On the 20th May, 1864 the English poet John Clare died. His work was largely neglected in his lifetime. It was only during the twentieth century that his work was re-evaluated and re-incorporated into the canon of English poetry. He was renowned as a nature poet, and was revered for his fierce defence of the English countryside. Clare sought to protect the dignity of the agricultural workers who laboured ceaselessly to save it from the pernicious effects of modernisation and industrialisation.
Clare maintained that the English landscape was sacred and that every native Englishman had and kept a pact with the land that was sacrosanct. All of this changed with the introduction of the Enclosure Acts, laws which were only enacted to benefit wealthy landowners.
Clare saw the destruction first hand, he saw the total desecration of the fields in his native Northamptonshire. Trees and hedges were uprooted, fens were drained and pastures were ploughed. His response was both caustic and uncompromising, it was undeniable that this was both an abomination and a profanity. Clare was only fourteen when these laws were implemented. The legislators justified these as methods that would increase yields.
However, the old way of life rapidly vanished as swathes of precious land were privatised for profit. In his poem “Helpston Green” he opines,
“But now, alas, your hawthorn bowers
All desolate we see
The tyrant’s hand their shade devours
And cuts down every tree.”
The fields were no longer the property of hard working, humble smallholders, they became the sole preserve of the rich, indolent elites.
These shallow, avaricious interlopers had no concept of the divinity in nature, it was simply another resource to exploit, and to further enrich themselves. These new landowners considered their new acquisition as yet another commodity. It was this casual dismissal of centuries of diligence and devotion which shocked him the most. When he learned that his favourite elm trees were to be condemned, he remarked that “I have been several mornings to bid them farewell”. He knew that the dedication of cultivation of these ancient trees was more than work, it was a vocation. In English folklore trees are divine and almost akin to holy totems.
Clare was fragile, and vulnerable. He suffered greatly with his mental health and spent most of his life in asylums. This mental fragility threatened to overshadow his legacy as a poet. However it must still be acknowledged that in spite of his emotional difficulties, his tremendous insight and lucidity shines through his poetry.
April 24th is St. Mark’s Eve, a solemn date of fasting and prayer dedicated to the dying. Tradition in England dictated that those observing the feast must keep vigil in the churchyard between 11PM and 1AM. It was believed that anyone who passed through the church porch during that time was destined to die within that year.
The symbol most commonly associated with St. Mark is a winged lion, an indefatigable and heroic figure. It is an icon reproduced in medieval heraldry. Mark’s influence was especially pronounced in Italy and was particularly revered by communicants of the English Church. The legend still reverberates throughout our culture, albeit in a watered down version in comparison to the devotions of previous centuries.
Mark was born in the spiritual wastelands of North Africa, yet through his tireless evangelism he established the foundations of Christianity in the desert, and ultimately across the whole of the African continent. The English poet John Keats was inspired by this prophetic story of building substance from sand, and could see parallels between this and the spiritual void of England.
Keats spoke of “the vale of soul making”, and alluded to the perpetual struggle of the English people to find a cohesive religious and cultural identity. He also made the declaration that “I am certain of nothing but the Holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the Imagination”. Keats was a visionary poet and part of a long tradition of seers and poets.
This originated with the omens and prophecies of the Druidic priests and was established on this island before continental invasion and colonisation. It has endured and remains a part of us, and our sensibility as a people. The foundation myth of our island was itself based upon a vision.
The legend states that the goddess Diana appeared before Brutus and declared, “beyond the realm of Gaul, a land there lies, sea-girt it lies, where giants dwelt of old. Now void it fits thy people…And kings be born of thee, whose dreaded might shall awe the world and conquer nations bold”. This is our inheritance and it has left an indelible impression on generations of English writers.
Keats’ poem, “The Eve of Saint Mark” focusses upon a vigil attended by a young woman called Bertha. The tone is both dream-like and melancholic. Bertha is sitting in the shadows of the graveyard, reading, praying and contemplating the significance of the occasion.
Keats illustrates this tremendously evocative scene, replete with visions of ghostly silhouettes,
“All was silent, all was gloom
Abroad and in the homely room:
Down she sat, poor cheated soul!
And struck a lamp from the dismal coal”.
In her fatigue she reaches some level of epiphany, as the poem concludes,
“At length her constant eyelids come
Upon the fervent martyrdom;
Then lastly to his holy shrine
Exalt amid the tapers’ shine
At Venice”.
