Where Ignorant Armies Clash by Night

 

 

            One of the world’s greatest possible book titles was pre-empted by the humanist poet Francis Petrarch in the 1360s when he published his little treatise entitled Concerning His Own and Lots of Other People’s Ignorance (De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia).  The crisis in our endangered American democracy  is everywhere in the news these days, and its root causes identified with varying degrees of plausibility: too much polarization in politics, too much money in politics, too little talent among politicians, gerrymandering, voter registration, voter suppression, voter fraud, voter apathy.  Perhaps we ought also to include Petrarch’s suggestion among the dangers.

 

            At both federal and state levels there are three branches of American constitutional government: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial.  For many years now a journalistic quiz conducted among eligible voters--the Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey—has tried to get a rough idea of what Americans actually know about the most basic rules and procedures by which we are governed.  In recent years,  with only slight percentage variations, only one third of Americans have been able to identify the three branches of the government.  That closely approximates the percentage of college graduates in the country, but there is less overlap than you might think. 

 

            Events of the past week suggest that many of us would benefit from a crash civics course.  Two of the branches were on conspicuous if controversial display: the legislature in the House of Representatives in Washington and the judicial in a courtroom in Wisconsin.  The wonder of it all is that despite powerful distractions, partisan passions, and much unbalanced and even erroneous commentary from major news sources,  they actually worked.  What I mean by this is that lawfully elected political representatives and a duly empaneled jury of our peers came to reasonable conclusions within the framework of our consensual social contract.  This does not mean that spending a huge amount of money we do not actually have is now an idea beyond cavil or that Kyle Rittenhouse is a “hero” rather than a dangerously undisciplined youth.  But it does mean that although nearly drowned out by all the clunky noises, our democratic processes actually were functioning.

 

            Though the passage of the “infrastructure bill” was in my opinion the more significant event of the week, it seems to have been the criminal trial that has most ominously inflamed passions and most clearly vindicated Petrarch’s title.  Ignorance of the law may be no excuse for criminal perpetrators, but it was nearly the default position of some eminent journalists who wrote about this case with passion, disseminating as they did so inflammatory untruths.  I would say “on both sides” if that phrase did not so basely betray the ideal of impartiality allegorized in Justice’s blindfold.  Fiction can indeed illuminate the inadequacy of our apparatuses of human justice, but it should do so honestly as fiction, not under the false flag of “reporting.”  All literature professors have to be Aristotelians if we want to keep bread on the table.  In his famous defense of the moral utility of fiction against radical Platonists who gave poetry the ethical status of a reflection in a mud puddle, Aristotle pointed to fiction’s moral clarity.  You can have all the messiness and ambiguity of reality, but without the occluding tedium and irrelevance.  Imagine facing Jardyce and Jarndyce from Bleak House as lived reality!

 

            As I look back at the past week, several novels dealing with adversarial legal proceedings come to my mind, including the only novel that many American high school graduates seem to have heard of, To Kill a Mockingbird.  Literary "courtroom drama" is pretty common, and a few great writers have created it with genius.  Of them few have been more interested in the ambiguities of justice, especially in the disparity, or rather the unbridgeable chasm between a Providential order and the imperfections of the human legal system,  than was Dostoyevsky.  Crime and Punishment was published only five years after the reforming Czar Alexander II, the “Liberator,” introduced the innovation of the “English” trial by jury into the Russian legal system in 1864.  Historians tell us that part of the contemporary impact of the trial scene in The Brothers Karamazov (1879) for its first Russian readers grew out of its still comparative novelty.  The twelfth book of Karamazov is certainly one of the greatest courtroom scenes in literary history, and like most of the others, it is rather disconcerting.  There’s a clue in the book‘s title: “A Judicial Error”.  Forty years later the whole “bourgeois” system would be overthrown by “revolutionary justice”, in which “individual rights” played no role.  Justice was what the Party defined as justice as, like a meandering stream, it moved through history to the dictates of dialectical necessity.  This, indeed, put an official end to judicial errors, as Solzhenitsyn underscores in the sardonic title to one of his short novels: We Do Not Make Mistakes.  Democracy is said to be the worst possible system of political organization except for all the others.  Something analogous could be said about our imperfect system of trial by jury.

