My problems with Glass Onion

Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion: “No, it’s just dumb!” Note the literal lampshade.

I’ve mentioned twice now, once in my initial review and once in my 2022 at the movies post, that I had some nagging misgivings about Rian Johnson’s latest Benoit Blanc mystery, Glass Onion. I’ve been mulling those problems over ever since I saw the movie around Thanksgiving and wondering whether I should ever try to work through them in writing. Well, a couple weeks ago my friend Danny Anderson of The Sectarian Review offered a short, pointed critique of the film that I’ve taken as permission and encouragement to do the same.

As I wrote at the time I first saw Glass Onion, I can’t lay out my problems with it without giving too much away, so consider this a spoiler warning.

Briefly, what I most admired and enjoyed about the film when I first saw it was its intricate structure and its humor. I think I mostly stand by that, though what I remember of the humor has somewhat soured on me since I first saw it. We’ll get to my deeper problems momentarily.

In his post, Danny faults Glass Onion for being clever but hollow, for jerking the audience around by offering a mystery without an actual mystery, and for its self-righteous indulgence in pillorying shallow, cartoonish characters.

Any disagreements I have with Danny’s assessment are only in degree, not kind. Or to put it another way, I agree with every point here, albeit with differing levels of intensity. To take these one at a time:

• Glass Onion’s structure still impresses me, but as other elements of the story have continued to bother me I’ve come to see the film’s fugue-like transparent layers as unworthy of the story it tells. It’s like a perfectly crafted sonnet in praise of cannibalism.

• I agree completely with Danny about the way the film manipulates the audience. Johnson’s self-awareness, the constant calling of attention to storytelling conventions and what he is doing, goes beyond the tongue-in-cheek or the meta to the pathological. Johnson displays an utter contempt not only for the characters he creates—leading one to ask “Why bother?”—but for his audience. Again, why bother? Is this purely about showing off?

• Danny’s last criticism, Johnson’s political point-scoring via ridiculous caricature, is where he spends most of his time, and while I agree completely on this point the characters bother me somewhat less because Glass Onion is pretty clearly a farce. For all the music-box intricacy of his plotting, Johnson doesn’t deal in nuance when it comes to human beings. I don’t necessarily like that (note that in my original review I described every character as “annoying”) but I’m willing to give it a pass purely for the sake of the genre.

To these I would add a few more misgivings of my own, some minor and technical but others, like Danny’s most serious complaints, what John Gardner called “faults of soul.”

First, and related to Danny’s point that Johnson continuously plays false with the viewer, Glass Onion breaks some of the classic rules of fair play in a whodunit story—namely Ronald Knox’s ten commandments of detective stories. The film bends or breaks several of these, as you can read about in greater detail here, including artificially withholding important clues. But the biggest and clearest cheat is against rule ten: “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.” Compare The Prestige, a film in which twins are part of the mystery’s solution and Christopher Nolan sets this revelation up expertly.

Two possible rejoinders occur to me: First, that rules are made to be broken, a point I’ve made plenty of times myself. Agatha Christie rather famously violated a number of Knox’s rules. And second, Glass Onion is not really a whodunit after all, but a combination revenge story/heist caper. To these I say: Rian Johnson is no Agatha Christie, who could match her mastery of plot and boldness in experiment with genuine compassion and a keen understanding of human nature; and to argue that presenting the audience with a mystery but having it turn out to be something else is just another dodge. And don’t make me bring up “subverting expectations.”

Second, and related to Danny’s argument about political point-scoring, there is Johnson’s obvious and already much commented-upon pandering to leftwing identity politics. But this is so much the norm for Hollywood now that it feels pointless to complain about. (Interestingly, both Danny and I discerned that Johnson’s worldview is shaped entirely too much by the anti-discourse of Twitter, a point that even made its way into the Honest Trailers spoof of Glass Onion.)

But—to use the same note about politics as a jumping-off point—my most serious misgivings always had to do with the climax of the film. When the aggrieved Andi finds her mission of vengeance stymied by Miles Bron and company, she simply starts smashing his collection of glass curios, a spree of vandalism that culminates in a (somehow) non-lethal explosion that destroys Bron’s glass onion house, an act Andi can only top by deliberately destroying the Mona Lisa.

