When a poem is not a poem

Online poetry culture is fascinating. The web has dramatically changed how we interact with language, so it’s no surprise that it’s affected poetry and our appreciation of it, too. Look at the way that ‘This is Just to Say’ has somehow become a meme, something as malleable as a screenshot from The Simpsons. Or the way that various people on Instagram have successfully wound up an entire generation of poets by writing the kind of thing you might find on a fridge magnet in a gift shop and publishing it as poetry.

I don’t like any of those Instagram poets, because they all write very badly, but I don’t think that what they do is not ‘real poetry’. It’s just bad writing. To illustrate my point, here is a typical poem by Instapoet Robert M. Drake:

The best kind
of humans are
the ones who
stay.

I’m not going to pretend this is good writing because it isn’t and I’m an honest person by both conviction and habit. It’s very bad, but it does illustrate some features that I think are distinctive in web poetry: short line length, no rhythm (i.e., it’s ‘free’ verse) and the use of line breaks for emphasis, almost instead of rhythm. It’s also irritatingly typical in its failure to even observe grammatical agreement. This happens a lot in English anyway (‘a number of rooms are free’ is the famous example; since ‘number’, the subject, is singular should the verb also be singular ‘is’ rather than plural ‘are’? Or should we say ‘are’ because what we’re ‘really’ talking about is (are?) the rooms?). But if you’re going to do this kind of thing in a poem, you should really interrogate it, rather than just leave it there. Indeed, just having ‘kinds’ would be better poetically and grammatically, as presumably there’s more than one kind of human who stays, anyway.

It’s shabby writing from top to bottom and asks endless questions which it makes no attempt to answer. Should I stay even after someone’s told me to leave, so that I can be the one kind of human who are the best? Why does it say ‘humans’, as though the speaker in the poem is a non-human? Or is there an an assumption that non-human animals do stay? Or that they don’t?

A lot of people find it irritating that someone like Drake, who, as we have seen, can barely write at all, is out there getting published as a poet, but there’s no discernible solution to this kind of ‘problem’. You don’t have to read him and my advice to you is that you don’t.

So, people who mainly get their poetry via Instagram have, by popular consensus, made Robert M. Drake a poet. This is fine, as far as it goes. But I didn’t write this blog to be mean about Drake. Because something far odder is what popular consensus has done to the writing of John Donne.

John Donne was a poet, who wrote in both Latin and English. He also wrote a lot of prose, some of it sermons which he wrote and delivered in his day job as the Dean of St. Paul’s. He’s still well-known as a poet, but the lines he’s most famous for are these, from a devotional work he wrote shortly after recovering from a near-fatal illness:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

(I’ve modernised Donne’s spelling and punctuation.)

You’re probably familiar with this passage or at least with some of the famous lines: ‘No man is an island’ and ‘for whom the bell tolls’ have each been quoted over and over again and used as the titles of various songs, books and films. It’s become one of the best-known statements of humanism and will probably remain well-known for as long as humanism is the default philosophy of our culture.

But the strange thing about this passage is that, in the last week alone, I have seen two different people, in different contexts, describe it as one of their favourite poems. But it’s not a poem. Donne wrote it as prose. He didn’t set it out as verse and it reads like prose. And yet, a lot of people, not just those two, think it’s a poem. Even better, one of them actually laid it out as verse, chopped up mostly at the semicolons but sometimes at the commas, like this:

No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,

And so forth.

Now, I didn’t want to say that Drake’s poem is not a poem. I am a little more confident in my view that this excerpt from a devotional tract is not a poem. I at least have authorial agreement on that point. Nor does chopping it up at the breaths make it into a poem. If Donne had wanted to express these ideas in iambic pentameter, he certainly could have done, but there’s no iambic pentameter here.

So, why do people think this is a poem?

Firstly, John Donne was a famous poet. It’s natural to come across some famous lines by a famous poet and assume they’re poetry. Or, it’s natural if you can’t hear poetic rhythm, which I am 100% certain most people cannot. A case in point can be seen in the ‘versified’ version above. You don’t need to beat out the rhythm on your desk or count on your fingers to see that these ‘lines’ don’t make any poetic sense.

Secondly, bits of it almost sound like a poem. ‘No man is an island’ starts us off with a series of trochees, which sound enough like iambs to mislead the casual reader. The other famous bit is even closer to iambic pentameter: ‘and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee‘. If you put a line break before ‘and’ and after ‘whom’, it’s a perfect iambic pentameter, which is quite pleasant. Even better, the same line is commonly misquoted, but in a way that emphasises the iambic because it relies on monosyllables: ‘send not to know for whom the bell tolls’.

That said, a few iambs does not make a poem. Iambs crop up all over the place in English and a lot of good writers, especially speechwriters, use them on purpose for this reason. Winston Churchill’s war speeches are a good example: ‘if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour“.’¹ Churchill was deliberately channelling the St. Crispin’s Day Speech, with the emphasis on people looking back on the battle after it’s all over, so the iambs are appropriate here both to make it memorable and to place it in a lineage of great British oratory about great victories against the odds.

Nevertheless, while people endlessly quote this and Churchill’s other war speeches, often while discussing football, I’ve yet to see anyone mistake any of them for a poem.

