Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare

The past couple weeks I have been reading Twelfth Night. As my seven year old said: “It’s basically a play about a boy pretending to be a woman who is pretending to be a boy!” Already his literary analysis is far superior to my seven year old obsession with PeeWee Scouts…

Up until recently that’s probably about where my knowledge of the play had been as well. But for the last two weeks I have slowly traced literary rabbit trails from one theme to the next, only to end in delirious ambiguity and confusion…which I think means I am reading it well. The thing about Shakespeare, as I am beginning to learn, is that he refuses to be easily defined. There’s always the subliminal complexity and the subversive ambiguity to wonder if what you think just happened really happened. Take the end of this play for example: my class had to discuss if we thought it had a happy ending or a sombre ending…I think the class decision was evenly split. 

I argued for a sombre ending the first week. Malvolio, the steward, has had an extreme practical joke played on him orchestrated by Maria, Olivia’s gentlewoman; Sir Toby, Olivia’s uncle; and Sir Andrew, the fool that Toby is trying to marry off to Olivia, but really is just using him for a bit of fun and extra cash. As Harold Bloom says: 

“…The mystery of Twelfth Night may well be Shakespeare’s enthusiasm for a practical joke so fearsome that the wretched Malvolio, at the play’s end really would be better off dead. Shakespeare the thinker- as gifted as Shakespeare the creator of personality, of language, of wisdom - challenges our ethics and our moral psychology by compelling us to realize that what we enjoy is the guilty pleasure of a solipsism in which we haplessly say: “This cannot happen to me.” (Bloom, 13) 

By the second week after reading R.W. Maslen’s essay "Twelfth Night, Gender, and Comedy" (Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, 2006) …I saw it from the opposite side. While the play does end with Malvolio in disgrace, Count Orsino has someone run after him and attempt to repair the damage that has been done. Both Orsino and Malvolio have shifted throughout the play, Orsino has shifted to realize that there is a world outside of himself and that people are capable of feelings (like for example women in general) and have complex emotions beyond his own narrow vision. He has realized he needs these people and has shifted to a posture of social cohesion rather than isolation. 

Malvolio has also realized he needs people. Throughout the play he is arrogantly above the hilarity of the festivities. He wants to reign the others in and create order…but his world is also one of isolation, best illuminated by his fantasy of marrying Olivia and spending more time itemizing his new luxury items (velvet! Day beds!) than actually appreciating Olivia as a multidimensional person of value. By the end, as he is running away yelling: shame on you all! I will have my revenge! He has learned that in dire situations you must have people to rely on. In the sense that the comedy has been propelled forward by the centripetal force of those in isolation and ends with cohesion…the play has a happy ending. 

All of that to say there are so many ways to look at everything…that I almost wish this was a 10 week class on a single play and we just spent our time carefully going through diametrically opposed criticism. 

So…without further ado…here we go:

The title Twelfth Night refers to the Feast of Epiphany or the Feast of Fools, A celebration that involved role reversals and merriment. The second title: or What You Will is a somewhat ambiguous play on words that preemptively sets the stage for a romp of complex dualities and mistaken identities. There is a general “twin-ness” about the play where we see the doubles or inverse of both characters and themes such as passive and active, male and female, agency and impotence. 

This duality immediately becomes apparent as the play begins: instead of merriment we find melancholy as Orsino pines over the unrequited love of Lady Olivia. Orsino is lovesick and moody, trapped in a world of his own creation. His metaphors and similes are intense: Music is the food of love, love is like insatiable hunger, love is like a stormy sea. We see unpredictability within his own emotions as he tells the musicians to “play on” and then moments later demands that they stop. The end rhyme “no more!/ before” perfectly highlights his fickleness. 

In this depressive verbal seascape, everything is shape shifting and unpredictable, (1.1.14) and yet it isn’t holiday cheer/ale that has inebriated him (like it has for Sir Toby) it is his own insatiable solipsistic love: “…give me excess of it.” (1.1.2) 

When asked if he will go hart hunting, he says he already is hunting the noblest hart/heart he has: his own! Using a homonym points to the duality and complexity within language itself. When Olivia surfaces within his narrative, it is only to “purge the air of pestilence” (1.1.19) so that his cruel hounds of desire can pursue his own hart/heart with better clarity. When she has shifted her cloistered devotion from her brother to himself and he is finally the proprietor of her “liver, brain and heart” then his “sovereign thrones” will be “supplied and filled” with “Her sweet perfections.” (1.1.32-38) He is so delighted by this mirage that he goes off to find the perfect bed of flowers to lie in.

Both Orsino and Olivia engage with love in a similar way. Orsino describes love as something almost unexpected and perhaps unwanted that came upon him and now holds him hostage. (1.1.5) A sentiment that will be echoed in Olivia’s surprising and unexpected affection for Cesario which she describes as catching a plague (1.5.178-80).

