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I thank the students who have come to speak with me over the months. We've had some very
interesting meetings.
Now let me quote you a few lines written 800 years ago. “The death of both of them shall
remain alive. We shall read their life, we shall read their death and it shall be sweeter
to us than bread. Their life and their death will be our bread. So their life will live
and so will their death live.”
Oh dear (laughter). Oh this is not working. I am sorry. I should start again now. This
is meant to be a serious bit and I've ruined it!
“The death of both of them shall remain alive. We shall read their life, we shall
read their death and it shall be sweeter to us than bread. Their life and their death
will be our bread. So their life will live and so will their death live. Although they
be dead so will they live and their death will be the bread of the living.”
These beautiful words go directly to the heart of storytelling. The origins are the kind
of writing we're most familiar with today. We tell the lives of the dead and in doing
this we keep them alive. All writing of stories is an art of memory and a continuation of
life. Art is a triumph of life over death and even of death over itself.
The writer says more than this. The stories of these other people's lives does more than
keep the dead alive in our memory. It keeps us alive too. It sustains us and is sweeter
to us than bread. The musical pattern of repetitions in the writer's words enacts the circular
dance of life and death and art.
This is Gottfried von Strassburg writing to introduce his version of the story of Tristan
and Isolde. I begin with his prologue because it reminds us succinctly of why we read stories
of any kind or watch them acted out. Whether the stories are in prose or in verse, whether
they are offered as true history or mere invention, from the story of other people's lives and
deaths we draw nourishment that helps us understand, endure and enjoy our own.
Earlier this year I talked about a “voice in the dark”. The voice came from Marlowe,
the storyteller in the sailing boat anchored at nightfall in the mouth of the river Thames.
He was talking about great power and it's misuse in a distant place. Joseph Conrad's
voice channeled through Marlowe, evoked other voices talking about empire, Gibbons, Elliott,
Symes, Saybaults, writing variously in history, poetry, fiction and something that hovered
on the perimeter of all three. Imperial Powers was several. Implicitly I was talking about
how a writer or the writer's surrogate relates to the reader and the quality of trust and
truth that depends on the writers voice. The identity created through the words that makes
us attend to what the writer is telling us.
Tonight I want to treat the big world of power in a different and more panoramic way. To
look rather than listen. I want to look at how a writer can transform the image of a
worldly power by refracting it through the prism of its antithesis, the eyes of ordinary
people.
Tellers of stories working in speech or images or written words have, until very recently,
through history until very recently, made their stories about people and events of great
moment. Great and good and terrible things in human life. These days stories are somewhat
diminished. They are about people more like ourselves or sometimes not about anybody who
seems very real at all. Even before this change happened, the people we can call ordinary
for short, were present in accounts of the lives of the mighty even if they were rarely
at the centre. The stood for the mass of us, the listeners
-2-
and the watchers but rarely the protagonists of the great events of our world. The ordinary
people in the stories made a necessary link between the lives and the deaths of mighty
people and our own. They anticipated and sometimes guided our feelings. Think of the chorus of
people in Greek tragedy voicing their response to terrible and momentous events as they unfolded.
I should tell you at this point that the notion I have just outlined, such as it is, is entirely
retrospective. When I was thinking about this evening, at first I wanted simply to talk
about some of the things in literature that I found most moving and most memorable and
sometimes the funniest. That meant thinking about why I found them so. You get to a certain
age and you start storing these things in your mind and going back to them. The new,
forget about it! Over some insomniac nights I made a list of moments to describe to you
tonight. The original list was far too long. The present one, the one that is printed out
in this pea green folder, is still long. A few things are going to have to go. The list
required me to think about what it spontaneously chosen items had in common. The first thing
I noticed that though they mostly came from works full of suspense, conflict and tragedy,
high drama in other words, they were all quiet moments before or after the big events. Moments
of anticipation or reflection. Often moments when nothing much happened at all or indeed
nothing at all. Moments a driving narrative, and our reading of it, tends to rush on past.
The works are not just high drama but high public drama. The Odyssey is a founding document
of the European identity and so is the later Christian gospel, in this case Mark's gospel.