There’s another way in which the ‘No man is an island’ passage seems like a poem, and it’s one which relates to Drake’s poem: the didactic tone. Donne was being didactic because he was essentially giving a sermon. They’re meant to be didactic. Some poets (and their online audiences) have absorbed the idea of deriving lessons from poetry. Even if they’ve never read In Defence of Poetry, they’re looking to poets as the ‘legislators of the world’. Look at both Drake and Donne: ‘The best kind / of humans are’ [etc.], ‘No man is an island’. These are both stated simply as facts. There’s no suggestion that disagreement might be a possibility. The poet has spoken. By contrast, in ‘Their finest hour’ there’s plenty of grand claims, but the overall intent is persuasive. It’s rhetoric, rather than a lesson. This, I think, is one of the reasons people don’t mistake it for a poem. The tone is wrong for what they associate with poetry, or at least with random lines of poetry printed over a stock photo of a sunset.

<img class="wp-block-cover__image-background wp-image-6119" alt="A stock photo of a sunset, with the 'alamy' watermark still on, superimposed with text reading:<br><br>I’m not going to pretend<br>this is good writing because it isn’t<br>and I’m an honest person by both conviction and

Am I doing this right?

Donne goes on to extend and complicate his metaphor, because he was a good writer. Extended metaphor is a technique we associate with poetry and especially with the metaphysical poets, of whom Donne is the exemplar in English literature, so this is another reason people read this and think it’s a poetry. Drake, of course, is incapable of extending a metaphor. His whole ten-word poem is this one clunky claim about a kind of humans(?), whereas Donne’s point is made in just the five oft-quoted words, but he then goes on to explain and enliven what he’s said, and does the job so well that he ends by introducing another entry in your Big Book of Clever Quotes of choice, but it’s a similarly lecturing tone. He doesn’t say, ‘It could be said that the bell tolls for thee’.

Many of the odd bits of poetry that get quoted like this are similar. Think of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 and its (wholly inaccurate) claim that ‘Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove’. Or of that dreadful, dreary passage from Corinthians people love to read at weddings (‘Love is patient, love is kind, it does not make the assembled wedding guests stab themselves in a hand with a fork, just to feel something, anything, other than this.’²). (Obviously, I know this isn’t a poem, either, but I bet you the people who read it at weddings don’t.) The point is, the tone is the same: sweeping, grandiose statements, divested of irony, stripped of context, mistranslated, essentially bowdlerised into something that is intended to feel in some way inarguably true, even when, it palpably isn’t and possibly wasn’t intended to be.

It’s probably understandable that some people prefer Drake’s didactic poem over, to pick an example at random, a poem that asks you to put yourself in the place of someone driven to a murderous rage by the fish that he unwisely turned into an anthropomorphic abomination, especially when they’re just scrolling past. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if people enjoy Drake’s poetry or think that Devotions upon Emergent Occasions is a poem. But there ought to be more to poetry than a lecture.

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1. Note that the ‘poetic’ stress falls in a different place than the sense would suggest. No one wants to say ‘This was their finest hour’. We always say ‘This was their finest hour’ – as did Churchill. ↩︎
2. In the King James Bible, this passage is about ‘charity’, rather than ‘love’, giving us yet another reason to reject the New International Version. In the original Greek, it’s about ‘agape’ (ἀγάπη), prononuced with three syllables ‘a-GAH-pay’, ‘AH-guh-pay’ or ‘AG-a-pay’ (ɑːˈɡɑːpeɪ, ˈɑːɡəˌpeɪ, ˈæɡə-). It really means God’s love for humanity, which at least if you believe in it makes far more sense than looking at human love and saying it doesn’t envy, of all things. In any case, it obviously has no application to your wedding. ↩︎

Why the writers of epic poems loved a long list

Homer has the catalogue of ships. Whoever wrote the Book of Numbers must have been kicking themselves that the spreadsheet hadn’t yet been invented, so that they could more easily represent just who owned all those oxen, and whose son he was. And the author(s) of The Mahabharata couldn’t just say that Dhritarashtra had a hundred sons without also naming them and nor, later, could they resist telling us all of Vishnu’s one thousand names. Clearly all these authors could have used a creative writing class, where they would have been strictly instructed to show, not tell, while also being assured that the passive voice is to be avoided.¹

I’ve been meaning for a while to write about the differences between written poetry, on the one hand, and spoken or sung poetry, on the other. Or, rather, what happens to poetry when it’s sung or spoken. We can start with some cliches: poetry was originally sung, chanted or spoken; most poetry people listen to now is sung (in the form of pop music); we nevertheless think of poetry as being primarily written; but the window in which most people experienced poetry as something on the page has been, historically speaking, very small, really only the time between the beginnings of mass literacy and the widespread adoption of radio.

I don’t think this is very important but it is interesting. Talking about how we define art is an essentially an elite pursuit, and as one of the few people who is capable of accepting that they’re part of the elite, I’m confident in saying that the reason we don’t worry too much about mass perception of poetry is that we think it just doesn’t really matter very much.

Poetry as distinct from prose is defined largely by repetition. This repetition can take place at the level of whole phrases (as in the chorus of a song or the repeated lines of a villanelle), as whole words (Elizabeth Bishop does this wonderfully in ‘The Fish’), clusters of phonemes (rhyme), individual phonemes (alliteration, assonance) or metrically (where the phonemes are of secondary importance and the repetition is a pattern of long/short or stress-unstressed syllables). Written poetry has increasingly done without some or all of these types of repetition, whereas they have, tellingly, remained popular in song.

There are several reasons for this. The first is a type of elitism: writers who write rejecting vernacular forms out of snobbery or boredom. I think we’re all pretty bored of jingle-jangle rhyming couplets of the kind Shakespeare loved to end most scenes of his plays with. But, Pam Ayres is the best-selling poet in Britain, so clearly I’m wrong.

