Studies in Fiction

Gothic Opera in Britain and in France

2008-02-11T10:56:00.000Z

Gothic Opera in Britain and France: Genre, Nationalism, and Trans-Cultural Angst

Authors

Diane Long Hoeveler
Marquette University

Sarah Davies Cordova
Marquette University

Abstract

Rescue operas developed along two somewhat different lines: “tyrant” operas and “humanitarian” operas within the general category of “opera semiseria,” or “opéra comique.” The first type corresponds to the conservative British “loyalty gothic,” with its focus on the trials and tribulations of the aristocracy, while the second type draws upon the Sentimental “virtue in distress” or “woman in jeopardy” genre, with its focus on middle class characters or women as the captured or besieged. The first category emphasized political injustice or abstract questions of law and embodied the threat of tyranny in an evil man who imprisons unjustly a noble character. Etienne Méhul’s Euphrosine and H.-M. Berton’s Les rigueurs du cloître (both 1790) are typical examples of the genre. “Humanitarian” operas, on the other hand, do not depict a tyrant, but instead portray an individual—usually a woman or a worthy bourgeois—who sacrifices everything in order to correct an injustice or to obtain some person’s freedom. Dalayrac’s Raoul, Sire de Créqui (1789) or Bouilly’s and Cherubini’s Les deux journées (1800) are examples, along with Sedaine’s pre-1789 works. But why, we might ask, were gothic dramas quickly transformed into gothic operas or what are known now as “rescue operas”? This essay examines the social and political ideologies that are explicit in the major gothic operatic adaptations of the most popular gothic novels of Britain, while at the same time examining British opera’s very close connections with French models as well as French adaptations of British cultural works.

... Mais ce n’est pas aux orateurs révolutionnaires que les romantiques vont demander des leçons de style, c’est à la Révolution en personne, à ce langage fait Histoire, lequel se signifie par des évènements qui sont des déclarations: La Terreur, on le sait bien, ne fut pas seulement terrible à cause des exécutions, elle le fut parce qu’elle se revendiqua elle-même sous cette forme majuscule, en faisant de la terreur la mesure de l’histoire et le logos des temps modernes.[1]

I: Introduction

1 The term “British opera” has often been thought an oxymoron. In fact, as the Italian opera made its way into eighteenth-century London it was greeted by outright hostility and contempt by such intellectuals as Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and numerous others.[2] As a wholly imported art form, arriving fully developed and with its own conventions set largely in place already, opera somehow had to find a way to adapt to British culture before it could be accepted by the public as a legitimate and viable art and form of entertainment. That opera did survive—and thrive—in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain is due, we think, not to the quality of the music, most of which is forgettable, but to the power of the genre’s ability to translate and stage potent ideological materials in a revolutionary age. And that ideological material—fear of violent revolution and its effects on what had been a stable class system—is largely the same content that was developed in the gothic novels of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Charlotte Dacre, and then in the gothic dramas of such adapters as James Boaden, Henry Siddons, and Lewis. These gothic novels and dramas most frequently took as their subjects the unlawful imprisonments of innocent victims of tyranny, released after heroic efforts by disinherited men who regain their rightful lands and title only after proving their worth. Most of these works read now like wish fulfillment, fairy tales or worse, but they were extremely popular and, as such, deserve our critical attention as important ideological markers for their culture.

2 Paula Backsheider has suggested that gothic dramas are “the earliest example[s] of what we call mass culture ... an artistic configuration that becomes formulaic and has mass appeal, that engages the attention of a very large, very diverse audience, and that stands up to repetition, not only of new examples of the type but production of individual plays” (150). But why, we might ask, were gothic dramas quickly transformed into gothic operas or what are known now as “rescue operas”? This essay examines the social and political ideologies that are explicit in the major gothic operatic adaptations of the most popular gothic novels of Britain, while at the same time examining British opera’s very close connections with French models as well as French adaptations of British cultural works.

3 What is most curious about all of these works is their use of the theme of escape from unjust imprisonment. In fact, the endlessly repeated motif of imprisonment and escape (from a tunnel, a tower, a labyrinth, a camp of pirates, a boat of kidnappers, etc.) is so pervasive that the modern critic knows that it bears the weight of the opera’s ideological meaning. But that is precisely where the confusion begins. Is the capture and escape meant to embody a politically and socially conservative message and a direct warning to the protagonists of the drama, and, by extension, to the audience? Or is the message one of revolution and liberation from tyranny and injustice? When one examines these rescue operas in and of themselves and not simply as inferior productions intended for a mass audience, one can see that each of the operas—in both Britain and France— participates in the ongoing national debate about the proper role of the monarchy, the threat of violent revolution, the shock of sudden class transformation, the anxiety of changing gender roles within the family structure, and, finally, the construction of newly nationalistic countries that seek to justify the means they have each taken to modernize and secularize.

4 Jeffrey Cox has observed in relation to romantic drama and the French Revolution, that when history itself becomes theatrical, theatre responds by “translating the representation of revolt from history to myth” (241). With this in mind, we might ask, what ideology undergirds gothic drama and opera? Are they, as Peter Brooks has observed about melodrama, essentially conservative, a means of reinstating social and political order (15), or can they be understood as a species of what Hayden White has called “anarchistic,” in that it calls for a dissolution of current institutions in order to reclaim a more humane community that existed sometime in the past (24-5)? “Rescue operas” are not simply a politically conservative discourse system as has generally been argued, but rather they intend to present something like an anarchistic warning by constructing a distant past that the opera reshapes as redeemable through the elimination of corrupt aristocrats. Each opera presents a political and social warning to the monarchy: reform or be overthrown by violence, which certainly would seem to constitute something of an anarchist message. The specter of the French Revolution hangs over each of these works and all of them introduce middle-class characters who embody the best of what Britain and France must become if they are to avoid violent and chaotic fates. The operas clearly are attempting to mediate between classes, races, and genders that saw themselves as being at odds over the shape and power structure of the newly evolving bourgeois society. In fact, the operas, like dramas, actually function as cathartic forms, public rituals in which the middle class haunted itself with its own act of imagined, fantasized revolution, usually depicted as some form of matricide or fratricide in a series of what we might see as social and political morality plays. The middle class audience flocked to these plays that presented its own mythology of origins, its own “Hyperion”-like creation of a new order built on the shorn backs of an aristocracy that quite simply did not deserve to survive.

5 As Robert Miles has noted, those involved in the invention of the gothic embraced the hieratic function of keeping alive the sacred mementoes of the race. But ideological conservatism intersected with the democratic nature of artistic production for the masses, creating what Foucault has called a site of “power/knowledge” at odds with itself. As a site of opposing strategies, rescue operas became a “hazardous play of dominations” seeking to compose for itself a coherent position amid rapid social, historical, and cultural transformations. It is, according to Miles, in the moments of slippage and discontinuity that the ideological business of the gothic aesthetic is most apparent (32). For him, the gothic aesthetic incorporates an idealized national identity together with a myth of origins (50). This position is very close to that most recently put forward by James Watt in his Contesting the Gothic (1999). For Watt, the 1790s through the early 1800s were dominated by what he calls the creation of “Loyalist Gothic” romances. He sees these works as reactions to Britain’s defeat in America in that they consistently portray a proud heritage of military victory played out within an unambiguous moral and political agenda. Setting their action around besieged castles, these operas present a stratified yet harmonious society, use real historical figures from the British military pantheon (Richard the Lion Hearted was a particular favorite), and consistently depict the defeat of effeminate or foreign villains. Loyalist gothics are structurally bound to depict an act of usurpation which is always corrected, often through the supernatural agency of a ghost (7). We might legitimately ask, however, why loyalty gothics would be so popular in a country like France, on the verge of overthrowing its king and establishing a republic? Was the viewing of opera and melodrama in which the rightful heir is rescued from those infinitely lower in rank and honor a form of nostalgic denial? A denial of parricide?

6 When Handel died in 1759 the Universal Chronicle printed an epitaph that saluted him as a musician “whose compositions were a sentimental language rather than mere sounds; and surpassed the power of words in expressing the various passions of the human heart.”[3] Delight and the expression of strong emotions was seen in this era as a part of the human condition, and Handel’s oratorios fit into the three main compositional styles that had been defined by Charles Avison in his Essay on Musical Expression (1752): the grand or sublime, the beautiful or serene, and the pathetic or devout, plaintive, or sorrowful. In a similar vein, James Beattie observed that “mere descriptions, however beautiful, and moral reflections, however just, become tiresome, where our passions are not occasionally awakened by some event that concerns our fellow-men” (qtd Schmidgall 37). The operas and oratorios of this period can be “read” as a “series of passionate or affective vignettes” which appear to portray the actions and emotions of their characters in a piecemeal fashion. Schmidgall sees Handel as working in the “passion-based aesthetic” of his time. His airs particularly attempt to express idealized versions of one of the passions of the human heart and therefore they reveal the eighteenth-century bias toward generalizing, and one thinks of Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions in this context. The Cartesian assumption that passions or emotions are definite in character, concrete in form, and separable in the mind led Shaftesbury to claim that human passions rather than reason were the “springs of action.” Shaftesbury attempted then to categorize the passions as “natural or social” affections directed toward the general welfare; “the self or private” affections directed toward the individual’s own good; and the “unnatural” affections directed toward neither. In Germany this tendency to systematize led to the theory of Affektenlehre, the doctrine that explained how the passions could be portrayed in music, leading to the belief that dramatic music must deal in various specific human emotions in order to evoke a pathetic response from its audience (Schmidgall 38-9). But this brings us to the Germanic attempt to define “rescue opera,” that musical experiment to translate the British gothic sensibility, complete with all its paranoia, claustrophobia, persecution mania, and ambivalence toward authority, onto the opera stage and which probably had its first incarnation in Friedrich von Schiller’s 1781 robber rescue drama, Die Raüber.

II: Definitions

7 Defining “rescue opera” musicologically and developing a clear and concise history for this genre has been fraught with difficulty. David Charlton has claimed that the term itself is unhistorical and of limited usefulness because it “plays false on three levels [of] the musical theatre that it purports to represent” (“On Redefinitions” 169). First of all, the term does not distinguish between works of different moral purposes or dramatic styles. Secondly, the term relies on a blanket notion of “rescue,” but does not take into consideration all of the other moral actions involved. Thirdly, the term ignores eighteenth-century definitions of its own theater. In summarizing all of the meanings for the term that have been proposed by musicologists as eminent as Winton Dean et al., Charlton claims that all of these attempts at definition “fail to account for certain operas and tendencies” (“On Redefinitions” 169). For him, rescue operas are not part of what he calls “an authentic genre like ‘opera buffa.’” Instead, the term was coined only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a legacy of that movement that sought to label music by the use of one word (e.g., Humanitätsmelodie). Dyneley Hussey used the term “rescue opera” to describe Beethoven’s Fidelio in 1927, while Karl M. Klob labeled these works “das sogenannte Rettungsoder Befreiungsstück,” (our translation: “the genre of the so-called rescue or deliverance operas”), suggesting that the term had become useful as a means of connecting the German Fidelio to the French tradition. As Charlton observes, the term “rescue” is problematic in that it suggests a happy resolution, the use of a deus ex machina to resolve complications much in the manner of opera seria.[4] Yet the sudden reversals of fortune which many of the rescue operas stage resemble less the coup de théâtre of classical theater which corresponded to the shifting alliances among royals and more to the “tableau” in which everyone is (re)united in and because of their desire to be happy. For our purposes it might be useful to draw the following analogy: the genre of “opera semiseria” is the musical equivalent of the literary genre of melodrama, while “rescue opera” is the staged correlative of the “roman frénétique/noir” or gothic novel.

8 Most musicologists agree that Michel-Jean Sedaine (1719-97) was the founder of the rescue opera-melodrama. They cite his very successful Richard coeur-de-lion (1784) as the originator of the genre. Indeed it was in its genre as successful as Beaumarchais’ Mariage de Figaro for the 1780s decade.[5] Claiming that he wrote light opéras comiques larmoyants in the Italian style, Sedaine particularly influenced René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773-1844), who in turn recognized his artistic paternity when he stated that melodrama was a “musical drama in which the music is played by the orchestra instead of being sung” (qtd Rahill 18) and was to be known as “l’école de Sedaine perfectionnée” [trans: “the school of Sedaine perfected” (Ledbury 248)].

9 Sedaine’s originality stemmed from his belief that drama should deal with political and moral issues and, in the rescue operas, he explores the theme of “unjust detention.” In each case the reasons for detention are different, and even though the plot emphasizes the excitement of the danger and tension found in the actual rescue, the underlying ideology portrayed avoided the simplistic moral categories of the popular melodramas dominating the French stage. The dungeon, which did not originate as a metaphor because of the Bastille, but because of its role in medieval literature, had by then become popular in England with the successes of such gothic novels as The Monk and The Italian. By the mid-eighteenth century, the prison was the trope most frequently referenced in these works, in addition to the imprisonment of the Philosophes for their publications and work on the Encyclopédie, as well as the arbitrary and infamous uses of the lettres de cachet.

10 Whereas Richard coeur-de-lion and Le Comte D’Albert (1786) concern the rescue of an aristocrat after violent assaults on prisons and the dramatic collapse of much pasteboard scenery on stage, Le Roi et le fermier (1762), one of many operas Sedaine wrote celebrating “freedom,” has the heroine Jenny happily escaping from her abductor. Therein the motif of endangered female innocence and sexual victimization is played out in a spectacularizing manner with the peasant girl, Jenny, cast as the victim of the lust of the aristocrat Lurewel. Although Richard says in Act I, scene iv that she has been “enlevée, séduite, trompée” (trans: “kidnapped, seduced, betrayed”), Lurewel later tells a courtier that ‘elle fait la sotte,’ (trans: “she is acting foolishly”) which represents his view (a literary-aristocratic cliché) of her defense of her honor. By having her embody some of the characteristics which patriarchal society desired of the ideal woman at this period (“Ma Jenny est si douce, si timide,” Act I , v: trans. “My Jenny is so sweet, so timid”), the libretto sets her up both to validate the patriarchal mode of female subjugation, and to put it into question since she escapes by using her wits (Dunkley 55).[6]

11 By the 1790s rescue operas were extremely popular, both in Britain and France, and adaptations of popular gothic novels about victimization and persecution reached all classes in a variety of theatrical and operatic venues. There were dozens of gothic novels written in England between 1764-1799, a large number of which attempted to defend the increasingly serious threats posed against the monarchy and the aristocracy more generally in England. The gothic began as an ideologically conservative genre committed to shoring up the claims of primogeniture and inheritance by entail. Novels such as Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765) and Clara Reeve’s Old English Baron (1778) were concerned with unjust tyrants, imprisonments, escapes, disinheritances, wrongful claims on an estate, threatened assaults on virginal females, and the eventual triumph of the “true” aristocrat as rightful heir. The staged form of these plots stressed the dramatic effects, and, as the Terror’s impact spread, melodramatic villains appeared in increasingly horrific manifestations.

12 The popularity of the gothic as a genre was conveyed almost immediately to France, where translations and stage adaptations of the British novels were in vogue. The first example of a British rescue opera was an adaptation of Sedaine’s libretto and André-E.-M.Grétry’s musical score for Richard coeur-de-lion, which was staged in London in two different versions in 1786. The most accomplished British musical composer of rescue operas was Stephen Storace, whose popularity was based on such escape operas as The Haunted Tower (1789), The Siege of Belgrade (1791), The Pirates (1792), and Lodoiska (1794). The last work, set in Poland during the Tartar invasion, was adapted as a text by John Philip Kemble for Storace from Kreutzer’s French version (1791). Like the others in this genre, it concerns a beautiful Countess imprisoned by an evil Baron and rescued by her beloved Count and his servant, with the unwitting aid of the Tartars (Taylor 94-5). The other dominant example of British rescue/gothic drama was Blue Beard (1798) by the well-known playwright George Colman and the successful singer-composer Michael Kelly. Their collaboration, again adapted from the French Barbe bleue by Grétry (1789), placed Blue Beard in the Orient and relied on references to Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt (Taylor 113). And if its political insinuations were not potent enough, this time the heroine has to escape from the harem of an accomplished wife-killer (Taylor 113).

13 It was a short step from the gothic novel to the “rescue opera,” with several versions of the same novel often appearing on stage within the same year even. For instance, in 1798, François B. Hoffman and Nicolas Dalayrac adapted Radcliffe’s novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) as the “tyrant” rescue opera Léon, ou Le Château de Montenero. And Pixérécourt, dubbed the “Corneille of the Boulevards” because most of his works were played on the boulevards that had replaced the old walls of Paris, turned the same British gothic story into Le Château des Appenins ou le fantôme vivant (1798), transforming as he went the ghostly apparitions of his source into hoaxes perpetuated on the gullible. Other less prominent French melodramatists utilized all the gothic devices at their disposal, hence there were bleeding nuns, doppelgängers, evil Dukes, and eventually vampires all over the French stage. M.-C. Cammaille-Saint-Aubin and César Ribié adapted Lewis’s Monk in 1797, causing a sensation and fostering a continuing obsession with the gothic on the Boulevard stage (Rahill 27). Le Moine was so popular that it was performed 116 times at a variety of Parisian theaters, including eighty performances at the Théâtre de la Gaîté.

14 But notice how rescue/exile/outlaw opera is transformed and anglicized in a typical example of a later native British “comic-opera,” Balfe’s The Maid of Artois (1836), with libretto by Bunn. The heroine Isolde has been kidnapped by the villainous marquis, while the hero Jules attempts to rescue her, but instead he is captured by the marquis’s henchmen and sent to a penal colony in Guiana. During the second act, however, Isolde manages to shake her jailors and travel across the ocean disguised as a sailor. Once safely landed, she then disguises herself as a Sister of Charity and rescues Jules herself. During their daring and dangerous escape, the lovers are rescued yet one more time, now by the reformed and repentant marquis, who begs them for forgiveness so that they can all live happily ever after. The dialogue was spoken and interspersed between the arias, but clearly the genre was infused with melodramatic as well as gothic tropes (and reminds us more than a little of Beethoven’s Fidelio). To conclude, the British rescue opera focused on material that was almost uniformly adapted from earlier French operas, but it tended to emphasize gothic elements that its populace would easily recognize from their readings of the novels and their attendance at the gothic dramas that were so quickly staged and based on those novels.

III: French Sources

15 It is necessary, therefore, to turn now to the situation in France, as there was as much artistic collaboration between the two countries as there was political angst and economic rivalry. While it is common to claim that the British imported melodrama from France (cf. Brooks) as they had earlier adopted opera from Italy, it is also possible to see a more convoluted pattern of influences by shifting our gaze back to the mid-eighteenth-century or so. All sorts of diversions moved across the English Channel in both directions, and there was in Paris a full-blown “cult of all things English” during the mid-eighteenth century (Rahill 109), including such entertainment enterprises as the Vauxhall and the Ranelagh which established themselves in London. The availability of a growing number of translations of fictional and philosophical British and French texts encouraged the exchange of fashionable ideas and an examination of different sources of inspiration. Pixérécourt’s favorite reading in 1793, for instance, was Rev. James Hervey’s Meditations and Contemplations Among the Tombs (1746-7) and Rev. Edward Young’s The Complaint, or Night Thoughts (1742-45), both works typifying what the French referred to as le spleen anglais. As Rahill has noted, the two authors were popular in France because of their “resolute moral didacticism, a morbid preoccupation with grief and misfortune, a noxious and all-pervading sentimentality, and an almost total absence of a sense of humor. All of these were to be in the inheritance of melodrama” (7).

16 In Paris, during the 1792 theater season, Le Château du diable, a four-act drama by Joseph Loaisel-Tréogate, was a huge success at the Théâtre de la Rue Martin. For many reasons, 1792 marks a turning point in the French Revolution and in the use of political representations and symbols. Along with the proclamation of the First Republic on September 21, the Marseillaise was composed and reached Paris on July 30; the name “Marianne”[7] designated the Republic for the first time and the female figure of Liberty with her phrygian bonnet emblematized the nation; while Louis XVI was imprisoned in August, tried in December and executed on January 20, 1793. Thus the events of 1792 point to gender as a founding category of modern politics, culture and ideology, even though the revolutionary era’s gender politics repressed women as subjects—they were excluded from citizenship in June 1793—and attempted to reconfigure them into subjects of masculine desire. On the theatrical stage, the years leading up to and encompassing the 1789 Revolution realized a transformative shift in the dramatic arts with such works as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1775 Pygmalion, Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’ 1784 Mariage de Figaro, Sedaine’s 1784 Richard coeur-de-lion and Pixérécourt’s 1800 Coelina ou l’enfant du mystère, which emerged, according to Charles Nodier, as the first representative piece of the “modern” melodramatic genre.[8]

17 Three legal events transformed the French theatrical world during the Revolution. First, actors were granted the status of “citizen” in December 1789; second, in 1790 the Catholic Church, which no longer bestowed legitimacy upon the King, had to swear allegiance to the Republic’s constitution; and third, the advent of the 1791 legislation of the National Convention broke up the Comédie française’s near monopoly of the repertoire which had limited smaller theaters to productions which differed little from the pantomimic, acrobatic and trained animal entertainment offered at the fairgrounds on the outskirts of Paris. The abolition of state control of theater venues brought about a proliferation of new theaters which rivaled each other in the productions they presented to their newly formed audiences. Spectators were drawn in by the promise that the action would go beyond the excitement and fears of the events witnessed during the Revolution. With the multiple daily beheadings serving as a backdrop to street “performances,” the excitement on stage had to surpass real disembodiments in order to compete. The boulevard du Temple in particular became popularly and humorously known as the “Boulevard du crime” because of all the staged abductions, murders, rapes and other heinous crimes committed on the theaters’s stages.[9] However, the theatrical world’s freedom proved to be short-lived. The reign of Terror gradually reinstated modes of censure as certain dramaturges denounced the government’s power struggles and, early in the nineteenth century, Napoleon re-instituted the hierarchy of theaters and designated what sorts of spectacles could be performed on the various stages.

18 The new dramas—most of which changed their categorization (comédie, tragi-comédie, opéra comique, drame, mélodrame etc.) depending often on the venue of the particular performance—alluded frequently yet indirectly to current events but in terms of individual stories which were displaced to other locales and times. The plots were borrowed from British successes as well as French literary and feudal histories even as the plays were enrolled by the state to promulgate didactically civic messages of virtue and republicanism. Re-readings of history which conformed (evidently or not) to the principles of the society the Republic was forging underpinned many of the most popular spectacles, while anti-clericalism guaranteed the popularity of a particular entertainment with its portrayal of the abuses perpetrated by convents and cloisters. Thus the ontology of melodrama situates itself within the framework of popular agitation surrounding the abolition of religious orders as well as of slavery, and divorce legislation (Didier 120). After 1789, operas increasingly took on the characteristics of popular melodrama, with a simple moral structure (the Manichean good vs. evil) and a conclusion that emphasized social and communal freedom rather than personal or individual redemption. The example already mentioned above of Le Château du diable follows this pattern. Consisting of equal parts melodrama and fairy tale, it charts the struggles of a young knight forced to penetrate a perilous castle filled with ghosts, ghouls, and all manner of sensual temptations. After many harrowing adventures endured while surviving his ordeal, the knightly hero learns that his fiancée’s father, in fact, has staged all of these horrors, in order to test his loyalty and courage.[10]

19 Other works attempted to explore regicide and the instability associated with the founding of the French republic. In particular, the recurrent thematics of the imprisonment of women dramatized in different ways the successful and not so effective efforts of the male population to restrain and contain women, especially those of lower social rank who had shown their energy and strength during the period of 1789-1792 by expressing their discontent at the misogynist, racist, and violent injustices of patriarchal society. According to David Charlton, the phases of the French Revolution produced melodrama’s thematics in accord with the moment:

20 The early years, 1789 to 1792, gave rise to works espousing hope in the equality of citizens, hope for constitutional monarchy, and for the self-determining unity of the French nation. The Terror years, 1793-94, produced intense didactic works about sacrifice and patriotism and works celebrating military victories. Then the fall of Robespierre (9 Thermidor II/27 July 1794) saw a resurgence of counter-revolutionary movements of all kinds; some contained old fashioned royalists, others, constitutionalists; but they were all united against the memory of Robespierre and his ‘drinkers of blood.’ (French Opera 9:57)

21 Encouraged by the success of Le Château du diable, Loaisel-Tréogate went on to write a number of other popular pieces including, for the 1797 theater season, La forêt périlleuse des brigands de la Calabre, one of the most popular melodramas to play nightly to a packed house on the Boulevard du Temple. Over-populated with banditti, the melodrama featured a beautiful heroine, Camille, and her devoted lover, Colisan, struggling against the evil machinations of an outlaw who kidnaps Camille and imprisons her in a cave where he threatens to starve her unless she becomes his mistress.[11] In his attempt to rescue Camille, Colisan stumbles into a secret passageway to the cave and eventually is forced to fight against his own rescuing party since his bandit captors have coerced him to join them. Such melodramatic effects suffusing French popular theater connect these plays with such British gothic novels as Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790), or to the French roman noir and roman frénétique with their utilization of medieval, chivalric, pantomimic, melodramatic, and gothic conventions.[12]

22 The popularity of Loaisel-Tréogate’s melodramatic pieces rested upon new conceptions of theatrical spectacle largely elaborated by Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Jean-George Noverre, Beaumarchais, and Sedaine which brought together the distinct genres of seventeenth-century classical theater to enact the blurring of their differences. With the politicization of literary and aesthetic criticism in the 1770’s, opposition to the Académie’s rigidity in differentiating between the genres situated parodic and satirical discourse against a revival of “a formal and civic vocabulary of virtuous emulation” (Ledbury 224) and led to the exploitation of sentiment and emotional anguish, crime and horror on stage. Moving performance style towards pre-romantic topics and conventions, these transfigurations opened the door to melodramatic stagings.

23 Melodrama, therefore, embodied the desires and expectations of audiences changed by the events of the period in representations of what Nodier called “the morality of the Revolution,” including messages about the pathos and appeal of virtue in distress, a scenario which enticed its audience, even if it did so with increasingly convoluted plots. Democratic in their appeal to a variety of spectators, these works advocated standing up to tyrants, traitors, or villains in order to find happiness and respect. Further, in their democratic emphasis, they placed on an equal footing all the arts associated with the theater, including the musical (song and instrumental accompaniment), the corporeal (dance and mime), costuming, stage effects and the decor. Clearly breaking with the normative classical theater elaborated in the seventeenth century, music and pantomime became constitutive staples of French melodrama in large part because of the expressive possibilities of the body. The language of gesture, which Noverre (the “Shakespeare of dance,” as David Garrick nicknamed him) observed at fair theaters, as well as during his tours at the Garrick theater in London, and which he advocated in his development of the ballet d’action, was presumed universally understandable to a variety of audiences, and thus transferable to other stages. As the performers communicated feelings derived from their moral response to various human conditions, they embodied either concepts of sensibilité which encompassed domestic loyalty, and the work ethic with docile bodies, or absolutist values with satirical moves from heavy conformity to grotesque excesses (Foster 42). Noverre’s insistence upon the readability of facial expression extended the melodramatic exploitation of the verbal language’s inability to convey the necessary emotion with its alternating use of emphatic music and spoken word.

24 These physical, visual, and aural complements to the declarative mode of classical theater underscored the emotional intensity of crisis, added legibility to the characters’ turmoil and allowed for the body politic, disengaged from the symbolic of the state by the Revolution, to be represented on the stage as actual embodiments of domestic life. The action of the melodramatic plot worked through confrontations having largely to do with questions of identity, misidentification of lineage and social position together with such conflations as that of social rank and the “droit du seigneur” mentality; economic class and male (virtual) blindness; or naïveté (often portrayed by mute male characters) and virtue. Thus although many, including the critics of the time, have emphasized how conservative and simplistic the messages of these melodramas and rescue operas appear, the episodes in the characters’ lives and their desires reflect often indirectly and ironically on both the domestic sphere and the political, public arena.

IV: Cross-Cultural Dialogue

25 But why did “rescue operas” and their progenitors, gothic melodramas, become so popular before, during, and after the Revolution, and what does such a cultural phenomenon reveal about the vexed and ambivalent cultural relationship between France and England during this period? In our attempt to answer those two questions, we have briefly examined the cultural fluidity of the gothic as a genre and pointed to the increasing interaction between librettists, composers and artists of the two countries who “borrowed” ideas, ideologies, acting styles, and even scripts and libretti from each other. Another important constituent of the genre’s success was how audience dynamics impacted and reflected upon the popularity of the genre together with the changing French public which started to resemble the more established British tradition of a diversified audience. With working citizens increasingly attending the theater and with Shakespeare’s growing popularity in France, spectators’ tastes were altered and this called for a theatrical experience full of emotional appeal and involvement. This new audience was interested in action-packed scenarios (the three unities rule of classical theater forbidding actions on stage clearly did not apply to the melodramatic plots), and rapidly developing intrigues rather than the slow building tableaux that had been popular earlier. Even though some theater critics considered the new theater to be a blatant pandering to the lowest elements, with its heavy reliance on grotesque prison scenes, dramatic escapes, wild crowd scenes, and the simplistic triumph of the just over the unjust, the public that sought entertainment rather than edification nevertheless expected to witness recognizable personal experiences which could serve as a means to self-knowledge (Kennedy 19-21).

26 Rescue operas, therefore, developed along two somewhat different lines: “tyrant” operas and “humanitarian” operas within the general category of “opera semiseria,” or “opéra comique.” The first type corresponds to the conservative British “loyalty gothic,” with its focus on the trials and tribulations of the aristocracy, while the second type draws upon the Sentimental “virtue in distress” or “woman in jeopardy” genre, with its focus on middle class characters or women as the captured or besieged. The first category emphasized political injustice or abstract questions of law and embodied the threat of tyranny in an evil man who imprisons unjustly a noble character. Etienne Méhul’s Euphrosine and H.-M. Berton’s Les rigueurs du cloître (both 1790) are typical examples of the genre. “Humanitarian” operas, on the other hand, do not depict a tyrant, but instead portray an individual—usually a woman or a worthy bourgeois—who sacrifices everything in order to correct an injustice or to obtain some person’s freedom. Dalayrac’s Raoul, Sire de Créqui (1789) or Bouilly’s and Cherubini’s Les deux journées (1800) are examples, along with Sedaine’s pre-1789 works. This tendency to depict in grandiose manner an act of humanity ties in with the general mood of the times and figures prominently in all the arts including painting, where such works have been labeled, according to R. Rosenblum, exemplum virtutis. The parallels which Ledbury has examined between the works of Sedaine and the painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) illustrate this correspondence, while Sedaine’s father-like mentoring of David bears witness to the close collaboration that existed between the arts in the staging and representation of ideology.

27 “Opera semiseria,” combining comic and horrible events with both aristocratic and lower-class characters, was well suited to the sentimentality of the period. Ironically, in a manner reminiscent of Sade, these operas specialized in juxtaposing the pathetic with the appalling without having to carry through the action to a tragic conclusion. Ferdinando Paër (1771-1839), an Italian who spent most of his productive life in Germany and France, is remembered today as one of the major practitioners of opera semiseria. One of his most famous operas was Camilla, ossia Il sotterano (1799), whose plot bears an uncanny resemblance to the aforementioned Radcliffe gothic novel, A Sicilian Romance, as can be seen from the brief synopsis of the action, which virtually retells the same story. This semi-serious opera makes heavy use of macabre settings, aberrant psychology, and jarring juxtapositions of the comic with the serious. The heroine Camilla has been imprisoned for seven years when the opera begins, forced to inhabit the underground vaults of a ruined castle in Naples owned by Duke Uberto, her husband by a secret marriage. The reason for Camilla’s banishment is provided quickly: she has refused to reveal the identity of a man who once kidnapped and tried to seduce her, albeit unsuccessfully. After much confusion over false identities and forced confessions, Loredano and Cola, the Duke’s nephew and servant, rescue Camilla and her son Adolfo. Loredano is himself forced to confess that he was the abductor and he clears Camilla’s name so that she can be reconciled to her husband and son. Paër’s version of the story utilized the same source as Dalayrac did for his opera of the same title (1791). But what is clear from these adaptations of A Sicilian Romance is how quickly British novels made their way onto Parisian stages.

28 Another example of an opera semiseria by Paër, I Fuorusciti de Firenze (1802), reveals yet another strain of the rescue opera, the “exile” or “outlaw” opera that would become particularly popular by 1830. In this work, the Princess Isabella of Florence has been kidnapped by Uberto’s banditti and imprisoned in a ruined Tuscan castle. His inveterate enemy Edoardo de Liggozzi, Isabella’s husband, had exiled Uberto himself from Florence twenty years earlier. In the disguise of a shepherd, Edoardo attempts to rescue his wife, but is captured and forced to reveal his true identity. Rather than kill the pair, Uberto suddenly reveals that twenty years earlier he had left an infant daughter in Florence when he was forced into exile: Isabella. As one might expect, a happy ending is provided amid much sudden light relief. Such a work as I Fuorusciti di Firenze reveals how thoroughly the gothic had been sentimentalized or melodramatized by the turn of the century. By then, the use of the reunion between parent and child, a staple of stage melodramas also found in Pixérécourt’s Coelina, had infiltrated opera.

29 But genres do not proliferate out of thin air. They evolve to serve specific ideological purposes, and theorists who have social, political, cultural, and aesthetic agendas in mind construct them. Diderot’s dramatic theory inspired the development of the drame bourgeois otherwise known as tragédie bourgeoise/domestique or drame sérieux and it influenced importantly Beaumarchais and Louis-Sébastien Mercier in France and Lessing and the Stürm und Dränger group in Germany.[13] In his Discours sur la poésie dramatique (1758; Discourse on Dramatic Poetry), Diderot distinguishes between “two types of tragedy, tragédie domestique ‘qui aurait pour objet la vertu et les devoirs de l’homme’ (trans: whose subject would be virtue and man’s duties), and tragédie héroïque ‘qui a pour objet les catastrophes publiques et les malheurs des grands’” (trans: whose subject focused upon public calamities and the misfortunes of the great) (qtd Ledbury 219). His tragédie domestique used “an intense private space to symbolize society” and “never posed the relationship between the private and the public spheres as a problematic one.” Many of the issues debated on the literary and philosophical page also applied to the opera stages. Diderot’s drame especially influenced opéra comique from the late 1750s on, and it was this “fertile centre of dramatic experiment” (232-33) in the 1770’s which in turn engineered melodrama, or what Peter Brooks calls in The Melodramatic Imagination, a modern cultural discourse.

30 Theorizing about genre in eighteenth-century France “mutated from a discourse of hierarchy to a discourse of opposition” which associated the notion of genre with that of gender. Where “hierarchical structures of thought and behaviour were central to the mind-set of the court society . . . [for] the encyclopédistes and other philosophes from Buffon to Diderot . . . the importance of genre and generic categorisation [was] . . . key to organising and understanding the complexity of nature and culture.”[14] Innovations which interrogated the hierarchical system of genres and the aesthetic culture of the times encountered horror and fascination and the possible creations were denounced as monsters in Claude-Henri Watelet’s terms by those working against the new forms. Of course, the figurative monsters so vehemently remonstrated against were soon translated into literally horrifying figures. We would argue, in fact, that the gothic melodramas and the rescue operas were exegeses on the distrust of this very new genre, for they liberalized the fears and the very language used to combat the new genre.

31 Sedaine, who wrote the libretti for some of the most successful opéras comiques of the last third of the eighteenth century, modernized by hybridizing the genre in such works adapted from British plays as Le Diable à quatre ou la double métamorphose (opéra-comique, 1757), and Le Roi et le fermier.[15] The latter, first performed on November 22, 1762, was based upon Robert Dodsley’s The Miller of Mansfield.[16] Sedaine’s comedy aspired to a new kind of seriousness with its presentation of an egalitarian storyline. According to Ledbury, the play combines both the intimate sphere and public life; audaciously exploits royal presence; presents the irresistible characters of Betsy and Richard; and implicitly critiques court circles and the abuse of power (100). Act I opens with Richard, the intendant des forêts, worried about Jenny, who has been absent since morning. When she does return, she explains that she has escaped from the castle of Lord Lurewel. However, since her flock, which was lured into the grounds as a device to snare her is still trapped, she now has no dowry and worries that this will prevent her marriage to Richard. In Act II, which takes place in the forest, Richard meets the king, who has been separated from his courtiers and does not reveal his identity. Richard mistrusts him and treats him brusquely at first, but eventually invites him in to shelter from the storm. At the same time, Richard’s gamekeepers arrest Lurewel. In Act III, over a joyful supper with the king, Richard tells Jenny’s story. Lurewel is brought in, and after the king has revealed his identity, the former is sent away in disgrace and the king offers to resolve all difficulties by providing Jenny’s dowry (100; n75). Thus Jenny, rather than being seduced as she is in the English version, escapes, while the beneficent and wise king, in contact with his people, sees the corruption and injustices of his courtiers and moves to correct and chastise them (102).

32 Sedaine worked through operatic reformulations with reconstructions of medieval stories such as Aucassin et Nicolette ou les moeurs du bon vieux tem[p]s (comédie, 1780) and Richard coeur-de-lion (comédie, 1786). As against Lionnel Gossman’s argument that the introduction and use during this period of the medieval was a conservative move, it appears that the rage for medievalism allowed Sedaine and his contemporaries to explore new themes and stage possibilities. It enabled transformations in stage decor and satirical (and ironic) messages to underlie the retelling of narratives like Aucassin et Nicolette. The staging of this anonymous late twelfth or early thirteenth century text, with its own extraordinary (parodic) intertextuality referencing Chrétien de Troyes’s romances and earlier chansons de geste, including The Song of Roland and La prise d’Orange, sustains aptly Sedaine’s argument in favor of genre hybridity. As chantefable, Aucassin et Nicolette alternated prose and assonanced verse and its performances, which sought to entertain rather than edify and instruct, were most likely musically accompanied. Prefiguring the form of opéra comique by almost six hundred years, the plot of this medieval tale anticipates those of the rescue operas. Its intrigue suggests that everything should be subordinated to love, including such chivalric attributes as honor and nobility. Indeed, Aucassin loves Nicolette, although she is a slave who has been baptized and is the godchild of the town’s viscount, his father’s vassal. His father refuses to let him marry her, however; and the father orders the viscount to send her away. The latter decides instead to seal her in his sumptuous palace. Utilizing both Nicolette’s and Aucassin’s refusal to obey their parents’ wishes with regards to whom they are to marry, as well as keeping the anti-clerical and feminist messages of the medieval version, allowed for a spirited participation in the social and cultural upheavals of the 1780’s from within the safe confines of a national literary treasure. This “revival” perhaps more than any other adaptation signals how the use of these medieval texts encouraged change and presented the new parameters of opera performance under the guise of historicity.