Throughout the play love has the potential to blur rather than provide clarity, as Orsino has suggested (1.1.19). It is the glue that holds the mistaken identities together as each character in their own way imputes meaning to the imaginary world they have created for themselves. Instead of the give and exchange of love, we see both Olivia and Orsino passively cloistered within their castles, discrete elements within a broken system, mirrors of each other’s emotional excess. 

By the end of the first Act the stage is set for an active hero (Viola/Cesario) to confront the imaginary worlds Orsino and Olivia have created and to move the action from contemplation and isolation into cohesive relationship. As to be expected, Viola isn’t the only hero capable of selfless love, she has a double, mirroring her action: and that is Antonio, the sailor who has rescued her twin brother Sebastian.

In researching Twelfth Night I went down an informative rabbit trail on the Cult of the Ideal Friendship. This type of friendship was built upon the classical notions of virtue and reason and required dedicated pursuit. (A concept that is almost cognitively dissonant for the modern person.) According to Cicero it demanded loyalty in times both prosperous and adverse;  a type of loyalty willing to defy all social norms and constraints. It was exclusive; an intimate bond between men 'who came together in good will. '  It was a relationship that you choose rather than had forced upon you, (Montaigne).

It was also a relationship that demanded proximity. You wanted good things, continued joy and happiness for your friend, and you desired to live with him in order to more fully share in his joys and sorrow. For Aristotle this type of friendship was almost like having another self.  

In De Amicitia  Cicero argues that "so spirited is the union and so closely joined are the two friends that their souls mix together and they can be considered as one person."  This mixing of souls became a type of mirroring, aimed at the self-improvement through the alter ego "mirror" of his own virtue. 

That being said, I think Antonio has the wrong twin. 

In his soliloquy Antonio is willing to risk danger and even loss of life.  His friendship with Sebastian has been the catalyst to heroic action. This is all very classical and echoed in Viola's response to Orsino: "And I most jocund, apt and willingly/ To do you rest a thousand deaths would die." (5.1.125-6) 

I read  that "to die" could be an Elizabethan euphemism for achieving orgasm? (Maslen, 2006) That might be a little extreme, but what Maslen suggests is that Viola is willing to publicly admit her love and defy social norms in doing so.  Sodomy was punishable by death. 

The Cult of Ideal Friendship within Elizabethan society was a well known concept. What was also well known, (and as Montaigne points out), this type of relationship was supposed to be impossible with women. As Orsino references (2.4.90-99), women lacked constancy and  there would be far too much sexual tension between men and women for it to translate into true friendship. Friendship was the purest form of relationship, unhindered by sexual desire, or the 'frenzy of love'. 

R.W. Maslen describes Cesario/Viola as:

"Neither male nor female, neither man nor boy, and in the end neither servant nor master, he is kind of riddle, a pun or double entendre in human form, testifying to the power of comedy as a means of disrupting settled notions and complicating illusory certainties." 

I love that. 

In a world where men and women were practically considered different species, Viola’s ability to pass as a man is quite remarkable… And prompts the questions: Is there something inherently unique about Viola? Is she more masculine than the average woman...or are preconceived notions of gender at stake and being rigorously challenged? 

Women, according to Aristotle, lacked the ability not only for ‘Ideal Friendships’ but also for rational thinking, they were subservient to men on all accounts and even considered to be a type of deformed male. Their socially acceptable verbs would be: passive, showing sexual restraint, submissive (both verbally and behaviorally)...or of course there were deviant women: shrews, drabs, scolds, and whores. Those were the options for most women.

Maslen argues that even for women to speak in many situations would be considered immodest, and he describes the plight of the dramatist as being how to have women speak without seeming indecent!

Maslen describes the women of Twelfth Night as a "trio of articulate women." While this articulation in some sense could be considered as a challenge to the status quo, in another it follows a socially acceptable pattern of behavior: Viola is allowed to be articulate because she is mistaken for a man. Olivia is allowed to be articulate because she represents an Elizabeth like figure of the ruling class, but she must also be virginal and chaste. Maria is allowed to be articulate by occupying the role of "female trickster." If there is a status quo element I wonder if it is in the predictable marriage of all the articulate women? In the end they all neatly fall beneath the headship of their husbands...

At the end of the play, having realized that Viola is actually female, Orsino still calls Viola "boy" one last time and she leaves the play in male attire…some critics take this to be symbolic hope for an egalitarian union…

Whether or not that is the case, as the play ends the reader/ viewer is left feeling the whiplash of social constructions never quite being fully discernible, themes riffing off each other and then subtly disappearing and characters that perpetually shape shift beyond definition. 

Montaigne, M. D., & Frame, D. M. (1979). Of friendship. In The complete essays of Montaigne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Howard, E. (1674). Poems, And Essays: With A paraphrase on Cicero Laelius, Or, Of Friendship. London.