Keats’ observations captured a different England, now lost to modernity.
It was a nation that was still steeped in piety, although that was beginning to wane in his lifetime. At that stage in our history, people still believed in the literal presence of ghosts. It is obvious that during a period of great privation and high mortality, certain beliefs or perhaps superstitions would be prevalent. Many churches in this country are dedicated to St. Mark and continue to attract large congregations. However the Church of England discourages these ancient practices and instead advises parishioners to light candles and pray for those facing death.
It is sad that there are negative connotations, it reflects our disconnection between ourselves and our ancestors and the modern taboo about death. It is the only inevitability in our lives, and we should not be ashamed. Keats faced his own demise with an admirable level of maturity and acceptance. We should acknowledge our own mortality in the same manner.
On the 19th April, 1824 the English poet Lord Byron died. He left an enduring poetic legacy, but also a dark reputation, both historically and culturally. Byron became a legend and a kind of totem for a new and startling epoch. The Romantic age was signified by its individualism, and its cast of unique characters. Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein” symbolises this, the narrative and characterisation almost mirrors the life and times of Byron. Byron was the bete noir of the English establishment and in the wake of scandal was exiled to the far fringes of Europe. Byron personified the louche sensibilities of the aristocracy. His behaviour demonstrated all of the worst characteristics associated with the upper echelons. He was libidinous and profligate with money.
He represented amorality, and displayed the kind of behaviour that fuelled widespread resentment, but in particular within the lower echelons of society. While banished to a remote corner of the continent, he attempted to restore his literary reputation. He was accompanied by his personal doctor, John William Polidori. On that stormy weekend Byron devised a test for his friends and fellow literary luminaries; he wanted to discover who could tell the best ghost story.
Dr. Polidori presented an early version of his story “The Vampyre”, the first prose piece of a legend only evinced in poetry. This mythic creature was also unearthly and immortal, and in Polidori’s imagination an alter ego of Byron himself. This was the first example of a “Byronic” figure before this term had even been coined. It is now such a familiar literary trope that we often fail to remember the origin. The Vampire is high born and has an impressive intellect, he is also tremendously alluring and amorous.
In the story, a young man called Aubrey is intrigued by the presence of a strange and enigmatic figure called Lord Ruthven and the unsettling infamy entwined within the character. Ruthven’s powers are legendary but they are also terrifying, which Aubrey encounters when he meets him in Rome. He leaves under a cloud, but Ruthven’s presence continues to haunt him. This story was a formative and important influence on the Irish writer Bram Stoker, who regenerated this theme nearly eighty years later.
“Dracula” is a new European reanimation of Ruthven, transmogrified into a dapper and urbane Count inhabiting a ghostly castle, rumoured to be the seat of Romanian aristocrats. This remnant of a palace is situated amidst the misty Transylvanian mountains. The trope is revived once more. The vampire seeks the vitality of youth and draws blood to remain immortal, and in the process ensures that the host also remains immortal. However this vampire story was simply a clever version of an old folk legend and not particularly shocking nor surprising.
However the world was undoubtedly disturbed and shaken by the unique and unforgettable creature created by Victor Frankenstein. It is a testament to Shelley’s originality and literary brilliance that her work had a much greater and wider cultural influence, and legacy. “Frankenstein” subtitled “The Modern Prometheus” subverted all of the conventions and mores of the age.
All of the characters imagined on that stormy night were Promethean figures. This was an entirely new concept of the Romantic era. They imagined characters imbued with superhuman and supernatural powers, defiantly challenging the natural order with their quest for omnipotence. Romantic literature exposes the flaws of the human ego when it is left unchecked. The romantic poet is a fragile figure, forced to play an unnatural role in a world of artifice. He is a ghostly presence in an arena that demands authenticity and spurns pretension.
Ghost stories themselves are allegories, designed to illustrate transgressive or repressed sexual desires. This theme resonates throughout “Frankenstein”. There is an all pervading sense of sexual repression, a blight upon the age. The notion that an immortal being could be created and then given life by a mad scientist was in itself a shocking concept.
However Frankenstein manufactured an unearthly and ageless being, utilising the tools of science. It was an entirely artificial construction devoid of original sin and in his own godlike vision it was a creature destined to supersede the follies of mortal men and eventually transcend death itself. Frankenstein himself does not feel ashamed that he has meddled with nature. He only feels a sense of enormous personal achievement, as the inventor of an entirely new kind of creature, one that will never die.