Another reason, beyond my latent snobbery, is that repetition makes things easier to memorise. This is how actors of Shakespeare memorise hudnreds and even thousands of lines of verse and why Judi Dench can go viral by repeating a sonnet she knows by heart on Graham Norton’s chat show. But it’s not just professionally trained actors who can do this kind of thing. You’ve probably had the experience of hearing a song for the first time in years and finding you still know all the words, for example. The music itself helps and, especially in pop, the music is often structured around the metrical qualities of the verse. Do we think any football fan ever made a point of memorising the lyrics to ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’? No, it just sort of happens. Once you’ve sung the first line of the chorus, it’s easy to remember that it’s too late because you’ve already sung that Sally can wait. And from there, you have the assonance between those rhyming words continued in away which leads you straight to say.

Another reason is the effect of these types of repetition on the page: they’re less striking, harder to perceive or just plain weird compared with how they come across when spoken or sung. Consider the Arcade Fire song ‘Rococo’ which features the chorus:

Rococo rococo rococo rococo

With also one variation that goes:

Rococo rococo rococo rococo rococo rococo rococo

Nothing much going on here, right? Even as spoken word this would be unlikely to have much impact but, in a song, it works. Part of the reason that written analyses of sung music don’t work well is that often, as here, the lyric is inseparable from the music. The English classroom (highlighters at the ready!) approach to analysis doesn’t work.

Similarly, the endless mileage that pop songwriters get out of rhymes like fire/desire and calling/falling is largely down to the fact that while they can only be made to rhyme in a couple of ways, they can be sung with near-infinite variation. This is probably also the reason that for most pop singers, fire has two syllables (that and the fact it sometimes/often/always needs to rhyme with ‘higher’).

Even among songwriters who don’t use traditional verse-chorus-verse structures, there’s a marked preference for more rhyme and repetition than is usually seen in contemporary poetry. Joanna Newsom is one of the best lyricists currently writing. Her songs almost always feature end rhyme and also internal rhyme, as in ‘Time, As a Symptom’ from Divers:

But stand brave, life-liver:
bleeding out your days
in the river of time.
Stand brave:
time moves both ways

Here, ‘days’ rhymes with ‘ways’ (while ‘brave’ maintains the assonance) and ‘-liver’ rhymes internally with ‘river’. The rhyme of ‘life-liver ‘ with ‘river’ also links the two thematically. This isn’t rhyme just for rhyme’s sake. It’s not a coincidence that there’s a visual rhyme of ‘-liver’ and ‘river’ with ‘diver’, reflecting the title and a central image of the album. So, the ‘life-liver’ is, in a sense, the ‘river’ and also the ‘diver’ swimming in the river. This is a great example of how the repetition works in a poem: it helps us link together ideas that might not otherwise obviously be linked, without Newsom having to actually say, ‘By the way, the river and the diver? Same guy.’ So – gasp! – she is showing not telling! And she uses rhyme to do it.

I once totally freaked out a 6th-form class by demonstrating that I knew a poem (‘The Second Coming’) off by heart. The funniest reaction was a kid who turned around to look at the back wall, convinced that I’d hidden a copy of the poem somewhere I could see it and he couldn’t. Obviously, I hadn’t. It’s just that I’m very used to iambic pentameter. Once I’ve gotten going with the poem, I don’t need to resort to counting beats to know where I’m going next, anymore than professional dancers have to count the beats in a waltz, because I’ve got the feel for it. Even in a poem that doesn’t have a handy rhyme scheme for me to lean on, I’m relying on repetition, but here the pattern of repetition is one of unstressed and stressed beats.

Now, there was definitely an element of showing off involved. I am a very competitive person and find it difficult to pass up opportunities to show that I’m good at something, whatever it might be. But this is certainly partly why those epic poets loved the long lists so much. So, your bard recited a hundred names of Vishnu, did he? Try FIVE hundred. Hell, let’s make it a thousand. You’ve got some people whose profession relied on an excellent memory, so of course they’re going to stretch it as far as they can. Having a steady beat allowed them to show off even more!

Going more into the realm of speculation, this might be part of the reason Shakespeare gave his actors increasingly long and complex speeches as his career advanced. He was a shareholder in his company, after all, and perhaps this was a way of showing off Richard Burbage, the leading man. Hamlet alone requires the lead actor to memorise some 1,500 lines (3/8ths of the entire play!). Did Shakespeare do this on purpose to challenge Burbage or to show him off? Or did Burbage ask for bigger parts, for his own showy purposes? We’ll never know, of course. But it’s at least possible.

This all plays into my general theory of art. We love a pattern. The great thing about patterns is you can alter them a little bit and end up with a new pattern. This is essentially the history of art in a couple of sentences. We find something we like, we tweak it a little bit and then we have a new thing. Of course, some people prefer the old thing. The next generation makes their own little changes to both new and old, and then we have a new-old thing and a new-new thing. And so we carry on, slouching towards perfection but finding it always another century off, one way or the other.

1. Yes, I know. That’s the joke. ↩︎

How Augustus shaped our political language

With a bonus section on the maddest claim to the succession of the Roman Empire

The Roman Empire continues to be a big deal for people, for some reason. I studied it at school and naturally I always found it interesting – it just is. I didn’t really understand just how weird people were about it till I went to the site of the Temple of Julius Caesar and saw that people had left flowers there. Here we are, at the temple to a guy who was very much a genocidal dictator who died two thousand years ago, and people are still putting flowers down here. Two thousand years is a long time, long enough that some of those people were almost certainly descended from people killed by Caesar and, quite possibly, also descended from the people who killed Caesar. I would also wager money that some of the people who laid flowers thought that they themselves were descended from Caesar, which is the least likely of those three options although, again, given it was so long ago, it’s at least possible.

