Today I ‘read’ a much-abridged audio version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The obvious disadvantage of this version is that it has been so very heavily abridged. The advantage is that the reading, by Trevor White, brings Twain’s vernacular language wonderfully to life. Part-farce, part satire, part social commentary, The Adventures is a colourful, elegiac depiction of a world that had already all but disappeared when Twain wrote about it. Who could not warm to such characters as Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer and the noble Jim? And who, but Dickens, perhaps, could invent such wonderful characters as the con artists, the duke and the king? Underlying all of this there is Huck’s constant tussle with his conscience, which is in opposition to the mores of the society he lives in, particularly regarding slavery. As Twain himself put it, Huckleberry Finn is a story where ‘a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat.’ Surely Twain intentionally juxtaposed the enslavement of a non-slave (Huck) with the struggles to free a slave who was in fact already free (Jim). Although Ernest Hemingway was critical of the ending he nevertheless considered that ‘All modern American literature comes from Huck Finn’ and he declared it to be ‘the best book we’ve ever had’. Even in the abridged version I heard today the book’s freshness and energy is still much in evidence.

With a view to the writing of a forthcoming article I have been revisiting systems theory and the thought and writings of the late Russell Ackoff (picture) in particular. I would encourage anybody who works in or with any sort of organisation to familiarise her- or himself with systems theory. Here, as an appetiser, are just a few of Ackoff’s nuggets of wisdom. Improving the performance of some parts of a system will not necessarily improve the performance of the whole. Problems are, by their nature, trans-disciplinary (put another way, reality is not ‘structured and organised in the same way universities are’). The best thing that can be done to a problem is to dissolve it (rather than solve it). Most systems are, in reality, pursuing objectives other than the ones they proclaim. ‘It is much better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right, because when errors are corrected, it makes doing the wrong thing wronger but the right thing righter.’ Educational systems are not dedicated to producing learning by students, but teaching by teachers – and teaching is a major obstruction to learning.’ (My son loves that one!) ‘The principal function of most corporations is not to maximise shareholder value, but to maximise the standard of living and quality of work of those who manage the corporation.’ ‘Corporations tend to collect activities that they do not have the competence or even the inclination to run well. They also tend more to adversarial relationships with employees, and to encourage competition between parts of the corporation and conflict with competitors.’ In the same vein, the late, great Peter Drucker once pointed out that there is more competition within corporations than between them, and the internal kind tends to be less ethical. Recognising the truth of such observations is one thing, reforming organisations to avoid such traps is another.

I have at last managed to read a fascinating article by Laura Kottos (University of Reading) in the Journal of Contemporary European Studies. The title of the article says it all: “A ‘European Commonwealth’: Britain, the European League for Economic Co-operation, and European Debates on Empire, 1947-1957.’ Put very briefly, in the immediate post-war period France and the UK reflected a great deal about the challenge of economic reconstruction against the backdrop of the economic protectionism of their colonies and former colonies, which benefitted from closed markets and preferential tariffs. This helped them, but not their mother economies. Belgium, on the other hand, did not have the same problem since, under the terms of the 1885 Berlin Treaty the Congo could not be protected by tariff walls. On the other hand, all three countries were united in their determination to re-launch their economies and in the belief that European integration was the best way to go about it. The first formal initiative came in early 1947 from the British (Labour) Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. Space precludes me from entering into the details of the various plans considered and the movements involved (including Harold Macmillan, Peter Thorneycroft and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s father, Edmond). But they all coalesced around the idea of proceeding from a customs union to a European Commonwealth in which (in a not so well-hidden agenda) those preferential tariffs would be reduced and ultimately disappear. Because of its considerable colonial and post-colonial interests, the United Kingdom remained at the heart of the debate, but could not bring itself to take part in France’s more radical plans for a coal and steel community. As Kottos writes: ‘Paradoxically, on the eve of the Treaty of Rome, which Britain chose not to sign, France and Belgium were pursuing a European policy which had been largely shaped in 1952 within the Council of Europe for the British Commonwealth and by the British members of the European League for Economic Cooperation.’ This is the stuff of counter-factual history! Here’s a free idea to any budding science fiction writers out there; what if Western Europe had been dominated by a European Commonwealth in which France and the United Kingdom were the leading partners? In any case, Kottos is to be congratulated on an excellent piece of research based largely on primary materials. And then, as I was looking for an illustration for this post, I came across the following interview with former longstanding doyen of Brussels journalists, John Palmer, in which the idea of a European Commonwealth is revived.

