The Last Hermits of Medieval Europe

Hermits in the European Middle Ages championed a theology of evangelical poverty versus ecclesiastical centralization, control, and corruption. From the point of view of ecclesiastical authorities, however, eremitic spirituality was too mystical, and, in its last centuries, too concerned with individual contemplation.

As late as the early fifteenth century, the last medieval guide for recluses, the Speculum inclusorum (or “Mirror for Recluses”) couched its directives disparagingly. Historian E. A. Jones notes that the guide warns against conversation with visitors, idleness, and sloth. It chastises aspiring anchorites for potential bad motives: seeking reclusion for its supposed ease (versus living in the world), using reclusion as penance for past sins (versus having a spiritual positive aspiration), and for pursuing reclusion as escape from the world and its temptations.

Ultimately, hermits proved unable to resist church authority or the suppression of anchorites accused of being heretics and vagabonds. The subsequent Protestant reformers and secular authorities completed the suppression of monks, priests, and nuns in key countries.

The three hermits highlighted below are not literally the last hermits of the Middle Ages, but their stories are representative of the fate of eremites in the waning centuries of the medieval era.

1. Hermit and Pope: Pietro Murrone & Celestine V

In the late thirteenth century, Italy was a battlefield of religious controversy, political intrigue, and incessant warfare. The pro–papal Guelphs fought the imperialist Ghibellines, authoritarian Dominicans opposed Spiritual Franciscans, and rival Roman families, the Colonna and the Orsini, fought for control of the Church.

In the last decades of the 1200s, France, England, Spanish Aragon, and the reigning popes fell into bitter conflict over ecclesiastical and secular prerogatives such as taxation of clergy and control of Naples and Sicily. Into this whirlwind comes Pietro di Murrone (1215–1296), a life–long hermit.

At the age of twenty–five, Benedictine monk Pietro Angelerio left his monastery for Mt. Murrone to become a hermit. After five years living in a cave he joins two companions to form a laura on Mt. Majella. News of his piety spreads. A community of fellow hermits develops. Pietro calls them “Hermits of St. Damiano” and gives them a rule. With Pietro as superior and with papal approval, the order grows and spreads over the next twenty years with thirty–six monasteries and hundreds of hermit–monks.

Pietro intended to retire at sixty but returns to work helping construct a church in Aquila. With a new superior for the order, the nearly seventy year old Pietro withdraws at last to Mt. Majella.

Amidst ongoing war and conflict, Pope Nicholas IV dies in 1292. The rival Colonna and Orsini families fight a two–year stalemate to have their preferred papal candidate elected. The ideal candidate must not represent a faction, but at the same time be malleable to the stronger family. An Orsini cardinal reports that God has told him to elevate a pious hermit to the papacy or face divine chastisement, and that the hermit is the unpretentious, retired lover of solitude Pietro Murrone.

In the spring of 1294, Pietro Murrone accedes to the demand of cardinals and kings and is crowned as Pope Celestine V.

How miserable the old hermit must have been in the midst of the cor-ruption and intrigue of Rome! For all his simplicity, Pietro clearly refused to submit to the farce, instead cranking out lofty spiritual correctives. From the start, Pietro threatened to resign. An exasperated Cardinal Caetani, the very Orsini who appointed Pietro in the first place and who continued to insist on Pietro’s cooperation, accedes at last to papal resignation—in order to himself succeed Pietro as Pope Boniface VIII!

Boniface rightly fears that the secular powers competing for control of Italy will challenge the validity of Celestine’s resignation. Pietro had been winding his way back to Mt. Majelli when Boniface orders his arrest and detention, to assure that all parties will accept the resignation.

Pietro’s friends hide him for months. They prepare his escape to Greece but the old man is caught. At first Boniface puts Pietro in the cardinal’s residence, insisting on statements to mollify the secular powers that Boniface fears. Getting nowhere, Boniface imprisons Pietro in a prison cell for nine months, where the exhausted old man dies in 1296 at the age of eighty-one, though many sources believe that Pietro Murrone was murdered at Boniface’s order.

2. Nicholas of Flue, Hermit of Switzerland

Nicholas of Flue (1417–1487), also called Nikolaus or Claus, is Switzerland’s only canonized saint. The eremitism of Nicholas is a paradox to contemporaries, representing two psychological dimensions of his personality: eremitism and a political–mystical persona.

The late Middle Ages was a chaotic time throughout Europe, as mentioned, including Switzerland. The contest of great powers around Switzerland exacerbate its historical mix of languages and cultures, as does the traditional absence of young Swiss men perennially seeking their fortunes as mercenaries in the wars of neighboring powers. Young Claus spent his youth in such wars.

Son of well–to–do peasants, the piety of Nicholas was unexceptional and predictable. He settled into marriage with a local peasant girl. They raise ten children while he continues heeding soldierly calls when summoned, rising to the rank of captain. Nearly illiterate and without practical political experience, Nicholas is elected or appointed to his town council, then to a judgeship he holds for nine years.

Among other accomplishments, Nicholaus resolves a dispute between the local parish and neighboring Engelberg monastery. Nicholas is even offered the governorship of his canton (which he declines). This staid life may have led Nicholas to deep reflection. By design, or because of a vision of God, the fifty–year old one day announces to his family his urgent desire to become a wandering hermit.

Nicholas declares his intent to travel to foreign lands, but walking to Basel, divine inspiration bids him stop and take up residence in Ranft, about an hour’s walk from his home. Here he built a crude hut for his dwelling, renouncing winter clothing for a mere gown, and refusing food and drink for nearly two decades. He called himself “Brother Klaus.”

When a dangerous fire in the nearby town of Sarnen miraculously extinguishes itself, the prayers of Nicholas are credited. His fame spreads. Civil authorities build a cell and chapel for him, the latter dedicated by vicar–general and bishop of Constance. After the pope grants an indulgence for pilgrimage to Nicholas’s hermitage, visitors from throughout Europe stream to his quarters seeking counsel, both personal and political. The Ranft location is declared part of the Way of St. James, the route to the pilgrim shrine of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

In 1480, Swiss delegates attending the Diet of Stans threatened one another with dissolution of the confederacy. The pastor of Stans hastened to Nicholas, begging his intervention. But Nicholas had vowed to never leave his cell. Instead he entrusts a simple statement to the pastor, urging a peaceful settlement of the issues, with a few modest propositions. The pastor hurries back to Stans. The delegates heed the advice of Nicholas, averting disastrous civil war. Though the content of the advice was never publicized, letters of thanks to Nicholas from the cities of Berne and Soleure survive.

Popularizations of the life of Nicholas of Flue conflate his influence on contemporary events with his mysticism. Throughout his hermit life, Nicholas experienced visions. A significant dream justified his eremitic life, wherein he saw a pilgrim approaching him, who is transformed into Christ but also into Wotan, berserker and wild man, like a bear. Psychologist Carl Jung interpreted this dream as Nicholas identifying himself with animal or subhuman shadow, bearlike and cold, as in his separation from family, committing a necessary “sin” that removes him from human accretions and the world.

Saint and beast are reconciled opposites. For the eremitic life means reconciling the impulses and instincts of aggression, anger, lust, and pride with the spiritual values of renunciation, disengagement, humility, and non–possession. The Christ–figure has never completely engaged the worldly, never been fully understood as anything but pain and suffering. Jung understands this representation of opposites at the heart of the psychological tension within Christianity.

Jungian psychologist Maria–Louise von Franz notes that “compared to such holy sages as Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu, Brother Klaus as a solitary hermit is a humbler figure.” The identification of eremitic solitude as a vocation not only exempts him in the eyes of his Swiss compatriots as a gifted person, but gives Brother Klaus the psychological space to grow as a hermit reconciling the opposing needs of spirituality and sociability, of mystical vision and contribution to others. His abandonment of the world is an abandonment of its false values, but not of his fellow human beings in their simple yearnings.

THE BOOK OF HERMITS

A History of Hermits from Antiquity to the Present

Robert Rodriguez

Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, or both, readers must decide for themselves

 A handful of scholars and critics in the humanities such as Rice University historian of religions Jeffrey J. Kripal have begun to take seriously the precognitive or prophetic dimensions of art and literature. Kripal envisions a scholarship of the impossible that he calls “the Superhumanities,”6 and in his 2011 book Mutants and Mystics, Kripal wrote about precognitive and other paranormal experiences as they shaped the lives and works of several comic book artists and science-fiction writers, including Philip K. Dick.7 Dick is an oft-cited example of a literary “precog,” since he was uniquely aware of precognition operating in his writing as well as in his dreams. He would write characters into his stories that he would subsequently meet, and situations that he would subsequently live through. In 1962, he wrote a novel about a robot Abraham Lincoln that no publisher would accept; then, two years later, he read in the news that Disneyland had created exactly such a thing—still one of its most famous exhibits. In 2013, a researcher in England named Anthony Peake wrote a biography of Dick that catalogued numerous instances in which that science-fiction writer’s works foreshadowed unpredictable events and developments in the culture, as well as charting the author’s evolving understanding of precognition as the root of his own creativity.8This phenomenon isn’t confined to the weirdos who write imaginative fiction. The weirdos who write regular fiction—the unimpeachably “literary,” even canonical stuff that gets taught in high school and college literature curriculums—are just as liable to channel the future in their works. Between 2005 and 2016, the French critic Pierre Bayard wrote a trilogy on literary prophecies in authors like Sophocles, Kafka, and Virginia Woolf, as well on as the idea of literary influence actually running in temporal reverse.9 And as we will see in Chapter 1, Cambridge theologian, songwriter, and poet Malcolm Guite published a book-length biographical study of Coleridge in 2017 that relates the themes and imagery in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner to events in the author’s life after he wrote his poem.10 Guite’s book, especially, was an important touchstone for my project in this book. But the argument that inspiration might inherently or always have some prophetic component is not one that academic writers have felt safe to make, partly because there has never been a scientifically plausible theory of how a capacity like precognition could really exist or arise in embodied beings such as ourselves. It has seemed like something spiritual or metaphysical, New Agey. That could soon change.

Precognitive experiences of one sort or another, especially in dreams, are reported by a quarter to a third of people and are experienced but not reported (for fear of ridicule) probably by many, many more. I’ve had such dreams, and after writing about the topic for more than a decade, I’ve received hundreds of emails from people all over the world who’ve shared their incredible (but really, not incredible) stories. Ours is the only culture on Earth, ever, that doesn’t accept precognition as an ordinary part of human life.11 Part of the story of precognition—and the part I have been especially interested in as an anthropologist—is the story of the stigma around it, the taboos that it breaks, and the boundaries it transgresses, in a society that resolutely sees time and causation as unfolding in a strictly linear way. A kind of superstitious revulsion against “things going backwards” has until recently kept the subject off the academic radar.12 But as precognition gains more widespread interest and awareness, especially among a younger generation more accepting of once-stigmatized subjects that commonly fall under the heading of the paranormal, some of the academic prejudice may break down.

