Narratology

Narratology (pronounced nar-uh-tol-uh-jee)

The study of narrative & narrative structure and the ways these affect human perception (with some mission creep over the years).

1967: The construct was narrate +‎ -ology, an Anglicization of the French narratologie, coined by Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher & structuralist literary critic Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017), it first appeared in his book Grammaire du Décaméron (1967), a structural analysis of Decameron (The Decameron (1348-1353)) by the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375).  Although once thought an arcane appendage to literature and a mere academic abstraction, structuralism and narratology in the 1970s and 1980s became a very popular (and controversial) field and while postmodernism’s historic movement may have passed, the tools are an important part of the “learning” process used by generative AI (artificial intelligence) to produce meaning from the LLM (large language models.)

Title page from a 1620 printing of Decameron.

Boccaccio’s Decameron (literally “ten days”) was a collection of short stories, structured into a hundred tales of seven young women and three young men who had secluded themselves in a villa outside Florence, seeking to avoid the Black Death pandemic (1346-1353) then sweeping Europe.  Although not too much should be made of this comparison, the work in some aspects is not dissimilar to reality television, being a mash-up of erotic scenes, set-piece jokes, suspense and unrequited love.  Todorov’s Grammaire du Décaméron was a literary analysis of the work but “grammaire” must be understood as meaning “grammar” in the sense of the structural or narratological principles rather than as its used in its “everyday” sense.  Historians and literary scholars have for centuries regarded Decameron as a valuable document because, written in the Florentine vernacular of the era, although fictional, it’s a kind of “snapshot” of life in what was one of Europe’s many troubled times.  It was Boccaccio who dubbed Dante’s (Dante Alighieri (circa 1265–1321)) Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy (circa 1310-1321)) “divine” (in the sense of “very good” rather than “holy”).

Narrate (to relate a story or series of events (historically in speech or writing)) may for years (or even decades) have been in oral use in English before the first known use in print in 1656, etymologists noting that until the nineteenth century it was stigmatized as “Scottish” (long a slur among the more fastidious) although it’s thought it was derived from the “respectable” narration.  Narrative ((1) a story or account of events or (2) the art, process or technique or telling the story) was in use by the 1440s and was from the Middle French noun & adjective narrative, from the Late Latin narrātīvus (narration (noun) & suitable for narration (adjective)), the construct being narrāt(us) (related, told), past participle of narrāre (to relate, tell, say) + -īvus (the adjectival suffix).  Again, like “narrate”, narrative was once used exclusively of speech or writing but in recent decades the terms have been more widely applied and not restricted to describing the efforts of humans.

Since the nineteenth century, “-ologies” have proliferated.

The suffix -ology was formed from -o- (as an interconsonantal vowel) +‎ -logy.  The origin in English of the -logy suffix lies with loanwords from the Ancient Greek, usually via Latin and French, where the suffix (-λογία) is an integral part of the word loaned (eg astrology from astrologia) since the sixteenth century.  French picked up -logie from the Latin -logia, from the Ancient Greek -λογία (-logía).  Within Greek, the suffix is an -ία (-ía) abstract from λόγος (lógos) (account, explanation, narrative), and that a verbal noun from λέγω (légō) (I say, speak, converse, tell a story).  In English the suffix became extraordinarily productive, used notably to form names of sciences or disciplines of study, analogous to the names traditionally borrowed from the Latin (eg astrology from astrologia; geology from geologia) and by the late eighteenth century, the practice (despite the disapproval of the pedants) extended to terms with no connection to Greek or Latin such as those building on French or German bases (eg insectology (1766) after the French insectologie; terminology (1801) after the German Terminologie).  Within a few decades of the intrusion of modern languages, combinations emerged using English terms (eg undergroundology (1820); hatology (1837)).  In this evolution, the development may be though similar to the latter-day proliferation of “-isms” (fascism; feminism et al).

A narrative is a story and it can run to thousands of pages or appear in a few words on a restaurant menu describing their fish & chips: “Ethically sourced, line-caught Atlantic cod, liberated from the frigid depths, encased in a whisper-light, effervescent golden shroud of our signature micro-foamed artisanal lager batter and served with hand-sliced, elongated potato batons fried to a crisp perfection in sustainably produced vegetable oil.”  In the age of every customer being able to post from their phone a rating and review of a restaurant, wisely, some institutions include a footnote along the lines: “These narratives are a guide and because natural products vary greatly, there will be variation.”  That’s an aspect of narratology, a process which is not the reading and interpretation of individual texts but an attempt to study the nature of “story” itself, as a concept and as a cultural practice or construct.

Crooked Hillary Clinton's book tour (2017).

Narratologists know that what to a narrator can be a narrative, a naratee will receive as spin.  In What Happened (2017), a work of a few dozen pages somehow padded out to a two-inch thick wad of over 500 using the “how to write an Amazon best-seller” template, crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013) explained who was to blame for her loss in the 2016 US presidential election (spoiler alert: it was everybody except her).

Presumably not comparing what they’re doing with making “fish & chips” sound like something expensive, politicians and their operatives will often describe something they offer as a “narrative” although were mush the same stuff to come from their opponents it might be dismissed as “spin”.  A political narrative functions as a cognitive schema intended to simplify complexity, motivate support and legitimizes particular courses of action.  The concept has a long history but in recent decades the emphasis has been on “simplicity”, something illustrated by comparing a narrative like The Federalist Papers (1878-1788; a collection of several dozen essays advocating the ratification of the Constitution of the United States) with how things are now done (mostly fleshed-out, three-word slogans endlessly repeated).  That descent doesn’t mean both are not narratives in that both are crafted interpretive frame rather than objective descriptions although the extent of the deception obviously had tended to change.  Political spin can also be a narrative and should be thought a parallel stream rather than a tributary; variations on a theme as it were.  Although the purpose may differ (a narrative a storyline intended to set and define and agenda whereas spin is a “damage control” story designed to re-shape perceptions.  Given that, a narrative can be thought of a “macro-management” and spin “micro-management”, both providing fine case-studies for narratologists.

Narratology is a noun; the noun plural is narratologies.  The derived forms are the noun antenarratology (the study of antenarratives and their interplay with narratives and stories), the noun antenarrative (the process by which a retrospective narrative is linked to a living story (the word unrelated to the noun antinarrative (a narrative, as of a play or novel, that deliberately avoids the typical conventions of the narrative, such as a coherent plot and resolution)), the noun  econarratology (an approach to literary criticism combining aspects of ecocriticism (the interdisciplinary study of literature and ecology) and narratology), the noun narratologist (one who (1) studies or (2) practices narratology), the adjective narratological (of or pertaining to narratology) and the adverb narratologically (in terms of narratology).  Remarkably (given the literary theory industry), the adjective narratologistic seems never to have appeared; it can be only a matter of time.

Tzvetan Todorov on the rooftop of Casa Milà (La Pedrera), Barcelona, Spain, November 2014.

Although not a lineal descendent, what Todorov did in Grammaire du Décaméron was in the tradition of Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) work, especially ποιητικῆς (Peri poietikês (De Poetica De Poe in the Latin and traditionally rendered in English as Poetics).  Poetics is notable as the earliest known study of the structure of Greek drama and remains the oldest known text written exclusively in the form of what now would be called literary theory.  To a modern audience the word “poetics” can mislead because the author’s focus was ποιητική (literally “the poetic art”, from ποιητής (poet, author, writer) and his scope encompassed verse drama (comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play), lyric poetry, and the epic.  For centuries, Poetics loomed over the Western understanding of Greek theatre; it was revered by scholars of the late Medieval period and especially the Renaissance and their influence endured.  As far as is known, the Greeks were the first of the tragedians and it’s through the surviving texts of Aristotle that later understandings were filtered but all of his conclusions were based only on the tragedies and such was his historic and intellectual authority that for centuries those theories came to be misapplied and misused, either by mapping them on to all forms of tragedy or using them as exclusionary, dismissing from the canon those works which couldn’t be made to fit his descriptions.  However, as well as being an invaluable historic text explain how Greek theatre handled mimesis (imitation of life, fiction, allegory etc), Poetics genuinely can be read as proto-critical theory and in it lies a framework for structuralism.

Paintings of Claude Lévi-Strauss: Portrait de Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1991 (1991), oil on panel by Bengt Lindström (1925-2008) (left) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (undated), oil on other by Cal Lekie (b 1999).