Remember Johnson’s political pandering, and the strawmen he has peopled his film with, and remember as well that Glass Onion takes place in the late spring of 2020, a setting Johnson is not only mining for quarantine and masking jokes. I’d wager that a climax in which injustice is not corrected but simply reacted to with a childish tantrum—by breaking other people’s stuff, setting things on fire, and destroying art—is not coincidental. And I’d argue absolutely that this is an instinct that does not need to be encouraged, much less held up as the satisfying final act of a drama of theft and restoration.

So the more I’ve reflected on Glass Onion, the more it’s struck me as precisely what Danny described in his post: hollow and self-satisfied, slick but contemptuous, a triumph of “precociousness over substance,” and a marriage of political shallowness with irresponsible virtue signaling. And these problems—“faults of soul,” as I mentioned above—originate with the film’s creator.

As so often, Chesterton comes to mind: “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

Kingsnorth (and Lewis) on nostalgia and progress

Last week Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Wake, one of my favorite novels from the last ten years,* posted a marvelous reflection on nostalgia on his Substack The Abbey of Misrule. He includes this personal note near the beginning:

We all recreate our preferred old world. Mine was—probably still is—an awkward melange of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer culture and rural England before the First World War. Is it possible to wander the whited hawthorn lanes of Edward Thomas’s south country, the barrows intact up on the downs, smoke curling from the chimneys of the old inns, the motorways and superstores nowhere to be seen, whilst also hunting mammoths? Probably not, though it might make an intriguing backdrop to a fantasy novel I will never write.

That’s a charming way to highlight the hodgepodge quality of the imagined pasts that attract us, an attraction sharpened by the sense that every bit of this “melange” gathered from across the centuries is now equally lost. Maybe sometime I’ll describe some of my own hodgepodges. But Kingsnorth also drives deeper into the substantial appeal of nostalgia:

I’ve never been addicted to drugs or alcohol, but I have often been addicted to dreams. This is the lot of the writer. You become a writer because the world you encountered in the stories you read as a child is more exciting than the world you are actually living in. More exciting and, in a strange way, more real. Your world is school and suburbs and bus stops and breakfast cereals and maths homework and being forced to wash your dad’s car at the weekend and wondering how to talk to girls and listening to the charts to work out what kind of music it’s permissible to like. This is not Lothlorien, and neither is it Earthsea. The worlds created by Tolkein [sic] and Asimov and Verne and Howard are better than this, and there is no doubt at all that given a splinter of a chance you would prefer to live in them. Then, one day, you pick up a pen and realise that you can create your own.

Meanwhile, out in what is fondly called ‘the real world’ by people who often don’t know very much about reality, you are living in the Machine. If you have the kind of sensibility which prefers Lothlorien to Isengard, this means that you are a character in a tragedy rather than a heroic epic. Most of the things you like are fading away.

Further on, Kingsnorth engages the usual dismissive (and often deliberately rude) responses to wishing for a vanished—or, more painfully, vanishing—world:

Nostalgia is a curious thing. The love of a dead past is, on the surface, pointless, and yet it seems to be a universal, pan-cultural longing for something better than an equally dead but often less enticing present. This is something which its critics never seem to understand. ‘That’s just nostalgia’, they say, dismissively, when you suggest that a high street made up of independent shops might have been better than one giant superstore, or that folk songs around the fire in the pub might be better than Celebrity Love Island.

Spot on. Curiously, I have encountered this most forcefully in defending traditional architecture against the unsustainable and impractical eyesores of modern architecture. Calling Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall ugly or the Gherkin (aka the London Egg or the London Suppository) a blemish on the skyline or suggesting that church spires and Victorian market squares are in some way superior to what has replaced them makes a certain kind of person angry. This is strange to me because it seems like architecture, which as the late Sir Roger Scruton noted creates an aesthetic ecology we all have to engage with publicly, as a community, is the most straightforwardly concrete argument for the value of tradition and beauty.

But I digress.**

Kingsnorth goes on to suggest that nostalgia is often, in fact,

a rational response to a world heading in the wrong direction. Perhaps a practical response too. If the Machine is destroying so many things of value, from the home to the ancient woodlands that once surrounded it, then remembering those things is not only an act of rebellion, but can also be the first stage in an act of necessary restoration.

Which immediately brought to mind one of CS Lewis’s many reflections on “progress,” the ultimate God-term of the last century:

“If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road.”

— CS Lewis

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be and if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. . . . There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.