Maslen, R. W. (2006). Twelfth Night, Gender, and Comedy. In G. A. Sullivan, P. Cheney, & A. Hadfield (Authors), Early modern English drama: A critical companion. New York: Oxford University Press.

Shakespeare, W., & Bevington, D. (2003). Twelfth Night. In The complete works of Shakespeare. New York: Longman.

Macbeth - William Shakespeare

Last week I started a 10 week course on Shakespeare. I’ve read a little Shakespeare in high school, I even had to memorize lines for the Second Witch of Macbeth and recite them for the class, probably overdoing it a bit with a hump and spitting out the infamous: 

“Double, double, toil and trouble;

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” 

But in high school, my critical reading abilities were superficial at best. (This was back when I thought a good analysis of The Great Gatsby was: “He wasn’t that great and his name wasn’t Gatsby! Mic drop.) 

We've been studying Macbeth this week and I've begun to look into the themes of gender and tyranny. I have just scratched the surface in my research and so what follows is kind of scatter-shot of ideas. 

One of the things I find peculiar is how despite the fact that Macbeth is a tyrant, he seems so relatable. Harold Bloom, in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations, describes him as: “a villain, indeed a monster of murderousness far surpassing the others.” (Bloom 1) And yet…assigning him culpability isn’t as simple as it should be.

In his Poetics, Aristotle argues that a tragic hero must be neither villainous nor virtuous but exist as a "character between these two extremes ...a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty."  The witches, through their equivocations, create the potential for an error. There was no reason to think that the kingship would not fall into place as easily as the Thaneship of Cawdor. And as Steven Greenblatt mentioned in his introduction to Macbeth: "Virtually everyone is subject to terrible dreams and lawless fantasies...but not everyone crosses the fatal line from criminal desire to criminal act. “ (Greenblatt 2712)

Macbeth, unlike Richard III, for example, is incredibly introspective, and we witness him wrestling through what these vague auguries could mean. 

This supernatural soliciting

Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill,

Why hath it given me earnest of success

Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. 

If good, why do I yield to that suggestion

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair

And make my seated heart knock at my ribs

Against the use of nature? Present fears

Are less than horrible imaginings. 

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,

Shakes so my single state of man

That function is smothers in surmise

And nothing is but what is not. 

1.3.141-44*

I would argue that the emphasis in the above passage isn’t that he has contemplated murder,  but rather that he has begun to fracture, and with his new identity as Thane of Cawdor, he has been dressed not only in "borrowed robes" (1.3.108) but also in the subsequent cowardice and treachery of his predecessor.  

The imagery of ill fitting clothing permeates the text and illustrates the idea that Macbeth is playacting a role that is not the right fit. The description paints a picture of a “small man enveloped in a coat too big for him” (5.2.15) while “his honors fit ill upon him like a loose and badly fitting garment belonging to someone else,” (1.3.144)

Caroline Spurgeon argues in Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us that this clothing imagery gives us a portrait of “a small ignoble man encumbered and degraded by garments unsuited to him.” (Spurgeon 326)

While Macbeth seems almost like a victim of fate, Lady Macbeth seems to be the most evil/culpable. We see no wrestling or moral oscillating, she is instantly in a place of "direst cruelty.” (1.5.41) 

Come, you Spirits

That tend on mortal thought, unsex me here, 

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood, 

That no compunctions visitings of nature 

Shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between

The ‘effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts

And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,

Wherever in your sightless substances 

You wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the funnest smoke of hell,

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark 

To cry, “Hold, hold!”

1.5.37-52

Perhaps, in a play thematically wrestling with succession and sterility the one successful embryonic growth would be one of ambition. In a gender reversal, Macbeth is the one, “unsexed” with the seed of ambition in need of fertilization. Can we read Lady Macbeth’s incantation as a type of insemination? 

Hie thee hither,

That I may pour my spirits in thine ear 

And chastise with the valor of my tongue 

All that impedes thee from the golden round,

Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem 

To have thee crowned withal. 

1.5.24-28

Instead of the liquid of men, Lady Macbeth ‘pours’ her ‘spirits’ in his ear.  And the place of implantation rather than a womb, is the mind, which will soon bring forth a brood of scorpions. (3.2.35) In any case, what we witness throughout the play is the birth of a tyrant, a birth in exchange for moral sterility. He personally murders King Duncan. He has Banquo, his closest friend and ally murdered. He has Lady Macduff and the children murdered. He has spies planted in all the castles listening for treachery..he has become a suspicious malevolent monster within a few acts, drowning in a solipsistic world where he exists as the “be all end all."

And yet…why doesn’t this seem so appalling? Have tyrants lost the ability to shock us? All of this brings questions of tyranny to the forefront and in need of a good exploration. 

Here’s a quote from Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics:

“The institutions of a free society are designed to ward off those who would govern, as Buchanan put it, “not for their country but for themselves, who take account not of the public interest but of their own pleasure.” Under what circumstances, Shakespeare asked himself, do such cherished institutions, seemingly deep-rooted and impregnable, suddenly prove fragile? Why do large numbers of people knowingly accept being lied to? How does a figure like Richard III or Macbeth ascend to the throne? 

