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Saturday, August 30, 2025

Anagoge

Anagoge (pronounced an-uh-goh-jee)

(1) The spiritual or mystical interpretation of a word or passage beyond the literal, allegorical or moral sense (especially in Biblical criticism); A form of allegorical interpretation of Scripture that seeks hidden meanings regarding the future life.

(2) A spiritual interpretation or application of words (following the tradition with the Scriptures.

(3) In psychology, deriving from, pertaining to, or reflecting the moral or idealistic striving of the unconscious.

(4) The mystical interpretation or hidden sense of words.

1350-1400: From the Middle English anagoge, from the Late Latin anagōgē, from the Medieval Latin anagōgia & anagogicus from the Ancient Greek ἀναγωγή (anagōg) (elevation; an uplifting; spiritual or mystical enlightenment), the construct being an- (up) + agōg (feminine of agōgós) (leading), from anagein (to lead up, lift up), the construct being ana- (up) + agein (to lead, put in motion) from the primitive Indo-European root ag- (to drive, draw out or forth, move).  In theology, the adjective anagogical was from the early sixteenth century the more commonly used form, explaining the ways in which passages from Scripture had a “secondary, spiritual sense”.  The idea of a “spiritual, hidden, allegorical or mystical meaning” spread to literature and other fields where it operates as a special form of allegorical interpretation.  The alternative spelling is anagogy.  Anagoge is a noun, anagogic & anagogical are adjectives and anagogically is an adverb; the noun plural is anagoges.

Portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley at the Baths of Caracalla, depicted writing Prometheus Unbound, oil on canvas, painted posthumously Joseph Severn (1793–1879), Rome, Italy, 1845.

In literary analysis, there does seem a fondness for classifying methods into groups of fours.  Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) was an English novelist and poet but despite a background in literature and little else, through family connections he was in 1819 appointed an administrator in the East India Company (which “sort of” ran British India in the years before the Raj).  It was an example of the tradition of “amateurism” much admired by the British establishment, something which didn’t survive the harsher economic realities of the late twentieth century although some still affect the style.  Despite being untrained in such matters, his career with the company was long and successful so he must have had a flair for the business although his duties were not so onerous as to preclude him from continuing to write both original compositions and works of literary analysis.  In 1820 he published Four Ages of Poetry which was regarded as a “provocative” and although a serious critique, the tone was whimsical, poetry classified into four periods: iron, gold, silver & brass.  His friend Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) understood the satire but seems to have been appalled anyone would treat his art with such flippancy, quickly penning the retaliatory essay Defence of Poetry although the text was unfinished and remained unpublished until 1840, almost two decades after his death.  It’s remembered now for its final sentence: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.  With that, the few thousand souls on the planet who buy (and presumably read) poetry collections might concur but for the many more who can’t tell the difference between a masterpiece and trite doggerel, it may sound either a conceit or a threat.

Peacock not treating poets and their oeuvre which what they believed was due reverence left a mark and while Shelly died before he could finish his reply, more than a century later the English poet & academic literary I.A. Richards (1893–1979) in Science and Poetry (1926) still was moved to defend the poetic turf.  Although approvingly quoting the words of English poet (and what would now be called a “social commentator”) Matthew Arnold (1822–1888): “The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.  There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve.  Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it.  But for poetry the idea is everything.”, he nevertheless admitted “Extraordinary claims have often been made for poetry…  Tellingly too, he acknowledged those claims elicited from many “astonishment” and the “more representative modern view” of the future of poetry would be that it’s “nil”.  Modern readers could decide for themselves whether that was as bleak as Peacock’s conclusion: “A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community.  He lives in the days that are past... In whatever degree poetry is cultivated, it must necessarily be to the neglect of some branch of useful study and it is a lamentable thing to see minds, capable of better things, tunning to seed in the spacious indolence of these empty aimless mockeries of intellectual exertion.  Take that poets.