His delusions of grandeur render him a secular deity, entirely detached from the historical and clerical foundations of European civilisation. Imagining a creature that is neither dead nor alive in the conventional sense is now a familiar literary trope, but it was an innovative idea for the time. This was a time of political foment on the continent, particularly in France.
In spite of growing alarm in Britain, the antics of the French revolutionaries left a trail of devastation. They were defiantly and belligerently anti-clerical and looted the churches and monasteries. It was a repudiation of the proud legacy of religious women who raised the status of women after the indignities of Pagan Rome. They had chosen to devote their lives to Christ for centuries, until the revolutionaries forced them to relinquish their property and divest themselves of their visibly religious status. In 1794, 16 Carmelite nuns refused to surrender to them and they were arrested and put to death. Each nun approached the guillotine in calm defiance singing a hymn to the Holy Spirit, their voices silenced by the sound of the blade. It was a scene of true courage.
Percy Shelley was another louche scion of the aristocracy. Shelley also had Byronic characteristics. He too, was profligate, promiscuous and almost by default, intensely alluring to women. The young Mary Godwin was just one out of many young women who had fallen under his spell. Their alliance was scandalous, and they too were exiled to Europe. Yet Europe was unfamiliar, strange and detached from civilisation. It was a continent that would be torn apart by the Napoleonic wars. The Faustian spirit that inspired the greatest art and literature also contained the seeds of its own destruction.
On the 10th April, 1966 the English author Evelyn Waugh died. He was part of a distinctly illustrious literary set. This was a contingent of writers who enjoyed and participated in the decadence of the Jazz Age, but in later life found a much greater meaning and solace in the Church of Rome. This was a distinguished group which also included literary luminaries such as Muriel Spark and Graham Greene.
In a strange twist of fate, Waugh died on Easter Sunday. He had just returned from a Latin Mass at his local church. The date was significant, representing not the end, but a new beginning. Waugh’s Catholicism was not a sudden epiphany, but a gradual, and often fraught process of re-examination, self-recrimination and ultimately atonement.
Waugh’s magnum opus, “Brideshead Revisited” is considered to be the primary conversion novel of the twentieth century. It details the long friendship of two Oxford students, Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder. Flyte is aristocratic, cultured, but most importantly Catholic, the descendant of an old recusant family living in the fading grandeur of Brideshead Castle. Ryder is from a comparatively ordinary, suburban and provincial family. However he is drawn into this intoxicating, exotic and rarefied world of the Flytes.
Ryder’s first meeting with Flyte is purely accidental. Flyte is a “hearty”club of Oxford students who have dedicated themselves to high living. The hearties are hedonistic and libidinous. They are seemingly unconcerned by the intellectual rigours of Oxford and instead spend their time eating luxurious dinners, drinking and carousing. Ryder witnesses a dishevelled and shambolic figure vomiting on the lawn outside his room, this is his first and unlikely introduction to Sebastian Flyte.
Unwittingly, this inopportune encounter leads him on to a path of discovery. The burgeoning friendship also opens up a once hidden corner of England. He discovers the ancient and sublime encapsulated in the grounds of Brideshead. This country pile is a symbol of England’s half buried past. It represents the old religion and the old ways that in spite of numerous attempts to destroy it, have never truly died. There are still traces of it, barely perceptible to us in the modern world, but remain deeply embedded within our history and our culture nonetheless.
All of Waugh’s novels are profound and moving elegies to old England and the Catholic foundations that built it. Political saboteurs like Oliver Cromwell sought in vain to erase it, but failed. Although Waugh is considered a satirist, his cynicism does not sour his fundamental message. The epicurean antics of the young and foolish are contrasted with sombre scenes of aging, death and transfiguration.
It is intensely revealing to observe the shallow nature of many of the characters that inhabit his novels. The Roman Catholic Church became a dominant presence in his life because it offered certainty. The moral strictures provided a constancy and comfort which have never wavered in spite of modern, fashionable opinion. This dependence on tradition has inspired many other writers and thinkers, and continues to do so today.
On February 19th, 1917 the American author Carson McCullers was born. She was a shy and diffident child, and by her own admission an outsider. She spent her childhood in a deeply conservative town that, in her mind, valued conformity above everything else. It seemed to her that imagination, creativity and the pursuit of meaning were of little or no concern to the majority of people who lived in this environment.