Such a disaster, Shakespeare suggested, could not happen without widespread complicity. His plays probe the psychological mechanisms that lead a nation to abandon its ideals and even its self-interest. Why would anyone, he asked himself, be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving, or indifferent to the truth? Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers? Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?” (Greenblatt 2)

Despite feeling eerily familiar…these are all good questions to ask. 

Obviously Macbeth is propelled on in some way by the witches and Lady Macbeth…but where is everyone else? How is villainy allowed to metastasize in a vacuum?

When Macbeth and Banquo meet the witches on the heath, Macbeth seems to be the picture of ambivalence. He is described as “brave Macbeth- for well he deserves that name-/Disdaining fortune with his brandished steel.” (1.2.16-17)

Macbeth as a soldier seems to have no algorithm for dealing with these weird sisters. Within their initial encounter Banquo is given descriptive lines, observing the choppy fingers and the beards, while Macbeth three times asks for verbal clarification:

Speak, if you can. What are you?

Stay you imperfect speakers tell me more.

Speak I charge you.

It seems when confronted with the immaterial, Macbeth takes a tactical pause, he needs more information to proceed. But after the news of Cawdor, he switches into a tactical analysis: Glamis, and Thane of Cawdor! The greatest is behind. Thanks for your pains. (1.3.19)

Banquo, after observation, seems to have determined on the explanation of insanity. His ‘prophecy’ makes no concrete sense and as such there is no tactical way to implement it. It seems throughout the exchange he has observed more closely an otherworldly realm beyond the corporal, observing:

But ’tis strange,

And oftentimes to win us to our harm,

The instruments of darkness tell us truths,

Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s

In deepest consequence. 

1.3.125-128

And perhaps this is the problem: we fail to see the fractures and insecurities within our heroes. We miss the fragility hidden behind their armor and battle scars. How could this man of valor, this man who “disdains fortune” transform into a murdering tyrant? It’s implausibility creates a vision problem for those closest to the would be tyrant. Since Banquo doesn’t see the impending doom strobe lighting before him, he does nothing to fight against it. Granted, the window of opportunity is rather small…but there is a window.

Again Greenblatt suggests: “The tyrant, Macbeth and other plays suggest, is driven by a range of sexual anxieties: a compulsive need to prove his manhood, dread of impotence, a nagging apprehension that he will not be found sufficiently attractive or powerful, a fear of failure. Hence the penchant for bullying, the vicious misogyny, and the explosive violence. Hence too, the vulnerability to taunts, especially those bearing latent or explicit sexual charge.” (Greenblatt 99)

Again, fighting alongside this heroic warrior, watching him “unseem” his enemies from the “nave to the chops,” (1.2.22) how would you possibly expect a little sexual taunting to drive him to the point of regicide? Lady Macbeth says: “If you be a man” in a handful of offensive ways. Is his manhood really so at stake? The manhood of a warrior? And yet it seems as if it is. 

With the suspicious and seemingly too convenient murder of King Duncan, Banquo has a choice. He could confront Macbeth..who already seems to be laying it on a little thick…or he can go along and pretend that everything is as it seems. Macbeth murders the soldiers on guard duty, the scape-goated perpetrators of the crime, in a fit of patriotic rage and passion, subsequently tying up all the loose ends. And Banquo does nothing. As Macbeth is crowned King, Banquo, whether out of cowardice or loyalty chooses to step into the imaginative world held together by the centripetal force of Macbeth’s villainy. 

“Tyrannical power is more easily exercised when it appears that the old order continues to exist. The reassuring consensual structures may now be hollowed out and merely decorative, but they are all still in place, so that the bystanders, who crave psychological security and a sense of well-being, can persuade themselves that the rule of law is being upheld.” (Greenblatt 100) 

This seems to be a necessary reminder to choose to see our leaders, to choose to look critically even when we’re afraid of what we might find. 

All quotes from Macbeth from The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, 2016.

The Day of the Owl - Leonardo Sciascia

This month I'm reading Leonardo Sciascia's Day of the Owl and going down a rabbit trail researching the Sicilian Mafia:) Book report to follow.

Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell

One day in December of 1936, Eric Arthur Blair did what many young idealists of the time were doing: he made his way from England to Barcelona, (wife in tow) to join the Spanish militia to fight against Franco and the global specter of fascism. As a journalist, he had originally anticipated writing articles documenting the brutal civil war, but almost immediately the revolutionary atmosphere of Barcelona persuaded him to abandon his pen and join arms with his fellow revolutionaries. The International Brigade, comprised of volunteers from around the world, were taking their stand to fight for the “last great cause.”