 

            For our justice system is full of mistakes.  How can it fail to be?  It must necessarily wade through the morass our own and many others’ ignorance.  What is necessary but also necessarily imperfect demands ethical delicacy.  In Dostoyevky’s novel the famous big city defense lawyer Fetyukovich—the Johnnie Cochrane of Saint Petersburg, so to speak--passionately invokes in its secular form an ancient theological maxim: sins of commission are more serious than sins of omission.  In our legal tradition this appears as “Blackstone’s ratio”—referring to William Blackstone, author of the Commentaries on the Laws of England.  Blackstone writes: It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.  I hope that might be something close to the actual traffic of our criminal courts even if it necessarily means that many, many felons walk free.  Yet how frequently do we find this spirit among zealous prosecutors, or the zealous commentaries of journalists?  The frequent fallibility of sanctioned police forces and established courts is paradoxically outstripped by the vigilantism that lawlessness ostensibly justifies.  I’m not a regular reader of Westerns, but I am a supporter of the Library of America, and not too long ago I got their anthology simply entitled The Western.  All the novels it brings together are good reads, but one of them deserves a permanent place in that rare category Virginia Woolf called “novels for adults”: The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1940).   In addition to being what is usually called a gripping story, it cocoons a work of political theory at least as challenging as the treatises of John Locke and rather easier to understand.  It is set in the nineteenth century, of course; but it is as fresh as this week’s news.  Good guys with guns.  Defund the police. The Helping Hand Strikes Again.

 

            The week’s events set me searching my shelves for one last novel.  I couldn’t find it, but  Joan turned it up immediately.  It is a golden oldie, A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes (1929).*  Our particular copy is a particularly precious oldie, a Modern Library hardback in its dust jacket with a printed price of 95¢! (Pennies long since being meaningless, the “cent mark” has disappeared from the computer keyboard.  You now have to seek it out among “Advanced Symbols”.)  If you have not read this book you will want to do so.  I will be a little coy about describing it and say it is a story about the unspeakable guilt of innocence.  In only slightly less cryptic terms, those of an excellent introduction by Isabel Patterson, it is “an account of the melancholy fate of a crew of well-meaning pirates who fell into the clutches of half a dozen children.”

 

            Perhaps the novel is not the ideal mode for the advancement of serious political discussion, but it sure beats Twitter.  Not a great deal that is profound can be reduced to 140 graphic characters, but in an age before “social media” Robert Goheen, a great president of my university, once did it in fifty.  I was then much younger, and much more certain about things than I am now.  After I had generously shared with him one of my certainties, Goheen paused, then replied gently, “John, never be sure that you are more than about 80% right.” This perhaps complicates matters.  As I read the reactions to this week’s news I conclude that the worst aspect of my and other people’s ignorance might be the part that thinks it knows too much.

 

*published in England under the title The Innocent Voyage

 

Ascent of Mont Ventoux

Mont Ventoux

Mont Ventoux, nicknamed the “Giant of Provence,” is a big mountain in a part of the south of France where it seems rather out of place.  It is as though Whoever laid out the Alps later discovered there was one Alp left over and jettisoned it more or less randomly and all on its lonesome onto the inland plain above Marseille and Avignon.  No mountain ought to be where this one is, especially such a tall and imposing one.  Its name, “Windy,” is apt, as air currents swirl around its summit frequently and with significant force.  It has a considerable literary and athletic history.  In 1968 we lived in a rustic paradise on the edge of the small town of L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, nearby.  Ostensibly I was doing research at the Musée Calvet in Avignon, but it was the time of the Great Strike or Mini-Revolution, and we had to exercise flexibility and improvise somewhat.

