A Proleptic view of 'A Tale of Two Cities' by Charles Dickens

I think I suffer from Post Delusion Syndrome. This is when you know that a position long held by you is objectively false but its patination remains.  You see I know that I have never read ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by Charles Dickens but I somehow feel that I have.  I am rectifying that idee fixe  by actually being now in the process of reading and the depthless sheen of my rereading it is due to be corrected.  Is it this that emboldens me as I pause at a 60% reading of it to offer a proleptic review?  These are the sorts of reviews that are never written and yet are frequently excogitated.  We often think as we draw back from immersion whither this is going and is the unfolding of the plot, not logical, but under the dominion of the active imagination.  Ordinary rational epideictic novels make sense under the canon of common sense however they fail in living verisimilitude which brings life through what Hindu ritualists call‘apurva’. A poesis in the work leaps forward to create connections which are real across the gap of facticity.  Thus they say that this is how ritual fructifies without the billiard ball causality of the Humean sort.

The theme of counterparts is well established.  Good Darnay against the functional alcoholic depressive Carton, the one rising the other in free fall.  The theme of imprisonment: Manette of course but also the fell hand of the bank and the sans cullotes languishing under the ancien regime.  Shoemaking lapsed into as the father is thrown back into the dungeon. Tingles and sparrowbills, the knife, the curiously shaped French hammer and the awl; items of self harm probably allowed for that hoped for end.

“This is a strange chance that throws you and me together. This must be a strange night to you, standing alone here with your counterpart on these street stones?”

The doctor speaks of his daughter:

“—any fancies, any reasons, any apprehensions, anything whatsoever, new or old, against the man she really loved—the direct responsibility thereof not lying on his head—they should all be obliterated for her sake. She is everything to me; more to me than suffering, more to me than wrong, more to me—Well! This is idle talk.”

Carton’s vow:

For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything. If my career were of that better kind that there was any opportunity or capacity of sacrifice in it, I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you.

We know our Dickens and the intertwining of all fates in a congeries of karma will be expected.  So far so very good. It is claimed to be the most read novel in English literature.  It is first in the rank of popularity on gutenberg.org which must stand as a confirmation of a sort in the digital annals.

 

Barbellion (author of 'Journal of a Disappointed Man) and Apurva/the uncanny, unprecedented

 Reading the ‘Journal of a Disappointed Man’ by Barbellion I reach back to the early 20th.Century to hope for him.  What can that hope, that prayer, that earnest supplication ‘give that man a break’ God; what can it do?  Are prayers dropped into eternity and in that way outside time?   Are they are retroactively effective, landing into Barbellion’s time and helping him?  What is the Christian theology on this point?  The Hindus who have thought of everything, for whom abstruse points are the old normal, speak of the uncanny, the apurva.  The wikipedia article :

apurva

summarises the main thinking on the topic.  Essentially its this: how can the sacrifice rightly done, the results of which must fructify, remain in abeyance and benefit the celebrant after their death.  The normal causal connections seem broken.  

And now I remember that in Christianity prayer for the souls of the dead in Purgatory is efficacious. The space time continuum is not as firm a construction as we suppose it to be.  Adepts at an advanced level regularly flout it.  

Ramana Maharshi the great sage was once asked whether it was possible that someone could be the reincarnation of a person who had not yet died.

Yes, he replied, because the upadhis (forms of limitation) are different in that case.  Causal logic is subverted and by the normal understanding of karma actions yet to be performed were fructifying in another life.  

How very apurva!!

I absolutely recommend ‘Journal of a Disappointed Man’ by Barbellion as the sort of book that you can take up and read some entries occasionally for their poignant beauty and resolute courage in the face of a dismal prognosis.  He died at age 27.

Barbellion

available on 

gutenberg.org 

'The Three Imposters' by Arthur Machen

    First of all you will have to pay attention to the prologue.  Do not regard as a long winded introduction to the main story.  It holds the key and introduces you to the imposters and their aliases.  You are  therefore primed to disbelieve everything they may say and enjoy the irony of their fabrications while seeking to discover why they go to such lengths to tell Dyson and Phillipps egregious rigmaroles.  That reason you will never discover  because it is opaque to the profane.  In this realm causality operates on another level not the normal billiard ball one which is a matter of transmission of gross force on the material plane. The imposters lie out of sheer jouissance in the activity.  To impose and rook the stranger is a goal in itself.  Its what they do and they are good at it.  But why do Dyson and Phillipps meet them to be the objects of their imposture? My intuition is that the gold Tiberius, that coin a lone survivor of coinage struck as the celebration of infamy is accursed and has brought destruction on its possessors down through the centuries, generally hidden from sight and fought for when it occasionally turns up. It has therefore become karmically magnetized and though the Three Imposters do not know that Dyson has the coin their will to evil draws them into his company and to Phillipps’s who also knows about the coin.  