Taciitus is the great historian of ancient Rome and its crisis. Gottfied von Strassburg
is one of the many tellers, English, French and German, of the story of Tristan and Isolde
which is itself at once an image of the knightly order of medieval Europe and the story of
its transgression by an overpowering *** love. Giordano Bruno is the thinker who broke
the grip of the Church on the European mind and Shakespeare is the dramatist of that same
moment when the modern world came into being. Stendhal and Tolstoy are romantics and realists
in the prose of a later time, deeply involved in the historical convulsions of Western and
Eastern Europe in the 19th century and the social struggles of church, army, despots
and aristocrats and bourgeois and in individual struggles for personal and *** freedom.
Both writers were obsessed with the figure of Napoleon. The Brazilian writer Machado
de Assis is a novelist of the age of Imperialism, of Europe overseas and is apparently humourous
in domestic fictions subtly and remorselessly dismantle the illusions and delusions of a
. . . . . bourgeoisie and the cruel falsities of a society built on its procreation and
slavery and the fragility of a social class whose well being depended on metropolitan
appetites for sugar and coffee. The Italians, Primo Levi and Giuseppe Tomasi
di Lampedusa, both wrote after the 20th century catastrophe of European civilisation in books
published in my own early adolescence. Their work is pervaded by a sense of loss and destruction.
I am reminding you now of these obvious things, these writers' shared concerns with conflict
and the body politic believed in freedom because they aren't at all obvious in the passages
that I have reprinted in this evening's pamphlet. Take Homer, when Odysseus arrives home from
the Trojan war and his years of journeying and danger, when he comes home at last to
reclaim his wife and set his house in order, largely by killing people, he arrives at the
palace disguised as a stranger, a traveller seeking hospitality and escorted by a friendly
local pig keeper. Immediately before and after he is taken into the palace, two things happen.
The first is described in the pamphlet, in the passage in the pamphlet. His old dog,
Argos, trained as a puppy by young Odysseus to become a champion hunter in an early hunting
society but abandoned and neglected for many years after his master's departure to the
war, recognises his master's voice. He pricks up his ears and his tail thumps but he is
too old and weak to move. His eyes close and he dies in the moment that Odysseus goes inside.
This to me is an amazing moment. It's the first and greatest dog moment in literature.
First greatest animal moment in literature probably. The hidden tear of Odysseus notwithstanding,
it's supremely unsentimental. The evocation of Argos's past life as a hunter is a generalised
reality. -3-
It's not done for pathos. Tolstoy in War and Peace tells us what his Russian wolfhounds
are thinking. Homer never presumes to do this. Neither is Argos's neglect in later life sentimentalised.
We are sharply reminded how slovenly and thoughtless slaves can get when not firmly controlled
and how enslavement itself deprives people of their integrity.
What sticks in the mind is the image itself of the emaciated old hound sprawled outside
the gates and the crusts of the dried cattle *** collected for use as fertiliser. The
shock of the old voice tipping him over into death is physiologically exact. Quoting from
Homer - “He thumped his tail, nuzzling low and his ears dropped though he had no strength
to drag himself an inch toward his master. The dark shadow of death closed down on Argos's
eyes the instant he saw Odysseus.”
Inside the palace an old female slave is directed to wash the unknown stranger's feet. She is
Odysseus's old nurse and immediately he knows she will recognise the scar on his leg from
a youthful hunting wound, and she does. But he claps his hand over her mouth to stop her
giving away his game and so the old nurse slave becomes part of the action and part
of the story. Whereas Argos is just an old dog who dies. The story of his life and the
tiny moment of recognition between dog and master is outside the main story and almost
unnoticed. But in a few lines it tells us a lot about the protagonist and his dog and
the world they live in and about time and life and death.
From my earliest year at Melbourne Grammar we had scripture classes and also later at
my school in New Zealand. The story of Peter's denial of Jesus on the night of the arrest
struck me at the age of six because Peter was the first other person I had ever heard
of with my own name. I identified with him. The story went deeper than that and it's never
left me. The prediction that Peter would let his friend down is spontaneous and sincere
expostulation when Jesus told him this, that he never would. The three convincing episodes,
one after another, where fear backed him into disowning the man he swore he would stand
by, the terrible remorse, all this seemed to say something that still disturbs me. I
still find this episode as indescribably painful today as I did at six.