 L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue

The mountain’s athletic reputation is rather sinister.  At some point the organizers of the most famous bicycle race in the world, the Tour de France, deciding that their grueling event was insufficiently hellish, added a slog up Mont Ventoux to the official course.  I am not sufficiently schooled in the lore of the velodrome to tell you exactly when that was, but it was all the chatter of Vaucluse when we arrived there.  It seems that in the previous year, 1967, a well-known British cyclist named Tom Simpson had dropped dead on the steep upgrade.  A post-mortem examination suggested that ingested alcohol and amphetamine tablets had contributed to this sad result, but Ventoux itself played a major part, justifying its new appellation contrôlée of “Killer Mountain.”

There is now in situ a kind of shrine to Mr. Simpson, established by pious members of the cycling fraternity, but it is not the only, or even the most important historical memorial to famous ascenders.  At the foot of the mountain there stands (or stood) a monument erected by the Touring Club de France in honor of the famous medieval writer Francis Petrarch (1304-1374), lauded as the world’s “first alpinist”.  Petrarch, whom I love for all sorts of endearing medieval qualities, is beloved by many others for his alleged demonstration of a “modern sensibility,” one manifestation of which was his decision to climb a tall mountain just for the hell of it or, alternatively, because it was there.

Petrarch celebrating Arbor Day

Well, Petrarch did indeed write an elaborate Latin letter, addressed to his friend and confessor, the Augustinian hermit Dionysius of Borgo San Sepulchro, describing his ascent of Mont Ventoux.  It is a spiritually uplifting cock-and-bull story, though people who go for the modern sensibility part seem to be able to swallow it.  The fact that the letter’s supposed recipient was long dead at the time Petrarch wrote it is only one of several  reasons I regard it as fiction.

Petrarch’s story is the following.  He had retreated in a spirit of lay asceticism to a remote place in the Provençal sticks, the Fontaine de Vaucluse, which is in fact the source of the river Sorgue.  (This part is true).  Having decided he would climb Mont Ventoux, he began wracking his brain in search of the perfect climbing partner.  The nearest village, Malaucène, had an official population of eight, which included two old women and one lame dog, so there was not much on offer there.  (This part I made up.)  He finally remembered his brother Gherardo, a monk and a spiritual athlete: the ideal Sherpa.  Oh, yes, very important, and I almost forgot.  During the climb Petrarch will have in his pocket a small-format edition of the Confessions of Saint Augustine, given to him by friar Dionysius.  It is at this point, if not before, that the wise reader, however modern his sensibility, should tumble to the fact that Petrarch is having him on.  I don’t know whether Petrarch was the first alpinist, but he remains to this day the most allegorical alpinist.

The climb begins.  Brother Gherardo takes off up the steep path like an arrow from the bow.  Petrarch wanders around laterally for a while before eventually discovering that he has actually been descending—a good trick, when you are at the base of a mountain.  Quite clearly, in Petrarch’s epistle, progress in climbing the mountain is so closely bound up with progress in the spiritual life of ascetic practice that there is not a denarius’s worth of difference between them.  All you need to comprehend this is the feeblest vestige of medieval sensibility.  But Petrarch finally does get to the top, long awaited by his monkish brother, and looks out at the magnificent view.  To that magnificence I, who reached the summit in a Citroën Deux-Chevaux, can attest.  Petrarch then remembers the Augustine in his pocket, and opens it at random, his eyes falling by chance upon the following passage: And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.  So if you want to climb, go easy on the alcohol, and skip the amphetamines altogether. Know thyself!  Nosce teipsum. 

I [Doubt It], Claudius

Every now and then one is prodded to think hard about something one has previously thought about hardly at all.  This can be a somewhat disconcerting experience.  I find myself in the throes of thinking about autobiography.  Don’t worry.  I have no intention of writing one.  Even were I so inclined I would shrink before the menacing fact that it turns out that I don’t know what autobiography is.  Nor is it particularly comforting that very few other people seem to know either.

            A friend seeking a favor called me up a few weeks ago.  She is a heading a project, now in an advanced stage, to bring out a Cambridge Companion to Autobiography.  You may know the “Cambridge Companions,” which are collections of essays offering for the general reader an introduction to an author, field, or topic.  There are so many of them by now that we need A Cambridge Companion to Cambridge Companions.  I have contributed to one of them myself: the companion to C. S. Lewis.  As I chose to receive the miserable guerdon for my task in books rather than money—I think the option was £100 cash or £200 worth of books--I now own among others the companions to Ovid, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Tolstoy.  So I know, too, that the quality of the essays is variable.