Peacock's second novel was the Regency-era three volume novel Melincourt (1817).  It was an ambitious work which explored issues as diverse as slavery, aspects of democracy and potential for currency destabilization inherent in the issue of paper money.  Another theme was the matter of differentiating between human beings and other animals, a central character being Sir Oran Haut-ton, an exquisitely mannered, musically gifted orangutan standing for election to the House of Commons.  The idea was thus of “an animal mimicking humanity” and the troubled English mathematician Dr Alan Turing (1912–1954) read Melincourt in 1948, some twelve months before he published a paper which included his “imitation game” (which came to be called the “Turing test”).  Turing was interested in “a machine mimicking humanity” and what the test involved was a subject reading the transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine, the object being to guess which interlocutor was the machine.  The test was for decades an element in AI (artificial intelligence) research and work on “natural language” computer interfaces but the field became a bit of a minefield because it was so littered with words like “feelings”, learning”, “thinking” and “consciousness”, the implications of which saw many a tangent followed.  Of course, by the 2020s the allegation bots like ChatGPT and character.ai have been suggesting their interlocutors commit suicide means it may be assumed that, at least for some subjects, the machine may have assumed a convincing human-like demeanour.  The next great step will be in the matter of thinking, feelings and consciousness when bio-computers are ready to be tested.  Bio-computers are speculative hybrids which combine what digital hardware is good at (storage, retrieval, computation etc) with a biological unit emulating a brain (good at thinking, imagining and, maybe, attaining self-awareness and thus consciousness).

Westminster Bridge And Abbey (1813), oil on canvas by William Daniell (1769–1837).

There’s more than one way to read Richards and it may be tacitly he accepted poetry had become something which would be enjoyed by an elite while others could spend their lives in ignorance of its charms, citing the sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 by William Wordsworth (1770–1850) as an experience for “the right kind of reader”.  So there it is: those who don’t enjoy poetry are the “wrong” kind of reader so to help the “right kind of reader”, Richards also came up with a foursome.  In Practical Criticism (1929) he listed the “four different meanings in a poem”: (1) the sense (what actually is said, (2) feeling (the writer's emotional attitude to what they have written), (3) tone (the writer's attitude towards their reader and (4) intention (the writer's purpose, the effect they seek to achieve).

A vision from Dante's InfernoThe Fifth Circle (1587) by Stradanus (1523-1605)), depicting Virgil and Dante on the River Styx in the fifth circle of Hell where the wrathful are for eternity condemned to splash around on the surface, fighting each other.  Helping the pair cross is the infernal ferryman Phlegyas.  Stradanus was one of the many names under which the Flemish artist Jan van der Straet painted, the others including Giovanni della Strada, Johannes della Strada, Giovanni Stradano, Johannes Stradano, Giovanni Stradanus, Johannes Stradanus, Jan van Straeten & Jan van Straten.

In literary theory, anagoge is one the classic “four levels of meaning” and while there is no consensus about the origins of the four, it’s clear there was an awareness of them manifest in the Middle Ages.  It was Dante (Dante Alighieri (circa 1265–1321)) in his Epistola a Cangrande (Epistle XIII to Cangrande della Scala (described usually as Epistle to Cangrande)) who most clearly explained the operation of the four.  Written in Latin sometime before 1343, the epistle was the author’s letter to his patron Cangrande della Scala (1291–1329), an Italian aristocrat and scion of the family which ruled Verona between 1308-1387; it was a kind of executive summary of the Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy (circa 1310-1321)) and an exposition of its structure.  Dante suggested the work could be analysed in four ways which he distinguished as (1) the literal or historical meaning, (2) the moral meaning, and (3) the allegorical meaning and (4) the anagogical.