That’s from Mere Christianity, which originated as a series of radio talks during World War II. Lewis knew whereof he spoke. And, writing now eighty-odd years later, I think it is pretty plain that the world has taken the pig-headed route.

To return to Kingsnorth, he reflects as well on the way “nostalgic” is used as an insult, a rhetorical cudgel, and how to defeat it:

[T]he fact that ‘nostalgic’—like ‘Romantic’, ‘Luddite’, ‘reactionary’ and any other word that suggests attachment to anything before progressive Year Zero—has become a term of mockery makes it a tempting label to embrace if you are conducting a personal rebellion against the Total System. Being called names is supposed to scare you into silence, but it doesn’t work if you wear the names like a medal on your chest. Romanticising the past, you say? Well, maybe I do. But it’s a hell of a lot better than romanticising the future.

Hear hear.

I strongly recommend the essay in its entirety, especially the second half in which Kingsnorth examines three possible responses to the decline and fragmentation characteristic of the present age. Two, he notes, are traps. One is the unthinking acceptance of the Myth of Progress. The other—perhaps surprisingly if you’ve read this far—is nostalgia itself. While it is “vital” to be “guided by the past,” Kingsnorth is alert to the dangers of nostalgia, too: “[A]s we stand against the Machine, we need solid ground on which to brace ourselves. Neither Progress nor nostalgia offer that solidity.” Kingsnorth goes on to suggest a third way, one seasoned by both resignation and faithful hope, “to watch the great fall, accept its reality, and then get on with our work.”

An intriguing and profoundly challenging conclusion, one that jibes with things I’ve meditated upon for years but that confronts me more forcefully with what this kind of fruitful nostalgia must mean if it is to be of benefit to anyone. I have to wonder if Kingsnorth has read Jünger’s The Forest Passage. I mean to reread that soon. Food for thought.

Notes:

*The Wake is the first of a loose trilogy set in the distant past, the present, and the distant future of England. I have read The Wake, which takes places at the time of the Norman Conquest, and the second volume, Beast, but have not yet gotten to the third and final novel, Alexandria. Kingsnorth writes a good bit about what inspired it near the end of this Substack essay. I briefly reviewed Beast here last year.

**Let me here recommend Tom Wolfe’s clique-puncturing From Bauhaus to Our House and move on.

Jünger and the homo religiosus revisited

At the beginning of last year I posted a passage from Ernst Jünger’s short series of interrelated essays The Forest Passage about the homo religiosus—man as a religious animal, with a need for religion that will be filled by something. Now, just over a year later, I’m reading his allegorical novel On the Marble Cliffs, and unsurprisingly given the novel’s context the same concern is manifest.

On the Marble Cliffs takes place in the Marina, an idyllic Mediterranean region by the sea. The unnamed narrator tells the story of how the tyrannical host of the Head Forester, a warlord in the forests far to the north, infiltrates and turns the Marina to the Head Forester’s will. Unlike the Marina, which seems to exist in a placid mix of genteel paganism and the gutsy but learned Christianity of the Church Fathers or the early medieval Benedictines, the northern forests are the home of brutal idol worship and crude nature gods. The narrator mentions the Æsir explicitly, as well as a grotesque bull god worshiped in a sacred grove.

As the narrator tells his loose, dreamlike story, the avenues through which the Head Forester gains control over the Marina become more and more clear, but the religious one proves particularly striking:

Yet who would have believed that the gods of fat and butter who filled the cows’ udders would gain a following in the Marina—of worshippers, at that, who came from houses in which offerings and sacrifices had long been mocked? The same spirits who deemed themselves strong enough to cut the ties that bound them to their ancestral faith became subjugated to the barbarian idols’ spell. The sight of their blind obedience was more repugnant than drunkenness at midday.

Per CS Lewis, whom I also quoted in last year, “spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served.” The scoffing abandonment of the old religion does not leave the apostate unreligious; it just leaves an opening that must be filled by something else, probably something worse.

On the Marble Cliffs was completed in 1939, just before the German invasion of Poland. When it was published it was pretty quickly interpreted as a fabular broadside against the Nazis, an interpretation that is certainly hard to avoid. It was even taken seriously enough by the Nazi regime that Goebbels tried to have the book suppressed.