Wild though such speculation is, they certainly wouldn’t be alone in thinking of themselves as being, one way or another, descended from Rome, or a certain idea of Rome, anyway. The word ‘Caesar’ in its various forms (Kaiser (German), Tsar (Slavic), Qaysar (Arabic)) lived on as a title for just shy of two thousand years until the deposition of the last Tsar of Bulgaria in 1946 (incredibly, he’s still alive at time of writing, though of course no longer a tsar). In one of history’s small ironies, in the actual Roman Empire, Caesar meant something a bit more like modern ‘prince’, in that it denoted the heir apparent; Augustus was the main title of the emperor. Caesar himself never used Caesar as a title because it was, after all, just his name.

A king by any other name

But this determination to hang on to Roman names and titles doesn’t stop with Caesar, either the word or the man. You might already know that ’emperor’ is derived from the Latin imperator, a word which goes even further back than Caesar, to the kings of Rome. It originally meant, basically, ‘guy who gives the orders’ (think of ‘imperative’) and hence ‘military commander’, but was later tagged on to the many names and titles accrued by Caesar’s heir, Augustus, who, by general consensus, is considered the first Roman emperor. Like Caesar and Augustus, ‘Imperator’ was literally Augustus’ name, albeit an assumed one. He used it as his praenomen, equivalent to a first name, in his regnal name, which was in full ‘Imperator Caesar Augustus’.

So, all of Augustus’ names became titles upon his death or at some point afterwards. But he did also use various titles in their own right, associated with the various offices he held. These included Princeps Civitatus, ‘First Citizen’, and Princeps Senatus, ‘First of the Senate’ and hence leader of the Senate. These two titles were rolled into one, princeps, from which we derive our word ‘prince’, still very much in use as both senior royal and, in the case of Monaco, head of state. The use of princeps as a title continued for centuries, until the emperor Diocletian decided it was time to stop pretending he wasn’t a monarch. Outside of strict etymology, the concept of a leading politician as merely ‘first-among-equals’ survives today in the terms ‘premier’, ‘prime minister’ and ‘first minister’, and in numerous other political and judicial concepts. It survives, too, in the way we address the speakers of parliaments as ‘Mister’ or ‘Madam’ Speaker. George Washington was thinking of this later usage when he decided that the President of the United States should be addressed as ‘Mr/Madam President’. Even ‘First Lady/Gentleman’ as an honorary tag for the spouse of a president descends from this idea of the First Citizen of Rome.

As well as being Princeps Senatus, which gave Augustus the right to speak first in the Senate, he was also often one of the two consuls throughout his rule. Like imperator, the title of consul predated Augustus, but unlike imperator it never became the sole preserve of the emperor. It too has been revived at various points, lastly (I think), during the French Revolution. As in republican and imperial Rome, the French consulate was an office held by multiple people, but with three instead of two officers. However, this three-part rule also had its antecedent in Rome: both Julius Caesar and Augustus were part of different ‘Triumvirates’, wherein the rule of the empire was divided up between three rivals, who eventually turned on one another. As with both Roman triumvirates, the French consulate was unstable and shortly collapsed, leading to sole rule by just one of the triumvirs: Napoelon.

Like Julius Caesar, Augustus was also made pontifex maximus, the high priest of the Roman religion. This survives today as one of the titles of the Bishop of Rome, better known as the Pope. The word ‘pontiff’, used for both the Pope himself and Catholic bishops in general, derives from the same term.

Other titles granted to Augustus were tribuni plebis (tribune of the plebs, whence ‘tribune’ in modern English) and censor, both of which again survive today, although neither has ever been used for a head of state, as far as I know. Like all good (bad) revolutionary populist leaders, Caesar and Augustus stole power from the very people whose names they acted in, rendering the tribunes, originally the offices of the common plebeian classes, even more of a pointless facade than the rest of the institutions of Rome that they variously co-opted and overthrew.

A quick recap: Imperator Caesar Augustus, Princeps Civitatus, Princeps Senatus, Pontifex Maximus, Tribuni Plebis, Censor and (occasionally) Consul. That’s nine or so names and titles (counting ‘princeps’ twice). All survived him as titles. Seven survived not only the first emperor but the fall of the empire many centuries later. Only ‘Augustus’ itself has fallen away entirely as a familiar word (except in the name of the month and as a given name – not a common one in English, granted), while ‘censor’ is a familiar word with an unrelated meaning (the Roman ‘censor’ conducted the census). Of those seven surviving titles, five have been used as names of heads of state or government: emperor, kaiser/tsar/qaysar, prince and pontiff (because the Pope is the head of state of Vatican City, the world’s least nationy nation), with only consul having a long break before its brief revival. Those last two big survivors, Prince and Pontiff, are still going strong today, so that, at least as far as etymology’s concerned, we’re still living in the world Augustus built. If we count the various ‘premier/first/prime minister’-type titles, of which there are dozens around the world, then princeps has the longest legacy of them all. In fact, the only one of Augustus’ regnal names and titles which didn’t survive the empire in any major way was, ironically, the one that was of greatest importance to the Romans themselves: Augustus.

Old names for old guys

Beside the titles associated specifically with Augustus, we’ve hung on to ‘senate‘ as a legislative body made up of old guys (no longer quite exclusively, but the etymology of the word ‘senate’ is related to age, as also seen in ‘senile’; insert your own joke here). We also still have the concept of a Dictator. Dictator means the one who speaks, as in ‘my word is law’, but it would be a stretch and also just daft to relate it to the idea of a ‘Speaker’ in a legislative assembly. Julius Caesar was Dictator Perpetuo – dictator for life – but Augustus repudiated this title for himself and in fact abolished the office. Now, a cynic might say he only did this because he already was a dictator in all but name, but a cynic at the time, particularly one who didn’t want to be crucified, might just shut up. Like Augustus, modern dictators don’t tend to include ‘dictator’ as part of their titles, preferring benign sounding title like ‘Chairman‘ or ‘General Secretary‘. So even when we don’t use Roman titles, the manner in which we don’t use them is similar to the Romans.

