Sunshine Recorder

Largely unavailable for centuries, a new collection of bawdy, naughty, and vivid medieval French tales reminds us that our ancestors were a dirty bunch. Yunte Huang on what they reveal about human nature. 

“By trade I am a fucker, miss
so may your heart be filled with bliss”

Scandalous at the time of their creation in the Middle Ages, the old French comic tales in verse, commonly known as the fabliaux, can still shock you today with their outrageous obscenity, salacious humor, and carnivalesque laughter. Equally scandalous, if not more so, is the fact that these lyrical tales, as provocative as The Plum in the Golden Vase, the Kama Sutra, or Ovid’s The Art of Love, have remained virtually inaccessible for so long due to censorship by cultural and religious orthodoxy. Over the centuries, general readers have only been able to savor a whiff of the fabliaux’s scatological aesthetics and erotic trickery filtered through bowdlerized versions or watered down by canonical authors. Chaucer, Boccaccio, Rabelais, and Molière, to name just a few, were all indebted to those itinerant minstrels wandering the countries and marketplaces of medieval France, those quixotic jongleurs who composed, performed, and passed down these quaint literary jewels. Now thanks to Nathaniel Dubin, a professor of modern classical languages at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University in Minnesota, we finally can read for ourselves these almost-millennium-old tales that once titillated some of the best literary minds in the West.

Literary history aside (or be damned), these anti-establishment, anti-ecclesiastical fabliaux are pure, unadulterated fun. Naughtily sporting 69 stories in total, Dubin’s volume is a golden bough of erotic imagination and folk humor, peopled by randy wives, cuckolded husbands, fornicating priests, and priapic knights. Breaking down rigid social hierarchy so characteristic of the Middle Ages, these riotous tales poke fun at everyone. In “The Three Estates,” two knights ride along and find a shady spot in the woods, “decked with flowers and herbs.” They imagine this to be a nice place for a picnic, a party of wine, pasties and other niceties “as gay as/in a great hall on the high dais.” Along come two clerics, who have a different idea for the use of the sylvan enclave: bring their lady friends here and have a quality time. At last, two peasants barge into the scene, with spades and threshers on their backs. Seeing the enticing spot,

they started speaking just like peasants:
“Hey, Fouchier, from the looks of it
this is the perfect place to shit.
Let’s take a dump right now, old pal.”
“Upon my soul, we may as well.”
Then each of them squats down and strains.

In contrast with the well-mannered noblemen on high horses and clerics with not-so-clerical minds, the peasants, in the parlance of everyone’s native town, just don’t give a shit.

Very often a fabliau is a comedy of situation: a rendezvous between a married woman and a priest is interrupted by the unexpected return of the cuckolded husband. All parties must think on their feet or risk exposure and shame. It’s a survival of the wittiest. In “The Crucified Priest,” the wife of a master carver and her cleric paramour are caught on a tight spot. She tells him to hide inside her husband’s studio and pose as a naked statue. As in all of the fabliaux, the table can be turned as easily as changing positions in bed. A trickster can be tricked, a duper duped. The husband, seeing through the ruse as clearly as he sees the “hanging balls and cock” of the priest, does not let on and comes up a clever scheme of revenge:

“Lady,” he says, “I’ve made a shock-
ing image here by not omitting
those virile members. How unfitting!
I must have had too much to drink.
Some light! I’ll fix it in a wink.”

He goes on to nip off the priest’s genitalia.

In spite of the exaggeration, hyperbolism, and excessiveness, the fabliaux embody an authentic, deep sense of realism. In the words of R. Howard Bloch, a Sterling Professor at Yale who writes a truly inspiring introduction to the volume, “the fabliaux make the body speak.” To be more precise, they make the lower body speak: cocks, cunts, butt holes, farts, shit, and urine. “The Blacksmith of Greil” sings a super-phallic panegyric, rendered superbly into colloquial English:

he was endowed with a prick,
the most colossal slab of meat
that’s served to women as a treat,
God’s honest truth—one shaped so fair
that Nature must have lavished care
to make it, and surpassed her craft,
around the bottom of the shaft
two palms in length, wide as a fist.
A hole, though shaped like an ellipse,
in which this well-hung stud had placed it
would look as if a compass traced it.

Or, in “Trial by Cunt,” three sisters fight for the same man by trying to outwit each other in reply to a Jeopardy!-style question: “Who was born first, your cunt or you?” The first sister replies that her cunt is older because it has a beard and she does not. The second thinks otherwise, because she has grown teeth, whereas her cunt has not. The third sister believes her answer hits the jackpot: “my cunt’s younger than I,/and I’ll tell you the reason why./While I have been weaned from the breast,/the mouth of my cunt gapes from thirst/and, at its young age, needs to suck.” Or, in “The Two Peasants,” the hostess’s gassy butt hole is mistaken for the hungry mouth of the peasant’s companion. Chaucer, it is said, borrowed the rim-job motif for “The Miller’s Tale” in his magnum opus.

Few perpetrators seek out their victims, let alone write books about them. Melita Maschmann, a former Nazi, published just such a book…

In recent years, many victims of violence have written memoirs in which they seek out and confront the perpetrators who harmed them. The opposite is rare. Few perpetrators seek out their victims, let alone write books about them. But fifty years ago this month, Melita Maschmann, a former Nazi, published just such a book.