The evidence for precognition is not just anecdotal. Ample evidence from methodologically rigorous experiments conducted by numerous laboratories over several decades also supports its existence.13 Jessica Utts, a UC-Irvine statistician and one-time president of the American Statistical Association who had been commissioned by the U.S. government to evaluate the findings of decades of parapsychological research, found the evidence supporting ESP, especially precognition, to be overwhelmingly robust methodologically and statistically.14 (An oft-rehearsed talking point among parapsychologists is that the evidence for ESP is much more robust statistically than the strong evidence supporting aspirin in the prevention of heart attacks.15)

(...)

In other words, our vaunted free will forces our future to speak in riddles. This makes the lives of prophets—or those in the orbit of prophecy—incredibly ironic. The ancients, who understood the premonitory nature of dreams and practiced other forms of divination, grasped these complexities of foresight and fate. Sophocles’ Oedipus fulfilled the prophecies about him—that he would kill his father and marry his mother—precisely by trying to evade those prophecies. And lo and behold, we find the same irony on full display when looking at the lives of many modern creative geniuses. The Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky is a particularly tragic example I examined in From Nowhere. His 1979 masterpiece Stalker seems to have been a premonition, in film form, of his hindsight regrets and wishes after belatedly realizing that filming that movie in a toxic Estonian landscape had given both his star actor and himself fatal lung cancers. Incredibly, the film embodied—literally, depicted within itself, in the form of a parable told by the Stalker of the title near the end of the film—these hindsight regrets. More famously, Stalker also seems to have prophesied the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

(...)

Picnic at Hanging Rock was not Lindsay’s first book. In 1966, when she wrote her novel, she had already penned a memoir, Time Without Clocks, and many journalistic pieces, and she had even published a satirical novel under a pseudonym when she was much younger. But while she had always aspired and intended to write something literary, she had not yet done so. Like many women of her generation, she had mostly subordinated her own artistic and intellectual aspirations to support those of her high-achieving husband.

Daryl Lindsay had been one of the leading Australian painters of his generation and was a high-profile director of Australia’s oldest and most prominent art museum, the National Gallery of Victoria. He retired in 1956, when he was knighted for “services to art.” For more than four decades, the Lindsays had lived in a drafty house called Mulberry Hill that they had built after their marriage in the early 1920s on the Mornington Peninsula south of Melbourne. They led an enviable life there, surrounded by fascinating bohemians and celebrities. They hosted fabulous parties and entertained an endless parade of guests—some, Joan recalled, stayed for days or weeks or longer and returned year after year.267 Lawrence Olivier and Vivian Leigh had been visitors to Mulberry Hill during its heyday, among many other notables. Through it all, Joan had little time or opportunity to express herself or develop her own considerable talents as a storyteller, und unfortunately she received little encouragement from Daryl. But her week of dreams changed everything.

The dream-origins of Picnic at Hanging Rock were later attested by the Lindsays’ live-in housekeeper, Rae Clements, who said they occurred in the coldest part of winter, 1966.268 On the bleak morning of Joan’s first dream, she told Clements that she had had a dream that would make a good book. She would allow no person from Porlock (or inquisitive spouse or housekeeper) to destroy her fragile recollection, so she promptly ensconced herself upstairs in her writing room, wrapped in a blue cardigan against the chilly drafts of the house, and hurriedly got down on paper all she had seen and heard. Clements recalled to Lindsay’s biographer Janelle McCulloch that the first dream was so vivid that Lindsay said she could still hear the laughter of the girls setting out on a Valentine’s Day picnic and could feel the hot summer breeze—February 14 falls in Australian summer, in case you had forgotten that the world is spherical in our fallen times. Lindsay had long wanted to write some story involving Hanging Rock, a place that had always fascinated her, but that first dream had finally given her the plot. Clements said Lindsay fully sketched out her novel by midday and spent the rest of the day furiously fleshing it out. And then she had the dream again—or some variant of it—that night … and then again every night for a week.

Dreaming and then furiously writing down what she had dreamed totally consumed Lindsay, as the story poured from her unconscious. She could think or talk about nothing else. “I just sort of thought about it all night and in the morning I would go straight up and sit on the floor, papers all around me, and just write like a demon!”269 When Lindsay wasn’t madly writing it all down, she talked about the characters and their actions like they were real people. Clements recalled also that Lindsay’s dreams unfolded the story in the sequence matching the chapters of her novel.

Lindsay completed her draft less than two weeks after her first dream, and the title she put on her cover page she borrowed from a beloved painting by William Ford that had hung in her husband’s office at the art museum. At the Hanging Rock shows a group of Victorian picnickers under the looming rock formation, in what could almost be a promotional still for Weir’s film. Before sending the manuscript to her publisher, Frank Cheshire, Lindsay also added a brief preface, planting the seeds for the cult that would later grow around the book and movie:

Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, or both, readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important. Seeing that we live in an age when Fact is nearly always harder to swallow than Fiction. For the author, who knew Mount Macedon and the Hanging Rock very well as a child, the story is entirely true.270Cheshire delegated the manuscript to his publishing director Andrew Fabinyi, who in turn entrusted it to a junior editor named Sandra Forbes, who would play a fateful role in the events I will describe. It was Forbes who delivered the good news to Lady Lindsay that the firm would publish her book, and her acceptance letter revealed that she took the author’s preface as meaning that her novel was indeed a true story: “Given that the actual disappearance of the girls is a fact, it is a fascinating problem, well presented in a style very much in keeping with the period and personages involved.”271 During the editing process, Lindsay held her own on various stylistic preferences, but she allowed Forbes to make some important editorial changes that we will discuss momentarily. Lindsay also allowed the publisher to cut the last two sentences of the preface, including the business about it being “entirely true.”

Picnic at Hanging Rock came out in hardcover almost a year after Lindsay submitted it, on November 1, 1967. Although it received good reviews, it was not a hot seller at first, nor did the publisher really expect it to be. But by a twist of fate, one of Cheshire’s staff was poached by the much larger British publisher Penguin in 1969, and he brought Picnic at Hanging Rock with him as the first of a new line of Australian fiction he envisioned. Then, an Australian TV presenter who read the novel after finding a copy in a discount book bin found she couldn’t get the story out of her mind and thought it would make a good movie. She sent a copy of the book to a young up-and-coming director she had once interviewed, Peter Weir, thinking he would be the perfect person to make the film. And the rest, as they say, is history. With the boost of Weir’s film adaptation, which Lindsay assisted with and fully endorsed, her maybe-true story cast a spell on a nation.

It begins with the following white text on black:

On Saturday 14th February 1900 a party of schoolgirls from Appleyard College picnicked at Hanging Rock near Mt. Macedon in the state of Victoria.

During the afternoon several members of the party disappeared without trace …

You could not ask for a more irresistible hook for a mystery than disappeared or dead schoolgirls. David Lynch adopted the same formula for his 1989 TV hit Twin Peaks, which begins with the discovery of a murdered high-school prom queen. Lindsay’s hints that her story had some basis in fact only added to its mystique. Besides that coy prefacing paragraph, the author also alluded in interviews to the fact that “something did happen.” It led Australian fans to obsessively scour newspapers from the period for reports of missing students at Hanging Rock.272Hanging Rock had been a pretty dangerous place in the late 19th century, near the time when Lindsay’s story was set. People sometimes did go missing. Prospectors returning to Melbourne from nearby gold fields were sometimes robbed and killed there. According to a 1975 documentary accompanying and promoting Weir’s film, a town in the vicinity has a monument to three children who went missing in the 1860s.273 Hanging Rock also was haunted by Australia’s colonial history and the murder of indigenous peoples, for whom the site was regarded as sacred. Still today, visitors regard it as a spooky, mysterious place. But fans searching for some true story about missing schoolgirls at Hanging Rock around the turn of the century came up empty handed. While it must have been amusing at first, the numerous uninvited visitors to Mulberry Hill seeking answers quickly became wearying for the ageing Lindsays—yet Joan did nothing to dispel the mystery by giving any more details.

Although director Weir was advised prior to his production of the movie not to ask Lindsay about the truth of her story, he couldn’t resist, and the displeased author kept mum and just said she hoped he wouldn’t ask the question again. In 1980, a critic named Yvonne Rousseau even compiled various theories of the girls’ disappearance in a book called The Murders at Hanging Rock—again, taking Lindsay’s book to be a real unsolved mystery rather than a work of fiction. Among the theories she presents in the book were that the girls were murdered, that they slipped into a parallel dimension, and that they were abducted by a UFO.274There are several clear autobiographical components in Lindsay’s novel. Mrs. Appleyard’s College for Young Ladies was based on a real private girls’ boarding school, the Clyde School in Mt. Macedon, near Hanging Rock, which Lindsay had attended as a young woman in the late 19-teens. In her research, McCulloch found that the novel is really a roman à clef, as some of the characters seem to have been based on people Lindsay would have known at the school, even if she set her story a decade and a half earlier to give it a more nostalgic, Edwardian-era atmosphere. McCulloch’s research revealed that in some cases she used her models’ actual names.

As they begin ascending the Rock in Lindsay’s novel, one of the girls, wealthy heiress Irma (the one who is later rescued by the boys), says “If only we could stay out all night and watch the moon rise.”275 Joan had been editor of the Clyde School’s paper, The Cluthan during her time there. McCulloch discovered that in 1919, a couple years after she graduated, a math teacher named Miss McCraw—undoubtedly the basis for the character in her novel—published in that paper an account of a nighttime field trip of the school’s Camera Club to Hanging Rock, to take moonlit pictures. The trip was evidently a fiasco. They departed, Miss McCraw described, as a row of “freshly clad maidens” yet returned, after difficult scrambling over rocks and brambles, in a disheveled state: “sorry objects.” The field trip evidently became a source of rumor and mild scandal among students in subsequent years.276 Joan would have known of this event, but on the surface at least, it hardly seems to qualify as something worthy of all the secrecy and coy allusions. Sleuths scouring newspapers for stories of missing schoolgirls around the time the author attended the Clyde school—thinking Lindsay’s true story might simply have been displaced in time, in her novel—also turned up nothing.277A strange encounter with the elderly Lindsay during the filming of the movie led Weir’s 19-year-old lead actress, Lambert, also to believe that there was indeed a reality to Lindsay’s story and that there had been some actual Miranda. Lambert recalled that during a difficult day of shooting, she went off on the Rock to be alone, but she sensed she was being followed. She turned and found it was an old woman, whom she recognized immediately as the then-78-year-old author. Lindsay embraced her tightly like they were old friends and spoke into the young woman’s ear: “Oh Miranda! It’s been so long!” Lindsay clung to Lambert shakily, in tears, as though it were a real reunion.

