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Buddha's Smile - Улыбка Будды

a very simple but beautiful story from a Mongolian boy's childhood...

TLS on Storytelling

on Storytelling

Book doctors
by LAURA DIETZ

a review of
Brian Boyd ON THE ORIGIN OF STORIES Evolution, cognition, and fiction 414pp. Harvard University Press. £25.95 (US $35). 978 0 674 03357 3

" Why do we spend so much of our time telling one another stories that neither side believes?" Brian Boyd, an authority on Nabakov at the University of Auckland, is entering a crowded field with On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, cognition, and fiction. The question is not whether we are addicted to fiction, but why? The only thing more obvious than its universal appeal is our universal embarrassment about it. For the past 2,500 years of recorded literary criticism, the answer has vacillated between attack and apologia. Moralists cite Plato, scorning mimesis as an unseemly taste, childish at best and dangerous at worst. Novels in particular appeal to weak-minded individuals in flight from the real world: Samuel Johnson's grouping of "the young, the ignorant, and the idle". Aesthetes retaliate with Aristotle, calling representation the refined pursuit of an elevated mind - yet still in need of justification. Boyd's contention is that fiction is not a taste at all. It is a tool for survival. Like evolutionary explanations for gender inequality or ethnic strife, his argument offers a release from shame, and is why On the Origin of Stories may have an impact far beyond academic circles.

Boyd sets himself a task in two parts. First, to demonstrate that fiction is an adaptation, rather than a quirky side effect of our overdeveloped neocortex (art as Steven Pinker's "'cheesecake' for the mind"), or a purely cultural phenomenon. Second, that "a biocultural approach makes it possible to explain stories both more comprehensively and more precisely". No one thinks on this scale anymore. Bent to the cultivation of shrinking plots of expertise, enlivened by the occasional boundary squabble, we are illaccustomed to broad new theories even from Young Turks, let alone established critics. Ambition is in itself cause for celebration. Boyd begins with the nature of art. Defining fiction as an art form, rather than information delivery that got out of hand, he graples with the enormous body of research devoted to the evolution of creativity. Even limiting himself to matters biological and skirting philosophical inquiry (though making an intriguing excursion into the storytelling that is religion), the survey is vast. He suggests that we "view art as a kind of cognitive play", a "stimulus and training for a flexible mind". But while play in other species is more easily connected to purpose - a cub pouncing on a sibling and miming a killing bite - the case for sonnets is not so clear. It is easy to argue that mental tasks strengthening mental ability, but why should painting a cave wall exercise us better than skinning another mammoth? (This is, in a sense, the old argument for a liberal arts education over vocational training.) His answer is that humans are hyperintelligent and hypersocial animals. Lining up key elements of intelligence and cooperation - pattern-seeking, alliance-making, theory of mind (the understanding that other beings have beliefs and knowledge of their own) - he seeks to show that art, and specifically the art of fiction, makes them stronger.
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Evolutionary psychology is a cross-fertilization of "evolutionary theory, ethology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, game theory, evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary economics, neurophysiology, analytic and experimental philosophy, evolutionary epistemology, and many branches of psychology - clin-icalcomparative, developmental, evolutionary, personality, and social". Boyd draws at least one piece of evidence from each field. Mirror neurons fire when we act but also when we see someone act, suggesting a physiological basis for empathy. Fairness sub-routines make complex logic puzzles such as the Wason test easy to solve when reframed as "look for cheaters" tasks. Dolphins blow bubble nets to herd prey, but also in loops and rings and whorls that appear to have no purpose but to satisfy the curiosity, or display the virtuosity, of the blower. The examples here are never random. Each one offers a pleasing trill of "aha!", and Boyd meticulously refers back to his main argument. But the inclusivity is exhausting. This is persuasion by brute force and relies, in part, on the fact that few readers will have the breadth of knowledge to debate with him on every point.

But how other than by force does one take on such a subject? The subtitle is misleading. The book and the theory both deal with art, with fiction being the chosen mode of illustration. It is only after dispatching painting, sculpture, song and dance (forms which Boyd believes emerged before storytelling) that we can look at the collision of art and narrative that makes fiction. Attention, Boyd argues, is the essential component of art, and status the reward that makes storytellers compete to refine their products. Adding the social advantages of enhanced narrative to the cognitive advantages of art makes fiction an adaptation worthy of the energy it requires. This meas-urefiction as a thing that does rather than a thing that is - a tool with measurable utility rather than an object for aesthetic admiration. It is the basis for Boyd's approach to literary analysis. Problem-solution is a model previously applied to visual art by Ernst Gombrich and to film by David Bordwell; extended to fiction, it becomes what Boyd calls "evocriticism". "Unlike current Theory, evocriticism prefers proposals concrete enough to be subjected to potential falsification by evidence." Boyd analyses "supremely successful stories" to prove his method. (Enduring popularity being the evolutionary theorist's way of separating Dickensian sheep from Mrs Humphry Ward goats.) For reasons of space he reduces an intended roster from Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Pride and Prejudice, Ulysses and Maus to two: the Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who! Boyd links the evolutionary imperatives examined in the opening sections with their expressions in Homer and Dr Seuss. He mines the Odyssey not for beauty or meaning but for sophisticated treatments of survival and reproductive success, particularly issues of cooperation within social groups. The same instinct for justice that makes capuchin monkeys angrily reject an unfair market, one that sometimes exchanges tokens for juicy grapes and sometimes for disappointing cucumber, compels listeners to attend to the punishment of Penelope's freeloading suitors. If "the prime impetus for the acceleration of intelligence" had not been "sociality, the need to understand and perhaps outwit others", we would not be so fascinated with Odysseus an honourable, yet deceitful hero.

The thesis sounds, on first airing, ludicrously reductive. Why should life-or-death questions not be interesting to readers, and could a shrewd critic not make up a similar rationale for any work, like a Freudian finding phallic symbols in any dream? But Boyd's treatment is engrossing, as elegant in the writing as the reasoning. It offers a new insight into the question of why some works speak to audiences across cultures and generations. Storytellers have a problem: how to gain and keep their listeners. The listeners have problems of their own: finding mates, earning status, persuading the gods to send fewer locusts. The most successful storytellers apply themselves to the listeners' dilemmas - not just to amuse, but to make them fitter to triumph in the contests of life. They keep attention by balancing pattern and novelty, issues of collective concern with individual twists. Boyd defines a successful story as solving problems on four levels: universal, local ("historical or regional circumstances" such as the hospitality customs in Homer's Greece), individual (the capacities of a given artist), and particular (the challenges of a particular piece, such as working within iam-bipentameter or the limits of early colour photolithography). Homer's disappearance into history makes the individual and particular a matter for speculation. But Boyd's analysis of Theodor Geisel, whose artistic practice as Dr Seuss is well-documented, shows the problem-solution approach in its full range. Horton Hears a Who! (1954) is simultaneously a tale of altruism, of the value of the individual, and of the emergence of democracy in postwar Japan. It sprang from the interests of juvenile readers, and the painstaking development of Seuss's visual and prose styles from bug spray advertisements to picture books, and the need for a sequel to Horton Hatches an Egg. Boyd's four-level model doesn't use lines of inquiry excluded by other literary criticism, but does offer a structure in which to examine the interaction of pressures and influences. It welcomes contradictions, expecting and even celebrating conflicting agendas within a given work. As reshaping the human pelvis for walking on two legs made it less able to cope with childbirth, every literary solution is seen as generating its own suite of problems, which require yet more solutions, and yet more human ingenuity. To look at a story as a naturalist looks at a leaf or shell, not criticizing improvizations but marvelling at its inventive beauty, is a refreshing experience.

The least interesting section of the book moves away from evocriticism to make an attack on competing schools of criticism. After the dutiful exposition of the opening sections (Boyd eschews the jaunty enthusiasm of the popular science writer), and the deftness of the Homer and Seuss analysis, the final chapters recall the Theory wars of the 1980s, about which no one inside an English department needs to be reminded, and no one outside an English department cares. But whatever your opinion of Derrida, Boyd offers absolution to all lovers of fiction. Our childish taste for make-believe, it seems, is a little more serious than we thought

Listening to: Guesch Patti

LRB on Danton

He Roared

by Hilary Mantel

• Danton: The Gentle Giant of Terror by David Lawday  Buy this book

‘Give me a place to stand,’ said Archimedes, ‘and I will move the earth.’ In the spring of 1789, your place to stand was a huddle of streets on Paris’s left bank. If you put your head out of the window of the café Procope, almost everyone you needed to overthrow the regime was within shouting distance. The Revolution was dreamed here before it was enacted, beneath the dark towers of Saint-Sulpice. George-Jacques Danton lived here, and Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, Legendre the master-butcher, Fabre d’Eglantine the political playwright, and a dozen others who would make their names through the fall of the old order. In the year the Revolution began, this area was known as the Cordeliers district, taking its name from the monastery of the Cordeliers, the Franciscan friars. It was not a working-class area like Saint-Antoine, but respectable with a bohemian fringe, bankers and civil servants ensconced on first floors, garrets stuffed with malcontent actors; its agitators garnished their invective with classical allusions. From 1789 onwards, this district, with Danton as ward boss, became notorious for hair-trigger revolutionary reflexes. ‘Spontaneous’ street protests could erupt there in an instant, and radical journalists hid their presses and their persons in the warren of houses. When a reorganisation of the city’s divisions threatened the identity of the district, the citizens turned themselves into a political club, and colonised the disused monastery for a meeting place. With Danton in the chair, the Cordeliers were a formidably disruptive force, noisier and cheaper to join than the Jacobin club on the right bank. The Cordeliers had an opinion on everything, from the parish to the world; you would think they owned the Revolution.

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You would disagree, of course, if you were across the river at City Hall, and struggling to impose good order on the populace. In the months after the fall of the Bastille, Mayor Bailly thought he owned the Revolution, along with Lafayette, commander of the National Guard. The National Assembly thought they owned it; the Duc d’Orléans, who hoped to replace his cousin Louis as king, thought that if he did not own it he had certainly paid for it. Mirabeau, the renegade aristocrat who was a hero both to parliamentarians and to the crowd, thought he had a right to it – was this not his hour to save his country, and at the same time get his debts paid? And perhaps Mr Pitt, plotting in London, thought it was Whitehall’s revolution; the opportunity to destabilise, embarrass and disable the old enemy could not be let slip, and if a bribe here and there could do it, he would be glad to have some revolutionaries in England’s pocket. Later, in 1793, the journalist Desmoulins would denounce the revolution of 1789 as a false revolution, bought and paid for, sold and resold, a put-up job, a fix. As a republican from the start, he could claim his hands were clean and his motives were pure; but where did that leave Danton, his old revolutionary comrade? Ambiguity hangs over his life and over his conduct as a leader of the Revolution, and what is soon evident about David Lawday’s spirited and highly readable biography is that he stands Danton in a flattering light and pays insufficient attention to movements in the shadows. ‘The Gentle Giant of Terror’, the subtitle calls him: which suggests, along with revolutionary vertu, a certain daft innocence. Lawday’s Danton is the Danton that Gérard Depardieu enacted for Andrzej Wajda in his 1983 film about the great man’s trial and death. He is a passionate defender of instinct and truth against the cold formulations of Robespierre: he is a peasant in a lawyer’s coat, a son of the soil, one of nature’s patriots; he is, in himself, a force of nature.