Apart from its terrible truth about failing one's own good intentions and Peter betrays
himself as much as he does Jesus, the force of the episode comes from its very marginality
to the main action. The story is almost identical in its four versions. In my opinion Mark's
is the best.
Ominous and terrible things happen to Jesus that night. Humanly terrible things. After
the night vigil in Gethsemane when his followers first fail him at the time when he most needs
their solidarity, Jesus is then betrayed by one of his own and sold to his captors. They
take him to the judge's house, interrogate and beat him. But the story stays
outside with Peter while these things happen inside. The important events, as it were,
happened out of sight in the judge's chamber in the depths of the judge's palace. Peter
remains outside and that's where the story remains. Peter joins the servants, warms himself
by the fire and waits for the outcome. It's the servants, not any figure of authority,
who identify him by his accent as an outsider and a friend of the arrested man. You have
the sense of idle talk during the wait around the fire. Mere curiosity, “aren't you one
of them?” elicits panic at no longer being an anonymous face in the crowd but having
attention drawn to him by figures of no account in themselves, other onlookers, servant girls,
that elicits the disproportionate vehements of Peter's three denials. As Mark says, “and
the second time the *** crew and Peter called to mind the word that Jesus had said unto
him 'before the *** crow twice thou shalt deny me thrice' and when he thought thereon
he wept.”
Giordano Bruno was the most brilliant and original thinker of the late 16th century.
His glory and his tragedy was delivered at the time of The Great Split in the European
Church, at a time of ideological cold war. Bruno grew up poor on the outskirts of Naples
and he joined the Church to get an education. His views soon got him in trouble with the
Inquisition. He fled Naples and then Italy and
spent the rest of his working life as a teacher and writer, mainly of polemics in various
temporary refuges all over Europe – Rome, Genoa, Toulouse, Geneva, Paris, London, Oxford,
Frankfurt, Wittenberg, Prague amongst other cities. He got into trouble wherever he went
as an impetuous outspoken and original thinker and in a time when orthodoxy was grimly and
cruelly enforced among all the variants of belief. He earned his living by teaching the
arts of memory. His departures were always precipitated. After a decade or more of this
exhausting and dangerous but amazingly productive life on the run, something lured Bruno back
to Italy. He went to Venice which was ostensibly a more cosmopolitan and tolerant city than
the other Italian cities, partly because he sensed an impending change in the political
and intellectual climate and immediately because a Venetian aristocrat offered to pay him some
badly needed money for a course in private home lessons in the art of memory. The aristocrat
turned out to be a fool and a bigot and a prude. Bruno couldn't stand him and as usual
spoke incautiously. When Bruno prepared to leave, his employer felt cheated, locked Bruno
in his room and called the Inquisition.
What followed was like a real life reprise of a comedy Bruno had written many years before.
A low life farce about *** and intellectual perversion in Naples. It was all recorded
in the aristocrats letters reporting Bruno to the authorities and in Bruno's later statements
under interrogation. But the arguments, the bargaining and the threats exchanged through
the keyhole in the bedroom door, had an edge of terrible seriousness as Bruno knew very
well.
The documents of Bruno's trial by Inquisition beginning with the report by a dissatisfied
customer and culminating in the reports of Bruno's being burnt alive in Rome eight years
later, are no more a literary document than Mark's account of the life and death of Jesus.
They're amazing because among the aristocrat's pettiness and Bruno's exasperated mockery
of Christian beliefs, fragments are articulated of the first expression in the modern and
post Christian idea of an infinite various and materially constant universe and these
two are mixed up with the existential desperation of a great thinker who despaired of his times,
the time that we count a Reformation in Italy to be precise.
There is a quality in the drama of these police reports that seems to move beyond the possibilities
of literature. These are his denouncer's words. These are from the police records. “He said
that Christ was a fraud. He said it was impossible for the *** to have given birth. He said
our opinions were donkey's doctrines. He said he wasn't afraid of the Inquisition because
he didn't harm anyone the way he lived and that he didn't recall saying anything bad
to me and that even if he had, he had said it to me alone, that the worst they could
do was to prevent him rejoining his Order. So you've been a member of a religious order
I said. And how do you reconcile that with not believing in the Holy Trinity and all
the bad things you said about Our Lord Jesus Christ? He only replied that he had already
packed his things and wanted to leave. He said if I let him out he would teach me everything
he knew and leave me all his things except for one little book. I told him to shut up.