33 Sedaine’s 1770 prose tragedy, Maillard ou Paris sauvé, attempted to breach the “natural and immutable barrier between high and low genre” (Ledbury 198). Although the play’s nationalism, its historical setting in the fourteenth century, and the entanglement of the domestic and political opposition between Maillard and Etienne Marcel placed it within the tragic mode, the work is clearly a hybrid. Maillard contains several scenes that daringly reveal the intimate relations of the young bourgeois lovers, and the depiction of their child and the mother’s breast-feeding pains disturb the bienséances of the genre (200-202). Furthermore, the almost choreographed spectacle, especially during the conspiracy scenes, together with such props as daggers thrust into a table, demonstrate Sedaine’s familiarity with the conventions of opera comique and with Shakespearean tragedies. Even Madame du Deffand commented to Walpole after having attended a private reading in 1770 of the first draft of the play that: “Cette pièce a plus de ressemblance à celles de votre Shakespeare qu’aucune des nôtres” [trans: “This play resembles more your Shakespeare’s [plays] than any of ours.”] (qtd. Ledbury 212).[17] Never publicly performed, Maillard’s consignment to obscurity reveals that the limits of tolerance for hybridity were quickly reached. However, the parodies which the Maillard debate fostered proliferated. They demonstrate that the prose tragedy was actually about the threat of genre anarchy (Ledbury 222-23), a literary anarchy which looked to dissolve boundaries and plotted out presciently the course of a civil and egalitarian society.

34 As a “pre-modern man of the theater,” Sedaine did not succeed in breaking the concept of generic purity. However his experimentations, alongside the contemporary discourses as well as the borrowings from Italian and British pantomimic traditions which David Garrick and Noverre so prized (Chéruzel 67-72), generated the foundation for an alternative theatrical practice. Sedaine’s theatrical sense and understanding of the necessity of intimacy and for an effet du reel, coupled with irony, “provided a blueprint for those practitioners in theater, art, music-drama who, in the later nineteenth century, were responsible for what we now understand as the transition to modernism” (Ledbury, Michel-Jean Sedaine, 38).[18]

35 Beethoven’s Fidelio, perhaps the most famous of all the so-called rescue operas, is considered by many to be the final flowering and only masterpiece of the rescue-opera genre. It was based on Jean-Nicolas Bouilly’s (1763-1842) libretto and Pierre Gaveaux’s score,[19] and their version, an opéra comique, opened at the Théâtre Feydeau on February 19, 1798 as Léonore ou l’amour conjugal. This work was in its turn adapted by Mayr as L’Amour Conjugal (1805) and also by Paër as Leonora (1804). Each version skillfully combined elements of both “tyrant” and “humanitarian” operas. Bouilly’s Léonore drew on recent French innovations with the imprisonment topos, the female singer in the male role, and the use of the rescue plot. Performed in the former ultra-royalist but pro-Italian opera Théâtre de Monsieur, with all its attendant social and political reputation, its composer played the role of Florestan, in an intrigue which engaged “French history by dramatizing a political crime at a sensitive juncture in the Directoire (1795-99).” “[H]istorically self-referential,” it showed with very slight disguise “events that had occurred in recent life” (51).[20] The Leonore libretto belongs to the Thermidorean reaction period after the end of the monarchy and of the revolutionary dictatorship (Charlton, French Opera 9:57). Fidelio first played in 1805 as a three act opera entitled Leonore as Napoleon invaded Austria. The 1814 definitive version bore the title of Fidelio and celebrated the triumph of liberty over tyranny and clearly marked Napoleon as the tyrant in Beethoven’s eyes, and indeed the rescue opera played over and over again during the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

36 Originally set in Spain, the story concerns an imprisoned young woman, Leonora, who disguises herself as the boy Fedele. While living in the jail, she apprentices herself to the jailer Rocco, hoping to be able to use her position to free her husband Florestano, unjustly imprisoned for two years by the tyrant Pizzarro because Florestano had exposed the crimes of Pizzarro (and thus made himself a victim of unjust abuse of power). Pizzarro learns that his supervisor, Fernando, will arrive for a visit the next day, and he fears that his treachery will be discovered and punished. In desperation, he commands Rocco to prepare Florestan for his assassination, to be performed by the masked Pizzarro and witnessed by the devoted apprentice Fidele. But Fidele stalls long enough for Fernando to arrive and rescue her husband. Rocco is pardoned, and Pizzarro imprisoned. Even though Bouilly’s politics bespoke of liberalism, his Léonore avoided explicit political allegorizing. Structured around motive and incident, it nevertheless portrayed the villain Pizarro as a tyrannical monster. His cruelty, described by a chorus of prisoners in the dungeon, signified by analogy the excesses of 1793-94 rather than any commentary on the ancien régime, while the finale of the spectacle celebrated the return of justice and truth (Charlton, French Opera 9:64-67).

37 Other works that anticipated Fidelio include Sedaine’s Comte d’Albert, and his Le déserteur, which must have influenced Beethoven since it was “the most frequently performed stage work in Germany of any genre” (Charlton, French Opera 9:54-55). Dalayrac’s Raoul, Sire de Crequi also prefigured Fidelio politically and dramatically and its English adaptation at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1792, includes the cross-dressing of two women as soldiers who seek to liberate the brother to one of them. A copy of Paër’s score for Leonora, discovered among Beethoven’s effects after his death, reveals that he had certainly studied and was influenced by Paër’s version of the famous tale. In Beethoven’s version, however, there are a few changes, most notably in the emphasis on the group rather than the individual rescue of the husband. Again, the hero, Florestan, is captured by the villainous Pizarro and held in a supposedly impregnable dungeon, while Florestan’s wife Leonore disguises herself as a boy, as in the British version, in order to rescue her husband. The reconnaissance or reconciliation scene between husband and wife in prison stands as the high point of the work. And the rescuing troops arrive in the nick of time so that all can end happily.

38 Operas such as Leonore and Fidelio were essentially serious operas with happy endings, opera semiseries. Clearly this genre was popular and played a particularly influential role in reforming notions of exactly what an opera should look and sound like. As Scott Balthazar points out, such operas emphasized continuous action, formal complexity in structure, and a certain amount of dramatic and musical comedy (NGD, 1150). More importantly, however, they were one means by which the tropes of northern Romanticism spread throughout southern Europe. What is perhaps most interesting to the contemporary literary critic, however, is the persistence of a female disguised as a male, or in a variety of androgynous costumes. Such a trope suggests the constructed nature of gender, while also revealing that gender as well as identity are performances to be enacted for a variety of social and political reasons. The female performer was asserting her rights both as an actor/singer/dancer and as a woman in the characters she embodied. Such a position comes close to the depiction of gender and identity in gothic as well as sentimental novels of the period and points to the new feminine symbols associated with “nation” building.

V. Conclusion

39 So finally it is necessary to ask in conclusion, what does it mean that British citizens flocked to a number of forgettable rescue operas before, during, and after the French Revolution? What was at stake in staging and viewing the performances? As we have suggested, the opera and its mutations/manifestations embodied a public space in which French and British citizens could vicariously experience the threats of violent political, social, and cultural revolution. But ultimately, we believe, the rescue operas were radically nationalistic for each nation, even though, ironically, they used the same tropes and told very similar familial and nationalistic scripts. Each country was trying to use the theater and the opera house to impose a form of nationalism on its emerging bourgeois populace. As Gerald Newman observes, Britain sought to see itself and its citizens in national and secular terms rather than in religious or tribal ones during the mid-eighteenth-century. This shift was made possible, according to Newman, because of cultural rather than political activity, with one of the central figures being the “artist-intellectual,” an individual who “both creates and organizes nationalist ideology” (56). A composite figure begins here to emerge: the adaptation and use of Handel as the artist and Shakespeare as the intellectual, a dual presence hovering as protectors over the domesticated landscape of British discourse. Benedict Anderson has also discussed the growth of secularism as allowing for a new sort of “imagined community,” a country with a “national imagination” that would replace the religious construction of the medieval and renaissance communities (6; 36). There is no question that the institutionalization of the popular, hybridized opera during the eighteenth century was a central development in the growth of the new British “national imagination.”

40 In contrast, French nationalism evolved in a radically different manner, with a revolution that accomplished very different ideological work than did the British revolution of the seventeenth century. At the conclusion of their brief experiment with a Commonwealth, the British welcomed back their King on their terms, and the country has not seriously contemplated violent social or political reform since. France’s prolonged sojourn in feudalism made for a combustible situation which ignited in 1789, and created a politically unstable and contested situation for most of the next century. Both countries staged hundreds of rescue operas, read dozens of gothic novels, and schooled themselves in the tenets of secularization, modernization, and nationalism. Taking their inspiration from Northern European sources—Shakespeare, medieval literature and French and British history especially—these texts were written in the uncertainty which defines modernity. Through the rescue trope, they romanced the past, lured in spectators with terrifying scenes and rhetorical turns, even as they hybridized genre and denounced the injustices and arbitrariness of the throne. So great was the appeal of the rescue operas that its cultural residue, sentimentalism and melodrama, remain with us to this day.

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Notes
[1] “But it is not to the orators of the revolution that the Romantics looked for instruction in rhetoric They looked to the revolution itself, to that language made into History, that draws its meaning from events which are declarations. The Terror, as one knows, was not only terrible because of the executions; it was terrible because it proclaimed itself with this capitalization and made Terror the measure of history and the sign of modern times” (Blanchot 520-21, qtd. Lebrun 174; our translation).

[2] Joseph Addison observed that the “absurdity of opera shows itself at the first sight,” while he went on to note that “nothing is capable of being well set to music, that is not nonsense.” Samuel Johnson called opera “an exotic and irrational entertainment,” while Jonathan Swift spoke of “that unnatural Taste for Italian Music among us, which is wholly unsuitable to our Northern Climate, and the Genius of the People, whereby we are overrun with Italian Effeminacy and Italian Nonsense” (qtd Schmidgall 32-3).

[3] Contrast this definition of music with that proposed by Claude Levi-Strauss, who claimed that music is primarily an expression of the emotions, while Roland Barthes has stated that music is “inactual,” that is, abstract and difficult to speak about because “language is of the order of the general, [while] music is of the order of difference” And in his own meditation about the meaning of opera, W. H. Auden echoes this definition: “Opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. Opera, therefore, cannot present character in the novelist’s sense of the word, namely, people who are potentially good and bad, active and passive, for music is immediate actuality and neither potentiality nor passivity can live in its presence” (qtd Schmidgall 20). So while Barthes emphasizes the inactual quality of music, Auden asserts the opposite.

[4] Charlton’s valuable essay “On Redefinitions of Rescue Opera” is the best on the subject, and includes six contradictory definitions of the term in an appendix.

[5] The success of Richard coeur-de-lion raised the opéra-comique to new levels and led to Sedaine’s long sought acceptance in the Académie française (Ledbury, Sedaine 284). Beaumarchais and Sedaine became collaborators and the latter advised Beaumarchais on the Mariage de Figaro.

[6] Naomi Schor states that “French Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism all draw their impetus from the revolution: nineteenth-century literature in France is a protracted and therapeutic working through of the trauma of regicide and the shock of democratization” (144).

[7] The first mention of “Marianne” to designate the Republic occurred in an Occitan song by Guillaume Lavabre entitled “La Garisou de Marianno” [“the healing/recovery of Marianne”].

[8] Pixérécourt’s Coelina, generally considered the first melodrama, was based on François-G Ducray-Duminil’s extraordinarily popular novel Coelina ou l’enfant du mystère (See Gaspard 128-129). Rahill provides this definition: “Melodrama is a form of dramatic composition in prose partaking of the nature of tragedy, comedy, pantomime, and spectacle, and intended for a popular audience. Primarily concerned with situation and plot, it depends on mimed action extensively and employs a more or less fixed complement of stock characters, the most important of which are a suffering heroine or hero, a persecuting villain, and a benevolent comic. It is conventionally moral and humanitarian in point of view and sentimental and optimistic in temper, concluding its fable happily with virtue rewarded after many trials and vice punished. Characteristically it offers elaborate scenic accessories and miscellaneous divertissements and introduces music freely, typically to underscore dramatic effect” (xiv).

[9] See Brooks passim; and Root-Bernstein.

[10] This tale is reminiscent of François Thomas du Fossé’s life story as recounted by Helen Maria Williams in her Letters from France (8 vols). He is not tested by his lover’s father but by his own father, Baron du Fossé, who cannot accept that his heir will marry the daughter of a local farmer and who issues a lettre de cachet with the aim of imprisoning him to prevent the marriage (see Mellor 261-262).

[11] The name “Camille” begins to function as a talisman from this time forward, with a beautiful, victimized woman named Camille rescued from out of a tunnel in no fewer than four popular “rescue operas” and melodramas of the period: Marsolier’s Camille ou le souterrain (1791), Paër’s Camilla, ossia Il sotterraneo (1799), Dalayrac’s Camille (1791), and Le Sueur’s La caverne (1793) Later, the female victim becomes a courtesan and by 1852 Alexandre Dumas fils had composed the first version of his famous La dame aux camélias, adapted yet again toward the end of the century to great acclaim by the American playwright John Wilds as Camille; or, the Fate of a Coquette.

[12] For the most thorough recent collection of this work, see Hale. The book assembles 24 tales, 19 of which have never been published before in English, and provides Nodier’s definition of the frénétiques: “[These writers] flaunt their atheism, madness and despair among the tombstones, exhume the dead in order to terrify the living and torment the imagination with scenes of such horror that it is necessary to look to the terror-ridden dreams of the sick to find a model.”

[13] See Ledbury, Sedaine 3.

[14] Such theorists as Roger de Piles, Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Claude-Henri Watelet, and Voltaire associated the notion of genre with that of gender as they recast genre in oppositional terms. The opposition of genres structured eighteenth-century aesthetic debates and disputes such as La Font’s attack upon the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in the 1740’s or the long-running Italian/French opera dispute (which included the querelle des bouffons). La Font’s utilized the gender binary to criticize “Boucher’s feminised mythologies” and to call for “a male and noble style” (Ledbury, Michel-Jean Sedaine, 14).

[15] Le Diable à quatre was Sedaine’s first drama written for public performance. It was based on the English play The Devil to pay performed at Garrick’s theater, and translated in Claude-Pierre Patu’s Choix de petites pièces du théâtre anglais (1756) as La boutique du bijoutier (See Ledbury, Sedaine 87-88). Like Marivaux and Beaumarchais, Sedaine utilized carnivalesque role reversals, farcical violence and alluded to contemporary customs, the activities of the aristocracy and satirized the clergy and the legal profession.

[16] Sedaine consulted Patu’s Choix de petites pièces and chose the Dodsley play in part because of its success on the British stage as an afterpiece in 1735 (Ledbury, Sedaine 100)

[17] Maillard was also a transposition of other English models, including the Restoration tragedy Venice preserv’d by Thomas Otway, which had been transposed by La Fosse into Manlius. Both had been used by Voltaire “to discuss tragic modes in drama in France and Britain in his Commentaires sur Corneille” (Ledbury, Sedaine 212-213). Voltaire saw Maillard as “the final culmination of all the trends . . . corroding the great traditions of French drama. He was convinced that it would open the floodgates to a form of practice that would destroy existing order” (213). Even Diderot found Maillard, a high tragedy set as an opéra-comique, too much for his taste and Grimm’s lack-luster support implies the general loss of support of Sedaine by the philosophes (Ledbury, Sedaine 220).

[18] See Marcoux.

[19] Gaveaux composed the reactionary song of the jeunesse dorée Le réveil du peuple in the 1790s in order to counter the revolutionary Marseillaise.

[20] See Charlton, French Opera 9:51-67, 170-172.

Venetian Conspiracy

2008-02-11T10:55:00.001Z

http://www.abjpress.com/tarpv1.html

THE VENETIAN CONSPIRACY

Address delivered to the ICLC Conference near Wiesbaden, Germany, Easter Sunday, 1981; (appeared in Campaigner, September, 1981)

Periods of history marked, like the one we are living through, by the convulsive instability of human institutions pose a special challenge for those who seek to base their actions on adequate and authentic knowledge of historical process. Such knowledge can come only through viewing history as the lawful interplay of contending conspiracies pitting Platonists against their epistemological and political adversaries.

There is no better way to gain insight into such matters than through the study of the history of the Venetian oligarchy, the classic example of oligarchical despotism and evil outside of the Far East.

Venice called itself the Serenissima Republica (Serene Republic), but it was no republic in any sense comprehensible to an American, as James Fenimore Cooper points out in the preface to his novel The Bravo. But its sinister institutions do provide an unmatched continuity of the most hideous oligarchical rule for fifteen centuries and more, from the years of the moribund Roman Empire in the West to the Napoleonic Wars, only yesterday in historical terms. Venice can best be thought of as a kind of conveyor belt, transporting the Babylonian contagions of decadent antiquity smack dab into the world of modern states.

The more than one and one-half millennia of Venetian continuity is first of all that of the oligarchical families and the government that was their stooge, but it is even more the relentless application of a characteristic method of statecraft and political intelligence. Venice, never exceeding a few hundred thousand in population, rose to the status of Great Power in the thirteenth century, and kept that status until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, thanks to the most highly developed system of embassies, of domestic and foreign intelligence, and related operational potentials.

As the following story details, Venice was at the center of the efforts to destroy the advanced European civilization of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and bears a crushing burden of guilt for the ascendancy of the Black Guelphs and the coming of the black plague. The Venetians were the intelligencers for the Mongol army of Ghengis Khan and his heirs, and had a hand in guiding them to the sack of Baghdad and the obliteration of its renaissance in the thirteenth century.

The Venetians were the mortal enemies of the humanist Paleologue dynasty in Byzantium. They were the implacable foes of Gemisthos Plethon, Cosimo de' Medici, Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and the entirety of the Florentine Golden Renaissance, which they conspired - successfully - to destroy. Venetian influence was decisive in cutting off the Elizabethan epoch in England, and in opening the door to the lugubrious Jacobean era.

Venetian public relations specialists were responsible for picking up the small-time German provincial heretic Martin Luther and raising him to the big-time status of heresiarch among a whole herd of total- predestination divines. Not content with this wrecking operation against the Church, Venice was thereafter the "mother" for the unsavory, itinerant Ignatius of Loyola and his Jesuit order. After the Council of Trent, Venice was also the matrix for the Philosophe- Libertin ferment of the delphic, anti-Leibniz Enlightenment. Venice beat Thomas Malthus and Jeremy Bentham to the punch in inflicting British political economy and philosophical radicalism on the whole world.

Although Napoleon Bonaparte had the merit of forcing the formal liquidation of this loathsome organism during his Italian campaign of 1797, his action did not have the effect we would have desired. The cancer, so to speak, had already had ample time for metastasis - into Geneva, Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere. Thus, though the sovereign political power of Venice had been extinguished, its characteristic method lived on, serving as the incubator of what the twentieth century knows as fascism, first in its role as a breeding ground for the protofascist productions of Wagner and Nietzsche, later in the sponsorship of fascist politicians like Gabriele D'Annunzio and Benito Mussolini. The Venetians ran a large chunk of the action associated with the Parvus Plan to dismember Russia, and may well have been the ones who surprised everyone, including London, by unleashing World War 1 in the Balkans.

Most important, Venice is today through its Cini Foundation and its Societé Europeenne de Culture the think tank and staging area for the Club of Rome and related deployments. Venice is the supranational homeland of the New Dark Ages gang, the unifying symbol for the most extreme Utopian lunatic fringe in the international intelligence community today.

Get to know Venice. Then look back to the monetarist imbecility of Paul Volker, at the ideological fanaticism that radiates forth from the Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, the Bank for International Settlements and the rest. You will recognize the unmistakable putrid stench of a Venetian canal, where the rotting marble palaces of generations of parasites are corroded by the greatest cynicism and cruelty the world has ever known.

THE ORIGINS

In the Middle Ages the Venetians were known as the archetypes of the parasite, the people who "neither sow nor reap." For the Greeks, they were the hated "frogs of the marshes." In Germany, a folk tale describes the merchant of Venice as an aged Pantaloon who makes his rounds robbing men of their human hearts and leaving a cold stone in their place.

Closer to the essence of Venice is the city's symbol, the winged lion of St. Mark, bearing the misleading inscription, Pax Tibi Marce, Evangelista Meus ("Peace be with you Mark, my evangelist.") The chimerical winged lion comes out of the East, either from Persia or from China. The symbol is thus blatantly pagan, with St. Mark being added as an afterthought because of his alleged visit to the Venetian lagoons. To buttress the story, the Venetians stole St. Mark's body from Alexandria in Egypt, and Tintoretto has a painting celebrating this feat.

The point is that Venice looks East, toward the Levant, Asia Minor, central Asia, and the Far East, toward its allies among the Asian and especially Chinese oligarchies which were its partners in trade and war. This is reflected in a whole range of weird, semi-oriental features of Venetian life, most notably the secluded, oriental status of women, with Doges like Mocenigo proudly exhibiting a personal harem well into modern times.

Venice today sits close to the line from Lubeck to Trieste, the demarcation between NATO and Warsaw Pact Europe, roughly corresponding to the boundary between Turks in the East and Christians in the West, and still earlier between the Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires. Into this part of the northern Adriatic flow the rivers of the southern side of the Dolomites and the Julian Alps. The greatest of these is the Po. These rivers, around 300 A.D., made the northern Adriatic a continuous belt of marshes and lagoons about fifteen kilometers wide, and extending from the city of Ravenna around to the base of the Istrian Peninsula, where the Italian- Yugoslavian border lies today.

In the center of this system was Aquileia, starting point of an important north-south trade route across the Brenner Pass to the Danube Valley and Bohemia. Aquileia was the seat of a patriarch of the Christian Church, but its tradition was overwhelmingly pagan, and typified by rituals of the Ancient Egyptian Isis cult. For a time after the year 404, Ravenna and not Rome was the capital of the Roman Empire in the West. After the extinction of the western empire, Ravenna was the seat of government of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, the court visited by Boethius. Later Ravenna was the capital of a part of Italy ruled by the Byzantines.

The islands of the lagoons provided an invulnerable refuge, comparable to Switzerland during World War II, for Roman aristocrats and others fleeing the paths of Goth, Hun, and Langobard armies. Already between 300 and 400 A.D. there are traces of families whose names will later become infamous: Candiano, Faliero, Dandolo. Legend has it that the big influx of refugees came during the raids of Attila the Hun in 452 A.D. Various areas of the lagoons were colonized, including the present site of Torcello, before the seat of administration was fixed at a group of islands known as Rivus Altus ("the highest bank"), later the Rialto, the present location of the city of Venice. The official Ab Urbe Condita is March 25, 721 A.D. Paoluccio Anafesto, the first ruler of the lagoon communities, called the doge (the Venetian equivalent of Latin dux or Florentine duca/duce, meaning leader or duke), is said to have been elected in the year 697.

The most significant fact of this entire period is that the whelp of what was later to become Venice survived and grew thanks to its close alliance with the evil Emperor Justinian in Constantinople, an alliance that was underlined in later years by intermarriage of doge and other leading Venetian oligarchs with the nobility of Byzantium, where a faction embodying the sinister traditions of the Roman Senate lived on for a thousand years after the fall of Rome in 476.

Venetian families are divided into two categories. First come the oldest families, or Longhi, who can claim to prove their nobility substantially before the year 1000. The Longhi include many names that are sadly familiar to the student of European history: Dandolo, Michiel, Morosini, Contarini, Giustinian (perhaps related to the just- mentioned Byzantine emperor), Zeno, Corner (or Cornaro), Gradenigo, Tiepolo, and Falier. These old families held a monopoly of the dogeship until 1382, at which time they were forced to admit the parvenu newcomers, or Curti, to the highest honor of the state. After this time new families like Mocenigo, Foscari, Malipiero, Vendramin, Loredano, Gritti, Dona, and Trevisan came into the ascendancy.

These families and the state they built grew rich through their parasitizing of trade, especially East-West trade, which came to flow overwhelmingly through the Rialto markets. But there is a deeper reality, one which even derogatory stories about spice merchants are designed to mask. The primary basis for Venetian opulence was slavery. This slavery was practiced as a matter of course against Saracens, Mongols, Turks, and other non-Christians. In addition, it is conclusively documented that it was a matter of standard Venetian practice to sell Christians into slavery. This included Italians and Greeks, who were most highly valued as galley slaves. It included Germans and Russians, the latter being shipped in from Tana, the Venetian outpost at the mouth of the Don, in the farthest corner of the Sea of Azov. At a later time, black Africans were added to the list and rapidly became a fad among the nobility of the republic.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SLAVERY

During the years of the Venetian overseas empire, islands like Crete, Cyprus, Corfu, Naxos, and smaller holdings in the Aegean were routinely worked by slave labor, either directly under the Venetian regime, or under the private administration of a Venetian oligarchical clan like the Corner, who owed their riches to such slavery. In later centuries, the harems of the entire Ottoman Empire, from the Balkans to Morocco, were stocked by Venetian slaves. The shock troops of the Ottoman Turkish armies, the Janissaries, were also largely provided by Venetian merchants. A section of the Venetian waterfront is still called Riva Degli Schiavoni - slaves' dock.

Around 1500, the Venetian oligarch Cristofor da Canal, the leading admiral of the Serenissima Repubblica at that time, composed what he described as a Platonic dialogue concerning the relative merits of galley slaves: the Italians the worst, Dalmatians better, the Greeks the best and toughest of all, although personally filthy and repulsive. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Venice had treaty relations with other states, like Bavaria, by which convicts were delivered to the Serenissima to work as life-long galley slaves.

Indistinguishable from slave gathering operation were piracy and buccaneering, the other staples of the Venetian economy. Wars with Genoa or with other powers were eagerly sought-after opportunities to loot the enemy's shipping with clouds of corsairs, and victory or defeat usually depended more on the success of the privateering than on the direct combat of the galleys, cogs, and soldiers of the battle fleets.

Piracy shades over imperceptibly into routine commerce. Through decades of treachery and mayhem, the Venetians were able to establish themselves as the leading entrepot port of the Mediterranean world, where, as in London up to 1914, the vast bulk of the world's strategic commodities were brought for sale, warehousing, and transshipment. The most significant commodities were spices and silks from India and China, destined for markets in Central and Western Europe. Europe in turn produced textiles and metals, especially precious metals, for export to the East.

Venetian production from the earliest period until the end was essentially nil, apart from salt and the glass manufactures of Murano. The role of the Venetian merchant is that of the profiteering middleman who rooks both buyer and seller, backing up his monopolization of the distribution and transportation systems with the war galleys of the battle fleet.

The Venetian approach to trade was ironically dirigistic. Venice asserted a monopoly of all trade and shipping in the northern Adriatic. The Serenissima's own functionaries organized merchant galley fleets that were sent out one or two times a year to key ports. The galleys were built by the regime in its shipyards, known as the Arsenal, for many centuries the largest factory in the world. They were leased to oligarchs and consortia of oligarchs at a type of auction. Every detail of the operation of these galley fleets, including the obligation to travel in convoy, was stipulated by peremptory state regulation.

In the heyday of Venice, galley fleets were sent to Tana and to Trebizond in the Black Sea, to Crete, Rhodes, and Cyprus on the way to Beirut in the Levant, to Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, Oran, and Alexandria in North Africa, as well as to Spanish, French, and west coast Italian cities. Especially well-served was "Romania," the area roughly corresponding to modern Greece. Another galley route passed through Gibraltar on the way to Southampton, London, Antwerp, and Bruges.

Many of these galley ports correspond to continuing Venetian influence today. In every instance the Venetians sought to skim the cream off the top of world trade. Their profit margins had to be sufficient to cover a "traditional" twenty percent interest rate, the financing of frequent wars, and maritime insurance premiums, in which they were pioneers.

THE VENETIAN STATE

The tremendous stability of the Venetian state has fascinated historians. How is it possible to maintain the great power of Venice for more than a millennium and a half without being conquered from the outside, and without significant upheavals from within?

Venice remained impervious to foreign invasion from the first settlement until 1797. The monolithic iniquity of Venetian state institutions was seriously disturbed no more than a half dozen times from within the city, and such incidents were speedily terminated by bloodbaths that restored stability rather than spurring more violence. This feature of the Venetian oligarchical system contrasts sharply with that of its rival, Genoa, where each regime from 1300 to 1500 had the life expectancy of an Italian government today. It contrasts sharply with the papacy, where the highest office was up for grabs every dozen years or less, and where humanist factions could sometimes prevail.

In Venice, the bloody resolution of internal faction fights within the oligarchy was suppressed to a minimum, and these energies were effectively sublimated in the depredation of the outside world. The raging heteronomy of each oligarch was directed outward, not at his factional rivals. In the typology of Plato's Republic, Venice is an oligarchy, "a constitution according to property, in which the rich govern and the poor man has no share in government," "the rule of the few, constitution full of many evils." This oligarchy has a residue of timocracy, of rule based on honor. But at the same time the Venetian regime was perversely aware of Plato's description of the swift transition from oligarchy to democracy and thence to tyranny, and against this evolution the patriciate took measures.

Plato notes in Book VIII of The Republic that a "change in a constitution always begins from the governing class when there is a faction within; but so long as they are of one mind, even if they be a very small class, it is impossible to disturb them." The threat of factionalization is located in the "storehouse full of gold, which every man has," and which "destroys such a constitution." The oligarchs "lay a sum of money, greater or less, according as the oligarchy is more or less complete, and proclaim that no one may share in the government unless his property comes up to the assessment. This they carry out by force of arms, or they have used terror before this to establish such a constitution."

Venice lasted as long as it did because of the effective subordination of the oligarchs and families to the needs of the oligarchy as a whole, by the ironclad delimitation of noble status to those already noble in 1297 and their male descendants, and by continuous terror against the masses and against the nobility itself.

All male members of the approximately one hundred fifty noble families had the permanent right to a seat in the Gran Consiglio, or Great Council, which grew to 2000 members around 1500 and thereafter slowly declined. The seat in the Gran Consiglio and the vote it brought were thus independent of which faction happened to be calling the shots at a given moment. The ins might be in, but the outs were sure of their place in the Gran Consiglio, and this body elected the key governing bodies of the regime.

The first of these were the one hundred twenty members, or Pregadi, of the Senate, the upper house which oversaw foreign affairs by choosing the Venetian ambassadors. In the middle of the fifteenth century, Venice was the first and only power which regularly maintained permanent legations in all principal courts and capitals. The Senate also chose five war ministers, five naval ministers (all called Savi), and six Savii Grandi, ministers of still higher rank.

The Gran Consiglio elected a Council of Forty, which was first devoted to budget and finance matters, later more to criminal prosecution. The Gran Consiglio chose three state prosecutors, who could and did sue any official of the state for malfeasance, although the doge was accorded the privilege of being tried after his death, with his family paying any fines levied. The Gran Consiglio also elected the doge himself, through an incredible Byzantine procedure designed to assure a representative choice. First, thirty members of the Gran Consiglio were chosen at random, using colored balls whose Venetian name is the origin of the American word ballot. These thirty drew lots to cut their number down to nine, who then nominated and elected a new group of forty electors. These were then cut down by drawing lots to a group of twelve. This procedure was repeated several times, terminating with a group of forty-one electors of whom twenty-five could nominate a doge for the approval of the Gran Consiglio. Somewhat less complicated procedures were used to select a group of six advisors for the doge.

Most typical of the Venetian system is the Council of Ten, established in 1310 as the coordinating body for foreign and domestic political intelligence operations. Meeting in secret session together with the doge and his six advisors, the Ten had the power to issue a bill of capital attainder against any person inside Venetian jurisdiction, or abroad. If in Venice, that person was generally strangled the same night and the body thrown into the Canale degli Orfani.

The Ten had at their disposal a very extensive foreign intelligence network, but it was inside Venetian territory that their surveillance powers became pervasive: the contents of any discussion among oligarchs or citizens was routinely known to the Ten within twenty- four hours or less, thanks to the ubiquity of its informers and spies. Visitors to the Doge's Palace today can see mail slots around the outside of the building in the shape of lion's mouths marked Per Denontie Segrete ("For Secret Denunciations") for those who wished to call to the attention of the Ten and their monstrous bureaucracy individuals stealing from the state or otherwise violating the law. Death sentences from the Ten were without appeal, and their proceedings were never made public. Offenders simply disappeared from view.

The Venetian regime is a perverse example of the "checks and balances" theory of statecraft, and there were indeed a myriad of such feedback mechanisms. The Savii Grandi balanced the powers of the doge, who was also checked by his six advisors, while more and more power passed to the state inquisitors and the chiefs of the Ten. The state attorneys acted as watchdogs on most matters, as did the Senate, and in times of crises the Gran Consiglio would also assert its powers. The Ten were constantly lurking in the background.

Almost all officials except the doge were elected for terms averaging between six months and one year, with stringent provision against being reelected to an office until a number of months had passed equal to the oligarch's previous tenure in that post. This meant that leading oligarchs were constantly being rotated and shunted from one stop on the Cursus Honorum to another: to Savio Grande to ducal advisor to state inquisitor and so forth. There was no continuity of the population of Venice; the continuity was located only in the oligarchy. In fact, the population of the city seemed unable to reproduce itself. Venice suffered astronomical rates of mortality from malaria and the plague - its canals, it must be remembered, were first and foremost its sewer system. The decimated natives were continually replenished by waves of immigration, so much so that the Frenchman Philippe de Comynes, an adversary of Machiavelli, could report that the population was mostly foreigners.

Internal order was entrusted to an intricate system of local control in each of the city's sixty parishes, meshing with an elaborate apparatus of corporatist guilds called the Scuole. This was supplemented by an unending parade of festivals, spectacles, and carnivals. Very few troops were usually stationed in the city.

So much for the phenomena. Reality was located in the fact that an elite of ten to fifteen families out of the one hundred fifty effectively ruled with an iron hand. Various Venetian diarists let the cat out of the bag in their descriptions of corruption and vote-buying, especially the bribery of the impoverished decadent nobility, called Barnabotti, who were increasingly numerous in the Gran Consiglio. The regime ran everything, and offices of all types were routinely sold.

This reality of graft was also known to Dante. The poetical geometry of Canto 21 of the Inferno, the canto of the grafters or Barattieri, is established by a reference to the Venetian Arsenal and the pitch used to caulk the hulls of the galleys:

As in the Arsenal of the Venetians
Boils in the winter the tenacious pitch
To smear their leaky vessels over again,
For sail they cannot.

The souls of the grafters are immersed in the boiling pitch, where they are guarded by the Malebranche, grotesque winged monsters armed with spears and hooks: a fitting allegory for the souls of the Venetians.

Dante visited Venice in 1321, acting in his capacity as diplomatic representative of the nearby city of Ravenna, whose overlord was for a time his protector. He died shortly after leaving Venice. The two explanations of his death converge on murder: one version state that he was denied a boat in which to travel south across the lagoon. He was forced to follow a path through the swamps, caught malaria, and died. Another version says that a boat was available, but that to board it would have meant certain assassination. Venetian records regarding this matter have conveniently disappeared.

PETRARCH VERSUS ARISTOTLE

The Venetian method of statecraft is based on Aristotle - the deepest Aristotelian tradition in the West. Long before the era of Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Venice had established itself as the chief center for the translation and teaching of Aristotle's works.

In the year 1135, the Senate sent Giacomo da Venezia to Byzantium, where he was trained in post-Justinian Aristotelian orthodoxy, returning to Venice after two years to begin lectures on Aristotle and to prepare Latin versions of the Greek texts he had brought back with him. A school of Aristotelian doctrine was set up at the Rialto market, the heart of the business and commercial activity of the city. When Venice conquered Padua at the beginning of the fifteenth century, Aristotelian hegemony was imposed on the University of Padua, which became the only one where Venetian nobility were allowed international clientele, especially from Germany.

The inveterate Aristotelianism of Venice is the starting point for a major literary attack on that city by Francesco Petrarch, son of Dante's personal secretary, who took up the responsibility of servicing Dante's humanist networks during the disastrous years around the middle of the fourteenth century. Although these were the years of the Black Death, Petrarch ("Fraunces Petrak the laureate poet" as Chaucer knew him) was the soul of a tenacious humanist rearguard action, with spirited counterattacks at every opportunity, that made the later Italian Renaissance possible.

Petrarch was a contemporary of the Ciompi revolt against oligarchical rule in Florence; he was certainly involved in Cola di Rienzo's seizure of power in Rome in May, 1347. The real story of Petrarch's literary and political achievements has yet to be told. Nonetheless, the fact that he was a determined foe of Venice and its ideology is abundantly clear.

In 1355 Venice had just passed through one of its infrequent internal crises, usually explained as the attempt of the Doge Marin Faliero to overthrow the regime and establish a Signoria, or personal dictatorship, of the type common in Italy at the time. Marin Faliero was publicly decapitated by the Council of Ten.

Petrarch might have had a hand in this operation; during this period he was a frequent guest at the court of the Da Carrara rulers of Padua, about thirty kilometers from the Venetian lagoon. Petrarch may have developed plans for injecting a dose of Platonism into the intellectual life of the Serenissima. Petrarch proposed that he be allowed to take up residence in Venice and locate his library there; the books would remain as a bequest to the city after his death, forming the nucleus of what would have been the first public library in Europe. The Venice authorities accepted, and Petrarch, the most celebrated intellectual of his times, took up his residence on the Riva degli Schiavoni.

Soon he began to receive the visits of four Venetian Aristotelians, whom he later referred to as "my four famous friends." These four oligarchs were Tommaso Talenti, Guido da Bagnolo, Leonardo Dandolo, and Zaccaria Contarini, the latter two of the most exalted lineage. After several discussions with Petrarch, these four began to circulate the slander that Petrarch was "a good man, but without any education."

Petrarch shortly abandoned the library project and soon thereafter left Venice permanently. His answer to the slanderers is contained in his treatise "De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia" (1367) (with a swipe at Aristotle in the title), his most powerful piece of invective- polemical writing.

Petrarch scored Aristotelian scholastic philosophy as "a prostitute who delights to worry about vain questions of words." Real philosophy, with the clear purpose of advancing morality, he said, is to be found in St. Augustine. All that Aristotle is capable of doing is providing a delphic description of what the external attributes of morality might look like. To the authority of Aristotle, Petrarch counterposed the Platonism of the New Testament, saying that Christ, not Aristotle, was for him the decisive guide. His "four friends," he asserted, were not Christian, but preferred to follow their favorite philosopher in their sophistry, blasphemy, and impiety. They mocked Christ, and were so pretentious that they could not even understand their own arguments.

Petrarch pointed out that Aristotle provided his followers with all sorts of strange and curious lore, like the number of hairs on a lion's head or of feathers in a hawk's tail, how elephants copulate backwards, how the phoenix arises out of his own ashes, how the only animal that can move its upper jaw is the crocodile. But these facts are not only useless, he said, they are false. "How could Aristotle know such facts, since neither reason nor experience reveal them? Concerning the ultimate objects of philosophy, Aristotle is more ignorant than an old peasant woman.