Such men are not often successful lawyers. Before the Revolution, Danton was doing well; he was not one of the people with nothing to lose. He had a wife, a comfortable home, and an established legal practice; many of the men who were his future comrades had nothing but sheaves of unpublished poems, unsung operas and unapplauded plays. But he was restless and perhaps, as Büchner suggested in his play Dantons Tod, he was easily bored. Revolution offered him five years of diversion and aggrandisement, and amplified his voice to the whole of Europe; in quieter times, 30 years of plodding application, bowing and scraping to his intellectual inferiors, would perhaps have taken him into the lower ranks of the establishment. Danton’s origins were one generation removed from the peasantry. He was born in 1759 in Arcis-sur-Aube in the Champagne region, the fifth child of a petty lawyer, who died when his only son was three. Georges-Jacques’s father had been married before; his mother would marry again; he had a network of relatives through the region. The family structure was stable, cohesive; his uncles and cousins were farmers, merchants, priests. His childhood was rural but eventful. Encounters with livestock left him broken-nosed, with a gash from a bull’s horn across his lips; smallpox left him scarred; he was tall, and grew burly if not obese. His ugliness was not of the craggy kind: ‘His bulbous cheeks,’ Lawday says, ‘gave him the look of an enormous cherub.’ To his political opponent Vadier, during the Terror, he was a turbot farci, a huge fish to be gutted. Danton’s riposte embodied all his smooth elegance: ‘I’ll eat his brains and use his skull to shit in.’

In Troyes, Danton was given the best of modern educations by the Oratorian order. Later, he built up an extensive library, and he spoke, or at least read, both English and Italian. He was 20 when he went to try his luck in Paris. He clerked for a Maître Vinot on the Ile Saint-Louis. Rather than sit the Parisian bar exams, he took a pragmatic trip to Reims, where the diploma could be picked up for a fee on proof of a few days’ residence. In 1787, in one of those arrangements so French that they almost defy translation, he bought the legal office of avocat au Conseil du Roi from a man called Huet de Paisy, who was engaged to marry his long-time mistress, Françoise Duhauttoir; Françoise herself lent Danton some of the purchase price. A 1964 biographer, Robert Christophe, speculated that Françoise may have had a child by Danton, and that he paid an inflated price to settle his obligations. He certainly drew on the dowry for his upcoming marriage to Gabrielle Charpentier, whose father was a tax official and the owner of a popular café near the law courts. As France slid towards bankruptcy and political turmoil, Danton had assets and prospects, but he also had entangling debts, obligations.

The Dantons had a son within a year of marriage. He did not survive babyhood, but two more boys followed. The household made an ambitious move to an apartment in one of the recently built townhouses near the Théâtre Français. There was an entrance on the cour du Commerce; his front door, it is thought, opened approximately where his statue stands now, in the carrefour de l’Odéon. He would live there for the rest of his short life. At this time, Danton may have talked of ‘revolution’, as he did – in Latin, and in typically ambivalent terms – at his reception into his new association of advocates. But he clearly thought the upheaval would be of a limited nature, for he chose to adopt the particle of nobility, calling himself d’Anton. It’s unlikely that anyone laughed; the manoeuvre was too familiar a stage in the progress of a social climber.

In May 1789 the Estates General met in Versailles. In Paris, there was sporadic rioting throughout the spring, the price of bread shot up, and Louis ringed the capital with troops. When the Bastille fell, Danton was not there; he was often elsewhere on days of revolutionary action, as he had a canny regard for his own skin. But within days a citizen militia, which would become the National Guard, was formed to keep the peace on the streets. This was Danton’s chance to put on a paramilitary uniform and strut about impressively. People were looking for leaders, and he – with the big presence and the big voice – was a natural leader. He was hospitable, a generous host, the glad-handing focus of the neighbourhood. He had also joined a Freemasons’ lodge; probably that was how he met the liberal, anglophile Philippe d’Orléans. In the duke’s circles, money changed hands, Lawday says, ‘and Danton was aware of it. Who wasn’t? But the giant from Arcis was not there out of greed, he was there riding the tide.’ At this time, it seemed a change of monarch, with the new one limited by constitution, might be enough to satisfy reformers; Orléans, the obvious candidate, functioned as a walking chequebook for Danton’s friends. Was Danton the fastidious exception? So many future leaders of the Revolution were scooped into the golden net of Orléanist pretentions, that they could hardly hold it against each other in the days of brutal accounting that came in with the Terror. Danton – devoted to Cicero, but fluent in street language – was just the sort of investment Orléans liked.

Nothing can be proved, though Danton’s finances are worth more scrutiny than they receive here. Allegations that he was an agent in English pay had surfaced as early as the autumn of 1789. We don’t know where his money came from, but we can be fairly sure it wasn’t from his legal practice. We know where it went – he was buying up land in Arcis. The evidence was marshalled in Norman Hampson’s 1978 biography, a wry, spare and careful assessment. Where others see a calculating opportunism running through Danton’s revolution, Lawday sees a man free from ‘demon ideals’ and driven by ‘impetuosity and heart’. At any rate, he was led by his heart when he chose his friends. Two men he was close to at the beginning went straight through his political career with him, and died on the same scaffold. Fabre d’Eglantine was an actor and playwright, interior designer and prize-winning poet, or so he said; he was a charming con man, and his stock market scams, uncovered during the winter of 1793, would start the Dantonist faction on the slide to oblivion. Camille Desmoulins was a freakishly brilliant failure till the Bastille days. He was a timid boy with a stammer, but the Revolution, he claimed, had made him brave; he made his name as a street orator, then launched one of the era’s most successful newspapers. His politics were republican before the Revolution; as he was ahead of everyone else, racing through a private revolution on his own speeded-up plan, it was only a matter of time before he collided messily with the rock-like Terrorist convictions of his childhood friend, Robespierre.

The company he kept, and his talents as a demagogue, made Danton suspect to the right bank grandees trying to steer the Revolution on a moderate and constitutional course. He was always adaptable, always approachable, and yet he seems to have scared them. It was the second wave of revolution in the late summer of 1792 that carried him to power: the attack on the Tuileries, the fall of the monarchy, the institution of the republic and the summoning of the National Convention. At a time of national emergency, with the troops of the enemy allies just 90 miles from Paris, Danton seized a position as de facto head of a provisional government. Lafayette, the commander of the French forces, defected to the Austrians, and at the same time rebels were on the march in the Vendée under the slogan ‘Death to Parisians’. The Duke of Brunswick, commander of the allied Prussian and Austrian forces, had threatened Paris itself with ‘exemplary vengeance’. The leaders of the Revolution were dead men walking, and the danger was that the capital would freeze with fear. Danton put the city on the march; he organised a giant recruiting drive and the seizure of all weapons in private hands. House-to-house searches picked up 3000 suspected royalists, many more than the prisons could securely hold. On 2 September 1792 Danton delivered his finest speech, ‘the charge against the enemies of the patrie’, who must be met with ‘l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace’. This was happy and forceful phrasemaking; like much revolutionary rhetoric, it loses some impact in translation, but all the same it is helpful that Lawday translates everything, and does it easily and idiomatically. That day of boldness was, Lawday says, the best and worst of Danton; his speech had a galvanising effect, but it acted as a call for direct action among the citizens, as well as a strike against the external enemy.

Danton’s style as leader of the government was a simple one. ‘Why do I do what he wants?’ the navy minister asked. ‘Because he scares the hell out of me and he’d give my head to the people otherwise.’ Danton’s official position was minister of justice, and he took Fabre and Desmoulins to the place Vendôme with him. Justice was in scant supply in early September, when the mobs broke into the prisons and massacred 1600 people. Some of them were prostitutes and others, detainees in a reformatory, were little more than children. Danton did nothing to stop the killing. In his 1899 biography, Hilaire Belloc said ‘he might have saved his reputation by protesting, though perhaps his protest would not have saved a single life.’ Danton roared on more than one occasion that he did not care about his reputation. A brutal realism prevailed: ‘No power on earth,’ he said, ‘could have stopped the national vengeance from spilling over.’ There could not be a revolution without blood, and no single man could hold up his hand and say ‘Enough.’ It was Danton who, the following spring, proposed to the Convention the establishment of a Revolutionary Tribunal: for which, he would later say, ‘I ask the pardon of God and of humanity.’ His reasoning at the time was that only swift, visible justice would stop the mobs taking the law into their own hands. But the Tribunal would become the instrument the revolutionaries used to slaughter each other.

The pressure of that terrible summer eased, though the republic’s victory at Valmy in September was less a military triumph than a propaganda coup. The allied commander withdrew, and Danton’s opponents claimed that he had bribed him with the French crown jewels, which had recently gone missing. If so, it was an ingenious use of them. Once the immediate panic was over, Danton left office and went home to the cour du Commerce, because as a member of the new National Convention he was not permitted to hold a ministry. Jean-Marie Roland, however, hung on to his post at the Interior, and mounted a relentless attack on Danton’s probity, demanding he account for the large sums he had disbursed during the days of emergency. Danton could not do it, and his failure would be a thorn in his side in the months ahead. Lawday makes much of Madame Roland’s animosity towards Danton, which (like generations of male historians) he takes to be a backhanded compliment to what he calls Danton’s ‘blatant bull-maleness’. Perhaps it’s time to revisit this condescending nonsense and give Manon Roland the benefit of the doubt; maybe, when said she disliked and distrusted Danton, she meant what she said and no more. Readers of her memoirs may see her as an irritating and self-regarding woman, but they will also remember her frankness about her early sexual experiences; she was not a fool, and not someone who lacked self-awareness. It’s questionable, anyway, if her personal feelings mattered as much as Lawday thinks. She had influence, but no power. Lawday uses the word ‘party’ often in relation to the Rolandins and the Girondins, though they were the loosest of groupings. In revolutionary politics, to represent your opponents as a ‘party’ was to defame and endanger them; it was to represent them as self-interested to the point of lacking patriotism. First you made them a ‘party’, and then, as they went to the guillotine, a ‘batch’. At the time, the men whom later historians call Girondins were more often referred to as ‘Brissotins’, as so many of them were friends of Jean-Pierre Brissot, a deputy, journalist and veteran of liberal causes. Brissot had been around long enough to be compromised; Marat and Desmoulins claimed he had been a police spy before the Revolution. They had been around too, so they knew. They held secret files on each other, or so they said.