Narratology as a distinct fork of structuralism does pre-date Todorov’s use of the word in 1967, the seminal work in the parameters of the discipline by Russian folklorist & literary historian of the formalist school Vladimir Propp (1895-1970) who doubtlessly never anticipated “formalism” would come to be weaponized by comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953).  Indeed, by the late 1920s the school of formalism had become unfashionable (something which in the Soviet Union could be dangerous for authors) and their works essentially “disappeared” until being re-discovered by structuralists in the 1950s.  In the West, the idea of narratology as the “theory, discourse or critique of narrative or narration” owes a debt to Belgian-born French anthropologist & ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) who defined the structural analysis by narrative as its now understood.  His landmark text Anthropologie structurale (Structural Anthropology (1958)) suggested myths are variations on basic themes and that in their totality (which runs to thousands) their narratives contain certain constant, basic and universal structures by which any one myth can be explained.  In that way, myths (collectively) exist as a kind “language” which can be deconstructed into units or “mythemes” (by analogy with phonemes (an indivisible unit of sound in a given language)).  Although he didn’t pursue the notion of the comparison with mathematics, others did and that (inherently more segmented) field perhaps better illustrates “structural roles” within language in elements which, although individually standing as minimal contrastive units, can be combined or manipulated according to rules to produce meaningful expressions.  As in formal language theory, in mathematical logic, the smallest units are the primitive symbols of a language which can be quantifiers, variables, logical connectives, relation symbols, function symbols or punctuation.  Broken into the individual parts, these need have no (or only minimal) semantic meaning but gain much meaning when assembled or otherwise handled through syntactic combination governed by a recognized grammar (ie although conceptual primitives rather than “building blocks”, complex meaning can be attained by applying axioms and rules).

Azerbaijani folk art, following Layla and Majnun (1188), a narrative poem by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi (circa 1141–1209), printed in Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928) by Vladimir Propp.  In something of a Russian tradition, there are no known photographs of Propp smiling.

Levi-Strauss’s contribution was that myths can be read in relation to each other rather than as reflecting a particular version, thus the his concept of a kind of “grammar” (the set of relations lying beneath the narrative’s surface), thus the general principle of the “collective existence of myths”, independent of individual thought.  That was of course interesting but the startling aspect was the implication myths as related to other myths rather than truth and reality; they are, in a sense, “outside” decentred, and possess their own truth and logic which, when contemplated in a “traditional” way, may be judged neither truthful nor logical.  In that, Levi-Strauss applied something of the method of Propp who, in Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928), “reduced” all folk tales to seven “spheres of action” and 31 fixed elements or “functions” of narrative.  In Propp’s scheme, the function was the basic unit of the narrative “language’ and denoted or referred to the actions which constitute the narrative while the functions tend to follow a logical sequence.  The concept would have been familiar to engineers and shipbuilders but genuinely there was some novelty when applied to literature

Lithuanian semiotician A. J “Julien” Greimas (1917–1992) was among the many academics working in France who found Propp’s reductionism compelling and in Sémantique Structurale Recherche de méthode (Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method (1966)) he further atomized things, apparently seeking something like a “universal macro language”, a grammar of narrative which could be derived from a semantic analysis of sentence structure.  That was as ambitious as it sounds and to replace Propp’s “spheres of action” he suggested the “actant” (or role): a structural unit which is neither character or narrative.  To handle the mechanics of this approach he posited three pairs of binary oppositions which included six actants: subject/object; sender/receiver; helper/opponent.  The interactions of these binary oppositions served to account for or describe the three basic patterns which are to be found in narrative: (1) desire, search or aim (subject/object), (2) communication (sender/receiver) and (3) auxiliary support or hindrance (helper/opponent).

An eleven-volume first edition of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (published originally in seven (1913-1927); in the the original French it contained some 1.267 million words.  By comparison, Leo Tolstoy's (1828-1910) War and Peace (1898) ran ran (depending on the edition) to 560-590 thousand.

While Greimas didn’t explicitly claim his model successfully could be mapped on to “any and every” narrative, he does appear to have built his model as a general theory and while not all critics were convinced, it seems generally to have been acknowledged his toolbox would work on a much wider range than that of Propp which did break down as narrative complexity increased.  Another French literary theorist associated with the structural movement was Gérard Genette (1930–2018) and in choosing a case study for his model he described in Discours du récit est un essai de méthode (Narrative Discourse: An essay in method (1972)) he selected Marcel Proust’s (1871-1922) À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) (originally translated in English as “Remembrance of Things Past” and of late as “In Search of Lost Time”) which spans many volumes and narrative streams.  This time the critics seemed more convinced and seem to have concluded Genette’s approach was “more accessible” (these things are relative).  Noting the distinctions made in Russian Formalism between fabula (story) & syuzhet (plot), Genette distinguished between récit (the chronological sequence of a narrative’s events), historie (the sequence in which the event actually occurred and narration (the act of narrating itself); atop that framework, he built a complex discussion.  Being a French structuralist, he of course added to the field some new jargon to delight the academy, concluding there were three basic kinds of narrator: (1) the heterodiegetic' (where the narrator is absent from his own narrative), (2) the homodiegetic (the narrator is inside his narrative, as in a story told in the first person) and the autodiegetic (the narrator is inside the narrative and also the main character).  Genene’s approach was thus relational, envisaging narrative as a product or consequence of the interplay of its different components, meaning all and all aspects of narrative can be seen as dependent units (or, debatably, layers).

Narrator & protagonist: Lindsay Lohan as Cady Heron in Mean Girls (2004).  What in literary theory is known as homodiegetic narration is in film production usually called “subjective narration” or “first-person narration”, realized usually in a “voice-over narration by the protagonist”.

In formulating his three categories Genene nodded to Aristotle and Plato (circa 427-348 BC), the ancient worthies distinguishing three basic kinds of narrator: (1) the speaker or writer using their own voice, (2) (b) one who assumes the voice of another or others and (3) one who uses both their own voice and that of others.  These categories need not be exclusive for a story may begin in the voice of a narrator who may then introduce another narrator who proceeds to tell the story of characters who usually have their own voices and one or more of them may turn to narration.  Structurally (and even logically), there’s no reason why such a progression (or regression) cannot be infinite.  Although it’s obvious the term “narrate” denotes the person to whom a narrative is addressed, just because there is a narrative, it need not be axiomatic a narratee is present or ever existed, T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) in The Three Voices of Poetry (1953-1954) discerning three modes (voices) of poetic expression: (1) the poet speaking to himself, a personal, often obscure meditation, (2) the poet addressing an audience, aiming to teach, persuade, or amuse and (3) the poet creating a dramatic character, as in verse drama, something demanding complex communication between imagined characters.  Eliot argued that “good” poetry often was a blend of these voices and distinguishing them helps in understanding a poem's social and artistic purpose, beyond its mere self-expression.  However, Eliot did note that in “talking to himself”, the writer could also be “talking to nobody”.  He was at pains also to point out that when speaking in the third voice, the poet is saying not what he would say in his own person, but only what he can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character.  More than many, Eliot knew narrative was not always reliable but the techniques of narratology (and structuralism generally) exist for purposes other than determining truth.

Roland Barthes (2015), oil and acrylic on canvas by Benoit Erwann Boucherot (b 1983).

Layers in narrative structure were identified by the French philosopher & literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and his work had great appeal, something of an academic cult once surrounded him and, almost half a century after his death, he retains a following.  In Introduction à l'analyse structurale des récits (Introduction to Structural Analysis of Narrative (1966)), Barthes presumed a hierarchy of levels existed within narrative, suggesting that, up to a point, they can be discussed separately.  Narrative (at least for this purpose), he conceived as a “long sentence”, just as every constative (in linguistics, pertaining to an utterance relaying information and likely to be regarded as true or false) sentence can be the “rough outline” of a short narrative.  Barthes’ model was more building block-like in that he selects basic units of narrative (such as “function” & “index”, functions constituting a chain of acts while indices are a kind of metadata containing information about characters.

François Mitterrand (1984), acrylic on canvas by Bryan Organ (b 1935).

On X (formerly known as Twitter), one tweeter analysed the images on Barthes which exists and the indexed web, finding in 72% he was smoking a cigarette or cigar.  The statistical risks associated with routinely inhaling a known carcinogen have for decades been well-known but Barthes didn’t live long enter the age of “peak statistical risk”.  In February, 1980, having just taken lunch with François Mitterrand (1916–1996; President of France 1981-1995) in a restaurant on Paris’s Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, Barthes was using a zebra crossing on the Rue des Ecoles when knocked down by a laundry van; never recovering from his injuries, he died a month later.  The van’s driver was one Yvan Delahov, of Bulgarian nationality who tested positive for alcohol, but his reading of 0.6 fell below the legal maximum of 0.8; admitting he was late delivering his shirts, he claimed he’d not exceeded 60 km/h (37.3) mph.  At the time, Barthes was carrying no identity documents but was identified his colleague, the philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984).

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (first edition, 1957).