But it’s not just etymology where we can see the influence of Rome on our political ideas. There are all those words, of course, for our senates, pontiffs, premiers and princes. Then there’s the nominal separation of powers of judges, magistrates, military leaders and priests. There’s our multiple legislative houses, (houses of commons, lords, representatives and so forth replacing the senate and the tribunes). We also rely on clever little fictions (everyone knows the King of England isn’t really the Head of the Church of England and everyone knows the US President isn’t really the head of the army). And, more symbolically still, there’s our obsession with putting eagles on flags and seals. With all of that and more, we’re still leaning heavily on Roman ideas of government and leadership.

Throughout history, by adopting these old Roman names, titles and concepts, or local variants, those various kings, politicians and pretenders were trying to say something about themselves and, quite often, the thing they were trying to say was: ‘This country is the legitimate successor to the Roman Empire and I am the legitimate successor to the Roman Emperors.’ Nowadays, we don’t tend to actually invoke the translatio imperii, the idea that some ruler or other was the successor to the Roman Empire. This is almost a shame, I think, because its one of those wonderfully mad ideas that exists with a local logic that makes no sense from the outside, like monarchy or test match cricket.

Who gets to be a Roman?

Somewhere near the top of the page, I promised to explain the maddest claims to be the successor to the Roman Empire. Unsurprisingly, it’s the English (see above, re: monarchy, test match cricket).

Like much that is strange about our country, we can blame Henry VIII for this one. As we all know, Henry VIII was desperate to father a son but struggled to beget¹ one who wasn’t stillborn or illegitimate or, for all anyone knows, both. Having convinced himself that the fault lay with his wife, Catherine of Aragon, he tried to get a divorce. Naturally, to do this he had to literally send a letter to the Pope and ask for permission. Unfortunately for Henry, the Pope said no and you had to listen to the Pope because, see above, he sort of, but not really, derived his authority from Augustus, the high priest of a different, pagan religion, and who, in any case, never ruled any of England, the place Henry lived in. I did say that none of this made sense.

To try and get around the fact that Augustus’ sort-of great-great-great-etc.-successor didn’t want him to dump his wife, Henry split away from the Catholic church. This was kind of a big problem, because apart from anything else, many people at the time maintained this strange fiction that there was only one earthly power, reflecting the sole heavenly power, God. The fact that there was just obviously not just one earthly power was no impediment to this way of thinking. This is the same ‘reason’, incidentally, that centuries later Napoleon (yeah, him again) got a Pope² to come all the way to Paris to hand him a crown. And it’s why until shockingly recently, western historians still referred to Caesar and his successors as rulers of the world³. The world is quite a big place, and it’s safe to say that Caesar didn’t rule it or even know about most of it. He didn’t even rule the biggest empire at the time, because that was China, a place Caesar had probably never heard of. Nevertheless, he doth bestride the world like a colossus.

However! To match the extremely strange views of political philosophers of the time, there were also plenty of extremely strange historians who were willing to advance still stranger theories about exactly who bestrid the world and why. According to these historians (or the English ones, anyway), Henry VIII did in fact have the right to rule England and the brand new Church of England. Did they derive this idea from some straightforward notion like sovereignty or right of conquest? Did they derive it just from the fact that there was, really quite obviously, more than one king knocking about the place?

No, they did not. They derived it from the Romans. Unfortunately for them, there was no reason whatsoever to do this. Instead, they hallucinated one.

Saint Helena was the mother of Constantine I (‘the Great’), who you may recall was the first Christian Emperor of Rome. This bit of the argument is the strongest bit of it, because it’s true. This Helena, they said, was English and the argument starts to go downhill really quite rapidly at this point because, first, England didn’t exist at the time and, secondly, she was actually Greek. Anyway, they somehow went on, because the mother of the first Christian Roman Emperor⁴ was British (no), that meant that the very idea of a Christian Roman Empire was also British (hang on –) and so that also means that whoever happens to be King of England now, a millennium later, inherited that right from the Romans (what?).

The reason English historians sort of got away with this kind of thing is that everyone was at it. The Holy Roman Empire (supported by the Pope), the Ottoman Empire (supported by ruling Constantinople and possessing heavy artillery), the Byzantine Emperors (till they found themselves on the receiving end of said artillery), the Trebizond empire, the Tsar of Russia, the Bulgarian empire and some distant relatives of the last Byzantine Emperor (all supported principally by themselves), each made some sort of claim to being successors of the Roman Empire. There are many more examples; these are just the claims made during Henry VIII’s lifetime.

Oh, incidentally, the problem of there being six or seven different emperors is called ‘The problem of two emperors’. Could pre-modern historians actually count? Experts suspect that no.

Who gets to be a Trojan?

At least for the English, then, the fixation with Rome was at first a matter of political convenience. And once people are obsessed with something, it tends to self-replicate: we’re kind of obsessed with the Romans because the generations before us were obsessed with them, too. Many of our contemporary ideas of what happened during the fall of the Republic are heavily influenced by William Shakespeare. He’s the reason we still use the name ‘Mark Antony’ for the man who called himself Marcus Antonius. Shakespeare wrote four plays about Rome (Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra⁵, and Coriolanus – more on which below) and one (Troilus and Cressida) about the Trojans, from whom the Romans, for similar mad reasons to those discussed above, thought they were descended.