And yet Jünger insisted that it is not just an anti-Nazi parable but more broadly applicable, and the insight offered above—that irreligion, especially the elite ability to see through it and treat it with derision, leaves the scoffer open to far worse in the form of ideology and political contagion—is certainly relevant in our day and age. I have certainly seen plenty of acquaintances abandon religion as closeminded and oppressive only to embrace far more shrill, narrowminded, intolerant—and, not insignificantly, much less fun—political ideologies, and with a “blind obedience” that makes me feel pity for them more than anything else.

I’m reading Tess Lewis’s new translation of On the Marble Cliffs for NRYB Classics. It’s excellent so far and I hope to finish it this evening, after which I’ll read the introduction and other apparatus. For those interested, Thomas Nevins also gives the novel pretty extensive treatment in his book on Jünger, which I mentioned a few weeks ago in a much more lighthearted context.

Johnson's rhino

One of my longtime favorite writers, historian and journalist Paul Johnson, died earlier this month aged 94.

I discovered his work in grad school when I read his notorious volume of character studies, Intellectuals, a searing takedown of destructive know-it-alls from Rousseau onward. My appreciation deepened not long before I got married and began teaching with A History of the American People, a massive narrative account of the origins, founding, and ups and downs of the United States written explicitly as an answer to the mendacious Howard Zinn. These two books demonstrate Johnson’s foremost gifts—polemic and grand narrative, the one with sharp elbows and cutting voice and the other with wide, eager eyes trained on far horizons.

In the first years of my marriage and teaching I enjoyed Johnson’s late-career venture into short biographies of great historical figures: Jesus, Napoleon, Churchill, Darwin, Socrates, Washington, Mozart. I have especially fond memories of Eisenhower: A Life, a little book I smuggled into the warehouse area of the sporting goods store where I worked to read furtively during the rare downtime of the retail Christmas season. My wife and I were expecting our first child and I was supplementing my adjunct paychecks from two colleges and a once-a-week tutoring gig. Stealing away to be with Ike for a page here, two pages there, and in Johnson’s brisk and elegant prose, was a great encouragement amidst the cold, the customers, and all the uncertainties of that time.

But I noticed after I finished Eisenhower that no more Johnson books were forthcoming. I looked off and on for years, checking in on Johnson via Google and hoping always for a newly announced title. I regretfully concluded that he was in decline. His death a few weeks ago makes my memories of those books all the more special.

Of the obits and appreciations published after Johnson’s death one stood out to me: a shambling, unstructured, and therefore endearing reminiscence by National Review’s Jay Nordlinger. Amidst the anecdotes and interesting tidbits (at Oxford, Johnson studied under AJP Taylor) Nordlinger included a mention of Johnson’s “Rhino Principle,” which Johnson explicated in a 2006 essay for Forbes. Here’s the principle:

Now, the rhino is not a particularly subtle or clever animal. It’s the last of the antediluvian quadrupeds to carry a great weight of body armor. And by all the rules of progressive design and the process of natural selection the rhino ought to have been eliminated. But it hasn't been. Why not? Because the rhino is single-minded. When it perceives an object, it makes a decision—to charge. And it puts everything it’s got into that charge. When the charge is over, the object is either flattened or has gone a long way into cover, whereupon the rhino instantly resumes browsing.

Few people think of learning from a rhino. But I have. And when I hear of an author who cannot finish or get started on a book, I send him (or her) a rhino card. I paint a watercolor of a rhinoceros on the front of a postcard—something I do well, as I’ve practiced it a great many times. And in the space next to the address I write: “Stop fussing about that book. Just charge it. Keep on charging it until it is finished. That’s what the rhino does. Put this card over your desk and remember the Rhino Principle.”

And the crucial point:

Now, the Rhino Principle may not produce the perfect book, but it does produce a book. And once a book is drafted, it can be improved, polished and made satisfactory. But if the Rhino Principle is ignored, there is no book at all.

Like Johnson’s Ike in the chilly shipping area of the Academy Sports warehouse, this was precisely the encouragement and inspiration I needed right now, and I’m grateful to Johnson for it.

To the ranks of the great proverbial possessives out there—Buridan’s ass, Morton’s fork, Hobson’s choice, Chesterton’s fence—let us add Johnson’s rhino.

Paul Johnson, journalist, critic, commentator, controversialist, and guide to the epic sweep of the past, RIP.

What are you doing here?

