The Tudors have always captured the imagination. They have been especially popular in recent decades. Because we are so familiar with the characters and events, Mantel is free to abbreviate her descriptions and background. We don’t need one more full-length portrait of big King Henry bursting at the seams. We don’t require more descriptions of ruffles and hose. Mantel has the freedom to indulge her tightly circumscribed narrative voice: most of us don’t stop to marvel at the details of our world as we move through it. We don’t start every encounter with a mental description of our colleague, boss or mate. Reading Mantel’s book, we are free to assume many of the details that Thomas Cromwell would naturally neglect and instead focus on our immersion, through his eyes, in the conflicts of the age.
A disadvantage to this method, in my opinion, is that the work is rather cool and detached. The world we explore, the world of this worldly man, is rather shadowy. A character as colourful as Henry VIII is rather muted in the circle of chiaroscuro drawn among Cromwell’s thoughts.
It makes sense that this sort of book about the Tudors was necessary, a book in which the passions are relegated to the royal chambers and to distant battlefields, while we listen in on the discussions of the adults left in charge. In this depiction of events, the events themselves must be positioned at a remove. Our attention will be on the dread and the remorse that attend history. In tumultuous times, the people with intellect just do their best, and they suffer.
The consequence, in my opinion, is a portrayal of a man of action that is comfortably devoid of action. The “Wolf Hall” books describe a writer’s world, don’t they? It’s a world of reflection and refraction, a world I well understand. This is certainly how I am most comfortable describing action, from a vantage point afterward, examining the quiet ripple of effects, surveying the wreckage. It’s something in the character of the writer, this impulse to quietly tread from still stone to still stone in the stream. That’s fine, and it makes for a provocative depiction of a historical figure who, by most accounts, was rather brutal.
A writer likes to see him or herself in the mirror of history, seeing the same fragile light of intellect in the eyes of Holbein’s portrait. But does that serve as a true guide to the age? Isn’t it likely that Cromwell was only what he seemed, a very capable and willing administrator, and a man who was, in fact, content with his duties and free of the impulse to philosophize? Isn’t it possible that people of action, in an age of action, are quite happy with the life of action, like football players who live from game to game without needing justification?
I enjoy Mantel’s work, and, believe me, I’m personally much more at home in her worlds than in many alternatives. But I do feel at times as though the “Wolf Hall” books were written by a book club as a kind of philosophical proof that the world has always been a Platonic dialogue. Mantel’s Cromwell spends a lot of time in discussion, sitting in gardens, strolling with colleagues and family, meditating over an aperitif. Is it Cromwell’s London we are invited to see, or the author’s? There’s little question which is comfier. But ultimately, I do think we need to be put a little more on our guard; we need a dose of the alien that lurks in history.
Whether we like it or not, it’s action that moves history. Commonly, historical fiction builds sympathy by access to thoughts and emotions, which we assume, rightly or wrongly, are constant. Then the narrative turns to action in order to break the bond of sympathy. Why is that? What is alien about action? It’s the concrete expression of difference. It’s true that Mantel doesn’t hide it. We are drawn close to blood and violence. There are heads on pikes; there is the beheading of Anne. But they are primarily offstage. And they become aesthetic pieces, in the final analysis. Exposed to the moments of shock, we withdraw into the breathable atmosphere of mood and thought for many subsequent pages.
Saturday, July 17, 2021
Thursday, July 15, 2021
The Present Perfect
Part Six
I’ve returned to Wolf Hall, finally reading the third book in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy. I came to it with great anticipation. The two previous volumes had revolutionized my thinking about historical fiction. They were intelligent and insightful. Events of the Tudor era, usually portrayed in breathless style, were humanized and lent some gravity. Sure, it’s fun to indulge in the scandal of the time, but the issues were serious, and the stakes were high, not only for the players in the Henry VIII’s drama, but for all the souls affected by the tumults of the Reformation, down to the present-day Irish. It was refreshing to enter into the quieter moments of the time and to be convinced of the dread that pervaded King Henry’s court.