“Fazit,” which was translated as “Account Rendered” in 1964, is the memoir of a woman who, as a fifteen-year-old and against her family’s wishes, joined the Hitler Youth. Before and during the Second World War, Maschmann worked in the high echelons of press and propaganda of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the girls’ section of the Nazi youth organization, and, later, she supervised the eviction of Polish farmers and the resettlement of ethnic Germans on their farms. Arrested in 1945 at the age of thirty-three, she completed a mandatory de-Nazification course and became a freelance journalist.

Soon after her release from internment in 1948, Maschmann wrote a letter to a Jewish former classmate with whom she had the kind of passionate friendship common among adolescent girls. She didn’t know if her friend had made it out of Berlin before the war, or if her mother (whose address she had obtained) would pass the letter on. “I don’t know if it reached you,” the author writes. “Since then I have often continued my conversation with you, awake and in dreams, but I have never tried to write any of it down. Now, today, I feel impelled to do so. I was prompted to this by a trivial incident. A woman spoke to me in the street and the way she held her head suddenly reminded me quite strikingly of you. But what is the real reason which made me sit down and write to you as soon as I came in? Perhaps in the intervening years I have, without being aware of it, prepared an account within me which must be presented.”

“Account Rendered” is written in the form of a second book-length letter. “With you as a witness,” the author writes, in a painful, exhaustive, seemingly scrupulous portrait of her younger self, “I should like to try once more to go over the result of my reflections on the past. You will compel me to be much more precise than I could be if left to myself.”

Maschmann is acutely aware that her friend might view her project as self-justifying, but writes, “Even the element of fate in a person’s life does not dispose of individual guilt, I know that. What I hope, dare to hope, is that you might be able to understand—not excuse—the wrong and even evil steps which I took and which I must report, and that such an understanding might form the basis for a lasting dialogue.”

Maschmann elaborated on her purpose to Hannah Arendt in 1963, in a letter that expressed her desire to help former Nazi colleagues reflect on their actions, and to help others “better understand” why people like her had been drawn to Hitler. (Their brief correspondence can be read online.)

A deft writer and practiced propagandist who understood the power of a vivid quote, detail, or anecdote, Maschmann portrayed herself as a girl who came of age in a culture imbued with the shame of Germany’s defeat in the First World War. “Before I understood the meaning of the word ‘Germany,’ I loved it as something mysteriously overshadowed with grief…,” she writes. Her wealthy parents, avid newspaper readers and members of the conservative German National Party, complained about “the chaotic squabbling of Parliament” and the millions of people out of work, but had a sign affixed to their door that read “No Hawkers or Beggars.” Melita sympathized with them, and with the maid, chauffeur, and house seamstress. The latter wore an embossed metal swastika under the lapel of her coat, spoke movingly of Hitler, and was instrumental in Melita’s resolve “to follow a different road from the conservative one prescribed for me by family tradition.” The book documents twelve years of following that road.

“Account Rendered” appeared at a time when Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” was making its way into public conversation, and while the West German parliament was debating the statute of limitations on crimes committed by Nazis. Some critics found the text candid and forthright; others considered it defensive, prevaricating, and melodramatic. Some of Maschmann’s former colleagues, Nazis who were issued kerosene with which to burn their documents at the end of the war, viewed it as a betrayal, and never forgave her for writing it.

In Germany, the book went through eight editions (the last in 1987) and was added to high-school reading lists in some school districts. It became part of Germany’s private, public, and scholarly debates over its own history. Historians of the Nazi period—Daniel Goldhagen and Claudia Koonz, among others—used “Account Rendered” as a primary source. Women’s studies researchers tried to discover in it the mentality of a female perpetrator. Students of memoir used the text to showcase the vagaries of personal narrative; sociologists looked for a relation between the literary work and the cultural setting from which it arose. Some readers questioned Maschmann’s reliability as a narrator, her motivation, and whether or not she was representative of ordinary Germans. They theorized about the Jewish friend to whom the memoir is addressed: Was she a construct, a composite, or a reality?

No one could answer those questions, because soon after the book’s publication, its author effectively disappeared from public view. She had found a guru, Sri Anandamayi Ma, a woman venerated as a “living saint,” in India. Maschmann took a Hindu name, lived in Indian ashrams, and returned to Germany only on brief family visits every two or three years.

I had never heard of Melita Maschmann until a friend, the former editor Arthur Samuelson, described “Account Rendered” as one of the most interesting memoirs he had ever read. My husband and I republish classic non-fiction as e-books at Plunkett Lake Press, and we were intrigued. “I found in the memoir someone who had been overtaken by history,” Samuelson told me. “Someone who was struggling to make sense of what no longer made sense, and to understand why it had once done so. And someone whose best self had been attracted to Nazism.”

We read the book and began to research its history.

First, we located Maschmann’s remaining family in Germany and France. According to her sister-in-law, now in her nineties, Maschmann had trouble finding friends and establishing a postwar life. She travelled, took some university courses, and freelanced for newspapers. In 1962, she toured Afghanistan and India and, after publishing her memoir, decided to leave Germany.

