 150.

[xlix] 224.

[l] 226.

[li] 226.

[lii] West, Aspects of a Life, 150.

[liii] Norman and Jeanne McKenzie. H. G. Wells: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973. 243.

[liv] West, Aspects of a Life, 328 & 327.

[lv] H. G. Wells. Tono-Bungay. New York: Penguin, 2005. 28.

[lvi] 10.

[lvii] 10 – 11.

[lviii] 12.

[lix] 93.

[lx] 219

[lxi] 101.

[lxii] 329.

[lxiii] 329.

[lxiv] 102.

[lxv] 15 – 16.

[lxvi] 20.

[lxvii] 99.

[lxviii] 100.

[lxix] 100.

[lxx] 128.

[lxxi] 220.

[lxxii] 135.

[lxxiii] 135.

[lxxiv] 135.

[lxxv] 135.

[lxxvi] 135.

[lxxvii] 136.

[lxxviii] 264.

[lxxix] 149.

[lxxx] 221.

[lxxxi] 221.

[lxxxii] West, 326.

[lxxxiii] Tono-Bungay, 330.

[lxxxiv] 222.

[lxxxv] 388.

[lxxxvi] H. G. Wells. The World of William Clissold. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1926. Two Volumes. Vol. II. 562.

[lxxxvii] H. G. Wells, edited by Warren Wagar. The Open Conspiracy: H. G. Wells on World Revolution. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2002. 54.

[lxxxviii] 62.

[lxxxix] T. S. Eliot. Christianity and Culture. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1988. 26 & 49.

[xc] H. G. Wells. The World Set Free. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1914. 264.

Dr. Thomas Bertonneau teaches English at SUNY-Oswego. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley in 1990.

Neither Fish Nor Fowl: The Narrative Middle Ground Between Oral and Literate (With Special Reference to the Irish Eachtra Mhelóra agus Orlando)

The seventeenth-century Irish Adventure of Melóra and Orlando (Eachtra Mhelóra agus Orlando) did not belong to the Age of Newton at all except circumstantially, having been set to paper in the late 1600s. I published an English translation of this text in the previous issue of Praesidium as faithful to its original Gaelic idiom as comprehensibility (and perhaps more than taste) would allow. In the present essay, I shall return to the Eachtra by means of my eccentrically literal rendition in order to argue that such a thing as a “transitional text” truly exists and has several distinguishing characteristics.

Naturally, a transition of any sort presupposes a point of departure and a point of arrival. For the purposes of this discussion, the place left behind would be that purely or predominantly oral-traditional environment where all human cultures, if traced back to their birth, first created techniques for communicating long narratives held to be worth preserving. The eventual destination would—from our privileged position—obviously be literacy, characterized by qualities which generally appeal less to the ear and to memory’s love of pattern, favoring instead the demands of precise description and profound analysis. Yet we should always take into consideration that nobody who embarks upon this cultural journey could possibly be aware that the written or printed page is its endpoint—not unless the culture has already made contact with another far more “advanced” in this regard.

Indeed, the ultimate objective of my discussion is to suggest that members of transitional cultures need not have imagined themselves anywhere other than where they were to be considered stable by us—that they were not inherently lacking because they always had one more step to take. This is the retrospective presumption of our time, and it is unjustified. Not only had such cultures managed to use their incipient writing skills to preserve (and in some cases enhance) the stylistic effects of oral performance; their attitudes, ethics, and general value system also worked out a middle way between the tribesman’s and the bibliophile’s which shows every sign of being indefinitely self-sustaining. Viewed impartially, their morality “makes sense”—or as much sense as ours. It certainly evinces no tendency to collapse if that succession of next little steps toward full literacy should stall. To designate this range of values with the term “transitional” is therefore clearly invidious and somewhat unfortunate, though also inevitable. To be sure, the “transitional mind” was on its way from orality to literacy in several historical respects. Yet I contend that we should not see it as obliged to make any journey at all in search of a coherent, feasible, and tolerably humane sense of beauty, justice, and duty.

First of all, what exactly are scholars talking about when they speak of an oral technique, a literate ethic, and so forth? Below I have provided three “profiles” of the cultural stages at issue (though, again, the word “stage” implies that transitional culture is bound to decay—a notion I intend to challenge later). I have used versions of these profiles to create a framework for World Literature classes for several years now. I flatter myself that they have been refined to the point where the embedded contrasts have risen to the surface, so I shall offer few supplementary comments.[1]

Formularity Applies at all levels, from stock phrases (Homer’s “swift-footed Achilles” lounging about his tent) to type-scenes (feasts, prayers, combats); clichés are made necessary by oral delivery (no time for performer to find new words, no way for posterity to remember highly unusual expressions), but also made convincing by the prominence of natural (solar, seasonal) cycles in societies with little technology, since the perceived universe really is repetitive.

Rambling, Episodic Plot Because oral traditions are simply tales beside or within tales (like a system of pipes), they do not build suspense well and include much matter without direct bearing on the particular story being told; adult audience also fully familiar with all major tales and does NOT listen for “surprises”. From a literate perspective, stories may hence fall prey to digression and irrelevance.

“Flat” Characters Tendency even for major characters in stories to seem stereotypically heroic, strong, villainous, seductive, etc., like figures in a cartoon. Since most of these tales are elaborating an ancient myth or ritual and since the internal human world of hidden motivation has not yet been much explored, such simplicity is inevitable.

Indefinite Networking No clear beginning or end to any tale, all stories interrelated. Poet must start in medias res, with many characters appearing to fulfill only minor roles and many events receiving only passing mention; audience brings experience of the complete mythic cycle to performance which one written text cannot supply.

Homeostasis Tendency literally to “stand in the same place”: stories adjust to new political or technological realities (e.g., changes in ruling elite or techniques of warfare) without betraying any awareness in either audience or performer. New and old are artfully spliced into one (e.g., guns in African Epic of Sonjara appear to be as old as spears). The culture assumes all tales to have been handed down unaltered for time immemorial.

Atavism Worshipful regard for the past; early in time, divinely descended heroes ruled world and established bounds within which later generations must live. No one can ever reach such heroic heights again, and the attempt to reach these heights in decadent later ages spells disaster.

Proverbs Virtually all important decisions are reached by adopting a course of action in line with the living wisdom of the ancients, or proverbs; rather than examine the proverbs’ content critically, disputants tend to make superficial associations (e.g., “might makes right” would be quoted to counsel accepting of rulers’ will rather than challenging of rulers’ moral foundation).

Agonistic, Extroverted Very weak concept of inner life and of self/other division causes feelings to be projected directly into objective world; e.g., anxieties about crop failure or disease may be portrayed as a harsh god’s wrath or a struggle with a nightmarish monster.

Cyclical Concept of Time Like Nature, human life moves in circles: “What has been is what will be… there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Thus the wisdom of forefathers remains forever reliable.

Paradox of Historical Decline Though history is cyclical, it also spirals downward; Golden Age of heroes is forever gone, and each new generation is a little farther from it. Many oral cultures (Hindu, Nordic, Five Ages in Hesiod’s Works and Days) foresee the world’s eventual annihilation when the age of advanced decadence is reached.

Naturalistic Concept of Gods Since oral culture has little technology and lives close to Nature, natural phenomena (seasonal changes, storms, droughts) are a source of many anxieties; gods personify these irresistible forces, often through brutal, heedless passions strictly condemned in human society. In other words, Nature’s violence is anthropomorphized into lawless immortals with human-like petulance.

Communally Centered With little technology, society only survives through cooperation among its members. Also, speech is necessarily a public medium, joining self with others. Reigning concepts of right seldom distinguish between communal will and personal feelings of duty (if these latter ever actually exist apart from the general will).

Static, Simple Class Structure Hunter-gatherers, the purest example of oral-traditional culture, have no classes. More often, classes have become rigidly structured in a “hierarchy” (lit., “holy order”) leading down from priests to soldiers to farmers (but recording of sacred laws by priestly class is often the first act of literacy, and emergence of markets for stored grain also tends to create records: so transition is implicit, even here).

N.B.: Note that oral culture emphasizes a “spiral” or “funnel” view of history whose high, broad end connects proto-humans (heroes) to the gods and whose lower, narrowing end prophesies a decadent twilight. This particular facet of the oral outlook is diametrically opposed to literacy’s progressive view of history, which insists that life will improve as people build upon their gathering wealth of knowledge. In other respects, such as its emphasis upon community, oral culture inspires a certain nostalgia in literate culture, whose moralists are often poignantly aware that the cost of enhanced individualism has been a strength and vibrancy of neighborly ties.

Disrupted Plot, Less Episodic But Not Yet Suspenseful Such scribal adaptations as are discussed above tend to stretch the original plot out of shape, not by digressing but by describing and annotating. The episodic nature of oral story-telling becomes easily stalled when packed with new details and explanations.

More Complex and Rigid Class Divisions The hierarchy of oral cultures is enhanced as literacy “hides” certain kinds of knowledge from the public domain (e.g., in sacred texts). The increased commerce and more structured urbanization which almost always accompany literacy also favor greater social division.

Confusion over Mythic Allusions The indefinite networking of oral traditions always leaves loose ends in any given text. The literate scribes who pass along these texts sometimes handle such allusions very awkwardly in their ignorance of the complete ancient tradition, even when they don’t try to “explain” it allegorically (below).

Tentative Allegorization To the traditional mind, every object has links to the supernatural; to the literate mind, matter and metaphysics have split apart. The transitional mind seeks to find in inherited myths some degree of allegory which keeps hard reality bound to mystery. An ancient tale's dragon may be viewed as representing the devouring passion of envy or lust. Such explanations often do not fit well, since they were wholly unintended in the original stories.

Increased Detail Literacy allows fuller description—dress, furnishings, facial expressions, etc.—to creep into texts as scribes embellish inherited traditions. The process is gradual: the more literate the text, the more detail it features. Transitional texts do NOT use detail effectively to foreshadow, hint at motive, or accomplish other highly literate ends.

Disrupted Plot, Less Episodic But Not Yet Taut Such scribal adaptations as are discussed above tend to stretch the original plot out of shape, not by digressing into appended episodes but by describing and annotating isolated details within episodes. The fluidly episodic nature of oral story-telling becomes easily stalled when packed with arbitrary minutiae about clothing, editorial rambles about destiny, etc., though the live performer would no doubt have introduced precisely such embellishments if he were able.

Stylistic Hypertrophy As suggested immediately above, the traditionalist with writing at his disposal will often lard his text (which he now reads rather than memorizes) with alliteration, florid description of arms and pageantry, and other effects only modestly attainable for his illiterate brethren. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has both intricate alliterations and relentless portrayals of finery. The author of the Welsh Dream of Rhonabwy actually mocks pre-literate tellers for not being able to replicate his details of coloration.

Emergence of Folklore Folklore is impossible to define clearly, but enhanced class divisions favor a new awareness of “the little guy”. Ancient stories are often recast in distinctly social terms to dramatize friction between these newly rigid classes (e.g., Aesop’s Fables and Pancatantra). Ethic of “survival at all costs” endorsed over the mythic hero’s sacrifice to the community for glory’s sake.

Emergence of Sexual Love as Theme As ancient social structures and traditions slowly dissolve, people seek reassurance in the smallest, “safest” possible interpersonal units, such as sexual relationships. Also, the spread of literacy enhances the sense of an inner life apart from social existence, which allows such relationships to be based on “feeling” rather than decorum.

Emergence of Romance as a Genre Known most widely as the literary expression of sexual love, romance more accurately provides escape to exotic settings and happy endings after long ordeals. Its emphasis on successful encounters with “otherness” reflects the opening frontiers of a growing economy, while making heroes more human and their “prize” more internal (e.g., a loving soulmate) also suggests a shift to more literate values.

Heightened Awareness of Other Cultures This is not a direct causal relationship—but semi-literate culture invariably makes other technological advances (in agriculture, transportation, warfare) which enhance the chances of mingling with alien cultures (e.g., through trade and/or war). Rising uncertainty about one’s native traditions also creates an interest in the culture of outsiders.

Polytheism Verging on Monotheism Paradoxically, the number of gods a culture worships usually does not shrink until it reaches one: it expands, through allegorization, until every moral abstraction is deified (e.g., the Roman temples to Intellect, Piety, Manly Virtue, and Faithfulness mentioned in Cicero’s Laws 2.11.28). All of these abstractions are then synthesized into the idea of a supreme moral being.

N.B.: The “advanced stage” is that which I shall argue in this essay to be a stabilized plain for culture. The earlier characteristics indeed leave the impression of a recently oral culture which has begun to grope about for its identity. It is entirely possible that this diffident groping deserves to be reckoned a stage—a true stage, a period of instability—in its own right. I am particularly intrigued by the phenomenon of folklore, which such scholars as G. S. Kirk refuse even to distinguish from myth at an evolutionary level.[2] Yet folktales display the very apparent difference in moral tenor from myth that I describe above. Clearly a more complicated class structure drives the tensions within the typical folktale in a manner rarely (I would argue never) observable in any myth.