What did mark out the Girondins, Rolandins and Brissotins was their federalist impulses; they distrusted Paris, and in a moment of panic in the autumn of 1792 they proposed taking the government out of the capital, an idea Danton dismissed with contempt. They favoured a policy which the left wing of the Convention saw as suicidal; unless united, how could France possibly withstand a grand European alliance dedicated to the crushing of the Revolution? It was not a big step, later, for the left to represent federalist sympathies as traitorous. Robespierre blamed Brissot’s friends for taking France into what they advertised as a ‘cleansing’ war. He regarded it as immoral, unwinnable and likely to end in military dictatorship. Danton would have avoided war too, and worked busily behind the scenes to negotiate a cessation of hostilities, while pumping out nationalist, expansionist rhetoric: ‘The boundaries of France are drawn by nature. We shall attain them on their four sides – the Ocean, the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees.’

Danton was with the armies in Belgium when his wife Gabrielle died giving birth to her fourth child. When he arrived in Paris, a grieving, howling wreck of a man who had been too long on the road, it was to find that the child was lost too and that Gabrielle had already been buried. She had been dead for a week when Danton had her exhumed so that a sculptor could take a mould for a bust; this gruesome proceeding, carried out by night, suggested that he was a man who, goaded to the edge of exhaustion, had tipped into emotional breakdown. At the king’s trial, he had voted for death, and death was what he had got. Perhaps it began here, the strange numbness that overtook him when he was most required to act. His political judgment was no longer secure, his lucky touch had gone. Until almost the last moment, when he deserted to the Austrians like Lafayette before him, Danton backed the army’s supreme commander, General Dumouriez. He had to explain that misjudgment to the National Convention; all the same, his domination of that body, in debate after debate, became clear in the spring of 1793. With the republic once more on the brink of being invaded, and threatening to break up internally, he launched another round of recruitment and requisitioning, declaring that Paris would have to save the country. When the Committee of Public Safety was first formed, in April 1793, it was known as the Danton Committee.

The idea was to fill a power vacuum; as the men seen to matter in France were deputies to the Convention, and so debarred from ministerial office, the old structure had lost status and the force of the executive arm had diminished. The Committee contained no Girondins, Brissotins or Rolandins. By June they were in prison or had fled. At this point, so many battles behind him, Danton faltered; he thought of his private life; he married again, Louise Gély, the 16-year-old daughter of a neighbour. To meet her family’s wishes, he married her secretly, before a renegade priest who had not taken the oath to the Constitution. His secret was soon out. ‘I can’t live without women,’ he pleaded. He took to spending time with his bride in a country house he had rented outside Paris. In July, he was dropped from the Committee. Two weeks later, Robespierre was elected. Till this point he had avoided government posts, but his time had come. He did not need women or relaxation, and did not have secrets. He often threatened to ‘unmask’ his opponents. For a long time he avoided thinking about what lay beneath Danton’s mask.

In October 1793, pleading illness, Danton took himself off to Arcis, to seal himself up in his much renovated ancestral home and try to ignore the Paris newspapers. That autumn the city of Lyon was razed by republican troops; Marie Antoinette and Manon Roland went to the guillotine, so did the former Duc d’Orléans, so did Bailly, Paris’s first revolutionary mayor. Desmoulins and Fabre begged Danton to come back and reassert his authority. When he reappeared in Paris, he found he was living in the Year II. The old calendar had ceased to exist, and so had his old address; he was now at home in the rue Marat. The political landscape was changing as fast as the street names. As the year closed – the old-style year, 1793 – Desmoulins launched a press campaign to end the executions and release the thousands of interned suspects held throughout the country. In its first weeks, the campaign for clemency was wildly popular. Robespierre gave cautious approval; then he pulled back, becoming aware that, of all those who needed clemency, the Dantonists perhaps needed it most. A fulminating stock market scandal, in which Fabre was deeply implicated, seemed in the climate of the times to have political ramifications. Perhaps it did: forgery was involved, and insider trading, and a dubious and cosmopolitan bunch of disparate individuals suspected of being enemy agents. Perhaps wisely, Lawday doesn’t attempt to unravel this affair, but he confuses his account of these crucial weeks by persistently referring to Danton’s friends as ‘the Cordeliers’. The club had long since been taken over by a populist faction, led by the journalist René Hébert. That was why Desmoulins’s newspaper, which led the clemency campaign, was called the Old Cordelier. Hébert was Desmoulins’s first target. Camille’s notion of mercy was qualified: he would first eliminate the immediate opponent, whom he hated like poison, and then all revolutionaries would be perfect friends.

Hébert had been a nuisance to the Committee of Public Safety, and when these new Cordeliers went to the guillotine, the ground was suddenly cleared, the revolutionary atmosphere bright, the light searching: an abyss opened beneath the feet of the Dantonist faction their opponents now called the Indulgents. Danton could perhaps have escaped. He had a warning, an hour or two before his arrest. But as he said, ‘You can’t take the patrie with you on the soles of your shoes.’ Danton lived by the word, but not the written word. He never wrote his speeches; he grew them extempore, and fed them on the emotion of his audience. All his life he was at the mercy of patchy note-takers. Alphonse Aulard, who held the first chair in revolutionary studies at the Sorbonne, investigated the problem in 1922: are Danton’s famous phrases real, or are they later inventions, are they what historians think he ought to have said? ‘It is probable that he said them. One hopes that he said them. Historically speaking, one cannot be sure. Perhaps they are more true than authentic.’ In any event, and however he phrased it, Danton disdained the chance of last-minute flight. In 1791, fleeing a backlash against the radicals, he had spent six weeks in England. He was not welcome then, he would be less welcome now. There was nowhere to go: now, March to April 1794, it was time for Danton’s many selves to meet each other.

A stormy session of two Committees – the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Defence, usually called the Police Committee – had resulted in two members refusing to sign the arrest warrants. Robespierre’s signature appeared, very small, very faint, at the foot of the page. Leaving his house in the small hours, under arrest, Danton told his little wife to expect him back. A few days later he faced his accusers with great courage, but he could not face them down. By this stage, the Committee did not ‘lose’ a trial. Danton, Desmoulins and other deputies found themselves tried alongside men who were strangers to them – Fabre’s shady cronies. Before the Convention, Saint-Just’s rhetorical deconstruction of Danton’s career seemed to show that every patriotic action had its ugly, shadow side. The trial process was truncated and farcical. Like the trial of the king, it was a political coup, not a forensic process; it was an assassination. Danton had hoarded a phrase for the scaffold: ‘Show my head to the people. It is worth a look.’ The Convention did not rally to him, the people did not rise up to save their old hero. Less than four months later, Robespierre himself stood at bay before the Convention, his voice faltering, dying in his throat. A deputy shouted: ‘It is the blood of Danton that chokes you!’

‘Is it Danton you regret?’ he snapped back. ‘Cowards! Why didn’t you defend him?’

It’s a good question. Historians have been doing it energetically ever since, though his contemporaries were slower to exculpate him. After Robespierre’s fall, the Convention decreed that flowers should be placed on Desmoulins’s presumed grave; no one had a bouquet for Danton. He divides people: those who value heart and flair, against those who are good at adding up on their fingers, sucking their teeth and shaking their heads. If you condemn him you are, like Robespierre, more in sorrow than in anger. Lawday takes Danton at his own valuation, which at all times was high. He was never reluctant to bellow out a testimonial to himself. ‘I have created what I am on my own . . . I know how to marry cool reason with a burning soul and a steadfast character.’ We know much more about his tactics than about his beliefs. He was a skilled, pragmatic political operator who, like Mirabeau before him, was expert in covering his tracks, and he has covered them from posterity. He had a brilliant oral memory, but avoided even writing letters, and Lawday speculates that nowadays we would have called him dyslexic. When he went to Paris, the lawyer who took him on as a clerk remarked that his handwriting was indecipherable; ça ne fait rien, Danton said haughtily, as he didn’t mean to make his living as a copyist. He preferred other people to put his thoughts on paper for him; then, of course, he could always repudiate them. Perhaps Lawday is right and there was some neurological glitch; the more jaundiced explanation is that he was secretive, and with good reason.

David Lawday lives in Paris and he is not one of those tepid Englishpersons who does not understand why these desperados wanted a revolution in the first place. He takes them on their own terms, these young men who threw off their powdered wigs, sought liberation from a lifetime of stifling politesse, and ended up wading through blood. On the other hand, he has a wholly English distrust of political theory. He makes Danton a man who often reacted to events rather than trying to shape them, and that seems a shrewd assessment. When things were going his way Danton took advantage of the moment, and when they were not he cleared off to Arcis till he could see improvement. Lawday writes as if Robespierre, by contrast, was in possession all along of an unshakeable plan, which included the destruction of Danton. He sets up the Danton/Robespierre contest early in the book. At his first appearance on the page, Robespierre has a ‘feline aspect’ and ‘joyless eyes’. This is better as drama than history. It easy to imagine their first meeting was not a success; Danton traded in first impressions and Robespierre was very hard to impress. But for most of the Revolution they worked together amicably enough, if on opposite sides of the river; and they worked in political agreement. Lawday can’t stretch his imagination to see Danton as Robespierre must have seen him: a blustering windbag, with his faux heartiness, his distractibility and his unreliability. To revolution, Robespierre had a vocation; he expected to follow it, and he expected it to kill him. It may have seemed to him that Danton saw revolution as a second career; he expected it to make him rich. Until the end, Robespierre decided to believe, or at least said he believed, that the gossip against Danton was slander. He took him for a patriot, with all his faults and flaws, and Lawday persuades his reader to do the same.

His book is not searching, contains little new, and for facts it would not be first choice. It is a romantic view of the Revolution; Lawday’s July crowds are pulled towards the Bastille ‘by some great intuitive magnet’; in fact, the fortress, almost emptied of prisoners by the authorities who had anticipated the attack, was a pre-selected target because of the explosives stored there. But Lawday creates some great set-pieces and striking turning points. At Danton’s first meeting with Mirabeau: ‘The two men had sat inspecting each other in silence for some minutes, impressed by each other’s ugliness.’ He is able to capture the atmosphere of the early Revolution: its inflammable mix of devilment and righteousness, reckless selflessness and flagrant self-promotion. He sees that Danton was more than the sum of his crimes, the sum of his secrets; he celebrates him, ‘large heart and violent impulses in irresolvable conflict’. He understands that much of his public aggression was a pose; Danton was by nature a negotiator, even if his negotiations sometimes looked more like an offer from a prostitute. One evening at his apartment in the cour du Commerce, Danton entertained Henry Holland, Fox’s nephew. ‘You can pay Danton 80,000 livres,’ he claimed, ‘but you can’t buy Danton for 80,000.’ Lawday assures us: ‘Gabrielle would have understood that he was talking of the compensation he had received for his legal practice.’ Only a wife or the fondest of biographers could believe that. He was simply raising the stakes.

Hilary Mantel’s most recent novel is Wolf Hall.

