Posts Tagged ‘British Empire’
“Not in utter loneliness to live / Myself at last did to the Devil give!”*…
With an excerpt from his new book, Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, Ed Simon on “the most important story ever told”– the story of Humanity’s transactional relationship with evil…
The legend of the Devil’s contract is the most alluring, the most provocative, the most insightful, the most important story ever told. It concerns a humanity strung between Heaven and Hell, the saintly and the satanic; how a man could trade his soul for powers omnipotent, signing a covenant with the Devil so that he could briefly live as a god before being pulled down to Hell. Frequently associated with Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, that Elizabethan play wasn’t the origin of that myth, but his is certainly a sterling example of that eternal script. Yet long before that Renaissance play and long afterwards, we can find the inky traces of Faust’s damned signature in a multitude of works both high and low, canonical and popular. More disturbing than that is the way that the Devil’s hoof-prints can be found across the wide swatch of history, in our willingness to embrace power and engage in exploitation, to summon self-interestedness and to conjure cruelty…
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… Tamburlaine the Great’s iconoclasm and The Jew of Malta’s irreverence aside, no work of sacred heresy in Marlowe’s oeuvre is as profound as Doctor Faustus. His quisling scholar selling his birthright for the pottage of trickery and illusion may be modernity’s operative metaphor, but Marlowe was hardly the originator of the myth. As you’ll read in the chapters ahead, Marlowe adapted the historical Johann Faust from German folkloric tradition, though the myth of a contract with Satan existed centuries before that unfortunate alchemist first crossed potassium nitrate with sulfur. Nor of course was Marlowe’s rendition the final word, as thousands of permutations of the basic story have been produced over the half-millennium, from Goethe to the musical Damn Yankees, Thomas Mann to the Dixie-fried pablum of the execrable Charlie Daniels Band number “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” High culture like Franz Liszt’s Faust Symphony and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8; pop culture from the comic book Ghost Rider to the Jack Black flick Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny.
“The figure of Faust is—after Christ, Mary, and the Devil—the single most popular character in the history of Western Christian culture,” writes Jeffrey Burton Russell in his classic Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World. And of those characters, Faust is the most fully human to us, in his arrogance and his failure, his negotiations and his capitulations, in the whole litany of abuse which the cankered soul is capable of inflicting upon itself. Russell’s contention is far from hyperbole, and amending the word “character” to “narrative,” I’d say that there are few archetypal scripts in our culture as essential as the legend of a man selling his soul to the Devil. Thousands of works of literature and film, music and art, grapple with the bargain whereby somebody trades what’s most human for power or wealth, influence or knowledge. Only the myth of Adam and Eve being cast out of Eden competes with Faust in terms of influence, and that story is arguably an early variation on the Devil’s contract…
… though it is ostensibly a history, and this narrative moves onward rather chronologically, I prefer to think of the story it tells as being about a character who is outside of time, who lives parallel to past, present, and future. An eternal story. Because what this book is concerned with are the implications— culturally, politically, theologically—of these highly symbolically charged narratives concerning the abjuration of a soul, of the ceding of what’s intrinsic to us, of the capitulations and negotiations which make up any failed life, which is to say every life. More than a history, then, Devil’s Contract is an account of what it means to be human in all of our failings.
Increasingly an account of humanity right now. For all the legend’s archaicism, the muttered Latin and the alchemical conjuration, Faust’s story has always been estimably modern, perhaps the first modern story. Unlike Adam and Eve, with their inscrutable Bronze Age story composed in an idiom so ancient and foreign that centuries of theologians have disagreed on what the implications of each facet of the tale might mean, the details in the Faust legend are inescapably of our time. This is, after all, the story of a contract. The dénouement of most versions of the Faust story involves the signing of a legally binding document, an experience foreign to the authors of Genesis but replete in our own lives, whether interacting with human resources or clicking on an agreement with our phone company. Faust’s tale may deal in the numinous and the transcendent, but it’s also about bureaucracy and paperwork, our contemporary hell and its sacrament, respectively. We recognize Faust in a manner that no character in the Bible can ever be our contemporary…
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… Marlowe staged his play at the very beginning of what is increasingly being called the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which humanity was finally able to impose its will (in an almost occult manner) upon the earth. There are costs to any such contract, as the wisdom of the legend has it, so that it’s worth considering after five centuries of human domination of the planet that we might now be facing our own collective appointment at Deptford. We seem to finally be facing the final act, the apocalyptic tenor of our times, from climate change to nuclear brinkmanship making the continued survival of humanity an open question, our sad predicament the result of hubris, and greed, and vainglory. It may be appropriate to rechristen this age the Faustocene. Because whether or not the Devil is real, his effects in the world are. When it comes to “truth” and “facts,” the two words are not synonymous, and I wouldn’t at all be surprised if I could make out the smoke of some devilish chimera beyond the neon-line of the Rose Theater, deep within a darkness so all-encompassing that not a squib of light is capable of escaping…
“A Deal With the Devil: What the Age-Old Faustian Bargain Reveals About the Modern World” in @lithub.
See also: “You Are Equal To The Spirit You Understand,” Nathan Gardels‘ consideration of the lessons in Goethe’s Faust, in @NoemaMag.
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
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As we reconsider our contracts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1834 that slavery was abolished in the British Empire, as the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 came into force (though it remained legal in the possessions of the East India Company until the passage of the Indian Slavery Act, 1843).
