HYPATIA

Thinking About Thought-full  & Difficult Stories

INTRODUCTION

Aren’t these two very ordinary questions a Reader might be asked at age 11,16, 21, 40, 50, or 70?

a) Which book did you find most difficult, but in some way valuable enough to endure the difficulty and finish?

b) Which difficult book did you abandon unfinished, and why?

If you finish a difficult book, perhaps some praise should go to the author too.  If you fail to finish a difficult book, perhaps you share some failing? As in telling a joke, so in giving a difficult book, timing is everything. But again, as with jokes, you ought to get certain stories at the right age, or you'll look a bit foolish laughing late.

It is a teacher's task to know most about timing the introduction of difficulty. To keep this skill alive, and to have moral authority, perhaps teachers ought to keep reading difficult books. Of course most don't : like people in other professions, they coast.

This brief essay looks at the Reader's experience of difficulty. It uses as a main example, a 19C novel that I have just read, at almost sixty : Hypatia by Charles Kingsley.

PART  ONE : REVIEWING THE DECALOGOS

In 1983, I was in a classroom, at the age of thirty, learning how to teach school-English. We were asked to do the following exercise. Open the book you’ve been given, turn to page one, and highlight every tenth word. Then choose another page at random, and repeat. Do this for five pages in total. On a separate sheet of paper write/type all the words. Finally, sift them as follows :

a) Those you judge to be comprehensible to an average under-9 child.

b) Those who judge to comprehensible to an average child, aged 9-11.

c) Those you judge to be new to a 9-11 child, but explained in the text.

d) Those you judge to be new to a 9-11 child, but not explained in the text :  (and so requiring a dictionary or a question to the teacher).

Some student-teachers had novels, some history, geography etc. But we were all asked to consider the question. What volumes of word-type (c) and word-type (d) would make the book challenging or forbidding to a ten-year old child?  Yes, we knew to keep in mind that though all ten year olds have physical bodies which have aged at least ten years, the quality of teaching & encouragement offered and the expectation of contentment and curiosity, of any cohort of ten year olds will vary  between a sink-school and Eton .  

Ten years later, I paused at the desk of a young woman. She was reading a novel: and beside her were a small dictionary and a notebook. We weren’t in a school : but a government office, as clerical colleagues. I smiled in warm empathy: for at the same late, after-school, age of 19, I’d returned to the same strategy. There is no short-cut if you wish to engage with some authors : you will have to learn to swim in their word-pool, or drown in your ignorant anger. That is one truth : the corollary is that you will be rewarded, for authors choose certain word-pools, and their next book will require less dictionary-time from the reader.  

Some authors choose, for commercial reasons rather than style, to use a precisely limited word-pool comprehensible to readers of a minimum age, as well as readers of any age who have failed to take, or have been failed to be offered, a less-limited word-pool : Simenon, Christie, Jackie Collins, Welsh.

Even though for some, perhaps many, readers, the unknown word feels like a stab in the eye., I believe it is a soul-betrayal for a writer to dumb-down. This is also an irresistible temptation to butchery for some writers, Will Self. (There’s a name for a Restoration character!)  

But of course, all writers must eat and feed their own kids. Shakespeare caught the tension perfectly in his phrase caviar to the general. He knew that most of the paying audience, the million, wouldn’t know what caviar even was.

PART-TWO  :  HOW MUCH OVER-EXPLAINING

This essay will be about story-art, the narrative poem, play or novel, which can present any human group, what it knows and how it lives. I further assume writers who are writing for bodies that have lived the disruption of childhood innocence both by puberty and by the first critical judgements of their elders : let’s say 16 onwards. How will this scene be received?  In a government building, in a modern capital, a new Governor is sitting in on a trial that has become bogged down in sordid detail. He remarks:  

This will last out a night in Russia ,

 When nights are longest there

 [Measure for Measure : Shakespeare]

The weight of the second line depends entirely on whether the Reader is ignorant of or knows this fact about geography and weather. If he knows, the line is quite tedious, ponderous. If he doesn’t, he learns a fact about an unknown place, and perhaps feels better or stronger for it. Though it should be added, that given the structure of the first line, it is possible to work out what comparative fact about Russia is implied. Today’s audiences, whose parents rocked to The Fab’s song: Back in the USSR, wouldn’t need the explanation. But even they might pause at This would last out a night in Neptune : and try and recall from school if Neptune had the longest nights or another infrequently referred to planet. This would last out a night in Uranus would be Kenneth Williams carrying on!  