I’m currently reading Thomas Nevin’s Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-45. In his chapter on the Weimar Era, Nevin describes how, after several years of writing for nationalist military magazines and other right-wing outlets, Jünger branched out in the intellectual company he kept:

He was friendly to the national Bolshevist Ernst Nieckish, to the Bohemian anarchist Erich Mühsam, to the putschist Ernst von Salomon, to the national socialist Otto Strasser, to the communists Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Toller. These men could get together in a room and talk in a civil way. It is facile to conclude they were united in opposing the republic. In fact, strong in intelligence, they were political weaklings.

One sympathizes.

This is a rich cross-section of Weimar political persuasions, with these men belonging to groups that were sometimes literally fighting each other in the streets. Indeed, the left-wing Nazi Otto Strasser and the anti-Nazi nationalist Ernst von Salomon were veterans of the Freikorps. (Von Salomon lightly fictionalized his experiences in The Outlaws, which I read two years ago.)

Nevin goes on to describe the regular salons Jünger and others would hold throughout 1929:

Regularly on Friday evenings . . . Jünger and brother Fritz met at the home of Friedrich Hielscher on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse. These gatherings usually included von Salomon, the publisher Rowohlt, Otto Strasser, the expressionist writer Arnolt Bronnen, and Vormarsch illustrator Paul Weber, soon famous for his prophetic drawings depicting Nazism as a cult of death.

Again—so far, so Weimar, especially when you look into some of the lesser-known figures and find that peculiar cocktail of playwrights, businessmen, and neopagans that could only make sense in that time and place. But then, just before describing how Joseph Goebbels himself began attending these meetings with the express aim of winning Jünger over to the Nazis, Nevin casually tosses this in:

The American novelist Thomas Wolfe also attended.

I, like Jim Halpert, have just so many questions.

In all seriousness, this was a great surprise, and something unexpected and new to look into. I’ve already had this out-of-print Wolfe biography, which gives good coverage to the years he spent in Germany, where Look Homeward, Angel was apparently a huge hit, recommended by a co-worker and Wolfe relation.

A reminder that one of the purest and strangest delights of studying history is stumbling across connections between seemingly separate things you’re interested in, connections that throw both subjects suddenly into a strange new relief—in this case, Ernst Jünger and interwar Germany and the Southern literary world of the same period.

Joel Coen on movies vs TV

In my 2022 movie year-in-review I mentioned my exhaustion with TV and my preference for movies. Joel Coen, from a 2020 podcast with longtime cinematographer Roger Deakins on why he and brother Ethan have stuck to movies and not ventured into TV, explains a little of what goes into my preference:

[L]ong-form was never something we could get our heads around. It’s a different paradigm. Not to be shitty about it, but you can look at stories that they have a beginning, middle, and end. But so much of television has a beginning, a middle, a middle, a middle, a middle, until the whole thing dies of exhaustion. It’s beaten to death and then you find a way of ending it.

We’ve all watched TV shows like this. Even some of our favorites fit the arc Coen describes here.

One of the reasons I hope movies and movie theatres survive is that the discipline of the form makes moviegoing better than binge-watching even a good TV show. The discipline of the filmmakers to turn out a compact, well-crafted, self-contained jewel—rather than giving themselves permission, as so many TV showrunners do, to sprawl all over the place—and the discipline of the audience starting a story and not being able to stop it, having to receive it continuously in the form intended by the filmmakers; these are virtues that dissipate in the size and potential aimlessness of a TV series.

There are exceptions, of course, but who has time to find them? And I’ll carve out space for mini-series, which demand some of the same beginning-middle-end discipline as a two-hour drama. Not for nothing is the five-episode Chernobyl and the six-episode The Night Manager the best TV I’ve seen in the last few years.

I’m currently listening to the full Deakins-Coen interview on my commute between campuses. I discovered it and the passage above thanks to this short post from World of Reel.

On ancient and medieval “propaganda”

It is commonplace among certain kinds of historians to refer to some ancient and medieval sources, especially anything produced at the behest or under the patronage of a king or nobleman, as “propaganda.” Among those that come to mind from my reading in the last couple years are Asser’s Life of King Alfred, the anonymous Life of King Edward (the Confessor), and Augustus’s Res Gestae Divi Augusti. And this is without taking into account the purely literary works that critics occasionally label propaganda, like the Aeneid.

