or if people could buy ready-made children at a shop - Samuel Butler's comedy

Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh is the book.  Ernest Pontifex is badly treated by his father, a clergyman, his mother, a religious fanatic, and the brutal pointlessness of his school.  His vocation as an Anglican priest is meaningless, unconnected from anyone’s lived experience, so unconnected poor Ernest lands in prison.  His friend is a con man, his wife an alcoholic, his family cruel, his beliefs empty.  But everything works out all right.

Butler’s novel is a comedy in the tradition of Thackeray and Forster.  Their omniscient narrator – I am currently reading A Room with a View (1908) and enjoying the narrator enormously – is replaced by Ernest’s godfather, a character in the story with his own opinions on everything that are often not those of Ernest.  He is collaborating with Ernest to tell his story, so he knows everything Ernest knows, or pretends to, and also knows more.  Semi-omniscient, and a clever solution.  He is often sarcastic:

Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.  (Ch. 6)

He is more often sarcastic about the opinions of others, like this mockery of Ernest’s father:

If [Ernest’s mother] could have given birth to a few full-grown clergymen in priest’s orders – of moderate views, but inclining rather to Evangelicalism, with comfortable livings and in all respects facsimiles of [Ernest’s father] himself – why, there might have been more sense in it; or if people could buy ready-made children at a shop of whatever age and sex they liked, instead of always having to make them at home and to begin at the beginning with them – that might do better, but as it was he did not like it.  (Ch. 20)

The reader who does not find that funny will not find much in this book funny.

This narrator does not have much to do with the physical world, but he is good with psychological metaphor.  This is a favorite – teenage Ernest has been not quite caught in a sin – will he confess all to his mother?:

Ernest, through sheer force of habit, of the sofa, and of the return of the associated ideas, was still so moved by the siren’s voice as to yearn to sail towards her, and fling himself into her arms, but it would not do; there were other associated ideas that returned also, and the mangled bones of too many murdered confessions were lying whitening round the skirts of his mother’s dress, to allow him any possibility to trust her further.  (Ch. 40)

The fact is that I don’t care much whether Victorian ideals and institutions are demolished.  That part of The Way of All Flesh has receded into history.  There is a passage early on where the narrator mocks the philistinism of Ernest’s grandfather, compared to Ernest’s (eventual) freedom from received ideas about art.  But by the time Butler is writing, anti-philistinism is also a received idea, the shot at the old-timers funny but cheap.  The Bildungsroman, though, and the great comedy of a son escaping from his father, even if it lands him in prison, are stories that have to be told again and again.

Again I asked Ernest whether he minded my printing this. He winced - Samuel Butler grinds himself to a powder in The Way of All Flesh

Samuel Butler’s posthumous The Way of All Flesh (1903) became, by chance, a Victorian tombstone, a novel-long critique of Victorianism published just after the fact.  He wrote the novel in the 1870s and 1880s, amidst published books on Darwinism and religion, as well as his amusing satirical Utopian novel Erewhon (1872).

Butler was not really a novelist, though – more of a controversialist – so it must have been a surprise that he had such an accomplished novel in the drawer.  It is something of a family saga, a rare genre for Victorians, it has an unusual narrator, and is psychologically sharp.  Visually, the book does not do much.  The insights are social and personal.

It is a novel of ideas that attacks the Victorian family, church, and schools.  Cambridge comes off well, but not the education that “had been an attempt, not so much to keep him [Ernest, the protagonist] in blinkers as to gouge his eyes out altogether” (Ch. 61).  This is just before poor Ernest does something so dumb he goes to prison for six months.  Long, long, long ago I asked where the English prison novels were, since it was such a common theme in French fiction.  Here it is, not where I expected.

The first fifth of the novels covers Ernest Pontifex’s ancestors, as personally known to the elderly narrator.  Ernest’s great-grandfather is a kindly craftsman, an 18th century figure, his grandfather a vulgar merchant (“Yet when a man is very fond of his money it is not easy for him at all times to be very fond of his children also,” Ch. 5), his father a narrow and cruel Anglican priest.  “The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday” (Ch. 26).

Ernest is sensitive and artistic, loving music especially.  The principle of the central three-fifths of the novel is to grind Ernest down to powder, expunging all of the false Victorianism from him.  Father, school, and church are the first means of punishment, then prison and a noble but bad marriage.  Ernest emerges as a perfect – what – a perfect gadfly.  A perfect idealist, who publishes controversial books about Darwinism and religion.  My favorite bit of grinding is incidental, Ernest’s attendance at a comic burlesque of Macbeth: “’What rot Shakespeare is after this,’ he exclaimed, involuntarily” (Ch. 70).  Even Victorian bardolatry has to be purged to make the new man. In the last fifth he builds himself back up.