“It was very moving,” Lambert said. “And it was clear she’d regressed into some part of her past. To her, I really was someone she had known, somewhere in time.”278 This encounter gave the young actress needed encouragement at a time she was doubting her abilities to master the role: “Right then, I felt then that if Joan Lindsay believed I was Miranda, I must have been doing okay. I felt that if she believed in me, I would be okay.”

Lindsay died ten years later, in December 1984, at the age of 88. At that point, any hope of learning the truth about her novel seemed lost. But astute readers and people who had been friends of the author suggested that whatever truth there was to her story, it wasn’t some mundane, lurid crime or scandal, but that it was somehow connected to Lindsay’s spiritual beliefs and her fascination—really a passionate love/hate relationship—with time. In Lindsay’s 1962 memoir, Time Without Clocks, she described her hatred of the clock-bound life most people lead.279 The only clocks allowed at Mulberry Hill were for the housekeeper, Clements. And Lindsay harbored a particularly irrational hatred of 4:00 PM. In the novel, after the girls disappear, the next chapter opens with Mrs. Appleyard awakening suddenly at 4:00 PM, having been dreaming of her dead husband. It was at 4:00 PM on a summer day in 1976, ten years after Lindsay wrote that scene and a year after Weir’s film came out, that her husband of 54 years, Daryl, had a fatal fall at age 86.280Lindsay in real life had claimed that clocks would not function near her, and friends confirmed that their watches would stop in her presence—a minor technology curse that is not uncommonly reported by people with psychic ability. In fact, during the filming of Picnic at Hanging Rock, watches and clocks went haywire or stopped frequently, just as happens to the girls’ watches in the novel when the coach arrives at the massive rock formation. It prompted Weir’s crew to wonder if it was a geomagnetic effect of the Rock itself or somehow was due to Lindsay’s involvement.281

Calendars were similarly problematic for Lindsay. She claimed that for most of her life she didn’t even know her own birth date, until she finally asked a journalist friend, Terence O’Neill, to help her research it. He discovered that she had been born November 16, 1896.282 In his own confusion of chronology, another journalist friend, Phillip Adams, described in a newspaper column that “Long before Einstein revealed his relativity theory, in which time ceases to be something solid and dependable and becomes elastic, Joan believed that it was somehow dreamlike, that yesterday is still with us while tomorrow is already here.”283 In reality, Joan was only nine when Einstein formulated his theory, but what’s a little time warp between friends?

Besides the stopped watches, there is another time-related anomaly early in Lindsay’s novel. The girls who have left the group gaze down on the valley below and muse philosophically on human purpose, almost like aliens surveying people from some Archimedean vantage point. Irma then hears a sound like drums:

The plain below was just visible; infinitely vague and distant. Peering down between the boulders Irma could see the glint of water and tiny figures coming and going through drifts of rosy smoke, or mist. ‘Whatever can those people be doing down there like a lot of ants?’ Marion looked out over her shoulder. ‘A surprising number of human beings are without purpose. Although it’s probable, of course, that they are performing some necessary function unknown to themselves.’ … The ants and their business were dismissed without further comment. Although Irma was aware, for a little while, of a rather curious sound coming up from the plain. Like the beating of far-off drums.284

Readers who are paying attention note that members of a search party several hours later bang on sheets of tin to try and signal to the missing girls. “No wonder the bloodhounds lose the trail,” Adams remarked, “For the girls aren’t lost on the rock. Like Alices stepping through the looking glass, they’re moving into another dimension.”285 Again, it is Irma who is found high on the rock a week later, asleep and unharmed except for a few scratches, but with no memory of what became of her companions. “Missing time,” again.

But here’s the thing: Amid all the speculation and sleuthing by readers, there were rumors of a final chapter that had been cut from Picnic at Hanging Rock prior to publication, which contained the answer to the mystery. Those rumors proved … entirely true. Three years after Lindsay’s death, the missing “Chapter 18” was published in a thin volume along with a couple critical commentaries, as The Secret of Hanging Rock. The chapter does indeed return us to the Rock and to what happened to Miranda, Marion, and their math teacher Miss McCraw. But its explanation is one that few readers could understand, let alone accept, especially in 1966-7. It is nothing that would fit within the usual coordinates of a romantic mystery novel. It is instead one of the most fascinating and beautiful pieces of paranormal fiction I have ever read. And the story of how it came to be excised from the novel is just as interesting and significant.

Slips Through Time

Chapter 18 opens with the otherworldly beauty Miranda, the intellectual Marion (who gazed down on the picnickers like at ants), and heiress Irma standing on a high ledge, finding themselves drawn toward a stone monolith that exerts a kind of spiral magnetic force, “pulling, like a tide.”286 They work their way past it, and then the girls fall asleep briefly, after which a disheveled “living creature,” a “clown-like figure” dressed only in her undergarments and boots—comes toward them from behind some bushes. It is clearly the math teacher, Miss McCraw, whom Edith earlier in the novel embarrassedly reported seeing coming up the hill in only her drawers. Yet Miranda and her companions don’t recognize the woman—they are already in a dream-like state where reality has been transfigured.

The woman faints from the heat, and the girls remove her restricting corset to help her breathe. Upon reviving her, Marion gets the idea they should all discard their corsets. They toss them off a precipice, only to see them hanging motionless, “becalmed on the windless air like a fleet of little ships.”287 The revived math teacher/stranger says “they are stuck fast in time,” at which point Irma tells her “when you said that about time I had such a funny feeling I had met you somewhere. A long time ago.”288 The older woman replies, “Anything is possible, unless it is proved impossible. And sometimes even then.” She then asks for the girls’ names, even though she should know them, and notes she has forgotten her own name: Waving toward a bush, she says “I have apparently left my own particular label somewhere over there.”289It is a trippy exchange—indeed, like a group of people under the influence of a powerful psychedelic. And it only gets stranger. When the intellectual Marion suggests they keep moving before the sun sets, the older woman utters further perplexities:

“For a person of your intelligence—I can see your brain quite distinctly—you are not very observant. Since there are no shadows here, the light too is unchanging.”

Irma was looking worried. “I don’t understand. Please, does that mean that if there are caves, they are filled with light or darkness? I am terrified of bats.”

Miranda was radiant. “Irma, darling—don’t you see? It means we arrive in the light!”

“Arrive? But Miranda … where are we going?”

“The girl Miranda is correct. I can see her heart, and it is full of understanding. Every living creature is due to arrive somewhere. …”290

Which is when they see a hole open up before them, and the woman formerly known as Miss McCraw beholds it rapturously:

It wasn’t a hole in the rocks, nor a hole in the ground. It was a hole in space. About the size of a fully rounded summer moon, coming and going. She saw it as painters and sculptors saw a hole, as a thing in itself, giving shape and significance to other shapes. As a presence, not an absence—a concrete affirmation of truth. She felt that she could go on looking at it forever in wonder and delight, from above, from below, from the other side. It was a solid as the globe, as transparent as an air bubble. An opening, easily passed through, and yet not concave at all.

She had passed a lifetime asking questions and now they were answered, simply by looking at the hole.291

The “hole in space” fades out, after which they observe a snake slither into a physical hole below two vertically stacked boulders, which seems to be the tiny opening of a cave. The girls’ erstwhile math teacher now becomes a kind of shamanic pied piper, confidently announcing that she will be privileged to enter first and that the girls will follow. When Marion expresses surprise at this idea, their leader corrects her: “Quite simple. You are thinking in terms of linear measurements …”292 At which point, she begins to undergo a metamorphosis: “Before anyone could answer, the long-boned torso was flattening itself out on the ground beside the hole, deliberately forming itself to the needs of a creature created to creep and burrow under the earth. The thin arms, crossed behind the head with its bright staring eyes, became the pincers of a giant crab …”293The crablike being, still clad in frilled pantaloons, wriggles through the small opening and out of sight. On the vanished teacher’s signal—tapping on the rock from within—Marion follows, and after Marion’s signal, Miranda. Both effortlessly conform their bodies to the shape and narrow size of the opening. But then to Irma’s horror, while she is awaiting her signal to follow, one of the boulders falls on the hole, sealing it off.

Irma had flung herself down on the rocks and was tearing and beating at the gritty face of the boulder with her bare hands. She had always been clever at embroidery. They were pretty little hands, soft and white.294

And that is how Joan Lindsay originally ended her novel: with Hanging Rock itself devouring the girls and their teacher after an encounter with what can only be called a black hole. In contrast to the relatively matter-of-fact tone of the rest of the book, it is more like something out of Carlos Castaneda. In fact, it is exactly like something out of Carlos Castaneda … although Castaneda would not publish his first book of psychedelic pop-shamanism, The Teachings of Don Juan, until the year after Lindsay wrote this shamanic-seeming scene. Nor would Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (or Arthur C. Clarke’s companion novel), with its “monolith” and its psychedelic passage through a monolith-stargate, come out until two years later. And although the possibility of gravitational singularities had been described in the upper echelons of astrophysics for years, they did not enter the public consciousness until, wait for it, 1967, when the term “black hole” was coined by physicist John Wheeler. In the vicinity of such objects, time is dilated, exactly what the girls and their teacher seem to experience. Yet Lindsay’s “hole in space” image was, again, written (and presumably dreamed) the previous year.295Lindsay’s finale is a stunning vision of the solidly four-dimensional spacetime continuum, often called the “block universe,” described by mathematician Hermann Minkowski on the basis of his former student Einstein’s theories. It is an Einsteinian vision, but with a Lewis Carroll twist. And as Yvonne Rousseau wrote in a commentary to this chapter, it bears close rereading. Among other peculiarities, there is something punnily akin to dream in these strange events: Miss McCraw’s crab-transformation is into a kind of claw. The corsets that hang in midair were colloquially called “stays,” and stay in spacetime is what they do.296 In fact, if there was any doubt about Picnic at Hanging Rock coming to its author in dreams, these materialized puns in its final bizarre chapter would have to eradicate it. The final metamorphosis of the girls and their teacher as they enter Hanging Rock is Freud’s “dream-work”—the active symbolic transformation of the primary process, Coleridge’s primary imagination—on full view. (And for what it’s worth, any reader of Wells’ The Time Machine, published the year before Lindsay’s birth, may also recall the Time Traveler’s farthest-future vision of a dying earth populated by crablike beings, perhaps humanity’s ultimate evolutionary transformation.)