Calling these sources “propaganda” seems to me wrongheaded and misleading for several reasons, foremost among them the anachronistic connotations embedded in the word itself.

While the word has innocent origins (and a quite interesting and revealing evolution) and it can, technically, still mean only “official information,” its technical sense, as with “Dark Ages,” has been almost entirely swamped by negative connotations. Labeling something “propaganda” immediately freights it with insinuation as to its origins and the ulterior motives of its creators. To me, the word propaganda suggests:

1—the direct involvement or oversight of a state or ruling power,
2—a carefully crafted and controlled programmatic message,
3—ideological motivation and rationalization for either distorting the truth or outright lying,

and, in terms of material conditions,

4—a means of mass production or at least mass dissemination, and
5—a corresponding mass readership.

I think this is a pretty fair assessment of where propaganda comes from, what it’s for, and what it needs to do its work, and yet by these standards most ancient and medieval texts offhandedly labeled “propaganda” by modern historians would fall far short.

Just the culture of widespread literacy required by 4 and 5 would eliminate almost all sources before Gutenberg and from most of the following two or three centuries, and 1 and 2 are seldom as obvious from a face-value reading of such sources as some historians would like you to believe.

To take the examples I gave at the beginning of this post:

• In Asser’s Life of King Alfred, Asser himself asserts authorship, openly acknowledges his personal connection to his subject, and explains why he wanted to write about him. What is not clear is that Alfred was directing Asser (1) or dictating how he was to be presented (2). And what certainly is clear, given how books were produced during the 9th century, was that Asser could not publish or widely disseminate his version of Alfred’s life (4) and that only a small number of people like Asser—clergy, religious, and a small number of educated laymen like Alfred himself—would ever read it, nixing (5).

• Ditto the Life of King Edward, with the added uncertainties of who precisely commissioned the book and who wrote it, so that it is even more speculative to argue for (1) and (2). Further, the Life survives in one manuscript, which is empirical proof that even if whoever commissioned the book aimed at (4) and (5), they did not achieve it.

• Of the unscientific sample I referred to at the top, the one that comes closest to fitting the definition of propaganda suggested by the term is Augustus’s Res Gestae or The Deeds of Augustus. Here you have the emperor himself dictating the text (1), much of which is political in nature (2), and widely reproduced as a monumental inscription (4). But even here it is not clear how many people could read the Res Gestae even when it was available inscribed in a public place.

So much for the anachronistic implications of the term. But there is a deeper level of error to which calling an ancient or medieval source “propaganda” leads.

What is missing from all of the sources I worked through above but fundamental to all modern propaganda is (3), an ideological framework that either allows or requires lying. This is not to say that these sources are 100% truthful, but flattery, omitting awkward or controversial topics, or simply not knowing things and not recording them are not the same thing as ideologically motivated suppression or fabrication of facts.

Assuming ancient and medieval sources to have the same pragmatic relationship to the truth as modern propagandists (or, increasingly, historians) is a clear case of projection. Their ways were not our ways. As Orwell wrote on this topic in a passage I posted last year:

Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened. . . . A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it. . . . Some of the facts . . . were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such thing would be possible now.

Further—and this is especially the case for sources like the Life of King Alfred and Life of King Edward—the dearth of alternative or parallel sources for many of the events they describe means that even the forms of non-propaganda bias listed above can only be inferred. Guessed at. Speculated.

Which I think gets at what’s really going on with accusations that such sources are “propaganda.” Calling a source propaganda grants the historian permission to read between the lines and construct alternate histories purely negatively, with a kind of kindergarten “opposite day” hermeneutic that ends up as a license to fabricate. And the problem is only more pronounced in those periods when we have precisely the lack of sources that requires us to rely on those commissioned by kings or abbots or emperors.

By all means, approach sources produced through some connection to or the patronage of a king or ruler or other authority with caution, and always, always look for bias. (It’ll be there, though that doesn’t mean anyone is lying.) But avoid dragging in words with such strongly modern associations and implications, and certainly don’t use that as an excuse to concoct the “real” story behind the sources we actually have. That way lies bad history.

If only we had a word for that kind of untruthful, selective, ideologically motivated storytelling.

High-profile targets

Which one do more people recognize? Which one are more people mad about? Which one deserves it?