Among the scholars who continue to be intrigued by Maschmann is Dagmar Reese, the author of “Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany.” She recalled that she had come across a footnote in an essay by the late Irmgard Klönne suggesting that Maschmann’s Jewish friend was not a literary construct but an actual person: Marianne Schweitzer, the daughter of the physician Ernst Schweitzer and Franziska Körte Schweitzer of Berlin. We located her at her home in La Jolla, California, and she almost hung up when we called, thinking we were telemarketers.

The executioners of the Ottoman Empire were never noted for their mercy; just ask the teenage Sultan Osman II, who in May 1622 suffered an excruciating death by “compression of the testicles”–as contemporary chronicles put it–at the hands of an assassin known as Pehlivan the Oil Wrestler. There was reason for this ruthlessness, however; for much of its history (the most successful bit, in fact), the Ottoman dynasty flourished—ruling over modern Turkey, the Balkans and most of North Africa and the Middle East—thanks in part to the staggering violence it meted out to the highest and mightiest members of society.

Seen from this perspective, it might be argued that the Ottomans’ decline set in early in the 17th century, precisely at the point when they abandoned the policy of ritually murdering a significant proportion of the royal family whenever a sultan died, and substituted the Western notion of simply giving the job to the first-born son instead. Before then, Ottoman succession had been governed by the “law of fratricide” drawn up by Mehmed II in the middle of the 15th century. Under the terms of this remarkable piece of legislation, whichever member of the ruling dynasty succeeded in seizing the throne on the death of the old sultan was not merely permitted, but enjoined, to murder all his brothers (together with any inconvenient uncles and cousins) in order to reduce the risk of subsequent rebellion and civil war. Although it was not invariably applied, Mehmed’s law resulted in the deaths of at least 80 members of the House of Osman over a period of 150 years. These victims included all 19 siblings of Sultan Mehmed III—some of whom were still infants at the breast, but all of whom were strangled with silk handkerchiefs immediately after their brother’s accession in 1595.

For all its deficiencies, the law of fratricide ensured that the most ruthless of the available princes generally ascended to the throne. That was more than could be said of its replacement, the policy of locking up unwanted siblings in the kafes(“cage”), a suite of rooms deep within the Topkapi palace in Istanbul. From around 1600, generations of Ottoman royals were kept imprisoned there until they were needed, sometimes several decades later, consoled in the meantime by barren concubines and permitted only a strictly limited range of recreations, the chief of which was macramé. This, the later history of the empire amply demonstrated, was not ideal preparation for the pressures of ruling one of the greatest states the world has ever known.

Should we invest today in preparing for extreme weather or face the consequences of inaction? The 17th century offers crucial lessons.

… So far, most attempts to predict the consequences of climate change look to the future by building on recent trends, but another methodology exists. We can look back to a past climate-induced catastrophe, using sources created by both humans (narrative and pictorial as well as archaeological) and nature (above all, annual ice-core and tree-ring data). In a 2012 article in The American Historical Review, Julia Adeney Thomas, an associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, reminded her colleagues that “climate change—or climate collapse—and all of its related global transformations” is “a world-altering force,” one “more devastating, and more definitive” than any other. She called for an “environmental turn” in the field, one that foregrounds climate as a protagonist in human affairs.

The evidence for major climate change in the 17th century is both copious and unambiguous. Consider the year 1675. In July, the Paris socialite Madame de Sévigné complained to her daughter, who lived close to the Mediterranean: “It is horribly cold: We have the fires lit, just like you, which is very remarkable.” She added: “We think the behavior of the sun and of the seasons has changed.”

Madame de Sévigné was correct on both scores: 1675 is one of the few years with an exceptionally cool summer on record, and the narrow tree rings from that time reveal unusually poor growth; both grape and grains ripened later than at any other time in the previous five centuries. As for the sun, much of the 17th century saw a remarkable aberration: an almost total absence of sunspots, those dark regions of intense magnetic activity on the solar surface surrounded by flares that make the sun shine with greater intensity. The development of telescopes after 1609 enabled observers to track the number of sunspots, but although astronomers around the world stared at the sun on more than 8,000 days between 1643 and 1715 (the duration of the reign of Louis XIV, popularly known as the Sun King), the grand total of sunspots they observed scarcely reached 100, fewer than appeared in even a single year of the 20th century.

Nevertheless, it took human stupidity to turn crisis into catastrophe. The meager French harvest of 1675 occurred just as the king raised new taxes to pay for his wars, with predictable results. Many people died of hunger, many more migrated in search of food, and in the west of France, many took part in the “red bonnets” revolts. Most striking were the signs of hardship written on the bodies of survivors. Government officials in France compiled data on each man who enlisted in the royal army, including his height; those born in 1675 stood on average just five feet tall, the shortest cohort of Frenchmen ever recorded.

The earth also experienced an unusually cold winter in 1620-1, when the Bosporus froze so hard that people could walk across the ice between Europe and Asia—a climatic anomaly. The summer of 1627 was the wettest recorded in Europe for 500 years, and 1628 was another “year without a summer,” with temperatures so low that in many areas food crops never ripened. From 1629 to 1632, northern India suffered a catastrophic drought, while much of Europe suffered excessive rains. In the Alps, unusually narrow tree rings reflect poor growing seasons throughout the 1640s, and glaciers advanced more than a mile. In the Northern Hemisphere, 1641 saw the third-coldest summer recorded over the past six centuries; 1641-2 was the coldest winter ever recorded in Scandinavia; and 1649-50 was the coldest winter on record in both northern and eastern China.

