Friday 28 October 2011

Gentle Regrets

A Conflict of Duty and Feeling

WITH three superlative E.M. Forster adaptations already to their credit, the Producer-Director-Screenwriter team of Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala turned their attention, in 1993, to Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, and his Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day (1989). If A Room with a View, Maurice and Howards End had been polished comedies of manners, then their new project would be a drama of protocol, and the nuanced cocktail of egotism and cautious diplomacy politics naturally entails. Recruiting Howards End alumni Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, the film charts Darlington Hall’s hosting of a summit during the inter-war years, and the coinciding arrival of a new housekeeper, Miss Kenton (Thompson). Lord Darlington (James Fox), keen to mend relations with Germany following the reparations demanded of her at Versailles in 1919, will lead the delegation, with Stevens the butler (Hopkins) ensuring that justice is realised in flawlessly opulent surroundings.

Foregrounding the imminent descent of Europe’s political elite, Stevens urges his staff to “let them know they are in England”, his assured rhetoric a curiously infantile advocacy of patriotism that subordinates the democratic process to a superficial theatre of nationhood.


Woven into preparations for the conference, and its bid to stabilise a tense political climate burgeoning in Europe, is the film’s second and similarly complex story – the sometimes tepid professional association of butler and housekeeper, but one that rarely betrays Stevens’ evolving regard for Miss Kenton, and perhaps his love. Indeed, though their early exchanges are slightly acrimonious – centring, variously, on an ill-positioned oriental treasure, and her inexperience compared to that of Stevens’ butler father (Peter Vaughan) – evident nonetheless is a mutual respect, even affection, between the two. At the heart of the narrative, then, is the brilliantly understated test of how far, if at all, Stevens will voice his feelings for Miss Kenton. His is a perpetual conflict of duty and feeling, and whether his perfected austerity will admit desire into a cloistered world of professionalism and restraint.  


Indeed, it is not solely love between them that Stevens’ abject loyalty stifles, but a political meeting of minds. When two maids, Elsa (Emma Lewis) and Irma (Joanna Joseph), look set to be dismissed on the ground of their Semitism, Stevens seems almost unmoved, while Miss Kenton threatens to leave herself, should they be obliged to depart. Whereas she is horrified that race can be any criterion for their exit from the house, Stevens insists “It is out of our hands. His Lordship has looked fully into issues surrounding the nature of Jewry”. Palpable throughout the film is the irony that Stevens’ consummate professionalism itself impairs his moral judgement, even the fascism in which he is unwittingly complicit a footnote to his unquestioning service to Darlington. During the pivotal conference dinner scene, a glittering ensemble of etiquette and sycophantism, American Congressman Lewis (Christopher Reeve) bemoans the “amateurism” of those assembled, noting how their well-intentioned words cannot veil how little they understand world affairs. Stevens’ taut expression, upon hearing Lewis’ polemic, conveys, through its peculiar naïveté, the true extent of his loyalty to Darlington – as if his employer’s rank political inexperience can be stressed above Darlington’s own but archaic retorts about “honour” and “goodness”.  
After interviewing another candidate for service, Lizzy (Lena Headey), Stevens declares “She’s not suitable”, but is assured by Miss Kenton that “She’ll do well”. Pressed by her on the matter, the butler dismissively claims to have “...placed [my] thoughts elsewhere, while you chatter away”, before holding Miss Kenton to be “always right”.


His purported immunity to her criticisms, only to be followed by a proclamation of her faultless intuitions, lends humour to their casual interactions, but pathos to moments when expressions of genuine emotion are impeded by his social unease. “Miss Kenton, you mean a great deal to this house. You’re extremely important to this house, Miss Kenton”, he tells her. “Am I?”, she replies, with surprise and hope. “Yes”, he says, as if frustrated there can be any doubt on the question. How much he has acknowledged her professional gravitas, how little the implicit depth of his feeling. Later, in Mr Stevens’ parlour, Miss Kenton probes him on what he is reading, gradually prizing the volume from his hand. He gazes at her almost tenderly, with a silence through which so much is said. In the film’s devastating account of their staid reciprocity, the parlour scene is perhaps the defining moment – whether Mr Stevens will allow intimacy to temper rationality, if his Kantian demeanour can entertain possibility amid almost ritualistic sensibilities.
Compelling and moving, Remains is a superbly executed drama that meditates evocatively on whether it is integrity or sacrifice which fosters potential, and just how far autonomy can go in ensuring happiness.

Friday 21 October 2011

After Amis: September 11th

"....that was the defining moment"

AT 8.49 on the morning of September 11th, 2001, a newsflash interrupted a commercial break on America’s CNN channel. It conveyed shocking images of smoke billowing from one of the towers of New York’s World Trade Centre. Initial reports were abundant with speculation but scant in detail – had this been an accident? What kind of craft had struck the Tower? How many had lost their lives in this monolithic hub of fiscal activity? At 9.03, the unthinkable answered those questions in a single and appalling motif of organised devastation, with the north tower likewise impacted by a passenger plane, a moment that compelled Martin Amis, in The Guardian, to observe -

"It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty; that was the defining moment." *

mirroring, it must be conceded, the benign voyeurism that, though of something irrefutably wicked, momentarily prevails in the mind of the viewer, our instinctive outrage tacitly supplanted by our innate and tangible attraction to drama.

Barely had the dust of those attacks settled than the jargon of the atrocity, “9/11”, “Al-Qaeda” and “Radicalism”, became firmly embedded in the empirical glossary of the Western consciousness. Everything seemed either directly associated with the event, or a mere footnote to its significance – we were all drafted into the climate of this savage, spontaneous modernity, the inhabitants of the “post-9/11 world”, an act of singular barbarism that had purportedly transferred the “threat” from the hypothetical to the realm of a malevolent normativity, affronts to liberty uniformly met with disbelief but couched deeply in a reluctantly accepted “state of fanatical play”. Each new instance of terror abjectly perverts our morality, to be sure, and yet expressions of revulsion seem accompanied, paradoxically, by a de-sensitization through which, if condemnation is primary, they are individual statements of shock located in a broader resignation to the “culture of the maniacal” rather than the “phenomena of the extreme”.