Venetian nominalism went hand in hand with the most vicious avarice. In a play written in Venetian dialect by Carlo Goldoni in the eighteenth century, a Pantalone-type miser comes home to find wife and daughter busily engaged in needlework. The two women look up briefly and say hello. The miser flies into a rage screaming "What? You quit working to pay me compliments!"

An eminent witness of this typical Venetian vice was Erasmus of Rotterdam, who was to the years after 1500 what Petrarch had been in his own time: Leader of the Platonic humanist faction. Erasmus came to Venice in 1508, on the eve, interestingly enough, of the attempt to annihilate Venice in the War of the League of Cambrai. Erasmus came to get in touch with Aldo Manunzio, the Aldus who owned what was at that time the largest and most famous publishing house in the world.

Venice had reacted to the invention of moveable-type printing by Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz in a way that foreshadowed the reaction of the British oligarchy in this century to radio, the movies, and television. They had immediately attempted to seize control of the new medium. Dozens of Gutenberg's apprentices from the Rhein-Main area were bought up and brought to Venice, where the production of books up to 1500 and beyond was frequently a multiple of the number of titles published in the rest of the world combined.

Aldus was the William Paley and Jack Warner of the industry. Martin Luther was one of that industry's later creations. Aldus brought out the works of Aristotle in Greek shortly after he began operations in 1495. Plato had to wait for almost twenty years.

One of Erasmus' goals in visiting Venice was to accelerate the publication of Plato. He stayed at the home of Aldus' brother-in-law. Erasmus writes about his Venetian sojourn some time later, in the dialogue titled "Opulentia Sordida" of the Colloquia Familiaria. The Urbs Opulenta referred to is of course the wealthiest of all cities, Venice. Aldus appears as Antronius ("the caveman"), described as a multi- millionaire in today's terms.

Erasmus had been away, and is asked by a friend how he got so skinny. Has he been working as a galley slave? Erasmus replies that he has undergone something far worse: ten months of starvation in the home of Antronius. Here people freeze in the winter because there is no wood to burn. Wine was a strategic commodity in Erasmus' opinion, as indeed it was in a time when water was often very unsafe to drink. To save money on wine, Antronius took water and faeces annorum decem miscebat (mixed it with ten year old shit), stirring it up so it would look like the real thing. His bread was made not with flour, but with clay, and was so hard it would break even a bear's teeth. A groaning board on the holidays for a houseful of people and servants was centered around three rotten eggs. There was never meat or fish, but the usual fare was sometimes supplemented by shellfish from a colony that Antronius cultivated in his latrine. When Erasmus consulted a physician, he was told that he was endangering his life by overeating. Erasmus' friend in the dialogue concludes that at this rate, all Germans, Englishmen, Danes, and Poles are about to die. Finally, Erasmus takes his leave, to head for the nearest French restaurant.

VENETIAN INTELLIGENCE

What was the Venetian political intelligence method? The classical Venetian predicament is that of the weaker power attempting to play off two or more major empires. This was the case when the Venetian power was in its very infancy, and survival depended upon playing off the Langobard Kingdom of Italy against the Byzantines. This ploy was later replaced by the attempt to play the Byzantines off against the Carolingian Empire in the West, an attempt that almost misfired when the army of Charlemagne under Pippin laid siege to Venice inside its lagoons. That siege, however, was not successful.

In the eleventh century, the Venetians successfully incited the Norman barons operating out of Sicily under Robert Guiscard to attack Byzantium, and then moved in to offer the desperate Byzantines protection. The price for that protection was indicated by the famous Golden Bull of 1082, a decree of the Byzantine Emperor by which Venice acquired tax customs-free access to the whole of the eastern empire, where the Greeks themselves had to pay a tax of 10 percent on their own transactions. Thus began a hatred for Venice among the Greek population which persists down to the present day.

In the sixteenth century, Venetian strategic doctrine was to play the Ottoman Turks against the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs, and then to correct any residual strategic imbalance by playing the Hapsburgs off in their turn against the French. Sometimes Venice attempted to play the Portuguese rival power off against the Dutch. Later this was expanded to include playing the Dutch against the English, and the English against the French.

The Venetians also goaded forces out of the East to attack Christendom. Venice was the manipulator of Saracens, Mongols, and Turks, and got along with the slave-trading factions in each of these groups about as well as a power like Venice could get along with anybody. In particular, the Venetians were more willing to see territory - excepting Venetian territory - be occupied by the Turks than any other power. Venice was thus the past master of the more exotic permutations of the stolid old British dividi et impera, "divide and conquer."

But the essence of their strategic doctrine was something more abstruse, something sometimes described as the "collapse of empires" scenario. Venice parasitized the decline of much larger states, a decline that Venice itself strove to organize, sometimes in a long and gradual descending curve, but sometimes in a quick bonanza of looting.

Venice was repeatedly confronted with the problem posed by a triumphant enemy, at the height of his power, who would be perfectly capable of crushing the Serenissima in short order. This enemy had to be manipulated into self-destruction, not in any old way, but in the precise and specific way that served the Venetian interest. Does this sound impossible? What is astounding is how often it has succeeded. In fact, it is succeeding in a very real sense in the world today.

The most spectacular example of Venetian manipulation of the dumb giants of this world has gone down in history as the Fourth Crusade. At a tournament in the Champagne in 1201, the Duke of Champagne and numerous feudal barons collectively vowed to make a fighting pilgrimage to the sepulcher of Our Lord in Jerusalem. Here they were to reinforce a French garrison hard-pressed by the Turk Saladin. For many of them, this involved penance for certain misdeeds, not the least of which was a plot against their own sovereign liege, the king.

Reaching the Holy Land required transportation, and the French knights sent Geoffrey of Villehardouin to Venice to negotiate a convoy of merchant galleys with an appropriate escort of warships. Geoffrey closed the deal with the Doge Enrico Dandolo, blind and over eighty years old. Dandolo drove a hard bargain: for the convoy with escort to Jerusalem and back, the French knights would have to fork over the sum of 85,000 silver marks, equal to 20,000 kilograms of silver, or about double the yearly income of the King of England or of France at that time.

When 10,000 French knights and infantry gathered on the Lido of Venice in the summer of 1202, it was found that the French, after pawning everything down to the family silver, still owed the Venetians 35,000 marks. The cunning Dandolo proposed that this debt could easily be canceled if the crusaders would join the Venetians in subjugating Zara, a Christian city in Dalmatia, across the Adriatic from Venice. To this the knights readily agreed, and the feudal army forced the capitulation of Zara, which had been in revolt against Venice.

At this point Dandolo made the crusaders a "geopolitical" proposal, pointing out that the emperor of Byzantium was suspected of being in alliance with the Saracens, and that an advance to the Holy Land would be foolhardy unless this problem were first dealt with. As it happened, the Venetians were supporting a pretender to the Byzantine throne, since the current emperor was seeking to deny them their trading privileges. The pretender was the young Alexios, who promised the knights that if they helped him gain power, he would join them on the crusade with an army of 10,000 Greek soldiers.

Thus, from 1203 to 1204, Constantinople was besieged by the joint Franco-Venetian expeditionary force, which finally succeeded in breaking through the fortifications along the Golden Horn, the bay on the north side of the city.

Byzantium was sacked in an orgy of violence and destruction, from which the Venetians brought back as booty the four bronze horses which generally stand on the Basilica of St. Mark, but which are often exhibited in other cities. Count Baudoin of Flanders was place on the throne of a new concoction titled the Latin Empire of Constantinople. The doge of Venice received a piece of the action in the form of the title Lord of Three Eighths of the Latin Empire. Venice took over three-eighths of Constantinople, a permanent Venetian colony with its own battle fleet. Lemnos and Gallipoli came into Venetian hands. Crete was annexed, and were Naxos and related islands, and the large island of Euboa, which the Venetians called Negroponte. On the Ionian side, the Venetians appropriated Modon and Koron and several islands up to and including Corfu. All Venetian trading privileges in Greece were restored.

The loot brought back from the sack of Constantinople was greater than anything Europe would see until the Spanish treasure fleets from the New World several centuries later. Venice had acquired a colonial empire of naval bases, and was hegemonic in the eastern Mediterranean. To top it all off, the sultan of Egypt had paid a substantial bribe to Dandolo to keep the Crusaders out of Palestine in the first place.

For the human race, the Fourth Crusade was an unmitigated tragedy. The hypertrophy of Venetian power in the Mediterranean was one of the decisive factors ensuring the later defeat of Emperor Federigo II of Hohenstaufen, King of Sicily. The Venetian puppet "Latin Empire" was overthrown by the Paleologues in 1261, but by that time Federigo was gone. By 1266-68, Federigo's two sons and their Ghibelline supporters were defeated by Charles of Anjou, and the last representative of the Hohenstaufen dynasty was beheaded in the public square of Naples. The triumph of the Black Guelphs had become irreversible.

A further contributing factor in this tragedy was doubtless the Mongol hordes. At about the time the Venetians were sacking Constantinople, Ghengis Khan ruled over an empire that extended from Korea all the way to Iran, and which was rapidly advancing to the West. Batu, a nephew of Ghengis, defeated the Bulgarians in 1236, captured Kiev in the Ukraine in 1240, and swept into Poland. In Silesia in 1241 the German and Polish feudal army, including the Teutonic Knights, was annihilated. Later in the same year the Mongols defeated the Hungarians. The Mongols did not, for reasons that are not clear, advance further westward, but the Mongol Golden Horde that imposed its hegemony over Russia was the beginning of Russia's economic and cultural backwardness. For some loosening of the Mongol yoke, the Russians would have to fight the titanic battle of Kulokovo Field on the Don in 1380.

In these Mongol victories, there was something more than mere numerical superiority at work. as one historian sums up the case:

The Mongols did not sweep in wildly and suddenly, like reckless barbarians. No indeed, they advanced according to careful plan. At every stage, the Mongol generals informed themselves ahead of time about the state of European courts, and learned what feuds and disorders would be advantageous to their conquests. This valuable knowledge they obtained from Venetian merchants, men like Marco Polo's father. It was thus not without reason that Polo himself was made welcome at the court of Kublai, and became for a time administrator of the Great Khan.

So the great Marco Polo, and the Venetian family from which he came, was responsible for directing the destruction of Ghengis Khan against Europe. The omnipresent Venetian intelligence was also a factor in the Mongol destruction of the Arab cultural center of Baghdad in 1258.

Friedrich Schiller and William Shakespeare both analyze the manipulative methods employed by the Venetian secret intelligence establishment; both considered Venetian intelligence one of their most formidable enemies. Much of Schiller's writing is dedicated in various ways to fighting the Venice- Genoa- Geneva combination that had held the financial reins of King Philip II of Spain.

Schiller's direct treatment of Venice is a fragment of a novel titled Der Geisterseher ("The Ghost Seer"). Its central character is a Sicilian charlatan, expert at bringing the spirits of the departed back into the world for the thrill-seeking nobility at seances. This Sicilian charlatan is a figure for a whole class of Venetian intelligence operatives, like Count Cagliostro, the mountebank who claimed to be the reincarnation of the leading Mason of ancient Egypt. Another of this breed was Emanuel Swedenborg. After Schiller's time, this category swelled considerably with theosophists like Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Henry Steel Olcott, and with that archapparitionist Rudolph Steiner, founder of the Anthroposophy movement and the Waldorf schools.

In Schiller's tale, a young German prince in Venice for the grand tour is subjected to a series of manipulations by a sinister, masked Armenian, who informs him, before the fact, of the death of a close relative hundreds of miles away. At a gambling den, a young Venetian patrician picks a quarrel with the prince, who fears for his life until he is ushered into one of the chambers of the Council of Ten, where the offending patrician is strangled before his eyes. He comes into contact with the Sicilian mountebank, and then spends weeks attempting to ascertain the identity of a mysterious beauty he has seen at church.

He begins to frequent a semi-secret free-thinking club, called the Bucentoro after the golden ship used by the doge on occasions of state. At least one cardinal is also a member of the Bucentoro. He takes to gambling, loses heavily, and contracts immense debts. In the meantime, rumors are spread at his Protestant court that he has become a Catholic, which leads to his repudiation by his entire family. At the end of the fragment, his life has been ruined, and his death is imminent.

Shakespeare's "Othello, The Moor of Venice" is a more finished analysis of the same technique. It was written and performed shortly after 1603, when the Venetians and Genoese had acquired vast powers in England through the accession of their puppet James I to the throne.

Othello is a Moor, hired out to Venice as a mercenary, and at the apex of his power, having just won a victory over the Turkish fleet attacking Cyprus. He enjoys the full confidence of the Senate, and has just married Desdemona, the daughter of a patrician. Othello, the "erring barbarian," is however something of a dumb giant: his proficiency in the arts of war is unmatched, but his emotional makeup tends decidedly toward the naive and infantile. He has no real insight into affairs of state, or into psychology. Above all, he is superstitious and has a propensity for jealousy.

All of these weaknesses are systematically exploited by "honest Iago," a member of Othello's staff who is determined to destroy him. Iago is the figure of the Venetian intelligence officer, an expert in what he calls "double knavery" - the art of manipulation. He sets out to destroy Othello using an accurate psychological profile of the Moor, and exploiting above all Othello's naive willingness to trust his "honest Iago." Iago's modus operandi is to:

Make the Moor thank me, love me, and reward me,
For making him egregiously an ass
And practicing upon his peace and quit
Even to madness.

Iago uses his throwaway agent, the dupe Roderigo, for financing and services. He sets up scenes where he cons one participant with one story, briefs another participant with a different story, brings them together in a controlled environment, and exploits the resulting fireworks for his overall strategy. He sets up a fight between Roderigo and the drunken Cassio that leads to the wounding of Montano by Cassio, who is ousted as chief lieutenant by Othello. After this, he manipulates Desdemona's naive desire to help Cassio regain his post into prima facie evidence that Desdemona is an adulteress. Iago is then able to goad Othello all the way to killing Desdemona and, finally, himself.

At the center of the play are epistemological questions of truth and proof. In Act 3, Iago drives Othello wild with innuendoes about Desdemona's alleged adultery, and makes him commit to the murder of Cassio, all without the slightest shred of proof. What Othello then regards as definitive proof of adultery, sufficient to motivate the murder of Desdemona, is a handkerchief which Iago obtains and plants on Cassio. This handkerchief is an object of deep emotional and superstitious importance for Othello, as it had been given by his father to his mother. It had been his first love token for Desdemona. When he sees it in the hands of Cassio, he is ready to kill.

Iago is well aware of Othello's epistemological weakness. When he first obtains the handkerchief, he gloats:

I will in Cassio's lodging lose this napkin,
And let him find it. Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmations strong
As proofs of holy writ; this may do something.

Shortly thereafter, Othello demands certainty that Desdemona is betraying him. What would be definitive proof, Iago asks?

Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape upon -
Behold her tupp'd?

This kind of certainty, he says, is impossible to obtain, but he offers an inductive- deductive substitute:

But yet, I say,
If imputation and strong circumstances,
Which lead directly to the door of truth,
Will give you satisfaction, you might have't.

In the final scene, we can agree with Iago's wife Emilia that Othello is a gull and a dolt, a "murderous coxcomb ... as ignorant as dirt." But the lesson is that not only Othello, but all those who love not wisely but too well, who, "being wrought" and "perplexed in the extreme," are potential victims of Venetian intelligence.

DESTRUCTION OF THE RENAISSANCE

Since the Venetian oligarchy relied for its survival on the secret weapon of political intelligence manipulation, its primary strategic targets were first and foremost dictated by epistemological rather than military criteria. Fleets and armies, even in the hands of a powerful and aggressive enemy state, could well redound to Venetian advantage. The real danger was a hostile power that developed epistemological defenses against manipulation and deceit. In the face of such a threat Venice did - and does - kill.

The Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, perhaps the greatest outpouring of human creativity in history, represented such a threat to the Serene Republic, and in a more concentrated form than it had ever faced before. The threat arose from the epistemological warfare and alliance system of the great Cosimo de' Medici of Florence and his successors. Venice mobilized every resource at its disposal to destroy the Renaissance. After decades of sabotage, going so far as to arrange the ravaging of Italy by foreign armies, Venice succeeded.

The potential political and epistemological power of the Italian Renaissance are best identified in the ecumenical council of the Church convened in Florence in the year 1438. The council, first convened in Ferrara, was moved to Florence at the urging of Cosimo de' Medici, who held power from 1434 to 1464. Cosimo was the major financial and political sponsor of the proceedings.

Cosimo was a self-declared enemy of Venice. On one occasion he wrote, "Association with the Venetians brings two things which have always been rejected by men of wisdom: certain perdition and disgrace."

The council had to deal with the ongoing crisis in the western church, which had been exacerbated by the struggle between the Council of Basel and Pope Eugene IV, who had been driven out of Rome by a revolt. In the East, the Ottoman Turks were beginning to recover from the crushing defeat that the Turkish Emperor Bajazet had suffered in 1402 at the battle of Ankara at the hand of Tamerlane the Great. The first, unsuccessful, Turkish siege of Constantinople had already been mounted in 1422.

The hope held out by the Council of Florence was to implement Nicolas of Cusa's program of the Concordantia Catholica - a community of principle among humanist sovereign states for cultural and economic development, against Venetians, Turks, and all enemies of natural law. To Florence came the Emperor of Byzantium, John VIII Paleologue, accompanied by his advisor Gemisthos Plethon and Plethon's student, Archbishop Bessarion of Nicea. The Latin delegation was titularly headed by Pope Eugene IV, heavily dependent upon the support of Cosimo de' Medici at that time. This delegation was dominated in outlook by men like Nicolas of Cusa, Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo Bruni, Cardinal Capranica, and Aeneas Piccolomini of Siena, later Pope Pius II. The Greek and Latin delegations were each profoundly vitiated by powerful Aristotelian factions, but this was still one of the most impressive assemblies in history.

The culmination of the council was an impassioned oration by Plethon on the antithesis between Plato and Aristotle, a speech which went far beyond anything ever heard in the West. Marsilio Ficino, himself a participant at the council, tells the story of how Cosimo de' Medici, while listening to Plethon, made up his mind to create the Platonic Academy in Florence.

The most immediate question to be addressed was the reunification of the Roman and Greek churches, abrogating the mutual excommunications issued by the pope and the patriarch of Constantinople in 1054. The contending theologians debated the question of the "filioque" in the Latin credo, attempting to resolve the question of whether the Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Father, as the Greeks argued, or from the Son as well, according to the Roman view. The Greeks eventually agreed to recognize the correctness of the Latin position, although they declined to modify their own credo accordingly. The Paleologue emperor intervened repeatedly in these discussions, stressing that there were no real differences in doctrine, and that anyone who let nonexistent divergences stand in the way of common action against the Turks was a worse traitor than Judas. In the end a purely formal reunification of the two churches was attained, but it remained a dead letter.

Even so, Cosimo and his cothinkers came close several times to welding an alliance capable of dominating the world, and the first to pay the price of their success would have been the Venetians. Medici Florence was at the center of a network of trade and finance that was beginning to rival Venice, with the crucial difference that the Florentines were the producers, thanks to Cosimo's dirigism, of the textile products they offered for sale. The Duchy of Milan would shortly come under the domination of the condottiero (mercenary commander) Francesco Sforza, installed in power with the help of the Medici, and an enemy of Venice. In 1461 the humanist Louis XI would take the throne of France. This new king was determined to apply the concepts of statecraft developed in Italy, and considered the Venetians "insolent merchants." In 1460, the humanist Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini would be elected Pope Pius II; in the meantime he was in a position to influence Frederick III of Hapsburg, the Holy Roman Emperor.

The Venetian reaction to this potential for the implementation of an ecumenical Grand Design on the platform of the Italian Renaissance humanists was, predictably, to bring on the Turks once again. During all these years the Turks possessed a combined warehouse- residence- safehouse in Venice, the Fondaco dei Turchi, which facilitated dealings between the doge and the sultan. Spurred on by Venetian financing and Venetian- procured artillery, the Sultan Mohammed the Conqueror laid siege to Constantinople and captured it in 1453. The Turks were aided by the Greek patriarch, who had pronounced the defense of the Paleologue dynasty a heretical cause. Finally, it was the Genoese troops who opened the gates of the city to the forces of the sultan. Hardly a coincidence was the burning of the library of Constantinople with its matchless collection of Ionian and Platonic codices, most unavailable anywhere else since the library of Alexandria had been destroyed some fifteen centuries earlier. In their own sack of Constantinople in 1204, the Venetians had declined to appropriate these manuscripts.

The destruction of Byzantium by the Turks gave the Venetians a slogan with which to organize their war against the Renaissance. Since the Roman Empire had finally ended, it was left to the Venetians to arrogate to themselves the task of building a new Roman Empire. The foundation of a new Roman Empire became, in Venice, from the middle of the fifteenth century on, the leading obsession of the oligarchs.

"The Venetians are called new Romans," confided the patrician Bernardo Bembo to his diary. Francesco Sforza of Milan wrote that the Venetians were:

"obstinate and hardened, always keeping their mouths open to be able to bite off power and usurp the state of all their neighbors to fulfill the appetite of their souls to conquer Italy and then beyond, as did the Romans, thinking to compare themselves to the Romans when their power was at its apex."

Machiavelli wrote that the Venetians had "fixed in their souls the intention of creating a monarchy on the Roman model." This is corroborated by a dispatch of the ambassador of Louis XII of France at the court of the Emperor Maximilian I some years later, which described the Venetians as:

"traders in human blood, traitors to the Christian faith who have tacitly divided up the world with the Turks, and who are already planning to throw bridgeheads across the Danube, the Rhine, the Seine, and Tagus, and the Ebro, attempting to reduce Europe to a province and to keep it subjugated to their armies."

These megalomaniac plans of the Venetians were no secret. In 1423, the Doge Tommaso Mocenigo had urged upon his fellow oligarchs a policy of expansionism which would make them the overlords "of all the gold and of Christendom."

The most penetrating indictments of the Venetians during this period were issued by Pope Pius II Piccolomino, who tried in vain to force Venice into joining a crusade against the Turks. A Venetian saying of this period was Prima son Vinizian, poi son Cristian. (I am a Venetian first, then a Christian.") In his Commentaries, Pius II excoriates the Venetians for their duplicitous treachery, and establishes the fact that they are a pagan, totalitarian state. The Venetians, he says, have acted in their diplomacy:

"with the good faith characteristics of barbarians, or after the manner of traders whose nature it is to weigh everything by utility, paying no attention to honor. But what do fish care about law? As among the brute beasts aquatic creatures have the least intelligence, so among human beings the Venetians are the least just and the least capable of humanity, and naturally so, for they live on the sea and pass their lives in the water; they use ships instead of horses; they are not so much companions of men as of fish and comrades of marine monsters. They please only themselves, and while they talk they listen to and admire themselves.... They are hypocrites. They wish to appear as Christians before the world, but in reality they never think of God and, except for the state, which they regard as a deity, they hold nothing sacred, nothing holy. To a Venetian, that is just which is for the good of the state; that is pious which increases the empire.... What the senate approves is holy even though it is opposed to the gospel.... They are allowed to do anything that will bring them to supreme power. All law and right may be violated for the sake of power."

During many of these years Venetians were in a tacit alliance with the Turks. When, for example, a revolt against Venetian rule in Albania was started, threatening the Venetian naval base at Durazzo, the Venetians made a deal with the Turks to crush the revolt. On one occasion Pius II received the Venetian ambassador to the Roman court and condemned Venetian policy with these words:

"Your cause is one with thieves and robbers.... No power was ever greater than the Roman empire and yet God overthrew it because it was impious, and He put in its place the priesthood because it respected divine law.... You think [your] republic will last forever. It will not last long. Your population so wickedly gathered together will soon be scattered abroad. The offscourings of fishermen will be exterminated. A mad state cannot long stand."

In 1464 Pius II, despite a serious illness, traveled from Rome to Ancona to personally lead a crusade against the Turks. He wished to force the hand of the Venetians, who had promised him a battle fleet. He died shortly after the Venetian warships arrived, and Venice thereupon pulled out of any serious fighting against the Turks. But his attack on "the mad state" was on target, then and now.

During the first half of the fifteenth century, much Venetian energy was devoted to a rapid expansion up the Po Valley toward Milan. They seized Padua, Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, and Bergamo, reaching the Adda River, just a few miles from Milan. With Milan under Venetian control, the "new Romans" could bid fair to dominate northern Italy and then the entire peninsula.

Cosimo de' Medici, as we have seen, secured a Florence-Milan alliance by supporting the claims of Francesco Sforza, fighting a was against Venice to do it. Basing himself on this Florence-Milan axis, Cosimo then proceeded to create an uneasy peace in Italy that was to last forty years. This was the Italian League, formed at the Peace of Lodi in 1453, which united the leading powers of Italy, the pope, Naples, Milan, Florence, and Venice, ostensibly in an alliance against the Turks, who had for a time held a toe-hold in Apulia. In reality, the Italian League was a Florence- Milan- Naples combination designed to check Venetian expansionism. In this it proved effective, giving the Renaissance almost half a century of time to develop under the longa pax of the Medici.

During these years, stymied in Italy, the Venetians concentrated on overseas expansion, including the conquest of Cyprus. But on the death of Cosimo's successor, Lorenzo the Magnificent, they began their systematic campaign to destroy the civilization of the high renaissance. Their basic premise was that, given their own inability to devastate the centers of Renaissance culture and economic development, they must concentrate on duping the overwhelming military forces of European states like France, Spain, and the other Hapsburg dominions into accomplishing this task for them.

The most competent contemporary observer of these matters was Niccolo Machiavelli, active somewhat later in the post-Medici Florentine diplomatic service, and a factional ally of Cesare Borgia, Duke of Valentino. Machiavelli noted that the two most dangerous forces in Italy around the turn of the century were the Venetians and the pope. His own hatred was directed especially against Venice, firstly because of the stated Venetian intention to subjugate Italy in a new Roman Empire. Secondly, Venice more than any other state relied on armies of mercenaries, and thus embodied precisely that practice which Machiavelli knew had to be extirpated, in favor of citizen-soldiers, if Italy was to be saved from humiliating subjugation to the likes of the Hapsburgs.

Machiavelli pointed out that the disintegration of Italy began when the Venetians succeeded in turning Lodovico il Moro, successor of Francesco as Duke of Milan, making him their agent of influence. Lodovico was responsible for the first major invasion of Italy in many years when he agreed to support the claims of Charles VIII of France to the Kingdom of Naples. This was the French king whom his father, the great Louis XI, considered a hopeless imbecile. In 1494 the French army crossed the Alps, accompanied by a Genoese advisor we will meet again later: Giuliano della Rovere.

This was enough to bring about the fall of the Medici regime in Florence, to the advantage of the Pazzi, Albizi, and related oligarchs of that city. These oligarchs immediately sought to crush the Florentine Renaissance using the regime of the demented Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola, who set up a theocracy a la Khomeini. Savonarola proudly trumpeted that his rule was based on sound Venetian principles; his family was closely related to the Padua Aristotelian community. As for Charles VIII, he went on to establish a tenuous hold on Naples.

Several years later, in 1498, the Venetians repeated this maneuver, with the variation that this time it was they who blatantly invited the French to cross the Alps. This time the pretext was the French claim to the Milanese dukedom, and the dupe was a new French king, Louis XII. The French army knocked out Milan in 1500, a fatal blow to the Renaissance cultural ferment associated there with Leonardo da Vinci. Shortly thereafter, Louis XII decided to compensate the Hapsburgs with Naples. Naples accordingly became the first beachhead of what would shortly become a totally destructive Hapsburg hegemony in Italy.

VENICE AND GENOA COMBINE

For Venice, so far so good: Florence, Naples, and Milan had been ruined. But ironically, the same dumb Valois and Hapsburg giants which had taken out three dangerous rivals were now to turn like Frankenstein's monsters on the wily new Romans. Venetian manipulations were about to boomerang in the form of an alliance of all of Europe against Venice.

This was the famous crisis of the War of the League of Cambrai, which was assembled in 1508-1509. The opposing coalition was made up of the pope (by then the Genoese Giuliano della Rovere, as Julius II), the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, France, Spain, Savoy, Mantua, and Ferrara. The announced purpose of this alliance was to expunge Venice from the face of the earth.

It nearly worked. At Agnadello, near the Adda River, the Venetian mercenary army was crushed by an army composed predominantly of Frenchmen. The Venetians were driven all the way down the Po Valley to Padua, and they soon lost that as well. Machiavelli exulted that on the day of Agnadello, the Venetians lost everything that they had conquered in more than 800 years. Machiavelli was himself engaged in operations against Venice, bringing a grant of Florentine cash to the aid of the Franco-Imperial forces holding Verona.

With nothing left but the lagoons, the Venetian position was desperate. The doge sent a message to the pope asking for mercy, and announcing that Venice would vacate territory taken in the past from the Papal States.

Inside Venice, Agnadello brought on an orgy of hysterical self-flagellation among the terrified patricians. The banker Girolamo Priuli wrote in his diary that Agnadello had been a punishment for the sins of the Venetian nobility, among which he numbered arrogance, violation of promises, lechery in nunneries, sodomy, effeminate dress, and luxurious and lascivious entertainments. Antonio Contarini, newly appointed patriarch of Venice, gave a speech to the Senate in which he characterized the Serenissima as a thoroughly amoral city. The defeat was a punishment for the city's sins, he said. Nunneries were catering to the sexual needs of the rich and powerful. Homosexuality was so widespread that female prostitutes had complained to him that they had earned so little during their youth that they had to keep working far into their old age.

But more significantly, the shock of Agnadello set into motion a strategic review in the Venetian intelligence community which led to very far-reaching conclusions, some of which were not obvious before several decades had gone by.

The first Venetian ploy was to attempt to dismember the Cambrai coalition. They started with Pope Julius II. This pontiff was, as already noted, Genoese. Genoa and Venice had engaged in a series of highly destructive wars up till about the end of the fourteenth century, but after that, Genoa gravitated toward the status of junior partner and close associate of the Venetians. The Venetians had bested the Genoese by virtue of superior connections in the East, but otherwise their was a broad area of agreement.

The symbol of Genoa was St. George the dragon-slayer, in reality no saint at all but a thinly disguised version of Perseus saving Andromeda by slaying the sea monster, a legend that is centered on the coast of Lebanon. The "George" is said to come from the Gorgon Medusa, whose head Perseus was carrying.

Perseus is in turn nothing but a westernized variant of Marduk, the Syrian Apollo, a deity associated with the most evil forces of ancient Assyria and Babylon. The Venetians had their own Marduk cult, although subordinated to St. Mark, on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, home of a Dominican monastery and today of the Cini Foundation, one of the highest level think tanks in the world. The modern British preference of Gorgons is too well known to need comment.

What probably accounted more directly for Julius II's decision to reverse his alliances was a deal mediated with the Venetians by Agostino Chigi, the Siena Black Guelph banker from whose financial empire the infamous Siena Group of today derives. He proposed that the Venetians stop buying alum, needed in textile and glass manufacture, from the Turks, but contract for a large shipment at higher prices from the alum mines at Tolfa in the Papal States - mines for which he, Chigi, was acting as agent. To sweeten the pot, Chigi offered the Venetians tens of thousands of ducats in much-needed loans.

The Venetians, fearing a rapid French offensive, accepted. Their own state finances were in total shambles. Only the Chigi loan allowed them to hire enough Swiss mercenaries to hold out against the French and the Imperial Landsknechte.

To provide a plausible cover for his move, Julius II suddenly discovered that the real issue was not Venice after all, but the need to expel the barbarians (primarily the French) from Italy. Julius stipulated an alliance with Venice. He then set up the slogan of Fuori Barbari! (Kick the Barbarians out!) which is still recorded by credulous writers of Italian school books as the beginning of the struggle to unify Italy. Even the Venetian mercenaries, mostly Swiss, began using the battle cry of "Italy and Freedom!"

Thus the post-Agnadello crisis was overcome. Some years later the Venetians tried the same tactic in reverse, this time with more lasting success. By 1525 the prevalent barbarians in Italy were the forces of Emperor Charles V, who had defeated the French at Pavia, capturing King Francis I. The French lost their hold on Naples and Milan. At this point Doge Andrea Gritti, whose portrait by Tiziano speaks volumes about his personality, decided to agitate once again the banner of Italian freedom. This took the form of the Holy League of Cognac "for the restoration of Italian liberty," uniting France, Venice, Milan, Florence, and the Papal States under Pope Clement VIII Medici. After having set up this alliance, designed to play the French against Charles V once again to destroy Medici-controlled Rome, the last intact Renaissance center, the Venetians retired into defensive positions to await the outcome.

Venetian capacities to manipulate Charles V were formidable indeed. The emperor's bankers and intelligencers were the Fuggers of Augsburg, a banking house and a city that must be regarded as Venetian satellites, within a context of very heavy Venetian control of the cities of the Danube valley. Virtually every young male member of the Fugger family, and of their colleagues the Welsers as well, was sent to Venice for a period of apprenticeship at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. This was the case with Jacob Fugger the Rich. Venice was the pivot for Fugger metals trading, especially toward the East.

Thus, the Venetians stayed in their phony war posture against Charles V, while the imperial army of Lutheran Lanzi under Georg Frundsberg devastated Italy. The sack of Rome in 1527 was the direct outcome of this combined Venetian diplomacy and manipulation. To make Charles V's triumph complete, the Genoese Admiral Andrea Doria, commanding the French fleet, defected to the imperial side. A Doria coup in Genoa then established a permanent de facto alliance with Venice.

In 1530, Charles V was crowned as Holy Roman Emperor and King of Italy in a ceremony at Bologna. Garrisons of imperial troops were shortly stationed in every major city. Thanks to the tenacious policy of the Venetians, the main centers of the Renaissance had been subverted or destroyed. Venice was the only major Italian state which had retained real sovereignty. With the end of the Renaissance, Venice could feel free to start a delphic Renaissance among the throngs of intellectuals seeking asylum in the lagoons.

THE CREATION OF THE JESUITS

The "long autumn of the Italian Renaissance in Venice" during the rest of the sixteenth century was only one deployment among several. Another was the promotion of the Protestant Reformation. The more immediate controllers of Martin Luther have yet to be identified, but this is something of a secondary matter. Luther's agitation in Wittenberg was merely one more example of protests against the papacy and the Curia that had been chronic and endemic for decades. What gave Luther and the rest of the Protestant reformers real clout was a publicity and diffusion of their ideas that owed much to the Venetian publishing establishment. The Venetian presses quickly turned out 40,000 copies of the writings of Luther, Calvin, Melancthon, and the heresiarch Juan Valdes, especially popular in Italy.

Pope Leo X publicly denounced the University of Padua as the hotbed of inspiration of the German disease of Lutheranism. Clearly, Venetian interest was well-served by a schismatic movement that would embroil Germany, France, and the rest of Europe in a series of easily profiled conflicts. In addition, a conflict between reformers and counter- reformers, all owing allegiance to Aristotle, would severely undercut the influence of Erasmus and others like him.

Venetian influence on both Reformation and Counter- Reformation can be seen most clearly in the remarkable career of Gasparo Contarini, who did not let the fact that he was a Protestant in theology, well before Luther, prevent him from founding the Society of Jesus.

Contarini was the scion of one of Venice's most prestigious LONGHI families. The Contarinis had produced seven doges, and Gasparo had his sights set on being the eighth, before he was tapped to serve Venice as a member of the College of Cardinals. He served the Serene Republic as ambassador to the court of Charles V, and as ambassador to the Vatican, where he took a role in setting up the Medici Pope Clement VII for the 1527 sack of Rome. Toward the end of his life, Contarini was sent as papal legate to the Imperial Diet at Regenburg, where he represented the Roman point of view in debates with schismatics like Melancthon. There, he had a hand in destroying any compromise between the Lutherans and the Emperor Charles, which would have helped to end the bloodshed and dissension of the Reformation years.

What does this sublime Venetian patrician have to do with the founding of the Jesuit order by that itinerant and deranged mystic, Ignatius of Loyola? Ignatius was the creature of Venice, and of Contarini in particular.

In 1521, Ignatius was wounded while fighting the French in one of the wars of Charles V. During his convalescence, he underwent his much-touted mystical crisis, after which he took up the life of a hobo. Making his way around Europe seeking funding for a pilgrimage to the holy land, Ignatius found his way to Venice, where he camped out in St. Mark's Square and lived by begging.

One evening the Venetian oligarch Marcantonio Trevisan was sleeping in his golden palace, and had a vision. An angel came to him asking, "Why are you sleeping so soundly in your warm bed, while in the square there is a holy man, a poor pilgrim who needs your help?" Trevisan rushed downstairs to find Ignatius, who became his house guest, fleas and all.

After that, Ignatius was given an audience with the doge, Andrea Gritti, who offered him passage to Cyprus on a Venetian warship as first leg of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Ignatius continued his travels, but soon returned to Venice to develop relationships with other members of the oligarchy. These included Gasparo Contarini's nephew Pietro, who became a recipient of Ignatius' patented brainwashing treatment, the Exercitationes Spirituales.

Then Ignatius made his way to Rome. Here he became the protégé of Gasparo Contarini, who had been appointed to the College of Cardinals by Pope Paul III Farnese. The cardinal took the Exercitationes Spirituales, and appointed Ignatius his personal confessor and spiritual advisor. By 1540, Contarini had personally interceded with the pope against Ignatius' enemies within the church hierarchy to ensure the founding of the Society of Jesus as a new Church order. In June 1539, Contarini personally traveled to the pope's summer residence at Tivoli, and prevailed on the pontiff to let him read aloud the statutes of the new order composed by Ignatius. The pope must have been favorably impressed by something. His approving comment Hic est digitus Dei, ("Here is the finger of God"), has become a feature of the turgid Jesuit homiletics.

BIRTH OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

An ironic postscript to this story is that later the Venetian oligarchy decided that it simply would not do to be too closely identified with the benighted excesses of the Spanish and the papacy they so thoroughly dominated. In the years around 1570, accordingly, Venice became the site of the first example in Europe of what the French later termed "salons" for socializing and literary discussion: the Ridotto Morosini, sponsored by the ancient family of the same name. Here the seeds were sown that would later produce free-thinking, l'esprit libertin and the Philosophes - in a word, the Enlightenment. The Ridotto Morosini salon was in favor of tolerance and science, against everything doctrinaire and narrow. They sheltered Galileo against the Inquisition. Out of the Morosini salon came one of the rare public factions in Venetian political history, the so-called Giovani.

The Giovani, in contrast to their rivals, the Vecchi, were in favor of profound innovations in Venetian foreign policy. They wished above all to cement alliances with the countries to whom they felt the future belonged: France, England, and the Netherlands. The Vecchi, they said, were paralyzed by too much fear of Spanish power, and not ready enough to tangle with the people.