Climate change on this scale seems to have triggered an unusual concentration of extreme weather events. In France, the river Seine has experienced 62 recorded floods, 18 of which occurred in the 17th century. Grape harvests in western France between 1640 and 1643 began a full month later than usual, producing wine too bitter to drink, while grain prices surged as a result of poor cereal harvests. Unseasonable weather in England ruined the corn and hay each year from 1646 to 1651, with five more bad harvests from 1657 to 1661: 11 harvest failures within the space of 16 years. Such abnormal climatic conditions lasted from the 1620s until the 1690s, the longest as well as the most severe episode of global cooling recorded in the past 12,000 years.

Why did this happen? A spate of major volcanic eruptions, including 12 around the Pacific between 1638 and 1644 (apparently an all-time record), produced dust veils that cooled the earth’s atmosphere, reducing mean summer temperatures by about 2 degrees Celsius. To a skeptic, such a change seems insignificant. But since the difference between the hottest and the coldest temperatures recorded since the last ice age is no more than 6 degrees Celsius, a change of one-third of the historical maximum is dramatic. In the 17th century, those climatic changes coincided with both political instability and mass starvation.

That century witnessed more cases of state breakdown around the globe than did any previous or subsequent age. In the coldest decade, the 1640s, Ming China, the most populous state in the world, collapsed; the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the largest state in Europe, disintegrated; much of the Spanish monarchy seceded; and the entire Stuart monarchy rebelled—Scotland, Ireland, England, and its North American colonies. In addition, in 1648 alone, rebellions paralyzed both Russia (the largest state in the world) and France (the most populous state in Europe); while in Istanbul (Europe’s largest city), irate subjects strangled Sultan Ibrahim, and in London King Charles I went on trial for war crimes (the first head of state to do so).

Wars also became more frequent. Europe experienced only three years of complete peace during the entire 17th century; the Ottoman Empire enjoyed only 10 such years; and both the Chinese and Mughal empires fought campaigns almost continuously. Civil wars proliferated. For six decades, supporters of the Ming and Qing dynasties fought for control of China. The rebellions of large parts of the Stuart and the Spanish monarchies unleashed internal conflicts that lasted over two decades in the former and almost three in the latter. The Germanic states, with powerful foreign support, fought one another for 30 years. France endured a civil war that lasted five years; the Mughals suffered two wars of succession. Throughout the Northern Hemisphere, war became the norm for resolving both domestic and international problems.

When, in 1953, Chou En Lai, the Chinese Prime Minister, was in Geneva for the peace negotiations to end the Korean war, a French journalist asked him what does he think about the French Revolution; Chou replied: “It is still too early to tell.” In a way, he was right: with the disintegration of the “people’s democracies” in the late 1990s, the struggle for the historical place of the French Revolution flared up again. The liberal revisionists tried to impose the notion that the demise of Communism in 1989 occurred at exactly the right moment: it marked the end of the era which began in 1789, the final failure of the statist-revolutionary model which first entered the scene with the Jacobins.

Nowhere is the dictum “every history is a history of the present” more true than in the case of the French Revolution: its historiographic reception always closely mirrored the twists and turns of political struggles. The identifying mark of all kinds of conservatives is its flat rejection: the French Revolution was a catastrophe from its very beginning, the product of the godless modern mind, it is to be interpreted as God’s punishment for the humanity’s wicked ways, so its traces should be undone as thoroughly as possible. The typical liberal attitude is a differentiated one: its formula is “1789 without 1793.” In short, what the sensitive liberals want is a decaffeinated revolution, a revolution which doesn’t smell of a revolution. Francois Furet and others thus try to deprive the French Revolution of its status as the founding event of modern democracy, relegating it to a historical anomaly: there was a historical necessity to assert the modern principles of personal freedom, etc., but, as the English example demonstrates, the same could have been much more efficiently achieved in a more peaceful way… Radicals are, on the contrary, possessed by what Alain Badiou called the “passion of the Real”: if you say A - equality, human rights and freedoms - you should not shirk from its consequences and gather the courage to say B - the terror needed to really defend and assert the A.

However, it is all too easy to say that today’s Left should simply continue along this path. Something, some kind of historical cut, effectively took place in 1990: everyone, today’s “radical Left” included, is somehow ashamed of the Jacobin legacy of revolutionary terror with its state-centralized character, so that the commonly accepted motto is that the Left, if it is to regain political efficiency, should thoroughly reinvent itself, finally abandoning the so-called “Jacobin paradigm.” In our post-modern era of “emerging properties,” chaotic interaction of multiple subjectivities, of free interaction instead of centralized hierarchy, of a multitude of opinions instead of one Truth, the Jacobin dictatorship is fundamentally “not for our taste” (free the term “taste” should be given all its historical weight, as the name for a basic ideological disposition). Can one imagine something more foreign to our universe of the freedom of opinions, of market competition, of nomadic pluralist interaction, etc., than Robespierre’s politics of Truth (with a capital T, of course), whose proclaimed goal is “to return the destiny of liberty into the hands of the truth”? Such a Truth can only be enforced in a terrorist way:

If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, amid revolution it is at the same time virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue. It is less a special principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most pressing needs.