“We have always been taught that navigation is the result of civilization, but modern archeology has demonstrated very clearly that this is not so”*…
The islands of Polynesia stretch over thousands of miles of ocean, presenting a daunting barrier to ancient people before the invention of magnetic compasses and modern navigation equipment.
Yet early Europeans exploring the Pacific found island after island full of people who shared similar customs and beliefs despite their far-flung distribution. They told tales of epic voyages of discovery and colonization, undertaken in ocean-going canoes, robust enough to make the trip but fragile enough to make some Western scholars doubt they could have made the crossing, preferring instead a narrative of accident and drift.
Who the Polynesians were, where they came from, and how they navigated such formidable seas has puzzled explorers, missionaries, anthropologists, and archaeologists for centuries…
A conversation with Harvard Review editor Christina Thompson, author of Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia, in which she examines what’s known about what might be humanity’s most epic migration, and what questions remain: “The history and mystery of Polynesian navigation.”
[Image above: source]
* Thor Heyerdahl (who had a hand in unraveling [some of] the secrets of ancient Polynesian navigation)
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As we find our way, we might recall that it was on this date in 1606 that James I of England established the Virginia Company of London by royal charter with the purpose of establishing colonial settlements in North America. Several months later, on Dec 20, the Company loaded three ships with settlers, who set sail to establish Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. As this was the UK’s first colony, that day can be considered the birthday of the British Empire.
A rendering of the initial settlement/fort at Jamestown, c. 1607
“Study the past if you would define the future”*…
Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (SDFB) is a digital reconstruction of the early modern social network that scholars and students from all over the world will be able to collaboratively expand, revise, curate, and critique. Historians and literary critics have long studied the way that early modern people associated with each other and participated in various kinds of formal and informal groups. By data-mining existing scholarship that describes relationships between early modern persons, documents, and institutions, we have created a unified, systematized representation of the way people in early modern England were connected…
Follow the connections at Six Degrees of Francis Bacon.
* Confucius
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As we marvel at the interconnectedness of it all, we might recall that it was on this date in 1606 that The Virginia Company loaded three ships with settlers, who set sail to establish Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. As this was the UK’s first colony, today can be considered the birthday of the British Empire.
A rendering of the initial settlement/fort at Jamestown, c. 1607
“A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets”*…
On the heels of the Scottish Referendum, a meditation on the scope of the U.K…
Mitch Fraas, curator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Special Collections, recently sent me this image and GIF of a moveable toy distributed by the Children’s Encyclopedia in Britain in the early twentieth century. The toy, which doubles as an ad for the encyclopedia, takes the old saying “The sun never sets on the British empire” and represents it physically, through the medium of a spinning wheel.
The Children’s Encyclopedia, one of the first such projects directed exclusively at young people, was first sold in Britain as a serial in 1908. The illustrated Encyclopedia addressed a grab-bag of subjects, structured not alphabetically but thematically, with each volume holding information on nineteen different topics (animals, history, literature, geography, the Bible). Like the text on this movable map, the overwhelming tone of the Encyclopedia was optimistic and patriotic, with the United Kingdom’s achievements in science, literature, and war always emphasized.
The Encyclopedia was republished in the United States as The Book of Knowledge,where (its publisher claimed) it sold three and half million sets between 1910 and 1945. Here’s a poem by Howard Nemerov about his childhood experience reading the project’s American edition, which he describes as “The vast pudding of knowledge,/With poetry rare as raisins scattered through/The twelve gold-lettered volumes black and green”…
More at the invaluable Rebecca Onion’s “‘The Sun Never Sets Upon the British Empire,’ Explained in GIF by an Old Children’s Toy.”
* George Orwell’s harsh judgement of British imperialism, in Burmese Days
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As we break for a cup of tea, we might recall that it was on this date in 1779 that John Paul Jones, a Scottish sailor who’d immigrated to America and was fighting for the Colonies in the Revolutionary War, became the first American naval hero when he won a hard-fought engagement against the British ships-of-war Serapis and Countess of Scarborough off the east coast of England. Though Jones went on to serve in the Imperial Russian Navy, he is often called the “Father of the United States Navy” (an honorific he shares with John Barry).
A 1781 painting of John Paul Jones by Charles Willson Peale.
Fractured Fractals…
From the art and design blog Colossal:
Artist Sagaki Keita was born in 1984 and lives and works in Tokyo. His densely composited pen and ink illustrations contain thousands of whimsical characters that are drawn almost completely improvised. I am dumbstruck looking at these and love the wacky juxtaposition of fine art and notebook doodles. See more of his work here, and be sure to click the images above for more detail.
Indeed…
More, at Keita’s site…
As we search for ever-finer nibs, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that Britain observed its first British Empire Day, celebrating the colonial reach achieved from the first Irish “plantations” in the 16th century through the 19th century– a reach that, by the outbreak of World War II, encompassed a quarter of the world’s population and almost a quarter of the world’s land mass.
But of course World War II, and the new global regime that it spawned, spelled the end of empire. While 14 “overseas territories” remain under British dominion, colonization effectively ended with the hand-over of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Indeed the process of decolonization was sufficiently advanced by 1958 that– on this date that year– the name of the holiday was changed to “British Commonwealth Day.”
The British Empire, with British Overseas Territories underlined in red (source and larger version)
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