I shall have more to say of folklore in the final section, for its chacun pour soi creed is the antithesis of the guiding moral vision I see emerging as a culture truly distinct from the oral takes shape. Hence there is a genuine paradox waiting to be unmasked. Were folktales, perhaps, told in the humble domiciles of those simple people who had not made the passage to a more literate cultural stage and whose once-comfortable communities were now beleaguered pockets of backwardness? I think this very likely.

Analytical Approach to Reality Since alphabetic writing requires words to be divided into basic sounds represented by letters, and since writings are made up of words, sentences, chapters, etc. (e.g., all chapters in the Homeric epics were imposed later by librarians), readers develop a habit of cutting the whole into component parts.

Attention to the Unique This follows from analysis; as parts are examined more closely, their differences change from general irrelevance (oral) to extreme relevance, since they may hold the key to the special nature of an unexplored phenomenon. Stories now contain fine description whose unique elements may hold vital clues about character, motive, etc.

“Round” Characters Integrated into Plot Unlike the “flat” (i.e., stereotypical) characters of oral tradition, literate characters are complex, both because the new concept of man acknowledges his “inner being” and because motive becomes an important part of literary plot.

Emphasis of Author’s Subjectivity Differs from one text to another, but authors are generally much more aware of their perspective’s limits and biases; the first-person point of view proliferates, letters and essays are born.

Introverted, “Self/Other” Perspective The analytical mind, reflecting on itself, sees inner and outer selves as essential (often clashing) components (e.g., spirit/body, conscience/custom); other people share remoteness and mystery of outside since their feelings/beliefs less knowable than one’s own (where “one” is author and/or main character).

Progressive View of History As thinkers analyze reality, they discover (or so they believe) ability to reduce chances of failure and enhance those of success. (At advanced stage, even natural history is seen as reflecting a process of gradual change for the better; like individuals and governments, species and eco-systems constantly work to achieve higher levels of stability and efficiency.)

Pyramidal Plot of Rising Suspense Since truth is now viewed as linear rather than cyclical, and since all wholes are viewed as produced by their parts, the good story is seen as a sequence of changes driven by a “conspiracy” of common elements; plot is a closed system with Aristotle's beginning, middle, and end (i.e., a problem, complications, and climax).

Parody Due to author’s growing awareness of power over text, once-revered tales of gods and heroes, which seem quite impossible to vouch for on the basis of any author’s personal experience, are now often treated as outrageous deceptions practiced on gullible minds. An ironic gap develops between narrative and “truth” which certain witty authors exploit.

Deracination/Alienation Only now a major theme in literature: as old-fashioned story-telling becomes the object of parody, so traditional beliefs generally become more and more inadequate to handle the new conditions and pressures of the literate world. People pass through a stage of feeling uprooted and lost in a world where their fathers’ truths no longer make sense and where they themselves are seen as responsible for their lives.

Paradoxical Rise in Both Secularism and Mysticism The competition of literacy with tradition dramatizes a broader competition of new ways and old. The seeming irrelevance or inadequacy of old ways leads some to believe only in immediate realities, while others flirt with magic and the supernatural to revive the power of old belief systems. This process continues well into the advanced literate phase.

Class Divisions Thrown Into Confusion The hierarchy of transitional cultures slowly slackens as literacy spreads and knowledge trickles into the public domain (a very slow process before the printing press). Even the illiterate may profit materially from the increased trade which often occurs for reasons related to the rise of literacy.

Rise of Empiricism and Science Empiricism (testing the truth of things through sense experience: “trust only what you see and touch”) emerges amid skepticism about traditional beliefs; this, coupled with a new regard for the logic of how pieces compose wholes, eventually leads to science.

Unprecedented Socio-Economic Mobility Literacy puts unlimited knowledge within reach of anyone literate, a new respect for the individual creates more liberal social legislation, the rise of science generates new technology, the valuing of creativity erases traditional obstacles, etc. All adds up to more fluid social and economic environment, with classes based on the ability to compete in the marketplace rather than on inherited resources.

Reformist View of Society Fixed forms of government (primarily monarchy) yield to more flexible forms allowing for continual improvement, the belief in which reflects a literate confidence that things can be analyzed and changed for better.

Right Conduct Based on Conscience Conduct either imitates outside example or obeys an inner feeling of compulsion. The inner voice (conscience) is increasingly viewed as more authoritative and the only source of truly good conduct, since the inner being is closer to the true self and the spirit.

Developed Concept of Individualism Since parts hold the secret of whole and since conscience is man’s only lawful ruler, society’s purpose is to develop strong individuals with an active, honest consciences; individuals must not be turned into the cogs of an impersonal social machine.

Valuing of Creativity Over Conformity Similar to above: both artistically and morally, more credit is given to breaking with tradition and asserting personal talent, insight, belief, interpretation, etc.. Bias toward newness is now favorable rather than (as in the oral mind) dismissive.

Monotheism Based on Morality The law of conscience found within the individual self is saved from arbitrary selfish impulse by the concept of spirituality. The god of literacy is a private voice of goodness joining all reasonable people together in a sense of higher, super-material purpose (a latent contradiction with growing empiricism).

N. B.: Worth stressing is the number of tensions implicit in this triumphant “arrival”. The achievement of high literacy, in other words, offers us no compelling reason to suppose it the end of the line. Very literate cultures can be both deeply spiritual and immovably materialist, both profoundly introverted and zealous for daring social experiments, both mawkishly sentimental over the lost simplicity of the “natural” life and deliriously euphoric over the prospect of an artificially constructed paradise in the future. (Individuals within these cultures, too—if observations of our own hold true generally—may themselves harbor such contradictory attitudes at the same time!) Some of these tug-of-wars must surely produce winners and losers sooner or later. The resulting profile of culture’s next phase might suggest a return to a quasi-oral primitivism after the fashion so flamboyantly etched out by Marshall McLuhan a few decades ago… or it might involve a fusion of humans with robotic technology, or some other scenario that strikes us presently as science-fiction. At any rate, none of the profiles above features tensions of a more dynamic and explosive nature straining within it; so my own judgment (not without much regret, given the kinds of possible “next step” I have identified) is that the equation of literacy with evolutionary terminus must be rejected.

The Eachtra could easily have been read aloud to an audience that would imagine itself (but for the obvious presence of a paper text and the resulting constriction of the reader’s movements) listening to an oral performance of the highest caliber. The rhetorical strategies which abound in the narrative are those to which speakers have a clear predisposition. Writing has not weaned the Irish romancier from oral technique; on the contrary, it has probably permitted him or her to inject more oral flourish into the narration than would have been possible when mere memory is put on the spot within a circle of unblinking eyes.

Alain Renoir appears to have received this “hypertrophic oralism” (my phrase) of the polished transitional author rather differently, if I understand him. Of the Nibelungenlied, for instance, he writes, “we must be permitted to doubt that the author… would have intentionally composed that epic in such a manner that only readers and listeners steeped in those older forms could have interpreted the work and appreciated the narrative mastery which had gone into its composition.” I believe Renoir to be needlessly assuming that the oral performance is an acquired taste soon lost as texts start to be written down. Nonetheless, he concedes that “the Nibelungenlied might reflect the oral-formulaic style of earlier texts which the poet had studied without necessarily knowing anything about oral-formulaic composition.”[3] Why would this knowledge be so cryptic? Its thrust was largely to create a narrative with engaging phonetic effects and with various kinds of repetition to assist the bard’s chore of memorizing. The phonetic effects would remain popular if the literate text was read aloud (as it surely was in most medieval settings); while the mnemonic strategies, though no longer necessary, would retain a kind of charm in a culture which had not yet left the oral world fully behind and did not (like ours) see tedium in all recurrence.

That a deep appreciation for oral aesthetics abided both in authors and their audiences is indeed the inescapable conclusion when we find works like the Eachtra Mhélora exploiting the written word to arrange alliteration and assonance—often through strings of like-sounding synonyms—far in excess of what most live performers could have managed. Of these self-echoing chains, the text offers dozens, mostly having to do with arms or combat (the same situations where they crop up in later, ampler texts of the ancient Táin Bo Cúalgne). The three most sustained and artful cases occur in the battle between the Africans and the Babylonians, in the subsequent single combat between the African king and the Blue Knight, and in the description of the ship’s surreptitious launch with the shanghaied King of Narsinga. I will reproduce only the last of these: “he heard the groaning and sad gurgling of the grieving, keening, guttering waves upon the hollow flanks of the wide vessel, and the struggle and straining rustle of the speeding, ever-shrieking winds in the sleek, snug-spun canvas, and the knife-sided light-nosed advancing prow of the ship a-splitting and a-sundering the hasty hill-faced waves.” I must not be prolix, so I ask readers to accept that the Irish is at least as dense with assonance and alliteration as I have represented it (such effects are always a great challenge to mimic in translation). The passage is the more remarkable in that it does not have anything to do with battle: i.e., the romancier has imported an oral technique to a type of scene seldom employed in the oral tradition. A fifteenth-century text of the Cath Fintrágha (Battle of Ventry) offers something similar in portraying the approach of the invading Norman fleet.[4]

As for formulas, those seemingly otiose repetitions which Milman Parry made famous (or infamous) in his study of Homeric verse, the Eachtra seems no more bashful about using them than Renoir found the Nibelungenlied to be. The most frequent were the phrases ciodh trachta (which I finally translated “whatever’s to be said”) and gidh eadh (“though it were so”), along with a great many bland idioms used in speech (“if it’s so…”, “O King and Lord…”, “what’s to be done is…”, etc.). Of course, such repetitions are found even in the most literate speech, and they are clearly not being employed as a technique to render the material memorable. Perhaps this is what Renoir means when claiming that medieval composers do not understand the strategies they vaguely imitate. Were we to suppose as much, however, we would simply be conceding that the neo-literate story-teller was attached to the perceived effect of oral style—even so apparently lackluster an effect as formularity.

To help in the cataloguing of several techniques or effects which plainly rely on the speaker-listener (as opposed to the writer-reader) relation, I have had recourse to the Roman rhetorical treatise Ad Herennium. Once thought to have been penned by Cicero, now consigned to the list of works whose authors we shall never be sure of, this remarkable handbook for aspiring orators is a veritable index of all strategies and tropes known to and named by the ancients, Greeks as well as Romans. I can think of no better way to emphasize the Eachtra Mhélora’s resoundingly oral style than borrowing some of the rubrics in this tract’s fourth book. I have used Greek names below, however, since they are generally more familiar to rhetoricians.

anadiplosis: probably a poor choice for the feature of the Eachtra which I wish to highlight here, but I can find no better term; properly the repetition of a significant word to add ringing emphasis (e.g., “You knew the victim, you knew his routine, you knew of his wealth…”). Occurs in the Eachtra exclusively during speeches to identify the speaker, as in, “… so she said, ‘Sir Mador,’ said she…”. No apparent need to stress the speaker in most of these cases; clearly the adoption of an oral habit very common in our own informal usage (e.g., “So I said to him, ‘Billy,’ I said…”).

asyndeton: the absence of conjunctions (lit. “untied’); can be used in very literate circumstances to slow down rhythm of text (e.g., “he was perplexed, disoriented, mildly frightened) or in oral narratives—often with alliteration—to concentrate an effect (e.g., “the sun rose big, bright, beautiful, beaming”). Descriptions in the Eachtra abound in the latter kind of congeries. Cf. the two steeds upon which the African king and the Blue Knight ride into combat: “a horse high-headed, heavy-winded, wide-sided, ebony-hued beneath him” and “a horse braided, blue-maned, mad-rageous, unrestrained beneath him”.

catachresis: similar to the mixed metaphor and the transferred epithet. The Ad Herennium gives these examples, among others: “Man’s vigor [i.e., life] is brief,” and, “long wisdom in a man” (4. 33). Even the best writers sometimes garble their words thus: the oral performer is apt to do so routinely, and with a certain gay abandon. Consider the delightful phrase, “people of music and amusement” (lucht ciúil agus oifide). In many cases, my translation cannot capture connotations of words in the Eachtra that might strain propriety (especially since I sought to duplicate alliterative effects); but minor strains are fairly common, and seldom without the charm of vagueness (though the Ad Herennium’s author has no use for imprecision).

enargeia: a term referring a description or narration made lively—not necessarily by shifting tense to the “historic present”; yet the Ad Herennium does include frequent tense shifts in its illustration (4. 55), and several such shifts occur in the Eachtra, almost always with “come” or “go”. E.g., “the Knight of the Blue Arms comes into the cave, and he drew the carbuncle out of his bosom….” Common even in our own conversation today (e.g., “So I called out, and he turns to me…”)

hendiadys: the splitting of one object, quality, or idea into two (a species of synonymy): e.g., “wrack and ruin”. Possibly gives an oral performer an extra second to ponder his next words, but more likely a bid for a copious grandeur of style that magnifies the subject (which is how the Ad Herennium’s author understands it). In the Eachtra, examples include mo grádh agus mo shecréit (both meaning “my darling”) and suain agus codlata (synonyms for sleep).