In another part of Storyville, a different power-broker is briefly broken by regret:  

Will all great Neptune 's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas  incarnadine,

Making the green one red

[Macbeth : Shakespeare]

The third line is the pentameter with the least number of words in the Complete Works. Shakespeare is credited with inventing the word incarnadine : so the word must be explained as referring to the colour (blood)-red not flesh. Scholars dispute whether ‘one’ is a noun or adverb. But they agree that he worked through his Will Self flashiness early on in Love’s Labours Lost where his longest word is thrown in, unexplained - . honorificabilitudinitatibus.

Some people have new experiences, imagine or discover new concepts, make new machines or propose new institutions, to which they must give new names, in order to explain, in terms of known words. They hope the audience will make an effort to understand. Some stories are almost entirely explanations of how some people do a (new) kind of work:  Hotel, Airport, Hospital, Police Precinct, Gymkhana They are called procedurals, and are only slightly more literary than a manual : all technical terms for objects and for human hierarchies are (over)explained. Abstract concepts of course are the hardest to explain and rarely appear there.

But an art-work is not a lecture or a manual or a State judgement. The story-art-element of thought -  what a character thinks, or a narrator thinks, or even what an author thinks  -  must be artistically integrated with the other five elements, plot character, diction, song, and spectacle. Each of the elements offers its precise pleasure : but none must be separable from the whole. This is quite difficult to do for the writer. One might argue that thought  is probably the hardest element to anchor in the story. Amis sounded a great note of caution in his pithy remark “In science-fiction, the idea is hero”.  One might borrow this to say - In many a so-called political novel - The idea(l) is anti-hero. Orwell, in his masterpiece couldn’t quite integrate the sheer of volume of thought he brought to 1984, and was reduced to referring mid-story to an appended essay! 

It might also be quite difficult for the Reader to recognize the elements and the success or failure of their integration. I hope introducing the elements of story-art helps the Reader with the two very ordinary questions asked above.

a) Which book did you find most difficult, but in some way valuable enough to endure the difficulty and finish?

b) Which difficult book did you abandon unfinished, and why? 

Who can define value? Many people, with or without exams & professional titles, have heard themselves saying aloud to someone else, things like :

“I didn’t read that book. It read me. It changed me. I’m not the same person anymore. My way of looking at things, and thinking about people is different. I can’t recommend it enough.”  

This can be said about any book. I’ve heard it said about The Alchemist, and The Celestine Prophecy and Jonathon Livingstone Seagull. So the intensity of such confessions is not enough. Surely the quality of change brought about by what generations of international reading communities have called difficult is deeper. As in the sublime vignette by a middle-aged woman: 

“I was so astonished as a teenager by Crime & Punishment that I took to wandering around Dublin on dark evenings in a greatcoat imagining I was Raskolnikov.”

The most withering skepticism about the efficiency of educational opportunity was expressed by X:  “The volume of illiteracy has not diminished in five decades: it is just that more people can read.”  

Of the six aesthetic elements of story-art, it is diction and thought which are the most complex and contribute to the reader’s sense of difficulty (or intellectuality) of a book. Most people can follow complicated plots, recognize character-types, and enjoy song and spectacle : but they might not recognize types of meter or clause : nor understand allusions to other texts or even know what certain words/concepts mean, except that they might have to get a  dictionary or read some other bloody book first. The latter is probably the key criterion of what might be called a thinking-story or an intellectual novel/play : that it refers  to or presumes knowledge of non-fiction texts in which a central word/idea/concept is discussed with a complexity beyond the capability of a pre-adult consciousness. The density of intellectuality is measured by the number of such books referred to.

Probably the most referred to text in English literature, in Shakespeare and the whole of 19C story-art is The King James Bible. Until about thirty years ago, most people of all ages, and all levels of schooling would have recognized these Biblical allusions and their weight. I doubt that is the case now.  