***

To understand the enigmatic Chapter 18, it is necessary to first understand some of the real paranormal experiences of its author. They go way beyond recalcitrant timepieces and clock-time resonances.

Like other of the authors and artists I have examined here and in my previous book From Nowhere, Lindsay was clearly someone who, in another time and another culture, would likely have been something like a shaman. McCulloch writes:

Some of Joan's friends called her a “mystic”. According to those who were close to her, she had certain abilities, sensitivities. She could “see” things that others couldn’t, especially in the bush landscape. She knew things without being told. She could not only tell what had happened in the past, but also predict events in the future, without knowing why or how. And she could communicate with those who live in that grey space between life and the world beyond it. Those friends feel that Joan's novel is the result of this curious ability, which she'd had ever since she was three.297McCulloch gives few concrete details, unfortunately, except for one particularly strange story Lindsay had told a few of her friends in confidence. In 1929, she and her husband were driving to another town, Creswick, to visit Daryl’s parents. On the way, Joan saw something peculiar: a group of nuns running through a field, seemingly fleeing from something. The clothing of one of them seemed to be burned, and Joan thought she could see a burning building behind them. Daryl, however, saw nothing. She felt that what she had seen was a vision of the past. When they arrived at Daryl’s family home, Joan asked Daryl’s mother if there was a convent nearby. Her mother-in-law, no doubt perplexed by Joan’s question, replied that there had indeed been a convent but that it had been destroyed in a fire years earlier.298It is undoubtedly because of this strange experience that Lindsay was drawn to a remarkable book, first published anonymously in 1911, called An Adventure.299 The authors were a pair of English schoolteachers, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain—principle and vice-principle, respectively, of St. Hugh’s College for women in Oxford—who claimed to have experienced what paranormal writers now call a “time slip” while on vacation in France in 1901. While wandering the Trianon gardens on the grounds of Versailles, the women wrote, they both fell into a strange depression and then encountered people in anachronistic dress that they later determined must have been the ghosts of Marie Antoinette and her courtiers circa 1789, just before their execution during the French Revolution. It seemed to the experiencers like they had seen actual people and events of that year, as well as catching those doomed aristocrats’ despondency as it somehow lingered in the landscape from that time. Lindsay confided to her friend Adams that her writing of Picnic at Hanging Rock had been influenced by Moberly and Jourdain’s book.300

Moberly and Jourdain were writing at a time of exciting new technologies that were providing novel, semi-sciencey interpretations of unexplained phenomena. The popular idea of telepathy, for instance, was based on the metaphor of the telegraph, which in the last decades of the 19th century was linking people across great distances.301 Classicist and psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers, who coined the term telepathy, was one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882, a precursor to the parapsychological laboratories that emerged in the next century. Lindsay was a believer, and probably experiencer, of such things: Albert’s dream of his sister on the night she jumps to her death would fit right into the numerous anecdotes of purported telepathy collected by Myers and his SPR colleagues in their book Phantasms of the Living. (In the novel, among the inquiries Mrs. Appleyard receives about the mysterious disappearances is a letter from an investigator with the SPR.)

And at the same time Myers was writing, new photography and sound-recording technologies suggested the idea that matter could store not only images and sounds but also thoughts and feelings from the past—and that places, as SPR researcher Eleanor Sidgwick wrote in 1888, could have a kind of “memory.” Thomas Edison patented the technology for recording and playing back sounds on wax cylinders in 1877, and the explosion of this technology in the subsequent decades made things like hauntings thinkable in a new way: Tragic or sad events could etch themselves in the setting where they occurred like a groove in a wax cylinder or, later, a phonograph record. A psychically sensitive person visiting the landscape was (per this metaphor) like the needle of a phonograph enabling playback of the past. (The method of mass-producing wax cylinders, which made phonographs affordable to consumers, was developed just a year after Moberly and Jourdain’s experience.) In 1939, another SPR researcher, H. H. Price, proposed that a “psychic aether” was the medium of such imprinting.302Seemingly facilitated by this new metaphor, the 20th century’s annals of the unexplained include many seeming time slips similar to the adventure of Moberly and Jourdain. For instance, an SPR investigator names James McHarg wrote of a fascinating experience reported to him by a spinster named E. F. Smith from the village of Letham in eastern Scotland. In Smith’s account, late one winter night in 1950, she had been walking along a road after her car broke down on her way home from a Christmas party in a neighboring hamlet. Below a prominent hill near her village, called Dunnichen Hill, she saw torches of what she took to be ancient soldiers searching for their fallen comrades after a battle. That plain was then thought, at least in local folklore, to be the site of a famous Dark-Age battle, the Battle of Nechtansmere in the year 685, in which an outnumbered Pictish army routed an army of pursuing Northumbrian soldiers—a bit of history recorded by our old friend Bede, the great historian of the period. Smith’s account particularly interested McHarg because the specific roundabout path the soldiers appeared to take through the field corresponded precisely to the shoreline of a long-vanished lake, which Smith was unlikely to have known about, as it had only been described in an archaeological journal. This detail, he felt, lent authenticity to her claim. Although the journal article with the detail about the lake had already been published by the time Smith had her vision, she assured the investigator she had not read that article, nor did she know very much of the local historical lore until her experience drove her to research it.

Another well-known time-slip case occurred in 1953 in the English city of York. An 18-year-old apprentice plumber named Henry Martindale reported that while installing a new boiler in the cellar of the city’s Treasurer’s House, he fell from his ladder and then saw a line of Roman centurions march past, but sunken slightly into the stone floor almost like they were wading through a shallow stream. Six years later, excavations revealed a Roman road passing under the cellar floor in that spot. The soldiers in Martindale’s vision bore round shields, which Roman soldiers were not known to use in York until another archaeological discovery a few years after Martindale saw his spectral centurions. Again, these archaeological discoveries lent a certain credence to Martindale’s vision, because there is seemingly no way he could have known about the presence of a Roman road under the Treasurer’s House or the unique shape of the shields carried by Romans in that part of Britain.

Although Moberly and Jourdain’s account of the “ghosts of the Trianon” remains the best-known time slip, it has proven to be one of the least persuasive. One critic chalked it up to costume parties an aristocrat was known to throw on the grounds of Versailles around the turn of the century. Another, Lucille Iremonger, attributed the women’s experiences to a lesbian folie-a-deux (because lesbians, evidently, are prone to hallucination).303 The biggest problem with the teachers’ story is time: The women admitted that weeks had elapsed after their visit before they even conferred on what they had seen, and both seem to have experienced different things. And there is no telling how much their memories of their first visit may have been shaped by their subsequent decade of research delving into the history of the Trianon garden and Versailles as well as their further visits to the location. Nor can it be determined whether and to what extent each woman’s memories influenced those of the other.

Still, it made for an interesting and exciting book—one that was influential on many writers, including J. R. R. Tolkien.304 And more importantly, the edition of An Adventure that Lindsay is likely to have read, from 1931, also included an introductory note by J. W. Dunne, author of the most important book ever written on the subject of precognition and its relation to the Einsteinian, time-elastic universe, An Experiment with Time. Dunne writes that he was asked to comment on the scientific plausibility of the women’s account and states that “if Einstein is right, the contents of time are just as ‘real’ as the contents of space. Marie Antoinette—body and brain—is sitting in the Trianon garden now.”305 Dunne is referring here to Minkowski’s block universe, in which the future already exists and the past still exists, indelibly, permanently. More than anything in Moberly and Jourdain’s text, it is that one line from Dunne’s introduction that surely exerted its effect on Lindsay when opening her hallucinatory Chapter 18:

It is happening now. As it has been happening ever since Edith Horton ran stumbling and screaming towards the plain. As it will go on happening until the end of time. The scene is never varied by so much as the falling of a leaf or the flight of a bird. To the four people on the Rock it is always acted out in the tepid twilight of a present without a past. Their joys and agonies are forever new.306

The pun that Yvonne Rousseau misses, although Lindsay herself may well have been conscious of it, is that the girls and their teacher atop the Rock, having discarded their dresses and stays, would have been clad in slips.

An Uncomfortable Style

You will be right to ask about Chapter 18’s authenticity. A missing chapter to a nationally beloved novel turning up shortly after the death of the author should always be suspect. However, in this case, there is no question of the text being a forgery, as there are living witnesses to the original manuscript with the chapter in place, including Sarah Forbes, the editor who asked for its removal.

Although Forbes wrote in her acceptance letter to Lindsay that she enjoyed the novel, she felt the story could use more ambiguity and was uncomfortable about the ending. “I’m very doubtful about the last chapter. On the whole, would prefer to omit it altogether.” In an interview with McCulloch, Forbes asserted that the decision to cut the chapter had been agreed on by the author: “We all discussed it and it seemed the right thing to do.”

Without being able to ask Lindsay, it is hard to know how to evaluate Forbes’ claim. The author’s friend and literary agent John Taylor, to whom she entrusted the typed pages of the cut chapter in 1972 and who published it in 1987, insisted in his commentary that Lindsay did intend it to be published one day. It was part of her original vision and clearly expressed spiritual truths that were important to her. “What artist wants to conceal an unflawed work?” But, Taylor claimed, despite her natural artistic wish not to excise part of her novel, she allowed herself to be persuaded by others: “She was meticulous in respecting the interests of those who were exploiting her work, and understood that it might have worked against those interests.”307Besides losing a very personal and important part of her story, the absence of the final chapter also had become a kind of Albatross for Lindsay by the time of her death. It left readers to concoct fictions of their own to solve the puzzle—those theories of Yvonne Rousseau, for instance—and all the demands for confirmation left her and Daryl with little peace during their old age. Taylor wrote: “Although she knew perfectly well that the huge success of both book and film had a lot to do with the mystery of ‘what really happened’, she had moments of wishing she had published the final chapter and saved herself the pestering.” Lindsay gave Taylor the copyright to the final chapter after Weir’s film came out, “as part of her general horrified reaction to the flood of demanding inquiries” about the true fate of the girls.308 As her literary agent, it was Taylor’s job to field the constant questions.

Thinking purely in terms of the bottom line, Forbes clearly made the right editorial decision, since the book would likely never have been as successful without the question mark it leaves in the reader’s mind. Taylor acknowledges this, keenly comparing the missing chapter to the Psalmist’s “stone rejected by the builders” that becomes the cornerstone of the edifice. Chapter 18 is “the previously invisible foundation stone on whose absence the Australian film industry built itself.”309 The missing Chapter 18 is, he notes, “totally unfilmable.” Still, despite Forbes’ implication that the decision to cut Chapter 18 was mutual, it appears to have been a very difficult one for Lindsay.