I’ve had time to build up anticipation, so it would be natural that I felt some disappointment once I started reading. Moreover, Mantel’s style is not the type to stun or overwhelm in the first pages. It builds in its effect. As I started reading, I had to accustom myself again to her cadence, slow and stately. I had to get used to the narrator’s point of view. Mantel adopts that unsettlingly intimate third person, according to which Cromwell is rarely referred to by name. Instead, ‘he’ is so often the subject of sentences that it can become confusing. Every so often, the voice shifts into ‘we’, as though voicing Cromwell’s thoughts. Quotes begin in quotation marks and then continue without them, as though narrative about Cromwell becomes Cromwell’s notes. There is consistency in it; Mantel is precise. It creates a sense of seeing through Cromwell’s eyes while still maintaining the detachment of a third-person narrative. The question isn’t about Mantel’s execution but whether the effort was worth the effect. It’s always interesting; it’s occasionally annoying. I’m not ready to judge it yet.
My questions are broader. What does the point of view tell us about Mantel’s goals? What is she revealing about Cromwell and his times? Is her focus on Cromwell or his times? Is her focus more on the specific or the general? Are we meant to finish the book feeling satisfied with what we learned about Cromwell and Tudor England or satisfied with story and character and the wisdom between the book’s covers? (Both, of course! and all of the above. But most books do tilt in one direction or another.)
Mantel chose a dimly perceived figure from a dramatic time. Thomas Cromwell, the king’s troll and executioner, who has had so little to say to us across the distance of time, suddenly has a voice. It turns out to be a finely modulated voice, giving shape to surprisingly refined thoughts and feelings. Mantel’s goal to humanize this obscure historical figure is achieved: Cromwell emerges as a sympathetic and coherent human being. It turns out he’s surrounded by people with adult voices. The past is not so alien. We might be surprised, as though most of what we read makes children of the people in the past.
Tuesday, July 13, 2021
Whatever I may say about medievalism as a concept, the actual ages we call medieval were populated by real individuals. And the shades of interpretation I’m applying to evolutions in grammatical usage pale in the light of that simple fact. It’s fun to play out thought experiments that no one lives long enough to see validated. It’s another thing when we discuss history itself. Accuracy means something when dealing with real people and real events. We owe that much to the human beings, the great and the unsung alike, who have shared our greater story. They themselves are not thought experiments.
Historical fiction seeks to bring people from other ages alive again. There are a variety of impulses motivating authors to do that, some motives at odds with others. Do we want to honour historical figures or to entertain ourselves? Do we look to increase our understanding of those people or to stress-test versions of ourselves in extreme circumstances? We might understand our motives better by answering the question, how alien do we find characters from the past? It’s a profound question. It’s one thing, for example, to understand in an academic sense why the slave trade flourished in the seventeenth century. It’s another to place yourself within the skin of a slave trader. When we revile the slave trader, what are we expressing? It’s the easiest sort of moral statement, of course. At a deeper level, isn’t it an expression of our alienation from the past? An honest answer to the question of alienation can tell us a lot about ourselves.
In any case, I think it’s safe to say that Hilary Mantel is one of those who find sympathy with historical figures. She’s been open in lectures and interviews about her agenda, wanting to explore the common humanity of figures in history. A figure like Thomas Cromwell presents a special challenge. He’s a man who emerges from the historical record as something of a riddle, a commoner who came to rule in Henry VIII’s name and rule quite astutely. He was reviled by many for his low birth and for his ruthlessness (which differed little from others’) and for his part in England’s breach with the Catholic Church. Contemporary portraits are not flattering and tend to be caricatured. We’re left with little but the bare facts of his policy and official acts. How to draw a human portrait?