This Robespierre’s line of argumentation reaches its climax in the paradoxical identification of the opposites: revolutionary terror “sublates” the opposition between punishment and clemency - the just and severe punishment of the enemies IS the highest form of clemency, so that, in it, rigor and charity coincide:

To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to pardon them is barbarity. The rigor of tyrants has only rigor for a principle; the rigor of the republican government comes from charity.

What, then, should those who remain faithful to the legacy of the radical Left do with all these? Two things, at least. First, the terrorist past has to be accepted as OURS, even - or precisely because - it is critically rejected. The only alternative to the half-hearted defensive position of feeling guilty in front of our liberal or Rightist critics is: we have to do the critical job better than our opponents. This, however, is not the entire story: one should also not allow our opponents to determine the field and topic of the struggle. What this means is that the ruthless self-critique should go hand in hand with a fearless admission of what, to paraphrase Marx’s judgment on Hegel’s dialectics, one is tempted to call the “rational kernel” of the Jacobin Terror: “Materialist dialectics assumes, without particular joy, that, till now, no political subject was able to arrive at the eternity of the truth it was deploying without moments of terror. Since, as Saint-Just asked: “What do those who want neither Virtue nor Terror want?” His answer is well-known: they want corruption - another name for the subject’s defeat.

Or, as Saint-Just put it succinctly: “That which produces the general good is always terrible.” These words should not be interpreted as a warning against the temptation to impose violently the general good onto a society, but, on the contrary, as a bitter truth to be fully endorsed. - The further crucial point to bear in mind is that, for Robespierre, revolutionary terror is the very opposite of war: Robespierre was a pacifist, not out of hypocrisy or humanitarian sensitivity, but because he was well aware that war among nations as a rule serves as the means to obfuscate revolutionary struggle within each nation. Robespierre’s speech “On war” is of special importance today: it shows him as a true pacifist who ruthlessly denounces the patriotic call to war, even if the war is formulated as the defense of the Revolution, as the attempt of those who want “revolution without revolution” to divert the radicalization of the revolutionary process. His stance is thus the exact opposite of those who need war to militarize social life and take dictatorial control over it. Which is why Robespierre also denounced the temptation to export revolution to other countries, forcefully “liberating” them: “The French are not afflicted with a mania for rendering any nation happy and free against its will. All the kings could have vegetated or died unpunished on their blood-spattered thrones, if they had been able to respect the French people’s independence.”

(P. 240) … Throughout the nineteenth-century foreign observers multiplied as European gunboats forced China to open her ports. Their reports on the country revealed the prejudices of their Western homelands. These post-Enlightenment responses, however, were more diverse than the Jesuits’ in the seventeenth century. Since English homophobia was then reaching its zenith, we are not surprised to find John Barrow, secretary to the famous but ill-fated Macartney embassy of 1793, expressing himself in this vein in his Travels in China a decade later: “In China [the seclusion of women has the] effect of promoting that sort of connexion which, being one of the greatest violations of the laws of nature, ought to be considered among the first of moral crimes—a connexion that sinks the man many degrees below the brute. The commission of this detestable and unnatural act is attended with so little sense of shame, or feelings of delicacy, that many of the first officers of state seemed to make no hesitation in publicly avowing it.”

Napoleonic France, on the other hand, had ended executions and abol- ished criminal penalties for homosexual acts. The informed and dispassionate commentary of Jean-Jacques Matignon, a physician who served the French embassy in Peking in the 1880s, reflects this more enlightened Gallic view:

Pederasty in China, as it was in Rome, is purely physical and not idealized, but purified by aesthetic sentiment, the love of beautiful forms … In China it is almost always a relation with a hireling, a servant or a profes- sional who practices anal coitus for money … However, there is good rea- son to suppose that certain Chinese of intellectual refinement seek in ped- erasty the satisfaction of both the senses and the spirit … The Chinese often has a poetic soul: he loves poetry, music, the elegant phrases of the philosophers, things which one can not find among the fair sex in the Flowery Kingdom. So, if his means permit, he frequents the world of high masculine gallantry where he is sure to find young homosexuals [pédérés] … with literary knowledge. Public opinion is entirely indifferent to this kind of diversion and morality is not concerned about it: since it pleases the dominant partner and the passive one consents all is well. Chinese law does not like to involve itself with intimate affairs. Pederasty is even con- sidered a matter of good form, an expensive taste and therefore an elegant pleasure.85 

The only concern Matignon reported hearing in China was that these acts were “bad for the eyes.” 

For those who grew up with them, those late 1980s/early-1990s golden-age console and PC games can represent a great many things. They can still evoke long-lost affective states, emotive chords that have never been struck by any other medium. I’m an avid reader and a part-time cinephile, but books and movies have never done to me what Castlevania and many of its 8- and 16-bit peers did. There is a special sense of dread and anticipation, a special experience of the sublime, that belongs uniquely to those games, and that will be forever captured in my earliest memories like a solution in a jar, waiting to be occasionally stirred up by a passing remark, a news story, or a train ride.