hyperbole: exaggeration—everybody does it; yet oral culture uses this device in a distinctly inflated, simple manner wholly lacking in self-consciousness: e.g., Christy Mahon’s “I’m destroyed walking” in The Playboy of the Western World (Synge’s literal translation of a common expression in Irish). In the Eachtra, such exaggerations are largely confined to battle scenes. When the Blue Knight relieves the King of Babylon in this passage, an alliterated synonymous doublet is followed by a simile, whereupon the sentence falls apart (metanoia—see below) to be hastily rebuilt around a grand formulation of slightly strained logic: “he came to his aid and assistance like a long-leaping lion a-coming under a mad fit of wrath upon herds of brutish beasts—thunder it was that struck through him and in him, the way it seemed not killed was anyone all about the battlefield before that but those killed by the Knight of the Blue Arms around the King of Babylon in that place.”

litotes: familiar to us as “understatement”, and naturally not exclusive to oral rhetoric; yet oral poetry has a strange affinity with this device, especially in circumstances of combat (where it collaborates in a grim species of battleground humor). Ou mên isên g’eteisen, says Sophocles’s Oedipus of the stranger he slew at the crossroads: “It was no equal payback he gave me.” In the Eachtra, the convergence of the African and Babylonian forces for a great battle is inaugurated by a good example: “the two hosts set their faces either against the other, and not the encounter of friends was that encounter….”

metanoia: lit. “afterthought”; the Ad Herennium suggests (under correctio, 4. 36) that audibly replacing one word with a better may rivet attention on the new word. In oral circumstances (including those of casual conversation today), occurrences are seldom so artful—certainly not in the Eachtra. Cf. the King of Babylon’s rather uninspired stumble, “the other treasures which you treat of—as to say, the oil of the boar of Tús and the carbuncle—no deed is more difficult than to obtain them.”

onomatopoeia: dearer to some traditional poets than others—thought to hold no attractions for Homer (but cf. chalcopod’ hippo for a trotting pair of horses). Loses appeal as works more often read silently; even the Ad Herennium recommends limited use in speeches (hoc genere rare est utendum, 4. 31). The Eachtra’s glorious description of the ship setting sail with the King of Narsinga abounds in these effects: e.g., the glug-glug of gearán agus golghuire as the king hears the waters and the sibilants in siubhlaighe síorchaintighe as the sails fill.

parataxis: not actually discussed in Ad Herennium as a rhetorical strategy, but well known to students of oral tradition as the preferred manner of joining clauses in traditional matter. The “and… and… and…” structure of the Eachtra is indeed so jarring to modern taste that I was tempted in translating to suppress some of its exuberance. The oral mind tends to arrange events side by side without closely examining their logical connection through subordination (or hypotaxis). “The king’s son, by whom our adversary was slain, approached us,” may well emerge as, “Our adversary was slain, and it was the king’s son who slew him, and he approached us.”

simile: like hyperbole, a trope known to artistic expression of all stages yet enjoying a distinctive character at the traditional stage. Similes in oral works could not be passed along through generations of bards if minutely particularized. They are therefore quite general and brief, as a rule (“roared like a lion cornered by hunting dogs”, “ran like a young stallion escaped from the stable yard”). The great crack created when the Blue Knight rives the stone holding Orlando prisoner stirs a simile of this sort: “it was like unto a thin, fragile-rimmed bladder full of air after breaking apart, or a heavy-sodded plot of earth after being lightning-struck….” The terms are lively and effective but not at all rare, ironic, or multi-faceted.

synonymy: already discussed under “hendiadys”; oral tales may sometimes string together three or even four synonyms or near synonyms: e.g., the Eachtra’s opening description of Orlando: “to the utmost strong and skillful and skirmish-savvy, of face and form and fine manners best among all men young or old the wide world round.” Elements of longer congeries often will not be quite synonymous, but shades of difference are negligible. Worth stressing is that the members of many such lists are alliterated: gaile agus gaisgidh (both denoting skill at arms), catha no comhlainn (combat), uamhann agus eagla (fear—the initial “a” would be the prominent vowel sound beginning both words). As attention is being directed away from a fine reading of individual descriptors, it is simultaneously being courted by audible rhythms and repetitions

To this list might be added an oddity for which no formal designation exists, to my knowledge: the curious recasting of conjunctions as disjunctions. I have in mind such passages as, “she sought news of him, what land was this or what had made of it a wilderness,” and, “the king sought news of him, who was he or what land was his.” The hint of prolepsis here (i.e., the “I know thee who thou art” construction) is not the target of my query, though it is also highly characteristic of oral practice (being very close to metanoia). What puzzles me, rather, is the employment of “or” rather than “and” to distinguish between two alternatives essentially indistinguishable—not to be distinguished, at any rate, by a clear “either/or” choice. Perhaps to identify one’s land is not precisely the same as identifying oneself, though place of origin would be considered a vital part of personal identity in pre- or proto-literate times. Surely to explain the cause of a land’s devastation is not a substitute for actually naming the land.

It is worth remarking that the Odyssey features this same inquisitive redundancy when strangers are asked their identity. Tis pothen eis andrôn, pothi toi polis êde tokêes, asks Telemachus of the disguised Athena in book 1: “Who of men are you, what your city and your parents?” To have answered one of these questions would verge upon answering all three for an ancient Hellene. The disjunctive presentation is not in evidence here; but the copious style, making many things out of few, most certainly characterizes oral habits.

No doubt, I have overlooked several other traits that might have been cited to the same effect. The cumulative impact of the evidence moves us irresistibly to the conclusion that this text, though written down by an author rather than dictated to a scribe, almost indubitably, continues to throb with the techniques of the oral composer. To argue that the possession of literacy would quickly disaffect any narrator or creator with those techniques—that they would suddenly have grown childish or awkward to him—would be to blind oneself to the plain truth illustrated in texts like the Eachtra Mhélora.

To continue our review of the Eachtra’s residual oral qualities, we must note that its method of composition reflects the quilt-work construction of a bard who has inherited scores or even hundreds of tales from which to assemble tonight’s story—not the out-of-the-blue inspiration of the literate novelist seeking never-yet-expressed truth. Indeed, if Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso has shed any light of influence at all upon the Eachtra, it is far dimmer than the many clear rays beaming thereupon from native myth and folklore. Like a composer of the old school, the romancier shows utterly no self-consciousness about pilfering matter from these sources, which themselves had borrowed it from an immeasurable antiquity. The only criterion for finely (or roughly) adjusting an oft-used stone and slipping it into the narrative wall seems to be whether or not it fits the surrounding story—not the appropriateness of its source to the genre, the audience’s likely familiarity with the source, etc.

One example out of myriad possibilities will suffice. I remarked in note 5 of my translation that Orlando’s ill-fated journey to the Forest of Wonders resonates with a tale collected by scholar Séamus Ó Duilearga some time between 1930 and 1943 in County Clare. Ó Duilearga’s primary source was Stiofáin Uí Ealaoire, a man of very advanced years (he was born in 1858), recently stricken with blindness, and most probably not literate in any language. Stiofáin was just the kind of figure who would have grown up hearing oral recitations of matter centuries old (and perhaps, at its roots, even older). It is scarcely surprising, then, that the long tale which Ó Duilearga would entitle “Seacht Sléite an Óir” (“The Seven Roads of Gold”) echoes ancient mythology, medieval literature, and the repertoire of other more-or-less contemporary raconteurs at various points.[5] The only child of an old couple sets out to try his fortune in the world. He comes to an enchanted house which appears to be deserted by all human life, but in which a sumptuous supper is suddenly laid before him (68-69). After eating, he is asked by a cat if he would prefer that she assume human form by night or by day. He chooses night, cryptically explaining that they will have light by day (69). (Does the talking cat, perhaps, frighten him?) The cat warns him finally never to speak a word throughout the night, no matter what happens, and then sends him off to bed. She herself follows later—but there is no suggestion of a sexual encounter in Stiofáin’s very proper narrative, and indeed the woman of mystery eludes the young man every time he strikes a flint in the hope of glimpsing her features.

In any case, three successive nights turn out to be passed in an activity far from amorous. Three strangers stalk into the house and demand that the boy make a fourth to their card game, then—the next night—that he supplement a two-against-two fighting match, and at last—on the third night—that he participate in a two-on-two football scrimmage (70-72). Though never having uttered a word before, the boy cries out indignantly when fouled during the football contest. Next morning, the cat transforms herself into the most beautiful woman he has ever seen and informs him that he has broken the cruel spell laid upon her and that the two of them are free forever more to share a connubial life in the lap of luxury (72). Of course, the hero accepts.

With a little adjustment, this scenario is the Eachtra’s. The lonely journey, the enchanted space without human company, the miraculously laid feast, the prohibition of speech, the three feats whose completion is required to break the spell, the eventual happy union… all appear in both tales, though of course the adventurous boy is not paralyzed as his lady-love unravels the enchantments (except in their death-like bed) and the hellish guardian’s role is, in an almost complete turnaround, now the lady’s. (The cat, as was noted, preserves a hint of the sinister.) So much for Orlando and Mélora… but Stiofáin’s story is far from ended. His impetuous young man takes leave of his lady to visit his parents, being endowed by her at parting with a magical ring that will grant his every wish. He must only take care, he is warned, not to make the object of any wish his lovely wife or any occupant of their house (which is now attended by a swarm of dutiful servants). The young man Seán (Stiofáin finally names him for us) uses the ring’s magic to speed his passage to his parents and then to lodge them in a mansion (73-74). All is well until a meddlesome priest induces him to share a few glasses of porter. The serving girl, decides the priest, is the most perfect specimen of her sex on earth. No, no, retorts Seán: the least handsome servant of his lady’s palace is yet more beautiful. Naturally, he invokes a servant’s instant presence with the aid of his ring; and then, as the stakes in the frivolous dispute rise higher, his wife herself, the fairest of them all (75-77). The wife gives no immediate hint of vexation, but steals away that night with her ring, leaving behind a note (in a fascinating bit of homeostasis which infuses this oral world with universal literacy) to explain that Seán will never see her again unless he can find her in the Seven Roads of Gold (77-78).

For medievalists with a Celtic interest, this part of the tale pulses with literary suggestion. The otherworldly lover’s prohibiting her beau from revealing her existence lies at the center of Marie de France’s lay Lanval; and Marie, of course, insisted that she drew the matter from her native Brittany, where it had no doubt been worked into many a tale. The hero’s return to an earlier narrative setting to set things straight, his violating a strict taboo soon after arrival, and his being forced to surrender an entrusted ring by way of signifying divorce from his mystical partner are all vital elements in the Welsh Mabinogion’s romance Owein (which Chrétien would render Yvain in his version of the same matter). To suppose that Stiofáin had heard the text of the Eachtra Mhélora would be needless and somewhat naïve; to suppose further that he would have (or could have) had direct contact with these medieval tales in the literate form through which we know them would court absurdity. Rather, literary records are obviously telling us from several directions that local story-tellers like Stiofáin were still fishing in the narrative lakes—well into the twentieth century—from which Celtic narrative had reeled in material for at least a millennium.

The oldest resonance yet is that which the tale next offers. Seán at once begins his quest of the Golden Rose (the name which Stiofáin confers in English, also rather belatedly, upon his princess). He vows never to eat or sleep two nights running in the same place until he has found his lady. A brief adventure has him outsmarting three thieves, whose magical clothing of concealment and escape he is able to purloin by playing naïve (79-82). Thereafter he comes to a helpful old man who possesses the power to call together all the animals of the earth and ask them if any has seen or heard of the Seven Roads of Gold. No luck… but the old master gives Seán a special ball which, if repeatedly smacked, will eventually take the lad to the sage’s brother (84). This second wise man calls together all the fish of the sea, yet they are also unable to identify the Seven Roads of Gold. Another ball to follow… and Seán is led to a third wise brother, the master of all the birds in the sky. Though the feathered tribe appears just as ignorant as its predecessors, a great eagle arrives late. It had farther to fly—all the way from the Seven Roads of Gold (88)!