However this formative experience was tremendously useful. Her solitary childhood inspired her greatest fiction. It enabled her to write perceptively about the struggles of lonely people living in stifling environments who long to liberate themselves. All her characters yearn to express their own individuality without fear of censure, their difference is never celebrated, it is only feared. They are not embraced by the community, they are exiled to the fringes.
Her portraits are tremendously powerful and moving. She paints each character in painstaking detail. She illuminates their inner lives, giving them the dignity to tell their own stories. They are allowed some credence denied to them by others. They are not ostracised to the darker recesses, they are brought back into the light. Their importance is crucial to the narrative, there is no pretence or artifice. They are both seen and heard by the reader, instead of being relegated to the shadows and silenced.
McCullers endured her own struggles. She was frequently ill, and spent protracted periods convalescing at home. Spending so much time away from her peers at school set her apart. Her closest friendships were forged with her family’s household staff, and her extended family. She grew especially close to her aunts and her grandmothers. This was an education in itself, she developed empathy, maturity and wisdom that belied her youth.
When she was just five years old her father bought her a piano and a typewriter, and for many years she felt conflicted in her ambitions. She was not sure whether she wanted to be a musician or a writer. She remembered her cultural awakening. When she read a biography of Isadora Duncan, her example gave her hope that another life was possible, a life of personal expression and artistic fulfillment.
She yearned to escape from her small town, and make her mark in the wider world. At seventeen she made her first attempt. She moved to New York with a powerful ambition to acquire a place at the prestigious music college, the Julliard School. When she realised that the fees were too steep, she decided to take part-time work and attend night classes in writing.
One of her first stories was an early draft of what would eventually become the novel “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter”. This was a profound insight into the inner life of a profoundly deaf man called John Singer. Singer is detached from the community. His closest friend, another profoundly deaf man called Spiros Antonapoulous loses his mind and is sent to an asylum. He later dies at this institution. Isolated and alone, Singer takes his own life. His tragic death leaves a void in the town and the other characters are forced to contemplate their own moral failures.
It is extraordinary to consider that McCullers was just 23 when this novel was published. Her precocious literary talent was admired and feted by luminaries like Tennessee Williams who encouraged her to adapt her work for the stage. Tragically her health declined in the intervening years. At the age of just 50 she succumbed to a fatal brain haemorrhage. However her legacy as a writer and champion for the marginalised continues to resonate today.
On the 7th January, 1891 the African-American writer, anthropologist, folklorist and filmmaker Zora Neale Hurston was born. She grew up in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first autonomous black principalities in the United States. Her father was the Mayor, and a Baptist minister in the town.
She was educated at a Baptist boarding school in Jacksonville but was forced to leave after her father failed to pay her tuition fees. She worked as a maid and attended night school, before leaving for University in Washington. While on the course she grew fascinated by anthropology and folklore.
It opened up her mind to other cultures, which seemed so remote and distinct from the earthy humour and superstition of her hometown. However, as her upbringing was so detached from the experience of white Americans, it gave her a much greater sense of appreciation for the wisdom that she acquired growing up in an all black neighbourhood. She realised that her memories of the stories, traditions and rituals had a profound significance. She decided to continue to pursue anthropology as an academic subject, and she also composed short stories and satirical pieces.
In 1925 she was granted a scholarship at Columbia University, and three years later she received her B.A in anthropology. Her literary and scholarly talents were recognised by the philanthropist and literary patron Charlotte Osgood Mason. She provided Hurston with a stipend of $200 a month to help further her research into folklore. In 1935 she published her first literary anthology on African-American folklore called “Mules and Men”. This was swiftly followed by the novels “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and “Moses, Man of the Mountain”. Her extensive research work took her to the Southern states of America and also the Caribbean, where she collected stories and testimonies from the African diaspora.
In 1938, another collection of folklore was published. It was called “Tell My Horse” and it details the syncretic beliefs of the post-colonial world. Hurston’s work was overlooked in her lifetime, as she was overshadowed by literary titans like Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. Both Wright and Hughes were overtly partisan in their political beliefs, and this inevitably gave them more gravitas culturally. Hurston only reflected her experiences, and did not perceive herself as a propagandist for the cause of racial equality. Her objectivity, and obvious affection for the community of Eatonville resonates in her writing.