That sense of dread is unique to those particular video games, that unrepeatable phase of gaming history that lingered for a few years and then vanished into the slipstream of forward progress. Within a decade, that style of gameplay was entirely lost, crowded out by cinematics and back-story and sensationalism. I’m glad I got to live it at that receptive stage of my life, because it’s not coming back.

Castlevania II and the Indifferent Universe

The Castlevania series has always been a showcase of excellent game design, but the most audacious (partly because it was so early and innovative) was Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. In blocky NES-era sprite graphics, the designers at Konami created an ominous world abandoned by God, a Victorian Gothic Romance landscape interspersed with Houses of Usher. This world was not created as a cradle for its characters, but rather, as a slight against them, a meditation on decay and mortality.

Castlevania II’s barrage of Gothic themes was ceaseless and brutal. You could feel the weight of the gray sky during the day, even in the towns, which were mysterious, shuttered suburbs that felt empty and uneasy. Houses were single, empty rooms with an occasional single resident standing alone at the far end. The only place where this felt natural was the church, where you could be healed, if you could make it there. The impulse of the story – loosely explained by the anemic instruction manual – was that you were mortally cursed by Dracula, your old enemy, and in order to shed the curse, you had to collect his body parts from their tombs, reassemble the dark adversary, and destroy him utterly. It seems that even in his dismembered state, Dracula could weave a doomsday spell over you.

As if the barren landscape and vagrant monsters weren’t enough during the day, in Castlevania II, you had to deal with a primitive diurnal cycle. After a few minutes of gameplay, you would suddenly freeze, and out of nowhere an alert would spring like the voice of a cruel deity: WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE.

Suddenly, the monsters would be fast and strong – aggressive, rather than merely troublesome. The townsfolk would disappear, and they would be replaced by the restless dead, casing the locked houses and hunting for bystanders. The church was still a safe place, if you could get there, but it seemed to be less a function of God’s presence, and more the result of an aura that the monsters found distasteful.

Martin Heidegger spoke of something called ‘thrownness’ – that we are born into a universe not of our own choosing, and we have to confront it on its own terms and attempt to carve out a space within it. This is certainly the fate of Simon Belmont. Nobody would choose to be born into this blasted antiquarian Earth, where whips and headstones are your only companions. Every other Non-Player Character (NPC) keeps a low profile and huddles in a row-house, but Simon has to wander out into the wilderness, facing dark nights and itinerant werewolves, and he has to burrow into the depths of stone fortresses to dispel the curse that afflicts him.

Lest you forget, this is the hero of Castlevania! Once, he was a chosen son, saving the world! Now, according to this sparse backstory, he’s paying for it with his own suffering. His reward for his good deed? He now has to reverse it, reassembling his enemy for a retrial and a second punishment. He has not “risen” to this task, nor been appointed patron hero by some protective monarch. There is no ritual of anointing or acceptance (vis à vis Campbell’s monomyth, reproduced in all the Zelda games). Rather, he has been condemned to it – thrown, as it were, into an afflicted life.

…

Prince of Persia and the Cycle of Self-Destruction
Out Of This World, The Digital Sublime, the Leap of Faith
Quest For Glory III and Cosmologies of the Absurd
Doom and the Ghost of the Body
Daggerfall and the Plague of Back-Story

(Source: sunrec)

In a world where Kevin Garnett, Harold Ford, and Halle Berry all check “black” on the census, even the argument that racial labels refer to natural differences in physical traits doesn’t hold up.

Andrew Sullivan and Freddie Deboer have two pieces up worth checking out. I disagree with Andrew’s (though I detect some movement in his position.) Freddie’s piece is entitled ”Precisely How Not to Argue About Race and IQ.” He writes:

The problem with people who argue for inherent racial inferiority is not that they lie about the results of IQ tests, but that they are credulous about those tests and others like them when they shouldn’t be; that they misunderstand the implications of what those tests would indicate even if they were credible; and that they fail to find the moral, analytic, and political response to questions of race and intelligence.

I think this is a good point, but I want to expand it. Most of the honest writing I’ve seen on “race and intelligence” focuses on critiquing the idea of “intelligence.” So there’s lot of good literature on whether it can be measured, its relevance in modern society, whether intelligence changes across generations, whether it changes with environment, and what we mean when we say IQ. As Freddie mentions here, I had a mathematician stop past to tell me I needed to stop studying French, and immediately start studying statistics — otherwise I can’t possibly understand this debate.

It’s a fair critique. My response is that he should stop studying math and start studying history.

I am not being flip or coy. If you tell me that you plan to study “race and intelligence” then it is only fair that I ask you, “What do you mean by race?” It’s true I don’t always do math so well, but I understand the need to define the terms of your study. If you’re a math guy, perhaps your instinct is to point out the problems in the interpretation of the data. My instinct is to point out that your entire experiment proceeds from a basic flaw — no coherent, fixed definition of race actually exists.

The history bears this out. In 1856, Ralph Waldo Emerson delineated thesignificance of race:

It is race, is it not, that puts the hundred millions of India under the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe. Race avails much, if that be true, which is alleged, that all Celts are Catholics, and all Saxons are Protestants; that Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the representative principle. Race is a controlling influence in the Jew, who, for two millenniums, under every climate, has preserved the same character and employments. Race in the negro is of appalling importance. The French in Canada, cut off from all intercourse with the parent people, have held their national traits. I chanced to read Tacitus “on the Manners of the Germans,” not long since, in Missouri, and the heart of Illinois, and I found abundant points of resemblance between the Germans of the Hercynian forest, and our Hoosiers, Suckers, and Badgers of the American woods.

