'The Count of Monte Cristo' by Alexandre Dumas

 ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ was serialised over two years and for the modern reader beset by vastly more media and their attendant distractions one might imagine that a similar time might be required to get through its over 1200 pages.  As Dell Comix used to say “don’t take less”.  Really don’t, steer clear of the rocks of an abridged version.  It’s a lee shore as Edmund Dantes might have said in a nautical metaphor.  Anybody that starts to read the Penguin Classic, flex your knees when lifting, version will affirm that the voyage through this ‘baggy monster’ will be done much more quickly.  I may have spent two weeks or so at it.  

It speeds along with a fair narrative wind behind it.  The Penguin edition has footnotes which elucidated the political background and the various mythological references that Dumas throws to elevate the tone.  It’s a rattling good story and as I read it I thought apart from the treasure it is quite credible.  In regimes which were insecure the threat of summary incarceration keep a fractious populace in line.  Looking further into the background of the writing of the novel I discovered that the basic outline of the plot was lifted from the ‘memoirs’ of a policeman.  You might say being ‘stitched up’ was what got Dantes in durance vile and also what got him out of it to wreak: what?  Revenge or retribution?  Is not all judicial punishment a rebalancing of the scale and if that involves the loss of everything that the criminals hold dear then we accept it.  Call it what you will, the rent in the universe has been mended.  Dantes should have died but he did not, now they must pay.  The intricacy of their repayment of their debt is is beautiful.  We are given hints but the unfolding is like an engine of condign retribution, running smooth as a sowing machine stitching the traitors into a shroud.  All that was hidden will be brought into the light of day.  Long brooding on the mechanics of justice and how it is to be wrought has honed the blade that must fall.  Not literally of course, the miscreants destroy themselves by going steadily into paths of wickedness.  The irony is that two of them are ennobled, one a baron the other a count and another with the scoundrel’s ribbon of the legion of honour.  

All of them have forgotten that young sailor picked up at his betrothal party and whisked into oblivion.  The dungeon pallour of the Count of Monte Cristo, a nice running metaphor, has changed his appearance and unlimited money from the treasure is better than plastic surgery as a means of disguise.  Who could imagine that the two men were one and the same.  

The reading did not pall in the least and the high tone as it moves through multiple locations never descends into bathos. Perhaps once when Cristo dons a sailors kit when repelling a burglar is there a hint of buffo to the opera.  That I think is the keynote that should guide the reader.  It is grand opera.  Scale up.  Interludes like the Roman carnival with Franz and Albert are ways of lulling you into a lyric mode.  This is life, sweet isn’t it?  Now imagine being the victim of envy and cowardice and suddenly rapt into horror.  

Still can you control everything?  Might not your retribution bring collateral damage in its train?  Cristo wonders but we are quite complacent.  Stay not your hand, smite them we urge. 

Dammed good read.  It skips along. Forget the movies, this is the proper article warranted genuine Dumas.  I must read more of him.

Upamana Pramana (Comparison) and Genus and Species.

 Does the pramana of upamana translated as ‘comparison’ start somewhat in midstream?  We are immediately given the concept of genus and species, the cow in this case so in essence we already have the power to discover genus and species natively.  Taking the single example of the ‘gavaya’ ( bos gaurus) we can be immediately aware that it must be a member of a species and with that awareness comes the knowledge of differentiation which makes a species.  Sharing the same genus as the cow (bos Taurus) is a likely presumption.  

There is an element of the problem of universals lurking beneath the surface of Upamana:

This (upamana) is not possible through perception, for then the cow’s form is not in contact with the eyes.

We only sense particulars and actually to begin with genus and species is logically downstream from the universal ‘cow’.  The problem of universals is not salient in the ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’ of Adhvarindra.  Sankara deals with it in his section of Brahma Sutra Bhasya called ‘Vedic Words’.  I find some similarity (that word) between his treatment and the ideas of William of Ockham.

More anon on that.

Addendum to "A Tree in the Yard' 17/7/26

 It is important to distinguish between the object which can be grasped by the senses I.e. the tree in the yard and the metaphysical reality which makes that perception possible.  That reality is not itself perceptible but it can be realized.  That realization does not refer to a special mental condition or continuing experience.  Sankara in BSBh rejects the notion that samadhi is equivalent to the highest realization.  He regards it as just another state of mind.