On the 1st January, 1988 the first English language edition of the novel “Love in the Time of Cholera”, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez was published. It was something of a gift to the Anglophone literary world, as it opened up a new and exciting frontier of writing and writers.
The culture of post-colonial Latin America was once hidden from the rest of the world. It was a region that was considered mysterious and exotic, and Marquez was an expert and a vivid voice describing this colourful and multidimensional corner of the world.
The novel is set in an era where tradition and modernity converge. It is a confusing time for the characters who inhabit a place of instability and uncertainty. The confusion stems from the imbalance between pragmatic duty, loyalty and the affairs of the heart.
The characters are suspended on a precipice, a precarious line between the old world and the new world. This is illustrated with a dramatic and auspicious scene, the occasion of a hot air balloon ride on the eve of the twentieth century.
The main protagonists are the fastidious, correct, upright Doctor Urbino, his wife Fermina, and her lost love Florentino. Florentino is a humble shipping clerk who, as the story unfolds, works his way up to become the manager of the company.
He is revealed to have poetic aspirations and dreams. Their initial courtship is clandestine, and fails when by chance the doctor arrives in Fermina’s life. She is persuaded by her family to marry him.
The contrasts between enlightenment and superstition, medicine and primitivism could not be more stark. The parallels between the epidemic of cholera and the pathology of love are intensely moving. Urbino seems immune to affection, and perceives marriage as purely pragmatic. He is puzzled by the very idea of romantic love, and how it is possible between two opposing genders.
Urbino dies, allowing the revival of Fermina and Florentina’s love affair. Even in old age, their love has refused to die. It has left a permanent imprint. Marquez detailed an alluring and magical world that has continued to charm.
On the 20th of November, 1752 the English poet Thomas Chatterton was born. He was born in Bristol to a family who played an important and prestigious role in the office of sexton for St Mary Radcliffe Church. His mother, Sarah Chatterton was a part-time seamstress. His father, also called Thomas, was a numismatist who died shortly after he was born.
He was educated at Edward Colston’s charity school, reputedly on the site of a ruined Carmelite convent. His childhood was steeped in mystery and myth, but also difficulty and poverty. This inauspicious start in life did not bode well for his future. In spite of his efforts to establish himself as a professional poet he died at the tragically young age of 17. His death occurred in murky circumstances. Many assumed that he had taken his own life.
However other commentators have suggested that his demise may have been accidental, as his death was attributed to arsenic poisoning. Arsenic was a common treatment for venereal disease at that time. Nonetheless his death still created a myth that lingers to this day, of the tortured, doomed and misunderstood poet destined for obscurity.
His death and the legend that surrounded it influenced other writers and artists for at least a century afterwards, and beyond. In 1835 the French playwright Alfred de Vigny wrote the visionary drama “Chatterton”. The troubled Victorian poet and Catholic mystic Francis Thompson believed that he was saved from suicide by the comforting presence of Chatterton’s ghost.
The myth was also immortalised in the popular imagination by the pre-Raphaelite artist Henry Wallis in his 1856 painting “The Death of Chatterton”. In 2010 the outsider artist George Harding was inspired to create his own interpretation of this iconic image in the painting “Everything is Real except God and Death”, inspired by his experience as an in-patient at Bethlem hospital.
Harding re-imagined the mythic figure of Chatterton, and re-created the infamous death scene with himself at the centre. However in the painting, Harding is not dead, but in a state of madness and confusion. In the grip of his delusion, he has no head, in its place is the Eye of Providence. The painting illustrates that disturbing and unsettling no-man’s land that exists between reality and insanity in which death itself has no meaning.
Chatterton’s extraordinary life and death provides a dark inspiration for those who have found themselves adrift in society. Chatterton was an imaginative and sensitive child. When he was six he amused himself with solitary pursuits, and spent entire days reading and writing. At school he was prone to daydreaming, and neglected his academic work. He started writing poetry at the age of eleven, and this was encouraged by his mother.
He was fascinated by history, particularly folklore and many of his earliest writings illuminate the old myths and tales of England. The ancient legends and landscapes of England, especially Bristol animated his verse. This was something that he cultivated while still a schoolboy at Colston’s school. It was staggering to consider that he was only sixteen, and unlike many youths of today who are only too keen to forge ahead and create new ideas for the future, he was more inclined to look back into the past.