Indeed, Emerson in 1835, saw race as central to American greatness:

The inhabitants of the United States, especially of the Northern portion, are descended from the people of England and have inherited the trais of their national character…It is common with the Franks to break their faith and laugh at it The race of Franks is faithless.

Emerson was not alone, as historian James McPherson points out, Southerners not only thought of themselves as a race separate from blacks, but as a race apart from Northern whites:

The South’s leading writer on political economy, James B. D. De Bow, subscribed to this Norman-Cavalier thesis and helped to popularize it in De Bow’s Review. As the lower-South states seceded one after another during the winter of 1860-61, this influential journal carried several long articles justifying secession on the grounds of irreconcilable ethnic differences between Southern and Northern whites. “The Cavaliers, Jacobites, and Huguenots, who settled the South, naturally hate, contemn, and despise the Puritans who settled the North,” proclaimed one of these articles. “The former are a master-race; the latter a slave race, the descendants of Saxon serfs.” The South was now achieving its “independent destiny” by repudiating the failed experiment of civic nationalism that had foolishly tried in 1789 to “erect one nation out of two irreconcilable peoples.”

Similarly, in 1899 William Z. Ripley wrote The Races of Europe, which sought to delineate racial difference through head-type:

The shape of the human head by which we mean the general proportions of length, breadth, and height, irrespective of the ” bumps ” of the phrenologist is one of the best available tests of race known. Its value is, at the same time, but imperfectly appreciated beyond the inner circle of professional anthropology. Yet it is so simple a phenomenon, both in principle and in practical application, that it may readily be of use to the traveller and the not too superficial observer of men.

To be sure, widespread and constant peculiarities of head form are less noticeable in America, because of the extreme variability of our population, compounded as it is of all the races of Europe; they seem also to be less fundamental among the American aborigines. But in the Old World the observant traveller may with a little attention often detect the racial affinity of a people by this means.

Two years later, Edward A. Ross sought to apprehend “The Causes of Race Superiority.” He saw the differences between the Arab “race” and the Jewish “race” as a central illustration:

It is certain that races differ in their attitude toward past and future. M. Lapie has drawn a contrast between the Arab and the Jew. The Arab remembers; he is mindful of past favors and past injuries. He harbors his vengeance and cherishes his gratitude. He accepts everything on the authority of tradition, loves the ways of his ancestors, forms strong local attachments, and migrates little. The Jew, on the other hand, turns his face toward the future. He is thrifty and always ready for a good stroke of business, will, indeed, join with his worst enemy if it pays. He is calculating, enterprising, migrant and ambitious

You can see more of this here.

Our notion of what constitutes “white” and what constitutes “black” is a product of social context. It is utterly impossible to look at the delineation of a “Southern race” and not see the Civil War, the creation of an “Irish race” and not think of Cromwell’s ethnic cleansing, the creation of a “Jewish race” and not see anti-Semitism. There is no fixed sense of “whiteness” or “blackness,” not even today. It is quite common for whites to point out that Barack Obama isn’t really “black” but “half-white.” One wonders if they would say this if Barack Obama were a notorious drug-lord.

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Icelandic Sagas. First written down in the 13th century, the sagas tell the stories of the Norse settlers of Iceland, who began to arrive on the island in the late 9th century. They contain some of the richest and most extraordinary writing of the Middle Ages, and often depict events known to have happened in the early years of Icelandic history, although there is much debate as to how much of their content is factual and how much imaginative. Full of heroes, feuds and outlaws, with a smattering of ghosts and trolls, the sagas inspired later writers including Sir Walter Scott, William Morris and WH Auden.

With:Carolyne Larrington, Fellow and Tutor in Medieval English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford; Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, University Lecturer in Scandinavian History at the University of Cambridge; Emily Lethbridge, Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Árni Magnússon Manuscripts Institute in Reykjavík.

… The 1890s were a time of starvation and revolt. It was a decade of environmental catastrophe, economic depression and savage colonial wars. It was also the golden age of liberal capitalism and global imperialism, a time when the combination of industrial manufactures and Western arms had penetrated almost every corner of the world. In the 1890s, most people still lived on the knife-edge of subsistence, stalked by the threat of drought and flood, boom and bust. In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis argues that the El Niño-driven famines that characterized this era, exacerbated by political forces, helped to create the Third World. Climate oscillations put millions in jeopardy, while new technologies reduced them to the status of laboring machines and made armed resistance seem futile. In response, people pursued politics by other means. Messiahs and prophets walked the land offering fiery predictions and magical cures. Their movements confronted despair with millenarian longing. Their methods combined mysticism with violence.