Finally must be acknowledged the contribution of Canadian literary critic & literary theorist Northrop Frye (1912–1991) whose Anatomy of Criticism (1957) is regarded still as one of the more “remarkable and original” (in the words of the English historian and critic J.A. Cuddon (1928-1966)) works of literary theory in the English-speaking world.  In the narrow technical sense, Frye's theory is not structuralist (something which doubtless burnished its reputation among many) but it certainly contains strands which can be seen as structuralist.  Frye positioned literature as an “autonomous verbal structure”' unrelated to anything beyond itself, a world which contains “life and reality in a system of verbal relationships”.  In this “self-contained literary universe”, there were four radical “mythoi” (plot forms and basic organizing structural principles) which corresponded to the four seasons of the natural order and constitute the four main genres of comedy romance, tragedy and satire.  For those non-postmodernists who still long for l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake), Frye’s mythois are there to be used and he proved their utility in a wide range of texts, including the Bible.

Viscacha or vizcacha

Viscacha or vizcacha (pronounced vi-skah-chuh)

A gregarious burrowing hystricomorph rodent (Lagostomus maximus), of the genera Lagidium and Lagostomus, within family Chinchillidae, about the size of a groundhog, inhabiting the pampas of Paraguay and Argentina and allied to the smaller chinchilla, also from the family Chinchillidae.  It’s known also at the mountain viscacha, a related rodent of the genus Lagidium (of the Andes), about the size of a squirrel, having rabbit-like ears and a squirrel-like tail.

1595–1605: From the Spanish viscacha from Quechua wisk’acha or Quechuan wiskácha.  The Spanish Quechua is from qhichwa (literally “temperate valley”).  With use depending on prevailing practice, both the spellings viscacha & vizcacha are used in various branches of biology and zoology, the older alternatives biscacha, biscacho & bizcacha now rare except in historic citation.  The noun plural is viscachas and the derived term is viscachera (plural viscacheras) which describes a warren inhabited by viscachas.

Vizcacha moments: Time for the world weary to take a nap; Lindsay Lohan (left) joining a viscacha (right) in a yawn.

The viscachas or vizcachas, of which there are five extant species, are rodents of the genera (Lagidium and Lagostomus) within the family Chinchillidae.  Native to South America, despite looking similar to rabbits or hares, they’re not related to either and are thus of interest to evolutionary biologists because they’re an example of convergent evolution.  When biologists first saw the viscacha they noted the question of heritage: mammals part of the Leporidae family (rabbit) or the Chinchillidae family (Chinchilla)?  Sharing the large ears, powerful hind legs, and small front paws, Vizcachas do bear a striking resemblance to the rabbit family but are distinguished by their long bushy tail, a trait unique to the Chinchillidae family.  Helpful for biologists as a species indicator, for the small rodent, it’s a marker of their state of mind, the tail is extended when distressed and curled when at ease.

Residing throughout southern and western South America, they tend to stay close to their underground burrows but possess surprising dexterity as climbers, able to jump from rock to rock so effortlessly and with such alacrity observers report their progress is hard to track with the naked eye.  They live in colonies that can be barely a dozen or number in the hundreds and have acquired an extensive repertoire of vocalizations used in social interactions.  Small they may be but Vizcachas are voluble and, belying their sleepy appearance, are noted for their gregarious behavior.

Up to two feet (.6 m) in length and weighing typically around 3.5 lbs (1.6 kg), Vizcachas are relatively large by rodent standards but are small compared to their carnivorous neighbors, the Puma and Culpeo Fox.  These two are fierce predators but the fast, agile Vizcacha has the advantage of inhabiting a mountainous environment littered with boulders and rocks which is difficult hunting ground so doesn’t suffer greatly from predation induced population decline.  The main threat is humans, less from the habitat loss which threatens some species but because of illegal hunting for their meat and fur, luxury items in some markets.

There are spiritual traditions in which exists the concept of the spirit animal, a creature the spirit of which is said to help guide or protect a person on a journey and the characteristics of which that person shares or embodies.  The apparently ancient concept is prominent in a number of indigenous (notably Native American) religions and cultures and was embraced by Pagan and Wiccan communities as recently as the 1990s and the term totem was sometimes used.  Totem was from the Native North American Ojibwe ᑑᑌᒼ or ᑑᑌᒻ (doodem) and referred to a sacred object, symbol or spirit and in a sense can be thought of as the equivalent of a flag (in the case of a tribe) or coat of arms (in the case of a clan).  The word totem became widely used by anthropologists when discussing cultural practices in many places (and not just in North America).  In academic use where it's a neutral descriptor this is usually not controversial but in general use it can be a form of cultural misappropriation.  In the West, the idea of spirit animals was picked up in the weird world of the new age, dolphins and other charismatic creatures predictably popular.  The concept turned out also to have appeal to some among the less spiritual who adopted the viscacha as their spirit animal because there is seemingly no living thing on earth with an appearance which so encapsulates the qualities of the melancholic, world-weariness and the need to take a nap.

Vizcacha moments: Jiang Zemin (1926–2022; General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (and thus paramount leader) 1989-2002 & President of the People's Republic of China (PRC) 1993-2003), yawning (left) and resting his eyes (right) during one of the less interesting speeches delivered as part of the otherwise riveting proceedings of the nineteenth congress of the CCP, Beijing, October 2017.  Western diplomats noted that, unusually among those in the senior echelon of the CCP, Mr Jiang could at times seem almost "exuberant" (a contrast to his two more dour successors) but in retirement he may have adopted the viscacha as his spirit animal, the creature quite suited to his more somnolent lifestyle.

The Ciano Diaries, 1939-1943.  Although a literary genre not always renowned for accuracy, historians regard Ciano's among the more reliable.

One can understand Mr Jiang taking a moment to rest his eyes during the congress.  After half a lifetime in politics, some of it in the era when “a fatal error” was not a figurative phrase, he’d probably heard it all before and could sense when he could “tune out” for a while.  Cases have often been documented of those for whom continued attention becomes just too much and one who caused more vizcacha moments than most was Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) whose repetitive and seemingly endless monologues (touching discursively on subjects such as art, architecture, dog breeding, artificial honey, the church, philosophy and vegetarianism) came to be dreaded by almost all compelled to sit and endure a session.  Count Galeazzo Ciano (1903–1944; Italian foreign minister 1936-1943 (and the son-in-law of Benito Mussolini who ordered his execution)) was, like us all, a flawed character but he had a diarist’s eye and in his entries left some of the most vivid recollections of the World War II era.  In the Austrian city of Salzburg in May, 1942 he attended a series of meetings along with Benito Mussolini (1883-1945; Duce (leader) & Prime-Minister of Italy 1922-1943), General Ugo Cavallero (1880–1943; Chief of the Italian General Staff 1940-1943) and the two senior figures from the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (the German military's high command)), Generalfeldmarschall (Field Marshal) Wilhelm Keitel (1882–1946; chief of OKW 1938-1945) and Generaloberst (Colonel General) Alfred Jodl (1890–1946, chief of the OKW operations staff 1939-1945), noting in his diary one “epic struggle”:

“Hitler talks, talks, talks, talks.  Mussolini suffers - he, who is in the habit of talking himself, and who, instead, practically has to keep quiet.  On the second day, after lunch, when everything had been said, Hitler talked uninterruptedly for an hour and forty minutes.  He omitted absolutely no argument: war and peace, religion and philosophy, art and history.  Mussolini automatically looked at his wrist watch, I had my mind on my own business, and only Cavallero, who is a phenomenon of servility, pretended he was listening in ecstasy, continually nodding his head in approval.  Those, however, who dreaded the ordeal less than we did were the Germans.  Poor people.  They have to take it every day, and I am certain there isn’t a gesture, a word, or a pause which they don’t know by heart.  General Jodl, after an epic struggle, finally went to sleep on the divan. Keitel was reeling, but he succeeded in keeping his head up.  He was too close to Hitler to let himself go as he would have liked to do.”

Things did not end well for those who attended the Salzburg meeting.  Some nine months after being dismissed from his military command, Cavallero (a confessed Freemason) was found dead in the garden of a hotel in Frascati, some 20 km (12 miles) south-east of Rome.  The case of death was a single gunshot and historians still can't be certain whether he committed suicide or was assassinated by the Italians or Germans, most favoring the latter.  After a prompting from Hitler, Ciano was executed on the orders of Mussolini (his father-in-law!) and the Duce himself was assassinated by Italian partisans.  Keitel and Jodl were tried before the IMT (International Mititary Tribunal in the first Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946) and, after being convicted on all four counts: (1) Conspiracy to wage aggressive war; (2) Waging aggressive war; (3) War crimes and (4) Crimes against humanity, both were sentenced to death and hanged.  Hitler, with his wife Eva (née Braun; 1912–1945) of a few hours, committed suicide with the tanks of the Red Army only a couple of blocks from the Berlin Führerbunker.

Deodand

Deodand (pronounced dee-uh-dand)

(1) In English law (prior to 1846), an animal or a personal chattel (the scope later extended) that, having been the immediate, accidental cause of the death of a human being, was forfeited to the Crown to be sold with the money gained applied originally to pious uses.

