There is a dramatic principle, relevant for all writers of
narrative whether fiction or non-fiction, known as “Chekhov’s Shotgun”. It might be known as the Law of
Narrative Parsimony. The great
Russian playwright and master of the short story wrote various versions of the
principle, which can be summarized thus: “If in the first act you have hung a
shotgun on the wall, then make sure it goes off in the following act. Otherwise don't put it there.” Chekhov said nothing of camels, though he
might have.
Every
reader will resonate with the idea and will bring to mind its effective use by
an admired writer. One of my
favorites is a very telling example in Chaucer’s ribald bedroom farce, the
“Reeve’s Tale”. This is a “Biter
Bit” story in which an unscrupulous miller defrauds two Cambridge
undergraduates, and is repaid with interest when the students take sexual
recompense from his daughter and wife.
In describing the sleeping arrangements in the miller’s house, the
narrator mentions an infant’s cradle at the foot of the marital bed:
The
cradle at hir beddes feet is set,
To
rokken, and to yeve the child to sowke.
I encourage you to read the Reeve’s Tale for yourself, but I
can tell you that this casually mentioned cradle is actually a shotgun, and it
does go off in the next act.
This
leads me, perhaps not exactly inexorably, to Hieronymus and the Janjeweed. It is admittedly hard to keep up with
these things, but only a couple of genocides ago, in Darfur, there was a
particularly nasty lot of thugs called the Janjeweed—janjeweed being an Arabic word meaning roughly “cavalry” or
“mounted gunmen”. The Janjeweed
created havoc and performed atrocities throughout the villages of the South
Sudan. One of their specialties
was burning people—dead or alive.
Alive for a while, that
is. Some of the janjeweed were horsemen, but the most
feared, apparently, were mounted on camels. I had not sufficiently imagined the camel as an engine of
war, but it must be a terrifying one.
Janjeweed
Next,
Hieronymus. Hieronymus is the Latin
proper name rendered in English as Jerome, one of the greatest of the doctors
of the early Church and the translator of the Vulgate (the standard Latin bible
of the Middle Ages.) But why
render his name in English? If you’ve
got it, flaunt it. You wouldn’t
talk about the great painter "Jerome Bosch", would you? Well, one of my next major projects will involve the
literature of early Christian monasticism, and to this literature Hieronymus
made important contributions, especially in three “biographies” of early
monastic saints—Paul of Thebes, Hilarion, and Malchus.
I
had not read the Life of Malchus for
at least forty-five years, and I had forgotten what a great story it is, and
how beautifully shaped by its author.
The narrator (Hieronymus) in
old age tells us that he in his youth heard the story from the lips of Malchus
himself—speaking as an old man about events of his youth. So if the
story is not quite a manuscript found in a cave, its events could already be a
century old as we hear them.
As
a youth Malchus fled his parents’ importunities that he marry to become a monk;
but he later made the big mistake of taking a furlough from the monastic life
in order to go back and visit his home.
He had the bad luck in transit to be captured and enslaved by the
Janjeweed. Hieronymus doesn’t call
them that. He calls them
“Ishmaelites” and “Saracens,” but they are ferocious anti-Christians who arrive
in a raiding party mounted on horses and camels.
Chekhov
himself could not have done a better job with the plotting of the rest of the Life of Malchus. His new master compels the monk-slave
to marry another captive, but Malchus is spared suicide when his spouse
surprises him by abjuring sex with an ascetic fervor equal to his own. He still longs for his lost monastery,
of course, and one day, observing the cooperative industry of the tiny
residents of an anthill, and combining equal parts of entomology and scriptural
exegesis (“Go to the ant, thou sluggard!”),* Malchus and his chaste partner
flee from their captors into the unforgiving desert.
There
are several marvelous details of their escape, but for economy’s sake we must
take up the story at the point of Chekhov’s shotgun—or in this instance,
Chekhov’s camels. Toward the end
of the third day of flight the runaways are horrified to see—still distant but
moving rapidly toward them—the forms of two war camels. Their incensed master, accompanied by
one of his slave-warriors, has followed them. Scott himself cannot have been filled with greater dread,
and Malchus and his monachal missus take refuge in a convenient cave. The fortuitous cave is the good
news. The bad news is that it is
already occupied—by a lioness protecting her cub!
Hieronymus and pal
Some
of the early Christians had difficulties with lions when they met up with them
in the Colosseum; but the desert monks tended to get on with them much
better. Jerome himself seems to
have gone nowhere without his special leonine companion. So you know what happens next. The lioness leaves the fugitive slaves
untouched but kills their two pursuers, one after the other, when they enter
the grotto intending mayhem. The lioness then calmly exits carrying
her cub.
The
runaways are still in a tough spot, stranded as they are on foot in the
trackless desert. Only when they
exit the cave do they comprehend the full bounty of Providence. “When we came out into the light of day
we saw the two camels--the kind called dromedaries
[i.e., “racers”] because of their great speed…” Happily mounted on these now ownerless fleet beasts, they
are able to arrive only two days later at a Roman fort. There the quartermaster is happy to pay
them good money for their valuable steeds—just enough to defray the costs of
setting up two new separate but affiliated his-and-her hermitages.
*Go
to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which
having no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth
her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest, (Proverbs, 6:6-8)