In a 2017 interview by Helen Goltz for the book No Picnic at Hanging Rock, Forbes recalled conversations with Taylor in 1984, after Lindsay’s death, about the possibility of publishing the missing chapter; she reiterated her earlier sentiments: “I didn’t like the final chapter, it was not written in the same style, it was an uncomfortable style and I don’t think the final chapter did the book any service to publish it.”310 Goltz herself seems to share Forbes’ discomfort with the chapter, agreeing with the decision to leave it out and finding it merely bizarre: “I suspect the reader will be more bewildered as to the outcome of the young women on reading The Secret of Hanging Rock.”311

These are clearly not fans of science fiction or the paranormal, nor readers of pop-shamanism like Castaneda (a genre that was, again, still in the future when Lindsay wrote her novel). Indeed, the core issue with Lindsay’s book is that, in its original form, it transgressed genres. Although Forbes may not have articulated it this way, Chapter 18 turned Picnic at Hanging Rock into some kind of supernatural Gothic mystery. Lindsay’s friend Adams called her novel “science fiction in crinolines instead of space suits.”312

Where Was It Before the Dream?

TIME LOOPS AND INTERPRETATION

__________

Eric Wargo

Exercises in Decreation

15 Bartleby, or On Contingency

(...)
The Formula, or On Potentiality

1. This is the philosophical constellation to which Bartleby the scrivener belongs. As a scribe who has stopped writing, Bartleby is the extreme figure of the Nothing from which all creation derives; and at the same time, he constitutes the most implacable vindication of this Nothing as pure, absolute potentiality. The scrivener has become the writing tablet; he is now nothing other than his white sheet. It is not surprising, therefore, that he dwells so obstinately in the abyss of potentiality and does not seem to have the slightest intention of leaving it. Our ethical tradition has often sought to avoid the problem of potentiality by reducing it to the terms of will and necessity. Not what you can do, but what you want to do or must do is its dominant theme. This is what the man of the law repeats to Bartleby. When he asks him to go to the post office ("just step around to the Post Office, won't you?"), and Bartleby opposes him with his usual "I would prefer not to," the man of the law hastily translates Bartleby's answer into "You will not?" But Bartleby, with his soft but firm voice, specifies, "I prefer not" ("I prefer not," which appears three times, is the only variation of Bartleby's usual phrase; and if Bartleby then renounces the conditional, this is only because doing so allows him to eliminate all traces of the verb "will," even in its modal use). 2 When the man of the law honestly tries, in his own way, to understand the scrivener, the readings to which he dedicates himself leave no doubts as to the categories he intends to use: "'Edwards on the Will,' and 'Priestly on Necessity.'" 3 But potentiality is not will, and impotentiality is not necessity; despite the salutary impression that the books give him, the categories of the man of the law have no power over Bartleby. To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do)--this is the perpetual illusion of morality.

Medieval theologians distinguish between potentia absoluta, an "absolute potentiality" by which God can do anything (according to some, even evil, even acting such that the world never existed, or restoring a girl's lost virginity), and potentia ordinata, an "ordered potentiality," by which God can do only what is in accord with his will. Will is the principle that makes it possible to order the undifferentiated chaos of potentiality. If it is true that God could have lied, broken his oaths, incarnated himself in a woman or an animal instead of in the Son, he thus did not want to do so and he could not have wanted to do so; and a potentiality without will is altogether unrealizable and cannot pass into actuality.

Bartleby calls into question precisely this supremacy of the will over potentiality. If God (at least de potentia ordinata) is truly capable only of what he wants, Bartleby is capable only without wanting; he is capable only de potentia absoluta. But his potentiality is not, therefore, unrealized; it does not remain unactualized on account of a lack of will. On the contrary, it exceeds will (his own and that of others) at every point. Inverting Karl Valentin's witticism "I wanted to want it, but I didn't feel able to want it," one could say of Bartleby that he succeeds in being able (and not being able) absolutely without wanting it. Hence the irreducibility of his "I would prefer not to." It is not that he does not want to copy or that he does not want to leave the office; he simply would prefer not to. The formula that he so obstinately repeats destroys all possibility of constructing a relation between being able and willing, between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata. It is the formula of potentiality.

2. Gilles Deleuze has analyzed the particular structure of Bartleby's formula, likening it to expressions that linguists define as agrammatical, such as Cummings's "he danced his did" or "j'en ai un de pas assez." Deleuze argues that the destructive force of Bartleby's formula consists in its secret agrammaticality: "the formula 'disconnects' words and things, words and actions, but also speech acts and words--it severs language from all reference, in accordance with Bartleby's absolute vocation, to be a man without references, someone who appears suddenly and then disappears, without reference to himself or anything else." 4 Philippe Jaworski, for his part, has observed that Bartleby's formula is neither affirmative nor negative and that Bartleby neither accepts nor refuses, stepping forward and stepping backward at the same time. As Deleuze suggests, the formula thus opens a zone of indistinction between yes and no, the preferable and the nonpreferable. But also--in the context that interests us--between the potential to be (or do) and the potential not to be (or do). The final "to" that ends Bartleby's phrase has an anaphoric character, for it does not refer directly to a segment of reality but, rather, to a preceding term from which it draws its only meaning. But here it is as if this anaphora were absolutized to the point of losing all reference, now turning, so to speak, back toward the phrase itself--an absolute anaphora, spinning on itself, no longer referring either to a real object or to an anaphorized term: I would prefer not to prefer not to. . . .

What is the origin of this formula? Critics have cited one of Melville's letters to Hawthorne, in which he praises "no" over "yes" as a possible precursor to Bartleby's phrase ("For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no--why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unencumbered travelers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpetbag--that is to say, the Ego"). The reference could not be more out of place. Bartleby does not consent, but neither does he simply refuse to do what is asked of him; nothing is farther from him than the heroic pathos of negation. In the history of Western culture, there is only one formula that hovers so decidedly between affirmation and negation, acceptance and rejection, giving and taking. The formula, which is morphologically and semantically similar to the scrivener's litany, is recorded, among other places, in a text that was familiar to every cultured man of the nineteenth century: Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers. We are referring to the expression ou mallon, "no more than," the technical term with which the Skeptics denoted their most characteristic experience: epokhē, suspension.

"The Skeptics," Diogenes writes in his life of Pyrrho, "use this expression neither positively [thetikōs] nor negatively [anairetikōs], as when they refute an argument by saying: 'Scylla exists no more than [ou mallon] a chimera.'" 5 The term, however, is nevertheless not to be understood as indicating a genuine comparison: "But the Skeptics refute even the 'no more than.' For just as providence exists no more than it does not exist, so the 'no more than' is no more than it is not." Sextus Empiricus reaffirms the self-referential status of ou mallon just as decisively: "Even as the proposition 'every discourse is false' says that it too, like all propositions, is false, so the formula 'no more than' says that it itself is no more than it is not. . . . And even if this expression appears as an affirmation or a negation, still this is not the sense in which we use it but rather an indifferent [adiaforōs] and illegitimate sense [katakrēstikōs]." The way in which the scrivener makes use of his obstinate formula could not be characterized more precisely. But the analogy can also be followed up in another direction. In his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, having commented on the meaning of the expression ou mallon, Sextus adds: "the most important thing is that, in uttering this expression, the Skeptic says the phenomenon and announces the affect without any opinion [apaggellei to pathos adoxastōs]." Although it is not usually recorded as such, this last expression (pathos apaggellein) is also a technical term of the Skeptics' lexis. We find it once again, in the same sense, in another passage of Sextus's Outlines: "When we say 'everything is incomprehensible,' we do not mean to state that what the dogmatics seek is by nature incomprehensible; we limit ourselves to announcing the passion [or affect: to heautou pathos apaggellontos]."

Aggellō and apaggellō are verbs that express the function of the aggelos, the messenger, who simply carries a message without adding anything, or who performatively announces an event (polemon apaggellein means "to declare war"). The Skeptic does not simply oppose aphasia to phasis, silence to discourse; rather, he displaces language from the register of the proposition, which predicates something of something (legein ti kata tinos), to that of the announcement, which predicates nothing of nothing. Maintaining itself in the epokhē of the "no more than," language is transformed into the angel of the phenomenon, the pure announcement of its passion. As the adverb adoxastōs specifies, "passion" here indicates nothing subjective; pathos is purified of all doxa, all subjective appearance, and becomes the pure announcement of appearance, the intimation of Being without any predicate.

In this light, Bartleby's formula shows its full sense. It inscribes whomever utters it in the line of aggeloi, messengers. One of these messengers is Kafka's Barnaby, who, we read, "was perhaps simply a messenger, one who knew nothing of the content of the letters entrusted to him," one whose "gaze, smile, and walk seemed to be those of a messenger, although he himself was not aware of it." As a messenger, Bartleby was sent or some mysterious purpose of an all-wise Providence, which it was not for a simple mortal . . . to fathom." 6 But if the formula he repeats hovers so obstinately between acceptance and refusal, negation and position, if it predicates nothing and, in the end, even refutes itself, what is the message he has come to tell us, what does his formula announce?

3. "The Skeptics understand potentiality-possibility [dynamis] as any opposition between sensibles and intelligibles. By virtue of the equivalence found in the opposition between words and things, we thus reach the epokhē, the suspension, which is a condition in which we can neither posit nor negate, accept nor refuse." According to this striking text of Sextus, the Skeptics viewed suspension not simply as indifference but as an experience of possibility or potentiality. What shows itself on the threshold between Being and non-Being, between sensible and intelligible, between word and thing, is not the colorless abyss of the Nothing but the luminous spiral of the possible. To be able is neither to posit nor to negate. But in what way does what is-no-more-than-it-is-not still preserve in itself something like potentiality?

Leibniz once expressed the originary potentiality of Being in the form of a principle usually defined as the "principle of sufficient reason." This principle has the following form: ratio est cur aliquid sit potius quam non sit, "there is a reason for which something does rather than does not exist." Insofar as it cannot be reduced either to the pole of Being or to the pole of the Nothing, Bartleby's formula (like its Skeptic archetype) calls into question the "strongest of all principles," appealing precisely to the potius, the "rather" that articulates its scansion. Forcibly tearing it from its context, the formula emancipates potentiality (potius, from potis, which means "more powerful") from both its connection to a "reason" (ratio) and its subordination to Being.

Commenting on the principle of sufficient reason, which his teacher Leibniz had left unproven, Christian Wolff explains that our reason is disgusted by the idea of something taking place without a reason. If one takes away this principle, he writes, "the true world becomes a fairy-tale world, in which the will of men takes the place of reasons for what happens" (mundus verus abit in mundum fabulosum, in quo voluntas hominis stat pro ratione eorum, quae fiunt). The mundus fabulosus at issue here is that of the absurd fairy tale told by old women and that, in our vernacular, is called Schlarrafenland, the Land of Plenty. . . . You would like a cherry--and, at your command, there appears a cherry tree full of ripe fruit. According to your wish, the fruit flies toward your mouth and, if you so will it, divides in half in mid air, letting the pit and the bad parts fall to the ground so that you do not have to spit them out. Pigeons roasted on a spit fall from the sky and spontaneously enter the mouths of whoever is hungry.