Autobiography, obviously, but with the clever addition of the narrator, who is writing up Ernest’s story with his permission, and even presence:

Again I asked Ernest whether he minded my printing this.  He winced, but said, “No, not if it helps you to tell your story: but don’t you think it is too long?” (Ch. 53)

The narrator, who freely expresses his opinions about everything, is the constant narratorial voice, which is a clever way to split the author between the narrator and protagonist, allowing more irony and tamping any self-pity.  Both are Butler, so neither are Butler, and they can disagree on things.

It's a good novel.  I can see how The Way of All Flesh, published when it was, felt like a necessary novel to many readers.

My ignorance of technical terms has led me doubtless into many errors - my imaginary Erewhon

The narrator of Erewhon spends his first three months in the strange country learning the language.

I found to my sorrow that the resemblance to European things, which I had so frequently observed hitherto, did not hold good in the matter of language; for I could detect no analogy whatever between this and any tongue of which I have the slightest knowledge, - a thing which made me think it possible that I might be learning Hebrew. (Ch. 8)

Hebrew, because he thinks he has stumbled upon a lost tribe of Israel.  He begins his study with numbers and objects, logically, but the bulk of the book is concerned with abstractions – the College of Unreason, the religious beliefs of the Erewhonians, the details of their legal system.  He claims that the long excerpts from "The Book of Machines" and other works are his own translations – he smuggles the manuscripts back to England under absurd circumstances.  Prof. Mayhew observes that reading an Italian text full of cognates is easier than one about household objects, but Italian, for him, is full of cognates.  Our hero insists he has no knowledge whatsoever of Greek or Hebrew, and that the Erewhonian tongue is completely unfamiliar.

My ignorance of technical terms has led me doubtless into many errors, and I have occasionally, where I found translation impossible, substituted purely English names and ideas for the original Erewhonian ones, but the reader may rely on my general accuracy. (Ch. 22)

Ya know, in a different kind of book, a disclaimer like this would set off the unreliability alarm bells.  Add to this the narrator’s nutty insistence on the Lost Tribe theory, and his crackpot, even evil, final-chapter scheme to profit from it (it involves sugar plantations and a gunboat).  Maybe this fellow is not altogether right in the head.

I don’t think there’s quite enough of these clues, or that they’re arranged in a tight enough pattern, to spend much time looking for the secret subtext.  Butler wants to take his shots at the Anglican church, classical education, false middle-class respectability, and he wants to find a context for his amusing ideas about the Darwinian evolution of machinery.  Anything else is just messing around.

The messing around, though, suggests the possibility of another novel.  A better novel, says I.  The traveler arrives in Erewhon, learns the language, confidently but badly, and proceeds to misunderstand everything he sees.  The Colleges of Unreason are, of course, Colleges of Reason – the narrator never figures out how negations work.  Criminals go to prison, and ill people to the doctor, just like anywhere else.  The church is treated with respect.  There are of course no Professors of Inconsistency and Evasion.

The plot, as such, can go a couple of different ways.  In Erewhon, the nation that at first seems bizarre turns out to be a veiled version of England, at least in its hypocrisies and absurdities.  But perhaps it is a genuine Utopia, the vices only existing in the mind of the uncomprehending and stubborn traveler.  Or perhaps he has been knocked on the head, and has been in England all along.  No wonder he picks up the language so quickly.

This would be a clever book.  Erewhon is a clever book, too, but the one I want to read would be more clever.

Cultivating a sufficient distrust of printed matter - notes on Erewhonian pedagogy

Erewhon (1872), in the antique (1927) Modern Library edition I read, is 308 pages long.  The first 43 pages move the narrator from his life as a New Zealand shepherd across the mountains to the hidden Erewhonian civilization.  This passage for some reason ends with a page of a Handel score, for harpsichord.  The basics are covered for 44 more pages – dress, food, and so on, and questions about how these people live, not answers.  Then, for 197 uninterrupted pages, satire.  How we all love satire.  In Book Blog Land, I often see “satire” used as a kind of swear word.  Two final chapters in 25 pages, “Escape” and “Conclusion,” finish off the novel-like business of the novel, bringing the narrator back to England.