Other articles by this contributor:

Frocks and Shocks · Jane Boleyn

The Real Price of Everything · The Many Lives of Elizabeth Marsh

The Crowe is White · Bloody Mary

Some girls want out · spectacular saintliness

I have washed my feet out of it · Growing up in Ghana

That Wilting Flower · The Lure of the Unexplained

If you’d seen his green eyes · The People’s Robespierre

Someone to Disturb · A Memoir

No more 100w lamp bulbs in Europe

Energie
Le retrait des ampoules de 100 watts le 1er septembre

Les ampoules de 100 watts seront retirées le 1er septembre 2009 de l’ensemble des rayons de l’Union européenne (UE).D’ici trois ans, toutes les ampoules à incandescence devraient être remplacées par les lampes de nouvelle génération, consommant 80% d’énergie en moins. A l’échelle de l’UE, l’économie se chiffrerait entre 5 et 10 milliards d’euros par an, selon la Commission. Après les ampoules de 100 watts, ce sera au tour de celles de 75 watts dans un an, de 60 watts dans deux ans et de 40 watts et 25 watts d’ici au 1er septembre 2012. – (AFP.)

LRB: Personals

Cantab Pair (M 22, F 21) seeks clever F (40-50) to share ideas & bed.

Without my grandfather's contribution to agricultural reforms in 1912, this nation would currently have to import its turnips. While you think about this I shall remove my clothes. Man. 55.

I have a dream. And that dream is to try on every pair of shoes in the world. That's where you come in: brusque, butch fem cobbler to 55 with expansive collection of animal skins and a strap-on. Man. 76.

I cast a magic spell on you. And now you are reading this advert in a literary magazine that exists only in your mind. Soon you will fall in love with me. When we meet, the odour will not concern you. Mr. Mesmer: amateur hypnotist, professional shrimp-farmer (M, 51). Also available for birthdays and weddings.

I dream of the day when I make love to you all (red-haired women to 25) with reckless abandon. M. 72

TLS on Mary Magdalene

The real Mary Magdalene
A new study of this important, ambiguous figure makes a case for reassessmentA. E. Harvey

All that is known about Mary Magdalene can be quickly told. She is mentioned in all the gospels as one of the witnesses to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, and once in Luke’s Gospel among other women followers of Jesus, where it is also said that she was a person from whom "seven devils had gone out". On one occasion only (though a highly significant one) she appears alone: it is she, according to a haunting passage in John’s Gospel, who was the first to encounter Jesus in the garden after the resurrection. From this meagre information the most it is possible to infer with any confidence is that she was Galilean (Magdala is on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee), that she had been cured through an exorcism (presumably performed by Jesus), and that she was one of a small group of women who were close to Jesus both during his ministry and at his death, and who also had an experience of the risen Jesus. Mary Magdalene is distinguished from the other women solely by the fact that in John’s Gospel she is vouchsafed a dramatic meeting with the risen Jesus on her own.
From these scanty sources two streams of elaboration have flowed, one within the Church and one among groups known as "Gnostic" and regarded as heretical by the Church Fathers. One of these took its departure from the two occasions in the gospels where we meet at least one other woman called "Mary": the Mary known as a prostitute who wept over Jesus’ feet and dried them with her hair at the Pharisee’s banquet, and the Mary of Bethany who brought expensive perfume to anoint him before the crucifixion. There is no evidence that these two Marys were the same as Mary of Magdala; but the temptation to assume their identity was very strong, and was yielded to decisively by church authorities in the sixth century, thereby creating an icon of the penitent sinner pouring out her gratitude for Jesus’ forgiveness in reckless generosity and rewarded by a privileged encounter with him at the resurrection. This iconic quality is captured by Donatello in his astonishing sculpture of a haggard Mary, her nakedness concealed, it seems, entirely by her long hair.

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The other stream flows from the scene at the end of John’s Gospel, where Mary Magdalene is alone with Jesus, whom she mistakes for the gardener but then recognizes as the risen Lord whom she must not touch, but about whose miraculous resurrection she must immediately tell the other disciples. Did not this scene elevate Mary to a quite exceptional status in the narrative, making her a crucial witness to the resurrection and recording a uniquely privileged experience of the divine? Did not this one scene constitute a challenge to the otherwise consistent reports in the New Testament that it was only men who were the accredited apostles and witnesses to the resurrection? The prominence of women, and their sometimes surprising ease of access to and converse with Jesus, is a striking feature in the gospel narrative; even in Paul’s letters there are notable examples of women taking leading roles in the early Church. How did it come about, then, that apostleship became ascribed exclusively to men? (It was, and still is, arguable that the apparent exception, the apostle Junia in Romans 16:7, is a form of a Roman masculine name, Junias.) Might it not be that a male-dominated Church had deliberately downplayed her significance? Might it have been left to the so-called heretics to preserve her true dignity and importance, and thereby to recover an aspect of the life of Jesus – even an almost erotic intimacy with women, if not actual sexual love and marriage – which the main tradition of the Churches had suppressed in the interest of their disapproval of all expressions of sexuality other than within the marriage bond? It was a line of thought explored with vigour in some Gnostic circles. It has surfaced occasionally down the centuries until the present day; and now countless readers have been fascinated by the fictional exploitation of it in The Da Vinci Code.
Robin Griffith-Jones has rightly seen that, now that this alternative (and formerly heretical) image of Jesus has been given such a high profile in popular literature, it is time to subject the question to careful analysis, but in a form accessible to others besides scholars. His prose therefore runs easily, with an occasional touch of the rhetorical. But the research is serious and well presented, and his conclusions – and occasional refusals to come to a conclusion – deserve scrutiny.
As a prerequisite for assessing the strength of the alternative, "Gnostic", tradition, Griffith-Jones takes us on a journey through a selection of Gnostic texts. Gnosticism (a modern term) is notoriously difficult to define and characterize. A common but not invariable theme is the use of cosmic myths as well as gospel texts (particularly John’s Gospel) to help the devotee advance in the knowledge of realities beyond the material world and so achieve spiritual liberation from the constraints and temptations of earthly and carnal influences. Sometimes this led to extremes of self-denial and asceticism; sometimes to a degree of libertinism; and within the movement (if indeed it is correct to call it a single movement at all) there were clear differences over the status of men and women and their ultimate destiny in a paradise that would transcend all sexual distinctions. In this debate Mary Magdalene plays a notable part in some Gnostic texts, particularly the Gospel of Mary, which makes much of the privileged intercourse that Mary Magdalene had with Jesus after the resurrection, and portrays the male apostles as reluctant to acknowledge that such knowledge could have been vouchsafed to a woman. Do we overhear here a dispute about leadership in the early Church? Were women struggling to assert their rightful claims against an inveterate culture of male dominance? And may we find in this struggle against masculine pretensions a precedent, or even some authorization, for present male–female tensions within the Church?
All of this speculation hinges on the scene at the end of John’s Gospel, Mary’s encounter with the risen Jesus. Accordingly Griffith-Jones employs the same hinge on which to rest his argument. Claiming that he is offering a reading of John which has "hardly been seen in centuries", he seeks to show (in a mere dozen pages) that its intention is to lead the reader through successive stages of "knowledge" by means of the riddling self-disclosure of Jesus until the climactic scene (though in fact it is by no means the end of the Gospel) in which Mary Magdalen represents the reader having attained, not just certainty of Jesus’ resurrection, but a vision of the Holy of Holies (the tomb) and the Garden of Eden (the garden outside the tomb) where the new Adam (Jesus) and the new Eve (Mary) are – not united, for she must not touch him, but brought into an other-worldly intimacy of love such as the Gnostics envisaged being their destiny in paradise. It is this meaning, Griffith-Jones suggests, that is captured in Titian’s famous and perceptibly erotic depiction of the scene. "Mary, by her sensuous longing for Jesus, rises to heaven . . . while her Jesus gives himself to earth."
If we falter in our confidence in this reading of the scene, with its rich infusion of erotic imagery from the Song of Songs, we may begin to feel that the hinge has had too great a weight placed upon it. It is certainly true that this scene has fascinated generations of readers and inspired legions of artists; but does it really have such crucial significance in the Gospel? Is it really the case that the reader is intended to see in Mary the prototype and embodiment of the true "Gnostic", the one who is led to "know" a reality beyond the senses? The purpose of John’s Gospel, after all, is quite explicitly said to be that we should "believe", not that we should "know" (John 20:31). And the one truly "Gnostic" vision (angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man) is promised, not to a woman, but to a man (Nathaniel). For all Griffith-Jones’s protestations of a historian’s impartiality, his occasional references to contemporary Christian attitudes ("the solemn voice of a priest or minister browbeating us in church", etc) inevitably make one alert to traces of a hidden agenda.
Indeed, the subtitle itself, The woman whom Jesus loved, already goes beyond anything we can infer for certain from the gospel text. But the enterprise was timely and is carried out with style and much industrious research. It may not be the definitive study we might have hoped for; but it brings forward a case for reassessment which should not be ignored.
Robin Griffith-Jones
MARY MAGDALENE
The woman whom Jesus loved
286pp. Canterbury Press. £12.99.
978 1 85311 818 0

A. E. Harvey is a former Canon and Sub-Dean of Westminster. A revised edition of his Companion to the New Testament appeared in 2004.

Is this Aura?

Abstract
The human body literally glimmers. The intensity of the light emitted by the body is 1000 times lower than the sensitivity of our naked eyes. Ultraweak photon emission is known as the energy released as light through the changes in energy metabolism. We successfully imaged the diurnal change of this ultraweak photon emission with an improved highly sensitive imaging system using cryogenic charge-coupled device (CCD) camera. We found that the human body directly and rhythmically emits light. The diurnal changes in photon emission might be linked to changes in energy metabolism.

Bioluminescence, which is weak but visible, is sometimes produced in living organisms, such as fireflies or jellyfish, as the result of specialized enzymatic reactions that require adenosine triphosphate. However, virtually all living organisms emit extremely weak light, spontaneously without external photoexcitation [1]. This biophoton emission is categorized in different phenomena of light emission from bioluminescence, and is believed to be a by-product of biochemical reactions in which excited molecules are produced from bioenergetic processes that involves active oxygen species [1], [2]. Human body is glimmering with light of intensity weaker than 1/1000 times the sensitivity of naked eyes [3], [4]. By using a sensitive charge-coupled-device (CCD) camera with the ability to detect light at the level of a single photon, we succeeded in imaging the spontaneous photon emission from human bodies [3].

Previously, for obtaining an image, it took more than 1 hour of acquisition, which is practically impossible for the analysis of physiologically relevant biophoton emission. By improving the CCD camera and lens system, here we have succeeded in obtaining clear images using a short exposure time, comparable with the analysis of physiological phenomena. Since metabolic rates are known to change in a circadian fashion [5], [6], we investigated the temporal variations of biophoton emission across the day from healthy human body.