The Giovani were able to implement their program in 1606, when the Pope (now Paul V, Camillo Borghese) strenuously objected to the arrest by Venice of several ecclesiastics in its territory. The Borghese pope placed Venice under the interdict, and proceeded to excommunicate government officials. The main supporter of Venice internationally was James I, the Stuart ruler of England.

At the same time, the powerful Venetian propaganda apparatus swung into action, under the leadership of a Servite monk named Paolo Sarpi, whose lack of noble birth kept him from public office. Sarpi was the Venetian contact man for Sir Francis Bacon.

Sarpi had been in Rome, where he had been associated with Nicholas Bobadilla, one of St. Ignatius' original hard core. He had been a friend of Bellarmino, later the Jesuit-general, and his direct adversary during the Interdict affair. He was close to Galileo, who called him "my father." Sarpi had lent a hand in the construction of Galileo's telescope. Sarpi was lavish in his praise of Gilbert's treatise on magnetism. He was also the author of an Arte di Ben Pensare, which is curiously similar to the writings of John Locke. Sarpi admitted in private to being "a Protestant."

He engaged in a long pamphlet war with Bellarmino, and topped this off with a muck-raking History of the Council of Trent, which needless to say whitewashed the role of Venetian intelligence in the Counter- Reformation. The noise created around the whole affair was so great that some people forgot that it had after all been the Venetians, specifically Zuane Mocenigo, who had consigned Giordano Bruno - also of Ridotto Morosini - into the hands of the Inquisition just a few years before.

METASTASIS

The policies of the Giovani, propagandized by Sarpi and Doge Leonardo Dona' during the struggle around the Interdict, corresponded to a metastasis of Venice's power and influence through the world. The Venetians and their Genoese Doria-faction associates were busily shifting their family fortunes into more profitable locations, not tied to the fate of what was rapidly becoming a third-rate naval power.

The Venice-Genoa partnership is in evidence first of all in the banking side of the Spanish looting of the New World. Venice got control of the silver coming from the Americas, shifting to a silver standard from the previous gold standard in the middle of the sixteenth century. This silver was used to pay for the spices and other products from the East.

Venice was extremely liquid at this time, with about 14 million ducats in coins in reserve around 1600. At about the same time, incredibly, the Venetian regime had completed the process of paying off its entire public debt, leaving the state with no outstanding obligations of any type. This overall highly liquid situation is a sure sign that flights of capital are underway, in the direction of the countries singled out by the Giovani as future partners or victims: France, England, and the Netherlands.

The Genoese around the St. George's Bank received virtually the entire world's circulating gold stocks. The two cities teamed up starting around 1579 at the Piacenza Fair, a prototype of a clearing house for European banks, which soon had a turnover of 20 million ducats a year. This fair was a precursor of the post-Versailles Bank for International Settlements.

In 1603, Venice and Genoa assumed direction of the finances of Stuart England, and imparted their characteristic method to the British East India Company. It is also this tandem that was present at the creation of the great Amsterdam Bank, the financial hinge of the seventeenth century, and of the Dutch East India Company. Venice and Genoa were also the midwives for the great financial power growing up in Geneva, which specialized in controlling the French public debt and in fostering the delphic spirits of the Enlightenment.

The Venetians, in cooperation with the restored - that is, degenerated - Medici interests, began a major move into maritime and other types of insurance. These ventures live on today in the biggest business enterprise associated with Venice, the Assicurazioni Generali Venezia, one of the biggest if not the biggest insurance and real estate holdings in the world.

On May 12, 1797, the Gran Consiglio obeyed Napoleon's ultimatum and voted itself out of existence. Four thousand French infantrymen paraded on St. Mark's Square, where foreign troops had never before in history been seen. The golden Bucentoro was burned and the gold carted off. The Venetian "Republic" was finished, but it continued most emphatically to exist in less visible but highly effective forms.

One particular of the last years of Venice is of special interest to us: During the American Revolution about 3000 Venetian naval personnel, corresponding to about one-third of the total available strength, were serving with the British Royal Navy.

Commenting on the liquidation of Venice, the great Neapolitan Neoplatonic Giuseppe Cuoco wrote:

"I don't know what will happen to Italy, but the fulfillment of the Florentine secretary's prophecy in the destruction of the old, imbecilic Venetian oligarchy will be a great boon for Italy always."

The reference, of course, is to Machiavelli.

On the other side, William Wordsworth lamented the demise of "a maiden city," the "eldest child of liberty."

POST MORTEM

Unfortunately, all the obituaries were premature: Venice has continued to be very much alive. During the nineteenth century and up to our own time it has been the most important single incubator for fascist movements. With its military and financial power largely emigrated elsewhere, Venice's importance for political culture is now greater than ever.

Examples of this are inexhaustible. Richard Wagner wrote part of Tristan und Isolde while living in the Palazzo Giustinian on the Grand Canal. One story has it that the leitmotif of the Liebestod was inspired by the mournful call of a gondolier. At the end of his life Wagner moved to Palazzo Vendramin Callergi, where he died. This building, presently a gambling casino, was also the home of Count Coudenhove- Kalergi, the founder of the Pan-European Union. Friedrich Nietzsche loved Venice, returned there incessantly, and dedicated certain poems to the city which today can still be used in lieu of a powerful emetic. Venice was an inspiration for Lord Byron, for Thomas Mann, and so on.

Other examples abound of how the Venetian oligarchy's cultural and political influence has reached down into the modern era:

* When British East India Company retainer Thomas Malthus published his Essay on Population he was plagiarizing from the Venetian Giammaria Ortes, who produced, around 1750, a fully developed version of the argument that geometric population growth outstrips the much slower arithmetric progress of food production.

* John Ruskin, the leading ideologue of the British Dark Ages faction, began his career with a raving treatise on architecture, The Stones of Venice (1851). This volume popularized the notion that a "Venetian Gothic" style had been developed in the better times of the city's history (which for Ruskin ended in 1418) and it was used systematically to discredit the Golden Renaissance.

* A turn-of-the-century new Roman Empire faction led by Venetian Count Volpi di Misurata, who was known as the doge of his era, sponsored the fascist Mussolini supporter Gabriele D'Annunzio to drum up enthusiasm for a new crusade into the Balkans and the East. Volpi became finance minister in Mussolini's cabinet, along with a very large number of other Venetians. D'Annunzio incited the Italians to take back Trieste, the rest of Italia Irredenta, and the Dardanelles, bringing on to center stage the so-called Parvus Plan for dismemberment of the Ottoman and Russian empires, which is generally recognized as the detonator of World War I. It is possible that the turn-of-the- century super spook Alexander Parvus was ultimately employed by Venice.

* The Societe Europeenne de Culture, a think tank created in 1950 through the efforts of Venetian intelligence operative Umberto Campagnolo, has for the past three decades pulled intellectuals from both East and West into organizing for an "international culture," based on rejecting the existence of sovereign nations. The SEC counted among its members the cream of the postwar intelligencia: Adam Schaff of Poland, Bertolt Brecht of East Germany, Georg Lukas of Hungary, and Boris Paternak of the Soviet Union, as well as Stephen Spender and Arnold Toynbee, Benedetto Croce and Norberto Bobbio, Julian Huxley and Thomas Mann, Francois Mauriac, and Jean Cocteau. Later, the SEC launched the Third World national liberation ideology.

Today, the Club of Rome is the institution that represents the most concentrated essence of Venetian influence and the Venetian method. The Club of Rome wants to convince the great powers and peoples of the world to commit collective suicide by accepting the genocidal doctrine of zero growth. It also hopes to abolish the sovereign nation as a vehicle for economic growth and scientific progress.

Club of Rome founder Aurelio Peccei has just written a new book titled One Hundred Pages For the Future, a global review of the impact of the Club of Rome, and particularly since its 1972 release of the zero-growth model Limits to Growth was published, a series of social movements has sprung up under the sponsorship of the ideas in the book. These - the women's movement, the peace movement, Third World national liberation movements, gay rights, civil liberties, ecologists, consumer and minority rights, etc. - must now be welded together into one movement for a single strategic goal: the implementation of a zero-growth international order.

The Venetian problem remains with us today. Truly, the most urgent task of this generation of mankind is to definitively liquidate the horror that is Venice.

venetian system transplanted into England

2008-02-11T10:53:00.000Z

HOW THE VENETIAN SYSTEM WAS TRANSPLANTED INTO ENGLAND

New Federalist, June 3, 1996

NOBLE VENETIAN: ...pray tell us what other prerogatives the King [of England] enjoys in the government; for otherwise, I who am a Venetian, may be apt to think that our Doge, who is called our prince, may have as much power as yours.

Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus, 1681

The oligarchical system of Great Britain is not an autochthonous product of English or British history. It represents rather the tradition of the Babylonians, Romans, Byzantines, and Venetians which has been transplanted into the British Isles through a series of upheavals. The status of Britain as the nation foutué of modern history is due in particular to the sixteenth and seventeenth century metastasis into England and Scotland of the Venetian oligarchy along with its philosophy, political forms, family fortunes, and imperial geopolitics. The victory of the Venetian party in England between 1509 and 1715 built in turn upon a pre-existing foundation of Byzantine and Venetian influence.

One of the best governments in English history was that of King Alfred the Great, who ruled from 871 to 899. Alfred pursued a policy of literacy, education, and nation-building, and stands as a founder of Old English literature. The Byzantine Empire saw in Alfred a flare-up of the Platonic Christian humanism of the Irish monks and Alcuin of York, the principal adviser to Charlemagne a century earlier. Byzantium accordingly incited Vikings and Varangians, who had been defeated by Alfred the Great, to renew their attacks on England.

Then, in 1066, two armies converged on England. The first was the Norwegian army of King Harold Hardrada ("the pitiless"), a Byzantine general who had served as the commander of the Imperial Guard in Constantinople. Harold Hardrada was killed by the English at Stamford Bridge in 1066. But in that same year the weakened English forces were defeated at Hastings by William of Normandy ("the Conqueror"). Thus began the Norman Yoke, imposed by Norman oligarchs and a century of Norman kings.

The next dynasty, the Plantagenets, featured such figures as Richard I Lionheart, a flamboyant homosexual who avidly participated in the Venetian- sponsored Crusades in the eastern Mediterranean. The Magna Carta extorted from Richard's successor King John in 1215 had nothing to do with political liberties in the modern sense, but protected the license of marauding feudal barons against the central monarchy. The enforcement machinery of the Magna Carta permitted the barons lawfully to wage war upon the King in case their grievances were not settled. Since civil war and private warfare were by far the greatest curses of society at that time, England was held hostage to parasitical feudal overlords that a more centralized (or "absolute") monarchy might have mitigated. The barons, whose sociopathic prerogatives were anchored in the Magna Carta by a license for civil war, were easily the most reactionary element in English society, and were susceptible to easy manipulation by Venice, which had now conquered Byzantium and was approaching the apogee of its power.

Venetian influence in England was mediated by banking. Venetian oligarchs were a guiding force among the Lombard bankers who carried out the "great shearing" of England which led to the bankruptcy of the English King Henry III, who, during the 1250's, repudiated his debts and went bankrupt. The bankruptcy was followed by a large- scale civil war.

It was under Venetian auspices that England started the catastrophic conflict against France known today as the Hundred Years' War. In 1340, King Edward III of England sent an embassy to Doge Gradenigo announcing his intention to wage war on France, and proposing an Anglo-Venetian alliance. Gradenigo accepted Edward III's offer that all Venetians on English soil would receive all the same privileges and immunities enjoyed by Englishmen. The Venetians accepted the privileges, and declined to join in the fighting. Henceforth, English armies laying waste to the French towns and countryside would do so as Venetian surrogates. France was in no position to interfere in the final phase of the rivalry between Venice and Genoa, which was decided in favor of Venice. The degeneracy of English society during these years of Venetian ascendancy is chronicled in the writings of Chaucer - the greatest English writer of the age - who was an ally of the anti-Venetian Dante- Petrarca- Boccaccio grouping.

The Venetians concocted myths to enhance their influence on English society. For the nobility and the court, there was the anti-Christian myth of King Arthur and his Round Table of oligarchs seeking the Holy Grail. For the mute and downtrodden masses, there was the myth of Robin Hood, who by robbing from the rich to give to the poor combined plunder with class struggle.

During the wartime 1370's, the population of England collapsed by 1.5 million souls, from a total of 4 to 2.5 million, because of the Black Death, which itself resulted from Venetian debt service policies. The year 1381 saw an uprising in London and southeast England on a program of abolishing feudal dues, free use of forests, and an end to the tithes or taxes collected by the church. This was called Wat Tyler's rebellion, which ended when Wat was killed by the Mayor of London. Contemporary with this was the rise of Lollardry, the prototype of English Protestantism promoted by John Wycliffe, the Oxford scholastic. Wycliffe's anti-clerical campaign had many easy targets, but his theology was inferior and his stress on every person's right to read and interpret the Bible was designed to spawn a myriad of fundamentalist fanatics.

Lollardry as a social phenomenon had a specific Venetian pedigree, best seen through the prevalence among the Lollard rank and file of the belief that the soul is not immortal and dies with the body. This is the mortalist heresy, and can more accurately be called the Venetian heresy, because of its deep roots within the Venetian oligarchy. Later, beginning in the early sixteenth century, the University of Padua and Pietro Pomponazzi were notorious for their advocacy of mortalism.

In 1377 Wycliffe was saved from prosecution by an uprising of the London mob. Lollardry kept going for centuries as an underground religion for the disinherited kept going by itinerant preachers. During Queen Elizabeth's time, Lollardry lived in the form of sects called the Familists and the Grindletonians. These finally flowed into the Puritan Revolution of the 1640's. Lollardy contained a strong dose of primitive socialism; Lollard leaders like John Ball and "Jack Straw" preached social revolution with slogans such as, "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?" This is the ultimate source of that communism which David Urquhardt taught Karl Marx five centuries later. Finally, Lollardry spread into central Europe through the medium of the Hussites of Bohemia and caused a series of wars of religion there. In seventeenth- century England there was a slogan to the effect that Wycliffe begat Hus, Hus begat Luther, and Luther begat truth. There is every reason to view the Lollards as a Venetian pilot project for Luther's 1517 launching of the Reformation during the war of the League of Cambrai.

The English defeat in the Hundred Years' War (1453) left English society in a shambles. This was the setting for the oligarchical chaos and civil war known as the Wars of the Roses, which pitted the House of York with its symbol the white rose against the House of Lancaster with its red rose. Both groupings derived from quarrels among the seven sons of the pro-Venetian Edward III, who had started the wars with France. The Wars of the Roses, fought between 1455 and 1485, brought English society to the point of breakdown.

From this crisis England was saved by the coming of Henry Tudor, the Earl of Richmond, who became king as Henry VII. It was under Henry VII that England began to become a modern state and to participate in the Renaissance progress associated with Medici Florence and the France of Louis XI. The precondition for the revival of England was the suppression of the pro-Venetian oligarchy, the barons. Conveniently, these had been decimated by their own handiwork of civil war. Henry VII set himself up as the Big Policeman against the oligarchs. Henry VII established for the central government an effective monopoly of police and military powers. One of the reasons for the great ineptitude demonstrated by both sides in the English Civil War of the 1640's is that under the Tudors the nobility and gentry had largely forgotten how to wage civil war.

Like that of Louis XI, Henry VII's policy was based on an alliance of the crown with the urban trading and productive classes against the latifundist barons. Barons were excluded from the state administration, which relied rather on city merchants who were much more likely to be loyal to the king. Since the oligarchs routinely intimidated local courts, Henry VII gave new prominence to the court of the Star Chamber, a special royal court designed to impose central authority on the barons. The private armies of oligarchs along with other bandits and pirates were liquidated.

Henry VII was an active dirigist, promoting trading companies to expand overseas commerce. Under the Tudor state, England existed as a nation, with relative internal stability and a clear dynastic succession.

Henry VII's suppression of the oligarchs displeased Venice. Venice also did not like Henry's policy of alliance with Spain, secured by the marriage of his heir to Catherine of Aragon. Henry VII in fact sought good relations with both France and Spain. The Venetians wanted England to become embroiled with both France and Spain. Venice was also fundamentally hostile to the modern nation-state, which Henry was promoting in England. When Henry VII's son Henry VIII turned out to be a murderous pro-Venetian psychotic and satyr, the Venetians were able to re-assert their oligarchical system.

Henry VIII was King of England between 1509 and 1547. His accession to the throne coincided with the outbreak of the War of the League of Cambrai, in which most European states, including France, the Holy Roman Empire (Germany), Spain, and the papacy of Pope Julius II della Rovere joined together in a combination that bid fair to annihilate Venice and its oligarchy. The League of Cambrai was the world war that ushered in the modern era. Henry VIII attracted the attention of the Venetian oligarchy when he - alone among the major rulers of Europe - maintained a pro-Venetian position during the crisis years of 1509-1510, just as Venice was on the brink of destruction. Henry VIII was for a time the formal ally of Venice and Pope Julius. The Venetian oligarchy became intrigued with England.

In 1527, when Henry VIII sought to divorce Catherine of Aragon, the Venetian-controlled University of Padua endorsed Henry's legal arguments. Gasparo Contarini, the dominant political figure of the Venetian oligarchy, sent to the English court a delegation which included his own uncle, Francesco Zorzi. The oligarch and intelligence operative Zorzi, consummately skilled in playing on Henry's lust and paranoia, became the founder of the powerful Rosicrucian, Hermetic, cabalistic, and Freemasonic tradition in the Tudor court. Later, Henry VIII took the momentous step of breaking with the Roman Papacy to become the new Constantine and founder of the Anglican Church. He did this under the explicit advice of Thomas Cromwell, a Venetian agent who had become his chief adviser. Thomas Cromwell was Henry VIII's business agent in the confiscation of the former Catholic monasteries and other church property, which were sold off to rising families. Thomas Cromwell thus served as the midwife to many a line of oligarchs.

Under the impact of the War of the League of Cambrai, the Venetian oligarchy realized the futility of attempting a policy of world domination from the tiny base of a city-state among the lagoons of the northern Adriatic. As was first suggested by the present writer in 1981, the Venetian oligarchy (especially its "giovani" faction around Paolo Sarpi) responded by transferring its family fortunes (fondi), philosophical outlook, and political methods into such states as England, France, and the Netherlands. Soon the Venetians decided that England (and Scotland) was the most suitable site for the New Venice, the future center of a new, world-wide Roman Empire based on maritime supremacy. Success of this policy required oligarchical domination and the degradation of the political system by wiping out any Platonic humanist opposition.

The overall Venetian policy was to foment wars of religion between the Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans on the one hand, and the Jesuit-dominated Catholic Counter- reformation of the Council of Trent on the other. The Venetians had spawned both sides of this conflict, and exercised profound influence over them. The Venetians insisted on the maintenance of a Protestant dynasty and a Protestant state church in England, since this made conflict with the Catholic powers more likely. The Venetians demanded an anti- Spanish policy on the part of London, generally to energize the imperial rivalry with Madrid, and most immediately to prevent the Spanish army stationed in Milan from getting an opportunity to conquer Venice.

The destruction of the English mind was fostered by the Venetians under the banner of murderous religious fanaticism. Under Henry VIII, the English population continued in their traditional Roman Catholicism, which had been established in 644 at the synod of Whitby. Then, in 1534, Henry's and Thomas Cromwell's Act of Supremacy made the Roman Pope anathema. Those who refused to follow Henry VIII down this path, like St. Thomas More and many others, were executed. This first phase of Anglicanism lasted until 1553, when the Catholic Queen Mary I ("Bloody Mary," the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon) took power. Mary re-established Papal authority and married King Philip of Spain. Bloody Mary's main adviser in her proscriptions was Cardinal Reginald Pole, who had lived in Venice for some years and was part of the immediate circle around Gasparo Contarini. Henry VIII had feared Pole, an heir to the Plantagenets, as a possible pretender, and Pole had done everything to excite Henry's paranoia. Pole incited Bloody Mary to carry out a bloodbath with 300 to 500 prominent victims. These executions of the "Marian martyrs" were immortalized in John Foxe's celebrated Book of Martyrs (1554 ff.), a copy of which was later kept in every church in England and which attained the status of a second Bible among Protestants of all types. The events orchestrated by Pole seemed to many Englishmen to prove the thesis that a Catholic restoration would threaten their lives and property.

Bloody Mary died in 1558 and was succeeded by Elizabeth I, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. From the Catholic point of view Elizabeth was a bastard, so it was sure that she would rule as a Protestant. Elizabeth forcibly restored her father's Anglican or Episcopal Church.

Three times within the span of 25 years the English population was thus coerced into changing their religion under the threat of capital punishment. Three times, the supposedly eternal verities taught by the village parson were turned upside down, clearly because of dynastic ambition and raison d'état. The moral, psychological, and intellectual destruction involved in this process was permanent and immense.

Elizabeth's anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish policies fulfilled the basic Venetian imperatives. The struggle against the Spanish Armada in 1588 also gave these policies an undeniable popularity. Elizabeth was for 40 years under the influence of William Cecil, whom she created First Baron of Burleigh and Lord Treasurer. The Cecils were notorious assets of Venice; their ancestral home at Hatfield house was festooned with Lions of St. Mark. When William Cecil was too old to act as Elizabeth's controller, he was succeeded by his son Robert Cecil, the 1st Earl of Salisbury. The Venetian- Genoese Sir Horatio Pallavicini was an important controller of English state finance.

Elizabeth's economic policies had strong elements of dirigism and mercantilism. The numerous industrial monopolies she promoted had the result of establishing new areas of production in the country. Cecil developed the merchant marine and the navy. There were taxes to support those unable to work, and a detailed regulation of jobs and working conditions. Many of these successful measures were coherent with the Venetian desire to build up England as the new world empire and as a counterweight to the immense power of Spain.

At the death of Elizabeth, Robert Cecil masterminded the installation of the Stuart King of Scotland as King James I of England. Cecil was for a time James' key adviser. James I was a pederast and pedant, an individual of flamboyant depravity, an open homosexual who made his male lovers into the court favorites. In addition to pederasty, James aspired to tyranny.

James I was a leading theoretician of the divine right of kings. He delivered long speeches to the parliament, telling the wealthy latifundists and the Puritan merchant oligarchs of London that they could as little tell him what to do as they could tell God what to do. Policy, said James, was "king's craft" and thus "far above their reach and capacity." James I was an enthusiastic supporter of Paolo Sarpi in Sarpi's 1606 struggle against the Papal Interdict. James I did this in part because he thought he had received his crown directly from God, without any mediation by the Pope. Venetian influence at the Stuart court was accordingly very great. Sarpi even talked of retiring to England.

James was also an occultist. Shakespeare left London not long after the coming of James, and died after unwisely sitting down to drinks with the Aristotelian hack Ben Jonson.

James's feeble pro-Spanish appeasement policy bitterly disappointed Paolo Sarpi, Cecil's boss and the leading Venetian intelligence chief of the era. James made peace with Spain in 1604, ending 19 years of war. Cecil then tried to induce James into an anti-Spanish policy with a planned provocation - Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder plot of 1605. Sarpi schemed to unleash the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) as an apocalyptic confrontation between Protestant and Catholic Europe, and he wanted England in the fray. James's adviser, Sir Francis Bacon of the Cecil family, urged James to enter the war against Spain and Austria, but James first attempted to mediate the conflict and then did nothing. Charles I was equally disappointing: He married the Catholic Princess Henrietta Maria of France, and helped France to defeat the French Calvinists or Huguenots - a Venetian asset - in their stronghold of LaRochelle.

The early Stuarts were unable to assert England as a great power because war required taxes, and taxes required the vote of Parliament, which they did not wish to convoke, since it would undercut their claims of divine right. Between 1628 and 1639, Charles I attempted to rule as an autocrat, without calling a Parliament. English naval power grew so weak that even ships bringing coal coastwise from Newcastle upon Tyne to London were not protected from pirates. This outraged the City of London and its Puritan merchants, followers of doctrines derived from Calvin of Geneva.

With their tirades about their own divine right, the early Stuarts were violating a cardinal point of the Venetian political code. Venice was an oligarchy ruled by, at most, a few thousand male nobles. In practice, power belonged to several dozen patrician leaders. But no single patrician was strong enough to dominate all the rest as dictator. The Grand Council (Maggior Consilgio) was the general assembly of the nobility, and elected the Senate or Pregadi. The Grand Council, using a complicated procedure, also elected the Doge or Duke, who occupied the highest post in the state. The Doge was accordingly an elected and limited executive who served for life. This office was never hereditary; when one Doge died, a new one was elected by the Maggior Consiglio. The Doge was surrounded by his cabinet or Collegio, including the ministers (savi) of various departments. Under this system, the Doge was not the leader of a nation and the protector of all the people, as an absolute monarch might be; he was the chief functionary of a consortium of noble families who owned and ran the state for the private profit of their own fondi. For the Venetians, an oligarchy required the weak executive power of a Doge, and this was the system they wanted transplanted into their clone, England.

These issues were prominent in seventeenth-century Europe. Louis XIV of France in his better moments exemplified the benefits of centralistic absolutism, as directed against the pro-Venetian French nobles responsible for the civil wars of the Fronde and the wars of religion. Colbert pursued economic unification by wiping out local interests intent on collecting parasitical taxes. Louis compelled the great nobility to be towel-boys and fixtures at Versailles, while the French departments were ruled by Intendants sent by the king. A little later, in Russia, some of the same issues were fought out between the centralizing absolutist Peter the Great and the great latifundist nobles, known in Russia as the boyars. Real economic and social development was best served by breaking the power of the aristocracy. England, by contrast, was the country where the triumph of the oligarchs was eventually most complete. (This is even clearer if we bear in mind that the English gentry and squires correspond to the level of count in the continental titled aristocracy.) The English gentry were determined that they, and not intendants from the government in Whitehall, would rule in the shires.

When Charles I was forced to call a Parliament in 1640 because he needed money, a conflict between oligarchy and monarchy developed. The House of Commons theoretically represented men with property capable of bringing in 40 shillings per year; this was the threshold of free subjects who had a stake in the state. The Commons were elected by about one-tenth of the people of England. The House of Lords was full of latifundists, but it was estimated that the landowners and merchants of the House of Commons were rich enough to buy the House of Lords three times over. Parliamentary leaders like Pym and Hampden wanted to establish an oligarchy by the surrender of the King to Parliament so they could build up a navy and hasten the looting of the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean. They wanted a more vigorous pursuit of the slave trade. Pym and Hampden asserted Parliamentary authority by passing bills of impeachment and attainder against royal favorites like Strafford and Archbishop Laud, the head of the Church of England, who were both executed. In 1641, Charles I tried to arrest Pym and Hampden. The pro-Venetian City of London, the ports, and the south and east of England rebelled against this botched coup by the stupid King, who fled north. The English Civil War, or Puritan Revolution, was on. Many English were appalled by the miserable level of leadership and wretched programs of both the sides. A contemporary wrote that many people tried to remain neutral because they thought that "both sides raised an unlawful war, or ...could not tell which (if either) was in the right...." The civil war was artificially imposed by two rival London cliques, both under Venetian influence.

England would be the only major European country in which a war of religion would be fought between two pro-Venetian Protestant factions - the Anglican royalist cavaliers and the Parliamentary Puritan Roundheads. One result would be the liquidation of the remaining positive and dirigist features of the Tudor state.

During the first phase of the civil war, (1642-1646), there emerged two factions among the Parliamentarian Roundheads. A more conservative group favored a limited, defensive war against Charles I, followed by a negotiated peace. They hoped to defeat Charles by using a foreign army, preferably the Scottish one, in order to avoid arming the English lower orders. The Scots demanded for England a Presbyterian state church on the model of their own kirk - run by synods of Calvinist elders - but that was what the majority of the Long Parliament wanted anyway. So this faction came to be called the Presbyterians. Among them were the Calvinist town oligarchy of London.

The other group wanted total war and eventually the execution of the King and the end of the monarchy and the House of Lords. This group was willing to accept a standing army of sectarian religious fanatics in order to prevail. This group was called the Independents or Congregationalists. They were favored by Venice. Oliver Cromwell emerged as the leader of this second group.

Oliver Cromwell was a Venetian agent. Prominent in Oliver Cromwell's family tree was the widely hated Venetian agent Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540), Earl of Essex and the author of Henry VIII's decision to break with Rome and found the Church of England. Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) was descended from Thomas Cromwell's sister. Oliver Cromwell's uncle had married the widow of the Genoese- Venetian financier Sir Horatio Pallavicini. This widow brought two children by her marriage to Pallavicini and married them to her own later Cromwell children. So the Cromwell family was intimately connected to the world of Venetian finance. One of the leading figures of Parliament, John Hampden, was Oliver Cromwell's cousin. Cromwell's home was in the Fens, the large swamp in eastern England. The swamp- dwelling Venetians, true to form, came to choose another swamp- dweller as their prime asset of the moment.

Cromwell ridiculed the weakness of the Parliamentary army, which he said was made up of "decayed tapsters" (elderly waiters). Cromwell's own Ironsides regiment was made up of relatively well-off cavalrymen of heterodox religious views. This regiment was highly effective against the Royalist or Cavalier forces. The Ironsides contained numerous Independents. It also contained many of the more extreme sects. Some of the most important roots of modern communism can be found in the sects represented in Cromwell's Ironsides.

After 1640, the censorship of printed books practically collapsed. The church courts, which prosecuted crimes like heresy and blasphemy broke down. Especially in the City of London, but also in the countryside, a lunatic fringe of radical religious sects began to gather followers. What boiled up reflected the pervasive influence of Venetian kookery in England going back to Wycliffe. Ideas came to the surface which went back to Francesco Zorzi and Edmund Spenser, to Francis Bacon, Robert Fludd, and Bernardino Ochino, one of Contarini's Italian Protestants or spirituali who had been active in London around 1550 under Edward VI.

There were the Levellers, radical democrats of the Jeffersonian or sans culotte type, who wanted to expand the franchise for Parliamentary elections - although they would have left half or more without the vote. Apprentices, laborers, and servants would remain disenfranchised. Levellers wanted no monarchy, no House of Lords, no monopolies, no tithes, and no state church. Their petitions sound well today, but so do parts of the Jacobin Club's Declaration of the Rights of Man. Among the Leveller leaders were John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and Sir John Wildman. The latter two were double agents, taking money from Royalists as well as from Thurloe, the director of Cromwell's secret police.

Sir John Wildman was a land speculator and an agent of the Duke of Buckingham (as Pepys's diary tells us). He plotted against every regime from Cromwell to William III. He was a member of Harrington's Rota Club, a nest of Venetian agents in 1659-1660. He appears as a classic type of Venetian provocateur. Richard Overton was the author of the tract Mans Mortalitie, which argues that the soul dies with the body - the Venetian heresy once again. As for Lilburne, he died in jail after becoming a Quaker.

In 1647, with the Royalist forces wiped out, the Presbyterian faction tried to disband the army, and the Levellers responded by electing Agitators - in effect, political commissars - for each regiment. But the Leveller movement was soon crushed by Cromwell.

Other groups owed their continued existence to the pro-toleration policies of the Ironsides, which Cromwell often respected. There were the True Levellers or Diggers, with Gerard Winstanley as main spokesman. Winstanley supported mortalism, the Venetian heresy. The Diggers in 1649 began to form communes to squat on land and cultivate it - three centuries before Chairman Mao. Their idea was primitive communism and the abolition of wage labor. Private property they condemned as one of the results of Adam's Fall. Their program was "Glory Here!," the creation of heaven on earth. With the communist, materialist (and some would say, atheist) Gerard Winstanley, we see the Anglo-Venetian roots of the later Marxism financed and directed by Lord Palmerston's stooge David Urquhardt.

Then came the Ranters, devotees of the antinomian heresy, the free love party. The Ranters, many of whom were ex-Levellers, held that sin and the law had been abolished - at least for the elect - leaving mankind with "perfect freedom and true Libertinism." Some of them thought that fornication and adultery were positive religious duties, necessary to enjoy a maximum of grace. Ranter leaders included Laurence Clarkson and Abiezer Coppe. Clarkson supported mortalism, the Venetian heresy. The Ranter John Robins proclaimed that he was God and agitated to lead 140,000 men to conquer the Holy Land - thus foreshadowing later British policy in the Middle East. Ranters were heavily repressed.

The Quakers, a new sect in those days, had not yet made their pacifist turn. Often Ranters became Quakers. Many of them were highly militaristic troopers in Cromwell's New Model Army. Quakers were heavily represented in the English army that carried out Cromwell's genocide against Ireland. But Quaker James Naylor was cruelly punished for blasphemy after he re-enacted at Bristol Christ's Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem. In 1657, the Quaker leader George Fox criticized the English army because it had not yet seized Rome. Pacifism was adopted only after the Stuart Restoration, in 1661.

The other group that came out of the Ranter milieu was the Muggletonians, led by John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, who claimed that they had been commissioned by God in 1652 to serve as the Two Last Witnesses foretold in Revelations 11. Muggletonians supported mortalism, the Venetian heresy; they were also anti-Trinitarians and materialists. If formal positions on theological issues are counted up, John Milton turns out to have been very close to the Muggletonians. The Muggletonians kept going in Britain until about 1970.

The Fifth Monarchists were radical millenarians, believing that the Second Coming and the Rule of the Saints were close at hand - some thought as close as the Barebones Parliament convened under the Commonwealth in 1653. Some Fifth Monarchists in the Barebones Parliament wanted to re-impose the Mosaic law in place of the English common law, and wanted a Sanhedrin of the Saints to assume state power. Diminishing interest in the New Testament was also documented by the official banning around this time of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost (Whitsunday), which were all condemned as popish idolatry. The roots of the British Israelite movement are clearly revealed.

There were also the Seekers, who thought all existing religions were inadequate; they claimed they were still looking for the right one. One Seeker was Milton's friend and language teacher Roger Williams, later of Rhode Island. Finally, there were the extreme sectaries, parties of one, unable to get along with any of the above. John Milton was an example of these.

These were the Hydra-like components of the army which was Cromwell's power base. Cromwell attacked all the sects at certain times, but leaned heavily on them at other times. But he always relied for his power upon the army, of which the sectarians were the backbone. In 1648, Colonel Pride, acting for Cromwell, expelled from the Long Parliament some 100 of the most Presbyterian members, some of whom had been negotiating under the table with Charles I, by now a captive of the Army. What was left, was called the Rump Parliament. Cromwell then tried Charles I for treason and executed him on 30 January 1649. The Commonwealth was declared and the monarchy abolished.

Cromwell's problem was now to govern a country in which no elected Parliament could countenance the army and its gun-toting sectarian iconoclasts. The Rump, which harbored its own desires of becoming a ruling oligarchy, was dispersed by Cromwell's troops in 1653. The next Parliament, the Barebones, was a hand-picked selection of the godly, many nominated by Independent congregations. The Barebones was modeled as an oligarchy: it chose a Council of State as its own executive, and was supposed to choose its own successors before it disbanded. Instead, Major-General Thomas Harrison of the New Model Army, convinced he was the Son of God, dominated the proceedings. A moderate faction around Major Gen. Lambert caused the dissolution of the Barebones with a coup de main. For many sectaries, Cromwell suddenly went from being the New Moses to being the small horn of the Antichrist.

Cromwell accepted the Instrument of Government, the first written constitution of England. The franchise was restricted, going up from the old 40-shilling freehold to a personal net worth of 200 pounds, which meant much greater wealth. The Parliament was made more oligarchical. Cromwell was named Lord Protector. The Protector was backed up by a Council of State of generals serving for life. The first Protectorate Parliament refused to fund the standing army (now 57,000 troops) and rebelled against toleration (toleration of the sects), so Cromwell dissolved it in January 1655. This was already Cromwell's third dissolution; he would ultimately make it four.

In March 1655, Cromwell decided in favor of a "thorough" Bonapartist military dictatorship. The country was divided into 11 ad hoc districts, and a major-general of the army was put in charge of each district. The major-generals controlled the local militia, ran the courts, appointed all officials, and suppressed public immorality. All of this was done arbitrarily, with little reference to law. At the same time, secretary Thurloe, the Lavrenti Beria of the regime, extended his secret tentacles into every pore of society and into every country of Europe. The rule of the Major-Generals prefigured European fascism. But they alienated many oligarchs who found this interference far worse than that of Charles I.

The second Protectorate parliament was impelled by desperation to pass the Humble Petition and Advice, which urged Cromwell to take up the crown. But it was a doge's crown, a limited monarchy of the House of Cromwell subject to Parliament. Under pressure from the army generals, Cromwell declined the title of king but accepted all the rest. In February 1658, Cromwell dissolved his last Parliament, and died the same year. His son Richard attempted to rule, but left after a few months. 1659-1660 was a time of great chaos, with the restored Rump alternating with direct army rule. Finally, the army split into pieces; the commander of the winning piece, General Monck, joined the new Parliament in recalling Charles II, the son of the executed Charles I.

Observing these events, the pro-Venetian writer John Milton - who had been Latin secretary to Cromwell's Council of State - lamented that the City of London had concluded that "nothing but kingship can restore trade." Milton's "Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth," issued in March, 1660, proposed a regime based on a Grand Council along explicitly Venetian lines, with life tenure and co-optation of new members. This could be obtained, Milton thought, by declaring the Rump perpetual and capable of co-opting new members when the old ones died off. Milton had wanted religious tolerance, but he was willing to sacrifice this to obtain an oligarchy without a single-person executive. Milton effusively praised Venice, which had made its "whole aristocracy immovable" with similar methods.

During this time, Milton was close to the Rota Club, a pro-Venetian salon dominated by James Harrington, author of the book Oceana and one of the most important Venetian ideologues in England. Harrington was the direct precursor of the great Whig aristocrats of the Venetian Party who were frequently in power after 1688. Other Rota members included Milton's close friend Cyriack Skinner, the economist Sir William Petty, the intelligence operative Sir John Wildman, the Fifth Monarchist Thomas Venner (who had led and would lead abortive uprisings in London), the diarist Samuel Pepys, and Andrew Marvell, poet and member of Parliament. There was also the Rumper Henry Neville, who propagandized Harrington's views in his political dialogue Plato Redivivus of 1681. There were Sir John Hoskins, later president of the Royal Society, and Richard Sackville, the Fifth Earl of Dorset. Charles II assumed power later in 1660.

Today some members of the British oligarchy are calling for the end of the monarchy and the creation of a republic. We must recall that the last time this was tried, the result was the fascist dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell and his major-generals. A "republic" in Britain in the early 21st century might turn out to be a military dictatorship rather similar to Cromwell's, with animal rights freaks acting the part of the Ranters and Diggers.