The trickster of tricksters theme which we see in the interlude of the thieves is universal in folklore. Rarer and more significant is the hero’s pursuit of the ball. This motif appears in Irish literature as early as the Táin Bó Cúalnge. Those versions of the great epic containing the Macgnímrada, or Youthful Deeds, of Cú Chulainn represent the wunderkind as setting out on a playful jaunt which involves hitting his silver ball as far as possible with his hurley stick and then catching it along with his other equipment (flung after the ball).[6] The orb, it is true, does not seem to reveal to little Cú a particular path which he must follow; the ball has obviously come to assume a mystical character with the passage of time. In a tale collected by Holger Pedersen in 1895 while visiting the Aran Islands, the ball role is usurped by a series of horses as fast as the wind. Pedersen’s scéalaí was one Mártín Neile Ó Conghaile, an old man very much like Stiofáin in his marginal literacy, his life of manual labor from which story-telling was mere respite, and his general immersion in traditional ways. The tale which Pedersen would dub “Iníon Ridire an Chaisleáin Ghlais” (“The Daughter of the Knight of the Gray Castle”) plainly shares some of the same narrative molds as produced Stiofáin’s episodes.[7] A young man flees an unpromising home to seek his fortune, he vows not to eat or sleep in the same place until having fulfilled his charge to find a mysterious princess, he is received by six supernaturally wise figures—three sisters, then three brothers—who send him along his way (the latter three with horses, not balls), the final brother commands all birds of the air to assemble and tell what they know of the Gray Castle, the late-arriving eagle is alone in recognizing the castle (from which it has just come)… and the two tales proceed to their conclusion almost step for step. In both, the eagle takes the adventurer upon its back and conveys him to the far-off land (being fed by the passenger periodically with raw meat taken aboard). The princess is pleased to see her beau (for the second time, in Seán’s case) and takes the initiative in securing (or affirming) a marriage by using her wits to resolve a menacing situation. Then a return and lasting happiness…

The ball has now bounced pretty far from Cú Chulainn. And so it would—for I am trying to illustrate the essential point that compositions like the Eachtra Mhélora cannot be viewed as having flowed directly from a particular source. In her introduction, Mac an tSaoi shows herself well aware that the Eachtra’s themes and motifs crop up in places like Chrétien de Troyes’s romances and the tales of the Mabinogion. She adds several early Irish sources, as well, such as the Eachtra Airt Mac Cuind (where she finds a precedent for the disembodied hands that amaze Orlando in Merlin’s enchanted cave).[8] Yet her the thesis, like mine, is that our text evolved from a promiscuous absorption of material highly reminiscent of an oral tale’s, it remains somewhat understated. Originally Mac an tSaoi appears to approve the argument of Robin Flower, formidable scholar and quondam curator of the British Museum, which she summarizes thus: “that not only was a translation into English of the Orlando Furioso made in Elizabeth’s time, but that the translator, Sir John Harrington, while visiting this country [Ireland], bestowed a copy of his work upon a son of the O’Neill and that the earl himself took pleasure in it. His [Flower’s] conjecture that here lies the first link in the chain that would grow to be our Eachtra Mhélora need not concern us.”[9]

On the contrary, I think we should be very concerned about this conjecture; for the correct response to it is both “yes” and “no” in broad terms, however wrong Flower might have been about the specific text he chose to foreground. To accept only a “yes” or a “no” in these matters of provenance—or even a “maybe”—would be to misapprehend the nature of a transitional work. Authors of this sort may be comparatively well read without having imbibed the literate notion of the discrete text, created almost ex nihilo and verbally fixed once and for all by a single intelligence whose personal name thereafter “owns” the literary “property”. Rather, printed matter is just more pottage in the pot. One stirs it with the other contents, which may include fragments of ancient myth, largely intact local legends, and grossly misremembered remnants of imported traditions; and one dishes out whatever comes to the surface in the ladle. Under such circumstances, it would be virtually impossible to prove that Harrington’s translation of Ariosto did not play some infinitesimal role in our Eachtra Mhélora—but not at all difficult to debunk the proposition that it was the tale’s nucleus. Indeed, why not suppose that Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which most certainly pilfered from Ariosto’s Orlando in a time-honored literate way, somehow influenced the conception of the “Merlin’s cave” episode in the Eachtra? Mac an tSaoi alludes to the proposed Spenserian influence with more skepticism than conviction (ix); but copies of Spenser’s allegorical epic would have been infinitely more abundant and accessible in late sixteenth-century Ireland than Harrington’s translation.

The long and the short of it is that no evidence can decide such claims, since the very nature of transitional style is to worry away the edges even of the most influential material into something that appears “stock”; in other words, to continue the universal borrowing and resistance to subtle reference that we observe in oral style. Frankly, I find it somewhat perverse that scholars tend to dismiss yet more direct patterns of influence in these cases. Why might the Eachtra not have culled a few particles of matter straight from Ariosto’s text in Italian? Irish soldiers-of-fortune had strayed all over Europe by this time, and European wrecks were also constantly washing up on Ireland’s western shores (as did a few ships of the Spanish Armada and, much later, the Lusitania). Not all of the Irishmen who thus made contact with the Mediterranean’s more literate heritage would have been fluent in all the requisite languages, to be sure—but the consequent problems of cross-cultural transmission are much exaggerated. A semi-literate Irish sailor might have heard parts of a text read or recited in Italian and then returned to his native village with what little he understood and recalled of the performance. A fisherman might have given to the local priest a book recovered from a chest along the strand, and the priest might have rendered whatever contents remained legible tant bien que mal in Irish during a long winter night’s cuartaíocht.[10]

Such a scenario would account for the extreme sketchiness and brevity of what possible literary borrowings tend to occur in transitional works. Had the compiler of the medieval Irish adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, the Merugud Uilix (Homecoming of Ulysses), ever read or heard anything approaching the complete epic? Perhaps so… but the only episodes he could recall with any degree of clarity were those involving Aeolus and the Cyclops.[11] Is there any scintilla of a hint that the Eachtra Mhélora’s author had a similarly fragmentary recall of Ariosto’s Italian original? The names of the characters may offer a hint. The non-Celtic “Mélora” hardly approximates “Bradamante”—but it comes much closer to the moniker of Ariosto’s other redoubtable virgin-warrior, Marfisa (muddled in memory, just maybe, with the original Orlando’s love interest, Angelica). Orlando himself has retained nothing but his name in Irish, having been utterly transformed both in manners and appearance: the Boiardo/Ariosto version is somewhat tongue-tied, socially awkward, hirsute, and gigantic. The villainous Sir Mador, however, is almost surely Angelica’s lover Medoro—the slip of a boy who steals Angelica away from Orlando in Ariosto’s romance, and does so in Spain! The chain of transmission upon which the Irishman has drawn apparently begrudges Medoro his success at the hero’s expense. Now he is a cad, defamed and execrated by a posterity far beyond the pale of his creator’s culture rather as was Odysseus by the Romans for conceiving the Trojan Horse--and as was Aeneas himself by medieval raconteurs for deserting Dido.

I suggested in my translation (see n. 13) that Mélora’s mare during her fight with the King of Africa may possibly represent a dim memory of the hippogryph (half horse, half griffin) briefly acquired by Ariosto’s Bradamante. Our author almost makes the light-footed steed take flight: “the likeness of a squirrel leaping between trees was that mare.” Furthermore, we are told in the next sentence that the Knight of the Blue Arms’ shield bears the image of a “wingèd griffin”. Besides these unarguably tenuous associations, the Irish tale produces several other dim echoes of Orlando Furioso 3-4. The wicked Pinabello tricks Bradamante into a plunge which lands her within a wondrously ornate cave, home to the tomb of none other than Merlin; and the deceased yet still prophetic seer is served by a priestess (not in the least diabolical, but Sibylline in her disheveled hair and loose garb) who introduces the brave bellatrix to her unborn progeny. The Irish Orlando’s entrapment in Merlin’s cave, while inverting these scenes in many ways, nevertheless recalls them. Of course, the lady saves her knight in Ariosto as in the Eachtra—not by returning to Merlin’s cave, to be sure, but by breaking the enchantment of a stupendous mountaintop palace built by the sorcerer Atlante. Employing both guile and force of arms, Bradamante ends up not only with her Ruggiero, but also—temporarily—with the hippogryph ridden by the magician.[12]

All of this may seem the mere idea of a plot line running from (or contorted through) Italian to Irish: the barest of skeletons without a trace of flesh or hair. The resulting connection between cantos 3 and 4 and the Eachtra offers scarcely more of a lifeline that what exists between “Medoro” and “Mador”.[13] Yet if our author took nothing from Ariosto more than a few garbled names, a sense of one misnamed character’s unworthiness, and the broadest blueprint of a story from two ill-remembered chapters, he nonetheless took something. He preserved the memory of someone else’s memory of a partial, weak translation. The transitional author, like the performing bard, is always open to suggestion, never sensitive to “intellectual property”.

We have not proved, then, that the Eachtra Mhélora’s author had no contact with the Orlando Furioso when we merely remark the flimsy connections between the two; we have adduced evidence, rather, that his authorial techniques of borrowing were pre-literate. One tale that the celebrated Peig Sayers, a story-teller of Ireland’s far-western Blasket Islands most active in the early twentieth century, used to recount was dimly reminiscent of a vignette from Boccaccio. After conferring with another collector of local lore, scholar James Stewart was able to trace the narrative echo back to a printed copy of the Decameron stashed away on the premises of one of the main island’s few inhabitants literate in English.

When, some time later, I met George Thomson and we were discussing the presence of these Boccaccian tales on the island, he recalled how in the mid-twenties he himself had heard either Mícheál Ó Gaoithín or his mother Peig tell an exotic-sounding tale involving a love-lorn man who was shut out in the snow by a heartless lady: the Seventh Story of the Eight Day, as it must be, one of the longest in the Decameron [sic]. When subsequently I asked George Thomson if he could recall any circumstances that might explain this knowledge of Boccaccio on the island, he wrote: “Some time later [i.e. after hearing the story in question] when I was in Maurice’s house (Tigh na Leacan), he turned out the contents of a little cupboard in the wall, and among them I found a tattered copy of an English edition of the Decameron.”[14]

To be exact, Stewart’s conclusion is not that old Muiris (or Maurice) had read the book to Peig. Knowing that printed or written matter was typically shared in these communities among those who could read it, he hypothesizes thus: “as she [Peig] was unable to read English with ease it may be assumed that she heard the story from her translator-son.”[15] Yet there is no reason whatever to suppose that another may not have read the tale in her presence—and even less to suppose that someone who had attended such a reading repeated elements of the story in her hearing; for her own version of it (to judge from sketchy reports) was largely a matter of following a plot line with little more detail—when we consider the Orlando’s vastness beside one story of Boccaccio’s—than the Eachtra Mhélora’s author had borrowed.

The scholar who deals in “literate literature” tends to insist upon clear and sustained references between two works before he or she will allow that one has influenced the other. At most, a single connection between a pair of works may be defended as long as the author intends a subtle, probably ironic allusion (for instance, T. S. Eliot’s snitching a line from Baudelaire). Specialists have known for some while—not since the time of Robin Flower, perhaps, but certainly since Milman Parry began to extrapolate from traditional Slavic songs to Homer in the thirties of the past century—that patterns of influence in oral cultures are such as I have described them above. Even Mac an tSaoi (whose edition was first published in 1946) astutely senses that the Eachtra Mhélora more resembles a grab-bag of Celtic folklore than a poorly recalled version of one or two of Ariosto’s cantos. I will allow Albert Lord to pose the obvious and essential question, which he does about halfway through his Singer of Tales:

It is worthy of emphasis that the question we have asked ourselves is whether there can be such a thing as a transitional text; not a period of transition between oral and written style, or between illiteracy and literacy, but a text, product of the creative brain of a single individual. When this emphasis is clear, it becomes possible to turn the question into whether there can be a single individual who in composing an epic would think now in one way now in another, or, perhaps, in a manner that is a combination of two techniques. I believe that the answer must be in the negative, because the two techniques are, I submit, contradictory and mutually exclusive.[16]

Lord (a friend and colleague of the short-lived Parry) had preceded this passage in his great work with an eloquent description of how the performing poet’s habits of thought would be undermined as soon as a scribbler sat down beside him to take dictation. The images are powerful and possess a certain common sense. Once the rhythm and flow of chanting were disrupted so that the bothersome scribe might keep up, the performer would become more composer. He would use the annoying lacunae in his presentation to ponder the next line more carefully… and the finesse, the attention to detail, the regard for relevance—many of the initial qualities of literate thinking—would be born, even though the poet himself might not be able to translate a single one of the scribe’s marks into sound.

All true, no doubt: a poet with prolonged exposure to such sessions—and a literate performer a fortiori, who would swat up on handwritten notes before a live show—would surely develop a keener eye for detail and a keener sense of how one far-flung element of the plot might foreshadow or ironically compromise another. Yet would such dawning awareness of the minute, the intricate, and the interdependent bring down the entire oral house of cards? Lord backed away from this proposition later in his career, and a great many works from the European Middle Ages belie it. Jongleurs and raconteurs who enjoyed almost routine exposure to written texts continued to perform with instruments in their hands or by the dimmest firelight. Texts provided reference points which might or might not be remembered completely. If they were texts from foreign shores or exotic cultures—if they were even printed texts transported from the Renaissance world into pockets of “backwardness”—their contents would nonetheless be kneaded into an oft-told tale as if the narrative had never known any other form. In my translation of the Eachtra Mhélora, I indeed conjectured at two points that the author might have had some small familiarity with the Greek and Roman classics (see nn. 20 and 21). Mélora’s successful attempt to conceal her tears from her father might contain a debt to Odysseus’s similar struggle in the court of Alcinous (Odyssey 8), while the heroic Blue Knight’s exposing the hellish hag who guards Orlando to the light of day resonates with Hercules’s unearthing of the wicked Cacus in Aeneid 8.

The resemblances here are few and tenuous, to be sure, just as were those suggested above between the Eachtra and the Orlando… and this, once again, is precisely my point. The Irish romancier is obviously quite literate in that he or she can write fluidly and very descriptively. Such literacy—most certainly not acquired only in Irish, which would have been a practical impossibility at the time—gives instant access to reading matter; and whatever this author did read, he or she indubitably might have read Latin and English classics (which were the staple of a lettered education), along with a smattering of the Greek canon. Such classics could hardly have been avoided during this era if one pursued lettered studies with any measure of formality. Yet the Eachtra bears no unmistakable reference to anything of the kind, nor to any Irish or Celtic stories as discrete texts. A considerable degree of literacy has not shaken this person from the oral style of prosody and allusion one perceptible iota.