What is truly disgusting to the philosopher's eyes, however, is not that will and caprice take the place of reason in the domain of things but that ratio is thus also extinguished in the domain of will and potentiality. "Not only are there now no principles of possibility and no principles of actuality external to man; what is more, not even the will has a principle for its willing, but instead indifferently wills anything. Hence it does not even want what it desires [ideo nimirum vult, quia libet]; there is no reason for it to want one thing rather than another." It is not true, therefore, that once the principle of reason is removed, human will takes the place of ratio, transforming the true world into a fable. Precisely the contrary is true, namely, that once ratio is removed, the will is ruined together with it.

In the ascetic Schlarrafenland in which Bartleby is at home, there is only a "rather" fully freed of all ratio, a preference and a potentiality that no longer function to assure the supremacy of Being over Nothing but exist, without reason, in the indifference between Being and Nothing. The indifference of Being and Nothing is not, however, an equivalence between two opposite principles; rather, it is the mode of Being of potentiality that is purified of all reason. Leibniz did not allow the possible to have any autonomous "potential to make itself exist" (puissance pour se faire exister), which he argued was to be found outside the possible, in God, insofar as he is a necessary being, that is, "existentifying" (Est ergo causa cur existentia praevaleat non-existentiae, seu ens necessarium est existentificans). Now wholly subverted, the Leibnizian principle instead takes on the Bartleby-like form of the following statement: "the fact that there is no reason for something to exist rather than not to exist is the existence of something no more than nothing." In the place of the Prince of Denmark's boutade, which reduces every problem to the opposition between to be and not to be, Being and non-Being, the scrivener's formula suggests a third term that transcends both: the "rather" (or the "no more than This is the one lesson to which Bartleby always holds. And, as the man of the law seems to intuit at a certain point, the scrivener's trial is the most extreme trial a creature can undergo. For to hold to the Nothing, non-Being, is certainly difficult; but it is the characteristic experience of the ungrateful guest--nihilism--with whom we are all too familiar today. And to hold simply to Being and its necessary positivity is also difficult; but is this not precisely the sense of the complicated Western ontotheo-logical ceremony whose morality is in secret solidarity with the guest it would like to drive away? To be capable, in pure potentiality, to bear the "no more than" beyond Being and Nothing, fully experiencing the impotent possibility that exceeds both--this is the trial that Bartleby announces. The green screen that isolates his desk traces the borders of an experimental laboratory in which potentiality, three decades before Nietzsche and in a sense that is altogether different from his, frees itself of the principle of reason. Emancipating itself from Being and non-Being alike, potentiality thus creates its own ontology.

The Experiment, or On Decreation

1. In a work on Robert Walser, Walter Lüssi invented the concept of an experiment without truth, that is, an experience characterized by the disappearance of all relation to truth.
Walser's writing is "pure poetry" (reine Dichtung) because it "refuses, in the widest sense, to recognize the Being of something as something." This concept should be transformed into a paradigm for literary writing. Not only science but also poetry and thinking conduct experiments. These experiments do not simply concern the truth or falsity of hypotheses, the occurrence or nonoccurrence of something, as in scientific experiments; rather, they call into question Being itself, before or beyond its determination as true or false. These experiments are without truth, for truth is what is at issue in them.

When Avicenna, proposing the experience of the flying man, imagines a dismembered and disorganized human body, showing that, thus fragmented and suspended in the air, man can still say "I am," and that the pure entity is the experience of a body without either parts or organs; when Cavalcanti describes the poetic experience as the transformation of the living body into a mechanical automaton ("I walk like a man outside life / who seems, to those who see him, a man / made of branches or rocks or wood / who is led along by artifice"); 7 when Condillac introduces his marble statue to the sense of smell, such that the statue "is no more than the scent of a rose"; when Dante desubjectifies the "I" of the poet into a third person (I' mi son un), a generic, homonymous being who functions only as a scribe in the dictation of love; when Rimbaud says "I is another"; when Kleist evokes the perfect body of the marionette as a paradigm of the absolute; and when Heidegger replaces the physical "I" with an empty and inessential being that is only its own ways of Being and has possibility only in the impossible--each time we must consider these "experiments without truth" with the greatest seriousness. Whoever submits himself to these experiments jeopardizes not so much the truth of his own statements as the very mode of his existence; he undergoes an anthropological change that is just as decisive in the context of the individual's natural history as the liberation of the hand by the erect position was for the primate or as was, for the reptile, the transformation of limbs that changed it into a bird.

The experiment that Melville entrusts to Bartleby is of this kind. If what is at issue in a scientific experiment can be defined by the question "Under what conditions can something occur or not occur, be true or be false?" what is at issue in Melville's story can instead be formulated in a question of the following form: "Under what conditions can something occur and (that is, at the same time) not occur, be true no more than not be true?" Only inside an experience that has thus retreated from all relation to truth, to the subsistence or nonsubsistence of things, does Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" acquire its full sense (or, alternatively, its nonsense). The formula cannot but bring to mind the propositions with which Wittgenstein, in his lecture on ethics, expresses his ethical experience par excellence: "I marvel at the sky because it exists," and "I am safe, whatever happens." The experience of a tautology--that is, a proposition that is impenetrable to truth conditions on account of always being true ("The sky is blue or the sky is not blue")--has its correlate in Bartleby in the experience of a thing's capacity to be true and, at the same time, not to be true. If no one dreams of verifying the scrivener's formula, this is because experiments without truth concern not the actual existence or nonexistence of a thing but exclusively its potentiality. And potentiality, insofar as it can be or not be, is by definition withdrawn from both truth conditions and, prior to the action of "the strongest of all principles," the principle of contradiction.

In first philosophy, a being that can both be and not be is said to be contingent. The experiment with which Bartleby threatens us is an experiment de contingentia absoluta.

(...)

Solely concerned with repressing the spirit of revenge, Nietzsche completely forgets the laments of what was not or could have been otherwise. An echo of this lament is still audible in Blanqui, when, in a prison cell in the Fort du Taureau, evoking the eternal return ten years before Nietzsche, he bitterly grants actual existence to all the possible worlds of the Palace of Destinies:

The number of our doubles is infinite in time and space. One can hardly demand more from the mind. These doubles are flesh and blood, even in pants, in crinolone and chignon.
They are not ghosts but eternity made real. And yet this is a great defect; there is no progress. Alas, these are vulgar new editions, repeats. Such are the exemplars of past worlds, of worlds to come. Let us not forget that everything that could have happened here has happened somewhere else.

In Zarathustra, this echo is completely muffled. In the end, Nietzsche's eternal return is only an atheistic variation of Leibniz Theodicy. Each of the pyramid's apartments now hosts the eternal repetition of what happened, thereby canceling the difference between the actual world and the possible world and returning potentiality to what was. And it is not an accident that Leibniz was the first to formulate--in almost the same terms--Nietzsche's decisive experience:

If the human species lasted long enough in its present state, a time would necessarily come in which even the lives of individuals would return in the same circumstances, down to the smallest details. I myself would return, to live once again in the city called Hannover, on the banks of the Leine river, once again busy studying the history of Brunswick and writing the same letters to the same friends.

Bartleby holds fast to this solution until he decides to give up copying. Benjamin discerns the inner correspondence between copying and the eternal return when he compares Nietzsche's concept to die Strafe des Nachsitzens, that is, the punishment assigned by the teacher to negligent schoolchildren that consists in copying out the same text countless times. ("The eternal return is copying projected onto the cosmos. Humanity must copy out its texts in innumerable repetitions.") The infinite repetition of what was abandons all its potential not to be. In its obstinate copying, as in Aristotle's contingency, there is no potential not to be. The will to power is, in truth, the will to will, an eternally repeated action; only as such is it potentialized. This is why the scrivener must stop copying, why he must give up his work.

6. At the end of Melville's story, the man of the law discretely proposes an interpretation of Bartleby on the basis of a piece of gossip. This "report" is that Bartleby "had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration." 11 I As elsewhere in the story, the man of the law furnishes the reader with correct information; but as always, the explanation he draws from it is off the mark. He insinuates that having worked in that office pushed the scrivener's innate temperament to "a pallid hopelessness." Bartleby's deplorable behavior and his mad formula, he suggests, can be clarified as the final stage of a preexistent pathological disposition precipitated by unfortunate circumstances. This explanation is trivial not so much because, like all psychological explanations, it ends by presupposing itself, as because it entirely fails to question the particular link between dead letters and Bartleby's formula. Why does a pallid hopelessness express itself in precisely this way and not another?

Yet it is the man of the law, once again, who allows us to answer the question.

"Sometimes," he says, from out of the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring--the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity--he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death. 12

There could be no clearer way to suggest that undelivered letters are the cipher of joyous events that could have been, but never took place. What took place was, instead, the opposite possibility. On the writing tablet of the celestial scribe, the letter, the act of writing, marks the passage from potentiality to actuality, the occurrence of a contingency.
But precisely for this reason, every letter also marks the nonoccurrence of something; every letter is always in this sense a "dead letter." This is the intolerable truth that Bartleby learned in the Washington office, and this is the meaning of the singular formula, "on errands of life, those letters speed to death."

Until now, it has not been noted that this formula is, in fact, a barely disguised citation from Romans 7:10, euretē moi hē entolē hē eis Zōēn, autē eis thanaton, which, in the translation Melville would have known, reads as follows: "And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death" (entolē is a "mandate," what is sent for a reason--hence epistolē, "letter"--and is more correctly rendered by "errand" than by "commandment"). In Paul's text, the mandate, the entolē, is that of the Law from which the Christian has been freed. The mandate is referred to the "oldness of the letter" to which the apostle has just opposed the "newness of spirit": "But now we are delivered from the Law, that being dead where we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, not in the oldness of the letter" ( Rom. 7:6, but see also 2 Cor. 3:6, "the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life"). In this light, not only the relationship between Bartleby and the man of the law but even that between Bartleby and writing acquires a new sense.
Bartleby is a "law-copyist," a scribe in the evangelical sense of the term, and his renunciation of copying is also a reference to the Law, a liberation from the "oldness of the letter." Critics have viewed Bartleby, like Joseph K., as a Christ figure (Deleuze calls him "a new Christ") who comes to abolish the old Law and to inaugurate a new mandate (ironically, it is the lawyer himself who recalls this to him: "A new commandment give I unto you that ye love one another"). But if Bartleby is a new Messiah, he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not. The Tartarus into which Bartleby, the new savior, descends is the deepest level of the Palace of Destinies, that whose sight Leibniz cannot tolerate, the world in which nothing is compossible with anything else, where "nothing exists rather than something." And Bartleby comes not to bring a new table of the Law but, as in the Cabalistic speculations on the messianic kingdom, to fulfill the Torah by destroying it from top to bottom. Scripture is the law of the first creation (which the Cabalists call the "Torah of Beriah"), in which God created the world on the basis of its potential to be, keeping it separate from its potential not to be. Every letter of this Torah is, therefore, turned both toward life and toward death; it signifies both the ring and the finger intended for it, which disintegrates in the grave, both what was and what could not be.