Any genuine thinking-story now ought to be able to allude, in an informed manner, to Marx, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, the genome and cybernetics. There are very, very few : just as there was really only George Eliot in the 19C. 

PART THREE : A Rare Addition : Hypatia  

This essay has been inspired by Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia. The first two parts were composed to find a way of situating its excellence more precisely. As with any great book, one wishes one had found it or been given it, years ago : and, in one’s geriatric enthusiasm, one longs to give it to a young person of the right age.  

Among young pupils, the aspirant philosopher is unique in his/her hunger to think : he/she feels awe & pride that after all the other subjects in a school or university have paraded their ideas and concepts, philosophy is the only discipline qualified to assess them for rationality, meaning, truth, purpose and practical viability. Among the very first facts about philosophy he/she learns is how threatening many people find it. But whereas religions boast of requiring the blood of countless new martyrs, philosophy is not so hysterical.

In fact, one story seems to have been enough for 25 centuries!  The trial and execution of Socrates, centuries before Christ : his abiding playfulness, rigour and dignity in the last days sets the exemplar. I instantly admit his personal faults: but at some point in his/her studies, the young philosopher almost faints at the truth of Whitehead’s remark: “The whole of philosophy is but footnotes to Plato and Aristotle” . To over-valorise Wittgenstein, who boasted of not reading much of them, is to forget that he was, for all his undeniable genius, a sexually demented, moral buffoon.  

I can still recall my awe, twenty-five years ago, when I read in the Beginner’s Guide to Philosophy,  the few lines about the work & murder of Hypatia. This was succeeded by puzzlement and anger that she had never been mentioned during all my years in the philosophy department. Seeing that Dora Russell had written a  tract using her name, I got and read that. Then by chance a new book about her, one of the very few, came out around that time. I read that too : not that I can recall much of it. To my shame, it successfully persuaded me to ignore Kingsley’s book. Having now read the latter, I wonder if then, and many times before, he has been fatally misrepresented because fatally misunderstood. I don’t know its printing history and reception: but I wouldn’t be surprised that it sold badly, garnered poor and condescending reviews and then was forgotten. Nor do I know why the glorious Everyman Publishers chose it as one its first library.  

It ought to be available in a new well-annotated edition. That ought to be a set text at 17/18/19. And, just as the young aspirant at his/her university interview might be asked to descant on Socrates as an exemplar, in order to assess his/her own philosophical disposition, so might the boy/girl be asked to descant on why Hypatia’s conception of the philosophical life was doomed. Kingsley’s sub-title, with its unequivocal tone of warning, is crucial : New Foes With an Old Face.

What makes this thinking-story, this intellectual novel, so interesting in itself and so valuable now?  I am not going to offer a literary essay : but rather make some remarks consonant with the first part of this piece. I hope it will be conceded (before or after reading the book) that this intellectual novel is sufficiently a novel. It has as much of a story, perhaps more, than  Orwell’s 1984. Most critics would say that St George’s prose is of a higher quality in his essays than his novels. It is clearly weaker than Austen, Eliot, Scott-Fitzgerald, Woolf and Plato. Kingsley’s novel-prose is as good as Orwell’s.

WHAT KINGSLEY PRESUMES THE READER KNOWS?

Within a few chapters, he has taken the Reader round a city that he tells us is inhabited by Greeks, Romans, Jews, Africans – Egyptian, Libyan -  Byzantines, and Goths. The beliefs which provide his characters with self-definition include Graeco-Roman theology, Norse theology, Judaic theology, Christian theology, and the meta-Homeric-theology of the neo-Platonic school of Hypatia . There are casual mentions, in the first twenty pages, of Tertullian, Origen, Clement, Cyprian, Cyril, Ptolemy Philadephus, Euclid, and the Nameless & the Absolute One. The neo-Hellenists are shown as sharing a similar bodily asceticism to the Christian monks, which is contrasted with Gothic sensuality. Interestingly the Jews present a medium.

Even the chapter titles presume the Reader will get the tone indicated: The New Diogenes, Nemesis, The Bower of Acrasia, The Rocks of the Sirens,  Nephelococcuguia.  

Certain fundamental questions are left ringing with a rhetorical charge:  

How do you know that the new mathematics students have not come to you as Critias & Alciabades did to Socrates, to learn a merely political and mundane virtue?  