I might add briefly (for here is not the place to rebut Lord’s original thesis in detail, were that rebuttal necessary) that the Ad Herennium on which I relied in the previous section is itself a running testimony that oral and literate can fuse rather tightly. The treatise’s unknown author is a storehouse of information about Greek and Roman rhetorical teachings and about various speeches delivered in court or at the senate. Yet for the very reason that his tract seeks to impart oratorical skill, it offers stratagems whose effect appeals purely to the ear along with others designed to satisfy the finely reasoning mind. Speech and writing, far from being “contradictory and mutually exclusive” in the ancient world, are often mutually supportive. To say that all of antiquity’s masterpieces are transitional would be overreaching: Lord was correct, in fact, to imply that a transition cannot be static, and to this extent our having inevitably to use such a term as “transitional” is unfortunate. What is no longer A and not yet C is not necessarily B by default as it makes its passage. Both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, however, and even more spectacularly in certain Eastern cultures—in short, everywhere in time that literacy has become the stable monopoly of an elite few for want of any technique of wide, quick, affordable diffusion (like the printing press)—we find that the written word enjoys long spells of simply helping speakers with their speeches, singers with their songs, and merchants with their inventory.

What, then, is the critical point which we may define as B along the spectrum of transition: i.e., when does writing become more than a mnemonic technology that reinforces traditional ways—when does it also encourage new ways without yet undermining the old? This point is not to be found at the surface, which remains largely as it has always been: formulaic, crackling with sound effects, ringing with the resonance of immemorably old tales. A Bedouin doesn’t cease to be a nomad when given a wristwatch and a transistor radio. We must peer beneath the surface to find that part of the transitional profile which justifies its not being dismissed as late orality or proto-literacy. If every nomad has a wristwatch, and if all the wristwatches work, then something subtle but profound may very well change the Bedouin’s culture. In the case of the Eachtra Mhélora, we shall find this change mostly in the characters’ psychology and in the system of values implied by their acts.

NOTES

[1] To document my sources for every item of each profile would consume vastly more space than I have at my disposal. Allow me, then, to recommend a few of the most recognized sources, in order of the utility which I personally have found in them: Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1989); Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1963), and The Muse Learns to Write (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1986); Alain Renoir, A Key to Old Poems: The Oral-Formulaic Approach to the Interpretation of West-Germanic Verse (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State UP, 1988); Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1960); Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse (London and New York: Oxford UP, 1987); John Miles Foley, The Theory of Oral Composition (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1988); Aleksandr Luria, Cognitive Development: Its Social and Cultural Foundations (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1976); Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1992); Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991). See also the biennial journal Oral Tradition, ed. J. M. Foley, first published in January 1986 (Columbus, OH: Slavica).

[2] Cf. G. S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Cambridge UP/U of California P, 1973), 41: “Folktales… tend to reflect simple social situations; they play on ordinary fears and desires as well as on men’s appreciation of neat and ingenious solutions; and they introduce fantastic subjects more to widen the range of adventure and acumen than through any imaginative or introspective urge.” In short, Kirk sees folklore simply as the product of the mythopoeic mind at a more relaxed moment—a view which I find naively negligent of social circumstances.

[3] Alain Renoir, A Key to Old Poems: The Oral-Formulaic Approach to the Interpretation of West-Germanic Verse (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State UP, 1988), 165-166.

[4] As rare as sailing scenes are in comparison to combat scenes, furthermore, the Irish tradition may have lavished alliteration and synonymy upon the former with special fondness. Cf. the voyage of Conall Gulaban described by one traditional raconteur during the twentieth century’s first half in Leabhar Stiofáin Uí Ealaoire, ed. Séamus Ó Duilearga (Dublin: Comhairle Béaloideas Éirinn, 1981), 31.

[5] See Leabhar Stiofáin Uí Ealaoire, ed. Séamus Ó Duilearga (ibid.), 68-92. Subsequent page references to the tale refer to this volume.

[6] See Cecile O’Rahilly’s edition of the TBC from the Book of Leinster (Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1970), ll. 759-766 (Irish) and p. 158-159 (English translation).

[7] Scéalta Mártín Neile, ed. Ole Munch-Pedersen (Baile Átha Cliath/Dublin: Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann, 1994), 81-102.

[8] See the introduction (in Irish) of Dhá Sgéal Artúraíochta, ed. Máire Mhac an tSaoi (Baile Átha Cliatha/Dublin: Institiúid Ard-Léinn, 1984 [first published 1946]), ix. The editor directs us to the journal Ériu, v. 3, p. 156, where she presumably happened upon this suggestion of influence.

[9] Ibid., viii. The translation from Irish is mine.

[10] In his autobiographical novel An Gleann agus a Raibh Ann (Baile Átha Cliath/Dublin: An Clóchomhar Tta, 1974), Séamus Ó Maolchathaigh devotes his eighteenth chapter, “Ag Cuartaíocht I dTeach Shiadhaile” (99-112), to describing the institution of cuartaíocht (lit. “visiting”). Villagers would converge upon certain houses known for their residents’ joke- and story-telling ability to wile away the long night hours. It bears emphasis that the author, who matured in the late nineteenth century, testifies to several cases where the most entertaining hosts would draw their material from books or newspapers which they had lately read.

[11] Stiofáin Uí Ealaoire most certainly did not read or speak Greek—yet he inserts a detailed version of the Polyphemus episode in his garbled account of Fionn MacCumhail’s youthful deeds, wherein the poet Fionn Éigeas from whom Fionn steals the Salmon of Knowledge becomes An Gaiscíoch Leath-Chaoch Rua (The Red Half-Blind Warrior”). The tail includes Fionn’s slipping through the blinded giant’s grasp under the belly of a goat! See Leabhar Stiofáin Uí Ealaoire (op. cit.), 18-21.

[12] Again, the connection has obviously been turned upside-down, if it exists at all, for the lady-knight’s adversary is employing the flying steed against her; and the King of Africa, besides, is a long way from the enchanted cave. Such unlikely alterations suggest distinctly the stunning transformations of an orally communicated tale rather than the minor lapses of literate transmission.

[13] The disguised female fighting for her man is not unknown in Eastern folklore (cf. “The Red Lotus of Chastity” from the Kathasaritsagara), and warrior-queens are strangers neither to the history nor the myth of the Celtic world (cf. Bodicca and the Ulster Cycle’s Scáthach); yet I know of no instances where these latter are represented as sacrificing themselves for mate or consort. It is not ludicrous, therefore, to bestow upon this “plot suggestion” some little importance as an influence.

[14] From the introduction (ix-xxii) of Boccaccio in the Blaskets, ed. James Stewart (Galway: Officina Typographica, 1988), x-xi.

[15] Ibid., xx.

[16] Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard UP, 1960), 129.

Dr. John Harris is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Texas at Tyler. His translation of the early-modern Irish Eachtra Mhelóra agus Orlando appeared in the previous edition of Praesidium.

Lt. Col. Michael Lythgoe (USAF, Rtd.) has interviewed poets and produced his own poetry for many years, being published both as a commentator and an artist in such journals as Christianity and Literature.

Blanc had perhaps dozed for a few minutes, for a few miles. On this stretch of Interstate at this hour, the theory was not implausible. But for the occasional small convoy of large haulers, traffic had thinned to nothing a good two hours before midnight. Birds had gone to their nests, and foxes to their lairs. Once or twice the wreathes of new residential development fond of that untaxed gap between a great metropolis and the highway skirting it had drawn his attention. He had seen a satellite dish or two pointed toward the stars, steadily radiant somewhere beyond the Interstate's necklace of floodlights. Clients just called them, without irony, "satellites"--low-frequency telescopes, nets cast into the great wide ocean of wavelengths in search of... a division-rival ballgame, a grope through a desperate housewife's underwear, a dismemberment by computer-simulated dinosaurs, the Nashville sound in stereo. Diversion before bedtime... anything to blot out another day of grind (anything, that is, but an truly alien transmission confirming the Third Planet's coordinates from a UFO's console: for the nets were designed to fish shallow depths).

Himself, he might have been an alien for all the invitation that reached him from gray plains of high chimney and steep gable, fashionable mansard and vinyl siding, all collapsed into an occasional wave of wreckage along his perimeter. Or he might have been dreaming in his snooze (for he had used to dream of such places, of suburban ownership and financial rootedness). Or he might have skidded off the road in his sleep, died instantly, and--before noticing the mangled body curled at his soul's feet--seen distant visions of settlement in some disappointing postmortem epiphany: the gambit of a B-film whose director wants to keep the audience guessing. Or he might have been awake the whole time and somehow played the slideshow behind his glazed eyes: the "Home That I Will Never Have" presentation reviewed far out of curb-appeal range. Tired, cold, costly, fenced and walled, without overall plan, its razed forests tombed under heavily watered blankets of rye grass, the "neighborhood" belonging to these specs was out there, was all around him--was the mighty arm of the evolutionary force which would inexorably work metropolis and highway into one pullulating magma. He could feel its impetus, its gravity, its acceleration, in the highway's bends and veers as an ancient mariner might feel the first draw of the Maelstrom.

But he had not actually seen any signs of habitation for hours now. Tomorrow was a work day, a grind day, and the picture windows in dens (visible behind their backyard fences only from the Interstate, three miles off, and hence invisible) had blacked out their homely yellow rectangles at some time during the six hours since he had stopped for a fish sandwich. Only his eyes were open now, had been open for hours now. They said truckers sometimes went into the ditch asleep. They said teams of truckers traded off a bunk behind the driver's seat. But he couldn't have slept. If he had closed his eyes, he would have seen the same ribbon of tarmac bending and veering under the same monotonously laid floodlights, which he would have driven behind his lids. Which he was driving now, perhaps, behind closed lids in a fatal dream of waking... unless waking had always only been a dream of restless sleep.

At first, the detour was a welcome respite. He had seen a truck convoy of three flash bright red stars far ahead as they had decelerated and nosed with perfect order into the ditch's direction. Amazingly, amusingly, their queue appeared to remain upright. He would probably have followed it into the unlit descent even if some hardhat crew (now long in their beds) had not installed an electric tote-and-point "detour" board. The deceleration and the sudden absence of pavement under his tires (replaced by pounded dirt) awakened him almost like a cold shower. His trusty floodlight gone, he had only headlamps to guide him and the very sporadic, almost accidental roadside reflector or orange cone that they turned up. Even the trucks were too far ahead now to transmit clues about the way's next vagary. Their taillights had grown tiny, red-shifted quasars whose leg of the universe might wholly contradict his own.

In fact, the trucks had apparently jigged where he had jagged. A glance up from the meager sweep scythed out by his headlamps revealed that they had already re-ascended the slope and were nosing their way back onto the Interstate. Leaning into the windshield over his steering wheel, he could see the first of them rise silver again in the precisely, hypnotically laid columns of the straight necklace's neon glow.

Turning back to look for the missed access road seemed inadvisable. Though no traffic whatever was behind him, he continued to see the smooth surface ahead with reasonable clarity. There was a purposiveness about its persistence. On the other hand, he had no reason at all to think that the trucks had peeled off on a surface as well prepared. Maybe they knew this route by day, and maybe they had dared an illicit shortcut. His road would be bound to hook up with another, and that with another, until he eventually found his way back. Every road must lead somewhere.

His fidelity was rewarded soon. Down at the bottom of what had become a very high hill--a minor mountain, as it seemed in the dark--waited a cozy rest stop. The locale's reason for being was at once advertised by the ample blacktop which limned a low but broad, flat-roofed structure. Vehicles of all descriptions--sedans, vans, SUV's, a camper, a couple of tractor-trailers--were spread along the frontal concrete walkway in no discernible order, the whole scene adequately lit beneath posts recalling in scaled-down design those that lined the Interstate. From within, a dim glow also kept watch behind the almost entirely glassed facade. Without signage indicating any commercial objective, such an unassuming place could hardly attract such patronage at such an hour and in so unpromising a spot if its comforts were not free to the passing public.

And yet, if the spot was unpromising for the sale of liquor or porn or videos, hidden at the bottom of a great dark hill, it was scarcely less so for administering a public service. Once the detour was removed, surely no one on the highway would be tempted to drive so far just for a leg stretch, a restroom, and a cup of free coffee--and to suppose that a new bend in the Interstate would utterly avoid the hill already conquered was absurd. The place remained a slow-burning mystery, no doubt a humble monument--one among many--to incompetent planning.

Blanc decided that he could well avail himself of a restroom. The deceleration of his car had oddly put him in mind of the need. The dirt track obligingly broadened before the already paved entrance to the parking lot, and he didn't resist the invitation. It would be good to stretch (good to reassure himself that he was neither dead nor dreaming).