What meaning then can we give to the notion of realization?  It is of course an unshakable belief in the unity of Being, the I AM that Nisargadatta focussed on during the time of his sadhana.  It creates a transformation in the qualities of the person, those that can be experienced by others.  It must be said that a penchant for the collection of Rolls Royce cars and high end watches is a counter indication of realization.  Spontaneous compassion and immediate insight into the spiritual condition of others is an essential indication.  Being in the presence of a sage can raise one’s own awareness to the point that instruction seems to come from within. I’m not sure that faith in him is even necessary.  It's a matter of spiritual harmonics.

A Vedantin views the Tree in the Yard

 The tree in the yard, that staple of solidity, reality and undeniable fact is sometimes referred to as unreal by the Vedantin.  What can he mean?  

Essentially the rope/snake analogy is being flaunted and asked to do a great deal of work.  We need to pull back a little further to get better focus and ask what the paradigmatic form of error is for the Vedantin.  It is confusion or taking something to be that which it is not.  That is perfectly fine for the everyday physical world.  In poor light we take the stump to be a man, the piece of shell to be silver etc., etc.

That sort of talk does not translate/transfer to the metaphysical however.  The tree is real but we may ask wherein does its perceptuality arise ?  How does that out there physical reality come to be in my consciousness as it actually is.  The short cut answer without going into the technicalities of upadhi and vritti is that there is a unity of the substratum of consciousness, a unity of Being.  What is real on the physical side, a tree that is separate and real for the perceiver is unified on the metaphysical side.  Taking the physical to be the only reality is a mis-take.  This is the world of duality.  Keeping both sides going is the world of non-duality.  

Thus we get the extravagant closing down sale of the world: everything must go.  This is an unreal bargain. 

Frank Wright's Moustache: The Loam which nourisheth and sustaineth.

 A really good, out-and-out "reactionary" journal is, at first, like a breath of fresh air in the midst of all this turbulent, pretentious, childish optimism. A royalist publication is worth its weight in gold. Catholicism, we feel, is essential to our health. We fly to the past — anywhere out of this suspended animation of the so smugly "revolutionary" present. Out of the detestable crowd of quacks — illumines, coueists, and psychologists — that the wealthy death-bed has attracted, and who throng these antechambers of defeat; from all the funeral-furnishers, catafalque-makers, house-agents, lawyers, moneylenders, with their eye on the Heir of all the Ages, we fly in despair.

But the "Reactionary" (a sort of highly respectable, genteel quack, as well, with military moustaches and an "aristocratic" bearing) is even more stupid — if that were possible — than the "Revolutionary." We listen to him for a moment, and he unfolds his barren, childish scheme with the muddleheaded emphasis of a very ferocious sheep. He lodges in the garret next to us at the inn, and is in arrears with the rent. The servants (who are all the reddest of revolutionists, of course) hate him. The Reactionary, in the long run, does not add to the cheerfulness of the scene.

(From ‘The Art of Being Ruled’ by Wyndham Lewis pub. 1926)

Lewis had a moustache and he was called a reactionary and a fascist so we may take the second paragraph as a piece of self mockery.  That flagrant item sported by Wright ends in points which demand wax.  I feel that he would repudiate gel as verging on the metrosexual.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that but when your aim is to bristle drooping fails to promote a sense of rigour.

Frank Wright Speaks

 There I was thinking I was a Traditionalist when according to Frank Wright I am in fact a Modernist and of course a heretic.  May I state once again that I admit to being a heretic but I am not an apostate.  What he means by Traditionalism is something quite different from that which I respect rather than adhere to if one can adhere to a general theory of the source of religions. 

traditionalism 

Who is Frank Wright when he’s at home?  Enter the name in the search box of youtube and be prepared for the deluge.  His political analysis of the march of Globalism is excellent and is delivered with witty asides, memes and serious foolery.  Essentially we are living in a constructed reality aimed at dissolving nation states into cupasoup bland uniformity at the behest of ‘stakeholders’.

Does Frank believe that outside the Catholic Church there is no redemption?  Though he has never uttered that precise phrase I think that his attitude is adjacent to that old time Catholicism.  Is that a bad thing?  On the whole it is not; most people are not prepared to wait for the answer to ‘what is truth’.  They want it straight and unequivocal and they also want eschatology not ecology.  Do I agree with the moral teaching of the Catholic Church?  Yes I do.  I realize that I may be going close to the Voltairean position that religion is good for the masses in that it gives them a definite moral path they can follow.  I think he recommended it for his butler.  The populace is safer without the bewilderment of comparative religion.  Who was it said that a little comparative religion leaves you with comparatively little religion? 