Blair would eventually adopt the pen name “George Orwell,” and his experience would be written into a short memoir, Homage to Catalonia, but at this exact moment in time, Orwell was standing in line to register for one of the “kaleidoscope of political parties” and somewhat arbitrarily getting assigned to the POUM or the The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification. Not knowing there were differences to each political faction, the “plague of initials” and the myriad of political parties seemed chaotic and unnecessary. Weren’t they all revolutionaries? Weren’t they all there to fight against the Hitlers and Mussolinis that had slowly been sucking the countries of Europe (and Abyssinia) into their vortex? The democratic peoples of the world had stood by and watched their governments do nothing, one altercation at a time and then the people of Catalonia had decided to take their stand, and volunteers from around the world had traveled to stand with them. 

“If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: ‘To fight against Fascism.’ and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: ‘Common decency.’ I had accepted the News Chronicle-New Statesmen version of the war as the defense of civilization against a maniacal outbreak by an army of Colonel Blimps in the pay of Hitler…

As a militiaman one was a soldier against Franco, but one was also a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought out between two political theories. When I scrounged for firewood on the mountain-side and wondered whether this was really the war or whether the News Chronicle had made it up, when I dodged the Communist machine-guns in the Barcelona riots, when I finally fled from Spain with the police one jump behind me- all these things happened to me in that particular way because I was serving in the POUM militia and not in the PSUC. So great is the difference between two sets of initials!” [p. 198]

And so, like Alice, he fell down a rabbit hole and emerged into a type of Wonderland that festered with chaos and disorganization and perpetually defied reason.

Ostensibly, he was volunteering for the Republicans, (a coalition of pro-democracy left wing parties,) but this ‘plague of initials’ had ominous implications. He was joining forces with an “idea” that had been fractured by internal division amongst the many differing views of socialism and communism, and without a unifying stance the infighting amongst the left was precariously poised to collapse. Stalin had greatly reduced his military commitment to the leftist rebels, out of fear of becoming overextended in territorial disputes closer to home, practically this resulted in lack of supplies and an impoverished militia, forced to cobble together weaponry to throw at Franco’s Nationalists (comprised of right-wing conservative Catholics), well supplied by Hitler and Mussolini. 

“I have spoken of the militia ‘uniform’ which probably gives a wrong impression. It was not exactly a uniform. Perhaps ‘multiform’ would be the proper name for it. Everyone’s clothes followed the same general plan, but they were never quite the same in any two cases.” [p.7]

Frequently without blankets, guns that worked or the ammunition to fire with, the revolutionary battalion seemed to have materialized from another era, if not an entirely different dimension.

‘On my second day at the barracks there began what was comically called ‘instruction’. At the beginning there were frightful scenes of chaos. The recruits were mostly boys of sixteen or seventeen from the back streets of Barcelona, full of revolutionary ardor but completely ignorant of the meaning of war. It was impossible even to get them to stand in line. Discipline did not exist; if a man disliked an order he would step out of the ranks and argue fiercely with the officer. ” [p.7] 

Drill practice usually dissolved into a swarm of men stopping over at the corner grocers and drinking cheep wine. There was the occasional troop transport that got lost en route with the volunteer militia wandering in the mist for hours looking for their battle station. The disorganization was epic. 

With attacks from the enemy infrequent and rarely concerning, Orwell finds the majority of his time taken up with matters of survival rather than war, as he forages for kindling, food, tobacco, candles and the enemy. 

“War, to me, meant roaring projectiles and skipping shards of steel; above all it meant, mud, lice, hunger, and cold. It is curious, but I dreaded the cold much more than I dreaded the enemy. The thought of it had been haunting me all the time I was in Barcelona; I had even lain awake at nights thinking of the old cold in the trenches, the stand-to’s in the grisly dawns, the long hours on the sentry-go with a frosted rifle, the icy mud that would slop over my boot tops. I admit, too, that I felt a kind of horror as I looked at the people I was marching among. You cannot possibly conceive what a rabble we looked. We straggled along with far less cohesion than a flock of sheep; before we had gone two miles the rear of the column was out of sight…It seemed dreadful that the defenders of the Republic should be this mob of ragged children carrying worn-out rifles which they did not know how to use.” [p18]

The trenches were filled with excrement; the weaponry was so awful that Orwell spends a good deal of time recording in detail the specific atrocities: one machine gun to fifty men, twenty year old Mausers that continually jammed, ammunition so scarce that each man was issued only fifty rounds…total, no tin hats, no bayonets, grenades that only detonate half the time, etc. 

But perhaps the most inconvenient and troublesome thing became the perpetual trouser louse. 