If, at the visual heart of arguably the most photographed event in human history, lay a litany of tragic images, an appalling confirmation of death on a mass scale, then, at the ideological core of the savagery resided, curiously, a twisted conception of Being. Sometime after the attacks, a four-page transcript was found among the belongings of pilot Mohamed Atta. If the pages were littered with intimations of death, then such “philosophies” were inextricably bound up with a malevolently-attained reward of immortality. The closing passage read –

"When the hour of reality approaches, the zero hour….wholeheartedly welcome death….
end your life while praying, seconds before the target….

Afterwards, we will all meet in the highest heaven…. ." **

Death was purely an interim necessity en route to a cruelly-won salvation. Even the moment of impact, the ultimate experiential horror, is confined within a grim metaphysical prospect – the “zero hour” saw the conspirators, in the final moment of their lives, acting independently of temporal and moral parameters, their thoughts centred not on fate but a belief in the “life to come”. The ‘….hour of reality….’ saw the terrorists ascribe greater actuality to an imminent “existential metaphysics” than to the world from which, through a terrible liaison of brute determinism and abhorrent iconography, they would depart for the ‘….highest heaven….’, an elite First Principle reserved for those who

"….strike like champions who do not want to go back to this world"

For the terrorists that morning, their objective was not the glorification of death, but the elevation borne of that sacrifice.

It is the sublime or the morbid within human nature which dictates whether that union, Being, is realised for the most altruistic or corrosive of anthropocentric ends. 'Being' is the Rosetta Stone of what divides experience and negation. That most seamless species of Being, the insatiable rivalry of horror and goodness, reveals the exhortions or superlatives on that seasoned tablet to be the most grotesque polemic or the most patient, benign etching.


* 'Fear and Loathing', The Guardian, September 18th, 2001
** 'A Nation Challenged: Notes found after the Hijackings' (Editorial, New York Times, September 29th, 2001)


Hours Blue and Eternal: Two late poems of Sylvia Plath

'Lady Lazarus' and 'Edge': A Brief Reflection

WRITING in 'Lady Lazarus' (1962), Sylvia Plath reflects that -

"Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call."

Plath sees all of life as a creative medium, dying no less significant a component of that “existential performance”. Death, like life, must not solely be experienced, but crafted (‘…an art…’). Death is not a moment but a process – mortality is something of Plath’s volition (‘I do it…’) rather than a circumstance beyond her control. She dictates its horrors (‘I do it…feels like hell’), yet even amid that prescribed barbarism, her objective is excellence (‘…exceptionally well’). Here, Plath aligns herself with death, opportunistically penning her own eulogy, in which she openly confronts that fate, rather than pathotically submitting to it. Her talk of ‘artistry’ sees her creatively taming rather than bowing down to death, authoring a poetic testimony in which the prospect of her mortality is intimated through expressive resolve rather than appeals for sympathy.

For Plath, death, ever the muse, never the nemesis, constitutes the thematic energy that will sustain her Being, her poetic legacy. If death is a ‘call’, sacrifice her vocation, then the role of her poetry must be to convey her story through that autobiographical application, not merely confirm her literary vitality. Such a view is at work in 'Edge', written six days before the poet lost her battle with depression –

"The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment…"

Whereas the wholly dispassionate respondent to these opening lines would view Plath as immersed in a hopelessly misguided communion with Dante’s Lion, the dreaded emblem of Pride, the triumphalist Plath retorts with a qualitative treatment of death – the body of the ‘perfected woman’ sees her located in a subliminal meritocracy, the fact of her mortality apparently peripheral to the glee of achievement.


Within the breathtaking power of these stanzas, death is but a companion piece to Plath’s broader ideal of excellence pervading not merely life but mortality itself – whatever torment she may ultimately feel, it is incorrigibly bound up with her insatiable pursuit of creative distinction. Her life – her experiences, output and death – are uniformly devoted to her Being, her posthumous inventive heritage, to a liberating exhibition of suffering (the ‘art of dying’), its anguish offset by the belief that even fate can feed her striving for brilliance. Mortality is a necessary yet cathartic evil on the path to unifying tragedy and genius. For Plath, the struggle of existence was seemingly consoled by the drama of her literary life, the magnetic and curiously enticing horror of death empirically, and, here, poetically, bound up with Being, the magnificent and abiding curtain call in her theatre of suicide.


Following Plath’s final ‘blue hour’, Ted Hughes wrote to a college friend of Sylvia’s, dolefully remarking

"That’s the end of my life. The rest is posthumous"

Scarcely could such an epitaph have been more apt. What he would now struggle with was that for which Plath had yearned, but which she could only realise in death – the fragility of her existence sequeled by the attention, the following, the Being, that would enamour the story of her life with a new and inexorable meaning.

"You are crucified by your own limitations"

observed a youthful Plath in her Journal. Lamenting the abject schism between her capacities and her ambitions, little could she have known that her ‘crucifixion’, the harsh reality of her creative boundaries, would itself be the foundation upon which posterity would build her discipleship.

Thursday 20 October 2011

Divine Murder: A Nietzschian Apology for Atheism?


Divine Murder: A Nietzschian Apology for Atheism?