So what had the Puritan Revolution accomplished, beyond killing 500,000 persons? First, Cromwell had founded the British Empire. Between 1651 and 1660 he had added 200 warships to the British Navy, more than the early Stuarts had managed to build during their 40-year tenure. Cromwell's war with the Dutch (1652-1654), which hardly made sense for a Puritan, made plenty of sense in the light of the 1,700 Dutch ships captured. Cromwell set up a convoy system for English merchant vessels, including those bringing coal from Newcastle. The basis of British naval domination was thus laid. After making peace with Holland, Cromwell made war on Spain, in exact conformity with Venetian requirements. Cromwell conquered: Jamaica, St. Helena, Surinam, Dunkirk, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick (in Canada). In addition, he established the status of the Portuguese Empire as a satellite and auxiliary of London. It was under Cromwell that English ships established a permanent presence in the Mediterranean; in his last years, he was considering the conquest of Gibraltar to facilitate this stationing. Jamaica, a center of the slave trade, stood out in what was called the Western Design - making war on Spain in the New World.

Cromwell was also personally responsible for the campaign of genocide and starvation in Ireland that began with the 1649 massacre of the garrison of Drogheda. Cromwell told the Parliament that if he waged war according to international law and the rules of war, the campaign would be too expensive. So Cromwell relied on massacres and famine. Cromwell's genocide eventually killed about one-third of the Irish population. Cromwell also invaded and reduced Scotland, which had switched to the Stuart cause in 1649. This laid the basis for the myth of a "British" people as a label imposed on Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and English victims of an oligarchy not of Englishmen, but of Venetians and their tools. Until 1991 there was talk of a "Soviet" people, but this is now nowhere to be found. Perhaps the fraud of a "British" people will also not survive too long.

Cromwell's rule marked the triumph of free trade, as it was understood at that time. All attempts by government to supervise the quality of production, to fix prices, to maintain jobs and employment, to influence labor- management relations, or to influence wage rates were wholly abandoned. The City of London demanded free trade. It got the abolition of all industrial monopolies, which had previously covered some 700 staple products. Laissez-faire was established in every sphere. Whatever the Restoration Stuarts tried to change in this regard was immediately rolled back after 1688.

In the years after Cromwell, it was estimated that cottagers and paupers, laborers and servants, who had no property and no vote, made up half of the population of England. One-third of all English households were exempted from the Hearth Tax because of their poverty. After 1660, wheat prices were kept artifically high because, it was argued, only fear of starvation could coerce the poor into working.

Under the Restoration, the gentry and latifundists had been released from their feudal dues to the King, but there was no protection for small farmers and tenants. By 1700, the family farm was well on its way to being wiped out in England, giving rise to a landless mass of agricultural day laborers. The English countryside was full of de facto serfs without land. Craftsmen and artisans in the towns were increasingly wiped out by merchant oligarchs and bankers. Through this brutal primitive accumulation, England acquired its propertyless proletariat, forced to live by selling its labor. Usury became thoroughly respectable. This is the world described by Karl Marx, but it was created by Anglo-Venetian finance, and not by modern capitalism. What might be called the middle class of small farmers and independent producers was crushed, while Puritan initiatives in popular education were suppressed. English society assumed the bipolar elite-mass structure which is a hallmark of empires. As for oligarchism, it was estimated in the 1690's that Parliamentary elections were under the effective control of about 2,000 men.

Charles II, who had been deeply impressed by his father's death and the civil war, was tolerated by the oligarchy because he had learned the virtue of caution. But Charles II had not given up on his royal prerogatives. During the 1670's, Charles II became the satellite and toady of Louis XIV of France, who paid him a subsidy which he used to circumvent Parliament. This enraged the Venetian Party. By now, the Venetians wanted to use England against the growing power of France, which had supplanted Spain at the top of their hit list. In 1678, Titus Oates alleged a new "popish plot" in which France, and no longer Spain, was the bogey-man. Charles II announced on his death-bed that he was a Roman Catholic, violating another key point of Venetian doctrine. That his brother and successor James II had also become a Catholic had been known and was the center of political battle for some time. The Whig party, the main vehicle of Venetian rule, made its mark at this time as the group most devoted to a Protestant succession to the English throne. James II was also in the pay of the Sun King.

When the Duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate but Protestant son of Charles II, attempted to land and stage an uprising, he was quickly defeated. In response, James II's lackey Judge Jeffries brought his Bloody Assizes court to the southwest of England, and began an orgy of thousands of death sentences. James II was trying to set up a standing army with Catholic officers, and put a Catholic admiral in charge of the Royal navy. Louis XIV's revocation around this time of the Edict of Nantes, which had provided toleration for Protestants, made it appear plausible to some that James II would now attempt to play the role of Bloody Mary.

The Anglo-Venetians decided that they were fed up with the now-Catholic, pro-French and wholly useless Stuart dynasty. Representatives of some of the leading oligarchical families signed an invitation to the Dutch King, William of Orange, and his Queen Mary, a daughter of James II. John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough, was typical of James' former supporters who now went over to support William and Mary. William landed and marched on London. This is called by the British the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688; in reality, it consolidated the powers and prerogatives of the oligarchy, which were expressed in the Bill of Rights of 1689. No taxes could be levied, no army raised, and no laws suspended without the consent of the oligarchy in Parliament. Members of Parliament were guaranteed immunity for their political actions and free speech. Soon, ministers could not stay in office for long without the support of a majority of Parliament. Parliament was supreme over the monarch and the state church. At the same time, seats in Parliament were now bought and sold in a de facto market. The greater the graft to be derived from a seat, the more a seat was worth. Within a few years after the Glorious Revolution there was a Bank of England and a national debt. When George I ascended the throne in 1714, he knew he was a Doge, the primus inter pares of an oligarchy.

The regime that took shape in England after 1688 was the most perfect copy of the Venetian oligarchy that was ever produced. There was a flare-up of resistance during the reign of Queen Anne because of the activity of the Tory Robert Harley and his ally Jonathan Swift; there was also the threat that the Hanoverian succession might bring Leibniz into England. Otherwise the Venetian Party was broadly hegemonic, and Britain was soon the dominant world power. The English masses had been so thoroughly crushed that little was heard from them for one and one half centuries, until the Chartist agitation of the 1840's. The franchise was not substantially expanded until after the American Civil War, with industrial workers getting the vote in 1867 and farm laborers allowed to cast ballots in 1884.

The struggles of seventeenth- century England were thus decisive in parlaying the strong Venetian influence which had existed before 1603 into the long-term domination by the British Venetian Party observable after 1714. These developments are not phenomena of English history per se. They can only be understood as aspects of the infiltration into England of the metastatic Venetian oligarchy, which in its British Imperial guise has remained the menace of mankind.

the british empire bid for undisputed world domination 1815-1870

2008-02-11T10:52:00.000Z

THE BRITISH EMPIRE BID FOR UNDISPUTED WORLD DOMINATION, 1815 - 1870

Schiller Institute Food For Peace Conference, Chicago, IL, Feb. 22-23, 1992

[The following paper is a transcription of a tape recording at the above conference of an oral presentation by Mr. Tarpley.]

I would like to attempt to illustrate the Versailles thesis in a certain amount of detail. I would say to people at the beginning, the best seats are emphatically here in the front part of the auditorium, because if you don't see these maps, it will be a little difficult to follow. So I urge you if you can, come up to the front.

The Versailles thesis has been referred to several times in the course of today's proceedings, and it is, in short, the idea that the world system or world order which is presently collapsing around our ears is rooted above all in the events of the first World War between 1914 and 1918; and then in the Versailles Treaty of 1919, actually in the Peace of Paris of 1919.

The thesis goes on to specify that World War I itself was the consequence of British geopolitical geostrategic decisions that were made in the period around 1870, in the wake of the American Civil War. The British, from 1870 to 1914, actively sought a general conflagration for the purpose of destroying civilization and for preserving the British Empire against the challenges that had emerged.

Now the theme in this is constantly the British quest for the single empire. Lyndon LaRouche referred to it before, I believe - the idea of a single new Roman Empire, an empire that would encompass the entire world, which would be under the ultimate domination of what the British considered to be an Anglo-Saxon master race. It would be oligarchical, colonial, imperialistic, malthusian; [it would] condemn large areas of the world to depopulation, poverty, and so forth, [and would be directed to] the preservation of the British Empire.

As we will see, the British came very close to establishing just such a single empire in the period between 1848 and 1863. That is the period we'll look at in some detail, because it's a period that's very like our own today, a period when the British - the Anglo-Americans - came close to establishing this kind of universal domination, the new Roman Empire.

In the course of this, I will have to simplify some things. We can certainly clarify some of those in the discussion, and I will have to proceed somewhat from the point of view of the British thrust in these directions, and you'll see the areas that pop up. We will also see the irony of history, that if the British between 1850 and 1860 came close to establishing their worldwide dominion, the irony is that the world then blew up in their faces - especially around the events of the American Civil War, the Russian cooperation with Lincoln during the Civil War - to the point where, by about 1870, the British had to fear a convergence of the United States, Russia, and a united Germany, in such a way that the future of the British Empire would have been put in jeopardy, [even] might have been terminated.

In the course of this, as you'll see, - and this is Lyn's [Lyndon LaRouche's] tremendous merit, to be able to do this given the conditions that he's working under - we will develop a radically new view of the last 200 years of history which you will not find in any textbook. Indeed, from the point of view of this concept, you will see what a tissue of lies the history of the last 200 years as presented in Anglo-American sources actually is, particularly the official U.S. version of World War I and World War II, which is a complete tissue of lies. Any idea of German war guilt for World War I has to go out the window, and it has to yield to the idea that World War I was a British creation which the British schemed for the best part of a half century to bring about.

[Display MAP OF EUROPE as redrawn at Congress of Vienna, 1815]

The question is, where do you start some kind of a review like this? We could usefully start it at the time of the American Revolution. What I thought we would do, though, is to skip to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, simply specifying that in the period before 1815 the British were able to extend their colonial domination to vast areas of the world, including India and so forth, with of course the new nation - the United States - standing out as a barrier, as a challenge, to British imperialism. So let us leap to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, what many people know as the Europe of the Congress of Vienna, as you see here. This was Europe as the map was redrawn by the oligarchs gathered at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. So here's our starting point.

Remember that in the world outside of Europe at this point, the British dominate. They rule the seas, their only significant challenge coming from the United States. Here's Congress of Vienna Europe. Notice that Poland is completely submerged, Italy is divided, the Turkish Ottoman Empire extends far into continental Europe, and in the middle of everything you've got this crazy quilt of Germany divided into dozens and dozens of petty states. Notice also that Belgium has been added to the Netherlands.

This is the Europe that you associate with Metternich, Prince Metternich, the guy who was ruling here in Vienna at that time, the chief minister of the Hapsburg Court. This is the Europe of the Holy Alliance. It is a condominium in which the British are obliged to co-exist with Metternich and the kinds of Central European oligarchs that he represents. Metternich is a very, very ugly figure, needless to say. The British are forced to deal with him almost as an equal. However, what you see - and this I think is a characteristic of the period - [is that] after about 1820 the British begin to drop out of the Congress of Vienna system. They stop going to the congresses; they stop signing the declarations; rather, what they do is to assume a position of splendid isolation and at the same time foment revolutions against all of their alleged allies on the continent of Europe. And in particular, the names of Mazzini, Karl Marx, Bakunin, the First International Workingmen's Association, plus all of the French socialists - Louis Blanc, Fourier, and all these other people - [all these constitute] a society of British agents for the destabilization of Metternich and company on the continent of Europe.

The British started a revolution here, in Serbia - they created that revolution in 1817. The British have been allied with Serbia for about two hundred years, and the Serbs have endured a monumental bloodletting as a result, as have the victims of the Serbs. The British created modern Greece in 1821; and the word went out from London that the British oligarchs would support everybody's revolutions, except of course their own. And they fomented these things, and this is what gave birth to the revolutions of 1848.

I have to caveat this, as Al Haig would say, by saying 1848 is also other things. There are a lot of very good people active in 1848, but the general thrust of the British policy is clearly [that] the British were destabilizing Austria, Russia, and Prussia for balance of power purposes.

Let me show you what happened in 1848, in case people have forgotten this. Basically every government in Europe was overthrown. The French July monarchy in the person of bourgeois King Louis Philippe of Orleans was overthrown in favor of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, a British agent and adventurer. Every government in Italy was overthrown; in particular, Mazzini succeeded in creating his Roman republic, and in forcing the pope to flee from Rome. Metternich himself was forced to flee from a revolution in Vienna; you had Kossuth in Hungary; every government in Germany was overthrown - not necessarily the monarch, but certainly the prime ministers; similar things in Spain, and so forth. The only country that escaped this was Russia, where there was no internal revolution.

With one fell swoop, the British had succeeded in overthrowing every government on the continent of Europe, in particular forcing Metternich to disguise himself as an Englishman and flee to London.

[Display NEXT MAP: 1848]

Here is this extremely interesting period between the 1848 revolutions and the turning points of the American Civil War, and this is something you won't find in any history book. This is an absolutely original concept that LaRouche has developed. Let us look at the tremendous worldwide offensive of the British imperialists back in the 1850's.

First of all, free trade. Where did free trade ever come from? Free trade was introduced by the British in 1846 and in the following years. Before that, as you may remember, they had Corn Laws, which set up very high tariffs to keep the price of grain extremely elevated, but this was then turned around, because they could look forward to the idea of being able to loot the world, and therefore they favored free trade.

The British were able to install their puppet, Napoleon III. He had studied the wars of Napoleon I, his ancestor, and had concluded that Napoleon's big mistake was fighting the British. So as so often happens in the history of French imperialism, here's a French imperialist who believes that the way to have a French empire is to be a junior partner to the British. That's exactly what he did. This is then acted out in the Crimean War, where the British and French join together to invade Russia, the only country that had survived those 1848 destabilizations.

We also got, in terms of a worldwide offensive, a reorganization of British rule in India. This is the famous Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, which led to the end of the direct rule of the British East India Company out there, and the creation of a British Viceroy of India. Prime Minister Disraeli made Queen Victoria the Empress of India.

In China, the Second Opium War fits precisely into this period. This is the British grabbing a whole series of ports and other bases on the coast of China, and it was clear at the time that they were about to go into China to partition the entire country. They wanted to occupy China militarily as they had India.

And Kansas. How does Kansas fit it? Well, Kansas is the beginning of the American Civil War. Bleeding Kansas, with gangs of pro-Confederate and pro-Union, or pro-slavery and pro-abolitionist groups, fighting it out in continuous bloodletting. Filibustering expeditions by proto-Confederates into Latin America, and the creation of this Hapsburg Maximilian Empire in Mexico. You look at this together, [and] there's not one continent of the entire globe where the British are not in a tremendous offensive. The idea is that the single empire, the universal monarchy, is within their grasp.

Now, pause for a second. It's very similar today. If you look at this, it looks like the British on paper have wrapped up the entire world. And you could say, if you look at the map, if you calculate, you could say, well, it really looks like the Anglo-Americans have dominated the world, and that the Anglo-Americans will continue to dominate the world for the next century. But let me just anticipate that it's not going to be so.

[Display MAP OF CRIMEAN WAR]

Here's the Crimean War. Here we are on the Black Sea, and what do we find here? The Ottoman Empire, of course; Russia up here, so who goes in? The British and the French bust through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, and they actually invaded the Crimea here. This was one of the largest amphibious war operations, the largest up to that time to be sure. And they succeeded in defeating the Russian army, although what they find is that their forces were not significant enough to push further inside the country.

[Display MAP OF BALACLAVA]

This is the city of Balaclava. [Do] you remember Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade?" This is one that Fred Wills could quote at great length. The charge of the Light Brigade took place here. This is the British invasion fleet, Anglo-American invasion, and there are some very large Russian forts in the background, and that's what the British threw their Light Brigade against. So here we are in the Crimean War.

[Display MAP OF MEXICO]

Maximilian! Remember him? The Hapsburg heir who was placed on the throne of Mexico by a French army, sent by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte? There he is. The idea was to begin to reintroduce direct colonialism, by British or British puppet states, into Mexico, Central America, and Ibero-America in general, while the U.S. was so tied down by the Civil War that the Monroe Doctrine could not be asserted by Washington.

[Display MAP OF INDIA]

In India, as we saw, the Sepoy Mutiny led to a vast reorganization of British colonialism in the area, sending out a viceroy from London, and before too long Queen Victoria was proclaimed "Empress of India," with this great empire, ruling over maharajahs and other local potentates.

[But] we have to pay special attention to the 1850's in the United States, and Lyn has been very emphatic about this. If you look at the United States in the 1850's, then you have to conclude that the place was a dead duck - lost. Why?

Let's start with the leadership. Let's look at the great series of presidents: Millard Fillmore, starting in the 1850's; Franklin Pierce, the ancestor of Barbara Pierce, Barbara Bush; and James Buchanan. This was the president under whose term the Civil War actually began to break out. (Someone said that this shows that one President Buchanan was enough.) What happened under these [men]? This is typical: Here's Jefferson Davis, wearing his uniform of major general of the United States Army. He was not just a major general; he was the Secretary of War under these administrations.

So what you had under presidents like Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan [were] Confederate traitors - like Jefferson Davis - members of the British Scottish Rite Freemasons, proto- Confederate slave holders, traitors, the scum of the earth; they could make great careers in the United States Army. And, of course, later on this was the same Jefferson Davis who became the president of the Confederate States of America, that despicable puppet state.

Don't be fooled by the Confederacy. Don't be fooled by that Sir Walter Scott aura of chivalry, and J.E.B. Stuart wrapped up in God knows what he's palmed off as the ethos of the Confederacy. This was based on human slavery, this was one of the most despicable proto-fascist states that has ever been seen on the face of the earth. Davis was the president.

People like Ulysses S. Grant, that you see here, could not make a career in the army. It's interesting to see that while Jefferson Davis was getting promoted, generals like Sherman and Grant were forced out of the U.S. military service. They had to go into business - into the private sector - to try to earn a living.

Here's a typical Confederate. We've talked a lot about him. Judah P. Benjamin, [who] was the secretary of the treasury of the Confederate States of America. At the end of the Civil War, he fled to Britain, where he lived. This is precisely the kind of British imperialist agent that you find in the upper reaches of the Confederate government. He is of course an agent in particular of the Rothschild family of London, and this mixture of what you would have to call Zionism and Confederacy today is what animates an organization like the Anti-Defamation League. That's exactly what this is. The ADL today continues the characteristic mentality of Judah Benjamin.

And then you look in the Union officer corps. How about this guy? He thinks he's Napoleon, or he's checking if he's still got his wallet. That's George McClellan, who in 1861-62 was the commander of all the Union armies. And here he is at Antietam.

This is the battle where McClellan had a good chance to destroy the Confederate Army under Lee. But he refused to do that. McClellan refused to attack on many occasions, because he wanted a negotiated peace. He said, "I can sit down with Robert E. Lee and work this out, and Abraham Lincoln doesn't really belong in this, because he doesn't understand these things the way I do." This is an interchange where Lincoln is basically telling him, "Why didn't you pursue Lee? You could have destroyed him on the battlefield, and you refused to do it. Now the Civil War's going to go on for three more years."

Here's the way this was viewed in a carton of the day. This is pro-McClellan propaganda. Here's Lincoln on the one side, and Jefferson Davis on the other, and here's George P. McClellan who's trying to reconcile them, mediating between them if you will. And of course he was the Democratic presidential candidate in 1864, and if it hadn't been for Sherman at Atlanta and Phil Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley and the naval battles off Cherbourg, France and Farragut at Mobile Bay, then McClellan might have won, and that would have been the end of the Union - because that was the idea, that the negotiated settlement would leave the Confederate States of America in existence as a British puppet state.

Now let's look at the way in which this world, which seemed lost, blew up in the face of the British.

A reforming czar in Russia, Alexander II. He came in the midst of the Crimean War, just as his country was under tremendous attack. [He] came in with a vast program of reforms, in particular the freeing of the serfs in 1861. Then we've got the turning point year of 1863: the Emancipation Proclamation, the twin Union victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg especially, and, as we will see, the arrival of the Russian fleets in New York and San Francisco.

The Seven Weeks' War. This is one that's hardly known. This was the [1866] defeat of Austria by Prussia, which was the immediate prelude to the complete unification of Germany [in 1871]. The collapse of Maximilian's Hapsburg Empire in Mexico, [and] German unification completed. And as we've stressed, what came out of these events, this tremendous turnaround of the 1860's, when all seemed to be lost, was a convergence of the United States, Russia, and Prussia - or call it Germany by that time - which attracted the attention of key forces in Japan and China. If you go back to Japan in this period, the reforming forces in Japan divide pretty much between pro- American and pro-German.

Here was a potential for a new combination in the northern hemisphere - the United States, Russia, Prussia, plus China and Japan - that would have been sufficient to dominate the world, and finish off the British Empire once and for all. Let's take a look at how this went.

Of course the principal figure in this is Abraham Lincoln, who administered one of the most severe defeats that British imperialism has ever had to absorb in the last 200 years.

This is Lincoln's ambassador. This is the original Cassius Clay, Cassius Clay of Kentucky. He was the Union ambassador to St. Petersburg at the time of the Civil War, and he secured really the only military assistance from any foreign power for Lincoln and for the Union.

This is Admiral Lisovsky. The photographer here is Mathew Brady, and Mathew Brady, the great Civil War photographer, had his studio in New York City. And here's the Admiral, the commander of the Russian Atlantic Fleet. Did he come all the way to have his picture taken? Obviously not.

The Russian fleet arrived in September and October. It sort of came in one ship after another, over a period of a couple of weeks. In September and October the Russian Atlantic fleet arrived in New York City, and they had been ordered by the Czar to place themselves under the command of Lincoln in the case of war between Britain and France on the one side and the Union on the other. Russia was going to join in that war. They had just fought the Crimean War against the British and the French, and they were ready to continue fighting. Similarly, another Russian fleet came to San Francisco, and spent the winter of 1863-64.

Here is another photograph by Mathew Brady. These are actual sailors of the Russian Atlantic fleet, who came into New York City in the fall of 1863 and played a key role in the saving of the Union. [The photo] was a token of the fact that if, for example, Napoleon III sent an army to fight the United States, then he would probably have to deal with Russia on the continent of Europe. As Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy for Lincoln in those days, said: "Thank God for the Russians."

Here's that other one that I just mentioned. This is a war you almost never hear about in the United States, a war between Prussia on the one side and Austria on the other. This is the Seven Weeks' War. The Prussian army was capable, within a period of about 50 days, of vanquishing the Austro-Hungarian forces. I think what the interesting thing about this is, this took place in 1866. What has never really been looked into is the relation of Gettysburg on the one side with German unification on the other. Would it have been possible for Germany to achieve unification, if Lincoln had not won the Civil War? I would submit to you that Gettysburg and Vicksburg are key turning points of world history, also in the sense that they opened the door to the unification of Germany.

One interesting fact: The kingdom of Hanover, here, which is of course where the British royal family comes from, was an island. It had ceased to exist as a result of this war. The Prussians simply put an end to the existence of Hanover. I can assure you the British didn't like that, [and] would have done something about this if they had not been so thoroughly defeated in the U.S. Civil War.

Here's unified Germany. Again, if you look at this map with the colors, you can see the crazy quilt that had existed - Bavaria down here, Baden Wurttemburg over here, Mecklenburg- Schwerin, and so forth. This was now brought together as one powerful unified national state by 1871. So, U.S., Russia, and Prussia.

However, the British Empire was of course very powerful at this point. Many people think, they tend to situate the British Empire high point back in the days of George III. Well, these are figures from 1909, and they will show you that in 1909 the British dominated one-quarter of the population of the world [within] the British Empire. One quarter of the world's population was subject to the British Empire, and about one-fifth of the world's land surface. There are other accounts that will tell you it's about 25 percent of the population, and indeed 25 percent of the land surface. Remember that the British Empire got even bigger after the First World War by absorbing German colonies, so much so that the entire coastline of the Indian Ocean was completely British controlled. This was then called "the British Lake."

And there, of course, is the old Brzezinski arc of crisis, which is simply the axis of British colonialism around the Indian Ocean.

What could the continental Europeans do to resist this kind of British domination? Well, this is the railway system on the continent of Europe at about 1900. I think that one interesting thing to us as you look at it is that it's clear there are three key points in the European railroad system: there's Paris, there's Berlin, and there's Vienna. That's Budapest over there - think of that as a kind of second center. The only thing that comes close is Milan, but then you've got the Alps here, with a low density of railroads there.

So it's clear that a European infrastructure and railroad triangle, here, does comprehend the densest area of industrial and infrastructural development. At the same time, there were railroads being built out here into the Russian Empire; in particular, we have to mention here the great Count Sergei Witte, who grew up as an employee of the Russian imperial railway system. He worked first of all in the railway ministry, became transportation minister, and later finance minister. And what he promoted was the building of this Trans-Siberian railway, the greatest infrastructural project of the 19th century, greater even than Lincoln's transcontinental railroad. As you see, it goes all the way from St. Petersburg up here, all the way across Central Asia. The original form of it went across Manchuria to Harbin and then to Vladivostock; later on, a second line was added up here, to avoid Chinese territory. It linked up to the Chinese railway system - for example from Harbin to Beijing and to these other areas here - Darien, Port Arthur, and so forth.

There is also a Russian system, as you see. Just to follow this a little bit, there's a second railway system which is called the Transcaspian, which gets right down to the base of the Caspian Sea, comes right across to Iran, and - look - here's British imperialism in India, coming up against the Russian Empire, with just this little Afghani buffer state in between.

So look at this tremendous ability of Witte's project to reach out and create an actual Eurasian railroad bloc. As was mentioned before, Witte's strategic concept was that France, Germany, and Russia should not fight each other. They should make an alliance against Britain in particular. That would have spared them all the carnage of World War I, and it would have robbed the British of their geopolitical strategy. The British geopolitical strategy, of course, was to dominate the United States, dominate Japan if they could, and then go into the so-called heartland, and play the forces of the heartland against each other, play France against Germany, Germany against Russia, and so on down the line. Witte's strategic concept would have made World War I impossible.

And here's the other great railroad project. This is now the Berlin to Baghdad Railway. You only see the Asia Minor part of it here, the Balkan and Asia Minor parts, but suffice it to say that this started in Berlin, came down here through the Hapsburg dominions, across the Bosporus on barges, went through Anatolia, through what is today Syria, and then into Mesopotamia, Iraq, reached Baghdad, reached Kirkuk, Mosul, Basra, and finally Kuwait. And this was going to be built between about 1900 and 1915. It was never completed. This would have provided an alternate route to India; it would have challenged the British domination of their empire lifeline. This was primarily the idea of Georg von Siemens of the German industrial family, but it was pursued also as a goal of German foreign policy. And if you put together the two maps that I've just shown you, the Trans-Siberian Railway and this Berlin to Baghdad railway, you would have made Berlin the rail hub of the universe, with the ability to call on an entire Eurasian hinterland, and of course this the British were determined to avoid at all costs.

Now some people may ask: If the British decided in 1870 or thereabouts, if Disraeli, Gladstone, Lord John Russell, Queen Victoria, and a few other people sat down at the table and said, "Well, let's have World War I," and they did that in 1870, and that's about what they did, why did it take so long for World War I to come about?

I would simply point to a couple of questions of Bismarck's foreign policy. The guy who superintended the creation of united Germany was, of course, Bismarck. He's a mixed figure: part monster, part realpolitiker. Bismarck as a realpolitiker was a great realist. He knew that there could be no general war in Europe as long as Germany and Russia maintained good relations. This picture you see up here is the alliance system created by Bismarck. And you can see the result of it is that Germany has plenty of allies, [and] France has none. France cannot start any wars - [even with] these pro-British governments in Paris - and the British are forced to stay off the continent of Europe pretty much. And I particularly would stress the good relations between Berlin and St. Petersburg, between Germany and Russia, first under the so-called Alliance of the Three Emperors - Dreikaiserbund - and then the so-called Reinsurance Treaty.

So from 1870 to 1890 or thereabouts, this is what Europe looked like. The bottom part shows what happened when Bismarck was forced out of the scene [in March, 1890 by] the lunatic Emperor William II (this is the guy you remember from the World War I period) when he came in. Kaiser Wilhelm did not understand; he rejected the importance of an alliance with Russia. This allowed France to make an alliance with Russia in 1894, and very soon after that the British were brought into this, and you have the Triple Entente of Russia, England and France, all directed against Germany. Germany is left with only one real ally, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, [though] this was not a good ally. With allies like this you don't really need enemies, and the way for World War I was actually clear.

The other thing to stress about this is the colonial rivalry in Africa. Lyn has talked about the Fashoda incident of 1898; there it is. The British wanted to unite a strip of territory from Cairo all the way down to the Cape. This was the way the British wanted to put Africa together. There were some French imperialists who said no, we're going to start over here in Dakar, and go to Djibouti; and these two groups clashed in Fashoda, and the mentality that won out on the French side under Theophile Delcasse was the idea that if you want to have an empire, you've got to do it with the British, because you're not strong enough to do it against them; therefore, make a deal with British imperialism. That's the key to the Entente Cordiale of 1904.

With that, everything is ready for World War I. Here you see Europe as it was in July and August of 1914. The Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire here; the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and as you can see, a very large Germany. The British had played their Eastern Question card; the Eastern Question meant their desire to destabilize the Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian Empires.

The thing that we have to stress about the way the war was conducted is that the United States fought on the wrong side. That's one of the key turning points in which the twentieth century went wrong. It was wrong for France to ally with the British against Germany, but it was doubly wrong for the United States to go into World War I on the side of the British. The catastrophes of this century would have been avoided to a very large degree if, for example, the United States had refused to back the British, but had rather insisted on arbitrating the war - ending the war by forcing a just peace on all the contending parties. That would have made all the difference. That would have created a much better world than the one that we're confronted with today.

And here's the fighting. You see these fighting fronts? There's a western front over here, there's a tremendous eastern front, an Italian front, there's a Balkan front, there's a Russian-Turkish front out here, and look: even out here there was a Kuwait front. Norman Schwarzkopf, where are you? This was done by the British. They were attacking Baghdad.

And, of course, the reality of World War I is that this is the greatest single tragedy, the greatest single hecatomb of western civilization. Nine million dead. These are French troops getting out of their trucks. They're going to fight the battle of Verdun, where, over a period of 6 or 8 months, more than a million men were killed.

It's about 9 million killed outright, 20 million wounded, and if you add in the Spanish flu of 1919 and a few other things, you get up to the area of about 25 million to 30 million dead as a result of World War I. And the majority of [those were from] Germany and France, the two most developed countries of western Europe.

Here is now the Europe that emerged after the peace of Paris. So this is now Versailles, we're now in the midst of Versailles, bringing World War I to an end. You can see the changes that have been made, a very large Poland up here, a rather large Czechoslovakia, a large Rumania, a fairly large Hungary. Notice also that Yugoslavia has been created. Probably the most typical territorial change of Versailles, this Peace of Paris of 1919, is the existence of Yugoslavia. You can also see the creation of Finland and Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, up here in the Baltics.

The territorial system that came out of this was vastly unpopular. Nobody was really satisfied with all of this. It awakened desires on the part of various groups, nobody liked it. It was fought in particular by Ataturk in Turkey, [and] there was a mass movement in China against the idea that the German colonial possessions were transferred to the Japanese under this same treaty. In Italy there was so much discontent that it led to the rise of fascism. Similarly in Germany, and so on down the line.

Here's Germany as it came out of World War I. Notice the areas that were taken away; and now, of course, the Oder-Neisse line over here is the border of Germany.

I would stress in the Versailles system the way in which the Ottoman Empire was partitioned in 1919. This was all the Ottoman Empire. Everything that you think of as being the Middle East - including Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia - all of these were created at the Peace of Paris - in particular the Treaty of Sevres. Israel took a little bit longer to create, but basically the mandate of Palestine under the British is what then later became Israel.

Hungary, Austria: this empire ceased to exist. Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Slovenians, Croatians, and others departed this empire, and I of course have to apologize for this map. This is a U.S., sort of a pro-Woodrow Wilson map, because it lists "Yugoslavs" as Serbs, Croatians, and Slovenes, and of course that's precisely what Yugoslavia was all about. This did not have anything to do with the wishes of those involved. This was a reward to Serbia by the British and their friend, Woodrow Wilson.

And Russia: the Russian Empire was dismembered. Here we see Finland taken off, the Baltic States taken off, Bessarabia, today Moldova taken off, areas in the Transcaucasus taken off. The Russian Empire has already been through one dismemberment in the 20th century. It's now going through the second dismemberment. And we must warn that unless economic dirigistic policies are introduced in these new states to make them viable, to make them prosperous, to make them stable, then as Helga was saying earlier there is every danger that those states will be re-engulfed by a Russian Empire within about 15 or 20 years, or even less. In this [1919] case, it took about 15 or 20 years for the Russian Empire to make its comeback under Stalin.

The other thing about Versailles that I would like to stress very much is the financial arrangements, because here we can really see the degree to which today's world is an extension of the Versailles system.

Germany, under the Treaty of Versailles, was required to pay $32 billion of reparations. It was said that the Germans bore the war guilt, that they were responsible for World War I. Big lie! But the reason for the big lie was that they [therefore] had to pay $32 billion. It's hard to calculate that in today's terms. Those were gold dollars, those were real dollars, maybe $32 trillion is some idea of what that would have meant today, and because of the 5 percent interest rates, this was going to be paid over about 60 to 70 years. By one calculation, the Germans would have wound up their payments about 1990. They would have just finished paying for World War I two years ago. [But the amount owed] was going to go up to about $100 billion because of the accrued interest over the period. So let's say, $100 trillion of reparations.

The French had borrowed $25 billion during the war, and the British and the French had borrowed about $10 billion from the United States. So here's the merry-go-round. Germany of course was not allowed to export. They were kept blockaded for a long time. They had to pay these reparations to the British and the French. Notice that the French had to also pay the British. The French and the British then paid the United States and the Wall Street bankers under the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan, and then refinanced the Germans so that they could keep paying. And that is a system of usury and destruction. It of course meant that the heart of Europe would be economically depressed; that Germany would be depressed economically, that there would be no development of the Third World as a result of European capital goods being sent out. It virtually guaranteed fascism and bolshevism advancing against the middle class societies; and it had within it the seeds of World War II. In other words, what Lord Keynes said about this - that it would require economic slavery in Germany - was absolutely accurate. It was a way of squeezing Germany until you could hear the pips squeak, as Keynes said.

So let's just summarize what we've gone through on this Versailles system.

What we've done here is to compare the Versailles arrangements of 1919 with the Yalta arrangements of 1945, which have now collapsed. The Versailles System had a League of Nations. Who was in the Security Council? The U.S., Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. Those were the Big Five. The U.S. didn't even join it, but the British wanted to run the world that way, as a condominium. And of course under the U.N. we've got the Security Council.

Under Versailles, you have the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. It's still there. This is widely considered today to be more powerful than the IMF and the World Bank and the other institutions that were put up under the Yalta system after the Second World War. We've mentioned the $32 billion in reparations, the $10 billion in war debts, the immense internal debts of all these countries. After the Second World War there was the demontage of German industry, simply taking it out, primarily by the Russians, but above all [by] the conditionalities of the IMF as they have been imposed on the former colonial sector.

Continuing this comparison, under Versailles you had a war guilt clause saying that Germany was responsible for World War I, and under Yalta, the same thing. Collective guilt. Every German is responsible for everything that Hitler did. Typical are the geographic changes that I've just mentioned; Yugoslavia is a very typical one. Under Yalta, it's the two Germanys, not simply cut down, but even divided.

And then, look at the Middle East as one example of what this meant for the Third World. Under the League of Nations there were these mandates. The British got the mandate of Palestine. That then became Israel. The British Foreign Office with the Balfour Declaration announced that it was going to create the state of Israel. This was then included in the secret British-French Sykes-Picot accords, and finally the Treaty of Sevres, which was the treaty with the Ottoman Empire.

What does that lead to? To your typical Yalta arrangement of endless wars of Israel against the Arab states. All these Middle East wars, 1948, 1956, 67, 69, 73, the Iran-Iraq War of '80, and finally the Gulf War of 1991. That brings us pretty much up to the present time.

I haven't been able, for reasons of time, to go into certain postwar events that are better known. A couple of things to say in conclusion.

What is the purpose of all this? Why did the British insist on this? The British insist on a world system or a form of organized chaos, which is what you see here, based on an irrational principle of arbitrary power - Oligarchy - the idea that the British royal family, the British House of Lords, and the British aristocracy and oligarchy have the God-given right to rule [as] the Anglo-Saxon master race. And they can inflict suffering on the entire rest of the world in the name of this lunatic, imbecilic principle of their power. Therefore, the purpose of this entire system is to crush humanity. Sure, you can say its really directed against Germany to keep the Germans down, to keep them divided; to keep the Germans and the Russians at each other's throats; to keep the French and the Germans at each other's throats. It also implies that the United States is subjected to colonial rule, which you see.

So all of these great nations are humiliated, each in its own way, by this Versailles System. But the purpose of it ultimately is to crush the entire human race, because one of the effects of this entire system is the poverty and economic backwardness of the developing sector today, which is directly due to these Versailles and Yalta arrangements.

We also have to ask ourselves: What is the center of evil in the world? Well, for a while there was Hitler and the Nazis. This was certainly very evil, Mussolini and the fascists. The Bolshevik Party has gone out of existence - Stalin's party, Lenin's party, is really no longer there. It could be reconstituted, I suppose. Mao and his heirs in China are still in power, but it looks like their future is going to be a limited one. So ultimately you have to ask yourself: What is the problem of evil in the 20th century in particular, because it has turned out not to be fundamentally, in the last analysis, any of those, but rather, the British oligarchy. British geopolitical thinking. The idea of dividing the world along these lines, and creating a series of endless wars.

We also have to recall, as we saw back in the 1850's, that when the British seemed to be on the verge of taking everything, that is the moment when the intrinsic weaknesses of their system pop out. This is an Anglo-American system that destroys its enemies, to be sure, but it destroys its sponsors and its owners with an even greater certitude. It's a system that literally devours its own flesh - as you see today, when it looks like the Anglo-Americans are ready to take over the entire world, but at the same time they're collapsing internally so fast that they will not be able to impose any permanent world order of any type.

And I think finally, what it means for us, is that this is a tremendous opportunity, because there is now a complete political and strategic vacuum, and economic vacuum, all around the world. There is a vacuum of ideas, a vacuum of strategy, [and] a political vacuum. Look at the 1992 Democratic candidates for president - the five-pack, the dwarves - and you can see that that is a vacuum of personalities, policies, and ideas. This is now the time to advance to fill that vacuum.

We must take advantage of the fact that the systems that have controlled the world in a certain manner of speaking, for the past 70 to 90 years, that these are now collapsing in front of our eyes, creating tremendous political opportunities.