“The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives continually in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the seems of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of their own at horrible speed. I think the pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war, indeed! In war all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae - every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles. “ [p. 54]

In April, after four months at the front, Orwell is given leave and returns to Barcelona to find his wife. The lice had been multiplying in his trousers faster than he could kill them, he had no socks and his boots had worn such a variety of holes that he was essentially barefoot. He wanted a hot bath, to fall asleep between clean sheets and for a few days re-emerge into civilized society.  Despite the lack of adequate…everything, he had retained an aura of hope: 

“When we went on leave I had been a hundred and fifteen days in the line, and at the time this period seemed to me to have been one of the most futile of my whole life. I had joined the militia in order to fight against Fascism, and as yet I had scarcely fought at all, had merely existed as a sort of passive object, doing nothing in return for my rations except to suffer from the cold and lack of sleep. Perhaps that is the fate of most soldiers in most wars. But now that I can see this period in perspective I do not altogether regret it…They formed a kind of interregnum in my life quite different from anything that had gone before and perhaps from anything that is to come, and they taught me things that I could not have learned in any other way.” [p. 86] 

What he learned was that despite the deprivations, despite their lack of experience and having virtually done nothing of military value: “One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality.”  [p.87]

During his absence, the atmosphere of Barcelona had changed. No more revolutionary spirit, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!” had been exchanged for disparity. Hierarchies had reemerged between class and the bourgeoisie had reinstated itself. While food and commodities were scarce for the working class, the wealthy luxuriated in their blackmarket goods and pleasantries. Perhaps more disturbing was the militarized in-fighting between the Communists and the Marxists. Barricades had been erected and the communists accused the POUM of being fascist traitors. 

The political turmoil is disillusioning. The division between the left is far greater than he had initially realized, it is fractured beyond repair and threatens to cripple the Republicans’ war effort against the Nationalists. Rather than idealists fighting for home in humanity, the communists have been revealed to be undemocratic manipulative aggressors, like any other political party vying for power. 

And while the civil war rages in its own Spanish way, and while the political factions are bent on tearing each other apart, the general population has grown indifferent. Their attention span for war and deprivation has run its course and they seem less enthused about revolution than they are about the occasional trip to the beach for a quick sunbathe. The ‘front’ had become a sort of ‘mythical far off place’ where men and boys went off and disappeared or returned home with wealth (their back pay) if not glory. In just a few short months, being a revolutionary was no longer fashionable. 

Orwell returns to the front and is subsequently shot in the neck. Once again he makes his way back to Barcelona where the political infighting has now spilled over into the citizenry. There is an atmosphere of “suspicion, fear, uncertainty and veiled hatred.” The war that seemed impossible to find has now emerged in the streets of Barcelona.

“The whole huge town of a million people was locked in a sort of violent inertia, a nightmare of noise without movement. The sunlit streets were quite empty. Nothing was happening except the streaming of bullets from barricades and sandbagged windows…What the devil was happening, who was fighting whom and who was winning, was at first very difficult to discover.” [p.117] 

The rest and luxury of Barcelona has been exchanged for the deprivations of the frontline, and Orwell and his wife live off the occasional sardine and bits of goat cheese. Orwell had picked the wrong political party and now his membership in POUM has made him a fugitive. His friends and compatriots are being thrown into jail en masse, in what can only be described as a reign of terror. The law, for now, was what the police decided to make it. 

As the Spanish hope for democracy seems to be over, the only hope seems to be if Franco and his mercenaries can be driven into the sea and exchanged for any other form of stifling dictatorship, even that would have been worth fighting for. 

Orwell and his wife miraculously manage to get on a train and leave the country, escaping to France, only too eager to leave the chaos of Barcelona behind them. Despite the horror, despite all of the mess and disorganization, as Orwell looks back on his experience rather than disillusionment or horror he has a sense of hope and in a strange way a cemented “belief in the decency of human beings.”  In every climate, on every battlefield, there exists the potential for both the cowardly and the heroic. And despite the odds, people will continue to fight for what they believe in. 

Gabriele D'Annunzio

Last summer we went to Croatia with Matthew’s parents and brother and as we wound our way through the city we stopped in every bookstore we could find. Books are our scavenger hunt item. Living in a non-English speaking country, English books are harder to find then one would expect. But the real treasure quest are for English books that are also on the Western Canon. It’s very rare and incredibly exciting when it actually happens. 

So, miraculously, in a little Croatian bookstore I found Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz…and what has followed has been an incredibly long and complex rabbit trail…or perhaps series of rabbit trails. 

80 pages in I realized I needed to stop and give myself a history lesson. What was the difference between fascism and communism, and how was Rosa Luxembourg (a Marxist) supported by both? Or was it neither? Men in different colored shirts (green, brown, black) are continuously starting brawls about politics in bars. There are oblique references to “Arras” and hyperinflation and the Dawes Act, etc. 

So I moved Alexanderplatz to the back burner and picked up Existentialism instead…and between the lines of the existentialists is this background radiation in the shape of Nietzsche… so I put a pin in that and decided to take a class about European Dictators between WWI and WWII.  After this class and all the subsequent rabbit trails it has led me down I think I will finally be able to read Alexanderplatz in good faith. 