            Well, as the copy deadline for Autobiography approached, the person (identity to me unknown) who had agreed to write an essay on “European Autobiography before 1600” or some such title had found it necessary to withdraw.  Could I, on an emergency basis, help out an old pal by whipping up pronto six thousand words on “Early European Autobiography”.  A piece of cake, I thought, I mean how hard can it be?  You have Augustine, you have Guibert of Nogent and Peter Abelard in the twelfth century, you’ve got Dante and Petrarch in the fourteenth.  By then you’re home free.  After all I know the female mystical autobiographers from Julian of Norwich to Teresa of Avila like the back of my hand, if you will forgive the indelicacy.  So I said yes.

            But then my personal motto is “Sin in haste, repent at leisure”.  The first downer was that Augustine was already dealt with.  He is so important that he already has a chapter on his own—written by somebody else.  Medieval autobiography without Augustine is sort of like King Lear minus Cordelia and the Fool, but I soldiered on.  I started reading theories of autobiography.  Yes, there are such things, beaucoup thereof, mainly by Frenchmen, of course.  In one of them (The Autobiographical Pact, by Philippe Lejeune) I find the following comprehensive definition.  An autobiography is “a retrospective narrative in prose which a real person creates of his life, placing the emphasis on his individual lived experience, and particularly on the history of his personality.”  In another, I find the emphasis put on a “contract” between autobiographer and reader, a contract demanding “unambiguous veracity” and “full disclosure in essential matters.”  
          

 Spiritual finger-pointing

            That made me feel better about losing Augustine’s Confessions, since by these definitions it cannot be an autobiography.  Augustine had no word for “personality” in the modern sense, because the thing it means had not yet made its public appearance in the European consciousness.  As my late, great teacher D. W. Robertson used to say,“you cannot play hopscotch until the rules for hopscotch have been invented.”  And as for the “complete disclosure” part, do you really believe, as literal truth, the last two paragraphs of the eighth book  in which Augustine for no particular reason sits down beneath a fig tree with a copy of Paul’s epistles on his lap, hears sing-song infantile voices instructing him to “pick it up and read it”, and opens the book at random to find before him the service reading for the first Sunday in Advent, the “New Year’s Day” of the Christian calendar?  If so, you will have no trouble crediting the literal autobiographical truth of pp. 316-319 of Petrarch’s celebrated “Letter on the Ascent of Mont Ventoux”, in which the flabby poet, having huffed and puffed his way to the top of the highest mountain in Provence, whips out his handy pocket edition of Augustine’s Confessions, opens it at random, and, well, you know…?

 Francis Petrarch: a man with a big pocket, though not a deep one

Not a single one of the early writers I am dealing with abides by the “autobiographical pact”.  They all subscribe to a canon of strict veracity, but one founded in the useful paradox that fiction is often truer than “what really happened”.  If you can throw in a bit of what we would be inclined to call plagiarism, it only stiffens the truth.  More modern writers who have tried this have come up with mixed appraisals.  Most people, including me, think that Gertrude Stein was rather brilliant in calling her memoirs The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—her lifelong companion.  But as I pointed out in The Anti-Communist Manifestos, fictive autobiography in the contemporary period is likely to be judged on political grounds.  Rigoberta Menchú, an indigenous Guatemalan activist, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Peace, was easily forgiven for making up various important details of her autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchú.  On the other hand James Frey, author of a memoir entitled A Million Little Pieces, was effectively rendered an un-person by Oprah in a scathing interrogation on live TV; she was irate at having promoted his somewhat fictional autobiography unawares on an earlier program.

            I’ll leave you to ponder that one.  I’m too busy pondering the eleventh-century monk Otloh of Saint Emmeram, who relates in full autobiographical frankness numerous encounters with the corporeal devil.