(2) In English law (prior to 1846), A fine paid to the Crown, equal to the value of a deodand, paid by the owner of the object and subsequently applied originally to pious uses.

1520–1530: From the late thirteenth century Anglo-French deodande, from the Medieval Latin deōdandum (a thing) to be given to God, the construct being the Classical Latin deō (to God (dative singular of deus (god)) + dand(um) to be given (neuter gerund of “dare to give”) from the primitive Indo-European root do- (to give).  Deus was from the primitive Indo-European root dyeu- (to shine and (in derivatives” “sky, heaven, god”).  Deodand is a noun; the noun plural is deodands.

That the doctrine of deodand was a medieval legal relic (the earliest recorded instances of use in England dating from the eleventh century) is not that remarkable because in that it was one of a number; what’s remarkable is it remained part of the common law until the mid-1800s.  The concept was first well documented in thirteenth century legal texts and historians have concluded this “semi-codification” reflected the earlier religious tradition which held an object which caused a death was “tainted” and should be removed from profane use.  In that, it inherited older notion from Roman civil law of noxae deditio (literally “surrender for the wrongdoing” and in English law written usually as “noxal surrender”), the construct being noxae (harm, injury, wrongdoing) + deditio (surrender, giving up).  Noxae deditio was a legal mechanism (in response to what would now be called a writ) with which the owner of an animal or slave (The Romans really did make a distinction) could avoid liability for delicts (wrongs) committed by them by surrendering the animal or slave to the injured party as an alternative to paying damages.  Intriguingly, at certain times, the doctrine was extended to sons (though apparently not daughters) in circumstances where an action was brought against a paterfamilias (the head of a household), on the basis he was held to be responsible for the son’s acts.  Literally, the son could be “handed over”, either until they attained statutory adulthood or for a specified period, depending on the damages assessed.  A similar idea was the Old English wergeld, from the Proto-West Germanic werageld, the construct being wer (man) +‎ ġield (payment).  It was a form of compensation paid by a transgressor to a victim, or (as “blood money) to the victim's family if the victim were dead (the quantum decided by social rank).  The concept is familiar in many societies and is sometimes formalized in Islamic systems using the Sharia Law where the victim’s family can be involved in determining not only how much blood money should be paid but also whether there should be a payment as an alternative to a death sentence.

What evolved in English common law was the rule under which, if a person was killed by an animal, vehicle, tool or other inanimate object, that object was declared a “deodand” to be forfeited to the Crown.  Reflecting the theological basis for this, notionally the surrender was “to God”, but quickly the standard practice became to appraise the value of the beast or object and levy a fine in that sum.  Although the documentary evidence is patchy, it appears originally the forfeited property (or cash from the fine) was devoted to pious uses such as alms (ie charity for the poor) or (as was the usual trend when a revenue stream was identified) ecclesiastical purposes such as building churches or stained glass windows.  Later (another trend being squabbles between church & state), deodans became a source of consolidated royal revenue.  The rationale was partly religious (atonement), partly superstitious (removing the dangerous object), and partly fiscal (Crown revenue).

The school bus scene: In Mean Girls (2004), had Regina George (Rachel McAdams (b 1978)) been killed by the school bus, the vehicle would have been declared a deodand and forfeited to the state although the usual practice was for its value to be assessed and an order for a payment in that sum to be served on the owner.

It was a simple concept but because there was much variation in the circumstances in which a deodand could be declared, the case law reveals inconsistencies in the verdicts.  Were someone to be killed by being run over by a horse-drawn cart, depending on this and that, the deodand might be found to be the cart and horse, the cart or horse alone or even just the particular wheel which crushed the unfortunate deceased.  One of the reasons for the variance is that in many instances the matter was determined not by a judge or magistrate working from precedent but (at coroners’ inquests) by juries which would both define the deodand and assess its value.  Given that, on what appear to be similar facts (a sailor who drowned after being struck by a mast), the deodand might be found to be the whole vessel or merely the mast.  In such cases, the issue was which object (or part of an object) should be held to be the “guilty instrument” and that was a process not simple to define, things made more difficult still by the opinions of jury members being so diverse and prone to be influenced by the identity of both the victim(s) and the owner of the object(s).

Aftermath of the explosion of a locomotive’s steam boiler.  If reduced to scrap by the event in which someone died, the jury could assess the value of the object in its "pre-event" condition.

By the eighteenth century, deodands had become largely devices of reference in that actual confiscation of objects was rare with an assessment of their monetary value to set the fine to be paid the standard practice.  Lawyers, politicians and (especially) those in commerce were critical of the system as irrational and even then there were traces of what would evolve as the modern notions of negligence and responsibility; critiques of deodand came both from what would now be described as “the right” and “the left”.  Those who owned the objects which became lethal instruments argued it was unfair they be punished so severely for what were, however tragic, “mere accidents”, pointing out the system discouraged industrial enterprise while those advocating for victims pointed out it was the state which gained the proceeds of the fines while victims’ families (many of which had lost their sole breadwinner) gained nothing.  What finally brought about the end of deodand was it being overtaken by the industrial age in which deaths came routinely to occur in clusters.  It was the multiple fatalities in marine and train accidents (infamously the Hull Tragedy (1838) and the Sonning Cutting Disaster (1840)) which attracted press coverage and public debate; in each case a “certificate of deodand” was attached to the machinery and, given the cavalier attitude of railway operators towards safety, it was hardly surprising coroners’ juries had little hesitation in declaring a locomotive and its rolling-stock a deodand.  That was obviously an expensive threat to capitalism and the lobbying by these vested interest resulted in parliament abolishing deodands by the Deodands Act 1846 (9 & 10 Vict. c.62).

Tallahassee Democrat, 13 October 1991.

The Daytona Yellow 1969 Chevrolet Corvette ZL1 coupé is the rarest and most valuable C3 Corvette (1968-1982) made, the “other ZL1” a Monaco Orange Roadster having a less pure pedigree (although at auction in January 2023 it realized US$3.14 million.  The yellow ZL1 last changed hands in October 1991 when it was sold in a government forfeiture auction for US$300,000 (then a lot of money) after being seized by the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency).

The Act however was part of a reform process and the early initiatives included the statutes which would by the mid twentieth century evolve into modern negligence and compensation law, the most significant of the early steps being the Fatal Accidents Act 1846 (Lord Campbell’s Act) which for the first time codified the idea of the “wrongful death claim” and permitted families to sue on this basis.  Although now largely forgotten, the 1846 act was a significant marker of the transition of English law from a medieval, semi-religious system of atonement to a modern, rationalized law of tort, product liability and compensation.

Echoes do however remain in certain legal doctrines of forfeiture (such as state seizures of the proceeds of crime) and the US practice of civil asset forfeiture does, at least in a philosophical sense, sometimes treat property as “guilty”.  The US law provides for property (cars, boats, money etc) connected with the commission of a crime to be seized by the state even if the owner, personally, wasn’t “guilty”; it’s a modern interpretation of the medieval view the object itself bore responsibility.  What this means is the legal rationale is structurally similar to what once was the religious justification: What once was “given to God” as expiation as atonement for sin translates now into deterrence as an expression of public policy (removing dangerous tools or preventing criminals from profiting).  As a kind of “legal fiction”, under both regimes the object is treated as if it possesses some kind of independent agency.  Intriguingly, as an administrative convenience, that idea survived in Admiralty Law under which vessels can in suits be “personified”, thus cases like “The SS <ship name> v. Cargo”, the model for civil asset forfeiture procedures in which the object is the defendant (such as “United States v. One 1969 Chevrolet Corvette”).

Building from Biblical tradition, the idea of independent agency had a curious history in the legal systems of Christendom and in Europe from the Middle Ages through the early modern period, animals could be put on trial (in both secular courts and ecclesiastical courts) for murder.  These trials followed legal procedures similar to those in which a human was the accused although, obviously, cross-examination was somewhat truncated.  The most commonly tried animals were pigs, simply because it wasn’t uncommon for them freely to roam in urban areas and attacks on babies and infants were frequent.  In Normandy in 1386, a sow was dressed in human clothing and publicly executed for killing a child while at Châlons in 1499, a sow and her six piglets were tried; the sow was executed for killing a man, while the piglets were acquitted due to “lack of evidence.”  Nor were the defendants exclusively porcine, bulls and horses occasionally executed for killing people and in ecclesiastical courts there are many records of rodents and insects being charged with damaging crops.  Presumably because every day of the week rodents and insects were killed just for “being guilty of being rodents and insects”, ceremonial executions wouldn’t have had much symbolic value so the usual result handed down was excommunication(!) or a demand (from God, as it were) the creatures vacate the fields in which they were consuming the crops.

Perpetually hungry weevils enjoying lunch in a granary.