Paper given at the Ockham Society, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Trinity Term 2011

ABSTRACT: Within the modern European consciousness, few figures have exerted as indelible an influence as Friedrich Nietzsche. Though what is arguably his most notable dictum, ‘God is dead’, voiced in The Gay Science (1882), has yielded a myriad of interpretations, it has, more than anything else, seen him held up as the paradigmatic secularist, the harbinger of a fertile yet altogether crude Enlightenment. My paper, far from sustaining the view that this sobering parable fosters an energetic assault on theological values, fronts a reading of divine murder that locates within its dense prose a palpable Christian ethos, and a lament for rather than vitriolic glorification of the decline of fundamental tenets and of a curiously Western societal fabric. Within its abjectly Orwellian sentiments is to be found a sympathetic, instructive manifesto that vindicates a seminal thinker from the protests that have overshadowed his creativity amid popular stereotype and coarse misrepresentation.

~
Have you not heard of that madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly “I’m looking for God! I’m looking for God!”? (2001: 119)

Upon reading the opening to this passage, arguably the most notable in the Nietzschian canon, two generic elements immediately come to mind, the first we might want to call “journalistic”, and the second “historical”. It resembles a work of journalism in that Nietzsche plainly anticipates a prior awareness on our part of the scenario presented, “Have you not heard?” almost a rhetorical question that cites what should already be a culturally-inherited story, the significance and ramifications of which we intuitively and accordingly acknowledge as key to our evolved social outlook. The “historical” quality, meanwhile, could scarcely be more flagrant, the marketplace setting for the action a direct allusion to Socratic discourse, to the intellectual and conversational prerogative of Plato’s mentor interacting in the agora with the Athenian everyman. Nietzsche continues –

Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing around together just then, he caused great laughter (ibid.)

In spite of the crowd’s ridicule of the Madman, though, it is telling that they can only conceive of God as real, as one who is described as “getting lost” or “losing his way”, as this image of such a Being as a conscious and physical construct is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s later, seemingly literal evocation of a ‘dead God’, his own descriptive method of portraying an actualised instance of divine mortality. Thus, although it is precisely the crowd’s dogmatic materialism that defines their atheism, an ability to think in purely and clinically humanistic terms – namely, of God as a wholly constituent property, or else not to exist at all – it is this mentality itself that, ironically, is likewise Nietzsche’s way of illustrating the full and demonstrable tragedy of divine murder, to speak of God as necessary and manifest.

Here, though, it is the crowd’s flat, unthinking dismissal of the madman’s frenzied, didactic rhetoric that elicits Nietzsche’s frustration, his sympathy with the reflective urgency of the madman rather than with the atheism of the majority all too apparent. To that observational end, though, we should note that it is not the madman’s pathos but his reason that procures Nietzsche’s authorial support. Nietzsche, in rejecting atheism’s godless philosophy as an obstructive ethos amid the madman’s frantic appeal for a Divine Being, cites the oddly sound judgment of the madman and the crude impiety of a non-believing crowd. Indeed, by analogous turns, the contrasting views here of the madman and the people starkly recall Nietzsche’s claim in an earlier work, Human, All Too Human (1878) –

that something is irrational is no argument against its existence, but rather a condition for it (1994: 238)

What the crowd take to be the unreason of any “quest for God” is, for the madman, a moral and existential criterion. In ‘The Madman’, we do not find a Nietzsche defiantly bemoaning the transition from superstition to verification, the primary goal and principle of the Enlightenment – far from it – but we do find a Nietzsche profoundly cynical about the spontaneous, dogmatic advance of an anarchic rationalism that privileges modernity over tradition, portrays past beliefs as baseless idealism, and construes the new for the progressive. Nietzsche continues –

The Madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes.  ‘Where is God?’, he cried; ‘I’ll tell you! We have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers (2001: 119)

Though, throughout the passage, Nietzsche describes what ‘we’ have done, effectively allotting collective responsibility, it is perhaps here that Nietzsche is most openly repentant. A tangibly autobiographical moment in the drama, Nietzsche condemns himself and the populace, a telling stylistic forerunner to his statement in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) that –

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author… (1973: 14)

Nietzsche holds himself to account, accepts a share of the blame, and casts himself among the guilty masses. Moreover, in his memoir Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes that –

I contradict as has never been contradicted before and am nevertheless the opposite of a no-saying spirit (1992: 96)

Divine murder is the ultimate countering of traditional conceptions of an existing God, yet only for the sake of illuminating the tragedy of His loss rather than to diverge from any established doctrinal line.

how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling….Is there still an up and a down? (2001: 120)

Positing questions, amid the death of God, that scrutinise such concepts, empirical or intuitive, as direction or linearity, evokes the burgeoning instability of natural and social geometry, respectively, the ordered makeup of Nature that embodies cosmological structure and sense, and a personalised symmetry that sees human existence united with the capacities of reason, consciousness or belief. Divine murder, as an intractable absolute, accordingly threatens notions of composition and status, those elements that enable and contextualise perception, and validate our sense of Self. The death of God, in creating so potently physical a sensation, renders man’s objects of motivation blurred, what he should aim or strive for unclear, any semblance of endeavour or purpose now effectively weightless. Man is reduced to unconscious subjectivity, to instincts and desires that have no source or qualification, convictions devoid of origin or basis. Nothing is static, everything is compromised. Only the coarse implacability of Aristotle’s dictum

For this alone is lacking even to God,
To make undone things that have once been done (1998: 139)

can adequately convey the Nietzschian muting of divine will.

Aren’t we straying as through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us?
(2001: 120)

It is with Nietzsche’s image of an ‘infinite nothing’ that we see the metaphysical elements of ‘The Madman’ passage come to the fore. Initially, such a realm – or rather, its description – possesses an oddly Christian air, with the closure of bodily life followed by secondary existence in this, the ‘new world’. Instead, though, we see that, rather than representing the Judeo ideal of life sequelling death, such a metaphysical sphere is now impervious to the functioning of the experiential world, an ‘infinite nothing’ the barren alternative to a society rendered meaningful by a present God. ‘Empty space’ is the ‘nothing that is’, a region devoid of makeup, properties or structure.

Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition? – Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him (ibid.)

It is these words, gothic and arresting by turns, that portray most strongly divine murder as both a social metaphor for the collapse of values and as a chilling literalism that advances the death of God from idea to reality. All potential for resurrection is disappointed amid Nietzsche’s image of a decaying God, the grim erosion of a Holy Body that has been corrupted. Not even God, the defining and fundamental emblem, is exempt from violation and disintegration. Whereas to quantify mortality may resemble a surreal and needless exercise, the notion that God ‘remains dead’ conjures the cold irreversibility of the act. Fate is absolute and brutally unequivocal in what is the clearest signal that Nietzsche views divine murder as a physical and perceptible event.

The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? (2001: 120)

What has hitherto defined the sacred has been lost, His removal violent, no individual absolved from complicity in the crime. We all have blood on our hands, and cannot erase the evidence.

A little water clears us of this deed - II:II.68 (1990: 129)

Lady Macbeth assures her husband after Duncan’s murder. Indulging in a moment of gruesome idealism, Lady Macbeth equates the cleansing of the body with that of the conscience, as if her evil can somehow be subservient to fantasies of moral purity. Nietzsche, though, affords the crowd no such luxuries – no temporary appeal to illusion can pardon or undo the ultimate sin, the obligation to atone immediate and appalling. “With what water could we cleanse ourselves?”, Nietzsche asks – no natural or ethical agent will suffice in a bid to reverse the circumstance. God is dead, and with Him the hope of redemptive empiricism.

Authority forgets a dying king - 1.289 (2008: 350)

remarked Tennyson, mirroring not the arrogance of power but the presumptuousness of assumed power, Nietzsche indicting the crowd as Shakespeare does Lady Macbeth and her husband – as those who usurp the true leaders through a warped fallacy masquerading as ordained right. We have appointed ourselves successors to God, a morbid pomposity through which we have sacrificed essence, coherence and reality.

Though comparatively restrained, even unconscious, in their expression, the anti-Marxist sentiments of ‘The Madman’ are palpable. Marx held that the future lies with the masses, and while such recent commentators as American journalist James Surowiecki have convincingly shown that the value of collective judgment – what he calls “the wisdom of crowds” – may very often supplant that of the individual, and resolve political or economic challenges, such empirical antidotes do not satisfy those inherent in Nietzsche’s latent moral discourse, wherein he favours one man’s apprehension of a fundamental truth to which the many are blind.

Instead, Nietzsche portrays the crowd’s mentality as classic mob instinct, their bemused, mocking scepticism in the face of the madman’s protestations endemic in their failure to recognise divine murder for what it is – a horrific melding of the grotesque and the sacrilegious that constitutes the ultimate social atrocity, and which carries infinitely broad ramifications – rather than as an absurd or momentary revelation wholly peripheral to their own concerns.

Thus, we can see clearly that Nietzsche, far from employing the crowd as a vehicle for any “Right Wing agenda”, is identifying instead their own stifling conservatism as what diverts their attention from the madman’s liberalism, what would otherwise alert them to the unrest effected by divine murder.

At this stage of the paper, having considered the possibility that one may be mistaken in assuming Nietzsche’s claim that ‘God is dead’ to denote a particularly staunch brand of atheism on his part, it would be productive to explore the ways in which certain extracts from two pivotal figures, Kant and Hawking – though popularly taken to signify their respective belief in God, have lately been shown to potentially veil quite different facets of their thinking. Such comparisons with Nietzsche will, I think, draw us to ask why Kant and Hawking, in simply citing God, have consequently been identified as believers, whereas Nietzsche, likewise invoking this deity, albeit with regard to his demise, has been suspected and accused of non-belief.

Firstly, Kant. In a series of groundbreaking commentaries in the journal New Humanist, in 2006, A.C. Grayling convincingly argued that, contrary to the theological sympathies discernible in the first Critique (1781), through Kant’s contention that God, as the unity of the intelligible world, is effectively the aggregate of all reality, what Kant calls

the substratum of all possibility - A 581-2 (1929: 494)

Kant was really an atheist, his implied belief reflecting a dutiful conformity to the religious mood of his day, rather than a genuinely held conviction.

That second, and much more recent example of an author’s intimation of the divine being taken to represent their subscription to the existence of a deity, can be found in the latter stages of A Brief History of Time (1988) with Hawking arguing that any unification of the principles that explain and define cosmological origins and the state of Nature would constitute

the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God
(1988: 193)

With many readers taking Hawking to mean that any understanding of what underpins the universes’ spatial and temporal conditions would lead to a full appreciation of divine intention, such an interpretation has lately been disappointed, with, among others, Richard Dawkins holding that Hawking’s climactic reference to a Supreme Being was not so much scientific objectivity as a way of ensuring A Brief History’s marketability. Nor does it seem that Dawkins is manipulatively grinding his own sceptical axe, since, in Hawking’s later anthology of essays, Black Holes and Baby Universes, Hawking notes that he had not referenced God

the sales might have been halved (1993: 33)

Thus, those readers who sought some concession to divine causality amid A Brief History’s overtly and iconographically mechanistic treatment of its themes must have thought these remarks offered them exactly that, only for the basis of their initial optimism to be lately exposed as little more than a key reason for the book’s commercial success. Moreover, Hawking remarked at a conference shortly after A Brief History’s release that he did not believe in “a personal God”, implying at least an unsentimental spiritual viewpoint.

Be that as it may. After all, it could feasibly be argued that our interpretations of a text are as much governed by our hopes or expectations of its content as by that writing itself. Indeed, if this is so, it is especially ironic that Nietzsche should be scorned for his perceived non-belief, when, as we are  perhaps beginning to see, it is he who is least guilty of this charge, particularly in view of Grayling and Dawkins’ potentially embarrassing detection of Kant and Hawking’s emergent pseudo-theology.