Chatterton adored the rarefied world of Medieval England. This was a period replete with ornate mythology and lore. It was a realm so captivating that he would frequently lose himself within it. He even adopted the persona of a Medieval poet, and attempted to appropriate the syntax and style. He created the pseudonym “Thomas Rowley”. The “Rowley” poems are an astounding testament to his literary and linguistic talents, honed at such a young age.
Chatterton believed that the character that he imagined, of a Medieval scholar, scribe and Priest, was so convincing, that he could fool the literary establishment. He appealed to the great and good of Bristol. He told them that he had discovered a neglected masterpiece written by an unknown and unrenowned poet from the fifteenth century. However they were unwilling to remunerate him.
Unchastened by this rejection, he sent his appeal further, to the esteemed Horace Walpole, who initially believed his account until he was informed of Chatterton’s age. He was sceptical of the veracity of the poems, and consulted his friend Thomas Gray. Gray instantly declared that the poems were fake. Walpole wrote a denouncing letter to Chatterton in which he called his poems “facile”, and the correspondence ended.
The rejection wounded him, and it sent Chatterton on a path to self-destruction, and led to his untimely demise. It seems tragic now to consider that he died not knowing that his work of medieval parody and pastiche would become a major influence on the Romantic poets, and inspire further generations of English poets.
On the 21st October, 1772 the English poet, literary critic, philosopher and theologian Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born. Coleridge was a prominent member of a rarefied group of writers and artists known collectively as the Romantics. This was an intellectual movement dedicated to the cultivation of the human imagination, regarded as the ultimate source of enlightenment and the key to the development and progression of civilisation.
In our modern understanding of the term, Romantics are idealistic dreamers with an excessively optimistic perception of human nature and its destiny. Romantics were the heirs of utopians, who themselves had too much faith in humankind, at least in terms of solving the almost intractable problems of existence. However we are living in a time of cynicism and scepticism, and these concepts do not have much significance or resonance, but in the past these ideas were considered radical.
Writers associated with utopianism include the moral philosopher William Godwin.
In 1793 Godwin published “An Enquiry Into Political Justice”. This essay fired the imagination of a young William Wordsworth. He implored others, in a spirit of reckless extravagance to “throw aside your books of chemistry” and urged his contemporaries to focus on Godwin’s theories instead. Coleridge himself was encouraged by his message and composed a “hymn” honouring him, announcing in emphatic tones.
“For that thy voice, in Passion’s stormy day,
When wild I roam’d the bleak heath of Distress,
Bade the bright form of Justice meet my way-
And told me that her name was HAPPINESS.”
At this time, Coleridge was young and fiery and determined to rid the world of all of its iniquities.
He was a bold and ambitious young man with tremendous zeal. However he was also afflicted with a sensitivity that was frequently misunderstood and maligned by mainstream society and its institutions. He was invalided out of the Army, and in spite of early academic promise, failed to graduate from Cambridge University. He published his first volume of poetry in 1796, which also featured poems from Charles Lamb and Robert Southey.
One year later he moved to a cottage in Nether Stowey, Somerset. He resided there for a year and created his best work, including “Kubla Khan”. This visionary, extraordinary poem was composed after an opium induced dream. The poem describes Xanadu, the summer capital of Mongol China. It details Emperor Kublai Khan’s pleasure dome, situated next to a holy river. The poem is a testament to the sacred and hallowed elements of the natural world.
Voyages into far flung lands are enduring themes in English literature. These are mythic tales which are not meant to be literally true. These are works designed to represent a national sensibility. These reflect a common experience living on a cold, dark island cut off from the rest of the world. The yearning for escape to more exotic climes speaks to an insular people who have a deep longing for a land of promise, a paradise, or even a garden of Eden.
Coleridge and his fellow Romantics were deeply committed to the artistic recreation of Godwin’s utopia. Utopia is more of a symbol than an actual destination, it represents the centre of goodness and harmony. The political philosophy of utopia has dwindled, but the art it inspired has left a lasting and profound legacy.
The 4th of July is a date of immense significance in the United States of America. It is an annual celebration of American independence, traditionally marked with patriotic displays, fireworks and family gatherings. This year, the national festivities have an element of piquancy, in the wake of the Biden/Harris defeat which was widely perceived to be a universal rejection of globalist and “woke” politics.