Sometimes the ecclesiastical courts could be imaginative.  In the Italian region of Tyrol in 1713, the priests ordered the hungry weevils to leave the vineyards where they were such a plague but in compensation granted their occupation of a barren piece of land as an alternative habitat.  The reaction of the insects to the ruling would have been rather as King Cnut (better known as Canute, circa 990–1035; King of England 1016-1035) would have predicted but despite that, there’s no record of the weevils being held in contempt of court.  Regrettably, there's no generally accepted collective noun for weevils but weevilage (a portmanteau word, the blend being weevil + (vill)age) seems more compelling than Adelognatha (the scientific term referring to a group of Curculionidae (a family of weevils) characterized by a specific anatomical feature).  There was at least some theological basis for the ecclesiastical courts claiming entomological jurisdiction because in scripture it was written beasts are God’s creatures like all others and over them God granted dominion to man (Genesis 1:26-28 (King James Version of the Bible (KJV, 1611)):

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Bovine trial in progress, rendered as a line drawing by Vovsoft.

The principle was animals could be held accountable for causing harm and this was taken especially seriously when the harm caused was something like that of a crime a human might commit (like murder) and in the secular courts, if the victim was someone of some importance, the proceedings could involve defense lawyers, witnesses, and formal sentencing.  In the ecclesiastical courts, it was more symbolic or ritualistic: insects and rodents might be “summoned” but of course they never turned up so excommunication or other curses were invoked.  By the eighteenth century, the thinkers of the Enlightenment had prevailed and the idea of animals as moral agents was so ridiculed the practice of charging them was almost wholly abandoned although in certain circumstances an owner could be held liable for the damage they caused.  There was though the odd, rural holdout.  In Normandy in 1845 a sow was executed for killing a child (in the legal archives listed as the last “classic pig trial” (the last in the US held in New Hampshire in 1819)) and in Switzerland in 1906 a dog was sentenced to death for a similar offence (this believed to be Europe’s last “animal trial”).

Cosmopolitan

Cosmopolitan (pronounced koz-muh-pol-i-tn)

(1) One free from local, provincial, or national ideas, prejudices, or attachments; an internationalist.

(2) One with the characteristics of a cosmopolite.

(3) A cocktail made with vodka, cranberry juice, an orange-flavored liqueur, and lime juice.

(4) Sophisticated, urbane, worldly.

(5) Of plants and animals, wildly distributed species.

(6) The vanessa cardui butterfly.

(7) A moth of species Leucania loreyi.

1828:  An adoption in Modern English, borrowed from the French cosmopolite (citizen of the world), ultimately derived from the Ancient Greek kosmopolitēs (κοσμοπολίτης), the construct being kósmos (κόσμος) (world) + politēs (πολίτης) (citizen); word being modeled on metropolitan.  The US magazine Cosmopolitan was first published in 1886.  Derived forms (hyphenated and not) have been constructed as needed including noncosmopolitan, subcosmopolitan, ultracosmopolitan, fauxcosmopolitan, anticosmopolitan & protocosmopolitan.  Because cosmopolitanness is a spectrum condition, the comparative is “more cosmopolitan” and the superlative “most cosmopolitan”.  Cosmopolitan is a noun & adjective, cosmopolitanism & cosmopolitanness are nouns, cosmopolitanize is a verb, cosmopolitanist is an adjective (and plausibly a noun) and cosmopolitanly is an adverb; the noun plural is cosmopolitans.

An aspect of Soviet Cold War policy under comrade Stalin

The phrase rootless cosmopolitans was coined in the nineteenth century by Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1848), a Russian literary critic much concerned about Western influences on both Russian literature and society.  He applied it to writers he felt “…lacked Russian national character” but as a pejorative euphemism, it’s now an anti-Semitic slur and one most associated with domestic policy in the Soviet Union (USSR) between 1946 and Stalin's death in 1953.  Comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) liked the phrase and applied it to the Jews, a race of which he was always suspicious because he thought their lack of a homeland made them “mystical, intangible and other-worldly”.  Not a biological racist like Hitler and other rabid anti-Semites, Stalin’s enemies were those he perceived a threat; Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), Grigory Zinoviev (1883–1936) and Lev Kamenev (1883–1936) were disposed of not because they were Jewish but because Stalin thought they might threaten his hold on power although the point has been made that while it wasn’t because he was Jewish that Trotsky was murdered, many Jews would come to suffer because Stalin associated them with Trotsky.

Comrade Stalin signing death warrants.

It was the same with institutions.  He found disturbing the activities of Moscow’s Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) and did not approve them being accepted by Western governments as representing the USSR.  Further, he feared the JAC’s connections with foreign powers might create a conduit for infiltration by Western influences; well Stalin knew the consequences of people being given ideas; the campaign of 1946-1953 was thus more analogous with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) opposition to the Falun Gong rather than the pogroms of Tsarist times.  Authoritarian administrations don’t like independent organisations; politics needs to be monolithic and control absolute.  In a speech in Moscow in 1946, he described certain Jewish writers and intellectuals, as “rootless cosmopolitans” accusing them of a lack of patriotism, questioning their allegiance to the USSR.  This theme festered but it was the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, fostering as it did an increased self consciousness among Soviet Jews, combined with the Cold War which turned Stalin into a murderous anti-Semite.

Ten years after: rootless cosmopolitan comrade Trotsky (left) talking to comrade Stalin (right), Moscow, 1930 (left) and Mexican police showing the ice axe used by an assassin (sent by Stalin) to murder Trotsky, Mexico, 1940.

Before the formation of the state of Israel, Stalin's anti-Semitism was more a Russian mannerism than any sort of obsession.  For years after assuming absolute power in the USSR, he expressed no disquiet at the preponderance of Jews in the foreign ministry and it was only in 1939, needing a temporary diplomatic accommodation with Nazi Germany, that he acted.  Having replaced the Jewish Foreign Commissar, Maxim Litvinov (1876–1951; People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union 1930–1939) with Vyacheslav Molotov (1890-1986; USSR Minister of Foreign Affairs 1939-1949 & 1953-1956), he ordered him to purge the diplomatic corps of Jews, his memorable phrase being "clean out the synagogue".  Concerned the presence of Jews might be an obstacle to rapprochement with Hitler, Stalin had the purge effected with his usual efficiency: many were transferred to less conspicuous roles and others were arrested or shot.

Meeting of minds: Joachim von Ribbentrop (left), comrade Stalin (centre) and comrade Molotov (right), the Kremlin, 23 August 1939.

Negotiations began in the summer of 1939, concluding with German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946; Nazi foreign minister 1938-1945) leading a delegation to Moscow to meet with Molotov and Stalin.  It proved a remarkably friendly conference of political gangsters and agreement was soon reached, the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (usually called the Nazi-Soviet Pact or Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) being signed on 23 August.  The pact contained also a notorious secret protocol by which the two dictators agreed to a carve-up of Poland consequent upon the impending Nazi invasion and the line dividing Poland between the two was almost identical to the Curzon Line, a demarcation between the new Polish Republic created in the aftermath of World War I (1914-1918) and the emergent Soviet Union which had been proposed by Lord Curzon (1859–1925; UK foreign secretary 1919-1924).  At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, during the difficult negotiations over Polish borders, Molotov habitually referred to "the Curzon Line" and the UK Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden (1897–1977; thrice UK foreign secretary & prime minister 1955-1957), in a not untypically bitchy barb, observed it was more common practice to call it the “Molotov-Ribbentrop line”.  "Call it whatever you like" replied Stalin, "we still think it's fair and just".  Comrade Stalin rarely much cared to conceal the nature of the regime he crafted in his own image.  Whatever the motives of Stalin, rootless cosmopolitans has joined the code of dog-whistle politics, a part of the core demonology to label the Jews a malign race, a phrase in the tradition of "Christ killers", "Rothschild-Capitalists and Untermenschen (the sub-humans).  Despite that, there are always optimists, Jewish writer Vincent Brook (b 1946), suggesting the term could convey the positive, a suggestion the Jews possess an “adaptability and empathy for others”.  It’s not a view widely shared and rootless cosmopolitan remains an anti-Semitic trope although it's not unknown for Jews to use it ironically.

In August 1942, Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) got to enjoy the rare pleasure of a well lubricated supper in comrade Stalin's private apartment in the Kremlin and also there was comrade Molotov.  By the time the third bottle had been uncorked, the occasion had progressed to the exchange of anecdotes and in the spirit of the occasion, Churchill asked Molotov if it was true he’d delayed his return from a visit to the US so he could spend a night on the town in Manhattan.  Molotov’s expression became even more dour than usual but Stalin explained things by saying: “It was not to New York he went. He went to Chicago, where the other gangsters live.”  More than one astute observer of the human condition has concluded more can be learned about a man from his humor than his more profound pronouncements but there was much also to be learned when comrade Stalin was being candid.  At the Yalta Conference, Franklin Roosevelt (FDR, 1882–1945, US president 1933-1945) asked Stalin: “Who is the chap with the pince-nez?”.  “That’s Beria” [Lavrentiy Beria (1899–1953; head of the Soviet secret police 1938-1946)], Stalin replied, “He’s our Himmler [the Nazi Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945; Reichsführer SS 1929-1945)], and he’s not bad either.”