I’m a heretic so what I offer is in Frank Wright’s opinion entirely useless and proves that I am foundered in Modernism.  Is religion like sums in Arithmetic where there is only one right answer.  A certain simplistic view of religious truth would hold that this is so.  Atheists and agnostics agree with this.  ‘Look’, they say, ‘they all of them claim that their truth is the only one’. ‘They can’t all be true so it is rational to decline to believe any of them until the issue is decided’.

The Traditionalist (Perennialist) would argue that the outcome of multiple truths does not end in relativism.  The absolute is incapable of being expressed in direct language.  It is apophatic.  However to put everyone under ‘the cloud of unknowing’ is to risk them being drenched by uncertainty.  One should not do anything to weaken the ‘simple’ faith of others.  Say your own prayers.------------

'Salem Chapel' by Mrs. Oliphant (pub. 1863)

 Yet another of those noticing women, Mrs. Oliphant.  The other one I was reading recently was Anita Brookner in her Booker prize winning ‘Hotel du Lac’.  Of the two the sharper is the Victorian lady  who can deal with a range of social settings and the delicate treatment of the nuances of class so much a part of English life.  That she was a Scotswoman probably helped to mould that acerbic view of the difference between the Church appointed by law and the non-conformist Chapel folk.  Though never identified as Methodist the talk of ‘our connection’ and ‘the connection’ is a Methodist way of describing the local control of the running of a chapel, the paying of a minister, selecting their own minister who might be dropped if he displeased the deacons.  This is a major theme of the novel.  Arthur Vincent though a powerful preacher seems a little too stand offish for the deacons.  He does not flatter them by attending their soirees and besides he is infatuated by Lady Western, a beautiful young dowager.  She’s church folk and that rankles.  We are never in any doubt that this attraction can come to nothing.  Her heart is given to another, the poor man who retired from the field leaving to Sir Joseph Western this peach, this nenuphar of nubility.  Sir Joe died off stage. 

Curiously the man who is wooing the sister of the minister has the same name as the unsuccessful suitor. I have already made clear that if you are bothered by coincidence do not read Victorian three volume novels.  They are a small world.

Matthew Arnold’s England was divided like Gaul in ‘partes tres’, the barbarians,the hebraic and the populace who are keen on doing what they like.  Lady Alice is not a barbarian aristocratic type, huntin, shootin, fishin.  She is too nice to the young minister simply out of patrician good manners.  Another woman of that class is Mrs. Hillyard who being poor, though gently born, has to make her living at piece work sewing.  She is a well drawn sharp observer of the milieu into which she has descended.  She now attends chapel.

Who are the dwellers of that town?  Mrs. Oliphant is able to give us the full flavour of Victorian Britain particularly the religious divisions on the Protestant side.  Within the Anglicans the main contrast is between the High Church with its ‘smells and bells’ and the Low Church’s clear lights of the unadorned.

As for Rome.  We don’t talk about Rome.  The locution ‘Romish’ is used as a pejorative.  Evangelism shuns those excesses.

Running parallel to the Vincent/Salem struggle over the social control of the minister is the fear that Susan Vincent will be ruined through her abduction by the estranged husband of Mrs Hillyard.  The author brought me at least into that sphere of Victorian mores.  This was a real fear.  Can you project yourself into that world by a species of moral time travel.  If you cannot enter into the dark mind of the patriarchy Victorian literature is not for you.  Ruined, you could always go to Australia.  

Carlingford and its novel cycle gives us a more complete picture of the life of a small town that 1000 Middlemarches.  We have the prosperous members of a rising lower middle class, the Poulterer, the Butterman.  They are confident in their own realm but insecure owing to their disabilities as Dissenters.  They want to put on a good show with packed pews, a minister capable of giving ‘coorses’ in the finer theological points of true Christian Free Worship unbeholden to the State.  Their social welfare system is organised and effective without the mummery of grey cloaked sisterhoods i.e. Anglican nuns.

The tracking of Vincent’s sister and Fordham is well done and we get the sense of the exhaustion and fear that he might be too late to prevent the ruin of his sister.  

A very complex and satisfying read.  Mrs. Oliphant is due a reappraisal.