However this situation is not new. The USA has always struggled to define its cultural identity. Competing and often contradictory political ideologies are a perennial feature preventing the nation from fully realising itself. Americans themselves will have different ideas about what it actually means to be American, especially in the modern age.
The defining picture for those of us who are not American, is totally different. The portrait we are shown of Americans is often unflattering. It is quite apt that this was the nation that popularised animation, as the depiction of the average American is cartoonish. It is sad that this caricature of Americans as coarse, obese, loud and over familiar perpetuates. It is, however, a goldmine for writers, who have rich material to play with these stereotypes. Many of them have a field day.
The stereotype originates from the post-war period, a time of increased prosperity. Many Americans enjoyed the benefits of material comforts and luxuries, but there was a paucity of spiritual meaning in their lives. Their increased wealth meant that they became detached from their ancestors, who endured many hardships in their quest to build a new nation. Their sense of a shared history did not seem to matter to them anymore, as they looked forward to the promises of the future instead.
In 1952, Kurt Vonnegut published his debut and prophetic novel “Player Piano” which predicted the emergence of what we now define as the globalist technocracy. It is an America dominated by machines, and Americans are the servants, rather than the masters of them.
It is a desolate, alien landscape, haunted with ghosts from the ancient past, as he notes,
“Here in the basin of the river bend, the Mohawks had overpowered the Algonquins, the Dutch the Mohawks, the British the Dutch, the Americans the British. Now, over bones and rotting palings and cannonballs and arrow heads, there lay a triangle of steel and masonry buildings…Where man had once howled and hawked at one another, and fought nip-and-tuck with nature as well, the machines hummed and clicked…the fruits of peace”.
Vonnegut recognised that the American sensibility was characterised by conflict. Violence was at the core of its creation, it seemed embedded within the psyche.
American society was admired across the world. Many people left their home countries, driven by the alluring promise of success and wealth to find a new life on this vast new frontier. However cultural and spiritual values were frequently set aside in this quest. It did not seem quite so important to acknowledge the principles of the Founding Fathers, those honourable men who built the foundations of the nation on virtue, civility and divine providence. Maintaining a strong and dynamic economy is not enough, a nation can only survive with a shared vision.
Consequently, the hope that once inspired people dwindled into despair and cynicism. Cultural misunderstandings spiralled into malevolent sectarianism, and the rise of gangs. Civil society was under threat, but in reality this was always tenuous. The majority were afraid of minorities. Prejudice and discrimination seemed inevitable, and this tribal mentality was reactivated once more. In 1971, E.L Doctorow published “The Book of Daniel”, a work of fiction loosely based on the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs.
Doctorow alludes to the subtle, and not so subtle undercurrents of antisemitism that coincided with the real fears that the USA could be torn asunder by the “Reds”. The fifties were a decade of real paranoia as Americans had only just defeated another foreign threat. Doctorow reflects,
“Many historians have noted an interesting phenomenon in American life in the years immediately after a war. In the councils of government fierce partisanship replaces the necessary political conditions of wartime…It is attributed to the continuance beyond the end of the war of the war hysteria. Unfortunately, the necessary emotional fever for fighting a war cannot be turned off like a water faucet..like a fiery furnace at white heat, it takes a considerable time to cool”.
Now, contemporary chroniclers have noted that President Trump has revived a new kind of fiery rhetoric in an attempt to unify Americans.
However American civic society has been hanging by a delicate thread, it has been riven with cultural divisions for decades. The so-called culture war was a battle driven by the forces of modernity at the expense of tradition. The intransigence stems from those who remain wedded to the belief that progress is both inevitable and unstoppable.
Vonnegut’s prescient novel predicted the ennui of twenty-first century America, as one of his protagonists laments,
“People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don’t apply any more. People have no choice but to become second rate machines themselves, or wards of machines”.
This brilliantly encapsulates the technocracy, and the consequent withering away of American cultural life.
Americans have been accused of being the chief instigators of artificiality and fake sentimentality. This accusation was levelled against the main creator of such a hollow world, Walt Disney. Doctorow recognised this, in the closing chapter of the novel he observes,
“The ideal Disneyland patron may be said to be one who responds to a process of symbolic manipulation that offers him his culminating and quintessential sentiment at the moment of purchase”.
Obviously, the USA is not Disneyland. However individuals like Disney have been guilty of perpetuating an entirely false portrayal of America and its people. It is time now, that the true picture of the country must emerge.
Ponderings 