If we are perturbed that the death of God, in being described in physical terms, will dissolve both material and metaphorical conceptions of His existence, a state of Being we have hitherto valued as a given, we should be concerned far more by the accounts of Kant and Hawking, who, though they speak about God in noticeably literal terms, additionally set down demanding proviso’s that, when also exposed as potential indicators of their cautiously masked scepticism, hardly bode well for our by now popular impression of their seemingly theistic credentials. Firstly, though Kant notes that the apprehension of a substance – God – when perceived fully, will draw us to all possible realities, he observes that this a “subjectively necessary hypothesis for our reason” – but does this not illuminate the perceptual limits of our rationality by presenting us with an idealised, purely notional, rather than wholly empirical, route to knowledge of God? Secondly, Hawking, though his proposition that the marriage of quantum mechanics and general relativity would lead us to a full comprehension of divine motivation is certainly tantalizing, it imposes an epistemic framework for arriving at that knowledge so rigorous as to defy the immediate capacities of intuition or of scientific enquiry.

Kant and Hawking set down stringent moral and technical criterions for the observation of God or of divine will that must precede any knowledge or view of Him. Thus, their allusions to God, allied so strongly to allegedly necessary deductive processes, cannot be implicitly taken as assertions of His existence – here, to reference is not to concur – and yet Nietzsche’s evocation of divine fate, through such powerful, immediate imagery, goes hand-in-hand with an innate and necessary supposition of the facticity of a formerly present, active agent. Thus, Nietzsche posits God’s Being as an existential imperative rather than a purely inherited-cum-romantic ideal. Moreover, while Kant and Hawking place dense analytical and observational criterions in our direct interpretive path, even Nietzsche’s illustration of a metaphysical sphere functions largely as the tragic synonym for our realm, now so devoid of content, rather than the viable alternative reality so desperately needed to substitute a world of experience starved of meaning and consequence by divine murder.

Indeed, Nietzsche’s metaphysics seems to function ably on two levels – either as an analogy peculiarly Christian in tone, by which creative virtue it is inevitably seen to harbour conspicuously Judeo-theistic sympathies; and even more powerfully independent of that Christian sensibility, as the death of God, rather than to lament a religion-specific deity, now typifies a cultural universal that marks the decline of the concept God, as opposed to a single and explicitly affiliated figurehead.

Tyler Durden’s oratorial diagnosis in Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) of man’s dangerously possessive materialism, ‘Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything’, starkly mirrors the nihilism at the heart of divine murder.

Yet even Tyler’s sobering determinism is the tip of the iceberg compared to the emptiness magnified by the death of God. Tyler critiques the appetite for wealth and the illusory contentment that follows, yet hints nonetheless that total loss engenders complete liberty, while, in the Nietzschian account, man is denied not just the trappings of capitalism or of experience, but his perceptual grasp of reality, freedoms sustained in the cited cinematic example by way of Tyler’s remedially Christian allusions to “resurrection”.

Indeed, we were reflecting earlier on the Christian resonance of “nothingness”, yet noted that, given the cessation of world order in the wake of divine murder, God is relegated from the status to Being to that of Concept. Tragically, then, any ideological affinity between God and Christianity is effectively dissolved, with the resurrection image, the defining signifier of man’s exorcism, now redundant. Far from glorifying atheism as a social aesthetic, as some new-fangled intellectualism of which man should be proud, Nietzsche could not be more troubled by the crowd’s stinging apathy when faced with a world reduced from entity to abstraction, God from agent to ideal. One senses, then, that, as author, Nietzsche has been forced to choose between the lesser of two evils. On the one hand, he knows that if he is to adequately illustrate the all-encompassing destruction embodied by divine murder, then, pragmatically, no value system, religious sensibility or social custom can be exempt from this picture of universal chaos; yet, on the other, if this totality is to be demonstrated, God, far from being spared, must be and is painted as the main casualty. Nietzsche could not be more obliged to write as he does, if he is to make clearly his point, and could not be less willing to do so, as one senses the retrieval of man’s dignity – what Tyler calls “resurrection”, and which embodies the Christian outlook to which “nothingness” seems uncannily sympathetic – is no longer a luxury afforded a humanity engulfed by the torment of divine murder. For Tyler, we have lost everything but can do anything. For Nietzsche, though, man is inseparable from the loss, and can do nothing. In his exasperation at man’s blindness to the meaning and implications of divine murder, Nietzsche could be no less atheistic – it is the crowd who “merit” this label, described by Nietzsche as “…those who did not believe in God…” – they revel and laugh. Friedrich Nietzsche, meanwhile, is the chief mourner, clad in scholarly black.

Thus, if we can see that atheism, what we may pre-suppose to lie at the attitudinal core of any proclamation of divine murder, or, more broadly, the immateriality of a deity, could not less accurately define Nietzsche’s agenda in making such a declaration, we can in turn recognise two further ideas – on the one hand, that even the least religious elements of ‘The Madman’ passage effectively reject non-belief, and, on the other, that if God is identified as a crucial and infinitely valuable emblem of belief that, for His expression, is dependent on linguistic, perceptual and intellectual tools, then these structures, too, are bereft of significance amid divine murder. God is the referential and futuristic lifeblood of existence – without God, society, structure, currency and potential evaporate.

I would like at this point to move towards the second and more important function of this paper, namely, to reflect on the passage’s religious qualities, sometimes neglected amid so deterministic an announcement as ‘God is dead’, and, in so doing, ask how balanced any popular impressions of its so-called “atheism” really are.