He parked in the space closest to the glassed double-doors, slightly puzzled that other spaces seemed to be preferred. In fact, padding over what felt to his soles and smelled to his flexing nostrils like brand-new stretched-and-glued carpet, he thought it quite curious that no one had penetrated this central space. The counter whose attendants would have served beverages and offered directions during the day, most likely, was closed behind a vertically sliding curtain, plastic or metallic despite a wooden hue, that ran on tracks; but three snack machines hummed and glowed nearby in fully operational mode. He eyed them approvingly, perhaps willing to make better acquaintance in a moment, as he made for the recessed door labeled "men". The door, surprisingly--annoyingly--wouldn't move. He had taken its yielding for granted, and now faced it with a new shove, as if heightened attention might do the trick. It did not. The little building's most essential feature was locked.

In a vexed but not yet morose mood, Blanc padded back out onto the concrete walkway, still somewhat compensated for his pains by the pleasure of feeling his legs move. He had resolved, besides, that his need would be fulfilled, one way or another. In the dead of night, almost a good half-mile off the highway in some hollow not yet discovered by suburbia, there was no reason to stand on ceremony. Yet the number of vehicles scattered through the lot unsteadied him--and even drove his curiosity to a higher level of need than his bodily one. He was magnetically attracted to a short queue of men (or not so short, as he approached--perhaps as many as ten) waiting outside a squat, unmarked door near the low building's corner. It could only have been an alternative restroom, not locked for the night (but not lit, either, by anything more than the buzzing pallor that dusted the parking lot). He thought about taking his place at the end, then about asking the latest-arrived patrons if he had indeed divined the little door's secret correctly. Yet he did neither. Edging past the group's last member, who had been forced well into the sidewalk, he continued around the corner as if to some known destination. Something about the group, the setting, the wait's length--the whole situation's plain absurdity--had unsettled him in the final instant (the instant before he stopped; for to have stopped and then to walk away after two or three minutes would imply an entirely new sequence of socially humiliating messages).

Of course, around the corner stretched the women's queue, which at a glance seemed to be moving no faster. He lowered his eyes, even in the deeper darkness (for the parking lot and its file of lamps did not persist down the building's side), lest he show an improper interest. He couldn't have guessed at this line's number, as a result. But now he was hurrying with a greater swagger of knowing advance than ever. The sidewalk had yielded to grass, and the purpose of his expedition would have grown obscenely clear to the queued eyes behind him if he had slowed to probe an especially thick shadow. Instead, he chose the gait of a maintenance man (one of his first jobs, to put himself through college) and very nearly whistled a tune.

The "I'm checking meters" amble had carried him, in its insouciance, much farther than he had meant to go. Any eyes fixed on his shoulders must have been repelled by cover of darkness long ago--and the terrain had started to execute yet another plunge, to boot, its love of working downward apparently not exhausted. Incredibly, he could feel the presence (through an impenetrable shadow in his peripheral vision) of the way-stop's structure at every step. A gymnasium could scarcely have claimed more real estate. He looked suddenly in the opposite direction as if he had been slapped, the thought of the Interstate--of his endless journey--having intruded itself. As high and hazy as a low Milky Way, the band of perfectly spaced highway lamps arched toward an invisible horizon.

He might have stopped here to finish his business, but curiosity had again gotten the better of him. When the next corner of the structure beside him arrived in a rebirth of filmy streetlight, it offered a sharp brick angle. He would have sworn that the facade above, where not glassed, was of sheet metal or vinyl siding. Then he noticed the actual street--the black pavement--marking the property's end in a dull shimmer beneath the lamp post, distinguished a stop sign's octagon and a street sign's warped crucifix... pale concrete curbs, hedges that glistened here and there like holly... and a couple of residences on either side of the intersection. He was moved. Strange to say, he was almost moved to something like a tear. These were not the upscale brick-veneer story-and-a-half castle knock-offs with deck and hot tub that he had seen (or seen in silhouette, or imagined seeing) from the Interstate. Their style had already appeared old to him when he was a child, though back then it clung to pretensions of being contemporary. A nearly flat roofline, an exposed steel beam about the front stoup, long rectangles of windows set much too high in the wall and hence seeming to wince... there were always plenty of these on the market during his abortive realtor days, and always in neighborhoods poised to take a step down. This neighborhood (he could tell at a glance) had not yet done so; but with urban sprawl already visible on the four horizons (almost audible on tonight's four black horizons), it would provide few days more of safe biking for kids and peaceful barbecues for retirees. He felt as though he were witnessing his mother grope for her children's names at the sanatorium.

It was not hard to flee this corner, which Blanc now did pensively. The rest stop's property once again enveloped him in darkness as he put behind him the homely inlet of modest suburbia (or of small-town Arcadia about to contract a fatal case of suburbanosis). He was aware, as he tried to find images to fit the rustle of grass beneath his shoes, that he could now safely pee.

Or perhaps not. As he planted his feet, stiffened his back, and exhaled, his need was once more silenced by dumb wonder. The structure around him had grown huge. It was a building of five, maybe six stories. He measured the sparse yellow squares of window space for vertical separation while struggling to deal with the vast horizontal gaps between them: both dimensions were overwhelming, as if he had rolled out of a sleeping bag to find himself at the base of a cliff. From the construction lines that showed plainly over a pale backdrop of indoor lighting, he could surmise that two great wings, in fact, loomed over him. He had blundered into the interior of a tall, flat, characterless brick V.

There was no particular evidence of anyone's labors in any of the uniform windows (two, maybe two-and-a-half by four). Why would there be, at an unknown hour past midnight? Amazing, to find any of them illuminated at all. Blanc thought of an old-fashioned newspaper building, fifties vintage, where the night shift scurried about in a certain wing and some senior columnist or editor-at-large pecked away in welcome isolation down an empty corridor. Yet he also thought of a scientific endeavor--an around-the-clock enterprise where results were constantly amassed and pored over. The fire escapes were missing from the fifties fantasy (as he could affirm with pupils newly adjusted to pure night). The windows also lacked thick sashes. They seemed less substantial, more minimalist, than something rooted in yesterday. He could spy out no curtains or blinds.

He had wandered farther without noticing. A Coke machine glowed and hummed nonsensically in a recess along the wall. (Why outside? Was he in a parking lot again? He could no longer hear grass beneath his shoes, yet neither was there any scuff of gravel.) The recess posed the perfect opportunity for a minute's privacy to do his special business... but the notion of befouling the happy precincts of the automated vendor shocked him. Besides, what would anyone think who happened to see him disappear beside the machine, then reemerge without a purchase? He again checked the two dozen or so windows illuminated in the two black cliff faces towering over him. No head, no silhouette in any position... but how reliable was a check of so many squares strewn across such cyclopean immensity? And how to ascertain that he was not being observed from an unlit window?

He opted, instead, to press his forehead against the building's darkest section, flatten himself against the wall, and aim blindly for the base. The sound of the splatter was softer than pavement, and the wall no longer felt like brick against his brow. It had been folly to ascribe the place to the fifties--the influence, perhaps, of those insipid residences marked for execution. But this place... it had to be part of the general overhaul which was sweeping through the area.

His steps less urgent now, Blanc could not resist proceeding still farther into the V. One of the very few ground-floor lights, he discovered, was emitted through the glass panels of a double-door. He was loath to attempt entry. He could hear in his mind the massive slam of an air-tight seal poorly caught by a pneumatic restraint (a slam known well to high schools and motels). Yet the handle was not such as he had imagined it upon inspection, and he was now more curious than ever. Besides, the building would obviously have restrooms; and even though he no longer needed the full services of one, it would be nice--it would be heavenly--to wash his hands and forehead and neck, and to see his face in a mirror.

The door yielded easily (with the ease refused to him by the indoor restroom, long minutes ago) and permitted itself to be re-lodged noiselessly. He had already ascertained through the glass panels that a stairwell awaited him, logically enough. More memories of high school as he trudged up the abbreviated first flight toward the most accessible internal entrance... and of college, even more, thanks to the multiple flights above him, whose extent he couldn't see but whose spiral shaft oddly magnified his soft footfalls. College, where he had wasted far too much time... but why the queues of students registering at midnight, if this were a college? Insomnia U? (Had the queues truly been separated by gender? Had their occupants held paperwork or satchels?)

The inevitable corridor leading to other doorways lay beyond the double-doors at the top of the initial steps--but Blanc, having already taken it for granted, was again forced to revise anticipated images. The corridor itself was being used for a kind of triage. People were drifting idly, curiously, not unsociably, in small groups to his left and right. Eventually they would melt into one or another of a great many doorways (mostly hidden to him by the sharp angle of his position, for the corridor's great length did indeed belong to the lore of high school). There were foldout tables and foldout chairs placed with fair regularity along the whitewashed walls. ("Samsonite"--was that the brand name one always found on the bottom of such things?) In fact, he had almost bruised his thigh on a table rather thoughtlessly arranged just in front of his entrance (on the assumption that no one would enter that way, perhaps?), and a woman seated behind it was volunteering to help him. Various stacks of papers--forms to fill out and pens to do the filling--were strewn before her, as they appeared to be before similar volunteers at other stations.

"I'm in the wrong place," he insisted, now without a smile. "I don't have that kind of money."

"If you haven't filled out a form yet, you will need to do one of these two. The hundred-dollar session takes about twice as long."

Now he was seriously interested, although the smile returned sheepishly as he asked for the hundred-dollar sign-up. The money would very nearly cover his gas on a trip that had no great prospects of success. And though some error had obviously occurred--some immense, probably ridiculous error--he was quite well versed enough in the basic disciplines to fake his way through whatever little survey or stimulus-response experiment was being performed on an apparently general public. The form elicited no testimony to any special credentials. Oddly enough, he would have had less trouble with such a section than he did with the address line. Where could he have his check sent? For now, he would have to use his sister's home.

He had almost decided that the woman might be pretty, that she might be young, if it weren't for her glasses. But it was the utter absence of humor, rather, for which the glasses only offered a kind of symbol, that discomfited him; and no trace of irony stirred when she called him back, pointed to his last name on the form, and announced:

The room two doors down was striking, not in its design (of which it had none: the bluntest of auditoria--a sloping plane with rows of foldout seats, bare walls, a slight stage and a rostrum up front): what struck him, rather, was the mob of people inside. More registrants continued to file in behind him. If each had been offered the same hundred dollars... then this one session would cost thousands.

As he waited, the couple which had nestled next to him (no hope of remaining a loner in this press) appeared to share with themselves some of his own observations. It was reassuring, at least, to see that they were no more clued in than he. In fact, with winning smiles and small talk, they began to engage him in a fashion that was obviously probing for enlightenment. He finally informed them that he was probably less in the know than they, since he had only walked in by chance. (He saw no reason to recount his intrepid quest of a restroom.)

"We thought it was a rest stop," shrugged the male, more graciously than he could have known. "One thing led to another, and... well, a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks. And there are two of us."

"They said something about a thousand-dollar session," confided the female with a blush, "but you would have had to sleep here, and then... well, not for us!"

"All the same, a man could make a living coming back and forth to this place," mulled the male. Blanc had just strung together the same words in his mind.

He liked them. If he had been able to stomach the cutthroat cynicism of the realty game, he would have liked to sell them a house. Their first house. He would have made it a good one--a good buy for them, a blessing on the future of whatever sort of union they enjoyed. (He didn't observe any gold rings on their fingers.) At first glance, they were a jarring pair: he dark and dour, looking like a lost conquistador with his short, pointed beard and black, brooding eyes; she fair as a flower in her long, straight auburn hair, her arched brows, her full cheeks that played to smiles. He might have fallen in love with her when he was younger. Now he had to content himself with the private observation that she had fallen in love with someone of his serious type--of the type that he had concluded such girls never fell for. Was it good to know the error of that conclusion? Was it better to think oneself damned and excommunicate from happiness, or to discover in oneself simply a bad manager of opportunities?

"This is taking too long," mumbled the young Cortez. "They need to start... whatever it is they're going to start."

"Maybe that's why they're paying us a hundred dollars!" smiled the Auburn Rose. "To make your money, you have to wait."

That thought settled them down, all three (or those thoughts--for Blanc was particularly intrigued by the girl's insight, though he said nothing). Yet others around them grew visibly, audibly more restless with every passing minute. The room appeared to have filled to capacity... and still the stage remained unoccupied. At least an hour must have passed since the couple had sat beside him--and at least another half-hour added to that for the time Blanc had sat alone.

A strange wave-like motion began to work the crowd. Dozens of diffuse conversations would build in volume from every direction until people were almost shouting; then the more civil would give up speech and only roll their eyes, while the boisterous roared until themselves aware that they had trampled down certain polite cordons and partitions. Then all would view every other around them in a kind of shock, some actually turning in their seats. A brief, highly volatile period of silence would elapse before someone said--more loudly than his neighbor's distance required, yet not quite addressing the assembly--"This is ridiculous!" The tune would be picked up in every corner of the room within seconds, and then another wave would start to build.

If the waves were regular in evolutionary pattern, however, an exponential shift was also notable in each. Blanc remarked that the silent troughs grew ever briefer, and that each new crescendo took less time to build. At some uncertain instant, from some undisclosed quarter, the chant, "GET... IT... ON! GET... IT... ON!" rose from the multitude. No cheering section of sports fanatics ever took up a battlecry more quickly. There was a whiff, an acrid savor, of danger in the dynamic. Voices and faces appeared to find a certain joy in venting what was now hours of frustration: raising a ruckus such as many had not done since childhood, probably, they delighted to discover in themselves a ghost of the Friday night football game with Crosstown High. Yet the frustration was also very real. The anxiety about possibly losing the hundred dollars for an early exit had become palpable now that so much time had been invested: it could all go for naught.