He laughed and said wait for Judgement Day and you'll get the reward you deserve. He
also told me he liked women a lot and he said it was very wrong of the Church to make a
sin out of something that served Nature so well and that he thought was a very good thing
indeed. I heard Bruno say in my house that the world is eternal and there are infinite
worlds. That Nature makes created souls pass from one animal to another. He is planning
to start a new sect he calls New Philosophy. He says all the best theologians in the world
won't know how to answer him. I heard him say that the world can't go on like this because
there was nothing but ignorance and no religion was any good. Soon the world was going to
be reformed because corruption like this couldn't last. He said that in this time of greater
ignorance than the world has ever known, some people are boasting of knowing more than ever
before.” Sounds a bit like today.
One of the things I most wanted to talk about this evening but found very hard to excerpt
is one of the threads of the two very great plays about Henry IV and his son Prince Hal
by Bruno's -5-
contemporary William Shakespeare. I'm talking about the story of Prince Hal's low-life friend
Falstaff. A story that runs as a subversive commentary in the slangy prose of ordinary
talk on the parallel drama about rebellion, guilt and civil war which unfolds in blank
verse. The two parts of Henry IV, especially the second, are the most sustained instance
I know of in literature of the effect I'm trying to identify this evening. Private narratives
of insignificance about nobody of importance and in which nothing really happens that illuminate
and validate somehow, people and events of great import.
The earlier instances we've looked at are small and distinct. An old dog dies, a hanger-on
stands by the servants' fire, the private tutor is locked in his room. These episodes,
the nothingness of real life, are brief and isolated or a small part of a larger effect.
But in Henry IV they take over and transform a great drama, two great dramas, Falstaff
the eater, the drinker, liar, their, whoremonger and parasite, mocks and parodies the drama
of State and the power struggle that's unfolding in alternate scenes.
What happens as the two plays unfold is that the comic and unheroic counterpoint and Falstaff
starts as a cartoon figure, gradually takes on a complex life of his own and becomes in
some ways a wise and moving and vulnerably real person without ceasing to be cynical,
shocking, gross and contemptible. Many people have tried to describe this extraordinary
transformation of Falstaff. I hardly dare do so myself. The process comes to a head
toward the end of the second part in a long and delicate handling of a brutal and disgusting
episode when Falstaff rounds up some pathetic country figures for the military contribution
he's expected to make to the King's army against the rebels. This scene has been foreshadowed
by a moment in the first part when Prince Hal mocks the bedraggled and broken-down force
Falstaff is sending into an earlier battle. “I did never see such pitiful rascals”
Hal says. Falstaff cynically replies “good enough to toss, food for powder, food for
powder. They'll fill a pit as well as better. Hush man. Mortal men, mortal men.” It's
where we get the phrase “cannon fodder” from. Yet frank cynicism in Falstaff has a
way of sounding like superior wisdom in a world of grandiose talk and tainted motives.
He remarks on the delusions and pretentions for instance, of the half senile country magistrate
he visits with a lot of self awareness.
In the earlier moment the conscripts get no chance to speak. But in the later scenes some
new recruits do and one of them Feeble, the little woman's tailor, much mocked by Falstaff,
wrong-foots everyone when he answers his *** commander. “I will do my good will sir,
you can have no more. A man can die but once. We owe God a debt. On their bearer base mine
and to be my destiny, so and to be not so. No man is too good to serve his Prince and
let it go which way it will. He that dies this year is fit for the next. I'll bear no
base mine.”