Among scholars of Dante the epistle is controversial, not for the content but the matter of authenticity, not all agreeing it was the author who wrote the text, the academic factions dividing thus: (1) Dante wrote it all, (2) Dante wrote none of it and (3) Dante wrote the dedication to his patron but the rest of the text is from the hand of another and it’s left open whether that content reflected the thoughts of Dante as expressed to the mysterious scribe or it was wholly the creation of the “forger”.  Even AI (artificial intelligence) tools have been used (a textual analysis of the epistle, Divine Comedy and other material verified to have been written by Dante) and while the process produced a “probability index”, the findings seemed not to shift factional alignments.  Dante’s authorship is of course interesting but the historical significance of the “four levels of meaning” concept endures in literary theory regardless of the source.

First edition of The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan (1628–1688).

So the critics agreed the anagogical meaning of a text was its spiritual, hidden, or mystical meaning so anagoge (or anagogy) was a special form of allegorical interpretation.  Whether it should be thought a subset or fork of allegory did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries trouble some who argued the anagogue was a wholly separate layer of meaning if the subject was biblical or otherwise religious but merely a type of allegorical interpretation if applied to something secular; that’s a debate unlikely to be staged now.  However, given the apparent overlap between anagogical and allegorical, just which should be used may seem baffling, especially if the work to which the concept is being applied has a religious flavor.  There is in the Bible much allegory (something which seems sometimes lost on the latter-day literalists among the US Republican Party’s religious right-wing) but only some can be said truly to be anagogic and although the distinction can at the margins become blurred, that’s true also of other devotional literature.  The distinction is more easily observed of less abstract constructions such John Bunyan in The Pilgrim's Progress calling his protagonist “Christian”, the choice not merely a name but symbolic of the Christian soul’s journey to salvation, hinted at by the book’s full title being The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come.  For something to be judged anagogical, the text needs to look beyond the literal and moral senses to its ultimate, transcendent, or eschatological significance, illustrated by applying the four-fold technique (literal, moral, allegorical & anagogical) to the biblical description of Jerusalem which deconstructs as: (1) Literal (the actual physical city in history), (2) Allegorical (the Church), (3) Moral (the soul striving to find a path to God and (4) Anagogical (the heavenly Jerusalem, the final destiny of those humanity who kept the faith).  The point of the anagoge was thus one of ultimate destiny or divine fulfilment: heaven, salvation, forgiveness and eternal life.

That does not however mean the anagogical is of necessity teleological.  Teleology was from the New Latin teleologia a construct from the Ancient Greek τέλος (télos) (purpose; end, goal, result) genitive τέλεος (téleos) (end; entire, perfect, complete) + λόγος (lógos) (word, speech, discourse).  In philosophy, it was the study of final causes; the doctrine that final causes exist; the belief that certain phenomena are best explained in terms of purpose rather than cause (a moral theory that maintains that the rightness or wrongness of actions solely depends on their consequences is called a teleological theory).  The implications which could be found in that attracted those in fields as diverse as botany & zoology (interested in the idea purpose is a part of or is apparent in nature) and creationists (anxious to find evidence of design or purpose in nature and especially prevalent in the cult of ID (intelligent design), a doctrine which hold there is evidence of purpose or design in the universe and especially that this provides proof of the existence of a designer (ie how to refer to God without using the “G-word”)).  Rationalists (and even some who were somewhere on the nihilism spectrum) accepted the way the phrase was used in philosophy & biology but thought the rest weird.  It was fine to accept Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) point the eye exists for the purpose of allowing creatures to see or that it’s reasonable to build a theory like utilitarianism which judges actions by the outcomes or goals achieved but to suggest what is life of earth is an end, purpose, or goal which can be explained only as the work of a “creator” was ultimately just “making stuff up”.  So to reductionists (1) the allegorical was “means something else”, (2) the anagogical was “points upward to our ultimate spiritual destiny” and (3) the teleological was “explained by its end or purpose”.