You cannot engage in politics today unless you have this kind of a scope - unless you go back to the Congress of Vienna, 1848, the British drive toward the single empire, and then that convergence of Lincoln, Alexander II, and united Germany that gave the British such a scare that they started World War I and created the Versailles System.

general list of internet resources for literary study

2008-02-11T10:49:00.000Z

This is a selective list of useful guides of a general nature for amateurs, students and scholars:

Encyclopedias
Electronic Texts
Guides to Humanities Internet Resources
Guides to Literary Internet Resources
Guides to History Internet Resources
Libraries
Guides to Philosophy Internet Resources
Publishers
Style Guides

Encyclopedias

The Literary Encyclopedia and Literary Dictionary provides biographies, text profiles and topic essays in a series of user-friendly indexed databases. Links to other useful resources can be found at the foot of each entry. This site is constantly expanding. Its homepage is at: http://www.litencyc.com and the index of completed profiles is at http://www.litencyc.com/contents/contents.html

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Electronic Texts

Project Gutenberg -- an almost unbelievable resource, supreme justification of net logic, that provides access to tens of thousands of online texts http://www.promo.net/pg/

A Guide to Historical Texts: http://www.scholiast.org/history/index.html

University of Virginia Electronic Text Centre: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/

Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts links to over one hundred authors, from Aristotle to Saki, with an in-built concordance: http://www.infomotions.com/alex/

The Online Books Page at Pennsylvania University includes many non-literary works: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/

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Guides to Humanities Internet Resources

Alan Liu's Voice of the Shuttle at University of California, Santa Barbara is the earliest and probably largest list of links: http://vos.ucsb.edu/index.asp

HUMBUL the Humanities Hub -- an indexed and annotated datbabase that provides an efficient way of finding websites of interest in the humanities. http://www.humbul.ac.uk

Michael Hall's List of Resources for Humanities Scholarship: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~mlhall/scholarly.html

The WESSWEB Guide to European Studies at the University of Virginia: http://www.lib.virginia.edu/wess/

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Guides to Literary Internet Resources

Jack Lynch's Literary Resources on the Net at Rutgers University is the oldest, richest, and much the best place to start: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/

Malaspina Great Books at Malaspina College, British Columbia, Canada, has some interesting biographies and author-related links: http://www.mala.bc.ca/~mcneil/fivestar.htm

American and English Literature Internet Resources: Winnie Shyam keeps an excellent annotated and categorised list at the Buley Library, Southern Connecticut State University: http://www.library.southernct.edu/litbib.html#engen

University-English: this site comprises a series of indexed databases that enable searches for literary and scholarly associations, university departments, scholarly journals and publishers, conferences, summer schools and other events, and teaching positions in higher education. Database-driven and carefully indexed, it enables the user rapidly to select from large amounts of information: http://www.university-english.com

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Guides to History Internet Resources

The Scholiast: http://www.scholiast.org/history/index.html

Historical Maps - an index prepared at the University of Texas: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/map_sites/hist_sites.html

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Libraries

The Library of Congress: http://lcweb.loc.gov/

The British Library Catalogue: http://blpc.bl.uk/

The British Library Homepage: http://bl.uk

LibDex - The Library Index - A List of Libraries around the world: http://www.libdex.com/

HERO - Higher Education in the UK - Guide to Resources - provides lists of libraries, booksellers, bookshops and much more: http://www.hero.ac.uk/reference_resources/resources413.cfm?menu=true

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Guides to Philosophy Internet Resources

Peter Suber's Guide to Philosophy on the Internet: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/philinks.htm

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Publishers

The Association of American Academic Presses: http://aaupnet.org/ has an online list of presses at http://aaup.uchicago.edu/

Museophile at the South Bank University also has a useful list of publishers at http://archive.museophile.sbu.ac.uk/publishers/

Try also the University-English publishers' database at http://www.university-english.com

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Style Guides

The English Style Book, appended to The Literary Encyclopedia, provides succinct information on matters as various as punctuation, correctional marks and the layout of documents: http://www.LitEncyc.com/StyleBook/TheEnglishStyleBook.htm

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Page updated: March 2004

university of oxford

2008-02-11T10:37:00.000Z

CENTRE FOR BRAZILIAN STUDIES

RACE AND GENDER IN BRAZILIAN LITERATURE

27 May 1999

The Centre for Brazilian Studies of the University of Oxford held its first conference on
Brazilian Literature in St. Antony's College on 27 May 1999. It brought together most
of the academics in the United Kingdom in the field of Brazilian literature and related
cultural studies.

The conference was opened by Professor Leslie Bethell, Director of the Centre, and
Professor Else R P Vieira, UFRJ and visiting Research Associate at the Centre working
in the area of comparative literary and cultural studies.
John Gledson, Emeritus Professor of Brazilian Literature of the University of Liverpool
delivered the opening lecture on 'Machado de Assis and Brazilian history' in which he
highlighted ways in which the theory of history and historical sources were used by this
19th century Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright and translator. Apparently small,
insignificant details in Machado's writings, he argued, point to larger themes, revealing,
however, a somewhat fragmented relationship to Brazilian history, references to
historical facts that are usually oblique and an avoidance of certain issues. The writer's
archives and library demonstrate his familiarity with classical historians, the great
historians of the 19th century, anthropologists and philosophers of a negative tradition
such as Schoppenhauer. Yet, history lacks a secure pattern in Machado de Assis which,
Gledson argued by way of conclusion, could be related to the uncertain times in which
he lived. The newspaper O Globo (12-06-1999) featured an article on the conference
under the heading "Machado de Assis e sua ironia começam a derrubar as sérias
muralhas de Oxford".

The rest of the conference was devoted to race and gender in Brazilian Literature. The
first panel focused on readings of nineteenth-century Indianism. The first contribution,
'Alencar, slavery and the Indian question', by Dr. David Treece of King's College,
London, revisited the nineteenth-century Indianist movement and nationalist discourse
in relation to the contemporary issue of of black slavery. Dr Treece traced the parallels,
both explicit and implicit, that successive writers drew between these two issues during
the course of the Empire, from José Bonifácio, through Gonçalves Dias and Joaquim
Manuel de Macedo, to Alencar himself. In the context of debates within nineteenth
century political theory and the Brazilian polemics concerning liberty and servitude,
civilization and barbarism, integration or marginalisation of Indian and black, the paper
concluded with a comparative examination of Alencar's Indianist novels O Guarani and
Iracema, and the so-called abolitionist dramas O Demônio Familiar and Mãe: these, it
was argued, could be seen as exemplary of a conservative, "Conciliatory" mythology of
the coloured races' self-sacrifice, voluntary servitude and collaboration in the building
of the nation.
Dr. Jean Andrews, of Goldsmiths' College, London, in her paper 'A prince of the
Goitaca at La Scala in 1870: Antonio Carlos Gomes's opera Il Guarany', opted for an
intersemiotic and intercultural handling of the theme, namely, the adaptation for opera
of Alencar's O Guarani presented in the late nineteenth-century in Europe and in Brazil.
The simplification of the original plot imposed by the demands of operatic convention
and the much reduced capacity of a libretto to convey complex narration led to a
conversion of the implicit and highly ambiguous relationship between the indigenous
hero and the Portuguese heroine in the novel into a full-blown operatic romance which,
unusually for an interracial relationship in late nineteenth-century grand opera, ended
happily. The gap between the indigenous hero and the Portuguese heroine is reduced by
allowing Peri to speak the same sophisticated language as the Portuguese, as opposed
to the pidgin he speaks in the novel. He is treated with greater respect, though not as an
equal, by her father and, in operatic terms, his status as a warrior hero is underlined by
the heroic nature of his music. Stressing that Carlos Gomes' work fell out of favour soon
after the short-lived success of Il Guarany, Andrews hypothesized that the very
conventions of late nineteenth-century opera which enabled Gomes and his librettists to
create a love story with a happy ending between a Brazilian Indian and a Portuguese
heiress in 1870 may, ironically, have denatured the substance of the Alencar novel to

such a degree as to deprive it of any Brazilian cultural specificity, this in order to
respond to the demands of a European audience used to the safe, generalised and
domesticated exoticism of the opera house.

The second panel opened with a paper by Dr. Maria Manuel Lisboa of the University of
Cambridge, '"My Mother's Blood Relation": Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas or the
dead heart of the family'. Her analysis of Machado de Assis's novel (translated into
English both as Epitaph of a Small Winner, Noonday Press, NY, trans. by William
Grossman, and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, OUP trans. by Gregory
Rabassa) is framed by the issue of motherhood in a "confused" national context
importing liberal ideologies. Her argument raises the problematic associations of
motherhood for Brazilians insofar as it interconnects mother (birth, origin), woman and
Europe (a continent, the origin). The need to reinvent the motherland anew,
compromised by colonial experiences, heightens the ambivalence of dependence and
emancipation from given models. Such a symbology of maternity is shown to run
through the novel, whose protagonist's relation with women questions evolutionary-
Darwinian tenets. Virgília, Brás Cuba's lover, smiles as she aborts what is presumably
his child. The well-known chapter on negatives, epitomized by "I had no children, I did
not not leave to anyone the legacy of our misery", is interpreted as exposing the
Darwinian failure.

Ms Jane-Marie Collins (University of Nottingham) and Ms Erika Laredo (University of
Leeds) in their joint contribution, 'Rhetoric and reality: the mulatta in slavery and
freedom', wove literature and history together and stressed the scarcity of scholarly
research on the mulatta. A series of ambivalences and suspicions surrounding the
mulatta were raised: an object of desire that is both celebrated and hated, the possessor
of a beauty perceived both as a source of social ascension and of misery, an actor in a
risky and not consecrated relationship, a concubine whose undecidable status rarely
defines towards marriage, neither free nor a slave in colonial times, a "racial class" in
transition to whiteness and incapable of reaching stability. From another perspective,
the mulatta has become the fantasy of desire of a nation and an object of consumption.
Moving away from such a context, what the contributors have been foregrounding in
their ongoing investigation is the unexploited gendered role of the mulatta as a mother .

The third panel opened with a paper by Professor Walnice Galvão, University of São
Paulo (USP) and Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Brazilian Studies, contributed with
'The question of the mestiço in the work of Euclides da Cunha'. Professor Galvão is
nationally and internationally known for her vast work on this Brazilian writer and the
turn of the century Canudos Rebellion. Her full professorship thesis (1972) was later
published as No Calor da Hora: a guerra de Canudos nos jornais, 4a expedição, which
is a study of the journalistic representaions of the War. She also edited a critical edition,
Os sertões: campanha de Canudos 1902 (São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1985), as well as
Correspondência de Euclides da Cunha, co-edited with Oswaldo Galotti (São Paulo,
Edusp, 1997). Her presentation was based on her ongoing research in Oxford which
was later published as Diário de uma expedição (São Paulo, Companhia das Letras,
2000). Points raised were the immense gap between the press coverage of the war at the
time and the book Os Sertões as a war chronicle. In an encyclopedic impulse, the book
subsumes the sciences and knowledge of the time. Euclides da Cunha, a soldier,
narrates history from the point of view of the army which imposed the modernization
project. In the context of the embattlement of three races (Indians, blacks and whites),
the book emerges as a true statement against the half breed; the native Indian, in his
turn, is incapable of understanding the mental complexity of the white man and the
backland characters (sertanejos) are depicted as brave. Euclides can be said to hesitate
between his conscience and the racist theories of the time. By way of conclusion,
Professor Galvão nevertheless emphasised that all of this weaves into a careful aesthetic
elaboration which grants the book its status as a great work.

Dr. David Murray, University of Nottingham, presented a paper 'Racial Tricksters: A
Comparative Reading of Macunaíma from a North Americanist" in which he explored
ways of thinking about race and national identity. He posed an initial question: Why
wasn't Mário de Andrade's classic work, Macunaíma, written in North America, and in fact
why couldn't it have been written there? To answer that he looked at issues of race and
identity in terms of the themes of transformation and exchange that run through this novel.
The absence in North America or in the British Empire of a recognised place within which
there can be social mobility for people of mixed race and thus a way in which social class
can intermingle with race, he argued, has been addressed by recent discussions of hybridity
(e.g. Homi Bhabha, Robert Young). In Macunaíma, Mário e Andrade's novel of the

1920s, race does not act as a watertight category. There are a number of unexpected

transformations. Not only does the hero himself change identities and shapes, but the book

itself is full of images of exchange at all levels including the economic. Murray further refocus

Macunaíma by looking at Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquists' Tale, a novel
about love and transgression in modern Guyana. It begins with an indigenous unamed
figure who is clearly recognisable as Macunaíma, used as a generalised trickster figure in
a postcolonial agenda designed to decentre the metropolitan view. An important question
for future thought and discussion is whether Macunaíma is representative of a national
plenitude, a fecundity of possibilities and a potentiality or of an emptiness, a blank, a
chaos.

Finally Professor Vieira chaired the closing plenary discussion on the study of
Brazilian literature, which, she noted, is expanding at an impressive rate not only in the
UK and the US but also in Portugal, and not least in the rest of Latin America. A
specific question posed was: what can the Oxford Centre for Brazilian Studies do to
stimulate the study of Brazilian literature and related studies? Variously expressed was

the need to update the critical agenda to cater for a changing concept of literature in the
light of television, video and Internet developments, a context in which literature can no
onger be seen as a monolithic or a homogeneous enterprise. A major suggestion was
the pursuit of inter- and trans-disciplinarity and the exploration of the interface between
Brazilian literary and cultural/media studies. This enables literature to be approached as
a cultural artefact and as a cultural sign interacting with the visual arts, theatre, music
and so on. It would further establish a bridge between the study of Brazilian literature
and anthropology, history and cultural studies. A thematic broadening would also foster
a welcome comparativist approach. Finally, some participants emphasised the need for
more translations of Brazilian literature in English and the setting up of a regular forum

of debates in the form of an e-mail discussion group.

Report by Else R P Vieira

Tropical Gothic

2006-07-13T13:12:00.000Z

O trabalho destaca a presença de imagens góticas no romance brasileiro O Guarani (1857), de José de Alencar, enfocando o que há de sexual, sublime, violento e demoníaco na obra. A abordagem propõe um novo ângulo de interpretação para este romance tradicionalmente entendido pela crítica literária como manifestação indianista, rousseauniana e épico-histórica, utilizando o gótico como estratégia de leitura.

Tropical Gothic faz aproximações específicas entre O Guarani e os romances ingleses The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) e The Italian (1797), ambos de Ann Radcliffe, e The Monk (1796), de Matthew Lewis, estabelecendo ligações através de imagens (o abismo, a montanha, o castelo) presentes nas narrativas e por meio da forma literária labiríntica que organiza os romances. De modo que se argumenta por um modelo intertextual entre a ficção gótica inglesa e o romance de Alencar. O objetivo da dissertação foi estipular alguns aspectos teóricos e temáticos a partir dos quais uma leitura comparativa pudesse ser feita. A tarefa parecia ser antagônica a princípio, mas não contraditória. O desacordo estaria nas discrepâncias histórico-culturais, políticas, religiosas e geográficas que se interpõem entre ingleses e brasileiros.

De um lado havia os romancistas ingleses situando seus romances em nações católicas e mediterrâneas. A crítica literária contemporânea já definiu plausivelmente o fundo político, de afirmação nacional e anti-revolucionário que orienta as origens do gótico inglês (1764-1820). Assim, ao ambientar suas histórias em castelos e igrejas e, ao referir-se aos costumes medievais, tais romancistas estavam apontando para as iniqüidades da Europa continental e reafirmando o projeto político inglês. De outro lado havia Alencar escrevendo de uma realidade diferente, pronunciando-se de um recém-independente país tropical, uma ex-colônia em busca de voz própria, onde a Idade Média se apresenta (se é que) como fragmento reminiscente da religião católica. No Brasil, os castelos, enquanto construções físicas, são referências inexistentes. A proposta de um gótico tropical parecia implicar um antagonismo, até terminológico, entre o “sombrio” e o “solar”, como associar essas duas literaturas aparentemente tão distintas à primeira vista?

Inicialmente foi necessário apresentar o romance gótico, discutir sua formação e os seus significados históricos. Traçam-se diferenças entre o gótico inglês e as narrativas irracionalistas, fantásticas que se praticavam em outros países da Europa, principalmente na França e Alemanha. A disposição mais lúgubre que encontrou sumarização em certas imagens literárias fez parte de um espírito de época mais sombrio que se abateu sobre a Europa no final do século XVIII. Os romances góticos fizeram um uso específico de tais imagens, refletindo seus desassossegos com os acontecimentos revolucionários iniciado nas Américas (1776) e posteriormente na Europa continental (1889), entretanto, deslocando-os para outro tempo e contexto. Além da simbologia das imagens, esses romances organizavam suas histórias através de interpolações narrativas, o que ficou conhecido como enredo labiríntico, cristalizando na ficção esses aspectos de desorientação política, demonstrando a ligação entre Literatura e História. Entendido não como um gênero literário, mas como um momento narrativo no qual se dá um desafio da Razão, o gótico representaria nos romances ingleses inquietações políticas e culturais em busca de resolução. Tais aspectos do romance gótico foram objetos de apropriação/aclimatação e se encontram presentes no O Guarani, manifestos na Casa de Mariz, na Natureza tropical, na tribo canibal aimoré e no vilão italiano.

Diante desse quadro de histórico-cultural, selecionei passagens nos romances góticos tradicionais, as quais continham imagens de abismos, montanhas e castelos, com o intuito de discutir em maior detalhe as inquietações e o éthos do século XVIII na Europa. Procuro demonstrar como as interpretações dessas imagens variavam de acordo com as inclinações políticas dos autores, do radicalismo filosófico do Marquês de Sade, do republicanismo de Mary Wollstonecraft ao monarquismo de Edmund Burke. Ao examinar os terrores sutis de Radcliffe, o horror explícito de Lewis e a paródia gótica de Austen, argumento que, apesar das particularidades nas abordagens, o século XVIII “canonizou” uma tradição gótica que destacou o antagonista estrangeiro como um objeto central para discutir assuntos de conotações políticas e nacionalistas, que esses romances invariavelmente continham. Ao fim dessa parte, a idéia foi passar ao leitor uma leitura de como as convenções góticas foram estabelecidas e, de como elas estão profundamente imbricadas com questões de identidade nacional.

Em seguida procurei isolar a relação de Alencar com essas convenções góticas que se formaram antes. Minha leitura “gótica” da obra busca apontar traços específicos da presença cultural britânica na literatura brasileira. Novamente, inicio esta parte com uma passagem contendo imagens similares do abismo, da montanha e do castelo, tentando demonstrar como Alencar as aborda na sua fundação imaginária do país. Ao explodir o solar do fidalgo português D. Antônio de Mariz (emblemático do império), juntamente com os ferozes aimorés (simbolizando a nação primitiva) e queimando o vilão italiano (representando a presença estrangeira), Alencar não desloca o debate dos problemas, como era comumente feito no romance gótico inglês, mas aborda as questões nacionais in loco. O autor utiliza a representação estereotípica dos vilões para designar uma rejeição do estrangeiro mercenário que vem ao país em busca de lucro fácil.

Tropical Gothic relê o romance O Guarani utilizando o gótico enquanto grade de leitura. A intertextualidade com o modelo inglês foi estabelecida através de imagens, símbolos e por meio da forma labiríntica recorrente nos romances. Ao longo da pesquisa apontei para as semelhanças e discrepâncias entre as narrativas mencionadas, focando aspectos relativos à percepção e descrição da Natureza, à representação de vilania e questões de identidade nacional e ao uso de um discurso gótico para purgar elementos não desejados nas narrativas. A definição “romance indianista” dada para O Guarani provém de uma sistematização literária posterior, porém Alencar não o pensava assim, por isso deu-lhe o subtítulo de romance brasileiro, destacado-lhe o caráter da nacionalidade como seu foco principal. Salienta-se que a maneira como apresentamos ou classificamos um determinado texto conduzirá a leitura que fazemos do mesmo. Porém, uma mudança de perspectiva pode renovar uma obra, revelado-lhe aspectos que se encontravam obscurecidos pela classificação.

tropical terror: subversion in the films of coffin joe

2006-05-29T15:42:00.000Z

My next project aims at pursuing theoretical and thematic features of Terror in the horror films of Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe). The idea is to focus on the subversive connotations, rather than on its exploitation elements, highlighting the cultural significance of these films both in their time of production and at present, when they unfold as ‘cult’ items for niche consumption.

Although the boundaries are not always clear, Terror is understood here as a broader category which encompasses, among others forms, Horror, Murder-Mystery, Thriller and Gothic-Supernatural narratives. [1] Critics have plausibly established the terms Terror and Horror to distinguish between two distinct types of Gothic fiction, with Ann Radcliffe and Mathew Lewis being respectively the prime examples of each. The conventions (images, symbols, plots, discourse, etc.) set by the former Gothic narratives still linger strongly in contemporary books and movies, those in which some aspect of fear is celebrated. According to Radcliffe herself, [2] Terror is characterised by ‘obscurity’ or indeterminacy in its treatment of potentially horrible events – it is this potentiality which leads to the effect of Sublime. In contrast, Horror ‘freezes and nearly annihilates them’ with its unambiguous, explicitly blunt displays of atrocity. One might think that what Horror does is to materialise the worst that Terror could make one imagine. If that is the case, despite the exchange of the mind's eye for the actual sight of the dreaded (perhaps a modern audience would feel disappointed in the absence of it), Horror should not be seen as an inferior category, but rather as specialisation of Terror. The underpinning concept here is to see Terror as wide-ranging model which can open the mind to possibilities that could never be physically actualised.

From this angle, Terror emerges as a response to disquietude, in other words, feeling “terrified” is a reaction that takes place when we are pushed beyond familiar limits. It is noteworthy how this uneasiness frequently stems from cultural matters and how it unfolds questions related to political and national identity. [3] Although Terror is a trans-cultural and trans-historical phenomenon, its significance can only be recognised in a defined space and time. That is to say, the meanings and implications of these conventions have to be culturally and historically observed.

If not the first true horror movies made in Brazil, the films of Coffin Joe are certainly a landmark in the country’s filmmaking. Inhabiting the realms of horror/comic, as Jack Morgan approaches the genre, [4] the character Coffin Joe is the invention of José Mojica Marins, who is also the writer, director and star of the films. The present historical moment brings about a renewed interest for these films shot almost half a century ago. Revisited by a contemporary perspective, namely the boundaries cult/trash, Marins’ films and character are currently paving the way to become an international classic. The antihero Coffin Joe is first appears to the public in 1964, in the film A Meia Noite Levarei sua Alma (At Midnight I will take your Soul). His figure is most distinctive: top hat, flowing black cape, chiselled beard, piercing eyes and nails like talons – perhaps anticipating Freddy Krueger. The character is the cruel and evil undertaker of a small village who terrorizes the citizens with extremely violent behaviour. His goal is to find a perfect woman to bear him a child. Having left his former wife, who he considers inept for the task, his desire befalls on his best friend’s spouse, who becomes the depositary of his thirst for Perfection.

Filmed in black and white, the desolate and impoverished village is photographed in a stylish manner, resembling, to a certain extent, the images of primitive cinema but, in fact, it was a way of concealing the limited budget. This crudeness has rendered Marins’ filmmaking an analogy with the works of Edward D. Wood Jr. (1924-1978), who has recurrently been called the worst director that has ever existed. Wood believed having an aptitude for filmmaking and he attempted his talent chiefly at Terror and Sci-Fi movies, working with hardly any budget and with collaborators who had very little charisma. His films are frequently considered “trash” or “naïf”, but he became more famous and cherished after his death. This sudden conversion into an icon is greatly due, not only by his work, but by the film Ed Wood (1994), in which the he was treated with respect and deference by Tim Burton. But can the films of Marins be compared to the works of Ed Wood? In part, perhaps. If the production’s low expenditure in Coffin Joe’s films suggest a “trashy” aesthetics, the quality of his nightmares offer more than enough material for constructing arguments in defence of a non-trashy art, but rather a vigorous, intuitive production stemming from the margins of the alleged official cinema.

Despite its technically poor production, some of the nocturnal graveyard sequences in this film seem to dialogue with the feats accomplished by Mario Bava in Black Sunday (1960). It also brings about scenes apparently influenced by Surrealism, as in the films of Buñuel, an atmosphere similar to that present in Terence Fisher's earlier Hammer films, not to mention the classic Universal horrors which crop up in numerous little “homages”. The comparisons here are not meant to exalt Marins’ films in the light of renowned productions, as he is original in his own rights. The point here is to show them as part of a world wide film production, of Terror making in particular, which was quite prolific in the 60s and 70s.

Against the odds (the country’s Catholic audience, unfamiliar with horror movies), At Midnight I’ll take your Soul becomes a small hit and its success encourages Marins to attempt newer productions. The initial black and white template gives way to further experiments and an unexpected, full-blown Technicolor scene of a frozen Hell can be seen in Esta Noite Encarnarei no teu Cadáver (This Night I’ll posses your corpse, 1967). The people trapped there are being tortured by means of branding and whipping, some are being gored with forks while chained to each other, while other are physically imprisoned by being plastered to the wall, etc. This multi-coloured sequence concerns a nightmare Coffin Joe has (his real life is portrayed in black and white), conveying in images an aesthetic of excess which complements textual aspects. The discussion about the existence of god is certainly an axis which orients the film.

There is a fleeting philosophical discussion in At Midnight I will Take your Soul, implying a conception of god as Nature, in which blood and genes are the only hope of immortality (there are stated Sadean references in his theory), or god as Supernatural force, whose transcendent power is manifested in the immorality of the spirit. In this film, Coffin Joe’s biological or materialistic belief is subdued after his Dantesque vision of agonising souls in Hell and, in death, he fearfully conforms to the existence of an after-life. In posterior films the character undergoes meaningful changes, concerning its power and influence, becoming more of a demigod, a dweller of the shadows and nightmares. Possessor of ghostly powers, Coffin Joe professes from the Limbo his evil and demoniac philosophy. However primary in technique Marins’ films might be, (sometimes naïvely, and even clumsily) due to its shocking scenes and excruciating themes, such as torture, mutilation and blunt violence, there is a dark side which emerges in these films suggesting a curious relationship with the brutal practices of the 64 dictatorship.

Although the finest of his production was made in the 60s and 70s under the state-controlled media of the military system, his fame subsisted the years of censorship and, in the 90s, stormed into the international market. Its up rise seems to have most noticeably begun with the release of a Coffin Joe Trilogy in the American market, turning his films into offbeat products. Since then the character has gained international projection as a horror film classic. This was followed by a high-tech six DVD box set updating Coffin Joe’s films to the digital era. The interest for the subject and character is booming as recently two journalists from São Paulo have written Marins’ biography, celebrating the originality and importance of the Brazilian horror filmmaker.

[1] In the 70s Todorov established a structural division for what he called Fantastic Literature, proposing four categories according to the development and dénouement of the narratives, they are: L’étrange pur, le fantastique-étrange, fantastique-merveilleux and le merveilleux pur. This interesting analysis, however, fails to consider the cultural aspects of the narratives, reducing the question to a dichotomy between Realism v. Fantastic. See: Tzvetan Todorov. Introduction a la Littérature Fantastique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970.

[2] See: Ann Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry”. IN: The New Monthly Magazine 7, 1826 (pp. 145-52). This essay, published posthumously, is itself a revision of the ideas about the sensual effects which lead to the sublime feeling, as proposed by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).

[3] I am using here Said’s definitions of culture: First, meaning all the practices “like the arts of description, communications, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social and political realms and that exist in aesthetic forms”. Second, meaning “culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevation element, each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and thought …In time, culture comes to be associated often aggressively, with the nation or the state; this differentiate “us” from “them” …Culture in this sense is a source of identity…” IN: Edward Said. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. (pp. xii , xiii)

[4] Using the image of a “double helix” or a DNA like spiral, the author argues there is a fine line between the horror and the comic and, still according to him, the excessively grotesque frequently provokes laughter. See: Jack Morgan, The Biology of Horror. Illinois: Southern Illinois UP, 2002.

alguns pressupostos burkeanos

2006-02-20T01:33:00.000Z

O pensamento conservador começou a se desenvolver no século XVIII e foi sensivelmente influenciado pelos acontecimentos revolucionários ocorridos na França, em 1789. O conservadorismo no Reino Unido surgiu das idéias contidas no livro Reflexões sobre a Revolução em França, do parlamentar Edmund Burke. O livro foi publicado inicialmente em 1790, sendo escrito pelo o político no calor dos acontecimentos ainda insurgentes. Nesse texto, que constitui um argumento de classe do conservadorismo, Burke se posicionou contra o levante popular. Ele procura desqualificar o discurso revolucionário, se antecipando para que este não atravesse o canal e ganhe adeptos na Inglaterra. Na sua argumentação anti-revolucionária, Burke arrisca previsões de grande violência e desfechos adversos para as propostas libertárias da Revolução Francesa. Para a reputação de Burke, parte dessas previsões viriam realmente a se confirmar, sobretudo durante a época do Terror, a mais violenta da Revolução Francesa. Burke defende a superioridade do sistema político britânico, sustentando que a liberdade do cidadão inglês é uma herança nacional e que estaria mais segura em um governo que balanceasse igualmente no tripé: democracia, aristocracia e monarquia.

“Nem todos os sofistas do seu país poderão produzir nada melhor para garantir um liberdade razoável e generosa que o método que nós adotamos; nós que procuramos seguir a natureza ao invés de nossas especulações e que preferimos confiar a conservação de nossos direitos e privilégios aos sentimentos de nossos corações ao invés de entregá-las a à sutileza de nossas invenções”. (Burke, 1977: p.70)

Burke via na Revolução Francesa um projeto malsucedido, porque seus líderes tentaram subverter um sistema político coeso e colocar outro em seu lugar de imediato. No seu entendimento não houve processo gradual de mudança mas um corte bruto, onde um fluxo natural fora interrompido, e a ordem deixou de ser perpetuada. Segundo o autor, quando a monarquia absolutista que vigorava no França sofreu o “golpe”, e o feudalismo fora declarado extinto, comprometeu-se toda a sociedade organizada. A revolução destituiu e destruiu as instituições religiosas, executivas, legislativas e judiciais que haviam se formado ao longo de séculos.

Na avaliação de Burke a monarquia absolutista francesa era a melhor na Europa, ainda que estivesse necessitando de algumas medidas corretivas para diminuição de abusos. Segundo o autor, tais reformas já estavam engatilhadas porém não houve tempo hábil de colocá-las em prática, antecipando a revolução. Se por um lado o autor procura defender a aristocracia francesa, por outro culpa-a por não ter evitado o rumo dos acontecimentos. Em sua crítica há uma oposição de interesses entre: o landed interest, representado pela nobreza e o moned interest, representado pelos burgueses. Para Burke, se a nobreza, proprietária de terras, tivesse aberto as portas da sociedade para burguesia, detentora de capital, a revolução poderia ter sido evitada. Por não ter feito as reformas contra os abusos e as concessões de classe necessárias, a aristocracia não conseguiu evitar a aliança entre os intelectuais e os burgueses que, unidos, acabaram por mobilizar o descontentamento popular, desencadeando a Revolução Francesa.

A crítica burkeana aos idealizadores da revolução, conhecidos também por racionalistas políticos, consistia em denunciar a metodologia doutrinária que apregoavam. De acordo com Burke a abordagem proposta pelos revolucionários não passava de uma série de máximas, sem cuidado pelo detalhe e pouco condizente com a realidade. Na ocasião do seu lançamento, Reflexões sobre a Revolução em França foi um livro extremamente popular, em nenhum do pontos que levantou faltou controvérsia, porém independente de toda a polêmica, se a análise de Burke foi acertada ou não, os acontecimentos revolucionários ocorridos na França o estimularam a conceber e escrever sua filosofia política.

A idéia subjacente à Reflexões sobre a Revolução em França compreende a sociedade como algo vasto e complexo, um organismo natural que se constituiu através de evolução histórica, não podendo ser interrompido abruptamente. Esse fluxo intermitente é depositário das experiências humanas, de sabedoria adquirida, e por isso deve ser reverenciado. De modo que, qualquer proposta de reforma para a sociedade deve ter em devida consideração a continuidade das tradições. Entende-se que o desejo conservador de manter “as coisas como estão” revela um entendimento da História como um fluxo contínuo, sem lugar para rupturas ou câmbios de direção. O fio condutor que supostamente uniria o passado ao presente, e ainda, teceria o futuro, seria urdido pela experiência e a tradição. No entendimento socio-político de Burke temos que uma comunidade de homens é fruto de laços históricos, e, tão antiga e intrincada são essas ligações que não podem ser racionalizadas. Sua visão organicista propõe que somente na ascendência histórica e na ordem natural o governo livre se faz possível.

Sobre igualdade entre os homens e ascensão dentro dessa sociedade, Burke é taxativo. Para ele o organismo social possui diferentes classes, e a desigualdade que existe entre os homens é inerente ao organismo. Assim, temos uma sociedade auto reguladora, que seleciona a sua própria “aristocracia natural”, cabe aos os homens comuns entender, aceitar e respeitar essa ordem estabelecida. Na concepção política burkeana, princípios abstratos, metas utópicas e regras gerais não são da ordem natural. Essa oposição pelos princípios abstratos promulgados na França, vinha da crença que os homens deveriam procurar no passado as repostas para suas questões do presente.

“Acredite-me, senhor, aqueles que tentam nivelar nunca igualam. Em todas as sociedades compostas de diferentes classes de cidadãos é necessário que algumas delas se sobreponham às outras. Os niveladores, portanto, apenas mudam e pervertem a ordem natural das coisas; sobrecarregando o edifício social ao colocar no ar o que a solidez do edifício exige ser posta no chão” . (Burke, 1977: p.81)

Além da sua crença em uma aristocracia natural, Burke era convicto de ser o cristianismo a única e verdadeira fé. Homem religioso que era, fundamentava o seu argumento último e inapelável na Providência. Sua tese advoga que o homem é um animal social e cortado das suas raízes não passaria de uma besta. Esse organismo social é sustentado pelo costume e a tradição. A reverência à Deus e à ordem social devem ser os dois maiores pilares do homem pois é em última instância um propósito de divino.

“Sem condenar violentamente nem a crença grega, nem a armênia, nem, desde que os rancores não existem mais, a crença romana, preferimos a crença protestante, não por que ela tenha menos do Cristianismo em si, mas sim porque, segundo o nosso julgamento, ela tem mais. Somos protestante não por indiferença, mas por zelo” (Burke, 1977: p.112).

A aparente intransigência de Burke em relação à mudanças era suavizada com o argumento da “mudança controlada”. Procurando dar certa relatividade à questão, Burke aceitava que às vezes as mudanças se fazem necessárias. Entretanto, advogava que essas deveriam ser ínfimas e que deveriam almejar ao máximo a preservação da ordem estabelecida. Tendo em vista que os limites e a natureza dessas mudanças não são devidamente mencionadas, talvez trate-se de uma saída retórica dentro de uma argumentação tão elaborada. Uma brecha por onde ele poderia escapar de uma posição sectária e rebater possíveis acusações de intransigência e passadismo.

apresentando o romance gótico

2006-02-16T22:09:00.000Z

Há uma relativa consistência nas convenções narrativas que fazem do romance gótico uma literatura reconhecível como tal, mas que não chega a constituir um gênero. O romance gótico é uma manifestação essencialmente híbrida, um elo entre o romanesco e o romance no qual uma atmosfera de mistério, aflição e terror prevalece. Chamados de “góticos” por retirarem sua inspiração de construções medievais, em parte, pode-se dizer que tais romances representaram uma volta ao passado feudal, provocada pela desilusão com os ideais racionalistas e pela tomada de consciência individual frente aos dilemas culturais que surgiram na Inglaterra a partir da metade final do século XVIII.

Por este ângulo, o romance gótico representa uma mescla de tradições distintas, uma mistura entre o mitológico e o mimético, entre imaginação e realidade. A proposta subjacente seria o retorno a uma época de sonhos, contra o materialismo burguês e de encontro ao Iluminismo. Nesses romances aquelas convicções mais simples do pensamento cartesiano, racionalista são postas em dúvida em detrimento de um discurso do sentimento, o qual, ora choroso ora violento, é freqüentemente exagerado na sua representação das emoções. À luz de uma filosofia da literatura, o romance gótico levantou questões que desafiaram o projeto das Luzes ao expor, até certo ponto, a natureza caótica do mundo e a contingência da vida. Ao se encarregarem de uma disposição existencial mais lúgubre, tais romancistas estabelecem um caminho para o surgimento da psicanálise do século seguinte, apresentando em suas narrativas a divisão ontológica do ser humano em duas grandes matrizes constitutivas: às vezes equilibrado, racional, harmônico (clássico) e às vezes exaltado, sentimental, excessivo (então gótico, ou possivelmente barroco).

Em oposição à filosofia neoclássica, de procedência aristotélica, os autores góticos investiram na criação de imagens obscuras e representações simbólicas. O medo e o anseio pela morte foram temas centrais nessas narrativas cujos enredos oscilavam entre a realidade verificável e a aceitação de um mundo sobrenatural. O romance gótico catalisou imagens que reaparecerão, devidamente adaptadas, no romance histórico do século posterior. Alguns exemplos recorrentes dessas imagens iniciais são: abadias decadentes habitadas por clérigos maléficos, castelos sinistros onde aristocratas tirânicos vivem isolados da sociedade como um todo. Dentro desses cenários é possível que portas que se fechem misteriosamente e velas se apaguem com uma súbita rajada de vento ao se caminhar em corredores escuros. Enquanto isso, pessoas se locomovem através de passagens secretas ou se escondem em úmidos recintos subterrâneos. Contrapondo-se a essas ambientações internas, geralmente tensas e claustrofóbicas, também são freqüentes nesses romances as representações da Natureza, mas o interesse por tais temas naturais não foi exclusividade da narrativa gótica.

O culto à Natureza, que já estava presente nas obras neoclássicas, foi uma característica comum a diversas obras do período, supostamente gerada pelo desenvolvimento científico e pelo crescimento das cidades.[1] Todavia, no caso específico dos romances góticos, além do habitual cenário pitoresco, as paisagens externas traziam visões sublimes, ou seja, o arrebatamento pelo poder e pela grandiosidade dos elementos naturais. A Natureza nos romances góticos freqüentemente se reveste do sublime, ou terror, cujo efeito é alcançado por uma retórica do excesso, uma linguagem hiperbólica com ênfase adjetival que torna o cenário intimidante: vastas paisagens, montanhas, abismos, vulcões, tempestades, mares revoltos, cachoeiras trovejantes, florestas escuras nas quais bandidos cruéis espreitam e as heroínas perseguidas temem (e leitores desejam) que o pior lhes aconteça.