So, you might say that the source of our strange idea that it’s important to establish a succession of imperial power from a distant, mythologised past was also invented… by the Romans.

And another thing…

What got me thinking about the Romans this week was watching Coriolanus, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes. Like Richard III, which I wrote about last week, it has an updated setting, which suits it quite well. Again, the performances are all excellent (Vanessa Redgrave in particular stands out as Volumnia), though no amount of acting can disguise the fact that Coriolanus is a very odd play with a deeply unsympathetic protagonist. The summary is that he hates poor people. He becomes a military hero by defeating the Volscians at Corioles, is granted the name ‘Coriolanus’ and expects to be elected consul, but is thwarted in this by the tribunes. He then goes to the same Volscians he had conquered and persuades them to march on Rome under his leadership. When he arrives at Rome, his mum comes out and points out to him that it might not be such a good idea to sack the city where his family lives and, this having apparently not previously occurred to him, he agrees to stop. When he goes back to the Volscians they, presumably annoyed at having marched all the way to Rome for nothing, murder him.

It’s all very dark and difficult. Even Frank Kermode struggled to interpret it, which tells you something about how tough it is. Probably the key oddity is that Coriolanus doesn’t much go in for soliloquies. Hamlet behaves quite oddly, but he regularly stops to tell the audience what’s going on; even when he contradicts himself, he at least tells us he’s contradicting himself. Coriolanus rarely talks to the audience and spends most of the play bellowing at the plebs. Still, even odd Shakespeare is Shakespeare. Volumnia’s big speeches are excellent and Aufidius (Gerard Butler) is compelling as a mirror of his great rival, Coriolanus. Fiennes acts the hell out of everything, as per, glaring unnervingly at everyone (I’m sure he blinks at some point but it feels as though he doesn’t) and conveying his character’s fundamental brokenness. He portrays Coriolanus as more of a machine than a human being, an absolute wreck of a man, and so succeeds in making Shakespeare’s strangest hero if not actually sympathetic, at least understandable.

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1. These still being the days of begetting. ↩︎
2. A different one, presumably. ↩︎
3. Westerners weren’t alone in this, obviously. The Emperors of China also claimed to rule the whole world and treated ambassadors as servants of vassals, come to pay tribute. This was understood by everyone concerned to be an elaborate fiction, but they played along with it because, well, how else were they going to get at all that tea, silk and opium? ↩︎
4. Just to make this even more entertaining, historians of the time also imagined that Constantine I’s dad (Constantius I) was himself a secret Christian which, if it were true, which it isn’t, would mean that Constantine the Great wasn’t the first Christian emperor. I’d say this makes the theory even more nonsensical but since none of it makes sense anyway I’m not sure it really matters. ↩︎
5. These two – Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra – make a sort of loose pair, with various shared characters, most notably Antony. Obviously they’re set around the same time, too, focusing on the fall of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire. It’s from Julius Caesar that we get the image of the man – and therefore the emperors who succeeded him – bestriding the world like a colossus. ↩︎

Following the clues

In a previous post, I described modern heroes and villains functioning as mirror images of each other. For example, Moriarty is a counterweight to Holmes, creating a duality we also see in Hector/Achilles and Iago/Othello: Holmes is impossibly intelligent; Moriarty is impossibly cunning. Holmes is good; Moriarty, evil. But Holmes’ role generally isn’t to be a paragon of goodness, it’s to explain the story, to unlock the narrative.

Watson is something like a Greek rhapsode, a narrator who starts of by asking someone else – the goddess, for Homer; Holmes, for Watson – to tell you, the reader/listener a story. Watson is embedded in the narrative, but there’s a sense in which he’s a narrator at secondhand: it’s Holmes who’s responsible for the key part of the exposition. Another Ancient Greek analogue here is the Chorus, which frequently steps in to explain what’s happened offstage (usually a particularly gruesome death which would’ve been too hard to present in the theatre). Shakespeare often does something similar, so that, in Julius Caesar, for example, the whole scene with Antony presenting Caesar with a diadem happens offstage and is explained at quite odd length onstage by Casca, even though there’s no obvious reason Shakespeare couldn’t have had this happen at the Globe. Presumably the reason he did it this way is that Brutus’ response to the information is more important than the information itself, and it was more effective to have him react in dialogue than it would’ve been to have him watching the tableau and making asides to the audience. Anyway, I’m not here to disagree with how Shakespeare thinks things ought to be staged.

Regardless of Shakespeare’s intentions, there’s a long history of multiple layers of narrative, going right back to The Odyssey, where the muse inspires Homer to tell the story of Odysseus, who himself narrates most of his own story (and, if you fancy another layer, the rhapsode would be in a sense ‘playing’ Homer, as well as the other characters, whenever they sung the poem). However, as we saw before with the hero-villain dichotomy, genre fiction presents a qualitative difference to the familiar setup of multiple narrators. Doyle-Watson-Holmes don’t just tell a story, they work backwards from a conclusion, unwinding the events that led up to the problem that we’re initially presented with. It’s not as simple as previous expositions, where characters would enter to find, e.g., a dead body, and another character would come in and say, ‘Ah, good sirs, I wouldst tell thee what hath happened this day, but break my heart it would’, until we all die of impatience and they eventually say, ‘It was him [points at A MAN TWIRLING HIS MOUSTACHE AND CACKLING]’. In detective fiction, the process of telling actually retells and reconstructs the narrative. The good detective story uses information we already have to cast the narrative in a new light, and in doing so resolves the mystery.