More than four years ago, in the early days of this blog, I reviewed a short biography of Raphael Semmes, captain of the Confederate commerce raider Alabama. In passing, I noted that despite his success and notoriety during the Civil War, he was now obscure enough that an announced demonstration at his monument in Mobile attracted no protesters. A vision of a vanished world, surely, but this was despite continued and well-publicized protests at monuments to General Lee and other figures.

On a recent episode of his excellent new podcast Uncancelled History, Douglas Murray interviewed historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, author of Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan and many other books on Spanish history and the Age of Exploration. After thorough comparisons of the much-maligned Columbus to other figures from that era—specifically Magellan, who actually did some of the heinous things Columbus is only accused of doing—Murray and Fernández-Armesto turn to the question of why some historical figures attract outrage, protest, and cancelation and others don’t:

DM: How is it all of these reputations, these very different people with very different attitudes, have sort of got wrapped up together? I mean, Magellan, for instance, I suspect that of those who know him today, relatively few will know what a kind of villain he was, but he gets wrapped up with Columbus. Everything in the Age of Explorers has got merged, somehow.

FFM: The paradox is, it’s got nothing to do with the facts! It’s very hard to say that about Magellan. And yet, you know, Columbus—the guys are tearing down his statues, they’re besmirching his reputation, they’re smattering him with obloquy, they’re treating him as if he were some kind of proto-fascist, and yet Magellan, who really was a bad guy, has escaped all that! You know? His statues are intact! Nobody is saying, Let’s tear down his statues. Nobody is saying, Let’s, you know, revise his reputation, et cetera—except me. No one is saying, Why don’t we right the injustices that have accrued from Magellan’s voyage. In fact, quite the contrary. There are all these scientific prizes and university programs and whole species and constellations named after Magellan, and nobody is saying Lets, you know, change those names. So it’s quite amazing that the relatively good guy gets all the brickbats and the relatively bad guy gets all the praise. And I think the reason—you know, it’s very hard to explain that—but I think it’s an example of how prejudice is inviolable by fact and that no matter what the truth is of an episode in the past, people decide what they think about it on the basis of their prejudices and on the basis of what it does for their own programs and agendas, and it’s very unfortunate that Columbus has become the victim of specifically American agendas to do with Native American identity and slavery, things that he really had nothing to do with but which have become associated with him historically in the course of the long—oh, I don’t know—sort of unfolding historiographical story between his day and ours. Whereas Magellan didn’t make any contribution to the United States, never even got anywhere near here, and is therefore pretty much ignored by public opinion in America.

In short, Columbus is well-known—for reasons specific to American pathologies—and Magellan is not. Columbus conjures strong associations and vivid if inaccurate mental pictures, and Magellan does not. So if the historically ignorant are going to attack an explorer—again, for reasons specific to American pathologies—they will attack Columbus.

But activists can take an alternate tack, as this discussion suggests. Murray calls it “wrapping up.” One might also call it “guilt by association” or simply judging all by the example of the worst. Being too ignorant to be specific, and to make specific, historically literate arguments about people like Columbus, it is easier to judge according to broad categories carefully presented—usually through cherrypicked evidence or simply shouting—as inarguably evil.

So while some poor sap somewhere might be tempted to argue the merits of “canceling” Columbus, it is harder to argue against a sweeping condemnation of all “colonizers.” Assuming these arguments are presented in good faith in the first place—an assumption I am unwilling to make.

This is clearly the case in the category of “Confederates.” Lee is famous in the first place and has intractable defenders today because he was a genuinely good and great man, and so efforts to attack this high-profile target, one of the few Confederate leaders anyone could name, were always going to be difficult. But shift the discussion to “Confederates” writ large, oversimplify and ignore context and specifics—striving always for “the clarity of caricature”—and even the obscure figures whom activists could never have otherwise named or recognized can be swept up in the net and liquidated.

Which brings me back to Raphael Semmes, whose statue did come down in just such a trawling approach in the summer of 2020. Like Magellan, he could never bring out mobs of protesters the way Lee (or Jefferson, or Washington, or Lincoln) could, but “wrapping up,” attacking categories, showed that actually knowing something about targets doesn’t matter. (Tellingly, an article on the removal of Semmes’s statue was headlined “Who was Confederate Adm. Raphael Semmes?”)

Food for thought, something this podcast is good for. I certainly recommend Murray’s interview with Fernández-Armesto, but perhaps the best episode I’ve listened to so far is the most recent, in which Murray talks to Thomas Chatterton-Williams about the woke campaign against the classics.