The interruption of writing marks the passage to the second creation, in which God summons all his potential not to be, creating on the basis of a point of indifference between potentiality and impotentiality. The creation that is now fulfilled is neither a re-creation nor an eternal repetition; it is, rather, a decreation in which what happened and what did not happen are returned to their originary unity in the mind of God, while what could have not been but was becomes indistinguishable from what could have been but was not.

A Persian Neoplatonist once expressed the shadow that contingency casts on every creature in the image of the dark wing of the archangel Gabriel:

Know that Gabriel has two wings. The first, the one on the right, is pure light. This wing is the sole and pure relation of Gabriel's Being with God. Then there is the left wing. This wing is grazed with a dark figure resembling the crimson color of the moon at dawn or the peacock's claw. This shadowy figure is Gabriel's capacity to be, which has one side turned toward non-Being (since it is, as such, also a capacity not to be). If you consider Gabriel in his act of Being through God's Being, then his Being is said to be necessary, since under this aspect it cannot not be. But if you consider him in his right to existence in itself, this right is immediately to the same degree a right not to be, since such is the right of a being that does not have its capacity to be in itself (and that is, therefore, a capacity not to be).

Decreation is the immobile flight sustained by the black wing alone. At this wing's every beating, the actual world is led back to its right not to be; all possible worlds are led back to their right to existence. Sextus the ill-fated tyrant of Rome and Sextus the happy peasant of Corinth blend together and can no longer be told apart. Gabriel's dark wing is the eternal scale keeping the best of all possible worlds carefully balanced against the counterweight of all impossible worlds. Decreation takes place at the point where Bartleby stands, "in the heart of the eternal pyramid" of the Palace of Destinies, which, in this ironic and inverted theodicy, is also called the Halls of Justice. His word is not justice, which gives a reward or a perpetual punishment to what was, but instead Palingenesis, apokatastasis pantōn, in which the new creature--for the new creature is what is at issue here--reaches the indemonstrable center of its "occurrence-or-nonoccurrence." This is the irrevocable end of the letter's journey, which, on errands of life, sped toward death. And it is here that the creature is finally at home, saved in being irredeemable. This is why in the end, the walled courtyard is not a sad place. There is sky and there is grass. And the creature knows perfectly well "where it is."

1. A different translation of this passage can be found in Aristotle's Metaphysics, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle (Grinnell, Iowa: The Peripatetic Press, 1979), p. 209.  

2. Herman Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener," in Billy Budd Sailor and Other Stories, ed. Harold Beaver ( London: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 73. 

3. Ibid., pp. 88-89.   4. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 73-7

4; the original is in Gilles Deleuze, Critique et clinique ( Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1993), p. 95.  

5. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, vol. 2 ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), p. 488.  

6. Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener," p. 89.  

7." I' vo come colui ch' è fuor di vita / che pare, a chi lo sguarda, ch' omo / sia fatto di rame o di pietra o di legno / che si conduca solo per maestria."  

8. Aristotle in Twenty-Three Volumes, vol. 19: The Nichomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 1139 b 6-10 (p. 331).

9. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil, trans. E. M. Huggard ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), p. 372.  

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann ( London: Penguin, 1954), p. 139.  

11. Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener," p. 99.  

12. Ibid.

POTENTIALITIES  Collected Essays in Philosophy
Giorgio Agamben 

Mencken on marriage

Monogamous marriage, by its very conditions . . . forces the two contracting parties into an intimacy that is too persistent and unmitigated; they are in contact at too many points, and too steadily. By and by all the mystery of the relation is gone, and they stand in the unsexed position of brother and sister.

. . . A husband begins by kissing a pretty girl, his wife; it is pleasant to have her so handy and so willing. He ends by making Machiavellian efforts to avoid kissing the every day sharer of his meals, books, bath towels, pocketbook, relatives, ambitions, secrets, malaises and business:  a proceeding about as romantic as having his boots blacked. The thing is too horribly dismal for words. Not all the native sentimentalism of man can overcome the distaste and boredom that get into it. Not all the histrionic capacity of woman can attach any appearance of gusto and spontaneity to it.

Once the adventurous descends to the habitual, it takes on an offensive and degrading character. The intimate approach, to give genuine joy, must be a concession, a feat of persuasion, a victory; once it loses that character it loses everything. Such a destructive conversion is effected by the average monogamous marriage. It breaks down all mystery and reserve, for how can mystery and reserve survive the use of the same hot water bag and a joint concern about butter and egg bills? What remains, at least on the husband’s side, is esteem— the feeling one has for an amiable aunt. And confidence— the emotion evoked by a lawyer, a dentist or a fortune- teller. And habit— the thing which makes it possible to eat the same breakfast every day, and to windup one’s watch regularly, and to earn a living.

[One might] prevent this stodgy dephlogistication of marriage by interrupting its course— that is, by separating the parties now and then, so that neither will become too familiar and commonplace to the other. By this means, . . . curiosity will be periodically revived, and there will be a chance for personality to expand a cappella, and so each reunion will have in it something of the surprise, the adventure and the virtuous satanry of the honeymoon. The husband will not come back to precisely the same wife that he parted from, and the wife will not welcome precisely the same husband.

Even supposing them to have gone on substantially as if together, they will have gone on out of sight and hearing of each other. Thus each will find the other, to some extent at least, a stranger, and hence a bit challenging, and hence a bit charming. The scheme . . . has been tried often, and with success. It is, indeed, a familiar observation that the happiest couples are those who are occasionally separated, and the fact has been embalmed in the trite maxim that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Perhaps not actually fonder, but at any rate more tolerant, more curious, more eager. Two difficulties, however, stand in the way of the widespread adoption of the remedy. One lies in its costliness: the average couple cannot afford a double establishment, even temporarily. The other lies in the fact that it inevitably arouses the envy and ill-nature of those who cannot adopt it, and so causes a gabbling of scandal. The world invariably suspects the worst. Let man and wife separate to save their happiness from suffocation in the kitchen, the dining room and the connubial chamber, and it will immediately conclude that the corpse is already laid out in the drawing-room.
**
The marriage of a first-rate man, when it takes place at all, commonly takes place relatively late. He may succumb in the end, but he is almost always able to postpone the disaster a good deal longer than the average poor clodpate, or normal man. If he actually marries early, it is nearly always proof that some intolerable external pressure has been applied to him. . .
The reasons which impel him to yield even then are somewhat obscure, but two or three of them, perhaps, may be vaguely discerned. One lies in the fact that every man, whether of the first-class or of any other class, tends to decline in mental agility as he grows older, though in the actual range and profundity of his intelligence he may keep on improving until he collapses into senility. Obviously, it is mere agility of mind, and not profundity, that is of most value and effect in so tricky and deceptive a combat as the duel of sex. The aging man, with his agility gradually withering, is thus confronted by women in whom it still luxuriates as a function of their relative youth.

Not only do women of his own age aspire to ensnare him, but also women of all ages back to adolescence. Hence his average or typical opponent tends to be progressively younger and younger than he is, and in the end the mere advantage of her youth may be sufficient to tip over his tottering defences.

This, I take it, is why oldish men are so often intrigued by girls in their teens. It is not that age calls maudlinly to youth, as the poets would have it; it is that age is no match for youth, especially when age is male and youth is female.
Another reason for the relatively late marriages of superior men is found, perhaps, in the fact that, as a man grows older, the disabilities he suffers by marriage tend to diminish and the advantages to increase. At thirty a man is terrified by the inhibitions of monogamy and has little taste for the so- called comforts of a home; at sixty he is beyond amorous adventure and is in need of creature ease and security. What he is oftenest conscious of, in these later years, is his physical decay; he sees himself as in imminent danger of falling into neglect and helplessness. He is thus confronted by a choice between getting a wife or hiring a nurse, and he commonly chooses the wife as the less expensive and exacting. The nurse, indeed, would probably try to marry him anyhow; if he employs her in place of a wife he commonly ends by finding himself married and minus a nurse, to his confusion and discomfiture, and to the far greater discomfiture of his heirs and assigns. . . . If men, at the normal mating age, had half as much to gain by marriage as women gain, then, all men would be as ardently in favour of it as women are.

**
Writing of monogamy as a pacifying institution, Mencken opined that :

Civilized men are in favour of it because they find that it works. And why does it work? Because it is the most effective of all available antidotes to the alarms and terrors of passion. Monogamy, in brief, kills passion— and passion is the most dangerous of all the surviving enemies to what we call civilization, which is based upon order, decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation.

The civilized man— the ideal civilized man— is simply one who never sacrifices the common security to his private passions. He reaches perfection when he even ceases to love passionately— when he reduces the most profound of all his instinctive experience from the level of an ecstasy to the level of a mere device for replenishing armies and workshops of the world, keeping clothes in repair, reducing the infant death-rate, providing enough tenants for every landlord, and making it possible for the Polizei to know where every citizen is at any hour of the day or night. Monogamy accomplishes this, not by producing satiety, but by destroying appetite. It makes passion formal and uninspiring, and so gradually kills it. (...)

The advocates of monogamy, deceived by its moral overtones, fail to get all the advantage out of it that is in it. Consider, for example, the important moral business of safeguarding the virtue of the unmarried— that is, of the still passionate. The present plan in dealing, say, with a young man of twenty, is to surround him with scare-crows and prohibitions— to try to convince him logically that passion is dangerous. This is both supererogation and imbecility— supererogation because he already knows that it is dangerous, and imbecility because it is quite impossible to kill a passion by arguing against it. The way to kill it is to give it rein under unfavourable and dispiriting conditions— to bring it down, by slow stages, to the estate of an absurdity and a horror. How much more, then, could be accomplished if the wild young man were forbidden polygamy, before marriage, but permitted monogamy!

The prohibition in this case would be relatively easy to enforce, instead of impossible, as in the other. Curiosity would be satisfied; nature would get out of her cage; even romance would get an inning. Ninety-nine young men out of a hundred would submit, if only because it would be much easier to submit than to resist.