Anagoge (pronounced an-uh-goh-jee) should not be confused with Anna Gogo (pronounced an-uh-goh-goh, left), a chartered engineer at Red Earth Engineering or Anna Go-Go (pronounced an-uh-goh-goh, right), persona of the proprietor of Anna's Go-Go Academy (a go-go dancing school).  Ms Go-Go is also a self-described “crazy cat lady” and the author of Cat Lady Manifesto (2024); she is believed to be high on J.D. Vance’s (b 1984; US vice president since 2025) enemies list.  Note the armchair's doilies, a cat lady favorite.

Anna & Gogomobil TS 250.

There is also Anna's Gogo which is "Anna explaining the Goggomobil TS 250 Coupé” (in Russian).  The TS 250 was a version of the Goggomobil two-door sedan, one of the many “microcars” that emerged in post-war Europe.  First displayed in 1954 by Bavaria-based Hans Glas GmbH of Dingolfing, the Goggomobil T 250 sedan was about as conventional in appearance as microcars got and its configuration (RWD (rear-wheel-drive) with a rear-mounted 245 cm3, air-cooled parallel twin engine) was not unusual, the economy of production made possible by adapting for four (sometime three) wheeled use mechanical components from motor-cycles.  Although rising prosperity, increased average road-speeds and safety concerns ultimately doomed the sector (in its original form although it survived in an urban niche and there’s been something of a modern revival), more than 200,000 of the little sedans (some with displacements a large as 392 cm3 which can be thought of (loosely) as the “muscle car” or “big block” version) manufactured, production finally ending in 1969.

Glas publictity shot for 1955 Gogomobil T 250 (left) and 1957 Googlemobile TS 250 Coupé (right).

The TS coupé appeared three years after the sedan and used the formula which for more than a century has proved profitable for the industry: Take the platform of a prosaic, mass-market car and drape atop a “more stylish and sporty” body, sometimes with (a little) more power and always a higher price.  The approach was in 1964 exemplified by the original Ford Mustang but the TS 250 was unusual in that to achieve the desired style, the coupé was actually longer than the sedan (3,035 mm (119.5 inches) vs 2,900 mm (114.2 inches) but describing the accommodation as “2+2” was more accurate to modern eyes than the “full four-seater” claim attached to the sedan although, in the era, it wasn’t unusual for families of five or more to be crammed inside.  Like the sedans, the coupés were offered in “muscle car spec” and on the Autobahns, if given long enough and without too many aboard, over 100 km/h (60 mph) was possible.

1959 Gogomobil Dart.

The platform also provided the underpinnings for the quirkiest of the breed, the Goggomobil Dart a fibreglass-bodied “microcar roadster” developed in Australia, with what seems now a remarkable 700-odd sold between 1959 to 1961.  Even when using the “big 392” (not to be confused with the 392 cubic inch (6.4 litre) Chrysler Hemi V8 which in the US had just ended production), it wasn’t “fast” but, weighing only 345 kg (761 lb), with a small frontal area and what was at the time industry-leading aerodynamic efficiency, it was lively enough in urban use and, on short circuits, some even appeared in competition.  The slippery lines however, while adding a little to top speed, hadn't benefited from wind-tunnel testing to ensure downforce was sufficient for high speed stability and even at around the 70 mph (110 km/h) the specially tuned versions could reach on race tracks, the drivers reported "front-end lift" and unpredictable directional stability.  All things considered, it was probably just as well the factory stopped at 392 cm3.  

Gogo Anime.

GogoAnime is an online streaming site for anime and related TV content (the distinction between the genres escapes most but it's well-established so must be real) which maintains a large library of anime content “ranging from classic titles to the latest releases” and for international audiences offers both “dubbed” (voice in various languages) and “subbed” (on-screen sub-titles in various languages) versions although there's a sub-set of “hard-core” aficionados for whom that will mean little because they know the best way to watch anime is with the sound muted.  Reviewers of GogoAnime praise its “intuitive and user-friendly interface” which makes streaming an effortless experience and it does appear the more disturbing anime content (much of which is available on physical media “off the shelf” in Japanese convenience stores) isn’t hosted.  The lawfulness of GogoAnime offering “free streaming” of commercially released product seems murky so gogo-scrapers should probably stream while they still can.