The stoic dignity startles since it comes from the mouth of a comic walk-on and it leads
directly towards the stoicism that Hamlet shows just before his own death in a slightly
later play. Hamlet says “We defy augury. There's a special providence in the pall of
the sparrow. . . . . is not to come. If it be not to come it will be now. If it be not
now yet it will come the readiness is awe. Since no man has altered what he leaves what
is to leave the times?” And Hamlet's words in turn lead to Lear's at the end of King
Lear the most terrible work in European literature after the Greeks. By the end of the play Lear
has been transformed from King and protagonist to a broken and marginal old figure whose
comments on the power play he once controlled. He says to his daughter Cordelia “Come,
let's away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds in a cage. When others ask me blessing
I'll kneel down and ask of thee forgiveness. And so we'll live and pray and sing and tell
old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies and hear poor rogues talk of court news. And
we'll talk with them too. Who loses and who wins. Who's in and who's out and take upon
us the mystery of things as if we were God's spies. And we'll wear out in a walled prison
packs and sets of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon.” And when Cordelia is
murdered a little later Lear says “Why should a
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dog, a horse, a rat have life . . . . . no breath at all. Thou'll come no more. Never,
never, never, never, never. Pray you undo this button. Thank you sir. You see this.
Look on her. Look her lips, look there, look there.” The two narratives, the power world
and ordinary life, coincide at the end of the play in nothingness.
The French novelist Stendhal wrote that “politics in a literary work were like a pistol shot
in the middle of a concert, shocking but impossible to ignore”. He liked this assertion so much
that he wrote versions of it half a dozen times in different places as I found once
when I tried to locate it. Stendhal wrote in his two great novels with such verve and
insight about *** passion that the novels' equalled brilliance is outside the studies
of power, is less often noticed.
In The Charterhouse of Parma, Fabrice a young soldier, stumbles through a meaningless and
sporadic series of episodes startled to learn afterwards that he is caught in the Battle
of Waterloo. This is a famous instance of the kind of oblique and redimensioning view
of the world of power that I'm trying to describe. But much later in the same novel Stendahl
uses his statement about politics, the one I have just quoted, to introduce a long scene
that's so funny that it's easy not to notice how brilliantly it also handles the dangers
of absolute power. The ordinary person in this world is a brilliant aristocratic woman.
But . . . . . uses her intelligence to make the young head of state and his mother burn
without reading it, a dossier compiled by a sinister . . . . in the government that
would incriminate herself in the assassination of the prince's father and calls her nephew
Fabrice, with whom she is unconfessably in love, to be executed. The young prince must
destroy the dossier on his own initiative otherwise the duchess will be later compromised
and destroyed and Fabrice will die. The prince doesn't know what to do. This is from the
novel - “The rince considered her highly intelligent and was annoyed by her evident
insistence at not offering an opinion. The duchess was determined to say nothing until
her advice was expressly requested. A good half hour passed before the prince, who had
a sense of his own dignity, brought himself to say 'but madam you say nothing. I'm here
to serve the princess and forget instantly whatever is said in my presence. Well then
madam' the prince said blushing deeply, 'I order you to give me your advice'. The portfolio
is burnt and it starts a fire in the palace. The duchess thinks she's achieved her goal
when she realises that there is a second and even more incriminating dossier. From the
novel again - “And she said quite cooly to the princess, does Her Highness order me
to burn the rest of the papers? And where will you burn them the princess asked crossly.
In the salon fireplace. If they're tossed in one by one there will be no danger. The
duchess put the portfolio crammed with papers under her arm, took up a candle and walked
into the adjoining salon and later hearing the sound of the duchess's departing carriage,
the princess was filled with rage.”
The court life in Stendahl's Absolutus Parma anticipates the m. . . . of Starlin's Kremlin.
The Russian court scenes in Tolstoy's War and Peace have less brilliance but more variety
and depth than Stendahl's. Stendahl's interest in people tended to limit itself to the young,
the beautiful, the intelligent, the impetuous and the highly sexed. On Napolean's military
disasters however, the two writers have more in common but only Tolstoy brings in a dog.
A very different dog from the hunger Argos. This is from Tolstoy, from War and Peace - “A
little blue grey dog with a long body and short bandy legs. This little dog lived in
their shed sleeping beside C. . . . .at night. It sometimes made excursions into the town
but always returned again. Probably it had never had an owner and it still belonged to
nobody and had no name. The French called it Azure. The soldier who told stories called
it Fem. . . . C. . . . and others called it Grey or sometimes Flop Ear. Its lack of a
master and name and even of a breed or any definite colour didn't seem to trouble the
blue grey dog in the least. It's furry tail stood up firm and round as a plume. Its bandy
legs served it so well that it would often gracefully lift a hind leg and run very quickly
and easily on three legs distaining to use all four.”