I’m four weeks into the class. Last week we discussed the rise of fascism in Italy and I came across someone very interesting: Gabriele D’Annunzio, the hero-poet. And it is here, with D’Annunzio, that all the rabbit trails converge. 

Disclaimer: While Gabriele D'Annunzio is on the list (Mais: In Praise of Life) I could not find a translation in English, so this month is more of query into the history of fascism than a traditional book report. 

Gabriele D’Annunzio was the father of fascism. He was a poet, a playwright, a national hero, an aviator for the Italian air force, a womanizer, the first “Il Duce,” the first to bring back the Roman salute, and quite possibly a psychopath. 

D’Annunzio began his international fame and notoriety with his attempt to rescue/ seize the port city of Fiume in September of 1919. The war had ended and the Austro-Hungarian empire needed to be reorganized along new lines recognizing new nations. Fiume had increasingly become a source of international tension. President Wilson argued that Fiume should become a buffer state between Italy and the Kingdoms of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later what would become Yugoslavia.) Wilson also suggested as an independent state, Fiume could be the future home of the League of Nations.

But not on D’Annunzio’s watch. He quickly cobbled together a makeshift army, easy for him to do as a celebrated national hero-poet, and began his march on Fiume to take back what was rightfully Italian. Followed by 186 soldiers, his big red (new) Fiat, so filled with flowers it was regularly mistaken for a hearse, slowly made it’s way forward. Even the Allied blockades were no match for D’Annunzio, being comprised of sympathetic Italian soldiers, who largely agreed with what D’Annunzio was doing. Rather then mount a resistance, one by one the soldiers would step aside, some even deserting to join ranks with D’Annunzio’s DIY militia.

“By the time he reached Fiume his following was some 2,000 strong. He was welcomed into the city by rapturous crowds who had been up all night waiting for him. An officer passing through the main square in the early hours of that morning saw it filled with women wearing evening dress and carrying guns, an image that nicely encapsulates the nature of the place - at once a phantasmagorical party and a battleground - during the fifteen months that D’Annunzio would hold Fiume as its Duce and dictator, in defiance of all the Allied powers.” (1)

D’Annunzio was described as a man of vehement and simultaneously incoherent political views. As a poet and artist he was an expert at crafting a turn of phrase and molding the emotions of the body politic. With his words and his guidance the populace was willing to rabidly follow his lead wherever it would take them. 

“He called his Fiume a “searchlight radiant” in the midst of an ocean of abjection.” It was a sacred fire whose sparks, flying on the wind, would set the world alight. It was the “City of the Holocaust.”  (2)

And with his charismatic presence and powerful rhetoric he attracted the most heterogeneous of advocates to his ‘city on a hill.” Lucy Hughes-Hallet describes this environment bristling with energy: 

“The place became a political laboratory. Socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, and some of those who had begun, earlier that year, to call themselves fascists, congregated there. Representatives of Sinn Fein and of nationalist groups from India and Egypt arrived, discreetly followed by British agents. Then there were the groups whose homeland was not of this earth: the Union of Free Spirits Tending Toward Perfection, who met under a fig tree in the old town to talk about love and the abolition of money, and YOGA, a kind of political-club-cum-street-gang described by one of its members as “an Island of the Blest in the infinite sea of History.””  (3)

So, here we see the origination of fascism with a nebulous political agenda. I think it’s easy to disregard the idealism of fascism. What it became has become synonymous with evil…but I think what was initially so appealing to such a wide variety of people was the hope that it proclaimed. A new future, a new vision with endless potential and possibility. [Granted, the ever present bullying regularly tipped over into murder/ hate crimes and the murders were frequently  directed against perceived outsiders like the Vietnamese-French soldiers, stabbed to death along the quay…] Eventually there would be clearly defined structures, but those would not fall into place until after almost twenty years of being slow boiled in a culture medium of volatile rhetoric. 

This is how fascism starts. Through poetry, through associations, through the deep almost dreamlike quality of associative propaganda…no one begins with the “death to the democrats” (Mussolini)…you get there slowly by first arguing for small injuries, like Mussolini’s 1922 summation of his political program: “It is to break the bones of the democrats…and the sooner the better.”  What’s a little bone breaking? Am I right? 

Here’s an example of fascist poetry, written by D’Annunzio in 1917:

THE DAWN DIVIDES THE DARKNESS FROM LIGHT

The dawn divides the darkness from light,

And my sensual pleasure from my desire,

O sweet stars, it is the hour of death.

A love more holy clears you from the skies.

Gleaming eyes, O you who'll ne'er return,

sad stars, snuff out your uncorrupted light!

I must die, I do not want to see the day,

For love of my own dream and of the night.

Envelop me,

O Night, in your maternal breast,

While the pale earth bathes itself in dew;

But let the dawn rise from my blood

And from my brief dream the eternal sun!

And from my brief dream the eternal sun!