Although long in the toolbox of theologians & Biblical scholars, anagogical analysis became an element for critics of poetry and, as the post-modernists taught us, everything is text so it can be applied to anything.  One case-study popular in teaching was George Orwell’s (1903-1950) Animal Farm (1945) and that’s because there’s a interesting C&C (compare & contrast) exercise in working out the anagoge first in Orwell’s original book and then in the film versions distributed in post-war Europe, the fun in that being the film rights were purchased by the US CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) which prevailed upon the makers to alter the ending so the capitalist class didn’t look so bad.  By conventional four-way analysis, Animal Farm traditionally is broken down as (1) Literal meaning: A tale of the revolt of the animals against their human overlords, and the outcome of that revolt, (2) Moral meaning: Power tends to corrupt'; (c) Allegorical meaning: Major=comrade Lenin; Napoleon=comrade Stalin; Snowball=Comrade Trotsky; Jones=corrupt capitalist owners of the means of production & distribution.

The Canyons, Cinema Poster.

Although theologians and literary critics alike prefer to apply their analytical skills to material densely packed with obscure meanings and passages impenetrable to most, their techniques yield results with just about any text, even something as deliberately flat and affectless like The Canyons (Paul Schrader’s (b 1946) film of 2013 with a screenplay by Bret Easton Ellis (b 1964)) one intriguing aspect of which was naming a central character “Christian” although unlike Bunyan’s (1628–1688) worthy protagonist seeking salvation in The Pilgrim's Progress, Ellis’s creation was an opportunistic, nihilistic, manipulative sociopath.  The author seems never to have discussed any link between the two Christians, one on a path to salvation, the other mid-descent into a life of drugs, sex, and violence.  It may be it was just too mischievously tempting to borrow the name of one of Christendom’s exemplars of redemption and use it for so figure so totally amoral and certainly it was a fit with the writer’s bleak view of Hollywood.  Structurally, the parallels were striking, Bunyan’s Christian trekking from the City of Destruction to Celestial City whereas Ellis has his character not seeking salvation but remaining in Hollywood on his own path of destruction, affecting both those around him and ultimately him too.  In interviews, Ellis said he chose the name after reading the E. L. James (b 1963) novel Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) in which Christian Grey was a central character and The Canyons does share more contemporary cultural touch-points with the novel than with Bunyan’s work.

A Lindsay Lohan GIF from The Canyons.

(1) Literal or Historical Meaning (a trust-fund movie producer exercises control over his girlfriend while being entangled in transactional and destructive relationships with others in a decadent Hollywood; (2) Moral Meaning: Christian’s controlling, voyeuristic cruelty and his girlfriend’s compromises illustrate the corrosion of moral agency induced by narcissism and a superficial, consumerist culture); (3) Allegorical Meaning (The Canyons is built as a microcosm of what Hollywood is imagined to be, Christian representing the ruthless producer; Tara the girlfriend as the powerless talent unable to escape from a web of exploitation and other characters as collateral damage.  The shuttered cinemas in inter-cut shots serve as allegory for the death of cinema, replaced by shallow, formulaic “product”; the film ultimately less about the two-dimensional characters than the descent of a culture to a moral wasteland and (4) Anagogical Meaning (The film is an eschatology of cultural decay; art corrupted by money, leaving something alive but spiritually dead, something which some choose to map onto late-stage capitalism sustained by atomized, voyeuristic consumption with human life cast adrift from moral responsibility or even its recognition).  Of course for moral theologians accustomed to dancing on the heads of pins, an anagogical viewing of The Canyons might allow one to see some hint of something redemptive and the more optimistic might imagine it as a kind of warning of what may be rather than what is, encouraging us to resist in the hope of transcendence.  That’s quite a hope for a place depicted as owing something to what’s found in Dante’s nine circles.