The Cosmopolitan cocktail

A brace of Cosmos.

The Cosmopolitan was based on the "Cosmopolitan 1934" cocktail, a mix from inter-war New York which included gin, Cointreau & and lemon juice, raspberry syrup lending the trademark pink hue.  The modern Cosmopolitan was also concocted in New York and seems to have appeared first in the Mid-1980s although it was appearances in the HBO (Home Box Office) television series Sex and the City (1998-2004) which made it as emblematic of a certain turn-of-the-millennium New York lifestyle as Manolo Blahnik’s stilettos but, the implications of that connotation aside, the enticing pink drink survived to remain a staple of cocktail lists.  Cosmopolitans can be made individually or as a batch to be poured from a pitcher; just multiply the ingredient count by however many are to be served.

Ingredients

2 oz (¼ cup) vodka (or citrus vodka according to taste)

½ ounce (1 tablespoon) triple sec, Cointreau (or Grand Marnier)

¾ oz (1½ tablespoons) cranberry juice

¼-½ ounce (1 ½-3 teaspoons) fresh lime juice

One 2-inch (50 mm) orange peel/twist

Instructions

(1) Add vodka, Cointreau, cranberry juice, and lime juice to a cocktail shaker filled with ice.

(2) Shake until well chilled.

(3) Strain into a chilled cocktail glass (classically a coupé or Martini glass).

(4) An orange or lemon twist is the traditional garnish.

Notes

(1) As a general principle, the higher the quality of the vodka, the better the Cosmopolitan, the lower priced sprits tending to taste rather more abrasive which for certain purposes can be good but doesn’t suit a “Cosmo”.

(2) The choice of unsweetened or sweetened cranberry juice (the latter sold sometimes as “cranberry juice cocktail”) is a matter of taste and if using the unsweetened most will prefer if a small splash of sugar syrup (or agave) is added because tartness isn’t associated with a Cosmopolitan.

(3) There is however a variant which is sometimes mixed deliberately to be tart.  That’s the “White Cosmo”, made by using white cranberry juice.

(4) Of the orange liqueur: Most mixologists recommend Cointreau but preference is wholly subjective and Cointreau & Grand Marnier variously are used, the consensus being Cointreau (a type of Triple Sec) is smoother, stronger and more complex.  Grand Marnier is also a type of Triple Sec, one combined with Cognac so the taste is richer, nutty and caramelized which some prefer.

(5) Of the lime juice: It really is worth the effort to cut and squeeze a fresh lime.  Packaged lime juice will work but something of the bite of the citrus always is lost in the processing, packaging, storage and transporting the stuff endures.

(6) Art of the orange peel: The use of the term “garnish” of suggests something which is merely decorative: visual bling and ultimately superfluous but because cocktails are designed to be sipped, as one lingers over ones’s Cosmopolitan, from the peel will come a faint orange aroma, adding to the experience as the fumes of a cognac enhance things; spirits and cocktails are “breathed in” as well as swallowed.

(7) Science of the orange peel: When peeling orange, do it over glass so the oil spurting (viewed close-up under high-magnification, it really is more spurt than spray) from the pores in the skin ends up in the drink.  For the ultimate effect, rub the rim of the glass with the peel, down a half-inch on the outside so lips can enjoy the sensation.

The Glossies

Lindsay Lohan, Cosmopolitan, various international editions: April, May & June, 2006.

Cosmopolitan Magazine was launched in 1886 as a family journal of fashion, household décor, cooking, and other domestic interests.  It survived in a crowded market but its publisher did not and within two years Cosmopolitan was taken over by another which added book reviews and serialized fiction to the content.  This attracted the specialist house founded by John Brisben Walker (1847-1931), which assumed control in 1889, expanding its circulation twenty-fold to become one of America’s most popular literary magazines.  The Hurst Corporation acquired the title in 1905, briefly adding yellow-journalism before settling on a format focused on short fiction, celebrities and public affairs.  The formula proved an enduring success, circulation reaching two million by 1940 and this was maintained until a decline began in the mid 1950s, general-interest magazines being squeezed out by specialist titles and the time-consuming steamroller of television.

It was the appointment in 1965 of Helen Gurley Brown (1922–2012) as editor which signalled Cosmopolitan’s shift to a magazine focused exclusively on an emerging and growing demographic with high disposable income: the young white women of the baby boom.  In what proved a perfect conjunction, a target market with (1) economic independence, (2) social freedom, (3) an embryonic feminist awareness and (4) the birth control pill, the magazine thrived, surviving even the rush of imitators its success spawned.  Gurley Brown had in 1962 published the best seller advice manual, Sex and the Single Girl and Cosmopolitan essentially, for decades, reproduced variations on the theme in a monthly, glossy package; clearly, there was a gap in the market.  The approach was a success but there was criticism.  Conservatives disliked the choices in photography and the ideas young women were receiving.  Feminists were divided, some approved but others thought the themes regressive, a retreat from the overtly political agenda of the early movement into something too focused on fun and fashion, reducing women yet again to objects seeking male approbation.

In a sense, Sex and the Single Girl was a product of pharmacological determinism, published as it was some two tears after the first oral contraceptive pill (still famously known as “the pill”) was approved for prescription use in the US by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration).  Without women gaining some degree of autonomous control over their fertility, the premise of the book would have been absurd because as well as arguing the importance of them being financially independent of men, she advocated pre-marital sex, if need be with multiple partners.  Women with their own money was an idea subversive enough but the notion of unrestrained promiscuity upset the priests and politicians even more and although in the era a number of books (including Rachel Carson’s (1907–1964) Silent Spring (1962), Anthony Burgess’s (1917–1993) A Clockwork Orange (1962), William S. Burroughs’ (1914-1997) Naked Lunch (1962), Edward Albee’s (1928–2016) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962), Betty Friedan’s (1921–2006) The Feminine Mystique (1963) and James Baldwin’s (1924–1987) Another Country (1963)) appeared which appalled many in the conservative establishment, there was something about S&theSG which seemed especially threatening.  The protests of course made it a succès de scandale (from the French and literally “success from scandal”) which is the literary or artistic term encapsulating the dictum Dr Joseph Goebbels (1897-1975; Nazi propaganda minister 1933-1945) followed when dealing with the press: “Let them abuse us and let them damn us but let them say something about us”, a variant of Oscar Wilde’s (1854–1900): “It doesn’t matter what people are saying about you as long as they’re saying something”.  Goebbels truly was evil but his point was well made because S&theSG sold by the million and spent more than a year on the New York Times best seller list.

Taylor Swift (b 1989), in purple on the cover of Cosmopolitan, December, 2014.

Still published in many international editions, Cosmopolitan Australia was one casualty of market forces, closed after a final printing in December 2018.  However, surprising many, Katarina Kroslakova (b 1978) in April 2024 announced her publishing house KK Press, in collaboration with New York-based Hearst Magazines International, would resume production of Cosmopolitan Australia as a bi-monthly and the first edition of the re-launched version was released in August, 2024.  Other than appearing in six issues per year rather than the traditional twelve, the format remained much the same, echoing Elle Australia which re-appeared on newsstands in March, ending a four-year hiatus.  Both revivals would as recently as 2023 have surprised industry analysts because the conventional, post-Covid wisdom was there existed in this segment few niches for time consuming and expensive titles in glossy print.

Amelia Dimoldenberg (b 1994) in polka-dots, on the cover of Cosmopolitan Australia April | May, 2025 (Issue 5, digital edition) which is downloadable file (96 MB in Adobe's PDF (portable document format) format.  Where digital titles have a history in print, the convention is to use the traditional cover format.  Even in the digital age, some legacy items have a genuine value to be exploited.

Ms Kroslakova clearly saw a viable business model and was quoted as saying print magazines are “the new social media” which was an interesting way of putting it but she explained the appeal by adding: “We need that 15 minutes to drop everything and actually have something tangible and beautiful in our hands to consume.  If we can present content which is multi-layered and deep and has authenticity and connection with the reader – that’s a really excellent starting point.”  She may have a point because in an age where screen-based content is intrinsically impermanent, the tactile pleasure of the traditional glossy may have genuine appeal, at least for an older readership who can remember the way things used to be done, something perhaps hinted at by her “15 minutes” reference, now regarded by many media analysts as a long-term connection given the apparent shortening of attention spans and after all, bound glossy pages are just another technology.  The revival of the print editions of Elle and Cosmopolitan will be an interesting experiment in a difficult economic environment which may get worse before it gets better.  Whether the novelty will attract enough of the "affluent readers" (what used to be called the A1, A2 & B1 demographic) to convince advertisers that it's a place to run their copy will likely decide the viability of the venture and while it's not impossible that will happen, Cosmopolitan is a couple of rungs down the ladder from the "prestige" titles (Vogue the classic mainstream example) which have maintained an advertising base. Cosmopolitan Australia offers a variety of subscription offers, the lowest unit cost available with a two-year, print + digital bundle (12 issues for Aus$105).