Imaging of Ultraweak Spontaneous Photon Emission from Human Body Displaying Diurnal Rhythm

by Masaki Kobayashi1*, Daisuke Kikuchi1, Hitoshi Okamura2,3*
1 Department of Electronics and Intelligent Systems, Tohoku Institute of Technology, Sendai, Japan, 2 Department of Systems Biology, Kyoto University Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kyoto, Japan, 3 Department of Brain Science, Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine, Kobe, Japan

Joke du jour

НОВЫЕ ПАДЕЖИ РУССКОГО ЯЗЫКА

Любительный – кого? куда?
Извратительный – куда? чем?
Посылательный – на что? во что?
Пробивательный – по чем? , у кого?
Курительный – что? , с кем?
Палительный – что? , где? , когда? с кем?
Желательный – кого бы?
Ласкательный – как? , чем?
Залетательный – от кого? и какого хера?
Изменительный – с кем? и какого хера?
Ругательный – куда? , и какого хера?
Недоверительный – да ладно? , серьезно?
Просирательный – сколько? , где? , и че дома то не сиделось?
Тупительный – а?
Сомнительный - ты уверен? стоит ли? , а может не надо? , да ну? а если
не получится?
Болтательный – о ком? о чем? , чем?
Крутительный – на чем? , на чьём?
Вонятельный – кто??!
Бухательный – будешь?
Кончательный – ты всё?
Старательный – тебе понравилось? а сейчас?
Горноспасательный – что держать? ты куда?
Завлекательный – до дна? пойдем?
Мечтательный – ты на мне женишься? ты куда??

LRB on Miracles

Miracles, Marvels, Magic
by Caroline Walker Bynum
The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages by Robert Bartlett  Buy this book
The events and beliefs of the Middle Ages that have appeared unusual to later centuries have always attracted attention of two rather different sorts. One tendency has been to explain them away. For example, sophisticated and thoughtful about many religious phenomena though he was, in The Varieties of Religious Experience William James tended to reduce the mystical experiences of medieval women, especially when accompanied by bodily rigidity, swelling or trances, to psychological aberrations. Catholic scholars such as Herbert Thurston also attempted to explain a number of supposed miraculous occurrences such as stigmata or the incorruptibility of bodies after death as natural or artificially induced effects. For at least 150 years, chemists and biologists have delighted in pointing out that a red fungus known as micrococcus prodigiosus could account for alleged miracles of bleeding communion hosts. Art historians have occasionally suggested that new objects such as hanging lamps in the shape of doves or brightly painted statues might have caused visionary experiences when worshippers in dusty and smoke-filled churches mistook them for apparitions.Reductive explanations of this sort were not unknown even in the Middle Ages. Theologians and ecclesiastical authorities were aware that some miraculous hosts had mould on them; church lawyers ferreted out cases of feigned sanctity and fraudulent miracles; contemplatives wrote with great sophistication about the worrisome possibility that their visions and prophecies might be self-induced, self-validating or self-deceiving. Nicole Oresme, one of the greatest medieval mathematicians and philosophers, thought that most visionary experiences were the result of hallucinations or of eating too close to bedtime. The 13th-century Franciscan missionary William of Rubruck, who travelled to China and India, attributed tales of a people who have only one foot, which they use as a sunshade, to the fact that all Indians carried umbrellas.
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The alternative tendency has been not to explain away medieval beliefs but to exaggerate their outlandishness and the credulity of those who held them. Some of the most astonishing medieval miracle claims were propagated not by medieval writers but by Protestant chroniclers of the 16th century, intent on exposing and indicting Catholic superstition. It was a 19th-century German pastor who, on the basis of a philological and theological misunderstanding, created the story of a 14th-century abbess at Lippoldsberg who claimed to have the actual body of Jesus as a relic and had inflicted wound marks on it. As Paul Freedman and Gabrielle Spiegel pointed out a decade ago, contemporary medievalists have also turned to the study of the grotesque, the bizarre or the downright offensive, justifying this as a means of enabling modern readers to explore mechanisms of repression or titillation. Moreover, like the tendency to reductionism, an enthusiasm for the bizarre is not merely a contemporary taste. Medieval writers themselves collected tales of werewolves and monsters, of exotic plants and exotic peoples. Marco Polo delighted in stories of strange beasts such as giraffes without deploying any very differentiated language to categorise them. Medieval marvel-collectors were sometimes careful to bracket their reports with layers of textual framing that disclaimed eyewitness knowledge of improbable events, or to suggest that the perspective from which a phenomenon is viewed determines whether it is seen as ‘odd’. The same William of Rubruck who explained away the monopods as umbrella-carrying Indians reported that men at the court of the great Chan gazed at the friars ‘as if they were monsters’ because they went barefoot, and explained not only that he couldn’t find the supposed monstrous races in India but also that the Indians thought such bizarre peoples must be located far away in William’s own country. Nonetheless, medieval thinkers, like a number of medievalists today, accumulated, overemphasised and vastly enjoyed the improbable.Both of these tendencies can interfere with scholarship, however, because both deprive the past of its full complexity and hence its full power to help us understand how beliefs and events emerge, then as now. Robert Bartlett understands this very well. In The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages, four lectures given in Belfast, he does something much harder than merely divert us with medieval oddities or explain them away as misunderstandings. He explores the categories in which medieval people themselves thought about the phenomena of their world, whether they were as rare as dog-headed humans and lunar eclipses or as ordinary as the housefly that fascinated the 13th-century natural philosopher Roger Bacon. Elucidating some very complicated subject matter in graceful prose, Bartlett argues against the suggestion that there was a unified ‘medieval mind’ or a single ‘belief system’; nor does he fall into simple dichotomies of learned and popular, Latin and vernacular, religious and secular. For each phenomenon he considers and for each century between the ninth and the early 14th (Bartlett treats few thinkers beyond 1300), he finds many positions on the nature of the world and the peoples in it, and a developing complexity in the categories used to organise and explain them.Four lectures of some 50 minutes each make for a very short book. There has not been room for probing analysis, and the book makes no general argument about the development or the context of the ideas it deals with. Its great appeal lies in its clear, lively style and in the range of its subject matter. All of it will be new to the general reader, at whom the book is directed, and much will be unfamiliar to medievalists as well. In contrast to what one usually finds in published lectures, there is a surprising amount both of original research and of new insight into familiar texts. Bartlett’s treatment of witchcraft, for example, not only adds to the well-known Canon episcopi and Malleus maleficarum some obscure and relevant material from 11th-century Hungary, but uses all three sources to provide a more nuanced interpretation than the old cliché about there having been a simple progression from the persecution of witch-belief to the persecution of witches.In the first lecture, Bartlett deals with the emergence, primarily in what we call scholastic theology, of the category of ‘supernatural’, arguing that the very appearance of the category limited its scope. He then briefly suggests two phenomena as proof of this contraction of the supernatural realm: the disappearance of trial by ordeal in the 13th century, and the adoption of a new educational syllabus that privileged the naturalism and empiricism of Aristotle. In the second chapter, Bartlett explores the medieval understanding of the physical world, especially the investigation of eclipses and the elucidation of the relation of land to water through theories of the elements. The third chapter deals with medieval anthropology – that is, categorisations of the human – once again refusing either to dismiss or simply to marvel at them. Discussions of angels are interpreted as complex explorations of time and space; theories of witchcraft are neither reduced to expressions of misogyny nor explained away as misunderstandings of early medieval legislation; belief in the existence of monstrous races is shown to recede into the distance as exploration and missionary work widen. As Bartlett remarks, ‘Monsters are always elsewhere.’ The fourth lecture takes one of the most fascinating and enigmatic of medieval figures, the friar, scientist, theorist of empirical method, scholarly elitist (not to say snob) and adviser to ecclesiastical powers, Roger Bacon, as a case study in medieval concepts and education.Over the course of the 12th and 13th centuries, the thinkers whose diverse views and range of knowledge Bartlett surveys moved towards a greater sophistication of categories, sorting miracles (what was beyond or contrary to natural processes) from marvels (what was extraordinary, evoking wonder, yet potentially understandable within natural laws) and distinguishing both from magic (what appeared to violate natural process but was actually a manipulation of it). Nonetheless, as Bartlett observes (following Jacques Le Goff), medieval writers not only used the words miracula, mirabilia and magica remarkably flexibly and imprecisely, they also had more complex views of phenomena than their stated definitions suggest. Traditional ideas, coming from the time of the New Testament, claimed, on the one hand, that everything is a miracle because effected by providence, yet asserted, on the other, that from God’s own perspective nothing is a miracle because He understands all the causes and patterns of things. Some thinkers referred to magic as ‘non-true’ miracles but they meant that demons manipulated natural laws, not that they had the power to abrogate them; and some impeccably orthodox theologians, such as the bishop of Paris, William of Auvergne, thought there was a ‘natural magic’ that could make good use of nature’s rules to, for example, ward off thunder or increase the fertility of olive trees.Moreover, as Bartlett’s second and third lectures show, an event such as an eclipse was interpreted according to a plethora of conflicting intellectual systems. Natural philosophers inherited from antiquity an understanding of solar and lunar eclipses that was correct according to modern astronomical models, and this understanding was widely purveyed. Nonetheless, the sources not only give us a glimpse of the popular practice of shouting at the eclipsed moon to help her escape from the forces eating her but also demonstrate that educated preachers and chroniclers interpreted such astronomical events as signs of divine judgment and intent. Similarly, discussions of geography, which utilised the most advanced science of their day (the theory of the four elements), ranged from the theological to the purely naturalistic. Manegold of Lautenbach, writing in the later 11th century, denied that it was possible for there to be geographical areas completely cut off from the known world, on the grounds that the coming of Christ to save humankind would not then be universal; in contrast, Dante, writing in the early 1300s, accounted for the distribution of land and water over the globe by the entirely naturalistic theory that a protuberance in the sphere of earth-matter was drawn out by the influence of the stars.The contraction of the scope of the supernatural, to which Bacon’s vast opus gives ample testimony, never resulted in a simple denial of miracles or divine providence by medieval thinkers, although some, such as Oresme, came close to naturalising all explanation. But after the condemnation of a number of philosophical positions by church authorities in both France and England in the 1270s, there was considerable opposition to the idea that natural philosophical (in our terms, scientific) analysis of the physical world should be completely separate from theological discussion. Nonetheless, as the work of Alain Boureau has recently shown, there was no halt to naturalistic analysis not only of the physical world but also of the human body, and it was carried out in what seem to modern eyes quite incongruous contexts. Thinkers in the 14th century pursued audacious inquiries into the natural components of such events as the stigmata of holy people or the conception of Christ without claiming to reduce either their causation or their significance to laws of biology or physics. As Bartlett’s and Boureau’s analyses suggest, the drawing by intellectuals of a clearer but not an absolute line between supernatural and natural enhanced the sophistication of the analysis to which both were subjected.Throughout these essays, Bartlett is comfortable with the ambiguities and contradictions that shape the ideas and practices of real people, but which scholars often deny in an urge to tidy up the past. Non-specialist readers will find a number of asides that give an education in miniature in the nature of medieval sources. In the first lecture we have, for example, an explanation not only of that vast compendium of medieval saints’ lives prepared by the religious order known as the Bollandists between the 17th and the early 20th centuries but also of how, once such a compendium becomes (as it has) a database, a search for a particular word can shed new light on medieval attitudes. The argument of Henri de Lubac in the 1940s that the category of ‘supernatural’ (from supra naturam) emerged in the 13th century – an argument achieved by a lifetime of painstaking reading – can now, as Bartlett shows us, be corroborated almost in an instant by computerised searches.It is on page 106 that Bartlett asks the fundamental question which all this fascinatingly discordant material urgently suggests: ‘What do “we” do about beliefs “we” do not share?’ To this, Bartlett’s exposition gives at least a negative answer: what we do not do is dismiss them as mistakes or delusions, reduce them to psychological aberrations, or giggle at them as objects of amusement. There is, however, a fuller and more positive answer: we should try to see how such beliefs arose and adapted in their changing historical context, which needs they met and functions they served, which basic emotional, spiritual and political quandaries and paradoxes they evoked and addressed. We should do this because, if we can understand the many views of past times in all their complexity – and this includes taking account of their real differences from our own views, including the implausible ones – we can perhaps understand the way in which the ideas not just of intellectuals but of ordinary people arise and change and also refuse to change.This is fiendishly difficult to do. One approach is to embed the ideas in contemporary practices. One might ask, for example, what sorts of miracle did canon lawyers and ecclesiastical authorities confront? What were so-called magicians and alchemists actually doing in their studios and workshops? What sorts of practical administrative problem were university professors, clerical authorities, missionaries and mendicant preachers facing as they tried to educate groups and populations newly reached by urban preaching, by the spread of the parish system, by merchant adventuring and colonial conquest? In other words, did the physical transformations and human problems that medieval theorists explained with their ideas of nature and super-nature change over the years between 1000 and 1500?The 13th and 14th centuries did see a range of new miracles, such as stigmata, bleeding communion wafers and animated statues – that is, a sort of allegedly supra-natural event never alleged before. The period also saw a new confidence in manipulating matter, which was manifested both in the spread of alchemy and in the emerging claim that the artisan and the artist are creators. As Bartlett himself indicates, new races, objects and societies were encountered in the Far East, while older expectations were disappointed. Natural philosophers such as Bacon and Oresme, who developed universal theories to explain physical events (rays in the case of Bacon, geometrical configurations in the case of Oresme), confronted an intellectual world of developed systems in, for example, bookkeeping and law that no doubt stimulated a thinking in terms of balances and networks that was entirely foreign to theorists such as Manegold of Lautenbach two or more centuries earlier. Ideas, events and practices always change in a complex mutual relationship. If missionaries to the East and the New World did not find monstrous races, alchemists in their laboratories and church lawyers in canonisation trials did encounter new and quite plausible claims for astonishing material metamorphoses. As some of the ‘beliefs “we” do not share’ dissipated around 1300, others emerged. Putting them in their lived context will help us to understand how even today we deal – and must deal – with ‘beliefs “we” do not share.’

