Classics Revisited
Questions of truth and identity
BY RAVI VYAS
The Man Who was Thursday, £6.99; The Complete Father Brown, special Indian price, £9.10; G.K. Chesterton, Penguin Classics.
G.K. CHESTERTON has said somewhere that when people cease to believe in God they do not believe in nothing — but rather believe in anything. And in one of his Father Brown's short stories, "The Blue Cross", the priest-sleuth traps the villain by drawing him into a philosophical discussion on the existence of God that exposes him when he attacks reason, which is the first sign of bad theology. Hence, there were two extravagances: To ignore reason and to think only of reason. It's not easy to regard either agnosticism or atheism as naturally coextensive with progress when one surveys the wasteland of capitalist materialism, the singular credulity of "cult" members (it could be al Qaeda or any of the terrorist groups) or the hysterical adoration heaped on third-rate mortal leaders of the political world, whether on the Left or Right. Chesterton was an unscrupulous Roman Catholic apologist but he had a point in his 1907 classic, The Man Who was Thursday, that is sub-titled A Nightmare. Which is: Is it God or the Invisible Hand that guides our destinies, or is there a music of chance, "a magic of the spheres" that takes us along and sees it through? We don't really know, and can't know.
Confusing logic
In an article published the day before his death, on June 13, 1936, Chesterton called Thursday, "a very melodramatic sort of moonshine but it had a kind of notion in it; and the point is that it described, first a band of the last champions of order fighting against what appeared to be a world of anarchy, and then the discovery that the mysterious master both of the anarchy and the order was the same sort of elemental elf who had appeared to be rather like a pantomime ogre. This line of logic, or lunacy, led many to infer that this equivocal being was meant for a serious description of the Deity... But this error was entirely due to the fact that they had read the book but had not read the title page (which carried the sub-title A Nightmare.) It was not meant to describe the real world as it was... It was intended to describe the world of wild doubt and despair... with just a gleam of hope in some double meaning of the doubt, which even the pessimists felt in some fitful fashion."
Serious issues
Set in a phantasmagoric London where policemen are poets and camouflage themselves as anarchists/ terrorists, nobody knows who's who. But Chesterton was concerned with more serious questions of truth and human identity and other metaphysical questions like the willingness of God to allow Man to suffer and the role of free will.
Our hero is Gabriel Syme, who cannot reveal that his fellow poet Lucian Gregory is also an anarchist. Syme is the virtual embodiment of paradox: "He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinthe and cocoa, for both of which he had a healthy dislike... Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left — sanity."
There are seven members of the radical Central Anarchist Council who, for security reasons, name themselves after the days of the week — Sunday, Monday etc. However the turn of events soon casts doubt on their true identities, for, the man who was Thursday is not the impassioned poet he pretends to be, but rather a member of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist squad of secret detectives. Who and what are the true identities of the other "days" of the week? Chesterton unwinds the mysterious entanglements in his own inventive and lively way and then escalates the mounting nightmare of paradox and surprise, culminating in a shocking revelation.
Amusing satire
In telling a simple story of terror and counter-terrorism, Chesterton probes the mysteries of behaviour and belief in an all too human world and in doing so raises the question of our multiple identities. Anarchy, social order, God, peace, war, religion and a dozen other weighty concepts are mashed together in a whacky little satire that will both amuse and educate you. At the end a mystery remains unsolved. Who or what is Sunday, the president of the Council? Genius, force of nature, villain, or the invisible hand that guides our destinies? It's anybody's guess because different interpretations have been offered and you, too, can have your own little take on it.
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