Lindsay Lohan on the cover of Cleo: March 2005 (left) and May 2009 (right).

Published in Australia between 1972-2016, Cleo was a monthly magazine targeted broadly at the demographic buying Cosmopolitan.  It was for decades successful and although there was some overlap in readership (and certainly advertising content), there was a perception there existed as distinct species “Cleo women” and “Cosmo women”.  Flicking through the glossy pages, husbands and boyfriends might have struggled to see much thematic variation although it’s likely they looked only at the pictures.  In the same vein, other than the paint, actual Cleo & Cosmo readers mostly probably wouldn’t have noticed much difference between Ford & Chevrolet V8s so it’s really a matter of where one’s interests lie (just because something is sexist stereotyping doesn’t mean it’s not true).  Had the men bothered to read the editorial content, they wouldn’t have needed training in textual deconstruction to detect both titles made much use of “cosmospeak”, a sub-dialect of English coined to describe the jargon, copy style and buzzwords characteristic of post 1950s Cosmopolitan magazine which contributed much to the language of non-academic “lipstick feminism”.  To summarize the market differentiation in women’s magazines, the industry joke was: “Cosmopolitan teaches you how to have an organism, Cleo teaches you how to fake an organism and the Women’s Weekly teaches you how to knit an organism”.  As a footnote, when in 1983 the Women’s Weekly changed from a weekly to monthly format, quickly rejected was the idea the title might be changed to “Women’s Monthly”.  In a charming coincidence, Helen Gurley Brown's mother was Cleo Fred (née Sisco; 1893–1980). 

Martyrdom of the Saints Cosmas and Damian, oil on canvas by Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro, circa 1395-1455), Musée du Louvre, Paris, France).  Fra was from the Italian frate (monk) and was a title for a Roman Catholic monk or friar (equivalent to Brother).

“Cleo” was a spunky two syllables but “Cosmopolitan” had a time-consuming five so almost universally it was used as “Cosmo”.  In Italy, Cosmo is a male given name and a variant of Cosimo, from the third century saint Cosmas who, with his brother Damian, was martyred in Syria during one of the many crackdowns on Christianity.  The name was from the Ancient Greek κόσμος (kósmos) (order, ordered universe), source of the now familiar “cosmos”.  Cosmas and Damian were Arab physicians who converted to Christianity and while ostensibly they suffered martyrdom for their faith, there may have been a financial motive because the brothers practiced much “free medicine”, not charging the poor for their “cures” so their services were understandably popular and thus a threat to the business model of the politically well-connected medical establishment.  The tension between medicine as some sort of social right and an industry run by corporations for profit has occasionally been suppressed but it’s never gone away, illustrated by the battles fought when the (literally) socialist post-war Labour government (1945-1951) established the UK’s NHS (National Health Service) and the (allegedly) socialist “Obamacare” (Affordable Care Act (ACA, 2010)) became law in the US.  By the twenty-first century, the medical establishment could no longer arrange decapitations of cut-price competitors threatening the profit margins but the conflicts remain, witness the freelancing of Luigi Mangione (1998).

The Cars

The presidential “parade convertible” 1950 Lincoln Cosmopolitan, parked outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC.

In the US, the Ford Motor Company (FoMoCo) produced the Lincoln Cosmopolitan between 1949-1954 but only in its first season was it the “top-of-the-range” model, “designation demotion” something which would over the decades become popular in Detroit.  Political legend has it Harry Truman (1884–1972; US president 1945-1953) personally selected Lincoln to supply the presidential car fleet as an act of revenge against General Motors (GM), the corporation having declined to provide him with cars to use during the 1948 election campaign.  It’s assumed GM’s management was reading the polls and assumed they’d need only to wait to wait for a call from president elect Thomas Dewey (1902–1971) but as things turned out, Mr Dewey never progressed beyond president-presumptive so GM didn’t get the commission, the keys to Cadillacs not returning to the Oval Office until the administration of Ronald Reagan (1911-2004; US president 1981-1989).  While it wouldn’t much have consoled the GM board, there was some of their technology in the Lincolns because, FoMoCo was compelled to buy heavy-duty Hydra-Matic transmissions from Cadillac, their own automatic gearbox not then ready for production.

The presidential “parade convertible” 1950 Lincoln Cosmopolitan with “Bubbletop” fitted.

The White House leased ten Lincoln Cosmopolitans which were modified by coach-builders who added features such as longer wheelbases and raised roof-lines.  Nine were full-enclosed limousines while one was an armoured “parade convertible” (a “Cabriolet D” in the Mercedes-Benz naming system) which was an impressive 20-odd feet (6 metres) in length.  The car used a large-displacement version (shared with Ford Trucks!) of the old Ford flathead V8 (first introduced in 1932) and, weighing a hefty 6,500 lb (2,900 kg), performance wasn’t sparkling but given its role was slowly to percolate along crowd-lined boulevards, it was “adequate”.  In 1954, during the administration of Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969; US president 1953-1961), the parade convertible was fitted with a Plexiglas roof (a material the president would have been familiar with because it was used on some World War II (1939-1945) aircraft and in this form the Lincoln came to share the aircrafts’ nickname: “Bubbletop”.  The “Bubbletop” Cosmopolitan remained in service in the White House fleet until 1967.

1968 Mazda Cosmo 110S (110S the export designation).

Although the Mazda corporation dates from 1920, it was another 40 years before it produced its first cars (one of the tiny 360 cm³ “kei cars” (a shortened form of kei-jidōsha, (軽自動車) (light vehicle)) so the appearance at the Tokyo Motor Show of the Cosmo Sport created quite an impression and that it was powered by a two-rotor Wankel rotary engine produced under licence from the German owners added to international interest.  Over two series, series production lasted from 1967 until 1972 but the intricate design was labour intensive to build and being expensive, demand was limited so in five years fewer than 1,200 were sold.  That makes it more of a rarity than a Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing (the W198, 1,400 of those built 1954-1957) and while Cosmo prices haven’t reached the level of the German car, it is a collectable and a number are now in museums and collections.  Mazda continued to use the Cosmo name until 1996 and while none of the subsequent models were as intriguing as the original, some versions of the JC Series Eunos Cosmo (1990–1996) enjoy the distinction of being the world’s only production car fitted with a three-rotor Wankel engine (the triple rotor 1969 Mercedes-Benz C111 was a Wankel test-bed). 

1975 Mazda Roadpacer (HJ model)

The Eunos Cosmo was not the only Mazda with a unique place in the troubled history of the Wankel engine, the Roadpacer (1975-1977) also a footnote.  Most Holden fans, as one-eyed as any, don’t have especially fond memories of the HJ (1974-1976) range; usually, all they’ll say is its face-lifted replacement (the HX (1976-1977)), was worse.  With its chassis not including the RTS (radial tuned suspension) which lent the successor HZ (1975-1980) such fine handling and with engines strangled by the crude plumbing used in the era to reduce emissions, driving the HJ or HX really wasn’t a rewarding experience (although the V8 versions retained some charm) so there might have been hope Mazda’s curious decision to use fit their smooth-running, two-rotor Wankel to the HJ Premier and sell it as their top-of-the range executive car might have transformed the thing.  That it did but the peaky, high-revving rotary was wholly unsuited to the relatively large, heavy car.  Despite producing less power and torque than even the anaemic 202 cubic inch (3.3 litre) Holden straight-six it replaced, so hard did it have to work to shift the weight that fuel consumption was worse even than when Holden fitted their hardly economical 308 cubic inch (5.0 litre) V8 for the home market.  Available only in Japan and sold officially between 1975-1977, fewer than eight-hundred were built, the company able to off-load the last of the HXs only in early 1980.  The only thing to which Mazda attached its name not mentioned in their corporate history, it's the skeleton in the Mazda closet and the company would prefer we forget the thing which it seems to think of as "our Edsel".  The Roadpacer did though provide one other footnote, being the only car built by General Motors (GM) ever sold with a Wankel engine.

Cosmopolitan Writing

In literary theory “cosmopolitan writing” is that concerned with universal themes and issues (political, social and such) as well (in a kind of parallel stream of study) as the attitudes and language involved in any discourse on these themes and issues.  In the post-war period, there were forces that popularized or even created some categories of cosmopolitan writing (migrants, refugees, indigenous peoples etc) and the process of decolonization saw the creation (or, in a sense, re-creation) of independent states that collectively came variously to be known (even if sometimes misleadingly) as the “Third World”, “Global South” or “Developing Economies”), a phenomenon which proved a fertile source of writers, especially novelists.  Amusingly, a sub-set of this new breed migrated to the erstwhile imperial centres, apparently content to live among their former colonial oppressors while extolling the superiority of the cultures they’d chosen to abandon; critiques apparently easier to write when one can drink water from the tap and the electricity supply is reliable, both deficiencies in their native lands at least partially attributable to the former imperial rulers.