Except for some odd, odd, odd business with the narrator, all of which I want to save for tomorrow, the heart, meat, and spirit of Erewhon is in the satirical chapters, two-thirds of the novel.  Religious practices, somehow involving a Musical Bank.  Education at the Colleges of Unreason.  The wisdom of The Book of the Machines.  Crime as illness; illness as crime.  The afterlife and the beforelife.

Often, episodes work by correspondence.  The Musical Bank is a church!  You go there to withdraw a special currency that everyone says is valuable, but does not actually allow you to buy anything, but you do get to hear some pretty music while banking.  Ha ha!  Or, not.

At the Colleges of Unreason, youngsters study nothing but “hypothetics,” for which they learn the hypothetical language.  Students “will spend years in learning to translate some of their own good poetry into the hypothetical language – to do so with fluency being reckoned a distinguishing mark of a scholar and a gentleman.”  Hey, I do believe Butler is talking about Latin!

This is thin stuff, really, but as Butler piles on the nonsense, the satire becomes more tangled, and thus, to my mind, sharper, more universal.  The allegory falls away.

Life, [the professors of Consistency and Unreason] urge, would be intolerable if men were to be guided in all they did by reason and reason only.

Unreason is a part of reason; it must therefore be allowed its full share in stating the initial conditions.

"It is not our business," [the professor of Worldly Wisdom] said, "to help students to think for themselves.  Surely this is the very last thing which one who wishes them well should encourage them to do.  Our duty is to ensure that they shall think as we do, or at any rate, as we hold it expedient to say we do."

One man was refused a degree for being too often and too seriously in the right, while a few days before I came a whole batch had been plucked for insufficient distrust of printed matter.

All of these aphorisms are from Chapters 21 and 22.  Are they wrong?  Yes, but, completely wrong?  One should certainly cultivate, for example, a sufficient distrust of Erewhon and its author.

The deeply rooted wish to spread opinions - Samuel Butler and Utopian exhaustion

Let one book lead to another, I advise, but I feel I am demonstrating the limits of the thesis.  Flaubert’s nightmarish siege of Carthage leads to Richard Jefferies’s nightmarish London bog in a book that is also an ecological semi-Utopia, so that leads to the satirical Utopia of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872).  Meanwhile, exotic Flaubert leads to exotic Anatole France (Thaïs, 1890), which inevitably sends me to another satirical Utopia, France’s 1908 Penguin Island, which has pretty much worn we out.  I should read William Morris next, shouldn’t I, News from Nowhere (1890)?  But I'm beat. Some other time.

The problem is two-fold.  First, these books are all second-rate.  I staunchly defend the second-rate, but a diet of nothing-but is wearing.  The characterization in these books is, to be generous, thin.  The stories do not necessarily have much forward momentum.  I’m not sure they should.  Still.

Second, the genuine satires, like Erewhon and Penguin Island and, to drop back to the source, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), are dang slippery.  The authors are, certainly, puncturing hypocrisies and mocking the unmockable, but they are also, at times, entirely serious.  Aren’t they?  So I’m batted back and forth, constantly on edge.  Was that joke just a joke?  A joke with a target I don’t recognize?  A joke that is not a joke at all?  I am thinking of Thomas Carlyle – as I read more of him, I realized that the more outrageous his claim, the more likely he was to really mean it.

Butler’s Erewhonians imprison people when they are ill and send them to the doctor when they embezzle funds or knife their neighbor.  They abolished machinery, or a lot of it, because of fears that machines would evolve into Robot Overlords.  They were all vegetarians for a while, until the entire nation briefly tried living without eating vegetables, although it was all right to eat “what had died a natural death, such as fruit that was lying on the ground and about to rot, or cabbage-leaves that had turned yellow in autumn” (Ch 27, “The Views of an Erewhonian Philosopher Concerning the Rights of Vegetables”).

Butler, my imagined Butler – I know nothing about the actual Butler – may or may not advocate vegetarianism, although I doubt it, but the anti-vegetable position is surely a folly, a mockery of systems that violate common sense.  How about the anti-machine position?  I suspected that I was reading the equivalent of a needle being threaded.

What could it matter to me how many absurdities the Erewhonians might adopt?  Nevertheless I longed to make them think as I did, for the wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence.  But let this pass. (Ch. 20)

I recognize the target of that passage.  It’s the author of Erewhon, and perhaps others, too, including, just possibly, the author of Wuthering Expectations.