This is the key point: the detective doesn’t narrate the story, they narrate it again, presenting the same information in a new light. When Holmes explains how he solved the mystery, he isn’t like Odysseus explaining how he got home; he’s more like Aeneas in the first book of The Aeneid or even Penelope in Maragret Atwood’s Penelopiad: the same story, the same ‘facts’, but a new interpretation. But this time, it’s not a sequel or a reimagining of an existing story, it is the story.

As with the redevelopment of the hero-villain aspect of narrative as an internal quality of the narrative, the detective genre turns the telling and interpretation of the narrative into the narrative itself. Again, it’s postmodernism in embryo. To understand detective fiction, we must already have a strong grasp of how narrative works. This is why, as I’ve argued, genre fiction is not literary fiction on easy mode: it in fact demands the audience understand how narrative works in order to unravel and rebuild its own narrative. In the next post, I’ll show how this is equally true with genres.

A brief history of narrative

This is part 3 of a series, a slight digression that ended up being a bit long. Anyway, if you’d like some context, you can read part 1 and part 2.

The Iliad is right at the beginning of western fiction. Some parts of it are utterly weird and others are quite familiar. Achilles getting into a fight with a river (and winning) is probably both at the same time: you can imagine it as part of the climax in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One thing that makes the Iliad stand out against contemporary fiction, especially the MCU, is its lack of a clear protagonist/antagonist duality. Achilles is the main character, invoked in the opening line alongside the muse, and Hector is his main opponent, but Hector is by far the more sympathetic character, popping home to see his wife and kids, and getting exasperated with his feckless younger brother, while Achilles, famously, spends most of the poem sulking because he’s not been given the slave he wants.

The interesting thing is that this lack of good vs. evil, so key to virtually all contemporary fiction, is absent not just from the Iliad but also from the rest of ancient fiction. Like Achilles, Gilgamesh is similarly basically a problem for most of the other characters he meets: his Epic begins with the people calling upon the gods to do something to distract him because he won’t stop murdering their sons, raping their daughters (and possibly also their sons, depending on the translation) and… ringing the temple bells really loud (there may be something lost in translation here, too). What we have of ancient literature doesn’t seem to be concerned so much with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but with how the gods respond to what we do here on Earth. The Greeks gave us the word ‘hero’, but their heroes don’t much resemble ours. In fact, reading Greek literature suggests you don’t really get to be a hero at all until you’ve murdered somebody (or, at minimum, thrown a huge tantrum that indirectly leads to their death).

Even up to the time of William Shakespeare, we find many heroes who don’t really do anything very heroic. In the Big Four Tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Lear are all, at best, flawed characters. The titular all become murderers during the course of the play, for starters. Even Edgar, who is more ‘heroic’ than Lear, fails dreadfully at everything he attempts. Beyond the big four, Henry V commits a war crime, and that’s after we’ve had to let him off the hook for rejecting poor old Falstaff at the end of IV Part 1, and for killing Hotspur. Granted, it was a battle, but Hotspur, like Hector, was the better man, murdered by history, rather than the gods.

But, in both cases, it wasn’t history or the gods (or Prince Hal or Achilles) who killed their opponents. It was Shakespeare and Homer or, in fact, it was the narrative. They die because they have to die for the plot arcs of Hal and Achilles to make sense. While Sir Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy really did die at the Battle of Shrewsbury, he certainly wasn’t killed in single combat by the Prince of Wales. Likewise, we don’t need to dig into the historicity of The Iliad to be pretty certain that, whatever happened at Troy and whatever Homer (whoever that was) knew about it, he wouldn’t have let the facts get in the way of a good climatic duel.

Drawing on ancient epic, renaissance drama and the Bible, Paradise Lost is both the first and last ‘modern’ epic: the line between good and evil could not be more apparent. His Satan has evolved into something completely different from the minor biblical figure or the butt-of-the-joke of medieval satire, or the horrifying monster depicted in Dante’s Inferno. While not a human, he’s given a recognisably human character. He can’t die, of course, but he’s definitively defeated in the context of the narrative, humiliated by being transformed into a speechless serpent ahead of the certainty of Christ’s ultimate victory over Hell.

By the time of Jane Austen, these complex dualities have started to collapse into something simpler. There’s also a further shift: the duality has crept out of tragedy and epic, and started to affect what we’d now call romance and comedy. Austen’s characters are still realistically drawn, so that the good guys have bad points and vice-versa, but there’s little ambiguity as to whether we’d prefer to see Elizabeth Bennet end up marrying Mr Darcy or Mr Wickham. Darcy is standoffish and arrogant, but he’s also genuinely noble and selfless. Even when his arrogance combines with his selflessness to make him think that he’s doing Lizzie a favour by proposing to his social inferior, he learns from his mistakes and is rewarded in the narrative for doing so. Likewise, Wickham’s good points turn out to be superficial: he’s unambiguously a wrong’un and Austen makes sure we know it.

This trend continues with Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist is so good he’s boring, while Sykes is so evil it’s implausible that he (or anyone in his vicinity) survives as long as he does. Again, in Dickens’ better work, the characters are complex and interesting, and even occasionally push back at the morals of the day, as in Bleak House, where Lady Dedlock has a child out of wedlock, but is clearly meant to be sympathetic, even though Britons looked down on single mums not only in Dickens’ time but well into the 21st century. Nevertheless, it’s always pretty clear who we’re meant to be sympathising with, so that, in David Copperfield, Uriah Heep is definitely bad even if we think that social climbing perhaps isn’t that much of a sin.