The tension was at last unsustainable--and also beyond taming to another trough. Two, four people rose in near-unison on the room's far side and made for the exit. Before they had fully cleared their row, scores more were on their feet. The first person actually to reach the exit may have been the thirtieth--or the hundred-and-twelfth--to stand up. The exodus proceeded as if a cork had been pulled from an inverted bottle... and it required long minutes, once begun. The single doorway was ill suited to handle a sudden egress of perhaps four or five hundred. Those many caught in the middle subsided into a passive posture that reminded Blanc of the figures waiting along the sidewalk outside the supposed restroom. They stretched themselves, smiled awkwardly, sputtered angrily, hung their heads sleepily. They had bought the ticket to rebellion, and now they had to wait in line to have it punched.

As for himself, Blanc had never budged. The sense that he was observing something phenomenal had been growing upon him ever since the girl's remark about their being paid to wait. He was dimly aware that his own stasis had exerted some unintended gravity upon the couple next to him--for they, too, remained. The young man, he guessed, did not want to be cheated out of his money, and would fight the good fight for it as long as one comrade held fast beside him... and the girl was standing by her man, glued sympathetically to her seat. Sure enough, the man at last asked him, as the crowd's ebb finally began to make their isolation distinct:

A few patient faces in the crowd were turned toward them in an apparent wiling away of time. A zephyr of gossip passed over the many-headed long surface slowly, until one of the laggards, all smiles now, leaned back to encourage the girl.

"He says we'll get our money. He says... he says they're telling them up front that our checks will be in the mail."

"Damn right!" snorted her mate. "There would have been a riot if they'd said anything less."

"Yes, there would have," nodded Blanc. And he realized that even this young dynamo had grasped at some remote level how the crowd had been brought exactly, precisely to its boiling point, then the heat quickly removed.

Blanc leaned forward in his seat, but only to cross his arms. The trouble that had been growing in him was about to reach its own point of chemical transition--of sublimation.

They were standing over him now, both of them. He rocked forward farther into a half-turn, and noticed that the auditorium was otherwise completely empty. He felt grateful to the girl for not wanting to cut him adrift in this great space. There was a kind of sociable genius in her.

The girl laughed, and her laugh drew a smile from her partner. Her lover. (He would do well to love her--he would be nothing without her.) Blanc took the one high step to the unimposing stage and looked down on the two benignly. But it was not for them that he was speaking.

"I have just a few words to say," he muttered, struggling to ratchet up his voice's volume. His eyes also fought to work their way up above his two friends. "A few words on this... this strange occasion."

They laughed, the two of them below. But they laughed less and less as he found his way better--as it became clearer that he spoke not for them.

"We came for a speech. We came expecting a speech... or a lecture, or something. But there never was a lecture in store, was there? We were the show, and we never even knew it. Most of them don't know it, even now."

He couldn't see the couple any longer as he scanned and scanned the bland, bare walls and ceiling for some kind of camera--some set of recording devices that he knew would be state-of-the-art, and hence invisible. Yet he could divine that even the girl was no longer smiling.

"You probably found what you expected to find. Maybe you refined it a little. Hypothesis, experiment. Confirmation. Maybe the data... maybe the time took longer than you thought it would. Or shorter. But you should know one thing. I... it's invalid data. You can throw me out--throw out my input, ignore my coordinates--for saying that. And you will, won't you? You're listening, but not paying attention. A statistical aberration. But what you don't see is that I'm not really an aberration--my words are not really off the chart. All people are really like me. It just shows up in some more than others. But we all... we're not really peas bouncing our way down a pinball machine, you know. We all end up on the bottom, maybe after a little shaking. But... but... but we know the bottom's coming. And it's no surprise to us, and we don't want to be there, and... and the reason we end up there anyway isn't destiny, or.. biology. It isn't because we're stupid, or because we're big blobs of reactive molecules. It's because we always end up with just a couple of choices. Or maybe three. And we don't have time enough to create more. We just don't have time. But none of them is what we want. That's what you're missing, completely missing. The room's empty. Hey! Big deal! What kind of measurable effect is that? Don't you see? What else could we do but come or go? But you have no idea what we really wanted to do. You haven't proved anything. All this... all this space, this lay-out... all that money... but you haven't proved anything."

He sighed, giving up and re-negotiating the distance from stage to floor. The girl broke into a round of applause and voiced a cheer, infecting her partner with the same enthusiasm. He devoutly hoped that they would stay together.

They shook hands, the three of them, fervently in front of the woman at the foldout table (who was collating paperwork in cryptic concert with a laptop computer's display). Then he sent them on their way back up the hall, and took his own forbidden (or forgotten) exit into the pitchy base of the V. He had not even bothered to look for a restroom inside. Instead, he stopped at about the same point as before and gave the great wall of unknown composition a farewell sprinkle.

The sky was growing silver as he re-entered the Interstate. He felt weariness begin to descend upon him like a hammer as the night lifted. Where to stop and sleep? Why did motels assume that people slept in the dark, when he could only ever sleep if the sun was safely up?

A frequent contributor to this journal for years, Dr. Moseby lives with his family in the Atlanta area, where he occasionally teaches at several institutions.

Fukuyama, Twenty-One Years After: Some Still Unanswered Philosophical Questions

Initial drafts of this response to Fukuyama’s article go back to November 1989. Referenced below are Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?" in The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989), 3-18; and Alan Bloom et al., "Responses to Fukuyama" in The National Interest, 16 (Summer 1989), 19-35.

Fukuyama’s article has caught the attention of many persons who study political philosophy, and who are deeply interested in questions of what might somewhat overoptimistically be called "the future of the West".

Fukuyama’s article has been perceived as a daring éclat on "the end of history", but certain aspects of these matters, it could be argued, have been fairly poorly represented in the debate. There is the lack of a perspective rooted in the writings of thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, George Parkin Grant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacques Ellul. Fukuyama has not entered into much of a dialogue with these thinkers in his thesis.

Generally speaking, the thesis on "the end of history" has been received in two main ways: most persons, while embracing the foreseen triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism, have expressed greater or lesser reservations about its completeness and permanence; while others have argued that socialism, for example, is still a worthwhile, viable alternative.

Professor Bloom received the thesis very warmly and celebrated the future triumph of liberal democracy (albeit tempered with a curious reference to the "fascist" threat). Considering how vociferously opposed Professor Bloom appeared to be to many aspects of contemporary American life in his coruscating Closing of the American Mind, his embracing of full-blown liberal democracy seems somewhat odd.

It could be argued that there was, in Fukuyama’s original article, a good deal of ambiguity about the total triumph of the liberal democratic model, an ambiguity that few of his critics seem to have picked up on or properly understood.

Indeed, there is a vast intellectual tradition of "the critique of modernity", aspects of which might have also found their way into Fukuyama’s article. Rather than seeing history as an upward progression, Heidegger basically saw it as a regression--from a primitive, primeval state of bliss to the modern, soulless, anomic world, with technology playing the role of "the serpent in the Garden". In the late nineteenth century, Nietzsche wrestled with the problem of "the death of God"--a God which man had killed--and searched for a way out of the sterility and mechanism of the modern world. Already at the birth of the Enlightenment, Rousseau--"the first Romantic"--argued for primeval virtue over civilized reason and criticized all forms of "progress" in his famous Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.

In more recent times, Ellul has formulated a critique of the rise of modern technology (which might largely be equated with the rise of capitalism and liberal democracy) as resulting in a totalistic, inhuman, technological framework from which all other viewpoints and perspectives are excluded. George Parkin Grant lamented the triumph of the universal "empire of technology", which, as he put it, "speaks with an American accent". Echoing the point Fukuyama made about Iran and other "developing" countries, Grant states that “ modern civilization makes all local cultures anachronistic. Where modern science has achieved its mastery, there is no place for local cultures."

On a more popular level, the dystopic possibilities of modernity are well expressed in Aldous Huxley's famous novel, Brave New World. Though some critics focus in on the biologically engineered caste system as a symptom of "corporate conservatism", the essential point of Huxley is likely much different. If, as Plato and Aristotle thought, each regime produces a certain predominant type of human being, then the predominant type of the Brave New World society is perhaps closest to (though not necessarily identical with) the modern, North American, liberal massman.

One might argue that "the end of history" really signifies "the end of meaning in history", as suggested in this key passage of Brave New World:

"`You all remember,' said the Controller, in his strong deep voice, `you all remember, I suppose that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford's: History is bunk. History,' he repeated slowly, `is bunk.'

He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible feather whisk, he had brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Harappa, was Ur of the Chaldees; some spiderwebs, and they were Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae. Whisk, whisk and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk and those specks of antique dirt called Athens and Rome, Jerusalem, and the Middle Kingdom all were gone. Whisk, the place where Italy had been was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of Pascal. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk..."

The point to be driven home is that anything resembling a pre-modern perspective, a meaningful memory of the past, and the slightest residue of a more authentic trans-rational stratum, is today being eliminated from North America and its global extensions. Therefore all history becomes "meaningless", and history therefore "ends".

One might also point out that the Brave New World is a remarkably "pure" and "orderly" example of a "liberal" society. John the Savage's inchoate argument against Brave New World is that it is "ignoble", destructive of man's real humanity, and he is forced to accept that "suffering, disease, death, and infirmity" is the price of being human. However, our current liberal democratic society does not seem to have this tranquil stability (however artificially arrived at) as its chief characteristic. Rather, it is riven with conflict and acrimony, and seems perpetually on the edge of disintegration. A "bill of rights" mentality, far from unifying society, has--according to its critics--transformed it into a litigious, selfish, and crime-prone collection of atomized individuals. Modern society is perceived as devolving into the "fevered city of sows", to use the Platonic term, or an all-too-literal "war of each against all".

The Brave New World society is one which has eliminated, through "socio-technical" means, those problems of our society which are obvious to most observers: racial conflicts, a constipated legal system, burgeoning crime rates, ineffectual and corrupt politics, drug abuse, stubborn pockets of poverty, and pollution. Everyone is "happy", at least at the superficial level--while even that can hardly be said of present-day civilization. (For example, surveys consistently indicate the unhappiness of most Americans with their jobs.) The actual end-product of our current development, if unchecked, might be closer to the "gritty future" of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, or Ridley Scott's Blade Runner scenarios, resulting in the so-called "air-conditioned nightmare" of near-complete social and environmental collapse, rather than the sanitized Brave New World environment. The deeper point to be made is that, unlike Brave New World, our society today seems rife with genuine unhappiness, unresolved contradictions, and alienation--possible catalysts for unexpected change.

The question might also be asked if "the end of history" means "the end of ideology"--or the total triumph of one ideology, liberalism, at the expense of all others. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is often cited as the primary "future nightmare", in contradistinction to Brave New World. The triumph of liberalism appears to put a world such as that depicted by Orwell safely out of the picture. This is certainly true in that coercion and violence and artificial scarcity (typically, Nazism or Stalinism) are no longer used to enforce ideological conformity. But if we look more deeply at Orwell's dystopia, we might see in it some traits in common with modern North America. We see that, in North America, a sort of ideological conformity--an ideological conformity to liberalism--is "enforced" through control of virtually all politically meaningful language and imagery (what Orwell called the B vocabulary), via the mass-media and mass-education systems. This level of normative and semantic control is, it could be argued, by far the most crucial: "Newspeak is Ingsoc, and Ingsoc is Newspeak." Professor Bloom's Closing of the American Mind could be seen as a brave act of resistance to such "thought control", and his response to Fukuyama’s article appears quite baffling.

One of the most troubling points of Fukuyama’s article was the overly simple, tripartite division into "fascist", "liberal", and "socialist" paradigms. This appears to have swallowed the possibility of legitimate rightist opposition to the excesses of liberalism, capitalism, and liberal democracy, by the characterizing of all such positions as "fascist". Yet it is only in current-day society’s approach to the Ground Zero of world history that the vast spaces of what is conventionally called "the Right" can be shrunken down so brutally. After all, there are persons "on the right" who cannot even agree on first premises: for example, Thomists and Nietzscheans, Classicists and Romantics, "natural rights" theorists and historicists. To confuse things further, libertarians and defenders of pure liberal democracy are also often classified as being "on the right"--and sometimes (as in the case of the libertarians) on the extreme right.

One may reasonably concur with Fukuyama’s identification of Japan as a possible exception to the universality of the liberal democratic model. Japan seems to have been able to effectively "synthesize" Eastern values with Western technology, an interesting development in itself. The future of Japan will probably be a good indicator of whether such a "synthesis" is at all possible, or whether the Japanese are only now passing through the "nineteenth-century", work-ethic-centered, expansive phase of their history, and will eventually end up where the West is today.