That Pallas herself should be conquered every day by Venus Pandemos!  

The philosopher had no gospel, then, for the harlot.

Psychoanalytic accounts of the experience of language acquisition and language use always foreground the fact that words bind affects, but imperfectly : for there is always a residue of unconscious affect, a person doesn't know how much an idea continues to trouble him/her emotionally. With time, new experiences and study, the unknowable affect might diminish, but never completely :  for all words are linked to other words, and there will be osmosis between the affects. Teen-time and young adulthood is a crucible for such discoveries of how words & feelings connect, soothe & terrify. It is not enough to know the dates of Diogenes or that Sirens appear in Homer. The modern (young) reader must connect this knowledge to the recollection of her lived experience of cynicism at parents and teachers, his longing for & terror of supermodels - how do clever girls get conquered by femme fatales? - and then back to Kingsley's version. Think how much reflection the phrase  'merely political and mundane'  assumes.

Early on, Kingsley presents a scene about crowd hysteria : cries in the night: Alexander’s church is on fire. Help! Help! Good Christians!  There was no fire, but Archbishop Cyril uses the non-event to raise a quieter, supposedly judicial, mob of Christians to plunder Jewish houses without doing bodily harm! His main project was to close Hypatia’s school of philosophy and make paganism untenable & powerless.

These brief notes show how much effort Kingsley presumed (dreamed) the ignorant Reader might make. Other books and films about her require less effort. I should confess that my first reading had great gaps when it came to the Church Fathers. 

CODA THE TEACHING MIRROR OF HISTORY

In Spring 1970, when I appeared in our school play The Crucible, our director told us there were three other schools in the shire putting it on that same month. But she didn’t tell us what this meant to her. Though we were told early on, that Miller had chosen to write about the Salem witch-hunts as a  way of referring to the moral barbarity of the McCarthy hearings of barely two decades past, we were not asked to reflect on our present freedoms being as fragile as his.   

As one gets older, one gets better at the references to big-ideas and other books: and perhaps one even thinks. This might bring its different dangers. I read the 1980 text The Name of the Rose  about medieval inquisitions as if it was about the Comintern pursuing its heretics in the 1930s. Eco’s reader will know that at its heart is terror at the imagined consequences of the dissemination of Aristotle’s (lost) book On Comedy : as if joke-theory might topple the Holy Roman church.  

I don’t know why at that point in his life in Imperial England, 1853, Kingsley felt he had to present to his contemporaries this cautionary tale set fourteen centuries earlier. I ought to find out. But I do know that any Christian scholar in 19C Europe had to struggle with  that part of his/her Self which conceded that very, very few texts coming after the Ancients were as beautiful and as intellectually thrilling. Even Dante struggled with his theological condescension six centuries before Kingsley.  

Proselytizing religions are doctrinally committed to burning all other paths & temples to God except their own. The good Muslim, logically wants Britain and the world under sharia law. Evangelical Christians temporarily support Israel as part of a apocalyptic precondition before world conversion. Some Jews wish to rebuild the Third Temple to receive the Messiah, regardless of what the Buddhists and Hindus and neo-Aztecs might be doing.

Despite coming from the East, I, like any teenager anywhere, could not help but be filled with awe at the abstract idea Raphael put into paint in his The School of Athens . It prompts an absolute affirmation  This must be rebuilt!  Surely, if you don't feel that, philosophy isn't really your passion but only your exam-course. It is hard to speak of levels of awe, so I will say that it was also awe that I felt in Wittgenstein’s house in Vienna in 2007, when I heard that they were thinking of reconstituting the Vienna Circle , that modern conceptual suburb of the Athens.

Burning University Schools and Publishers & Newspapers Offices is always an admission of ignorance and the terror of inferiority. To say with Kingsley that neo-paganism or neo-Platonism is flawed by an intellectually-aristocratic indifference to the poor and stupid and weak, is still no justification for attempting its erasure. His philosophical characters tried to circle the square of four paradigms: Pagans, Jews, Christians, Goths.

Today’s militating quartet would be Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Atheists. There’s a task for a young philosopher. Studying Hypatia is a good start.