The Last Emperor

When I first saw Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), it struck me as a remake of Doctor Zhivago. Both narratives begin in glamorous and archaic empires that fall to communist revolutions. Of course, that could just be due to the fact that the Chinese Revolution was something of a remake of the Russian Revolution. But there are parallels specific to the two films, both of which depict communism as recapitulating the old forms of despotism but as vulgar and brutal farces, stripped of all refinement. Both films also end on a note of hope. But what gives cause for hope is the reemergence of precisely what communism sought to abolish. Thus both Doctor Zhivago and The Last Emperor are not just anti-communist films, they are reactionary anti-communist films. But in the case of The Last Emperor, this is hard to square with the fact that director Bertolucci was himself a communist. 

The Last Emperor tells the story of Puyi, who became the last emperor of the Qing dynasty in 1908 at the age of two. He was deposed in 1912 after China became a republic. In 1924, he was expelled from his palace, the Forbidden City of Beijing. He then took refuge in Tientsin, where he plotted to regain his throne. Eventually, he threw in with the Japanese, in 1932 becoming the head of state of Manchukuo, the name given to Japanese-occupied Manchuria. In 1934, he was crowned emperor of Manchukuo. In 1945, he was captured by the Red Army. In 1950, he was turned over to the People’s Republic of China for trial and rehabilitation. In 1959, he was declared rehabilitated and released. He spent the rest of his life as a worker and citizen in the People’s Republic of China. He died of cancer in 1967. 

The Last Emperor is based primarily on Puyi’s 1964 autobiography, From Emperor to Citizen. The script was written by Bertlolucci and his brother-in-law Mark Peploe. The Last Emperor was the first Western film to be shot within the Forbidden City. The cast included John Lone as the adult Puyi, Joan Chen as his Empress Wanrong, and Peter O’Toole as his tutor Reginald Johnston. Ryuichi Sakamoto played Japanese agent Masahiko Amakasu and composed the bulk of the music. There were nearly 20,000 extras. The Last Emperor was a critical success. It also did well in theaters, despite its 163-minute running time. It won nine Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, as well as many other awards. 

The Last Emperor works simply as a dazzling, exotic costume drama. It is astonishing to learn that at the dawn of the twentieth century, China was ruled by an absolute monarchy that had not changed much in more than 2,000 years. The emperor was revered as a quasi-divine being who mediated between heaven and earth, a conduit by which higher order infused a world perpetually haunted by chaos. The emperors had multiple wives and were attended by an army of eunuchs, who were not only castrated but had their sexual organs entirely removed, usually when they were children. The only intact man who could sleep in the palace was the emperor. When the emperors died, they were bedecked in jewels and entombed like pharaohs. 

But it gets stranger yet. Even though the emperors had absolute power, they were little more than prisoners. They were never alone and were not allowed to do anything for themselves. This is dramatized most effectively on Puyi’s wedding night, when he and the empress were attended by six ladies in waiting, who disrobed them as discreetly as possible. 

Beyond that, the emperor had no contact with the world other than his courtiers and eunuchs, who used their control of information to shape policies. When a teenaged Puyi took on a Scotsman, Reginald Johnston, as his tutor, he knew almost nothing of world history or geography. The courtiers were so opposed to anything modern that they tried to veto eyeglasses for their nearsighted emperor. 

This system became most bizarre when children became emperors. Child rulers are inevitable in monarchies, but they also reduce it to absurdity. 

Hereditary monarchy has many benefits. Every social order needs a supreme executive. In normal circumstances, laws can be enforced and policies can be executed by bureaucrats, police, and judges. But in exceptional circumstances, where decisions cannot be based on settled laws and practices, executives need some discretionary power. And when the entire system is threatened by exceptional circumstances, one needs a chief executive who can decide what to do. 

Sometimes terrible things have to be done to preserve society. Rioters need to be shot, for instance. But in such circumstances, ordinary policemen and officials fear to do what is necessary because their offices are conditional, and they can be blamed and punished for their missteps. Thus it is important for there to be someone who can take full responsibility during a crisis. Such a decision-maker cannot answer to any other mortal. He must be guided only by his sense of what is required by the common good. And since the common good can sometimes require killing, the decider must be immune from punishment for his actions. In short, the whole political order depends on a decision-maker who is above the law and immune to it. 

An executive who can be removed from office, however, cannot employ unpopular measures even to save the nation. Thus the best executive rules for life. 

But how does he attain his office? If an executive is elected—especially if the election falls during a crisis—he cannot risk doing anything unpopular either, even if it is necessary to preserve society. Thus the best executive cannot be chosen, for that means he is beholden to those who choose him, not to the public good. The best executive, therefore, must simply be born. (Or he can be chosen by lottery.) Hereditary monarchy is thus one of the best ways to confer the fullest package of executive powers. 

Unfortunately, it often confers such powers upon unworthy parties. For when ultimate authority, responsibility, and immunity from punishment are reposed in the hands of a child—who is unable to understand statecraft and make decisions for himself and who cannot be held responsible for his actions, much less the actions of his underlings—monarchy becomes a farce. Decisions have to be made by other people—regents—who lack the ultimate authority or immunity of the sovereign. 

The last three Chinese emperors were children when they were crowned. During the reign of the first two—the Tongzhi Emperor and the Guangxu Emperor—power was largely in the hands of the Dowager Empress Cixi, the mother of the former and the aunt of the latter. When the Guangxu Emperor began to reform China, Cixi overthrew him in a palace coup and went back to running the country. When Cixi was dying, the Guangxu Emperor was poisoned. Puyi was placed on the throne, under the control of Cixi’s faction, so that no reforms could take place even after her death. 

A new level of farce was reached in 1912, when Puyi’s regents abdicated in his name—and didn’t even bother to tell him. After all, he was a child. He wouldn’t understand. Under the articles of abdication, Puyi remained emperor within the walls of the Forbidden City. The rituals of the court continued unaltered, although they were now completely detached from the mechanisms of government. 

Why did this farce continue? Part of it, surely, was superstition. The Chinese seemed unable to shake the belief that the Qing still enjoyed the Mandate of Heaven. Another part of it was the hope that the emperor would be restored, which did happen briefly in 1917. But the main part of it was probably corruption. The court provided a living for thousands. What else was a eunuch going to do in the twentieth century? The Forbidden City was a vast treasure house, which the courtiers were systematically plundering. When the teenaged Puyi ordered an inventory of the treasury, it was burned to the ground to cover the theft. 

But the corruption of the Qing court came from the very top. What is corruption anyway? The purpose of government is to serve the common good. Every office should play that role. Of course, every office is staffed by officials, and every official is a mere mortal, who has his own private ends. 

The only office where there is no divide between private and public interests is a hereditary monarch. His whole life, from birth to death, is dedicated to the public good. Thus he serves as an example to everyone else. But when the monarch is a puppet of scheming courtiers serving who knows what ends while merely going through the motions of serving the public good, it only makes sense for more humble functionaries to start looking out for themselves as well. 

Of course they keep going through the motions of government. But their hearts are not in it. The regime has been hollowed out. It no longer serves its purpose. A hollowed-out regime can last a long time if it is not tested. When it is tested, we see whether its functionaries are willing to pull together and do what is necessary for its survival. But China was in the throes of a century of humiliations. Eventually, under the stress of foreign interventionists, domestic rebellions, ambitious politicians, and rogue generals, the regime simply collapsed.

The Last Emperor begins in 1950 when Puyi arrives at a Chinese Communist prison. But as the film unfolds, we learn that he was basically a prisoner since the age of two, when he was made the emperor. 

It is astonishing that the communists did not kill Puyi. Mao’s regime was the bloodiest in human history. What would have been one more life? Yes, the communists believed that man is born good, does wrong only because of society, and can be reformed. But murdering their opposition was quicker and easier. There’s never been any shortage of Chinese. 

Perhaps Puyi was spared for propaganda purposes. If he could be reformed, then anyone could. But Puyi was not the only Qing to be spared by the Red Chinese. His father, Prince Chun, died in Beijing in 1950—in a palace, not a prison. Many descendants of the Qing royal clan live in China to this day. Perhaps they were protected by the Mandate of Heaven after all, or at least a lingering belief in it.

It was to break with such traditions that the Cultural Revolution was launched, but on Bertolucci’s depiction, it simply ended up recapitulating the old regime as farce. One of the most spectacular scenes of The Last Emperor is Puyi’s coronation, in which thousands of Chinese nobles assemble to kowtow to the new emperor. At the end of the movie, we see hysterical Red Guards parading thought criminals through the streets and demanding they kowtow to Chairman Mao. The end of The Last Emperor is enigmatic. The elderly Puyi buys a ticket to visit the Forbidden City as a tourist. Thinking he is alone, he tries to sit on this former coronation throne. A young boy in the red kerchief of the Pioneers stops him. Puyi tells him that he was once the emperor of China. To prove it, he rummages under the throne’s cushions and finds a cricket cage that he had hidden there. The cricket cage first appears during the coronation, when it is presented to Puyi by an official, Chen Baochen. When Chen opens the cage, the cricket emerges. Its crouched posture makes it look like it is kowtowing to the emperor too. When the boy opens the cage, the cricket reemerges. When the boy looks back at the throne, however, Puyi has disappeared. This is, of course, pure fantasy. Crickets only live a couple months. So this is a magic cricket. 

How do we interpret this ending? First, we can ask what the cricket means. The cricket represents the reemergence of something that has gone into hibernation for a very long time. The kowtow, of course, is a symbol of imperial authority, brought back by the Red Guards. But is such authority good or bad? If Bertolucci were a liberal, he should say it is bad. But Bertolucci is supposedly a Marxist, and Marxists never had any problem with state power and its symbols. 

Second, we can ask what it means to end with magic as such. Ultimately, Bertolucci doesn’t view history through Marxist lenses. Instead, he views it aesthetically. And as an aesthetic spectacle, he finds communism lacking. The most visually spectacular parts of the film are from Puyi’s childhood: his meeting with Cixi who pronounces him the new emperor, his coronation, and his wedding. In Tientsin and Manchukuo, Puyi and his court embraced modern dress and décor, with equally spectacular results. Bertolucci portrays the People’s Republic of China, however, as utterly drab and vulgar, and not just the prisons. At the end of the Red Guard scene, we are serenaded by massed accordions and treated to some proletarian ballet. Even as degenerate drug addicts, the Qing at least had style. 

One can criticize communism from the Left, but by turning history into an aesthetic spectacle and ending with a poetic flourish, The Last Emperor repudiates communism from the Right. 

Trevor Lynch 

 The Unz Review, September 29, 2021