To begin with, we should remind ourselves of the series of questions that abound in the wake of divine murder, and their disorientating impact on our immediate environment and grasp of reality – “What were we doing when we unchained the earth from the sun?”, asks Nietzsche, “Don’t lanterns have to be lit in the morning?”. While, as we have seen, Nietzsche does not align himself with the God of a specific religion in this passage, references to light and to the need for that clarity strike us as distinctly Christian motifs, with, in the Biblical framework, God as the bringer of light, and, in the Nietzschian setting, God’s decline personified in the fading of light and the enveloping onset of darkness. Jill Marsden, in After Nietzsche, notes that, with divine murder, there is

no horizon of overarching truth, no sun to navigate by (2002: 5)

her cultivation of the Christian analogy extremely apt, with intimations of “overarching truth” reflecting a God who traditionally constitutes a singular pragmatism, a present yet transcendent absolute.

What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves? (2001: 120)

asks Nietzsche. As we have seen, divine murder negates not just a defining figurehead, but social structure and system. Not only must we now adapt to an existence starved of those spiritual and intellectual reference points hitherto embodied in God, but also rejuvenate traditions and customs that see religious duty and social hedonism merge. The aftermath of divine murder permits only what is secondary and reflective, rather than primary and creative. ‘Holy games’ is the moral epithet for ritualistic acknowledgements of our eternal shame, for what have become customary and obligatory acts of atonement. Whereas we associate “games” with enjoyment or pleasure, the sole satisfaction derived from the death of God will be the knowledge that we repent for the ultimate sin. Man may smile, and smile, yet is a villain. We must actively initiate a revisionist ethics, whereby the basis of morality and progress can be defined anew, and those values be permitted to function viably once more. Remorse is no longer a mere sensibility or emotion – it has become a state of Being.

Nietzsche continues –

Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? (ibid.)

The author prescribes a morbid yet oddly defensible theological criterion for the death of God –that humanity must itself be divine to warrant the act. The imposed need to assume divine status to validate our crime is effectively to appoint a savage elite “qualified” to carry out the killing.

Nietzsche’s claim, though, that we must take on a ‘divine’ identity to justify our sin is not belated forgiveness on his part, but an extended critique of the arrogant imperialism through which the crowd believe themselves to be the sole existing species.

On their atheism is founded a dogmatic singularity that renders existence a meritocratic requirement for inclusion in the human value system. Yet in Nietzsche’s stipulation that we must become gods’ to validate our removal of such an agent, we see only the banal, laughable inadequacy of man’s proud, demanding and overbearing scepticism. After all, to ‘become a god’ implies, literally, a state of Becoming, the germination of Divine Being from concept to pragmatism. Nietzsche writes of God almost in the spirit of Cartesian First Principles – begin our enquiry by identifying what we cannot refute – for Nietzsche’s purposes in this passage, the necessary fact of God’s existence, and develop an epistemic framework based not on theories of knowledge but on demonstrable truth. Nietzsche, throughout ‘The Madman’ passage, speaks of God in real terms, so it is wholly appropriate that Nietzsche should describe God as an evolving property.

all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity
- I:II.72-3 (2006: 171)

muses Gertrude to Hamlet, the Queen’s reflections on ‘nature’ and ‘eternity’ resonantly synonymous in notional and Christian terms with Nietzsche’s allusions to God as the bearer of existential meaning and to the metaphysical infinity that sequels divine murder.

Returning to ‘The Madman’ passage –

There was never a greater deed – and whoever is born after us will on account of this deed belong to a higher history than all history up to now! (2001: 120)

Divine murder is civilization’s defining circumstance, its transcendent and abiding moment. What lies ahead is not the future but history, the temporal subtraction of meaning and optimism rather than the advancement of progress. All that is promised are the symptoms of the past – we have not dispensed with the archaic, but are instead faced with its onset.

Finally he threw his lantern on the ground so that it broke into pieces and went out. ‘I come too early’, he then said, ‘my time is not yet. This tremendous is still on its way, wandering….deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen and heard (ibid.)

We find the madman in an exasperated state of indecision, torn between warning the crowd further or letting the imminent event reveal its own and appalling story. Ultimately, the madman feels his words premature, and discontinues his breathless monologue, the dimming of the lantern extinguishing, in a tangibly Christian vein, the light of life.

That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts (1998: 149)

remarked Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols, the madman disconcerted that his candid, urgent words seem to fall on deaf ears. Yet if the madman believes that imparting to the crowd his candid, urgent words seem to fall on deaf ears. Yet if the madman believes that imparting to the crowd his revelation of divine murder and its significance is an ultimately fruitless endeavour, then philosopher Karl Popper’s contention that

we may become the masters of our fate when we have
ceased to pose as its prophets” (2003: xx)

seems all the more tragically pertinent if we do not actively assume responsibility for ourselves and for the positive future of society.

Indeed, a possible consequence is to be found in the madman’s climactic question “What are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?”. Through divine murder, we have grossly neglected reference, symbolism and ideology, with churches, once the safeguards of religious and spiritual belief, now the fading images of the encompassing and the representational.

The church is the grave of God and the final resting place of humanity.

If God is dead, the tragedy is ours.

Bibliography
Brooke, N. (ed.) Macbeth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)
Dawkins, R. The God Delusion (London: Bantam, 2006)
Faber, M. & Lehman, S. Friedrich Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human (London: Penguin, 1994)
Hawking, S.W. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (London: Bantam, 1988)
- Black Holes and Baby Universes and other Essays (London: Bantam, 1993)
Hollingdale, R.J. (trans.) Friedrich Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil (London: Penguin, 1973)
- Friedrich Nietzsche: Ecce Homo – How One Becomes What One Is (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992)
Kemp-Smith, N. (trans.) Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
Large, D. (trans.) Friedrich Nietzsche: Twilight of the Idols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
Marsden, J. After Nietzsche: Towards a Philosophy of Ecstasy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
Popper, K. The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume One: The Spell of Plato (Oxon: Routledge Classics, 2003)
Ross, D. (trans.) Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
Taylor, N. & Thompson, A. (eds.) The Arden Shakespeare: Hamlet (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006)
Tennyson, A. Idylls of the King (USA: Filiquarian Publishing, 2008)
Williams, B. (ed.) Friedrich Nietzsche: The Gay Science – With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Between Nature and Temptation

Published in Palatinate, No.721, November 2010

A Breathtaking Union of the Aesthetic and the Mysterious

IT is perhaps appropriate that The Truman Show (1998), with all its originality of plot and infectious surrealism, should have come from director Peter Weir, since his similarly enigmatic Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) effectively sounded the birth pangs of the Australian blockbuster.

