New York Diary

Experiment, Part 2

Hey folks. I've been kind of out of commission, but now I'm back, ready to pick up and see if anybody other than Noir actually read the Chesterton story. (Tangentially, in the meantime I read Corelli's Mandolin, and it was great. Highly recommended, especially as a study in human and humane moral ambiguities. Nobody is precisely evil, though many do terrible things; no one is precisely good, though we are nonetheless compelled to sympathize with a few main characters. Obviously, this contrasts distinctly with the Chesterton piece.)

On to Chesterton. I really like Thursday, both the straight adventure/detective story and because of the surreal twists at the end. Surely the chase scene must win some sort of award, too: foot to steed to car to fire engine, elephant, and hot air balloon... what more could one desire?

Oh, you desire questions, too, and attendant thoughts? It's your lucky day.

The Questions

1. Is this a book about the superiority of order over anarchy? Or is it a book about the unity of order and anarchy?

My first impression was the former; Zq's was the latter. Both seem plausible to me. To be sure, all of the heroes idealize order and are fighting against chaos in the world in this book; indeed it is just this struggle that is going on when the book opens and Gregory and Syme are facing off about the nature of poetry. If Syme is the hero and Gregory the villain, then perhaps we should say with Syme that "the rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.... Every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos." This is Syme's battle, and Syme is Chesterton's hero.

But there is a compelling counterargument which points out that it is evil and chaos in the world that make order a possible choice for Syme. If Syme is a hero because he makes right choices, then surely there is some great value in the chaos that he tries to eschew (and, despite that fact, in which he constantly finds himself embroiled). Most importantly, the seeming chaos in Syme's world is not random; it is in fact a carefully controlled anarchy that leads Syme inexorably to his preordained place at the end of the book. If it is chaotic, it is also both predicted and ordered. Perhaps, then, we should say that, on a human scale at least, Chesterton is arguing for a kind of unity of the passions.

But to me, Thursday just doesn't seem to be drawing the necessary sort of equivalence between anarchy and order. It seems instead to be an apologetics for evil in the world, and it asks us to equate evil with anarchism. Perhaps Chesterton is indeed saying that most evil is illusory, or that it is necessary that even good people surrounded by uniformly good people should feel themselves alone and embattled--but this is because they have right opinions about real evil (even if that real evil is, well, unrealized), not because there is no real evil. It does seem to me that we are meant to take a passion for true chaos to be the great evil in the world, and quite distinct from a love of order and right and goodness.

2. What does it mean that the book is subtitled "A Nightmare?"

Of course this suggests the dreamlike, surreal, and unbelievable ending to what began as a well-grounded and recognizable thriller. But it also seems to suggest that Syme's world is undesirable. This seems nonobvious to me. Can we tell from this book what would be more desirable? Perhaps a world in which there is no struggle between good and bad? Or a world in which nobody has a predisposition towards anarchy?

Or perhaps this book is nightmarish simply because nothing is as it seems. Everybody goes around in disguise; good people fight against other good people; the biggest bad guy is also the greatest moral force in the world. I don't know.

3. Do you think the book has any real implications for earthly governance?

Thursday is, of course, allegorical, but on its face it is also about anarchy and government in our world. Must Chesterton think--well, anything coherent at all--about governance here on this earth, in order to maintain a consistency with his allegory or his theology?

The obvious claim, I think, is that privileging predictability over revolt and order over anarchy would argue always against revolution. There some big differences, however, between trying to overthrow God and trying to overthrow one's government (not the least of which are 1. God is definitionally good, and 2. It is possible to successfully overthrow one's government). So much of the dialogue is political argument, though, that I wonder if there are any real political opinions being expressed.

4. What the hell is going on with the notes during the chase scene?

I mean this most sincerely. I just don't get it. Here I'm talking about the notes that Sunday leaves for Our Heroes the Days of the Week as they chase him around: "The word, I fancy, should be 'pink'" and "Your beauty has not left me indifferent.--From LITTLE SNOWDROP" and "What about Martin Tupper now." Are these just random? It seems so unlikely. Beautifully, Chesterton's book is tightly ordered from the start (much as it claims all things ought to be, if you buy what I'm saying under question # 1). This is allegory, and from the beginning each secret agent somehow embodies the day of Creation that he represents. Having finished the book, if one goes back to the beginning and restarts it one finds right away that Chesterton is giving away the game to anybody who is paying attention. (The obvious fact that the police commissioner is the same fellow as Sunday only reconfirms this consistency from the start.) The story develops in unexpected ways, but it is anything but random. (In fact, this might itself be another remove of allegory: just as Syme's story is carefully crafted by Sunday, but seems chaotic, desperate, and uncertain to him, The Man Who Was Thursday has been similarly organized and pored over, despite the fact that it seems to us to be moving swiftly and wildly towards the absurd.) As a result, I feel like there should be some satisfying interpretation of these notes that Sunday sends to the members of the Council. But what could it be?

5. Doesn't Thursday imply that human suffering imparts moral force?

Chesterton seems to be answering the "Why is there suffering in the world?" question not by the (perpetually unsatisfying) appeal to free will, but rather by saying that the suffering of his heroes provides an answer to Gregory's otherwise-valid sense of moral superiority. This seems at first to be a much better answer than saying, "Well, we must have suffering in order to have free choice." By making his agents know loneliness, fear, faithlessness, and battle, Sunday negates Gregory's ability to take the moral high ground when he stands alone against a much greater power. No longer can Gregory portray his anarchism as a noble struggle against those who are perfect and who, consequently, have never have known any sort of suffering at all; we all know that it is precisely playing into the hands of Chesterton's God when Gregory expounds, "The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme.... You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never come down from them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have had no troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule all mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a real agony such as I...." Of course the "seven angels" have come down from their thrones, have suffered real agony, and are therefore entirely unconvinced (as are we, the readers).

But what kind of world is it where suffering imparts moral force? We can see that Gregory's monologue is deliciously misguided, but taking a step back from the literary, I just don't see why it is necessary to have good people suffer real agonies just to deflate his victories. Is it such a great good, after all, that the good folks should, by virtue of their own harships, be able to ignore the sufferings of the bad people? If Gregory's stance appeared noble, is it less so because of what another, unrelated person has experienced? And if it is actually ignoble, is that affected by what Bull or Syme or the Professor has been through? Surely not. Yet Chesterton does seem to require this reading. Gregory's anarchism is base because one can suffer nobly for a good cause just as well as for a bad one.

How odd. And how undesirable in a world.

Perhaps that's why the book is a nightmare?

posted by Skay @ 7:27 PM