In the United States, the 1890s are an almost forgotten time. The whole stretch of American history between the end of the Civil War and the 1920s is gray area in popular memory, but the 1890s are especially blank, occupying a dead zone in between “Deadwood” and “Boardwalk Empire.” The decade lacked wild frontiers to mythologize or heroes to emulate (which might be why no one remembers it). Instead, the 1890s were marked by ferocious class hatreds and savage industrial strife. In Pittsburgh, a strike at the Homestead Steel Works turned into an all-out war between union members and the Pinkerton detectives sent to break them. In Johnson County, Wyoming, big ranchers fenced off lands which had once been held in common. When small farmers refused to leave, the ranchers hired mercenaries to kill them. In 1893, a banking panic set off a four-year depression, the worst the country had known until that time. One in five industrial workers was unemployed. Groups of men in the West banded together into tramp armies, overpowering railroad guards and riding trains for free in search of food. In the East, they rallied around a man named Jacob Coxey, who led an army of them to Washington to ask for work.

Michael Lesy captures this world in his book Wisconsin Death Trip, which uses photos and newspaper snippets from Black River Falls, Wisconsin to tell the story of a rural community consumed by disaster, epidemic, and despair. As agricultural prices fell and farmers could no longer pay their mortgages, families moved out or succumbed to destitution. Lesy writes: “By the end of the nineteenth century country towns had become charnel houses and the counties that surrounded them had become places of dry bones. The land and its farms were filled with the guilty voices of women mourning for their children and the aimless mutterings of men asking about jobs.”

Some people hung themselves, some went insane, and some fled to the cities, but for the most part, the American response to these blows was political. Working people agitated for full employment and loose silver. They organized in unions and voted for the Democrats. But then, they had practice. Politics was an American habit.

In other parts of the world, places where literacy was rarer and rights newer, politics took on different forms. In Sicily, socialism was received by the landless peasants of the interior as if it was the true teaching of Jesus Christ. A peasant woman from Corleone (where Vito came from in The Godfather) told a delegation: “We want everybody to work, as we work. There should no longer be either rich or poor. All should have bread for themselves and for their children. We should all be equal…,” she said: “Jesus was a true Socialist.”

Further afield, the response of local people had less to do with parties and more with prophecy, magic and war. In Northern Sudan, Arab people rallied around their own Messiah, Muhammad Ahmad—the Mahdi—whose army drove out the Egyptians before killing General Gordon at the Siege of Khartoum. His followers believed that he could turn enemy bullets into water. A few years later, the Maji-Maji in Tanzania became convinced that their war medicine (a mixture of water, castor oil, and millet seeds) had the same power, as they did their best to slaughter the German settlers who had taken their land. In Zimbabwe, the spirit mediums of the Mwari cult promised that the rains would return as soon as the white men were driven out. In the Philippines, thousands of sugar plantation workers fled into the hills, led by charismatic miracle workers, which included an eighty-year-old woman who called herself the Virgin Mary and a transvestite who claimed to control the weather.

In China, the forces of famine, folk religion and hostility to foreigners coalesced to create the most spectacular conflagration of all. At the end of the 1890s, in the drought-stricken provinces of Shandong and Zhili, bands of landless peasants organized together in martial arts societies. They became convinced that Christians, both Chinese and foreign, were harming the geomantic currents in the earth, causing drought and floods. The churches had bottled up the sky. Fearing starvation, at odds with the government and outgunned by the Western powers, the Boxers turned to the only instrument at their disposal—their bodies. They believed in the discipline of body and of breath. With sacrifices and spells they invited spirits to possess them. Once possessed, they behaved as if they were drunk or in a dream state. They felt themselves to be invulnerable to bullets. Like the dervishes and Maji-Majis, they fought courageously and recklessly, winning many victories on the road to total defeat.

It is a sign of the speed at which events are moving that Hurst and Blackett’s unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf, published only a year ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle. The obvious intention of the translator’s preface and notes is to tone down the book’s ferocity and present Hitler in as kindly a light as possible. For at that date Hitler was still respectable. He had crushed the German labour movement, and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything. Both Left and Right concurred in the very shallow notion that National Socialism was merely a version of Conservatism.

Then suddenly it turned out that Hitler was not respectable after all. As one result of this, Hurst and Blackett’s edition was reissued in a new jacket explaining that all profits would be devoted to the Red Cross. Nevertheless, simply on the internal evidence of Mein Kampf, it is difficult to believe that any real change has taken place in Hitler’s aims and opinions. When one compares his utterances of a year or so ago with those made fifteen years earlier, a thing that strikes one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn’t develop. It is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary manoeuvres of power politics. Probably, in Hitler’s own mind, the Russo-German Pact represents no more than an alteration of time-table. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with the implied intention of smashing England afterwards. Now, as it has turned out, England has got to be dealt with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed of the two. But Russia’s turn will come when England is out of the picture—that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees it. Whether it will turn out that way is of course a different question.

Suppose that Hitler’s programme could be put into effect. What he envisages, a hundred years hence, is a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of “living room” (i.e. stretching to Afghanistan or thereabouts), a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder. How was it that he was able to put this monstrous vision across? It is easy to say that at one stage of his career he was financed by the heavy industrialists, who saw in him the man who would smash the Socialists and Communists. They would not have backed him, however, if he had not talked a great movement into existence already. Again, the situation in Germany, with its seven million unemployed, was obviously favourable for demagogues. But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches …. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs—and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.

Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation “Greatest happiness of the greatest number” is a good slogan, but at this moment “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.