Today we took a group of young people to meet Gilberte Degeimbre, the sole surviving member of a group of five children who saw visions of the Virgin Mary (32 altogether) in Beauraing in 1932-33. Whatever anybody’s religious beliefs might be, this lady strikes everybody as being something out of the ordinary. Despite her advanced age (92), she is completely ‘with it’. She radiates serenity and tranquility. After so many years of repeating what she saw (she was nine at the time of the apparitions), there is an inevitable sense of a well-rehearsed account, but each time I hear her speak she adds a fresh dimension to her experiences. And, whatever happened, it is undeniable that something happened. Somebody should surely one day make a film about the apparitions. There is a sort of Picnic at Hanging Rock atmosphere brooding over the whole thing. Three aspects struck me particularly today. The first was the logicality of Gilberte’s explanation about how the pure ecstasy of the apparitions was followed by deep depression (‘like being in a deep well’) caused by deprivation. Related to that was her insistence that the apparitions were as much about suffering as joy. Not only did she suffer her post-apparition depressions, and not only was she hounded by the church and the press and various doctors and scientists, but she suffered the pain of being rejected and disbelieved by her mother. Lastly, I was struck again by Gilberte’s logicality in arguing that words were simply not up to the task of describing what they had seen and experienced. Clearly, to explain what had happened to them the children were obliged to put things into words, but those words would always be inadequate. She used the same logic when one of her audience asked her about the statues of the Virgin Mary dotted about Beauraing; were they a faithful likeness of what the children had seen. ‘they are based on the details we gave them,’ said Gilberte, waving a hand dismissively, but they (the statues) have nothing to do with what we saw.’

I have been gradually working my way through a CD collection of ‘speeches that changed the world’. There are a number of golden oldies: Neville Chamberlain (‘The Peace of Europe’); Winston Churchill (‘Blood, toil, tears and sweat’, ‘This was their finest hour’, ‘Never … was so much owed by so many to so few’ – all re-delivered in a recording studio); Franklin Delanoe Roosevelt (‘The only thing we have left to fear is fear itself’, ‘A date which will live in infamy’) , Jawarhlal Nehru, General Douglas MacArthur, Nelson Mandela… The title of the CD is a mite over-ambitious. The collection begins with Chamberlain and ends with George W. Bush, so effectively covers only the twentieth century, and then only what happened to have been recorded. Some of the choices are debateable. Mother Teresa, for example, may or may not have changed the world but her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech did not. There are some surprises. John F. Kennedy’s famous 1963 ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech, for example, was strangely laboured and, by modern standards, poorly delivered. Yet it definitely was a world-changer. Old ham Ronald Reagan’s ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall’ speech in the same city was brilliantly delivered and extraordinarily prophetic; just over two years later the wall was down. But when it comes to prophets, none in the collection can beat the natural oratorical skills of Martin Luther King Jr. The extraordinary poise and delivery and always inclusive rhetoric of his ‘I have a dream’ speech to no less than 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial would have been enough (and what a world changer that was), but this collection also includes his 3 April 1968 ‘I have been to the mountaintop’ speech in Memphis Tennessee. Towards the end of it he said ‘Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!’ One day later, King had fallen to an assassin’s bullet.