Entram em cena as transgressões sociais em suas formas hediondas: incestos, parricídio, fratricídio, sodomia, estupros, torturas, assuntos pelos os quais a Europa do século XVIII parecia sentir uma atração inconfessável e experimentava um estranho prazer em vê-los insinuados ou realizados, ainda que somente na imaginação. Como regra geral, o romance gótico inglês do século XVIII, ou pelo menos aquela ficção considerada mais refinada e moralmente correta, ou ainda, aquela que caiu no gosto da burguesia e se tornou “canônica” (sendo fundamentalmente uma literatura marginal), primou pela cautela e suavidade no trato dos temas hediondos. Nas narrativas inglesas o terror e os crimes eram sugeridos, mas quase nunca levados a cabo. O auge dessa expressão “sutil” do modelo inglês são os romances de Ann Radcliffe, os quais, apesar da admirável prosa poética, não cumpre a contento as possibilidades mais radicais abertas pelo romance, seu foco obviamente era outro. A primeira exceção a essa afirmação geral sobre a cautela do gótico inglês é o romance The Monk, de Matthew Lewis, todavia, é sabido que este preferia as narrativas alemãs, as quais não eram conhecidas por “góticas”, mas por Ritter, Räuber und Schauerroman, sendo histórias mais incisivas e violentas na abordagem das transgressões.[2]

Joyce Tompkins [3] afirma que não é necessária a distinção entre os diferentes góticos que proliferam na Europa, devido à influência mútua entre os países. De fato, houve uma grande interação literária nesse período, o rompimento com o Iluminismo promovido pelos dramas alemães, conhecidos por Sturm und Drang, o romance Die Räuber (1781) de Schiller contém algo dos elementos de terror gótico, abordando o zeitgeist rebelde e atormentado da época. As obras de Goethe, mais especificamente, Die Lienden des jungen Werther (1774), Die Braut von Corinth (1797) e Faust (1808,1832) foram extremamente populares no período. Os alemães leram e se apropriaram de Shakespeare, Rousseau, James Mcpherson, o forjador de Ossian, e Edward Young, um dos graveyard poets, e por sua vez influíram nas obras de Coleridge, Wordsworth e Byron. Na França, o roman noir de Abbé Prévost foi extremamente popular na década de 1730. O romance Histoire du Chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescau (1731) foi apreciado por Richardson, que ao mesmo tempo em que se apropriou dos incidentes extraordinários, do tratamento dado ao amor, dos elementos melodramáticos, suavizou a sexualidade mais visível para o leitor inglês. Os romances libertinos do marquês de Sade, da metade final do século XVIII, representam o extremo mais radical de uma sexualidade brutal, do irracionalismo das paixões e dos monstros da natureza humana. Do ponto de vista da filosofia, a exploração dos limites do racional/moral promovida pelos romances sadianos faz os terrores do gótico inglês parecerem meros contos da carochinha. A École Frénétique, assim cunhada por Charles Nodier em 1820, a qual tematizou o ateísmo, a exumação de cadáveres pra assustar os vivos, o insano e o horror presente nos sonhos, também capturaram essa atmosfera “gótica” que pairava sobre a Europa. Extrapolando a fronteira da literatura, pode-se citar a pintura de Goya como entretenimento para um público que gostavam de fantasiar com as possibilidades mais terríveis, embora não planejasse vivê-las ou senti-las na pele.

Entretanto, ainda que as obras mencionadas acima possuam elementos em comum com o romance gótico, principalmente aqueles que fazem parte do espírito de uma época, nenhuma delas é estritamente “gótica”, já que no contexto histórico que estamos tratando aqui esta é uma nomenclatura que se refere somente às narrativas inglesas. De modo geral, a ficção inglesa possui certas peculiaridades, como o gosto pelo thrill, ou frisson, que não ultrapassa as fronteiras de uma certa compostura, ou quando mais raramente o faz desloca ação para outro país, de modo a questionar os costumes das nações estrangeiras. O foco dessas obras obviamente não era inflamar as controvérsias diretamente, mas principalmente entreter o leitor e, ao final, confirmar a ordem burguesa. Creio que a proposta de Tompkins pertence a um outro momento e necessita ser revista à luz da crítica atual. Entendo que a unificação achata as características individuais de cada país, pois confere ao gótico inglês características que não são suas e impõe uma definição inglesa a obras que pertencem a tradições diferentes. Podemos tomar como exemplo de uma narrativa fantástica que faz parte de uma tradição diferente da gótica, Le Diable Amoreaux (1772), de Jacques Cazotte, uma história necromântica na qual o protagonista, don Alvare Maravillas, invoca o diabo em um ritual de magia. Este o atende na forma de uma monstruosa cabeça de dromedário, a qual Alvare pega pelas orelhas, subjugando-a e fazendo o diabo se transmutar em um cãozinho. O demônio, supostamente enamorado, passa então a obedece-lo e segui-lo por toda parte, agora transformado em Biondetta, uma ninfeta loira que se passa por mancebo escudeiro. Entre transmutações, confusão mental e distorção da realidade, a atmosfera onírica prevalece durante todo o texto. Os paradigmas estabelecidos por esta narrativa pertencem à outra vertente de histórias irracionalistas a qual ecoa na obra de autores como E.T.A. Hoffman, e o seu Der Sandmann (1816), e Die Verwandlung (1912), a metamorfose de Kafka.

Enquanto fenômeno comercial o gótico, essa ficção pré-romântica e pseudomedieval, foi intensamente produzida e avidamente lida na Inglaterra do final do século XVIII até o começo do século XIX. Durante o período os romances góticos haviam se tornado voga e obsessão entre um público leitor que não se cansava de consumi-los. A publicação desses romances havia virado um negócio rentável para livreiros e escritores profissionais constantemente ocupados em suprir a demanda de um número crescente de leitores e em prover lançamentos para os gabinetes de leitura.[4] Mas o ciclo de prosperidade teve curta duração. O romance gótico alcança seu auge na década de 1790, com a publicação das obras que consolidam suas características principais.[5] Todavia, ao final da próxima década esses romances já eram tido como um produto literário “obsoleto”, criticado em seus aspectos mais extravagantes. O grande sucesso de público deu início a uma série de lançamentos do mesmo formato. O furor desencadeado pela ficção gótica ocasionou uma produção enorme, em sua maioria direcionada para venda e com pouca preocupação por inovação literária. As imagens e símbolos usados pelos autores para a criação de efeito (ruínas, monastérios, castelos, labirintos, igrejas), as ambientações em países distantes e católicos, a donzela em perigo, seriam exemplos desses lugares comuns. Primeira literatura pré-fabricada da História, a saturação da produção, a complexidade e previsibilidade dos enredos seriam os motivos para o declínio desse gótico passível de formularização, em função de uma literatura vitoriana de aspectos mais referenciais e contemporâneos. Esse gótico reaparecerá no romantismo do século seguinte fornecendo (1) quase uma cartilha para uma estética de efeito, (2) um inventário de objetos e situações e (3) a relação psicológica do homem com aquilo que ele considera o mundo exterior, embora o entendimento da cultura e da História já tenham mudado.

[1] Em meados do século XIX Ruskin afirma que o culto setecentista à Natureza provém da urbanização e do desenvolvimento tecnológico ocorrido no período. De acordo com o autor, as pessoas passaram a idealizar ou “romantizar” a Natureza quando foram moram em cidades. Ver: John Ruskin. The Stones of Venice. 3 vols. London: George Allen,1905.

[2] Segundo Hans-Ulrich Mohr o termo “gosticher Roman” só foi aceito recentemente por acadêmicos alemães trabalhando na área de literatura inglesa e norte-americana. Ver: Hans-Ulrich Mohr. “German Gothic”. IN: The Handbook to Gothic Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1998. (pp.63-8)

[3] Ver: J.M.S Tompkins. The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800. London: Methuen & CO LTD, 1961.

[4] Ciculating libraries, bibliotecas circulantes, ou gabinetes de leitura foram negócios montados para atender aqueles leitores que não podiam comprar livros (artigos caros na época) mas podiam alugá-los. A Minerva Press (1791), de William Lane, foi a principal editora desses romances “genéricos”, freqüentemente criticada pelo seu catálogo composto por obras menores e por usar em seus livros material de baixa qualidade. Potter traça uma diferença entre os romances escritos com intenção artística e aqueles romances feitos somente para vender (a grande maioria), chamando os dois tipos respectivamente de “arte e comércio”, art and trade. Ver: Franz Potter. Twilight of a Genre: Art and Trade in Gothic Fiction 1814-1834. Tese de Phd, University of East Anglia, 2002.

[5] Estes são os principais romances da década: A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), Castle of Wolfenbach (1793), Caleb Williams (1794), Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Montalbert (1795), The Mysterious Warning (1796), The Monk (1796), The Italian (1797), Clermont (1798), The Orphan of the Rhine (1798) e St Leon (1799).

os vilões góticos

2006-01-11T13:09:00.000Z

Como o cenário dos romances góticos raramente é a Grã-Bretanha, a representação usual da Natureza é orientada pela geografia estrangeira. Deslocar as ansiedades no tempo e no espaço seria uma maneira de projetar no “outro” assuntos que a tradição protestante²¹ não queria abordar em seu próprio território. Essa transferência presente no romance gótico dirige-se a questões de estética e política desencadeadas pelos episódios revolucionários na França em 1789. Os romancistas ingleses interpretavam os acontecimentos na França à luz da sua própria história, considerando a Revolução Francesa como uma perpetuação tardia da sua reforma burguesa de 1688, a qual limitou o poder monárquico subjugando-o ao parlamento. Tais histórias de horror eram ambientadas principalmente da Itália, mas também na França e na Espanha.

O romance gótico expõe suas contradições ao tentar reunir uma escala de valores burgueses, a exemplo do sentimentalismo, virtude, domesticidade e família, somados a um entusiasmo pela arquitetura medieval, os costumes e valores aristocráticos, expressando uma admiração por um mundo feudal que era ao mesmo tempo fonte de autocracia e barbarismo. Essa ambigüidade levou os romancistas à criação de vilões malignos, freqüentemente aristocratas ou clérigos, que personificavam essa relação dúbia e imprecisa. Os eventos que ocorrem nos romances góticos são comumente representados de maneira irônica. Essas demonstrações contra as iniqüidades das nações estrangeiras foram um clichê para o leitor inglês do século XVIII. Por esse ângulo, o romance gótico pode ser considerado um romance nacionalista, proclamando seu ufanismo através da noção de alteridade presente na história, a qual contrasta com a crença nas instituições inglesas e seus os valores civilizados.

A obsessão gótica com o clero católico e a aristocracia, enquanto depositários de maldade, representaria esse perigo que vem do exterior. Os romancistas ajudaram na criação de uma identidade nacional por meio de uma dicotomia que opunha uma multidão de leitores ingleses e os infames personagens católicos e continentais. “ ‘Your picture is complete’, said he, ‘and I cannot but admire the facility with which you have classed the monks together with banditti’ ”. (The Italian, p.50), palavras do padre Schedoni, suplantando o jovem herói Vivaldi na retórica e relativizando as certezas dos leitores. Somente os vilões góticos são capazes de cometer maldades tão grandes e ainda assim manter a majestade nas atitudes. Em Northanger Abbey (1818), Jane Austen destaca os limites dessas convenções criadas pelo romance gótico, reescrevendo-as ao seu modo idiossincrático. Ainda no auge da produção gótica, Austen expõe a estrutura desses romances satirizando seus aspectos estereotipados.²²

O leitor geralmente escolhe os lados a partir da primeira descrição, ao ser feito cúmplice de um certo ponto de vista. Freqüentemente mais velho e mais experiente do que o herói e a heroína (como as nações românicas em relação à Grã-Bretanha) o vilão tem a compleição física descrita como escura, de pele morena e cabelos pretos, geralmente há algo de magnético ou perturbador nele. Chamar atenção para tais características seria uma maneira de propor contraste com o tipo claro inglês. Esse gancho inicial serve para introduzir uma afirmação nacional, na qual o narrador utilizará imagens e sutilezas lingüísticas objetivando criar uma afinidade com os leitores. A aparência do padre Ambrosio em The Monk (1796)²³ exemplifica esse costume retórico:

He was a Man of noble port and commanding presence. His stature was lofty, and his features uncommonly handsome. His Nose was aquiline, his eyes large black and sparkling, and his dark brows almost joined together. His complexion was of a deep but clear Brown; Study and watching had entirely deprived his cheek of colour. Tranquillity reigned upon his smooth unwrinkled forehead; and Content, expressed upon every feature, seemed to announce the Man equally unacquainted with cares and crimes.

(The Monk, vol. I, capítulo I, pp. 8-9)

Ambrosio personifica o estereótipo físico do homem mediterrâneo e, ainda que nesse momento no romance ele seja jovem, toda a sua vileza irá se revelar. Sua respeitável pessoa pública contrasta com a intimidade depravada (a questão do duplo ou doppelgänger, notavelmente sintetizada em 1891, por Oscar Wilde, em The Picture of Dorian Gray). A corrupção do vilão, aliada à sua natureza arrebatada e obsessiva, propensa a acessos de fúria, é uma constante em quase todos os romances góticos. Apesar do autocontrole estudado dos antagonistas, eles são naturalmente agressivos e esse ardor incontrolável vai transparecer sob o verniz da aparência equilibrada, levando-os do “summit of exultation to the abyss of despondency” (The Romance of the Forest, p.317) - note-se a metáfora com a Natureza aqui. A inclinação dos vilões para a violência, a imoralidade e os maus-humores em geral dá suporte à idéia central na construção da “alteridade” como característica do gótico. O modo como esses romances debatem a alteridade e as diferenças é demonizando o outro. Mas ilustrar o “outro” de modo degenerado tem suas implicações. Supostamente, isso levaria os leitores a crerem na, ou ao menos a refletirem sobre a idéia de “retidão” moral e decência de princípios da nação inglesa, na qual, “virtude” seria um código para “civilização”. É por esse ângulo que os romances góticos contribuem para a construção de uma identidade nacional e institucional britânica. Em última instância, se dirigindo à questões de nacionalidade pela promoção de distinções raciais, culturais, religiosas e institucionais, os antagonistas cumprirão o seu papel. Como se espera, os vilões têm uma personalidade enganadora, a marca da sua esperteza. Seu comportamento e discurso se adequam à situação, o antagonista gótico lança mão de intimidações, truques e até elogios para alcançar seus objetivos. Impulsionado pela desonestidade, Schedoni adota um tom suave com a Marchesa di Vivaldi.

- To what do you allude, righteous father. enquired the astonished Marchesa; .what indignity, what impiety has my son to answer for? I entreat you will speak explicitly, that I may prove I can lose the mother in the strict severity of the judge.

- That is spoken with the grandeur of sentiment, which has always distinguished you, my daughter! Strong minds perceive that justice is the highest of the moral attributes, mercy is only the favourite of weak ones.

(The Italian, vol. I, capítulo X, p. 111)

A cena exemplificaria como Schedoni se apropria do jargão sentimental da heroína e o usa em seu próprio benefício. Sua destreza retórica induz a Marchesa a juntar-se a ele e apoiá-lo em seus planos. No nível da narrativa, a imitação do discurso ingênuo do herói e da heroína pelo vilão revela a habilidade da própria Radcliffe, que neste momento está expondo sua estrutura com uma pequena provocação, talvez demonstrando que atributos morais são antes uma pose que se adota do que sentimentos legítimos. No vilão, esse tipo de maldade, voltada para o interesse próprio, está largamente relacionada ao estudo da história da Serenissima Republica veneziana, então um exemplo típico de despotismo e oligarquia fora do Oriente.²⁴ A “república” veneziana prosperou utilizando práticas baseadas na escravidão, na intermediação de finanças e no totalitarismo político. Em parte, os romancistas góticos ajudaram a construir esse leviatã, capitalizando suas histórias nas implementações estadistas que se originaram do mercantilismo veneziano. Textos como O Príncipe (1513), de Maquiavel, também contribuíram para essa estereotipização dos italianos, freqüentemente representados como pessoas obscuras e enganadoras. Shakespeare também utilizou o tema em Othello, the Moor of Venice (1601) e essa idéia permaneceu até, pelo menos, a releitura gótica de Schiller sobre o assunto em Der Geisterseher (1786-9), publicado em três partes durante três anos. Em 1792, Heinrich Zschokke criou um antagonista de vida dupla que era, paradoxalmente, aristocrata e mercenário. Abällino der grosse Bandit, é um conto do tipo gótico que foi traduzido do alemão para o inglês por Matthew Lewis, passando a se chamar The Bravo of Venice (1805). Essa história reafirma o papel de Veneza como um centro de corrupção política e de traição, mas também enfoca uma mudança notável na identidade típica do vilão. O personagem duplo Abellino/Flodoardo representa simultaneamente o lado escuro da nobreza e a sede por aventuras, ele é um caçador de fortunas e um empreendedor, de uma maneira burguesa.

Nesse sentido, o italiano funciona como um depositário de apreensões sociais, flutuando entre o aristocrata perverso e o burguês maléfico (ou ambos, como no caso de Zschokke), dependendo do ponto de vista do autor. Entretanto, como Fred Botting aponta, os vilões raramente são a causa da maldade por si só, pois o autêntico vício é identificado como um problema institucional,²⁵ e não do indivíduo. O poder da ideologia política e cultural de Veneza alcançou a Idade Moderna, mesmo após a Serenissima ter se extinguido. Contraditoriamente, esse método veneziano tornou-se o mesmo adotado no projeto imperial da Grã-Bretanha, encapsulado no lema dividi et impera (divide e governa). No século XIX, o leão alado da Piazza di San Marco tornou-se o leão britânico, a serviço da rainha, presença sempre vigilante em inúmeros prédios públicos e outros edifícios espalhados por Londres.²⁶

Olhos vigilantes foram um símbolo preferido desse comportamento autoritário, um atributo particularmente apropriado para lidar com temas relativos ao poder, à opressão e tirania. Olhos ameaçadores eram uma característica comum empregada na representação desses degenerados banditti que “seemed to penetrate, at a single glance, into the hearts of men, and to read their most secret thoughts; few persons could support their scrutiny, or even endure to meet them twice”. (The Italian, p. 35).

Nos romances góticos, é comum achar exemplos de intimidação na forma de olhos ou olhares temíveis. Ambrosio, em The Monk, exibe “a certain severity in his look and manner that inspired universal awe and few could sustain the glance of his eye at once fiery and penetrating” (p. 9). Melmoth possuía “a full-lighted blaze of those demon eyes” (Melmoth, the wanderer,1820, p. 12).²⁷ O califa Vathek (Vathek, 1786)²⁸ era uma figura agradável, mas quando enraivecido “one of his eyes became so terrible, that no person could bear to behold it” (p. 2). É curioso que Vathek pareça ter apenas um olho atemorizante, talvez parte do humor beckfordiano que ri da natureza ciclópica de governos totalizadores e autoritários. Adiante ele comenta sobre as pretensões intelectuais do califa e o tratamento que dava ao sábios: “He was fond of engaging in disputes with the learned, but did not allow them to push their opposition with warmth. He stopped with presents the mouths of those whose mouths could be stopped; whilst others, whom his liberaty was unable to subdue, he sent to prison to cool their blood; a remedy that often succeeded” (p. 3).

Como foi mencionado, os personagens góticos em geral não são psicologicamente desenvolvidos ou aprofundados, a grande maioria permanece imutável em suas resoluções durante toda a história. Seus pensamentos raramente são desvelados e suas vozes são ouvidas apenas em diálogos. Em parte pelo uso da terceira pessoa, em detrimento da primeira, que torna a leitura uma experiência menos dramática. Apesar das incursões subjetivas não serem levadas adiante, talvez os vilões possam ser considerados os únicos personagens que passam por um conflito interno. As pobres deliberações psicológicas (um retrocesso em relação a Lovelace) tornam-se mais evidentes durante a punição dos vilões, quando suas personalidades oscilam entre o pecado e a absolvição. Infelizmente, toda a audácia que os vilões demonstraram ao longo o romance acaba invariavelmente subjugada. É a minha opinião que algumas das excelentes construções dos vilões góticos é prejudicada pelo arrependimento de teor puritano na exoneração final.

Apesar de conseguir envenenar seu rival, um fraco e moribundo Schedoni termina sua participação como um vilão dobrado pelo arrependimento. Destronado, Manfredo (The Castle of Otranto, 1764) também se arrepende de sua vileza e se retira para uma vida de reclusão. O califa Vathek culpa sua mãe por ter insuflado a ambição desmedida em seu coração, mas seu arrependimento chega tarde, pois seu coração arderá para sempre no inferno de Giaour. O padre Ambrosio, que vendeu sua alma ao capeta, também se acovarda diante do fim e pede pela clemência divina. O demônio, enfurecido com seu tom choroso, leva-o para um vôo vertiginoso e joga-o das alturas. Em agonia, ele é deixado para à morte, por sete dias, empestado por moscas e aves carniceiras, até que uma tromba d’água finalmente leva seu corpo embora. Confissões públicas, revisões de consciência e arrependimentos finais distorcem a construção das histórias empurrando-as para desfechos moralizantes. A fim de restabelecer o equilíbrio no tecido social, para o gótico clássico inglês não basta apenas punir a maldade, mas é necessário que haja uma demonstração penitente, antes que se encerre a participação do antagonista, no intuito de assegurar as condições éticas no final. O arrependimento do vilão, seguido da declaração de mea culpa, prevalece nesses romances, apesar das pequenas variações em relação à maneira na qual o arrependimento acontece.

Enquanto reação contra o poder internacional representado pela Igreja Católica, o arrependimento do vilão reafirma os princípios políticos, sociais e religiosos seguidos pelos britânicos; ratificando a idéia de construção nacional através da oposição de valores e de culturas. Essas acomodações narrativas, por vezes apressadas e desajeitadas, parecem refletir as soluções políticas adotadas na Grã-Bretanha daquele período, as quais afirmaram e equilibraram os interesses monetários e os interesses fundiários, assegurando-lhes maneiras de se manter no poder.²⁹

invisible cities: labyrinths of reality

2006-01-11T12:57:00.000Z

“It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless formless ruin.”

Italo Calvino

In Invisible Cities (1972), Italo Calvino seems to contrast a rigid outline structure with a flexible textual content. The tension comprised by the numerical structure proposed in the index; stand out against the set of fluid texts which make up the subject matter of the book. The opposition between form and content seems to point to a fruitful dichotomy in the conception of the novel, linking to the aesthetics and the theories of the open work. This essay will try to investigate the structural construction of Invisible Cities by looking at its index, seeking to discuss some models of formalistic representation proposed by the criticism and the specific contribution they may, or may not, provide. Aiming to uncover possible meanings which may arise from the debate, this text will question to what extent structural complexities can be considered literary if they are not ultimately related to the culture in which a text is found.

The uses of the index as reading possibilities

By checking the index, the reader will detect a total of nine chapters in the book. A more detailed inspection will reveal an interesting progression of titles and numbers. The observer will notice this succession follows an orderly sequence and a keener eye will spot the use of a substitution principle. The criterion employed by the author is surely no random coincidence; on the contrary, it is indicative of a method applied in the formal organization of the book. Whether the reader chooses to explore it by examining the texts under the topics proposed (e.g. Cities & Desire, Cities & the Dead, etc.), or by analysing all the narratives which fall under a specific number on the index (according to the sequence 54321); Calvino’s Invisible Cities seems to unlock its texts to a range of possible ways of reading.

Although the book has the potential to be read in many directions, the concepts of what is known as “linear” reading is not completely discarded. This means that Calvino does not trespass all the fixed rules of narration and the realistic conventions; the encounter between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan persists as a solid foot in the historical realm. At the same time he conforms to a chronological past, Calvino also invests in the potential of the words, exploring the world through projections “in negative” and inverted mirrors-images. Building alternative realities, balancing the real and the fantastic, his art of narration constitutes a magic world of kaleidoscopic visions. Invisible Cities has often been compared to a hypertext, because it works in a connective style and may be approached like links on a web page. Having Umberto Eco’s book on the poetics of the open work as a stepping stone, Teresa de Laurentis refers to the “project” of the contemporary art work as being the use of “techniques of discontinuity and indetermination for the purpose of generating open series of performances or interpretations by the reader/listener/viewer”1.

The entrances to the book are many, as its’ fascicular disposition allows the blocks to be atomised without loss for its entirety. The index certainly provides a good way in, leading the reader to any combination of chapters and freely connecting within the work. But Invisible cities could not truly be called a hypertext if it did not also made way to extra-textual universes. The novel links to the work of other writers such as Borges, Cortázar, Pávitch, who also created literary games pending towards the multiplicity of realities, or a multi-linear2 text, intending to create new ways of expression. Calvino’s apology to the novel as a network in Invisible Cities seems to have been textually captured in the cities of Octavia, the spider-web city hanging over an abyss awaiting for its destruction; and in the city of Ersilia3, a ghost-town where all is left are strings indicating the connections among the people who once dwelled there. Ersilia is “a spider-web of intricate relationships seeking a form”.

In essence, Calvino’s procedure consists in using a “framework” to bring together the short narratives which form the book, giving a sense of closure. At the same time the disposition of index corroborates to recombine the texts, and multiply the interpretations; it also restrains the digressions, giving the texts limits and a sense of a unified, closed system. Calvino’s structural approach to the composition of Invisible Cities is an aspect often pointed out by the specialized criticism; it also constitutes an important characteristic of his other works. His interest in literary texts, which are somehow subject to a mathematical order, derives primarily from his associations with OULIPO group (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), the influence of the structuralist theories of Vladimir Propp, and the early works of Roland Barthes.

Calvino became interested in experiments which dealt with narrative technique, structure and linguistics due to his involvement with Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec, who were members of OULIPO, a group which applied the principles of mathematics and science toward the generation of a new literature. Calvino translated the experimental work of Queneau, Les Fleurs Bleues, to Italian, becoming, I Fiori Blu (1967)4. This association played an important part in his formation as a writer, and although he seems to diverge from it later in life, it certainly remains an influence for all his posterior output. Earlier in the 1960s the studies of Vladimir Propp, on the morphology of Russian folktale, were starting to become known among European and American scholars. Propp’s analysis of the structure of the folklore genre, revealing common basic traces among them, had a great impact on several areas of study, making way for the development of news investigations in areas such as Anthropology, Linguistics, and Literary Theory. According to MacLaughlin5, Calvino’s own interest in Italian folktales had also alerted him to similarities in the structure of all stories, making the author realise the important part structure had in the construction of texts.

The author Allain Robbe-Grillet and the critic Roland Barthes, in their respective works with the noveau roman and Le Degré Zéro de l'écriture (1953), advocated a fresh literary aesthetics, pursuing a fiction that did not breast-feed the readers (writing based on verisimilitude and omniscient narration), but provided only the observable elements from which the experienced readers could draw their owns interpretations. Calvino was also interested in the studies of Ferdinand Saussure, whose science of Semiology, or the language of signs, had an impact on his 60’s texts. According to Markey6, the author was later on influenced by Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralism theories and its sceptical critique of language as holder of the ultimate truth.

Although the origins of his affinities with scientific models are well documented; critics have been divided over the significance of mixing the preciseness of mathematics with the imaginary spirit of literature. The explanations about the significance of Calvino’s craft are frequently contradictory. Angela M. Jeannet claims that “through the intricate pattern of numbers, words, lines, and blank spaces Calvino is hunting for the food that feeds another human hunger, the need to make sense of the world”7. Jeannet defends the presence of a methodical structure set up in the index as the writer’s attempt to support, interpret and explain what is visible in human _expression. In other words, the mathematically constricted text would be a celebration of the signs, symbols, and logic devised by humanity to read the world.

Kathryn Humes refutes this explanation, coming up with a different reason to explain why Calvino employs such artifice. She believes the pattern to be clearly arbitrary, as it, at first, offers an “exceptionally orderly world”, but the “seriality embodies no values of beauty or taste; it is post-humanist and denies the network of cause and effect upon which our normal sense of order depends”8. Hume claims the division/units proposed in the index are just generic names and numbers, evidently interchangeable among each other and without a sense of purpose. “The overt orderliness is deceptive”, she states. Alternatively, she proposes the cities themselves as the bottom line of Calvino’s system, claiming the existence of “minimal units” within the text, which correspond to the appearance of repeated ideas or images throughout the book. Quoting Baker, she reinforces her incredulity about the form being an attempt at miming the reality of human _expression and communication. She concludes with Baker’s words: “the precision of structure set down in the index is itself a concise comment on the contradictory nature of any attempt to give meaning to the labyrinth of reality”9.

gothic conventions

2006-01-10T13:21:00.000Z

There is a relative consistency of conventions that make the gothic novel recognisable as a distinct genre. The gothic novel is a hybrid manifestation, a link between novel and romanance, in which an atmosphere of mystery, thrill and terror pevails. This pre-Romantic, pseudo-medieval type of fiction was intensely produced and avidly consumed from late 18th century to early 19th century. By taking its inspiration from medieval constructions and exploring a darker side of Nature, these novels put in doubt the certainties of Cartesian thought. Investing in a more gloomy disposition to overcome the sentimental/rational discourse, gothic novels presented a literary problem which challenged the project of Enlightment.

In opposition to neoclassical philosophy, these novelists invested in obscure images and symbolic representations such as: disintegrating abbeys where malevolent priests dwell, sinister castles inhabited by tyrannical aristocrats, people moving through secret passages and hiding behind concealed doors, dark forests where bandits stalk, sublime sights of vast wilderness where persecuted heroines fear the worst.

Fantastic literature[1] in its origins can be traced back to the popular and oral tradition, stemming from myths, legends and folklore, these narratives set foot in the 18th century by means of a literature of the irrational and the terror. In its European forms the fantastic novel seems to stem from a French branch, represented by Jacques Cazotte's Le Diable Amoreaux (1772), and an earlier English branch started by Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto, a gothick story (1764-5). This last novel is considered to be the founder of the branch we intent to apprehend for discussion. [2]

Semantically the term "gothic" needs some attention, as it meanings will vary depending on the context it is brought up. Initially, the adjective referred simply to the tribes that lived near the Danube and which helped to overthrow the Roman Empire. But at the same time it also meant anything that denoted medieval or post-roman. In that sense, keeping these two ideas in mind, the word “gothic” begun to be constructed in the decades following the Glorious Revolution (1688), coming into being as a controversial category.

It was an attempt by the English to distinguish themselves from a Greco-roman culture, designating an idealised democratic and freedom-loving British heritage, basing these suppositions on a historical registry which could be found in the Gothic architecture.[3] Despite this more positive interpretation, gothic also stood for antiquate, barbarous, feudal, irrational, chaotic, non-civilised. In short, the opposite of “Classical”. These two meanings were object of dispute, signalising conflicting political stands, that only found a clearer formulation much later, summarised in conflicting positions.

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), used the metaphor of a ruined gothic castle in support of the English heritage and monarchy.[4] His point of view was connected to an aristocratic or conservative part of the society. Defending long-standing, ancient relations within the social fabric, he expressed a rejection of the revolutionary upraises in France. On the other hand radicals as Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, defended a gothic associated to a despotic government, arbitrary power and aristocratic hereditary privileges. For them it represented worn out ideals that could no longer exist in the new world that was being formed. This approach was related to the Whig party, the middle class and the row of society who shared a progressive opinion. The political tension and duplicity these ideas raised reflected in literary grounds.

From the aesthetics perspective contesting the supremacy of neo-classic ideals, exploring sensorial aspects of human sensibility that were placed aside by the Enlightment, started to make way for a new “structure of sentiment”, in the expression of Raymond Williams. Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1760), by Richard Hurd, made apology to a re-appropriation of the past defending the rescue of links related to an old British legacy, the ballads, English medieval poetry, Spencer, Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. It was a reaction against the dominant Augustan principles, translated in the literary plan by Essay on Criticism (1711) by Alexander Pope, who defended a poetry based on control, reserve and reason. Also the graveyard poets, a marginal manifestation which took place around the 1740s decade, contested rationalism and the equilibrium upheld by the Illuminists, producing a poetry of defiance and divine inspiration, bringing into play the themes and settings which would become very dear to the gothic novels: death, graves, the night, fear. (Even though these elements were not a breakthrough to British literature and can be traced back to Shakespeare and further back to the popular imaginary)

A third element came to add to those renewed interest for things of the past, and to the admiration of that kind of melancholic poetry. The theory of the sublime traces back to a text frequently (but apparently wrongly) attributed to Longinus. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke provided a theory for the gothic machinery drew an aesthetic reading. The treatise which provided the foundation to establish relation between literature and terror, proposing an aesthetics constituted of vastness, obscurity, magnificence, ignoring technical perfection and the organic structure of neoclassic poetry and counteracting with the ideals of balance, harmony and rationality. Burke states that most of the ideas which are capable of making a strong impression on the mind may be reduced nearly to two heads: self-preservation and society. To the ends of one or the other, all our passions are calculated to respond. The passions that regard the preservation of the individual turn chiefly on pain and danger, and they are the most powerful of the passions. You could extract pleasure from experiencing a menacing situation from a distance. According to Burke it is possible to extract delight from terror.

These ideas, which were already present in his treatise, became clearer in his later discussion on the revolution. This nostalgia about the past and the lament for the end of the chivalric age constituted indexes of an idealization of a medieval era as an “organic” world in detriment of a modern bourgeoisie society.

As a reaction against the Humanistic beliefs and its narratives of progress, promoting changes by means of rational revolutions, gothic emerges to disturb the calm waters of realism, bringing about the fears that surrounded the upcoming bourgeois society. From the margins of a Enlightment culture, dramatising conflicts and uncertainties in face of a fast-changing social and economical world, gothic became the vehicle to address aesthetics and political questions raised by the 1789 issues in France. The English re-interpreted the ghost of the 1688 revolution through the French Revolution, displacing their anxieties to far countries and past times, making predominantly Italy, but also France and Spain, a scenery of horror stories.

The development of capitalism, in this period of internal realignment and external revolutions, would explain the success of this fiction which questions the constitution of “real”, making way for a blend of fear and attraction, anxiety and desire, which seems to have characterised the relations between bourgeoisie and aristocracy.[5] The gothic novel exposes its ambivalences, the intention of consolidating burgeoise values, like, domesticity, sentiment, virtue, family; side by side with a fascination for medieval architecture, customs and values. Expressing admiration for a feudal world which was at the same time a source of tyranny, barbarism, autocracy, this disapproval was projected in the creation of aristocratic or religious cruel and malevolent villains.

It was Sir Horace Walpole who first gave shape to a regicide narrative, a hybrid between old and modern, novel and romance, bringing about monstrous helmets, invisible hands, labyrinth-like dungeons, ghastly pictures, giant swords and all the paraphernalia which would make the success of the genre.[6] He coined the use of the word in literature by naming his narrative The Castle of Otranto, subtitle: a gothick story. A man of many interests among other things Walpole was a MP, occupation which at that point meant to be implied in the birth of capitalism, a stranger paternity which he seems to have abdicated later in life by retiring into his medieval world to his replica castle Strawberry Hill.

Thinking the gothic as a manifestation affiliated to the Romance tradition (or vice-versa), some system of codes (representation of time and place) and methods of composition (structuring and development) are shared between the two. The key elements of both traditions, which will be developed later, can already be found in Walpole’s five meagre chapters: a story set in past ages (often medieval) and in far away countries (usually Italy, Spain or France), stemming from the translation of a remote document or manuscript, the presence of vast and confined spaces, a narrative which progresses on an endless sequence of amazing circumstances, involving the heroine in breathtaking perils, lots of travelling around the country and the presence of a vicious villain. From this concise story, of simultaneous re-affirmation, in that sense paradoxical of aristocratic and individual values, the gothic romance would emerge as a hybrid form that blends idealised medieval proprieties with late 1800s manners and concerns.

His merit also consists of conscientiously mixing romance and novel, initiating what would be known as gothic fiction, but the story was considered far too incredible by his successors, and for that reason later authors chose to reform his unsophisticated dream-like tale. Clara Reeves’ The Old English Baron (1777) brought the novel back home and invested in a less extravagant, more down-to-earth romantic and melodramatic form. Other writers like Charlotte Smith and Sophia Lee, also pursued a more ‘domestic’ kind of writing, where the represented situations were far more probable and the supernatural circumstances were due to imaginary fears. But they also used heroines set in the Middle Ages or Renaissance, and represented the past in terms of a rational and moral present.

Interest in the Orient and in the depiction of “otherness” became popular in Europe with the translation of Les Mille et une Nuits early in the 1700, followed by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), Voltaire’s Zadig (1747) and the exotic American adventures Candide (1759). Attracted by the extravagant, stereotyped side of the Orient, William Beckford invested in a luxuriant portray of a despot to create his infernal narrative of the caliph, Vathek (1786), using the same gothic discourse to encode the foreign/aristocrat as corrupt and threatening.

A more established/consolidated gothic fiction came out with the publication of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). It is generally accepted/considered that Ann Radcliffe’s writings stands for the zenith of a “canonised” gothic production. She certainly represents the heyday of a commercial gothic. “The great enchantress” had a prodigious imagination, she was acquainted with the works of those previous novelists who also developed the cult of suspense, and those who invested in sentimental stories, “persecuted innocence” and character, like Richardson and his infamous Lovelace. She masterfully used the Burkean thesis of sublime to achieve thrilling effects in her works.[7] In short, she kept the fire of gothic burning much more steadily than the candles in her novels, always blown out by a cold draft in a moment of excited apprehension, while sneaking in the damp corridors of haunted abbeys.

Her work influenced a subsequent generation of illustrious writers, namely Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Charles Maturin and Charlotte Brontë. Quite conservative in her views, Radcliffe was not a writer who aimed at questioning the established order, and by the end of her romances she would have conveyed a message of bourgeois moral, naturalistic values and domesticity, according to the 18th century historical understanding. In between her two successful romances Matthew Lewis published The Monk (1796), which dialogued with her “explained supernatural” narrative solutions and as a result helped to consolidate the “core” of genre. Mathews trend of gothic fiction was based on the German type of novel, Schauerroman (horror-romance), introducing blunt terror and heavy handed violence to contrast with the subtle thrills of the Radcliffean mode. Still in the heat of the moment the Marquis de Sade, wrote his famous preface Les Ideés sur les Romans (1800), stating his preference for Lewis’ work and marking the tradition of linking the gothic romance to the French revolution.[8]

Jane Austin’s Northanger Abbey (1818) operates within the limits set by Radcliffe’s stories, parodying and exposing her structures. She satirizes the absurd fantasies of gothic romances and its taste for a imaginary universe in detriment of a realistic perspective. On the other hand, the book insinuates the contagious force of fiction in real life, manifested in the vicissitudes of Catherine Morland who surrounds herself with the, sceneries, moods, symbols, plots and all the conventions that make the gothic novel recognisable as such. Charles Maturin’s Melmoth, the wanderer (1820) is considered to be the last breath of this gothic era. Further landmarks of this “Gothic body” are Frankenstein (1818) and Dracula (1897) which exploited a more scientific and modern fear, involving the new gadgets and technology, like telegraphs and typewriters.