One may NOT smile and smile and be a villain, behave

Once we’d gotten used to our protagonists being heroic and our antagonists being villainous, we couldn’t stop. This, in fact, is one of the hallmarks of genre fiction: Van Helsing isn’t just a folklorist with a niche specialism in Eastern European legends and an unusually hands-on approach, he’s a crusader for God; Count Dracula isn’t just an old aristocrat looking to make a shady real estate deal, he’s the Devil on Earth. Sherlock Holmes isn’t just a good detective, he’s also strongly motivated by a sense of justice; Moriarty isn’t just a crook he’s ‘the Napoleon of crime’. Superman isn’t just a big strong dude, he’s the big blue boyscout; Lex Luthor isn’t just a scientist/CEO, he’s a megolamaniac who wants to rule the world. Etc.

In the case of these characters the desire for a straightforward hero-villain duality has manifested itself in a way that’s embedded in the narrative. Let’s go back over our examples: Hector isn’t a villain at all, but Achilles needs a near-equal to fight, so to his death Hector goes; Iago is a villain because he takes advantage of latent villainy in others, so that it’s Othello who actually commits the crime; Satan is a villain because he’s, y’know, Satan, and commits his crime in a similar way to Iago, through manipulation; Wickham is a villain because he’s selfish and dissolute; Heep is a villain because he’s manipulative and because he’s upsetting the social order that Dickens held dear. But the villainy of Dracula is qualitatively different: there is no universe in which Dracula can be a good guy and still be Dracula. His historical analogue, as the Count himself points out, was defending his homeland when he committed his crimes – a bad guy, yes, but someone who, in another story, might have been sympathetic: a Coriolanus or even a Hector. But our Count is barely a step away from Satan himself, the enemy of all humanity, all goodness. He’s impossibly, gleefully, inhumanly evil. Horror fiction is thus part of an impulse to justify narrative arcs for heroes by creating unambiguously villainous characters, against whom we can enjoy a guilt-free struggle.

What has happened here? The need for an antagonist to push a narrative arc a certain way has become something the narrative itself has to justify: it’s no longer assumed that Hector has to die because that’s what the story demands (or even because that’s what ‘really happened&rqsuo;), so the Hector-shaped character in the narrative becomes increasingly evil, to ‘justify&rqsuo; the shape of the arc that ends with their death. No one doubts Iago is worse than Othello, even though Othello has committed a grievous wrong. No one doubts that Darcy is the better man than Wickham. On the other hand, it is literally impossible to doubt that Van Helsing is a better person than Dracula; Dracula is barely a person at all.

What we have here is postmodernism: the narrative becoming self-aware, so that one way of reading Dracula is as an exploration of the nature of the antagonist in the narrative.

Back with Shakespeare, we can now read Iago and Edmund as prototypes of these later irredeemable villains. Edmund only shows a flicker of compassion much too late; it’s a transparent bid not to go to Hell. Iago, on the other hand, is almost a pantomime villain. He’s one of the earliest villains who actively claims to be evil, which is very rarely the elevator pitch used by real-life villains (Donald Trump didn’t run on the slogan ‘Make America Evil Again’). Iago only succeeds because of other people’s, mainly Othello’s, moral failings: he serves as a sort of cautionary tale.

Of course, what happens to the antagonist must, to some extent, also happen to the protagonist. As the antagonist morphs from an opponent into a dodgy character, then a true villain and finally into the embodiment of evil, the protagonist has to change too, to compensate. So, the hero has to survive: Achilles can get into a fight with the gods and come out on top in The Iliad, but when the story moves on in the rest of the cycle and he’s no longer the central figure, then he has our permission to die. Interestingly, the myth of his near-invulnerability doesn’t feature in The Iliad and appears to have been a later addition. In the earlier versions of the Epic Cycle, of which our Iliad forms only a part, he’s killed by an arrow but where it hit him isn’t specified, and his death is more an illustration of Paris’ cowardice than a climatic story beat for Achilles.

Just as later accounts of Achilles give him a supernatural invulnerability missing in the original, so genre-fiction heroes often have superpowers. Sherlock Holmes is impossibly intelligent (he is always right, always interprets the clues accurately) and also so strong that he can straighten out a poker after it’s been bent in half. Superman, the ur-superhero, started off simply impossibly strong and tough: Action Comics #1 specifies that he’s ‘faster than a speeding train’ (not faster than light, for example), that ‘nothing less than a bursting shell could penetrate his skin’ (which means a tank shell could kill or wound him) and that he can ‘leap tall buildings at a single bound’ (he can’t fly). Like Achilles, it’s only gradually that Superman’s powers came to grow out of all proportion. Some of this is for narrative purposes. In order to ratchet up the drama, he had to face increasingly dangerous obstacles, and so the writers also made him stronger in order to overcome them. More prosaically, his ability to fly came about because, when he transitioned to the big screen, constantly animating him jumping around was tedious, so the animators asked if he could fly instead. By the time of the first Christopher Reeve movie, he can move tectonic plates and turn back time. In the ’90s, he ‘died’, only to come back to life, completing the journey to becoming a Christlike figure.

Something similar tends to happen with other superheroes (Captain America goes from being the peak of human performance, i.e., a very, but not impossibly, strong man, to being able to just jump out of aeroplanes without a parachute). However they develop, the superheroes’ powers are another manifestation of what is now called ‘plot armour’. Superman doesn’t survive everything Lex Luthor throws at him just because ‘he’s the hero, so he has to’; he survives because he has superpowers. As with the villainy of the villain, here we see another aspect of the narrative – that the hero prevails – becomes not an externality driven by how narrative works, but an internal, embedded part of the hero’s character. The functions of narrative are, again, justified within the narrative itself.

By exploring the role of the hero, we can see one of the defining qualities of genre fiction: the integration of narrative structure into the narrative itself. In the next post, I’ll show how a similar process took place in the emergence of the detective story as a distinct genre.