Material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys

Yesterday I started reading John Buchan’s Huntingtower, a 1922 adventure novel that introduced recurring character Dickson McCunn, a Glasgow “provision merchant” or grocer. Newly retired at the age of fifty-five and with his wife out of town, taking a cure at a Continental spa, McCunn decides to go on an adventure. Buchan informs us that “Mr McCunn—I may confess at the start—was an incurable romantic.”

The source of this incurable romanticism? His imagination, as fueled by decades of reading:

“He . . . sought in literature for one thing alone. . . . material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys.”

He had had a humdrum life since the day when he had first entered his uncle’s shop with the hope of some day succeeding that honest grocer; and his feet had never strayed a yard from his sober rut. But his mind, like the Dying Gladiator’s, had been far away. As a boy he had voyaged among books, and they had given him a world where he could shape his career according to his whimsical fancy. Not that Mr. McCunn was what is known as a great reader. He read slowly and fastidiously, and sought in literature for one thing alone. Sir Walter Scott had been his first guide, but he read the novels not for their insight into human character or for their historical pageantry, but because they gave him material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys. It was the same with Dickens. A lit tavern, a stage-coach, post-horses, the clack of hoofs on a frosty road, went to his head like wine. He was a Jacobite not because he had any views on Divine Right, but because he had always before his eyes a picture of a knot of adventurers in cloaks, new landed from France, among the western heather.

C’est moi. Like McCunn, what I wanted out of anything I read as a kid was to feel these things—to fall in with dangerous pirates, to narrowly escape kidnapping and murder, to wait in the cramped dark to spring a surprise attack, to go undercover among enemies, to fight monsters and elude giants, to witness the unfolding of world-shattering battle—and the exhilaration of living through it all. I would not just “watch” in my mind’s eye but imagine myself there thanks to all the raw, vivid, concrete sensory detail good writers provided, and would go on “to construct fantastic journeys” of my own. Like McCunn, I was a daydreamer. Still am. And like McCunn, I sympathize with the desperate, the uncertain, the underdog—with adventurers.

Recently the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore shared a list of the historical novels that inspired his love of history. I may have to put together just such a list of my own. In the meantime, here’s his list (or this screenshotted version to avoid the paywall). And Huntingtower is a delight so far, much the kind of adventure McCunn himself would have enjoyed.

We better not

Reviewing a new mini-series adaptation of Ben MacIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends, the story of notorious Communist agent Kim Philby, Charlotte Gill takes issue with an invented character named Lily Taylor who is scrupulously designed to appeal to certain sensibilities—a working class woman who don’t take guff off of nobody. Gill argues that Taylor’s intrusion into what is meant to be a dramatization of a true story is evidence of the filmmakers’ ideological capture. I don’t disagree.

Gill briefly outlines many other problems with the series from an historical and storytelling standpoint, but the fictional Lily Taylor highlights a problem with the storytellers themselves, and with modern storytelling more generally. Gill:

But what is most perplexing—not just with [A Spy Among Friends], but every drama or book that sees the past as a canvas that can be reworked—is why writers think their fiction (which they call history) is better than reality. It takes a certain arrogance to believe that you can improve it, worse still that you have the moral responsibility to erase parts you find objectionable. There is a reason people come back to the Philby story; because it is fascinating in itself—without the need for Lily Taylors. Sadly, as in the case of Kim Philby, ideology will remain paramount for some.

Spot on. And I have often wondered by filmmakers and all the others “reworking” historical stories or great literature for “modern audiences” don’t grasp that the appeal of most stories, whether historical or literary, is the story as it stands. It’s already interesting. It takes ideological capture, arrogance (but I repeat myself), and—it should be added—a startling lack of creativity not to see this.

Some years ago that great YouTube seer, Mr Plinkett, reviewed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in his inimitable style. Near the end, in considering whether it was a good idea to make a fourth installment in the series at all, he laid down a good prudential principle: “We all love Indiana Jones, yes, but everybody needs that part of their brain that says ‘We better not.’”

Ditto those who would “improve” the past to suit their own preconceptions.

Naturally, I have a lot of thoughts about the use of fictional characters in true stories or settings, as they are often an important tool in adaptation. I may delve into those here sometime soon.