Set on St Valentine’s Day 1900, Picnic charts the visit made by a group of girls from the exclusive Appleyard College to the geological marvel of the title. Some of the party, though, including mathematics teacher Miss McCraw (Vivean Gray), fail to return, setting in motion the mystery that ensues. A sense of mystery, though, is pervasive within Picnic, and revolves as much around the College as the Rock. The opening narration of Poe’s “What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream”, accompanied by the declarative tone of Gheorghe Zamfir’s haunting panpipe score, invokes from the outset a sense of wonder, breathing curiosity even into images of the girls’ everyday interactions and rituals. Whether they be reading from Shakespeare or dressing for the day, the visual is underscored by a purportedly benign abstraction that deftly fuels audience anticipation.

The girls’ visit to the Rock is prefaced by words of advice from the College Principal, Mrs Appleyard (Rachel Roberts), who awakens them to the opportunity for exploration that must be tempered by a social ambassadorship to “…bring credit to the College”. In the early stages of the film, Mrs Appleyard’s leadership of her namesake institution denotes a liberal matriarchy that affords the pupils comparative freedom, accompanied by an abject conservatism emblematic of Victoriana and the pride then endemic in Empire.


En route to the Rock, Miss McCraw shares little of the girls’ enthusiasm for their imminent adventure, remarking dolefully “This we do for pleasure, so that we may shortly be at the mercy of venomous snakes and poisonous ants – how foolish can human creatures be?”. Yet not even her sobering analysis of that potential danger can quell an appetite for temporary escape from the inevitably rather staid etiquette that is the pupils’ prescribed mentality at Appleyard. The Rock is an eerie, deceptive source of aesthetic fascination for the girls, their providential voyage into social and sexual liberation, in their removal of gloves and stockings, a sacred outlet for self-discovery and affirmation of their true rather than conformist identity.

Russell Boyd’s exquisite cinematography combines with the Zamfir theme to forge a unique, breathtaking evocation of human interaction with the natural scene, an almost dream-like quality that both enchants and discomforts – the beauty is magnetic, to be sure, but at what cost to its characters, about whom, through the quality of the performances, we come to care deeply? Among the Appleyard student elite, Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert) is the paradigmatic icon, a blond heroine dubbed by French instructor Mademoiselle de Poitiers (Helen Morse), musing over The Birth of Venus, “…a Botticelli Angel”.


Shared though we have in the girls’ beautifully-realised moments of freedom, a number of pupils, Miranda among them, are drawn, with a palpable submissiveness, to a crack in the Rock, into which they venture, and from which only one, Irma (Karen Robson), will ultimately re-emerge. The Rock, having turned the girls’ inquisitiveness against their reason, shows, later, an evidently pensive Miss McCraw that not even her immersion in the elegant precision of Euclidean geometry can assure her safety from its mysterious force, as she, too, disappears.

Mrs Appleyard, alerted in the evening to the disappearances, must now strive to maintain the face of the College, amid public intrigue and media scrutiny, with alcohol becoming her only source of comfort when her usually faultless composure is impeded by the intense, global interest in the case.


The police are not alone in investigating the disappearances, with a young Englishman, Michael Fitzhubert, after observing Miranda at the Rock, becoming obsessed with finding out the truth. Michael’s profound sense of responsibility, though slightly undermined by the occasionally mocking disinterestedness of his valet, Albert Crundall, nevertheless makes for a pleasing if unlikely chemistry between an incorrigibly principled traveller and the well-meaning crudity of his native servant, portrayed, respectively, by Dominic Guard and John Jarratt. Their friendship lends a touch of humour to an otherwise spellbinding yet often involved entertainment.

Weir’s film is a compelling, effortlessly engaging study of Man’s collision with Nature and its resultant effects, accompanied by a telling dissolution of perceived gender roles, and how burgeoning independence necessitates sometimes uncomfortable distinctions between freedom and happiness. Dichotomies of space and time, and an intoxicating union of the sublime and the subliminal, combine to make Picnic a masterpiece of social critique, quiet drama and rare visual richness.

A compelling theatrical rendition of York's past

Published in The Press, York, June 24th 2011

Bringing History to M
emorable Life

A DRAMATISATION of the past deserves a historic and atmospheric setting. For Hidden Voices, put on by the ReStage Company, the ancient and beautiful Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate, effortlessly provided that intensity for the production's inaugural performance on Thursday night. Written and directed by Chris Green, Hidden Voices, showing tonight and Saturday night, recounts a thousand years of York history, episodically charting everything from ninth-century Danish heroism to the fanatical moralising of Puritan England. Like the similar 1539, staged recently at Durham Cathedral, Hidden Voices fully engages the audience, as spectators follow the cast around the Church, and, with them, the strands of narrative re-created.

The melancholic strings of Arvo Pärt's Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977) are an evocative background to Christina of Markyate's (Christina Cairn) opening monologue on the Trinity, the medieval abbess's words appropriate to both venue and theme. Twenty-three scenes then convey ten centuries of religious fervour, impassioned devotion, and, finally, a return to the modern day.

Characters range from the well-known - St Augustine (Tom Straszewski) and Julian of Norwich (Cairn) to those locally significant - heretic Christopher Kelke (Chris Green) and the wife (Janice Lowther-Newton) of Reverend John Walker, supervising the design and execution of the fifteenth-century East Window. That the play is as much a biography of the building in which it is performed as it is the story of a city, gives the events an added pertinence, stressing spectator involvement rather than mere passivity.