The Welsh radical historian of the Caribbean, Gordon Lewis (1919-1991), described these diasporae (the big influx of non-white peoples from South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, the Far East & Latin America to the UK and North America) as “colonialism in reverse” although given the extent to which their novels became fashionable among critics and readers of the “book club” type, others preferred to suggest it was something like the “neo-colonizing” of London and New York publishing houses.  In different places these multi-ethnic microcosms have produced distinctive forms of literature including the two-inch thick “block-busting epic” narratives documenting the African American experience and the particular (sometimes verging on the semi-affectionate) take on the legacy of the British Raj by those who emarginated from India or the Pakistans (East & West).

Also produced was a wealth of what sometimes were classed as “novels of Empire”, works of fiction set in a the colonial world (not only the Raj).  For various reasons, not all remain canonical but examples include Rudyard Kipling’s (1865–1936) Kim (1901), Joseph Conrad’s (Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, 1857–1924) Heart of Darkness (1902), E. M. Forster’s (1879–1970) A Passage to India (1924), Graham Greene’s (1904-1991) The Heart of the Matter (1948), Anthony Burgess’s (1917–1993) The Malayan Trilogy (1972) and Paul Scott’s (1920–1978) Raj tetralogy (The Jewel in the Crown (1966); The Day of the Scorpion (1968); The Towers of Silence (1971); A Division of the Spoils (1975)).  Writers like Burgess and Greene were wordsmiths of rare skill and their works, even if dated, still effortlessly seduce but only partially represented the attitudes and way of life of the indigenous peoples whereas in his novels about his native Trinidad or A Bend in the River (1979 and set in a French-speaking Central African state) V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) provided the sort of insight the English or Europeans authors never could.  Both approaches were however genuinely within the rubric of cosmopolitan writing in that the term described literature which was an attempt to cross (or at least document) the boundaries and frontiers of nations and nationalism, the stress on the global nature of everyday life with depictions of individuals and societies used as devices to depict themes and concepts as globally representative.

Because the elements of fable, myth & parable tend to be cross-cultural, universal parallels & analogies are an identifiable feature of the school of cosmopolitan writing and those devices proved adaptable when the genre was adapted to the task of discussing the state and position of the immigrant in post-war and post-imperial Britain; despite having become a highly cosmopolitan place, this was for decades a neglected field despite the obvious attraction for novelists of the tales of immigrants and their difficulties in adjusting to an alien culture’; There were exceptions such as the works of Colin Maclnnes (1914-1976) of which City of Spades (1957) was the most notable.  More celebrated (for reasons political as well as literary) was Sir Salman Rushdie’s (b 1947) The Satanic Verses (1988) which was a particular take on British (more specifically “English”) cosmopolitanism with a particular emphasis on the South Asian Muslim community.  Because the text was deemed to have been a blasphemy (based on opprobrious remarks about the prophet Muhammad (circa 570-632)), a fatwa was issued by Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900-1989; Supreme Leader, Islamic Republic of Iran, 1979-1989), requiring that any Muslim so able should carry out a death sentence on the author.  After the death of the Imam, the fatwa was said to have “expired” but that was historically and theologically dubious and the threat remained, Sir Salman seriously was injured in an attempted murder in 2022.  That attack was of course a particular example of modern cosmopolitan life and that milieu may be compared with the world view(s) discussed in his earlier novels Midnight's Children (1981) and Shame (1983), the linking thread being the “in-between” state of the cosmopolitan, an individual endlessly in a state of “translation”, being of one culture yet existing in another and the rather clumsy term “transculturation” has been applied.  For some time, Indian-born Sir Salman has divided his time between London and New York so readers and critics should make of that what they will.

Cosmopolitan writing certainly was not a thing just of the old British Empire and one upsurge in literary output in the vein came in the 1960s to be dubbed the Boom latinoamericano (Latin American Boom); that described the works of a cluster of young Latin American novelists whose books came to be published (in a variety of translations in Europe and the English-speaking world.  The boom was most associated with Argentine Julio Cortázar (1914–1984), Mexican Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012), Peruvian Mario Vargas (1936–2025), Colombian Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) and Chilean-American Isabel Allende (b 1942); while clearly influenced by European and North American Modernism, they were also part of the Latin American Vanguardia movement and challenged the established conventions of the region’s literary traditions, the most significant contribution probably (and sometimes controversially) “magic realism”.  Vargas was perhaps the exemplar of applying the various techniques to create social and political simulacra which have cosmopolitan significance.  This was evident in La casa verde (The Green House, 1966) where the casa verde was a brothel (a motif about as global as things get) and Conversación en La Catedral (Conversation in The Cathedral, 1969), the symbolic location a sleazy bar called La Catedral; the irony may seem heavy-handed but the internal logic within the text was perfect.  His Márquez's Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967) was a little more subtle, the mythical town of Macando being a global and cosmopolitan urban image of decay, corruption, poverty and isolation, the various misfortunes which befall it and its inhabitants represented by biblical analogies.  

The archbishop and the abdication

Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang (1932), oil on canvas by Anglo-Hungarian society portraitist Philip Alexius László de Lombos (1869–1937 and known professionally as Philip de László).  Lang was christened Cosmo in honor of the local Laird (in Scotland, historically a feudal lord and latterly the “courtesy title” of an area’s leading land-owner, most prominent citizen etc).  The noun Laird was from the northern or Scottish Middle English lard & laverd (a variant of lord).

Scottish Anglican prelate Cosmo Gordon Lang (First Baron Lang of Lambeth, 1864–1945; Archbishop of York 1908–1928 & Archbishop of Canterbury 1928–1942 was a clergyman with uncompromising views about much.  This type was once common in pulpits and although those of his faction exist still in the the modern Church of England, fearing cancellation, they tend now to exchange views only behind closed doors.  He’d probably be today almost forgotten were it not for an incendiary broadcast he made (as Archbishop of Canterbury and thus spiritual head of the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican community) on BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) Radio on 13 December, 1936, two days after the abdication of Edward VIII (1894–1972; King of the UK & Emperor of India, January-December 1936, subsequently Duke of Windsor).  The address to the nation remains the most controversial public intervention made by a Church of England figure in the twentieth century, judged by many to be needlessly sanctimonious and distastefully personal, its political dimension the least objectionable aspect.

As a piece of text it did have a pleasingly medieval feel, opening with some memorable passages including: “From God he received a high and sacred trust. Yet by his own will he has abdicated” and “It is tragic that the sacred trust was not held with a firmer grip”.  That set the tone although when he said: “There has been much sympathy with the king in his great personal difficulty, and I do not forget how deeply he has touched the hearts of millions with his warm interest in the homes and lives of his people” his large audience may have thought some Christian charity did lurk in the Archbishop’s soul but quickly he let that moment pass, returning to his theme: “The causes which led to the king's decision are fully known to the nation.  But it has been made plain that the reigning sovereign of this country must be one whose private life and public conduct can be trusted to reflect the Christian ideal."

Unlike many modern Archbishops, there was no ambiguity about Lang so in his defense it can be argued he provided the Church with a moral clarity of greater certainty than anything which has in recent decades emanated from Lambeth Palace.  So there was that but by the 1930s the mood of opinion-makers in the UK had shifted and Lang’s text was seen as morally judgmental and the idea Edward VIII had failed not so much as a constitutional monarch but in his divine duty seemed archaic, few in the country framing things as the king’s personal failure before God.  What was clear was old Lang's point Edward’s relationship with a twice-divorced woman disqualified him morally and spiritually from being king which many critics within the church thought a bleak approach to a clergyman’s pastoral role.  In a sermon from the pulpit to the faithful it might have gone down well but as a national address, the tone was misplaced.  In self-imposed exile, privately Edward privately described the broadcast as “a vile and vindictive attack” and in his ghost-written memoirs (A King's Story (1951)), he accused the archbishop of “cruelty”.

Remembered also from the broadcast’s aftermath was a satirical verse printed in Punch by the novelist Gerald Bullett (1893–1958 (who published also under the pseudonym Sebastian Fox)).  Bullet’s included the words “how full of cant you are!”, using “cant” in the sense of “to speak in a manner speak in a hypocritical or insincere), an allusion to Lang signing his documents : “Cosmo Cantuar” (Cantuar the abbreviation for Cantuarium (Latin for Canterbury)):

“My Lord Archbishop, what a scold you are!
And when your man is down, how bold you are!
Of Christian charity how scant you are!
And, auld Lang swine, how full of cant you are!”