So much is happening between the lines of this poem. At first glance it seems so benign. The first line alludes to a division: 

“The dawn divides the darkness from light,”

Fascism is ultimately a policy of us vs. them. It quickly capitalizes on mankind’s predilection for tribalism and then shifts it into a more aggressive form of division. With an emphasis on nationalism, the “us” gets used to being defined with heroic rhetoric, marking them apart from the rest of humanity. They represent the “light” while everyone and everything else represents the “dark” opposition. (We see this in policies like Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine.) 

In How Fascism Works: Politics of Us and Them Jason Stanley describes the danger of these divisions as coming from: “The particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. By excluding these groups, it limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination.”  (4)

O sweet stars, it is the hour of death.

A love more holy clears you from the skies.

In May of 1919, D’Annunzio’s rhetoric became more religious/ blasphemous and increasingly seditious. Italy had emerged as a victor, but was politically unstable and financially depressed. What D’Annunzio would refer to as a “mutilated victory.” He pandered to a populace that felt disadvantaged, both financially and geopolitically. For D’Annunzio the war wasn’t over. This was the moment to rise up and claim victory for the Italian soldiers lying dead, scattered throughout European soil. 

“He said that Christ was calling out to the Italians to “rise up and not be afraid.” He led his listeners in chants in which the word “blood” tolled repeatedly - the blood shed already, the blood which yet must flow to cleanse Italy of the filthy shame of a negotiated peace. He was blasphemous, unreasonable, electrifying.” (5)

And so we see the “hour of death” being described as both necessary and heroic. The skies themselves represented the realm of the Übermensch or Superman, and those risking the sky-high missions of WWI had now taken their place as these super-human beings, beyond the judgment of a human tribunal. 

“Mass slaughter clears the space from which the superman can soar. D’Annunzio mourned the flyers, his friends, but he did not regret their deaths.” (6)

In both the second and third stanza again we see an emphasis on this need for a heroic cleansing death. “I must die, I do not want to see the day,” and again “But let the dawn rise from my blood."

Gleaming eyes, O you who'll ne'er return,

sad stars, snuff out your uncorrupted light!

The dead soldier would become a leitmotif throughout much of D’Annunzio’s subsequent work, symbolizing the mythology of war and emerging as the sacrificial victim, hero, and martyr. Their lives and more heroic deaths would become the rallying cry to join the dead saints and pursue the promise of a future glory.  

This is one out of four poems written for the operatic singer Francesco Paolo Tosti. Does this in a way represent a subterranean anthem of sorts? This poem would have been sung with passion or hummed while doing the dishes and going about the banality of daily domestic life. It seems like it would be impossible to sing the lines “But let the dawn rise from my blood” without in some capacity becoming “weaponized.”

I think tracing these patterns of thought through history are relevant because as the adage says: history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy the second time as farce. The Italians after WWI were struggling with their national identity and wanted an authoritative figure to give them guidance, at one point, that figure was internationally expected to be D’Annunzio. Instead they ended up with Mussolini. Madeline Albright describes fascism as being constructed through the politics of fear. 

“Fear is why Fascism’s emotional reach can extend to all levels of society. No political movement can flourish without popular support, but Fascism is as dependent on the wealthy and powerful as it is on the man or woman in the street -on those who have much to lose and those who have nothing at all.” (7)

I would argue that equally seditious is blinding patriotism and a charismatic leader. One hundred years after D’Annunzio marched his militia into Fiume, once more the world finds itself in the throes of populist movements. Fascism isn’t something that happened once a hundred years ago, it’s something always lurking beneath the surface. And maybe this is how it begins: With a leader charismatic enough to be equated with the second coming of Christ. As soon as religious language becomes the lingua franca of the political spectrum, we are sinking into miry propagandized rhetoric. 

There’s a great Neal Gabler quote that says “True religion, I believe, begins in doubt and continues in spiritual exploration. Debased religion begins in fear and terminates in certainty.” 

I wonder if it’s a good time to pause and wonder what it is that we’re humming. What subterranean rhetoric influences our opinions and values possibly to the point that we’re no longer recognizable to ourselves? Have our emotions been radicalized for someone else's agenda? What hot button topics do we find ourselves senselessly enraged over, ready to pick up our sabers and fight for to the death? Maybe metaphorically we’re always standing across the boundary line, one foot in Fiume pursuing the idealism of politics buttressed by hate, with the other foot in the nomads land of contested soil. 

We can’t know which way we’re going unless we can see. Here’s to civil discourse and the pursuit of wisdom!

1. Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. The Pike: Gabriele DAnnunzio Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. Fourth Estate, 2013.p.15

2. Ibid. p16

3.Ibid. p17

4. Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works: the Politics of Us and Them. Random House Publishing Group, 2018. p.xiv

5. Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. The Pike: Gabriele DAnnunzio Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. Fourth Estate, 2013. p. 951

6. Ibid. p.839

7. Albright, Madeleine, and Bill Woodward. Fascism a Warning. William Collins, 2018. p.8