The dog attaches itself to a group of Russian prisoners on the French retreat from Moscow,
in -7-
particular to the peasant called P. . . . whose wisdom and goodness powerfully impressed the
novel's Pierre who is also a prisoner in this group. C. . . . . is sick and the retreating
French are shooting the prisoners who can't keep up, the dog as well. From Tolstoy again
- “The blue grey bandy legged dog ran merrily along the side of the road, sometimes in proof
of its agility and self satisfaction, lifting one hind leg and hopping along on three and
then again going along on all four and rushing to bark at the crows that sat on the carrion.
The dog was merrier and sleeker than it had been in Moscow. All around lay the flesh of
various animals from men to horses in various stages of decomposition.” And a little later
- “From behind where C. . . . had been sitting came the sound of a shot. Pierre heard it
plainly. The dog began to howl. What a stupid beast. Why is it howling thought Pierre. His
comrades, the prisoner soldiers walking beside him avoided looking back at the place where
the shot had been fired and the dog was howling just as Pierre did but there was a set look
on their faces.”
War and Peace anticipates Europe's 20th century cataclysm and Primo Levi's memoir The Truce
is a sort of complement to Tolstoy's account of the French retreat from Moscow. Stendahl
himself I can't forebear mentioning had taken part in Napolean's retreat through Russia
but he never wrote about it in a novel. Levi's book tells the story of his long and circuitious
journey home from Auschwitz to Turin. A long of it going east with the Red Army in the
summer after the end of the Second World War. It starts at Auschwitz. This is Levi - “The
first Russian patrol came in sight of the camp toward midday on 27th January 1945. They
were four young soldiers on horseback moving cautiously and holding their machine guns
along the camp's perimeter road. When they got to the barbed wire they stopped and looked,
exchanging a few brief timid words and gazing with a strange embarrassment at the heaped
bodies, the broken down huts and us few living. To us they looked wonderfully bodily and real,
suspended on their enormous horses. The road was higher than the camp between the grey
of the snow and the grey of the sky, motionless under the gusts of damp wind threatening thaw,
with rough and boyish faces under their heavy fur hats.”
On his journey as his health slowly recovers, Levi glimses several times what he calls “the
extraordinary spectacle of the Red Army going home, at once coral and solemn as a biblical
migration and flighty and colourful as acrobats on the move. Horses reappear after the yellow
Berlin buses.” This is Levi - “After a week we saw only horses. The road was theirs.
They must have been all the horses of occupied Germany. Tens of thousands a day. They went
on forever in a cloud of flies and animal stench, tired sweaty hungry driven on by yelling
whip cracking girls riding bareback and bare legged, one every horses or so sunburnt and
dishevelled. In the evenings they let the horses graze and rest until dawn in the fields
and woods beside the rode. There were cart horses, race horses, mules, mares with foals,
arthritic old hacks, donkeys.”
If a starving Jewish survivor who observes the aftermath of an indescribable victory
becomes in the course of his reawakening a kind of participant himself in events, it's
because the Russian protagonists in the great history are ordinary people too. Their humanity
brings him back to life. The great world of history in the light of the powerless individual
this time, merge in a renewal.
What follows now is a postscript. The book these closing lines come from is a kind of
postscript itself from an account of the life and death of a vanished aristocratic class
written by a Sicilian aristrocrat who had survived it. These last words from The Leopard,
I'm reading for Luke Davies who is here tonight, poet, novelist, screen writer and winner of
the Prime Minister's Literary Prize. I read them for him because he likes them as much
as I do. They are about a dog or the remains of a stuffed dog. The dead princes . . . . and
in that sense they take us back to where we started. The dog is the ultimate observer
of human activity seeing eveything close up and saying nothing.
“While the carcass was being dragged off, it's glass eyes stared at her with a humble
reproach of things that had been disposed of an anulled. A few minutes later, what remained
of Bendico was -8-
thrown into a corner of the courtyard which the rubbish collector visited every day. During
its flight down from the window, its form recomposed itself for a moment. Along whiskered
quadruped could be seen dancing in the air with its right forepaw raised and seeming
to curse. Then everything found peace in a little heap of livered dust.”
That's all, thank you.