The action of the energies evoked by the coin are an example of what Hindu ritualists call ‘apurva’. Why, they asked, do rituals which must fructify appear to act with a non-linear causality? Are there subtle seeds which act to  create a catenary of action or must we accept that this action is apurva or unprecedented, uncanny if you will?  Shankaracarya the great teacher demurs.  It is the will of God that makes everything happen.  

The evil will and the vile energies that surround the coin make me fear for the future of Dyson and Phillips or whoever chances to bring it into the light of day.  The novel is a masterpiece of irony and palindromic fabulism.

Phillipps is most certainly wrong:

"I certainly think," replied Phillipps, "that, if you pull out that coin and flourish it under people's noses as you are doing at the present moment, you will very probably find yourself in touch with the criminal, or a criminal. You will undoubtedly be robbed with violence. Otherwise, I see no reason why either of us should be troubled. No one saw you secure the coin, and no one knows you have it. I, for my part, shall sleep peacefully, and go about my business with a sense of security and a firm dependence on the natural order of things. The events of the evening, the adventure in the street, have been odd, I grant you, but I resolutely decline to have any more to do with the matter, and, if necessary, I shall consult the police. I will not be enslaved by a gold Tiberius, even though it swims into my ken in a manner which is somewhat melodramatic."  

Karma, Janma and Apurva in the Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya of Shankaracarya

If you can look into the seeds of time
And say which will grow and which will not
Speak them to me, who neither beg nor fear
Your favours, nor your fate.

(Banquo addressing the Weird Sisters Macbeth Act 1 Scene III)

The concept of karma/janma, of desserts and birth is well established in the religious systems of India. In Vedanta in particular the metaphysical underpinning of the doctrine is given close study. The satkaryavada theory of the non-difference between cause and effect is an important theory first introduced by the Sankhya. If interested there is no reason to repeat myself. Like the detectorist said - check it out! enter ‘satkaryavada in the search box.
satkaryavada
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Naturally the attraction of puzzle cases that appear to explode this theory are examined by Shankaracarya in his Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya. We can accept the flow of the universe and the causal process which is timely or immediate -

But it does not stand to reason that fruits can come at some future time from actions which get destroyed the next moment; because something cannot come out of nothing.

(Bhb. III.ii.38)

What is in question here is the efficacy of ritual. Nothing seems to come of it. Is it a waste of good ghee?

Vedantin:That too does not remove the difficulty; for there can be no such thing as a result till the agent of the act comes to possess it, inasmuch as any happiness or sorrow experienced by any soul at any time is recognised in the world to be such a result relatively to that very time. ..........Again if it be maintained that though the result may not issue just after the action, it can issue (in the future) out of the unseen potency emerging out of the act, that too is unjustifiable, for potency, which is inert like stocks and stones, cannot act unless stimulated by some conscious agent. Besides, such an unseen potency lacks any valid proof.

Shankara means here by potency and act material causation. Unseen potency cannot work like milk being turned into curds. No causal path can be discerned for it. Therefore its efficacy can only be accepted on the basis of faith in divine energy.

In Bhb. III.ii.40 Shankara in his account of the Mimansaka maintains that they accept the ‘unseen potency’ idea. This is referred to as apurva or the unprecedented in the special sense of an occurence that has no immediately preceding cause.

Mimamsaka: If the Vedic authority is accepted, one has to think in the way that would justify the kind of relation between action and the result of action that is mentioned in the Vedas. Unless the action, while undergoing destruction, produces some unseen potency, it cannot produce its result after an interval. Hence the inference to be drawn is that there is such a thing called unseen potency which may be either some subtle state of the action itself or some previous (seed) state of the result. In this way the position stated earlier becomes logical. But the theory that God ordains the results is illogical. For one uniform cause cannot produce variegated results; that will lead to partiality and cruelty on God’s part and the performance of action will be useless. Hence the conclusion is that results are produced by virtuous deeds alone.

Is this conflict an aporia generated by the accepted efficacy of ritual. Shankara does not admit this impasse:

And God’s bestowing of results consists precisely in His creating the creatures according to individual merits. The defects of the impossibility of the emergence of variegated results from the very same cause, and so on, do not arise since God acts by taking into account the efforts made by his creatures (Bhb. III.ii.41)




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