There is appended at the end of this response to Fukuyama a brief, famous passage from Hegel's Phenomenology. This passage seems to contradict the Hegel-as-interpreted-by-Fukuyama. Indeed, it sounds like a powerful critique of the whole modern enterprise--the very opposite of a sanguine, progressive view of history as the triumph of reason and freedom which some ascribe to Hegel.

One should ask Fukuyama a fundamental question: Is not the wish for the total triumph of enlightenment and of the extinguishing of darkness (i.e., of the irrational and the trans-rational in human nature) as completely unnatural as its opposite, the wish for total darkness?

It would appear that serious consideration of “the critique of modernity” and its various highly philosophical exponents was largely absent from the bold elaboration of the “end of history” thesis by Fukuyama.

Time was when man had a heaven, decked and fitted out with endless wealth of thought and pictures. The significance of all that is lay in the thread of light by which it was attached to heaven; instead of dwelling in the present as it is here and now, the eye glanced away over the present to the Divine, away, so to say, to a present that lies beyond. The mind's gaze had to be directed under compulsion to what is earthly, and kept fixed there; and it has needed a long time to introduce that clearness, which only celestial realities had, into the crassness and confusion shrouding the sense of things earthly, and to make attention to the immediate present as such, which was called Experience, of interest and of value. Now we have apparently the opposite of all this; man's mind and interest are so deeply rooted in the earthly that we require a like power to have them raised above that level. His spirit shows such poverty of nature that it seems to long for the mere pitiful feeling of the divine in the abstract, and to get refreshment from that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for the merest mouthful of water. By the little which can thus satisfy the needs of the human spirit we can measure the extent of its loss.

Frederick G. Weiss, ed. Hegel: The Essential Writings. New York: Harper & Row, 1974, v.

Mark Wegierski is a Canadian freelance journalist based in Toronto. His special interests include political philosophy, popular culture, and creative works about the future.

In the vastly lucrative college textbook-writing industry, a tome titled, with naively forthright relativism, Everything's an Argument is a big seller. Repeatedly featured among this volume's florid photographic "learning aids" (the editors' thesis being that even pictures are arguments--even, at one point, prayers) is a shot of John Kerry saluting from center-stage during his 2004 quest of the presidency. That Kerry played the "patriotism" card often (played more such cards, indeed, than may be found in a regular deck... just how do you get all those Purple Hearts in one month without losing a finger?) allows of little doubt. One might contend that all this generous exposure, then, does not excuse Kerry from the book's pervasive cynicism--especially since not only is propaganda lurking in every speck of communication, but out of the merest innuendo may be spun any type of propaganda. Or so the freshman is to understand before "advancing".

Nevertheless, Kerry comes off looking pretty good, as will surprise no one familiar with contemporary education: a true patriot who simply wanted to remind his nation of his dedicated service. The right side of the aisle has to settle for being represented by Dineesh D'Souza, which is really rather punishing; but then, the editors don't exactly have to put words in Mr. D'Souza's mouth to make him appear bombastically complacent, insipidly facetious, and--in a hyphenated word--paradigmatically neo-conservative. Such "advocates" of American values really exist, they exist in abundance on the East Coast, they exist overpoweringly within the national political machine, and they exist to the discredit and rue of the nation's true Right Wing--which, as they complain endlessly, drawling hayseeds keep trying to wrest from their entitled grasp.

One sentence especially caught my eye in the case for saving Arab camel-jockeys from themselves which D'Souza makes avuncularly in ""America the Beautiful: What We're Fighting For". Remarks the author, "Incredible though it may seem to many in the West, Islamic societies today are in some respects not very different from how they were a thousand years ago." This observation is offered as self-evident proof that the technologically dynamic United States has moral authority and the love of God on her side (for D'Souza is willing enough to mimic a Bible-thumping hayseed when his rhetorical cause needs cannon-fodder). Yet one might very reasonably question why social stasis should be considered a sign of moral decay--and, to be fair, D'Souza partially does this through the trope of imagining Grand Inquisitor Torquemada explaining to a victim, "I am trying to save your soul from damnation." This hardly seems a bonafide representation of the other side rather than a caricature, however. May one not ask in utter seriousness why a static culture should not be accounted a successful one? If a remote culture of shepherds and small farmers lives much the way it did a millennium ago, might this not indicate that its people are satisfactorily fed and satisfactorily governed? Might the absence of provision among them for open-heart surgery not be viewed as offset by the absence of stresses, indoor lifestyles, and unwholesome diets that lead to heart disease? Is it so manifestly apparent to Mr. D'Souza and the New Right that women are better off penning essays about Jane Austen's closet lesbianism than raising healthy children (a position somewhat westward of the Old Left)? Is it such a small thing to be able to see the Andromeda Galaxy on any clear night with the naked eye--or is it so much a better thing to be able to watch Jackass via high-speed internet? All of these posers appear to be "no brainers" for neo-conservatives... but to those of us who actually believe in and prize the life of the spirit, to deny the presence of a real quandary is to exhibit no brains.

Now, to say that a republic of shepherds and farmers may be unlikely to survive in a world of oil tankers and underground cable is quite another proposition. Anyone but a complete dolt can tell that vulnerability in this case indicts not moral inferiority, but the perils of virtue. Thanks to oil spills and factory run-off, the goats may produce no milk and the trees no dates and olives. The shepherds may be stricken with a plague of cancerous sores. Sonic booms far overhead may disrupt even the last hours of the dying. Neighboring despots may move in to extract more black gold from under the dunes. Foreign missionaries with the best of intentions may import new diseases without curing the new plague, and their inevitable laptops and cell phones may well mesmerize children more than the Milky Way on a clear night, rendering ancestral habits contemptible in their unacclimated young eyes. For that matter, the Milky Way may no longer be very visible, even on the clearest night: the smog carrying inland from the new port may chase it farther into infinity.

To call the victims of such "progress" backward and self-evidently inferior, I repeat, is to show oneself a moral imbecile. Our technology, rather, faces a critical challenge to render itself less invasive as it frees man from truly onerous chores (such as fighting starvation--not beguiling away the night hours with Jackass rather than the lute). That the neo-conservative phalanx not only displays no interest in accepting this challenge but indeed derides it with all the glee of giggly schoolboys advertising that their pubescent membra virilia on a camp-out has done much to fuel the Green Movement's fanatically insurgent branch. Most of us adults know that our high-tech culture has gone too far too fast. I myself am forced to court sleep each night in a room whose sound-proofing leaves it looking like something from Beirut of the seventies, thanks to the noisy street a stone's throw from my head. I can understand that the deafening quiet of a starlit night is no negligible gift to the human being in his finer moments. So can you.

Yet the neo-con bad boys and their sexy, sultry bad girls (as seen--with plenty of leg--every day on FOX News) continue to skew the nation's overwhelmingly conservative tastes into the disastrous "do something" folly known best to bored high-school seniors. As much as for any other single reason, George Bush's party lost the 2008 election because of Iraq. People did not, and do not, understand why we must airlift hundreds of tanks halfway around the world to prowl sand dunes (claiming a certain number of those innocuous goatherds as collateral damage) when another 9?11 debacle might far more sensibly be prevented by arming pilots or posting a shotgun-rider before their cabin. The Twin Towers were brought down because our immigration authorities weren't doing their job, because airport security was non-existent, and because our legislating elite won't to this day allow anyone but a hooligan to carry a weapon. We brought those towers down. To flatter ourselves that chasing would-be thugs through the desert will somehow preempt such incidents in the future is as idiotic as hoping to arrest the loss of teenagers dying drunk behind the wheel by making all liquor shops shut down at five. Where are the parents when such things happen? Who's watching the front door of the home? Does anyone still know what a home is?

Neo-conservatives are pseudo-conservatives. They have nothing to do with us. They know us not. They find home insufferably boring--the whole world is scarcely wide enough to keep them amused--while we are the old folks back home, worrying about the safety of Main Street. We are farmers and artisans and shopkeepers. We used to applaud technology, true enough, because it helped us to grow better apples, make better furniture, and keep better books. In the hands of the progressives, however, it has neutered our fruit with the contamination of pricy, genetically altered stock; undercut the furniture market with flimsy, mass-produced articles from China; and boarded up Main Street under the onslaught of internet clearing-houses. We are told that we need to get re-educated and apply for some of these new jobs--but re-education takes years and is often obsolete as quickly as one acquires it, while professionals in underdeveloped countries, in any case, are snapping up such of those jobs as exist sooner than we can apply for them.

Now, why is it, once again, Mr. Hannity, Ms. Ingraham, Mr. Romney, Mrs. Palin--for all of you embrace neo-conservatism on this issue as much as Messrs. McCain and Giuliani... why is it that our greatest fear is a commandeered aircraft flying into a skyscraper? Most of us fear not being able to feed our families much more; and as far as terrorism, most of us think it infinitely more probable that our children may be cut down by the warring drug cartels which an unprotected border has allowed to spill into our small-town streets. We feel a strange but profound sympathy with that Berber shepherd who can no longer see the stars. We don't want you to eradicate technology and turn back the clock: we want you to direct technology like thoughtful adults and honest stewards, mindful that the only viable future must be rooted in the past. Secure our nation's borders, and build a missile shield covering our air space. Bring our troops home, and monitor the ingress and egress of foreign nationals. Please do not make us citizens of the world. We don't want a shot at the big bucks which international high-rolling makes available to a few, leaving the rest of us to stir their martinis and chauffeur their limos (if we can get the work). We want to see the stars again, we want our soil to bear fertile crops again, and we want Main Street to be alive and safe again.

This is conservatism. It is not paleo- or neo-conservatism, but conservatism. There's only one kind. ~ Pancratistes

This section of the journal is completely new and, obviously, very much a work in progress. I urgently invite submissions from educators of any background who believe themselves to have insight into how we may prepare our children for life without the assistance of our morally, intellectually, and (in many locations) economically bankrupt public institutions.

The truth is, however, that Praesidium has indirectly been serving the cause of home-schooling since its inception. Our objective has always been to reanimate in the general public a love of fine literature and art, and to do so with minimal dependence upon arcane scholarly arguments and minute footnoting. It is The Center's position, besides, that contemporary scholarship at the highest level often fails to understand the essential nature of literature: i.e., that a great work pleases before it does anything else--that it has a kind of harmony or intricate suggestion about it not shared by manifestos, political speeches, constitutions, legal codes, instruction manuals, etc., etc. No one familiar with higher education can deny that the mood in academe has long been that all is propaganda, including every item of the literary canon. Such self-styled scholars, then, are already hostile to the classical notion of universal human values that transcend specific struggles for power: they are pledged from the outset (unless they are intellectual-impersonators or duplicitous bandwagoners) to treat literature as a forked-tongued subspecies of history, which itself is a propagandistic record of political triumph. They are the demoralized, demoralizing kind of people, in short, from whom the home-schooler wishes to save his or her children.

May I point out, by way of illustrating our constant relevance to this issue, that the present edition of Praesidium has a great deal to offer the home-educator? Mark Wegierski's article above refers to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World at length, for instance. This is a work which used to be standard fare in public high schools: no more. I cannot say if it has been "shelved" because the New Guard has found Huxley's ironic critique too telling upon their own methods, or if the novel is simply too subtle for students and teachers alike in many such schools. (I incline to believe the latter: conspiracy theories should be saved for situations where relatively few minds are needed to hatch the plot.) Thomas Bertonneau, likewise, has directed the careful reader to several texts by H. G. Wells which he or she may wish to introduce to a teenaged son or daughter--and which will otherwise probably receive no introduction. Politically indexed irony of the sort that we see in these two highly astute authors of early twentieth-century Britain is indeed art in that it may be taken in several directions, often at the same time. (I believe that both Mr. Wegierski and Dr. Bertonneau actually remark that their authors have been claimed by various political groups at various moments.) The objective of the home-schooler, then, should not be to "indoctrinate" a child by use of such texts--a shady endeavor which is precisely what public schools are up to, let us remember. Rather, the real value in such art lies in its ability to make and keep the thoughtful person uncomfortable with reductive formulas, from whatever quarter they may come--to preserve his or her sense of mystery before life's prospects.

I want to tender my own piece, too, as a possible aid to teaching mythic or folkloric texts to young people. Parents should familiarize themselves with the unique qualities of a text produced largely by oral tradition before they try to teach Homer (or even, perhaps, the Bible). The Irish romance to which my essay refers, and which appeared in the previous issue of Praesidium, is scarcely a classic of seventeenth-century literature... but I can pretty well vouch for its ability to amuse young people, and it delivers more than a few inspiring moral lessons.

Our own creative artists--poets like Col. Lythgoe and fiction-writers like Dr. Moseby--are seldom within easy reach of a young adolescent. Yet I am unaware of ever having published any creative work in the journal which a college-bound seventeen- or eighteen-year-old might not read with profit. Parents occasionally tell me that our fiction is a bit strong for their taste, and of course I have no wish to deride that taste or to "convert" it somehow. I would merely observe, once again, that the fitting of blinders to young eyes is exactly what we can least tolerate in the behavior of some of our public institutions, and that a late-adolescent child in today's society will inevitably run head-on very soon into situations where the prevailing language and attitudes have much of the unsavory about them. In my view, it's better to meet a snake for the first time in your boots than barefoot. ~ JRH