How do you make someone real to a modern reader without compromising authenticity? How to emphasize similarities among human beings while honouring the difference of their culture and time? We start with small things: point of view, speech patterns, and scene construction. The tough decisions about details will have a lasting impact on the portrait.
Sunday, July 11, 2021
What is unique about my terracotta artist at the Oude Sluis, or about my local bits of folk art and decoration, the things that seem to make their walls, corners or plazas so special? Why, not so very much, of course. It’s folk art, and it looks an awful lot like folk art everywhere. The irony is how special they make us feel, these small flourishes by generous souls. As art – the way critics may judge art, – they don’t amount to much. As creations, or as gestures, they are great. What does that say about art? Does the refinement that separates individual pieces from the majority also separate them from our sentiments?
It might seem like the moderns had exactly that program in mind. At the least, sentiment was to be flouted. At most, the entire artistic program had to go. Central to the old program was the individualism that defined Renaissance thinking. It had to go, the baby in the bathwater. Might not, then, if that is so, have modern art been the harbinger of a new medievalism?
In its anonymity, my local art may have more in common with medieval art than with the productions of the Renaissance, during which artworks sought to distinguish themselves from the rest. Realism and individual character were the currency that Renaissance artists traded in, and they strove to create unique identity in themselves as much as in each creation. As a new type of culture hero, they launched a five-hundred-year quest for glory.
It took the eccentric twentieth century to challenge the hegemony of Renaissance priorities. Look at Bauhaus as one influential example. It stood for style over statement. Or the statement was the style. Or the idea stood over the art, or the group aesthetic over the individual. In just about any sort of analysis, it turned the model of art that they had inherited on its head. The Romantic-era heroic artist was benched. Name a Bauhaus hero.
The medieval artist, similarly, worked in anonymity. Art was produced collaboratively in workshops, master with apprentices. Art was created on order, and creating art was a job.
Returning to my grammar question, having considered the withering away of forms that cater to abstraction and speculation, that serve conditional and causal thinking, that facilitate the flow of logic and longer utterances, might we just conclude that these are the language geek’s parallel signs of a shift? Have we determined that in this brave, new world experience will be flattened and individualism (of circumstance as well as person) will be stripped of priority?
I’m seeing phantoms. This is my conspiracy theory. While other loonies complain about being Fauci’d; I see monks moving into the libraries and priests installed in the multiplexes. We are discovering some new medieval state, I postulate, just to scare the children, something hinted at by the Chinese experiment, perhaps: a strange model of market autocracy that requires the absolute submersion of the individual circumstance.
My conspiracy theory turns up signs in superhero motifs, where every character is a type. Types are a characteristic of medieval thinking (castle, knight, bishop, queen, and ... pawn). It shows up in television series, where characters are often types. And, yes, it shows up in literature, too. Genre works are particularly susceptible to the new world view of types over individuals. Scifi, westerns, romance and thrillers could hardly exist without typing. Then there’s historical fiction.
Friday, July 09, 2021
Hilary Mantel writes in passing about the famous sarcophagus commissioned by Cardinal Wolsey and never finished. Wolsey was Thomas Cromwell’s protégé, and an early casualty in Henry VIII’s struggle for the annulment of his first marriage.
“There is a sarcophagus of black touchstone,” Mantel writes, “in which the cardinal never lay … Benedetto worked on it year after year, but as soon as he put in his account, the cardinal thought of something else. There are twelve bronze saints, and putti bearing shields emblazoned with the Wolsey arms. There are sober angels who bear in their hands pillars and crosses, and dancing angels with curly hair, their garments floating about them as they caper and skip.”
The sarcophagus sat at Windsor for nearly three hundred years. Some pieces were lost. Some of the angels have only recently been recovered. In 1806, King George III declared the sarcophagus would host the body of Admiral Lord Nelson.