We see certain of the actors taking on multiple roles, and especially impressive is the versatility with which they traverse the serious and the dead-pan. Chris Green, in particular, stands out for his seamless shift from the craftsman who turns window symbolism into Art History 101 for a bamboozled vicar's spouse to the blood and thunder Stuart priest pontificating from the pulpit. An early scene, 'Purgatory', sees Dante meet Monty Python in a wonderfully surreal evocation of how excess in life means punishment in death - Tom Straszewski and Chris Green are clearly having great fun as they clash over Robert de Holmes' miserly benefaction of three shillings and four pence to a profligate son. Perhaps the standout performance comes from Christina Cairn as Markyate, her relationship with God a powerful reminder of medieval faith and deftly communicated by Cairns' hard-hitting commitment to her character.

A superb production informed by rare insights into York's past, combined with impeccable performances and a setting central to the stories memorably told.


Performances begin at 7.30pm. Tickets can be purchased online at http://www.restage.org.uk/ , or on the door for £8.

A dark tale of inconvenient truths


Keeping it in the family
 
FLEETING glances, forced smiles, nervous laughter, classic one-liners – if this is the behavioural stuff of manifold dinner table scenes in cinema, then ‘Festen’ willingly lends itself to that socio-aesthetic heritage. The inaugural work of the experimental Dogme 95 genre, this award-winning 1998 film, directed and co-written by Thomas Vinterberg, couches its title action in the gathering of an extended family to mark patriarch Helge’s (Henning Moritzen) sixtieth birthday. Helge’s success as a businessman is manifest – the setting for the action, a sprawling, family-run country hotel, confirms his commercial gravitas – but it is within the film’s narratological heart, an epic meal for friends and loved ones, that the cracks in their seamless bourgeois stability begin soberingly to appear.
 
One of Helge’s daughters, Helene (Paprika Steen) finds the suicide note of her sister, Linda. Meanwhile, a speech made by her brother, Christian (Ulrich Thomsen), brings otherwise jovial proceedings to a halt by suggesting that he and Helene were, as children, abused by Helge. Despite the dismissive reaction of the guests, Christian’s claims are confirmed when, later, Helene reads Linda’s suicide note, revealing the latter’s own molestation by her father, that paragon, outwardly, of decency and respectability. Yet this is just one revelation in a complex, multi-layered story of family ties, broken and otherwise.
 
Powerful and compellingly shot, Festen is a masterpiece of contemporary European cinema. Surreal, challenging and funny, it is a seminal work that demands – and richly rewards – audience attention.
 

Charting Man's Search for Meaning

Published in Palatinate, No.730, June 2011

Feeling Happy?

JUST when our entrenchment in the mass media and popular culture, and their manifold demands on both the collective attention and on the pocket, could scarcely be more absolute, Michael Foley, a London-based Lecturer in IT, comes up with The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to Be Happy, now available in paperback from Simon & Schuster.

With so many branches and forms of communication dictating what we do, what we think, wear, watch and hear apparently solving the conundrum bound up in that sub-title, we might be forgiven for wondering what more needs to be said. It is the mixed messages about how to look and what to believe that leave us perplexed about our prescribed, yet ever-fluctuating, value system, right? Well, before that assumption prevails and a book is judged by its cover, it is worth observing that, whilst The Age of Absurdity is indeed, on the one hand, a sobering primer that mercilessly critiques the eccentricities, benign and crude, of the modern condition, it is at least an infectious, instructive satire rather than some moralistic indictment revealing more home truths than we are comfortable with.

The inaugural chapter, ‘The Absurdity of Happiness’, sees Foley charting the invasive, nuanced and bewilderingly diverse box-ticking process incumbent upon the individual to prove to society they are “one of the crowd” – the material acquisitiveness, sexual adventurousness and brute independence necessary to verify him or herself as “well-adjusted”, attractive, dutifully libertarian and, wait for it, normal. Like Lester Burnham’s opening narration to American Beauty, Foley’s initial musings itemise the tensions and frustrations abundant on the road to societal acceptance, but end on the positive note that happiness initiates the purported wonder of potential, not contentment itself but the practice and satisfaction of the will.


Though there are points during this scene-setting when the poetic licence, infused though it is with impact and humour in its account of how, allegedly, “to fit in”, might leave us asking “And?”, Foley duly announces the intent of his project – to “…trawl philosophy, religious teaching, literature, psychology and neuroscience for common ideas on fulfilment.”. A multi-generic quest for the origins and possibility of happiness, then, embracing the sciences genetic and social, fundamental doctrines guiding ethical conduct, and seminal texts Eastern and Western, to ask how satisfaction can be so elusive when humanism is so incorrigibly proud. The ultimately brittle quality of that arrogance, though, is aptly summed up in Foley’s aphoristic assertion that one is more sinned against than sinning – “It is possible that a starving African farmer has less sense of injustice than a middle-aged Western male who has never been fellated.”

It would be difficult to stylistically pigeon hole Foley’s book, but “a historical analysis” might well be a valid classification, since it contains a wealth of reportage and provocative insight into cultural and intellectual definitions of happiness, and curious case studies (including claims that children who reject offers of marshmallows may go on to be happier and more successful in their adult lives!). To be sure, Foley’s book is no self-help guide, those well-meaning but superficial handbooks for “a happy life” beautifully derided in Chapter Four, ‘The Old Self and the New Science’, but that is not to say he merely commentates rather than entreats or inspires. On the contrary, he sums up, absurdity is neither to be celebrated nor scorned, but merely accepted. Life’s manifest oddities and contradictions go far in accounting for and accentuating its beauties, apparent and hidden, intuited and pursued.