From the LRB letters page: [ 23 July 2009 ] John Gale.

Caroline Walker Bynum teaches medieval European history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

LeMonde: Du shopping a la russe

Ce n’est ni la place Vendôme ni l’avenue Montaigne. Pas plus que la rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré ou la place de la Madeleine! Pourtant, Hermès n’y est qu’à quelques pas de Chaumet et de Van Cleef. Yves Saint Laurent pas très éloigné de Fauchon, de Ladurée ou d’Hédiard. La Maison du chocolat y fait face à la Réunion des Musées nationaux (RMN). Nous ne sommes pas à Paris ou dans une grande capitale, mais à l’aéroport de Roissy – Charles-de-Gaulle, terminal 2E, dans la zone des boutiques hors taxes gérées par Aéroports de Paris (ADP). Car si le premier métier d’ADP reste la gestion aéroportuaire et notamment celle des plates-formes de Roissy et d’Orly, l’entreprise tire une partie non négligeable de ses revenus de son activité commerciale, devenue,depuis 2005,le deuxième poste de son chiffre d’affaires derrière les redevances aéroportuaires.
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Quatre ans plus tard, cette diversification s’avère gagnante: le chiffre d’affaires de cette activité est passé de 170 millions à 230 millions d’euros.Mieux: alors que, sur le premier trimestre 2009, le trafic passagers a reculé de 8,7%et que le chiffre d’affaires des boutiques aéroportuaires européennes est en baisse de plus de 9%, Aéroports de Paris voit son chiffre d’affaires boutiques croître de 4,4%.
Pour Pascal Bourgue, directeur marketing, commerces et communication, cette progression n’est pas une surprise. «C’est la combinaison de plusieurs leviers, dit-il : l’augmentation des surfaces de vente, une bonne implantation de ces surfaces sur les zones de flux et l’embauche de spécialistes issus de la grande distribution.» Le reste, Pascal Bourgue le reconnaît volontiers, c’est la French touch:«C’est l’attrait combiné de la marque Paris et du made in France. » Quelques chiffres le confirment: en un an, sur les deux seuls aéroports de Paris–RoissyetOrly–, il se vend 500000 tours Eiffel, plus de 350000 cravates, 2,5 millions de flacons de parfum et 150 tonnes de… fromage.
Ces ventes, toutefois, dépendent des nationalités des passagers. Selon une étude réalisée par le cabinet GMV Conseil au mois de juin pour le compte d’ADP,sur l’ensemble de ses terminaux, la palme du shopping en aéroport revient sans conteste aux passagers russes. Près de la moitié d’entre eux (47%) achètent dans les boutiques – principalement l’alcool, la mode et la beauté-parfumerie. Cuir et talons A la boutique Yves Saint Laurent, l’acheteur russe est «plutôt une acheteuse qui aime le cuir, le prêt-à-porter et les chaussures à hauts talons». Les Russes ne dédaignent pas non plus Hermès, toujours pour le prêt-à-porter, ainsi que la soie (carrés et cravates). Ils sont aussi très présents chez les joailliers Chaumet et chez Van Cleef, tout comme chez l’horloger
de luxe Royal Quartz. Une clientèle choyée « qui aime le très haut de gamme, les diamants, l’or jaune et
les montres à complications». Viennent ensuite les Chinois : près de quatre passagers sur dix se rendent dans les boutiques.A la différence de l’acheteur russe, qui ne consacre en moyenne qu’une quinzaine de minutes à ses achats, le voyageur chinois prend la peine d’arriver plus tôt à l’aéroport pour faire son shopping. Avec un penchant pour les alcools et le tabac. A la boutique Pure et Rare, on vend plus de 300 bouteilles de cognac par mois. «C’est dans cette boutique qu’à laveille de Noël 2008 un passager chinois a dépensé la somme record de 46423 euros en achetant plusieurs grands crus de bourgogne, dont un jéroboam La Tâche à 19990 euros et une romanée-conti 2002 à 4950euros », se souvient avec émotion le vendeur. Les voyageurs chinois restent
très sensibles aux produits «made in France». Brigitte,qui gère la boutique Richesse des régions de France, le confirme: «C’est une clientèle qui adore les marques comme Fauchon ou Petrossian». Côté parfum, ils plébiscitent les parfums miniatures Christian Dior, «qu’ils appellent souvent CD», précise une vendeuse de Beauty Unlimited.
Les marques d’abord! Les passagers en provenance et à destination d’Afrique noire représentent la troisième clientèle des boutiques, avec une préférence marquée pour les produits de beauté et les parfums, souvent «fruités pour les femmes et capiteux pour les hommes», commente une vendeuse, qui ajoute que ces derniers «n’hésitent pas à acheter quatre ou cinq flacons à la fois».
La clientèle japonaise, elle, achète en moyenne quatre objets – plus que n’importe quelle autre nationalité. Des acheteurs qui «connaissent les marques», relève l’enquête. Ce que confirme Elena, de la boutique de cosmétiques
L’Occitane: «Ils viennent avec leur prospectus, ils savent ce qu’ils veulent et que c’est deux fois et demi moins cher qu’au Japon», dit-elle.
Même constat chez Longchamp, le spécialiste du bagage et notamment du fameux «pliage»: «Ils connaissent tous nos modèles, commente la vendeuse. Mais, attention !, ajoute-t-elle, il faut avoir du stock, car si l’un des membres
du groupe achète un modèle, tout le reste va jeter son dévolu sur le même.»>

Hyper Photos

Read the article and go see the pics HERE They are AMAZING!


"On Time,” Jean-François Rauzier's gargantuan 32-by-66-foot panorama composed of several hundred seamless images of clocks, cliffs, buildings and ocean, is emblematic of the hours upon hours Rauzier spends to capture, compose and edit each of his Hyper-photo dreamscapes. In the photo, a man in black stands alone amidst a beach comprised entirely of clocks, thousands and thousands of clocks.

The surrealist aesthetic of the image is interesting in itself. But the truly amazing quality of the photograph lies in the hyper-realistic detail of it. The faces of the clocks, and there seems to be miles of them, can each be read as if directly in front of you. It's like staring into a finely detailed world that can never blur.

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Collage

“I agree that it may sound crazy,” Rauzier explains when asked why he spends the inordinate time it takes to manufacture only a single Hyper-photo image, “but I've been a photographer, painter and sculptor for 30 years, exploring these different techniques of expression up until 2001. At that time, I began my Hyper-photo work and I haven't needed to do anything else. I'm entirely satisfied. As a photographer, I can use this powerful art medium to capture reality. As a painter, I can control my image exactly and put what I want where I want. And as a sculptor, I savor spending a long time on my work, as a meditation, to have the pleasure to approach, touch and feel the texture, then back away to see the entire work. Hyper-photo is a combination of all of these.”

Each image that Rauzier assembles is a collage of between 600 to 1,000 individual close-up images, each taken one by one, using a telephoto lens over a period of one to two hours. Once the entire scene is captured, Rauzier stitches them together using Photoshop, working obsessively until the naked eye can't discern where each piece of the image begins or ends.
The composited images are of enormous proportions, wall-sized photos that you can almost walk into, literally, in the case of a recent exhibit at the Los Angeles Pacific Design Center, where three separate fabric prints of a Rauzier image were printed in a succession of enlargements, mimicking the feel of walking into the symmetrical world of the image. Each curtain was a doorway, opening to finer details that weren't easily noticeable upon first inspection—antiquated pictures submerged in the water of a lake, a picnicking couple along a river bank, even down to the texture of tree limbs and single blades of grass. The human eye isn't remotely able to capture the precise details of each Hyper-photo.