Funerary art is one of the more tangible forms in which the Renaissance (and each era immediately following) reaches out to us. We discover it in many the great churches of Europe. We recognize the format immediately, the raised sarcophagus, the layers rising from base to heights, the rich Baroque elaborations, the stunning realism, and the frightening memento mori, in the form of skulls, dancing skeletons, and Death figures. These sepulchral displays are among the only art forms from the era that we get to see in their original form and in their original positions.
Reading Mantel’s passage, my first thought is not of the tombs of great men, but of the terracotta sculptures in the Oude Sluis in Delfshaven. This is a homey little pub set right above the waters of the old lock in Delfshaven where, centuries ago, village fathers settled to trade and build ships beside their little canal that connected Delft to the river and to the sea; where rich merchants from Holland’s Golden Age built the houses that we still enjoy today. I don’t know how long the Oude Sluis has been open, but it’s been at least a hundred years. It’s been a century that those relief sculptures have adorned the pub’s walls. They were a payment made by some Italian workers on their drinking debt. The pictures sculpted are scenes from Frans Hals or one of his contemporaries. Rude figures get up to rude activities in medieval taverns, and the effect is a very cheerful one. The scenes are quite large, more than several metres per side, and there are at least three of them to meditate on while enjoying one’s biertje.
One legacy for me from COVID times will be a new appreciation for local art. I spent months confined to my neighbourhood, inspecting all corners of my side of town, and developing a quick eye for bits of local decorative art, often art deco style from mid-century, which was when this area was developed. It’s nice to see things created close to home, and made for residents of the area. Not so polished as, say, the Rodin or Picasso pieces downtown, this art is still expressive, perhaps even more so for being raw and accessible.
All art was local at one time. The great Renaissance artists rose to prominence within the same late-medieval system that created tonnes of decorative art that we don’t find nearly so affecting. Art was commissioned by local churches and local patrons with a distinct end-purpose in mind: to be installed in one’s hall or one’s church in order to inspire Christian devotion and to emphasize the status of the patron. Even Michelangelo, famous as he was in his own day, worked on commissioned projects. The idea of international art treasures, belonging to the people as part of a universal human heritage, etc, is very recent.
The wealthier that patrons became and the larger their communities, the more intense their competition to show off their status, taste and wealth. This encouraged the emergence of individual style among artists. The difference between one generation of artists and the next was not superior skill so much as a change in the art market.
Individuation was the call-to-action during the era we call the Renaissance. We see it in the art, but it was emerging everywhere, in philosophy and governance and literature. That quality, that priority, can be said to be one hallmark of the European civilization that was emerging and that would last for five centuries.
Wednesday, July 07, 2021
Maybe it’s always been that way. Teachers see barbarism at every turn. The older we get, the more apparent the decline of civilization on all sides. We speaking examiners grouse about the impoverishment of our language. Is it true? Is everyday language in decline? I think it’s fair to say that the discourse in press and literature and civil discussion has declined. Is that the cause or the effect of what’s happening to everyday language? There is some agreement among researchers that vocabulary is in decline. Some are blaming social media. Social media and texting demand strict economy in language, whereas conversation is spacious and playful. Vocabulary is built through interaction, not in dreaming up cute captions.
My argument has been that language in decline will affect our experience of the world. An impoverishment among grammatical forms and vocabulary will narrow or simplify our perception of the world and our ability to communicate with subtlety. My example has been verb tenses. With fewer tenses at our disposal, wouldn’t our shared experience of time become more elementary? With fewer types of time, wouldn’t our accounting of time become clumsy? Consider the difference between “He has never been to Paris” and “He never went to Paris”. I’ve seen ample evidence that the latter is becoming an acceptable substitute for the former, as options diminish. Apparently, we’re under some kind of pressure to say things bluntly, so accuracy – and certainly elegance – must drop among priorities. ‘He never went’ is an answer to a specific question, something like, ‘Did he go? (I know he was thinking about it.)’ But instead we answer the general (has he ever been?) with the specific (he didn’t go). This conforms to a general pattern, in which abstraction and the hypothetical are sacrificed for the ever more concrete and personal.