The decade of l790s was the gothic novel’s peak, it had become a vogue and an obsession among admires who could not seem to read enough of this genre. It had also developed into a very profitable business for booksellers and professional writers, who were kept constantly busy trying to meet the public demand and providing for the circulating libraries. This frenzy for gothic fiction occasioned an enormous production, most of it directed to boost sales with very little preoccupation for literary innovation. The popularity of Ann Radcliffe’s novels was attested by the many imitators of her work, who would change a few words in the title and come out with pearls like: The mysteries of the forest, the Monk of Udolpho, Italian Mysteries, or even pseudonyms as little original as Mary Ann Radcliffe.

The gothic novel was the space to discuss political questions, though, placing these anxieties in other countries and time. It embraced the liberal values of sentimentalism, virtue and family mingled with an aristocratic past; however, marked by refutation of tyranny, mishandling of power. In that sense, Gothic can be read as a reaction against industrialization and scientific revolution. However short lived, circumscribed by the temporal boundaries 1764-1820, the gothic phenomenon delineated a response to a mutating society in a specific period of time. In trying to conciliate these social disputes, the genre adopted the figure of a chivalric hero, a romantic knight who behaved according to the bourgeoisie values. His antagonist was the gothic villain, the embodiment of evil itself, representing the dark side of nobility and of the religious institutions. Many reasons are appointed for the decline of the genre as such, including misevaluation on the narrative’s complexity, making plots too intricate and confusing, along with an overexploitation of the genre by the increasing culture of consumerism.

[1] Tzvetan Todorov says that “fantastic” relates to a literary genre that raises ambiguities between reality and dream, that is, proposing a insoluble doubt in the nature of the events narrated, allowing both a rational explanation, or another one which presupposes the existence of the supernatural: “Le fantastique mène donc une vie pleine de dangers, et peut s’évanouir à tout instant”.

[2] The French story, Le Diable Amoreux, will inspire Hoffman, Nerval, the onirical fantastic writers, from Nodier to Kafka. While from The Castle of Otranto will derive the literature of Ann Radcliffe, Charles Maturin, Bram Stoker, the gothic literature in the 19th century, as well as detectives stories and contemporary thrillers.

[3] The structural innovation promoted by gothic buildings constituted a technical advancement in relation to the Romanic form, bringing and end to dim churches. Liberating the wall for the penetration of light, high and sharp towers, broken arches are some of its distinctive features. This new conception, later denominated gothic, is attributed to the French abbot Suger (1081-1151), a Benedict monk from the church of St. Denis near Paris, who was searching for epiphany, or sublime elevation by painting coloured glasses and coloured afrescos.

[4] He believed that French monarchy was one of the best in Europe and its mistake was not to make concessions to the uprising bourgeoisie.

[5] Stefan Andriopoulos associates Adam‘s Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776) to the gothic novel using the invisible hand as metaphor of intervening power. See: ANDRIOPOULOS, S. “The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel,” ELH 66 (1999): 739-58. IN: http://www.lib.sfu.ca/researchhelp/subjectguides/pol/classes/poli033356.htm

[6] Victor Sage points to a discrepancy in The Castle of Otranto between the highly emotional subject matter and the dry, rational language employed by the narrative voice. SAGE, V. “The Gothic Novel”. IN: MULVEY-ROBERTS, Marie (ed.). The Handbook to Gothic Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1998. (p.82)

[7] She delighted in descriptions of scenery, usually drawn entirely from her inner consciousness but many painters receive mention in the novels of Ann Radcliffe. One of her references was Salvator Rosa, a 17th century Italian landscape painter, who created dramatic landscapes peopled with peasants and banditti. Like Ann Radcliffe, he intended to create a feeling of awe and sublime in the minds of his audience. The landscapes of another Italian artist, Giambattista Piranesi, also influenced many English Gothic writers, especially with his powerful black and white figurative engravings of Roman ruins, spectacular landscapes where banditti would lurk in ambush and his Carcieri fascinated the English mind.

[8] Sade preferred the philosophical debate to the aesthetics creation. From the point of view of debating with Illuminist, questioning the existence of God and the morals of sentiment, Radcliff’s naturalistic stories worked mere cautionary tales.

natureza no guarani: a casa interpreta a floresta

2006-01-10T13:12:00.000Z

A abordagem alencariana em relação à Natureza segue uma tradição tornada popular no Brasil pelos viajantes alemães Spix and Martius, no século XVIII, que entendiam a Natureza como fonte de emoções. Uma geração antes de Alencar, os críticos franceses Ferdinand Denis, Théodore Taunay and Édouard Corbière trouxeram ao país as idéias de Montaigne, Rousseau e Chateaubriand sobre a relevância dos povos autóctones.[1] Nesse sentido, O Guarani não produz inovações filosóficas, sendo uma variante do modelo estabelecido pelo bon sauvage.

Concentrado na tarefa de exaltar os elementos naturais, o autor freqüentemente investe em narrações que envolvem grandes ângulos descritivos, fazendo desse tipo de abordagem um estilo. A cena na abertura do romance é introduzida por meio de uma perspectiva “elevada”, como quem vê a cena de cima e em seguida desce, acompanhando a trajetória do rio da foz à nascente, em seu salto para o passado. A imagem da montanha também aparece na passagem, sendo usada por Alencar para reforçar a idéia de “amplidão”. O planalto sobre o qual se situa a casa não é escolhido por acaso. Do ponto de vista autoral, a visão a partir do solar, “lançando um olhar sobranceiro pelos vastos horizontes que se abriam em torno” (p.58), permite avaliar a beleza natural da cena de um ponto de vista privilegiado. Tal abordagem almeja falar sobre liberdade e independência. A idéia combina com os ideais românticos do século XIX, nos quais se entendia que ao tecer louvores à terra nativa se abrangeria a grandeza da nação. Visto que o mérito de um povo dependia da competência do artista em reafirmar as “cores locais”, se tornava necessário imbuir das mais arrebatadoras imagens ao se descrever a Natureza. Buscando um estilo que pudesse dar vazão às suas aspirações épicas, Alencar investiu no discurso do “sublime” e em figuras de linguagem, especialmente hipérboles, com intuito de magnificar os elementos naturais. Nesse aspecto em específico, sua linguagem poética se aproxima daquela de Ann Radcliffe. A fim de expressar suas capacidades estilísticas, Alencar emprega técnicas que aprendeu nas suas leituras dos romances góticos.[2] Ele produz uma narrativa que alterna conflito e relaxamento, revezando entre sensações e efeitos, visando à excitação do leitor. Os nomes e temas dos capítulos (Vilania/Nobreza, Desânimo/Esperança, Trégua/Peleja, etc.) demonstram esse uso de tensões para criar clímax, contrastando o sublime e o pitoresco na Natureza, propondo ocorrências sobrenaturais e as explicando em seguida. Ainda, como reminiscência de um gótico radcliffeano, uma função recorrente da Natureza em O Guarani são as cenas que antecipam ações futuras. A passagem abaixo descreve uma tempestade torrencial que preconiza a transformação do frei Angelo di Lucca no seu alter-ego Loredano.

Estava quase a anoitecer.
Uma tempestade seca, terrível e medonha, como as há freqüentemente nas fraldas da serrania, desabava sobre a terra. O vento mugindo açoitava as grossas árvores que vergavam os troncos seculares; o trovão ribombava no bojo das grossas nuvens desgarradas pelo céu; o relâmpago amiudava com tanta velocidade, que as florestas, os montes, toda a natureza nadava num oceano de fogo. [...] apoiado sobre a outra coluna, estava um frade carmelita, que acompanhava com um sorriso de satisfação íntima o progresso da borrasca; animava-lhe o rosto belo e de traços acentuados um raio de inteligência e uma expressão de energia que revelava o seu caráter.
Ao ver esse homem sorrindo à tempestade e afrontando com o olhar a luz do relâmpago, conhecia-se que sua alma tinha a força de resolução e a vontade indomável capaz de querer o impossível. E de lutar contra o céu e a terra para obtê-lo.
(O Guarani, parte II, capítulo I, p. 174)

Apesar de estar comprometido com o projeto de criação de uma literatura nacional, naquele momento, as idéias de Alencar ainda parecem muito influenciadas pelos modelos europeus. Porque a Natureza personificava o elemento de diferenciação nacional na literatura, entendia-se que ela deveria aparecer no romance cheia de significações e simbologias. Soma-se a isso o fato de que as riquezas da paisagem tropical ofereceriam o ambiente ideal para a manifestação desse espírito. Entretanto, apesar do vigor, da exuberância e da sensualidade manifesta na representação da natureza tropical, aspectos acertadamente comentados por Gilberto Freyre[3], Alencar não sucede em criar uma descrição completamente inovadora. Sua floresta é povoada por animais “fantásticos” e plantas “exóticas”. A Natureza no Guarani é observada da perspectiva de quem vê o país de fora. A vista do solar, situado no ponto mais elevado da região, pode sugerir a beleza da amplitude, propondo uma integração entre o civilizado e o natural. Entretanto, o que realmente se estabelece é uma relação hierárquica indicada pela diferença de altura entre as partes. A posição elevada da casa ofusca a Natureza à sua volta, e a associação íntima entre homem e Natureza não resiste a um exame mais severo, explico-me abaixo. Observando a cena por outro ângulo, a escada “feita metade pela natureza e metade pela arte” (p. 52) é utilizada para confirmar a capacidade do colonizador em transformar a paisagem. A proposta de comunhão no interior da casa é novamente decepcionante. Enquanto os objetos da metrópole são apresentados como finos, seja pela procedência artística ou por seu caráter de manufaturado, os produtos nativos são apenas matéria-prima, tratados como uma “coleção de curiosidades [...] de cores mimosas e formas esquisitas” (p. 55). Não obstante, esse tipo de linguagem exótica seria aceitável dentro da casa, que é o espaço do colonizador por definição. O problema começa quando a linguagem se espalha para a Natureza em volta.

A floresta abaixo da casa é descrita como “cúpula de verdura” (p. 66) ou “arcarias de verdura e dos capitéis formados pelos leques das palmeiras” (p. 51) e “profundas e sombrias abóbadas de verdura [...] ao qual serviam de colunas os troncos seculares de acaris e araribás” (p. 66). As árvores invocam características de estruturas arquitetônicas, aquelas encontradas primordialmente em castelos e igrejas. O planalto sobre o qual a casa se situa é comparado a um “altar da natureza” (p.58). Outras referências introduzem as construções e convicções religiosas no ambiente da floresta “a luz, coando entre a espessa folhagem, se descompunha inteiramente; nem uma réstia de sol penetrava nesse templo da criação” (p. 66). Os rios também assumem referências feudais, sendo chamados de “vassalo e tributário” (p. 51). Nas escolhas lexicais, a Natureza se torna portadora de ideologias, descrevendo aquilo que é nativo nos termos do civilizado. Evidencia-se um ecossistema modificado, no qual a casa se torna a voz definidora da paisagem, interpretando e classificando a floresta de acordo com os seus padrões. Nesse sentido, a casa lê a floresta, apresentando-a como fonte de matéria-prima, e reservando para si o papel de agente transformador, hierarquicamente acima numa escala de valores.

Poderia haver uma má interpretação do projeto que Alencar estabeleceu para si próprio? Não, creio que o quadro é mais complexo do que isso. Ao deslocar tal repertório de termos discursivos para dentro da paisagem brasileira, o autor não pretende se submeter à matriz européia (tampouco pretende esconder suas influências). Ao contrário, as referências textuais constituem um estratagema para citar a tradição estrangeira. Sua manipulação desses elementos é consciente, até certo ponto. Alencar parece dizer: se eles (europeus) têm castelos, nós (brasileiros) temos árvores fortes e ancestrais, se eles possuem templos, nosso santuário é a floresta, se eles têm cavaleiros em armaduras brilhantes, temos índios habilidosos adornados com lindas penas. Seu pensar é consistente e perfeitamente lógico com a tradição rousseauniana, a qual coloca a Natureza acima da sociedade. Entretanto, a comparação é ingênua na maneira como utiliza a medida estrangeira. Ao invés de mensurar o valor nativo contra os castelos e abadias, Alencar poderia ter perseguido uma ruptura estética mais significativa. Talvez, o que falta na fatura do romance seria a invenção de um modelo verdadeiramente original, ao invés de criar um romance brasileiro com os elementos da herança cultural européia.

Limitado por seu tempo histórico e pela sociedade em que viveu, poderia Alencar ter feito isso? Em caso afirmativo, teria sacrificado a consolidação do Guarani, o qual é parte de um projeto mais amplo para o romance brasileiro, que é posteriormente explicado no prefácio A Benção Paterna (1872), em detrimento de um experimentalismo ficcional sem utilidade. Se a Inglaterra já havia estabelecido uma identidade nacional confortável para si, no Brasil a época ainda era a de construir mitos nacionais. Alguns dos parâmetros de nacionalidade criados por Alencar, sejam temáticos, como a questão indígena e a mestiçagem, ou formais, como a questão da inovação pela linguagem, foram retomados e redefinidos, por exemplo, em Macunaíma (1928) de Mario de Andrade. Não esgotado pelos modernistas, o debate sobre a identidade brasileira perdura até hoje. O que pode se afirmar sobre Alencar aqui, é que a sua compreensão da nacionalidade, a qual funcionava a partir da dicotomia simplista e romântica nacional/estrangeiro, levou-o a ponto de destruir a casa portuguesa, representando o imperialismo, e com isso, quem sabe estivesse antecipando a possibilidade da república. Não obstante, O Guarani promove avanços sem precedentes, seja no Brasil ou na Europa, mostrando como Alencar estava à frente do seu tempo. Ele introduz o conceito de uma nação multicultural através da celebração da mistura de etnias (ainda que não sem contradições), que é uma característica essencial da sociedade brasileira e, fazendo isso, rejeita a demonização gótica das suas imagens centrais, como veremos a seguir.

[1] Antonio Candido. A Formação da Literatura Brasileira (Momentos Decisivos). 7a. edição. Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 1993 (pp. 260-3).

[2] A pesquisa de Sandra Vasconcelos sobre os romances ingleses que circularam no Brasil no século XIX fornece uma longa lista de autores góticos, inclusive Beckford, Godwin, Lewis (e a sua tradução de Zschokke) e Radcliffe. IN: Sandra G. T. Vasconcelos. Romances Ingleses em Circulação no Brasil durante o séc. XIX. Site da UNICAMP. http://www.unicamp.br/iel/memoria/Ensaios/Sandra/sandralev.htm

[3] Gilberto Freyre. Reinterpretando José de Alencar. MEC, Cadernos de Cultura, s.d.

loredano: um vilão gótico nos trópicos

2006-01-10T12:58:00.000Z

Loredano estava suspenso sobre o abismo pela sua mão; poderia salvá-lo ou precipitá-lo no despenhadeiro; e contudo dessa posição ainda ele impunha respeito ao aventureiro.
Rui tinha medo: não compreendia o motivo desse terror irresistível; mas o sentia como uma obsessão e um pesadelo.
No entanto a imagem da riqueza esplêndida, brilhante, radiando galas e luzimentos, passava diante dos seus olhos e o deslumbrava; um pouco de coragem e seria o único senhor do tesouro fabuloso, cujo era o italiano depositário do segredo.
Mas coragem é o que lhe faltava; por duas ou três vezes o aventureiro teve um ímpeto de suspender-se ao frechal e deixar a tábua rolar no abismo; não passou de um desejo.
Venceu afinal a tentação.
Teve um momento de desvario: os joelhos acurvaram-se; a tábua sofreu uma oscilação tão forte, que Rui admirou-se de como o italiano tinha podido suster.
Então o medo desapareceu; foi substituído por uma espécie de raiva e frenesi que se apoderou do aventureiro; o primeiro esforço lhe dera a ousadia, como a vista do sangue excita a fera.
Um segundo abalo mais forte agitou a tábua, que oscilou à borda do rochedo; porém não se ouviu o baque de um corpo; não se ouviu mais que o choque da madeira sobre a pedra. Rui, desesperado, ia soltar a prancha, quando chegou-lhe ao ouvido, abafada e sumida, a voz do italiano, que se percebia no silêncio profundo da noite.
- Estais cansado, Rui?... podeis tirar a tábua; não preciso mais dela.
O aventureiro ficou espavorido; decididamente esse homem era um espírito infernal que planava sobre o abismo e escarnecia do perigo; um ente superior a quem a morte não podia tocar.

(O Guarani, parte III, capítulo III, p. 312-3)

Apesar das tentativas de Rui de fazê-lo cair, Loredano caminha sobre o abismo, sugerindo o domínio de poderes infernais. Seu feito não apenas desafia as leis da probabilidade, mas reclama controle sobre o abismo, o símbolo da destruição. Esse instante, que se coloca além da compreensão, é um momento gótico. Esta cena fantasmagórica não vem sem aviso, ela representa o auge de uma série de pequenos indícios, que vem sendo construída desde o início do romance, em relação à malevolência do vilão. Loredano é chamado de condottiere, “aventureiro de baixa extração” (p.113), ele fala com “um ligeiro acento italiano, e um meio sorriso cuja expressão de ironia era disfarçada por uma benevolência suspeita” (p. 64). Alencar parece apostar no estereótipo do vilão italiano à moda inglesa. Apesar de Loredano ser eloqüente e articulado, sua condição de estrangeiro é salientada pelo sotaque. Loredano é duas vezes forasteiro, por ser o vilão e por não ser português ou índio. Sua aparência é descrita da seguinte maneira:

Um rosto moreno, coberto por uma longa barba negra, entre a qual o sorriso desdenhoso fazia brilhar a alvura de seus dentes; olhos vivos, a fronte larga, descoberta pelo chapéu desabado que caía sobre o ombro; alta estatura, e uma constituição forte, ágil e musculosa, eram os principais traços deste aventureiro.
(O Guarani, parte I, capítulo I, p. 66)

Visando acumular o máximo de tensão para as cenas de clímax, a maldade do vilão é apresentada num crescimento gradual. Ao longo do romance, Loredano sofre um processo de “bestialização”, que se inicia pela visão e olfato; os aspectos sensoriais começam a suplantar a racionalidade, “um olhar ardente, duro, incisivo; enquanto as narinas dilatadas aspiravam o ar com a delícia da fera que fareja a vítima” (p. 95). A transformação de homem em fera se torna mais freqüente, as definições cada vez mais precisas. Em outro momento, diz-se que “sua pupila fulva brilhou na treva, como os olhos da irara” (p.116), comparado aqui a uma onça. Ele também é chamado de “inimigo talvez mais terrível que os Aimorés, porque, se estes eram feras, aquele podia ser a serpente escondida entre as folhas e a relva” (p.159).[1]

À medida que o romance se desenvolve, e o plano de Loredano vai sendo revelado, a traição de Loredano ganha contornos de inimaginável blasfêmia. Sua luxúria por Ceci é tão incontrolável a ponto de ele dizer: “ainda cadáver, o contato desta mulher deve ser para mim um gozo imenso” (p.311). Com a introdução de aspectos hediondos, como a necrofilia, Loredano começa a transcender a condição de fera para atingir o patamar do diabólico, e ao andar sobre o abismo Loredano torna-se o próprio diabo. O narrador conclui que “decididamente esse homem era um espírito infernal que planava sobre o abismo e escarnecia do perigo; um ente superior a quem a morte não podia tocar” (p.313). O controle que ele exerce sobre parte dos aventureiros é anormal, um “terror irresistível, uma obsessão e um pesadelo” (p.312). Apesar do momento de desorientação, não muito depois, o narrador entra novamente para desmistificar a ação com uma solução radcliffeana. O “sobrenatural explicado” entra para elucidar o truque (neste caso de andar sobre o abismo, uma corda de segurança) subordinando o improvável às leis físicas e o fantástico a uma explicação racional dos fatos. É pertinente que, enquanto Alencar se apropria do gótico poético de Radcliffe, baseado na Natureza pitoresca e no sobrenatural explicado, o comportamento ímpio do seu vilão guarda semelhanças com o padre Ambrosio, de Lewis, pois ambos os vilões não conseguem controlar sua luxúria.

Loredano compartilha dessa dimensão “animalesca” com os índios aimorés. Diferentemente da transformação progressiva sofrida pelo vilão, os nativos são desumanizados desde o princípio e não chegam ao patamar do demoníaco. Sua aparência e conduta animalesca indicam antes uma total ausência de costumes civilizados, formando uma “horda selvagem reduzida à brutalidade das feras” (p. 349). Eles são a imagem do país selvagem que Alencar deseja sobrepujar, “filhos das brenhas”, ou seja, das florestas, como são chamados, ainda na infância da raça.

Um prazer feroz animava todas essas fisionomias sinistras, nas quais a braveza, a ignorância e os instintos carniceiros tinham quase de todo apagado o cunho da raça humana.
Os cabelos arruivados caiam-lhe sobre a fronte e ocultavam inteiramente a parte mais nobre do rosto, criada por Deus para a sede da inteligência, e para o trono donde o pensamento deve reinar sobre a matéria.
Os lábios decompostos, arregaçados por uma contração dos músculos faciais, tinham perdido a expressão suave e doce que imprimem o sorriso e a palavra; de lábios de homem se haviam transformado em mandíbulas de fera afeitas ao grito e ao bramido.
Os dentes agudos como a presa do jaguar, já não tinham o esmalte que a natureza lhes dera; armas ao mesmo tempo que instrumento da alimentação, o sangue os tingira da cor amarelenta que têm os dentes dos animais carniceiros.
As grandes unhas negras e retorcidas que cresciam nos dedos, a pele áspera e calosa, faziam de suas mãos, antes garras temíveis, do que a parte destinada a servir ao homem e da nobreza do gesto.
Grandes peles de animais cobriam o corpo agigantado desses filhos das brenhas, que a não ser o porte ereto se julgaria alguma raça de quadrúmanos indígenas do novo mundo.

(O Guarani, parte III, capítulo XIII, p. 387-8)

Estilisticamente, os adjetivos tornam-se macabros, porém não menos poéticos, se compreendidos dentro de uma estética do terror. A descrição dos indígenas carrega implicações ideológicas amparadas por um discurso do horror, o qual desempenha uma função importante nessa sensibilidade, pois alimentam a ojeriza aos aspectos destacados. Aqui, Alencar emprega estratégias que conectam corpo e deformação à imagem dos aimorés; seu objetivo estético seria gerar tensões e contrastes que se oponham à beleza indígena representada por Peri, ou a beleza angelical de Ceci. Além disso, subjaz um discurso que se funda no indeferimento, no repúdio do barbarismo, que ocuparia uma posição inferior na escala de valores que Alencar está construindo. Tradicionalmente, essas técnicas narrativas, que associam carne e dor, foram um recurso largamente utilizado pelos romancistas góticos e se encontram na essência do conceito de sublime imaginado por Burke.

Passado o primeiro espanto, os selvagens bramindo atiraram-se todos como uma só mole, como uma tromba do oceano, contra o índio que ousava atacá-los a peito descoberto.
Houve uma confusão, um trabalho horrível de homens que se repeliam, tombavam e se estorciam; de cabeças que se levantavam e outras que desapareciam; de braços e dorsos que se agitavam e se contraíam, como se tudo isso fosse partes de um só corpo, membros de algum monstro desconhecido debatendo-se em convulsões.
(O Guarani, parte III, capítulo XIII, p. 392)

O monstro gargantuesco acima se refere à dicotomia entre civilização e barbárie. A idéia de Alencar, e sua utilização de um discurso de horror no retrato dos aimorés, comprova uma preferência pelos hábitos racionais europeus ao invés do instinto rudimentar do nativo. Mas não é isso que ele pensa de todos os indígenas, a discussão de valores é habilmente deslocada na figura do herói Peri que, apesar de ser índio, incorpora os valores civilizatórios.

A disposição de Alencar tende a projetar o modelo racionalista europeu como exemplo preferencial. A impressão que se obtém da leitura faz acreditar que o modelo defendido estaria além de questões étnicas ou culturais, impondo-se como padrão universal. Seu desejo é reproduzir nos trópicos o mesmo trato social da Europa, apresentando a civilidade dos costumes como a única conduta possível para homens de bem. Trabalhando com dicotomias, tudo que é considerado positivo no romance deve alinhar-se com o eixo da civilização. Justamente em Peri encontramos seu maior poder de persuasão; o índio seria o grande exemplo da sua proposta. Idealmente, Peri é a síntese de dois mundos, incorporando a nobreza refinada do europeu com o conhecimento empírico dos nativos. A fusão desses elementos pretende constituir a experiência de uma sociedade tropical cuidadosamente elaborada. Entretanto, dificilmente se pode reconhecer nele um personagem indígena, pois seu comportamento se assemelha mais aos códigos de honra seguidos por um cavaleiro medieval. Ele é até chamado de “um cavalheiro português no corpo de um selvagem” (p.102). Peri é um “amigo” enquanto ele adotar esses códigos, a valorização do personagem enquanto índio está condicionada à sua aceitação, ou alinhamento, com os costumes europeus, somente assim ele pode pertencer à nova ordem social que será instaurada. O clímax da sua derrota cultural acontece ao adotar o cristianismo; receber o sobrenome de Mariz é sua aceitação final das crenças do colonizador. Do lado oposto está Loredano, etnicamente alinhado com os europeus, mas que se move para a dimensão pagã e incivilizada dos aimorés, portando uma “fúria de Satanás precipitado no abismo” (p. 189).

Responsável por sabotar o projeto português de colonização, Loredano rebela-se contra a configuração da Casa de Mariz. Ganância, ambição e falta de mobilidade social parecem desencadear o descontentamento. Sendo o portador do mapa do tesouro, ele entende que não tem que se submeter às regras aristocráticas, mas seu amor por Cecília é a sua desdita. Sendo que os aimorés representam a brutalidade incivilizada, o autor descarta o vilão, descontente e apaixonado, como um elemento inadequado ao seu projeto de nação devido a sua cobiça e luxúria.

Loredano parece ser o único personagem capaz de promover mudanças no seu destino, em um romance onde a maioria dos personagens são "planificados", representantes de um papel social, e incapazes de comunicarem suas individualidades. Nesse sentido, seus processos psicológicos são inexpressivos, a exploração subjetiva da alma não se aprofunda e os personagens não se tornam “humanizados”, permanecendo no nível caricatural. Até certo ponto, a personalidade de Loredano parece conter um certo grau de antagonismo. Este seria representado pela oposição entre uma vida de pureza e de pecado, sendo a discórdia entre o espírito e o corpo um drama psicológico dentro do contraditório complexo que é a alma humana.

Quanto aos elementos da composição do personagem, alguns aspectos ligam o perfil de Loredano àquelas convenções estabelecidas pelos primeiros vilões góticos: a compleição física morena, os olhos ameaçadores, o passado obscuro, a origem italiana, a dupla identidade, inclinações violentas e a ganância excessiva. Alencar parece usar o vilão popularizado no romance gótico tradicional para insuflar sentimentos de estranhamento e alteridade entre os leitores brasileiros. Assim como os romancistas ingleses, Alencar estaria com isso levantando questões de nacionalidade. Entretanto, se o conceito de estrangeiro era facilmente reconhecível, propondo uma questão de patriotismo sob a qual todos poderiam se engajar, o projeto necessita de uma aclimatação para fazer sentido na realidade brasileira. Enquanto o modelo gótico tradicional incorporava o assunto de uma identidade nacional britânica, falando em nome de uma nação protestante, democrática, civilizada e tradicional, o mesmo não poderia simplesmente ser transferido para o Brasil.

Apesar de absorver algumas das convenções e dos elementos góticos, O Guarani diverge da fórmula inglesa particularmente ao não deslocar os assuntos nacionais para fora do país. Todo o conflito é situado dentro do Brasil. A condição de estrangeiro de Loredano é destacada no seu sotaque e no seu jargão usual, a exemplo de “per Dio” ou “per Bacco”. Enquanto todos os europeus na casa possuem nomes portugueses, o vilão pode ser notado por seu nome incomum.

A nova identidade assumida por ele parece ser uma referência a um célebre doge de Veneza, cuja riqueza e poder o vilão almeja igualar (ver p. 169). Todavia, diferentemente de muitos vilões góticos, Loredano não é nobre, detalhe que constitui uma distinção importante entre as formas britânicas e a brasileira. O passado do antagonista é parcialmente revelado num capítulo cheio de chuvas torrenciais e relâmpagos. Essa história é uma subnarrativa da história principal, muito parecida com a história de Spalatro e do Barone di Cambrusca em The Italian.[2] A interpolação (metanarrativa) aqui segue uma estrutura labiríntica de enredo, característica de muitos romances góticos. Essas são histórias que resistem a serem contadas e, em última instância, escondem mais do que revelam intenções. Loredano é filho de pescadores em Veneza, que entra na ordem dos Capuchinhos talvez para escapar da mesma sina do pai. Ele procura uma posição social melhor ingressando no seminário. Angelo di Lucca vem ao Brasil para trabalhar como missionário na conversão de indígenas. Suas possíveis privações econômicas enquanto criança tornaram-se privações psicológicas, efeito colateral do aprisionamento monástico, no qual sua sexualidade foi reprimida. Isto é revelado no dia em que ele descobre o mapa das minas de prata e abandona o hábito por uma vida de aventuras. Seu delírio gótico expõe seus anseios de fortuna e de prazer.

Diante de seus olhos, a imaginação exaltada lhe apresentava um mar argênteo, um oceano de metal fundido, alvo e resplandecente, que ia se perder no infinito. As vagas desse mar de prata ora achamalotavam-se, ora rolavam formando frocos de espumas, que pareciam flores de diamantes, de esmeraldas e rubins cintilando à luz do sol.
Às vezes também nessa face lisa e polida desenhavam-se como em um espelho palácios encantados, mulheres belas como as huris do profeta, virgens graciosas como os anjos de Nossa Senhora do Monte Carmelo.
(O Guarani, parte II, capítulo I, p. 180)

O frei regressa do desvario renascido como Loredano (l'ore dano, o minério nocivo?), e ele agora perseguirá o quinhão de mulher e de riqueza que o mundo lhe deve. Seu ressentimento social emerge diante da possibilidade de enriquecimento, e a bela Cecília torna-se depositária do seu desejo de amar. Pobreza, ambição excessiva e abstinência sexual constituem a fórmula alencariana do vilão.

A origem humilde de Loredano distingue-o dos seus potenciais modelos góticos, Ambrosio e Schedoni. Enquanto a maioria dos vilões góticos, em algum momento das suas histórias, foi rica ou desfrutou de algum prestígio, a ambição de Loredano emerge após uma vida de privações, e isso apontaria para o que ele representa nesse contexto. Nesse sentido, o vilão ganha personalidade própria. Adiante, mais diferenças separam Loredano de seus pares britânicos. Enquanto as súbitas revisões de consciência e changes of heart tomam de assalto os vilões ingleses, introduzindo confissões públicas, arrependimentos de última hora, a fim de dar um tom moralizante ao romance, Loredano permanece impassível em seus últimos momentos.

Antes de obedecerem à ordem de D. Antônio de Mariz, eles tinham executado a sua sentença proferida contra Loredano; e quem passasse sobre a esplanada veria em torno do poste, em que estava atado o frade, uma língua vermelha que lambia fogueira, enroscando-se pelos toros de lenha.
O italiano já sentia o fogo que se aproximava e a fumaça, que, enovelando-se, envolvia-o numa névoa espessa, é impossível descrever a raiva, a cólera, e o furor que se apossaram dele nesses momentos que precederam o suplício.
(O Guarani, parte IV, capítulo IX, p. 464)

Diante da morte não há arrependimentos declarados que sirvam para moralizar os momentos finais de Loredano; todavia, sua punição é exemplar para todos aqueles que ousem divergir da boa conduta e da religião cristã. Queimado na fogueira como um herege medieval (para ser purificado pelo fogo), o ex-frei não apela para a misericórdia dos homens, suplica aos Céus ou arrepende-se intimamente. Seus últimos momentos são silenciosos, frustrados e enraivecidos por um sonho de opulência e amor que não chega a se materializar. O Santo Ofício, a Santa Inquisição e a queima de hereges em praça pública foram assuntos principais para os romancistas ingleses que escreveram durante o auge do gótico, e o tema é usado aqui por Alencar.[3] O tribunal eclesiástico instituído pela Igreja Católica adotava esse procedimento, conhecido como Auto da Fé, ou seja, um ato de fé, como uma interpretação do princípio Ecclesia non novit sanguinem (A igreja não está manchada com sangue). Como no modelo britânico, Alencar não deixa o Mal sem punição, entretanto não força acomodações finais, ou as reconciliações forçosas que eram comuns na ficção inglesa. Essas diferenças na origem, nas motivações e na morte do vilão alencariano parecem apontar para quem ele seria. Ao assimilar alguns traços do modelo gótico, Alencar não reproduz a mesma ideologia protestante de que fala Victor Sage. Ele parece apoiar, acima de tudo, valores civilizatórios, como o racionalismo e a honra, em detrimento do primitivismo, brutalidade e traição. Além disso, o romance propõe princípios de domesticidade, família e cristandade, enquanto descarta a licenciosidade, a ganância e a impiedade.

Após exorcizar a casa portuguesa, os selvagens aimorés e o vilão italiano, Alencar parece indicar que velhos ideais aristocráticos assim como, o primitivismo e estrangeiros ambiciosos à procura de riquezas já não eram bem-vindos na sociedade brasileira de 1857. O fundo político do gótico torna-o a linguagem mais apropriada para tratar do assunto, pois fornece um discurso para esse tipo de exorcismo. Não obstante, Loredano difere dos seus pares britânicos, pois não representa mais o medo de uma revolução passada e distante, mas a resposta única de Alencar para as ansiedades brasileiras. O vilão gótico alencariano e as imagens góticas que ele cria representam uma contestação do tempo e a sociedade em que viveu. Sua resposta cultural, imbricada com discussões imperialistas e de soberania nacional, faz sentido na medida em que a sociedade brasileira ia abrindo espaço para pensamentos pré-republicanos, os quais o próprio Alencar ajudou a fomentar, ainda que ele não venha a ver a República. Em sintonia com o seu tempo, Alencar viu as possibilidades do país, que não desejava mais suportar o anacrônico modelo colonial e a exploração estrangeira. Loredano é o símbolo desse descontentamento, que é exorcizado pelo discurso gótico junto com as pessoas que viam o Brasil como um lugar de empreendimentos descomprometidos e de fácil rentabilidade. “Hei de ser rico e poderoso, contra a vontade do mundo inteiro!” (p. 181), diz Loredano demonstrando sua ética e revelando o que veio fazer.

É costumeiro representar o colonialista como um homem rico, geralmente bem arrumado, ou enxugando o suor com um lenço. Se britânico, ele poderá vestir algo na cor bege, um chapéu de caça e um monóculo, e talvez até beber chá servido em porcelana branca. Até mesmo entre uma boa parte da chamada crítica pós-colonial, essa representação do colono rico parece ser comumente empregada, perpetuando uma idéia que não é de todo correta. É obvio que alguns colonialistas eram muito ricos e sofisticados, e se tornaram ainda mais ricos com o comércio, enquanto outros perderam tudo na sua aposta por riquezas. Não obstante, um número significativo desses homens veio de condições pobres. Nos portos de Liverpool, por exemplo, eles eram recrutados pelas companhias de comércio e navegação, para se tornarem capatazes no exterior, baseados exatamente nesse critério de pobreza. A companhia sabia que suas origens humildes iriam constituir um ímpeto de ambição, e que eles iriam aproveitar ao máximo a oportunidade. Então, uma vez endinheirados, eles iriam imitar os hábitos e costumes das classes ricas. Eu entendo Loredano como esse tipo de aventureiro desfavorecido, aspirando construir uma fortuna. Nascido em uma família de poucos bens, ele está preparado para investir tudo na possibilidade de tornar-se rico, mesmo que isso signifique apelar para violência, seqüestro e assassinato. Na verdade, Loredano poderia ter saído da Casa de Mariz a qualquer momento, e conquistado a fortuna com seu mapa das minas de prata. Mas sendo o vilão de um romance romântico, seu reclame maior é amor. “Unicamente vos aviso que aquele que tocar a soleira da porta da filha de D. Antônio de Mariz é um homem morto; essa é a minha parte na presa! É a parte do leão.” (p. 169).

[1] Ao discorrer sobre o terror no seu tratado sobre o Sublime, Burke diz que muitos animais são capazes de invocar idéias de transcendência. IN: Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas about the Sublime and the Beautiful. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958 (p. 57).

[2] Ver Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, pp. 131-255.

[3] Como Loredano, Ambrosio também seria queimado vivo, mas ele escapa do julgamento vendendo sua alma ao Diabo. IN: Matthew Lewis, The Monk, pp. 298-300. Charles Maturin também aborda a questão da queima de hereges em praça pública como fonte de horror no gótico inglês. IN: Charles Maturin. Melmoth, the wanderer, 2000.

o gótico: nas fissuras da razão

2006-01-10T12:56:00.000Z

O gótico habita as fissuras da Razão. Um momento de assombro, um segundo de desorientação que nos transporta para além das fronteiras do conhecimento. Textualmente, o gótico se apresenta como um efeito retórico que desafia a segurança epistemológica do leitor. A ordem pode ser imediatamente restabelecida, por meio de explicação autoral, trazendo os leitores de volta à lucidez e fazendo aquele instante de deslumbramento recolher-se à sua rachadura. Mas o gótico persiste, como uma semente de incerteza alojada nas fundações da Razão, pronta para emergir de novo, ou penetrar raízes cada vez mais fundo, até trazer o prédio inteiro abaixo.

Por esse ângulo, o gótico constitui uma resposta que se dá a uma inquietação, uma reação que acontece quando somos empurrados para além dos limites culturais que nos são familiares. É curioso notar como esse desassossego cultural freqüentemente se desdobra em questões de identidade nacional e política. Como discurso literário, o gótico teve início com os romancistas ingleses, na metade final do século XVIII, englobando uma solução para a ansiedade causada pela Revolução Francesa que acontecia do outro lado do canal. Com a popularização do romance, nos séculos XIX e XX, as convenções e imagens estabelecidas por esse gótico literário “clássico” difundiram-se pelo mundo e, no século XXI, elas ainda persistem com vigor, ressurgindo nos livros e no cinema. Apesar de o discurso gótico ser um fenômeno transcultural e trans-histórico, sua significação só pode ser estabelecida em um dado espaço e tempo. Isto quer dizer que os significados e as implicações do gótico têm que ser cultural e historicamente observados para que se compreenda seu sentido.