“No lens can give the perfect sharpness in one photo,” Rauzier says, “from as close as 12 inches up to infinity, that I can achieve by assembling 500 photos. It's interesting to know that the details exist, hidden in the picture, as in reality. And during an exhibition, I exhibit cropped and enlarged details. People go alternatively to the picture—and the details.”

Rauzier wants the viewer to have to decide whether the image is a photograph or a painting, or both, in some cases, as in the “Ideal Library of the Senate,” where some of the library patrons are photographed as paintings of prominent literary figures. Thematically, his ideas and images form puzzles themselves.

“I'm really dreaming awake—sometimes sleeping in front of my computer, oui, oui! I go to bed and awake always thinking about the image I'm making, as in a wonderful dream. During the long period of time it takes me to work on my image, my imagination is working, especially when I'm sleeping in front of the computer, and a story is coming step by step.

“Objects and people are telling it,” he continues. “Some objects are recurrent—snakes, apples, cats, roses, mystic or sexual symbols—things we have in our unconscious minds. Always existential questions: Why are we here? What must we do? Are we responsible for the good and the bad? My recurrent themes are the original sin, the innocence of a child that's lost very quickly and we don't remember exactly when and how.”

Puzzle Pieces

“First I need large landscapes, fields and deserts, other escapes,” Rauzier explains. “Most of the time, a landscape inspires me. I have an emotion, but I can't really see how the final image will be. It's very important to know that because it was difficult for me at first. It's exactly the opposite of photography. As a classic photographer, I look in my viewfinder and shoot and I have my picture. In the case of the Hyper-photo, in the viewfinder, I just see details. I tried every wide-angle viewfinder as a movie director would, but it's impossible to have 360-degree vision; 180-degree viewfinders exist, but there's so much distortion that we can't imagine the result. So when I shoot, I have some ideas, but I don't know how it will be in the end. It's always an adventure, a discovery of a parallel world.”

Adds Rauzier, “Now, I also explore towns, industry, urban places—any great locations with a lot of details and material to work with. For some pictures, such as the “Ideal Library of the Senate,” “Latest News,” the very surrealistic images, I have a very precise idea before taking pictures and have to find the location closest to my idea to create it. Some, like “NY Reservoir,” are by chance. I was invited to a party and had a shock seeing the view from the flat. I just had to come back, shoot and respect the reality, enhancing some things, but changing very little.”

Rauzier's minute changes can be significant, though. “To create my ideal world,” he says, “I remove whatever signifies human presence in order to give the landscape its original virginity, perhaps a quest for the Garden of Eden. In a landscape, I'll try to re-create the original nature—timeless fields, even though planted by man, without ugly electric cables, houses, roads, cars—anything that was added recently, except for the objects I add to tell a story, to say something. Often abandoned objects, unexpected things.”

At the same time that he's removing things, Rauzier will place any number of photographically found objects, whatever he feels he needs to complete an image. Basketballs sit motionless in a still desert, dogs float on high-backed chairs along a shoreline, abandoned bicycles are strewn about an otherwise abandoned road. Many of these he will shoot in the studio, using a medium-format camera to avoid having to join together more images than already necessary.
Stitching

“In order to achieve panoramic images, I first tried panoramic cameras and wide-angle lenses,” Rauzier explains, “but was frustrated by not being able to control the distortion and ending up with a very typical panoramic and wide-angle effects. I began to shoot four to 10 pictures and stitch them together. After I mastered the process, it became a constant buildup until it was thousands of pictures.”

Of his equipment, Rauzier says, “I've used several cameras, mainly Fuji and Nikon. For studio work, I usually use the latest digital Hasselblad. Not using the same equipment all the time keeps me up with the latest technological advances that go along with the Hyper-photo's constant need for more precision and growth. I'm always looking for the best equipment and am not tied to anything in particular.”

Rauzier will use his Hasselblad in the field when he can, but prefers to carry his SLR cameras when he travels, as they're lighter and less expensive. When shooting with the high resolution of a medium-format camera, Rauzier makes fewer exposures in the field, but due to the extremely detailed and time-intensive nature of his work, there's still a never-ending struggle with the limitations of technology—restricted depth of field, blur due to the wind, flaring, etc.

“I shoot very systematically, shot by shot, with a graduated tripod,” says Rauzier. “I know that I've got the entire scene when I've shot all I can see! I try to not forget any details, even without interest, because when I skipped over some areas that apparently held no interest, I had holes in the image that were very hard to fill. It's better to capture everything, more than I need. I carry many memory cards and fill them quickly. The files are more than 30 to 40 gigabytes for a flattened image. I have no desire to be reasonable and reduce the size. I can't. It's a mutilation.”

Continues Rauzier, “I use Apple computers and Apple displays. I tried many programs, but now I use only Photoshop. It has many shortcomings for me, 3 GB of RAM maximum, but it's the only one that can manage the 30 to 40 GB files I'm making now. I need a 1 terabyte scratch disk and will soon use a RAID server. It works very slowly on the hard drive, but it works.”

Even though the time spent taking the image is less than the time spent putting it together comparatively, there can be a tremendous color shift between the first press of the shutter and the final shot of the image, especially at sunrise or sunset. In order to match images so flawlessly, Rauzier has to adjust each of them, often even single aspects within each image, with levels, color balance and hue/saturation.

Says Rauzier, “Practice, practice, practice is the only way I've been able to get good at it.”

Realization

“I can say I now take pictures everywhere I go,” Rauzier says. “When I was in L.A., I planned to take the big city, cars, freeways; instead I shot trees, cactus and flowers! I had an idea of L.A., but I discovered something else, very exotic and rich for my creativity. So I can't plan too much ahead of time. I know it when I see it. I shoot all that's interesting and have a huge library of images. Some pictures I took a few years ago and never put together, but I know they're on my hard drives as well as in my mind.

“For example, for “On Time,” I shot the beach of Étretat one year ago. I knew I'd do something with it. This beach, the atmosphere, and the shock I had in seeing how the stones had disappeared was so moving for me that I couldn't work on it before I had a great idea. When a man showed me his collection of alarm clocks, I had suddenly the idea for that image.”

Even after completing an image, for Rauzier, there's no time to rest: “When I finish an image, I'm very frustrated and depressed and need to start another one immediately. I'll soon show this work more often on screens as slideshows or movies of the Hyper-photos. It's the only way to see all the details and it's a fascinating trip. And eventually technology may catch up.”


To see more of Jean-François Rauzier's work, visit www.hyper-photo.com

TLS on Joseph Banks

on Joseph Banks

August 12, 2009

Linnaeus at the service of England

How an empire depended on Sir Joseph Banks and a systematic approach to botany
by Jim Endersby