A few more examples of starved grammatical forms might illustrate my point. Conditional statements have four fundamental forms in English, plus a few extra ‘mixed’ forms. We examiners have noticed that those six-plus forms have been reduced in everyday usage to two. Most commonly we hear the ‘zero’ conditional, all in the simple present, and an incorrect variety that deploys two ‘woulds’; e.g., ‘if I would go to school, I would learn a few things.’ The latter corresponds to a growing confusion about the difference between ‘will’ and ‘would’. ‘Imagine aliens landing tomorrow. That will change everything.’
Conditionals explore our relationship with the unreal: you would be a fool to quit that job; Hillary would have been a great president; etc. The decline in these usages offer further evidence of the deterioration of our capacity for abstraction. And this when faith in the scientific method is at its lowest since the days of the Inquisition.
Cohesive devices (for example, in fact, therefore, however, moreover, etc.) lead us through the logic of longer utterances, a function altogether useless in social media caption culture. In the new world, nothing worth saying takes longer than a sentence.
In sum, according to my Chicken Little interpretation, we’re losing degrees of time, we’re losing abstraction, and we’re losing cohesion. All is in the present. Nothing exists in any state but the concrete and real. And everything worth communicating can be delivered in single, disconnected, declarative sentences.
Monday, July 05, 2021
The Present Perfect
Please forgive the digression. I will return to the topic of Hilary Mantel ….
We are speaking examiners at a local language centre, conducting the speaking portion of English certification exams. Between sessions, we talk. Sometimes we even talk about language.
My colleague is a polyglot. She speaks Dutch, and so she has many opportunities to measure students’ language deficiencies in both English, their acquired language, and in Dutch, their mother tongue. How well do they align?
“Why can’t they get this?” teachers sometimes wonder. We assume that learners’ blocks arise from our flaws, bad judgement in lessons or in teaching style. My colleague tells me she has found, in trying to explain English vocabulary in Dutch, some surprising gaps in vocabulary in students’ own language. Learners are limited by what they bring into the learning experience. New concepts rely on old concepts. And language, like most skills, requires some equipment being in place.
Grammatical forms reflect conceptual thinking. We created verb tenses, for example, to offer variety and nuance in the communication of time. When did it happen? Is it over and done? Did it take a long time? Where is it in a sequence of events? Is our emphasis on the event itself or on its impact in the present?
I’m no linguist or philosopher, but I think it’s natural to ask whether thought happens without language. Will someone whose mother tongue has two tenses think about time the same way as someone whose mother tongue has twelve? Within a language group, what intellectual differences develop between those who are well-trained in a language and those who are poorly educated in the same language? Does someone with twice the vocabulary see the world in a more nuanced way?
A culture may have forged tools for thought that individuals within the culture don’t have access to. Say a generation drops the usage of the perfect tenses. Those tenses exist in the toolbox for the culture, but the individuals have no handy access to it. Does our experience of the past, for example, become shallower? Without the perfect tenses, does the past becomes more starkly separate from us? Does the past become a series of discreet events without continuity? These would be subtle things, but nonetheless with consequence. Never having been exposed to perfect tenses, you could be forgiven for not seeing the use for them. For example, the subjunctive mood in English has largely withered away, and we’ve done without it for a long while. Now, when we English speakers study Latin, with its rich subjunctive mood, we wonder why this elaborate structure was ever necessary. We don’t recognize its utility.
I think this is generally the human response to sophistication. Across cultures or among individuals, we tend to study each other and wonder how the other could be so captivated by some strange pursuit or by the development of some skill beyond our understanding.
(On a related note, I’ve often thought that we write time travel scenarios simply to congratulate ourselves. The medieval philosopher would be so impressed with us, we tell ourselves. In fact, he would hold a smart phone in his hands and wonder, “Why?”)