We first saw Vivement Dimanche, the great François Truffaut’s very last film, in 1983, in the Roman theatre in Fiesole (which is transformed into an outdoors cinema in the summer months) and loved it. The film is quirky (filmed in black and white) but we remembered it as an ordinary crime thriller with an occasional comic twist. A small town estate agent, Julian Vercel (played with brilliant deadpan by Jean-Louis Trintignant), has just sacked his secretary, Barbara Becker (played just as brilliantly by the handsome Fanny Ardant), for impertinence when he becomes the prime suspect in a series of murders and has to hide, leaving Becker, who secretly loves him, to launch her inquiries – in parallel to the police inquiries, bien naturellement. At one level, this is Agatha Christie/Georges Simenon territory, with obvious motives undermined by subsequent events and, of course, the murderer is never, ever who you think it is. It reminded me of John Huston’s penultimate film, Prizzi’s Honour. The feel-good factor is high and for good measure Truffaut eggs his pudding with some slapstick; for example, the real culprit (impishly played by Philippe Laudenbach) is so distracted by his impending doom that he ends up smoking two cigarettes at once. But then the real motive is revealed – almost as an aside – and undermines the whole cosy, heterosexual consensus that the film has so far cheerfully portrayed. It was just by coincidence that we watched Vivement Dimanche the day after The Tenant, but these films explore the same fragile territory via different genres. For both Polanski’s tenant and Truffaut’s lawyer (Laudenbach) are cross-dressing paranoids whose comfort comes from pretending to be what they are not and cannot be. Maybe, just maybe, Polanski and Truffaut were genuflecting, in their different ways, before Hitchcock’s Psycho?

Roman Polanksi’s 1976 The Tenant, the third and the last of his ‘apartment’ trilogy (after Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby), is a horror film of sorts but it is above all an unnerving portrayal of an outsider’s descent into paranoid schizophrenia as well as a play on Polanski’s favourite theme, namely that when an individual is pitted against a collective the latter invariably wins. Underlining this, Polanksi himself plays the lead role of the outsider, Trelkovsky, and toys with his audience by not listing himself in the closing credits. The nervous and unassuming Trelkovsky rents a Parisian apartment whose previous occupant, Simone Choule, has committed suicide by throwing herself out of the window. Trelkovsky visits her in hospital just before she dies. At her bedside he meets her slightly zany friend, Stella (played by Isabelle Adjani). She will provide moments of relief but cannot prevent his descent. Back at the apartment building strange things happen and Trelkovsky feels increasingly persecuted by the landlord (Melvyn Douglas) and the concièrge (Shelley Winters). Polanski very cleverly traps us with the oldest trick in the book; the unreliable narrator/camera. At first, the camera seems to show us how Trelkovsky’s point of view is becoming increasingly unreliable, but later we realise that the supposedly more ‘objective’ shots might also be unreliable – at least, some of the time. The viewer ends up not knowing where reality begins and ends or even if there ever was reality. Put another way, what Trelkovsky apparently sees is his reality which, in the end, is just as valid as any other perceived reality, including our own. The enigmatic ending, where Trelkovsky seems to end up in exactly the same mummified position in a hospital bed as Simone Choule, but then we see Trelkovsky apparently visiting himself, provides the icing on the cake. At any rate, we’re still discussing its significance. It is surprising only that this film isn’t better known.

This evening we watched Len Wiseman’s 2012 remake of Total Recall. Like the 1990 original, with good old Arnie, the remake is based on a typically ingenious Philip K. Dick short story, ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’. Were the constant rain in the dystopian metropolis and the aerial advertisements some sort of conscious hommage to Blade Runner (also based on a Philip K. Dick short story) we wondered, as the film got under way? In any case, we settled down in excited anticipation of a fresh take, twenty-three years on, doubtless making full use of all the technological advances in special effects that have since occurred. We were not, at first, disappointed. Screenplay writers Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback have the action take place on an Earth devastated by chemical warfare rather than the Mars of the Dick story and the more faithful 1990 version. Distinguishing itself from the typical dystopian riff of survivors in underground communities, the plot has the cities in the surviving United Federation of Britain (UFB) built high above the poisoned ground (we are treated to convincing depictions of a vertical China Town and sprawling aerial slums). The UFB’s factories are manned by a combination of robotic workers and human beings who commute every day from the Colony (the former Australia) via ‘The Fall’ – a gravity elevator that travels through the Earth. (This was perhaps a deliberate echo of the old lift cages in coal mines, which literally fell, powered by gravity and the weight of the miners on board.) Gradually, ‘fast-paced action’ takes over, with frequent chases with explosive conclusions and much use of heights and levels and lifts but, somehow, the film never rises to the level of its own ambitions and the happy ending is risible. ‘The past is a construct of the mind,’ is a key phrase in the plot but we are never allowed to let our imaginations explore the possible implications of this. Kate Beckinsale, playing Quaid’s treacherous ‘fake’ wife, Lori, never entirely convinces and I had to keep reminding myself that Quaid/Hauser’s ‘real’ wife was not actually Mrs Nicolas Sarkozy (Jessica Biel looking uncannily like Carla Bruni). Oh, and whenever I see the beetle-browed Colin Farrell (who plays the Quaid/Hauser main protagonist) sitting up bare-chested in a bed with white sheets up to his waist I can’t help but expect him to say something very, very rude about Bruges – and in this film he doesn’t.