On September 29, 1781, Dr Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of this year’s unavoidable Darwin) wrote to Joseph Banks, asking for permission to dedicate a small book of translations to him. The translations were of the botanical writings of Carl von Linné, now better known as Linnaeus. In the letter (collected in the first of six volumes of The Scientific Correspondence), Darwin explained that he and the Lichfield botanical society had decided to translate Linnaeus’s Latin into English with a view to “propagating the knowledge of Botany”, and hoped to secure Banks’s blessing for their enterprise, given “the knowledge of your general love of science & your philanthropy to wish that science to be propagated amongst your countrymen”.
Darwin’s translation appeared two years later as A System of Vegetables according to their Classes, etc, and was prefaced by the dedicatory letter, which congratulated Banks on the rare and excellent example you have given, so honourable to science, of foregoing the more brilliant advantages of birth and fortune, to seek for knowledge through difficulties and dangers, at a period of life when the allurements of pleasure are least resistible, and in an age when the general effeminacy of manners seemed beyond that of former times to discourage every virtuous exertion, justly entitles you to the preeminence you enjoy in the philosophical world.
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Banks had sought for knowledge “through difficulties and dangers” by joining Captain James Cook on the Endeavour’s voyage to Tahiti in 1768, from which he had returned laden with natural history specimens that added hugely to European knowledge of the plant world. Banks transformed his home into a virtual museum of the Pacific, and visitors were often dumbfounded by what they saw, including more than 30,000 plant specimens, which encompassed 110 new genera and 1,400 new species. The collections certainly brought Banks pre-eminence in the “philosophical world”, as the scientific world was known at the time, but his motive was hardly the “philanthropy” that Darwin politely ascribed to him. For Banks and most of his contemporaries, botany was primarily of economic importance; discovering and naming plants was the first step towards exploiting them for commercial gain. As Darwin’s preface to the System of Vegetables proclaimed, “the future improvements in Agriculture, in Medicine, and in many inferior Arts, as dying, tanning, varnishing; with many of the more important Manufactures, as of paper, linen, cordage; must principally arise from the knowledge of BOTANY”.
Neil Chambers’s collections of Banks’s letters not only provide an invaluable scholarly resource, but give a wonderful flavour of the world that produced Banks, and which he then proceeded to shape. The Scientific Correspondence contains over 2,200 items, and the first volume of The Indian and Pacific Correspondence adds another 250 to these (predominantly letters received by Banks). The standard against which projects of this kind must inevitably be compared is The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge University Press), now in its seventeenth volume, and the Banks correspondence emerges fairly well from the comparison. Each letter has been meticulously transcribed, complete with additions and deletions; however, while the footnotes in the newest series are slightly more comprehensive than those in the earlier one, they remain rather basic compared with the wealth of scholarship that accompanies Darwin’s letters.
Banks’s letters clearly demonstrate his commitment to Britain’s imperial interests and to accurate plant classification as a means to those imperial ends. The links between them are evident in a letter from William Roxburgh in India that Banks received in November 1779. Roxburgh had gone to India as assistant surgeon on one of the East India Company’s ships, then set up in general practice in Madras, where he met Johann Gerhard Koenig, a former pupil of Linnaeus, who introduced Linnaean botany to India. Encouraged by Koenig, Roxburgh became a keen botanist, and was eventually appointed the first paid superintendent of the Company’s botanic garden in Calcutta.
In his letter, Roxburgh described some new plants he was sending, and emphasized “the astringent qualities of the Terminalia Myrobalana (Myrobal. Citrin.)”. The genus Terminalia had received its name from Linnaeus himself in 1767 (in the thirteenth edition of the Systema Naturae), but assigning the plant to the correct species was more difficult, as Roxburgh’s parenthesis shows. In 1774 the tree had received the name Myrobalanifera citrina from Petrus Houttuyn, professor of botany at Leiden, and it is now called Terminalia catappa. Yet it still goes by many different common names, including Indian almond, Bengal almond, Malabar almond, Sea bean tree and Umbrella tree; it has several Hindi names, including Baadaam, Deshi badam and Jangli badam; in Malay it’s Ketapang; and in Nepalese Kaathe badaam. And the University of Melbourne’s multilingual, multi-script plant names database (www.plantnames.unimelb.edu.au) lists dozens of others.
Putting an end to this botanical Babel had been a key motive for Linnaeus’s reforms, and while much clearly remained to be done in Banks’s time, the situation was greatly improved compared to that of a generation earlier, when each country’s botanists tended to use their own language and system of names. Roxburgh’s letter also makes it clear why accurate, unambiguous names mattered so much: “I think \[Terminalia Myrobalana\] will prove the strongest vegetable Astringent known”, he wrote, telling Banks that he used it to make ink and that it was also used by the Chinese in dyes and paints: “without it their colours would run like Ink on Blotting Paper”. He was therefore convinced that “it would prove a great acquisition to a Commercial Nation”. But only if the right plant, and the best variety of that plant, could be obtained and grown.
Sweden’s commercial interests had persuaded Linnaeus that new, simpler and more accurate names were needed in order to ensure that botanists’ time and money were well spent. Banks shared these concerns, and the adoption of the new names marked an important shift away from the cultures of curiosity, within which gentlemen like Banks had traditionally operated. Until the mid-eighteenth century, educated virtuosi such as Banks had collected anything and everything that was rare and curious; the practical uses of such collections were beneath a gentleman’s notice. However, Linnaeus’s standardized names were intended to put the plant world to work, to transform rare flowers into commodities that could be bought and sold, traded and transplanted. Linnaeus’s names allowed accurate communication between naturalists around the world. By adopting them, Banks aligned himself with Britain’s mercantile concerns and devoted himself to the use of science in the cultivation of empire. Unsurprisingly, Darwin’s plan to translate Linnaeus into English received Banks’s enthusiastic support.
By the time Erasmus Darwin wrote to him, Banks was becoming one of Europe’s best-known naturalists, but when he had set sail with Cook, he had been just one among many gentleman naturalists. His only previous, brief expedition to Newfoundland had produced neither great discoveries nor a major publication. Hearing that Cook was about to take the Endeavour to Tahiti, an excited Banks told his old school friend, William Perrin, that the South Seas had “never been visited by any man of Science in any Branch of Literature”. Joining the voyage would give Banks an opportunity to make a name for himself among Europe’s men of science.
As an ambitious young naturalist, Banks had one major asset – the huge tracts of land that made up the Revesby estate in Lincolnshire, which his father had left him when he was still in his teens. He soon abandoned his studies at Oxford and spent much of his time in London, attending scientific meetings and studying the natural history collections at the British Museum, where he became close friends with the assistant librarian, Daniel Solander, a Swede who had studied under Linnaeus. Solander advised Banks on the equipment he would need for his first voyage, and when the opportunity to sail with Cook presented itself, Banks persuaded Solander to take leave from the museum and join him – and paid him to do so.
At a time when most British expeditions depended on the ship’s surgeon to make natural history collections when and if their patients allowed them to, Banks’s deep pockets ensured that Cook’s scientific complement would exceed any seen before. Banks wrote to Perrin to tell him that, in addition to Solander, “I take also besides ourselves two men to draw & four more to Collect in the different branches of Nat. Hist. & such a Collection of Bottles Boxes Baskets bags nets &c &c &c: as almost frighten me”. Banks not only paid the salaries of all those who came with him, but provided their equipment and supplies. One of his contemporaries, the naturalist John Ellis, described the expedition’s equipment in a letter to Linnaeus, asserting that:
No people ever went to sea better fitted out for the purpose of Natural History, nor more elegantly. They have got a fine library of natural history; they have all sorts of machines for catching and preserving insects; all kinds of nets, trawls, drags and hooks for coral fishing; they have even a curious contrivance of a telescope, by which, put into the water, you can see the bottom to a great depth where the water is clear . . . besides there are many people whose sole business it is to attend them for this very purpose.
Ellis added that, according to Solander, the expedition’s equipment had cost over £1,000 (about £1 million in today’s money). Banks’s contribution was a quarter of that provided by the King himself; no wonder he was “almost frightened” by his own ambition.
It was to be July 1771 before Banks would again write “London” at the head of a letter, in which he briefly described to Perrin the expedition’s return. “Mr Buchan Mr Parkinson & Mr Sporing are all dead as is our astronomer & seven officers & about a third part of the Ships crew of Diseases contracted in the East Indies”. Yet despite these losses, the voyage with Cook was a resounding success from Banks’s perspective: he came home even more celebrated than his captain and traded his collections, expertise and fame for a vital role at the heart of Britain’s expanding empire. Despite holding no official government positions for most of his career, he became – as one of his friends put it – “HM minister of philosophic affairs”, de facto science minister to the King.
One striking aspect of these volumes is the range of Bank’s correspondents: in addition to a Who’s Who of naturalists from across Europe, there are also letters from the engineers Matthew Boulton and James Watt, and from Dr Johnson, as well as a considerable collection of noblemen and aristocrats, many of whom were more or less formally in charge of Britain’s government and the management of its empire. The sheer size of Banks’s collections made him famous, and everyone with scientific interests and ambitions came to call – either in person or by letter – seeking his friendship, advice and support. Linnaeus himself wrote (in Latin; he neither spoke nor read English), to congratulate Banks on the voyage and described him as “Tu gloria Angliae non tantum, sed totius orbis; Tu nostrum eris Oraculum!” (You are the glory not only of England, but of the whole world. You will be our Oracle!). Banks began to transform his celebrity into a web of friendship, patronage and influence that allowed him to grant favours, open doors and find positions for his friends and protégés.
Among his most regular correspondents was James Edward Smith, President of the Linnean Society of London, who shared his enthusiasm for promoting the Linnaean system. They had known each other since Smith had been a young medical student with a passion for natural history who, hoping to make a name for himself as a naturalist, had turned to Banks for encouragement and patronage. In December 1783, the two were having breakfast when a letter arrived from Sweden, announcing that Linnaeus’s son was dead (Linnaeus himself had died five years earlier) and offering to sell Banks all the Linnaean collections – for a thousand guineas. Deciding he had no space to store the collections, Banks suggested that Smith should buy them instead, since owning such an important collection would immediately give him the reputation he wanted. Smith, having persuaded his father, a wealthy cloth merchant, to part with the equivalent of over £1 million, bought the whole of Linnaeus’s collections, books, stuffed specimens, dried plants, anthropological artefacts and scientific instruments. A few years later, in 1788, he helped to found the Linnean Society at his home in London to look after the collections, and it rapidly became an important venue for naturalists wanting to meet and exchange ideas and specimens.
By bringing Linnaeus’s collections to London, Smith and the Linnean Society had effectively annexed the Linnaean system of classification, adding a new colony to the British empire of knowledge. And Banks, despite his occasional concern that specialized scientific societies would undermine the prestige of the Royal Society (of which he was President from 1778 until his death), was among the Linnean Society’s earliest members. He proudly told an Italian correspondent that “Linnaeus’s herbarium has been purchased by an Englishman & is safely arrived here so we are masters of the definitions of Species Plantarum”.
Banks shared the Society’s goal of ensuring the simple and easily understood Linnaean system of plant names should be used as widely as possible, especially in all of Britain’s botanic gardens, so that they could help reduce the country’s dependence on imports. In the year that the Linnean Society was founded, Banks received a letter from the politician Charles Jenkinson (who would become the first Baron Hawkesbury and Earl of Liverpool for his services to the King), which complained that importing Chinese tea was costing Britain between £600,000 and £700,000 a year (about £800 million today). Since “there is no possibility of preventing the consumption of tea even to its present amount”, Jenkinson felt that “the only Object We can aim at is, to produce the Article ourselves”, pointing to earlier successes with coffee and sugar, “which we now produce in abundance in our colonies”. Banks used the expertise he had drawn from correspondents like Roxburgh to propose that India, a country he never set foot in, might be suitable for tea-growing. Inspired by his suggestion, British botanists eventually found an Indian variety of Camellia sinensis (known as assamica), which broke the Chinese monopoly on the tea trade.
Jenkinson’s letter has yet to be published in this series; researchers will have to wait for the remaining volumes, which will be appearing annually until 2013, to read it and the many others (most of which have never been published before) that relate to the development and exploitation of India. Given the substantial cost of producing a printed edition like this, and considering the state of most university libraries’ finances, some researchers will no doubt regret the publisher’s decision not to produce these in an electronic format. An online edition would also have allowed the new letters to be added in sequence with those already published, whereas at present the Banks correspondence is becoming scattered over several different series of books. An electronic version would also have made it easier to find specific letters, topics or correspondents (which would be especially valuable given the inadequate index to these volumes).
One of Banks’s last letters to James Smith, December 1817, praised Smith’s article on botany in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, confessing himself to be “highly Gratified by the distinguished situation in which you have Placed me”. He also complimented Smith for his “defence of the Linnaean Natural Classes”, which Banks described as “Ingenious Entertaining & it Evinces a deep Skill in the Mysteries of Classification”. Yet, despite their continuing friendship, Banks was beginning to have his doubts about the venerable Linnaean system and he told Smith that “I Fear you will differ from me in opinion when I Fancy Jussieus Natural Orders to be Superior to Those of Linnaeus”. In referring so favourably to the French natural system of classification, founded by Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and developed by Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle, Banks must have been sure that he and Smith would “differ”, since Smith and the Linnean Society were still zealously defending the Linnaean system (which had come to be seen as essentially British) from its French rival. Their patriotic conservatism had gradually turned British botany into an intellectual backwater, as became clear the following year when Smith attempted to get himself appointed as professor of botany at the University of Cambridge. He failed and, dismayed by his rejection, publicly criticized the university for its prejudices.
The university’s Professor of Greek, James Monk, attacked the upstart Smith in an article in the Quarterly Review which suggested that the very simplicity and ease of use that had made the Linnaean system so popular was now being turned against it. Monk argued that botanical science “was a pursuit which demanded little exertion of the highest powers of intellect” and suggested that the Linnean Society (which had of course supported Smith) should have called in Its auxiliary forces, the Horticultural and Gooseberry Societies, with their irregular troops, the tulip fanciers and prize auricula men: and what with their scientific arrangements, classifications, and pruning hooks, they no doubt would have formed a very imposing body and might have taken the Botanical Chair by storm.
It was precisely the usefulness of botany, which made it so valuable to men like Banks, that damaged its intellectual standing. In the decades following Banks’s death, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which he had done so much to nurture and develop, would become the graveyard of the Linnaean botanical system, as its director, Joseph Hooker, and his colleague, George Bentham, produced their monumental Genera Plantarum (1862– 83), based on the French classificatory system. Nevertheless, the global reach that Kew and its collectors attained under Hooker’s leadership was the fulfilment of Banks’s dream, to see the gardens become “a great botanical exchange house for the empire”.


Neil Chambers, editor
THE SCIENTIFIC CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR JOSEPH BANKS, 1765–1820
Six Volumes 3,088pp. £595 (US $1,050).
978 1 85196 766 7

THE INDIAN AND PACIFIC CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR JOSEPH BANKS, 1768–1820
Volume One
464pp. £100 (US $180).
978 1 85196 835 0
Pickering and Chatto



Jim Endersby lectures in History at the University of Sussex. He has recently edited a new edition of the Origin of Species, published earlier this year.