I have been thinking a lot about treachery and betrayal in the recent past. André Philippe, mentioned in a previous post, lost his whole family and an important part of his youth because of a hideous act of betrayal that resulted in many deaths. In his case, the traitor was a double agent who had infilitrated a resistance network. What leads people – frequently respected or popular members of their communities (as this particular lady was) – to behave in such a way, especially when they are indebted (sometimes very heavily) to those they betray? I naturally turned to the example of the most notorious traitor in the New Testament – Judas Iscariot – and immediately discovered that there was much more to his story than I had until now imagined. For a start, the biblical accounts (Mark, Matthew, John) are ambiguous and contradictory about the act of betrayal itself, and this has led to a huge raft of philosophical and theological debates, ranging from, for example, Bertrand Russell’s The Problem of Natural Evil through to Jorge Luis Borge’s short story, Three Versions of Judas. Was Judas’s act of betrayal an act of free will or predetermined? If predetermined, how could Judas be a traitor? And did it anyway make any difference to Jesus’s fate, given that, according to his own scheme of things, he had to die in any case in order that man might be redeemed? Did Judas even exist at all, given his absence from, for example, the Epistles of St Paul? Beyond that fundamental question, there are academic and theological question marks hanging over Judas’s death (did he hang himself or did he fall?) and the possible significance of that. It was thus that I came across an exquisite book, The Many Deaths of Judas Iscariot  A Meditation on Suicide, by A.M.H. Saari. A theologian, Aaron Saari was drawn to the theme after his elder brother, a long-term sufferer of mental illness, committed suicide, an action traditional Christian teaching asserts is a mortal sin. The grieving Saari consoled himself with meditation through theological research and on the basis of his findings came to the firm conclusion that Judas Iscariot was a literary invention of the Markan community. Saari argues that the language used effectively indicated a split between Pauline Christians, who saw no reason for the establishment of an organized Church, and the followers of Peter, who did. Judas, in other words, was a character invented to undermine the authority of the ‘college’ of the twelve apostles. It’s a lovely book, combining theological research and literary critique with touching reminiscences about his brother. The last sentence sums the book’s theme succinctly: ‘When we are bogged down by questions of historicity, we deny the evangelists the opportunity to impart their story.’

Not long ago I had the pleasure and the privilege of meeting the couple in the picture. The man, André Philippe, had a most dreadful experience during the Second World War. His family hid a Canadian aviator who had parachuted out of a crippled bomber. They contacted the resistance network. A double agent gave them all away. His father was shot. His mother died in a concentration camp. He (just 17) and his brother were sentenced to hard labour. Conditions grew increasingly harsh. He ended up on a death march to Dachau. At the gates to the camp their guards fled, afraid of the approaching Americans. André made his way back to his home town where he was eventually taken in as a lodger by a farmer’s widow. The widow had two daughters. He married the younger of the two, Gilberte Degeimbre. Gilberte is now the sole survivor of a group of five children who experienced repeated visions of the Virgin Mary in Beauraing in 1932-33. She’s now a feisty 92 year-old. I wrote up my notes of the encounter (see more below). Here is a link from last year, when she celebrated the eightieth anniversary of the first vision.

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