Monday, April 28, 2025

Demimonde

Demimonde (pronounced dem-ee-mond or duh-mee-mawnd (French))

(1) That class of women existing beyond or on the margins of respectable society because of their indiscreet behavior or sexual promiscuity; typically they were mistresses but not courtesans and certainly not prostitutes (classic meaning from the mid-late nineteenth century).

(2) A group, the activities of which are ethically or legally questionable (later use).

(3) Any social group considered to be not wholly respectable (though vested sometimes with a certain edgy glamour).

(4) By extension, a member of such a class or group of persons.

1850–1855: From the French demi-monde, the construct being demi- (half) + monde (world (in the sense of “people”)), thus literally “half world” and translatable as something like “those really not ‘one of us’”.  It may have been coined by the French author and playwright Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) but certainly was popularized in his comedic play, Le Demi Monde (1855).  The hyphenated original from French (demi-monde) is sometimes used in English.  Demimonde is a noun; the noun plural is demimondes.

In English, demi dates from the mid-1300 and was from the Middle English demi (half, half-sized, partial), from the twelfth century Anglo-Norman demi (half), from the Vulgar Latin dimedius, from the Classical Latin dīmidius, the construct being dis- (apart; in two) + medius (middle).  The French demi (which English borrowed) was a combining form which existed as noun, adjective, and adverb.  The French monde was from the twelfth century Old French monde, a semi-learned form of the tenth century mont (etymologists trace the alteration to ensure the word was distinct from the unrelated mont (mountain)), from the Latin mundus which could mean (1) clean, pure; neat, nice, fine, elegant, sophisticated, decorated, adorned or (2) universe, world (especially the heavens and heavenly bodies with the sense “universe” being a calque of the Ancient Greek κόσμος (kósmos)).or mankind (as in "inhabitants of the earth").  In Medieval Latin it was used also the mean "century" and "group of people".  The Latin mundus may have been from the Etruscan munθ (order, kit, ornament) or the primitive Indo-European mhnd- (to adorn) which was cognate with the Old High German mandag (joyful, happy; dashing).  As well as the historically pejorative sense in demimonde, “demi” appeared in other loanwords from French meaning “half”  including demilunes (in the shape of a half-moon (semi-circular)) and demitasse (a small coffee cup of the type associated with the short black) and, on that model, is also prefixed to words of English origin (eg demigod).

Treading Water Perfume's Demimonde.  The Trending Water brand is described as “queer-owned” and the products are “hand crafted”.

Similar forms in French included beau monde (literally “beautiful world”, the plural being beaux mondes) which meant “the fashionable part of society (ie the “beautiful people”) and demi-mondaine (plural demimondaines) which was used in a variety of ways ranging from “women of equivocal reputation and standing in society” to “a sexually promiscuous woman” (ie, one of the demimonde).  Of lifestyles in some way disreputable (or at least unconventional), the terms “bohemian” and “demimonde” are often used although if one is to acknowledge the history of use, they should be differentiated despite both being associated with non-conformity.  Bohemianiam is best used of artistic and intellectual milieus where there’s a pursuit of the non-orthodox and often a rejection of societal norms (or they are at least ignored).  Demimonde, reflecting the specific origin as describing a social class of women financially able to sustain a lifestyle deemed morally dubious, retains to this day the hint of something disreputable although with the decline in the observation of such things, this is now more nuanced.  The gradual distancing of the word from its origins in the intricacies of defining the sexual morality of nineteenth century French women meant it became available to all and in her politely received novel The Last Thing He Wanted (1996), Joan Didion (1934-2021) explored the murky world of the back-channel deals in politics as it is practiced, a demimonde in which individuals are “trying to create a context for democracy” but may be “getting [their] hands a little dirty in the process.

The Canyons (2013), Lindsay Lohan's demimonde film.

It was Alexandre Dumas’ play Le Demi Monde (1855) which popularized the use but in earlier works, notably La Dame aux Camélias (1848), the character of the demi-mondaine is identifiable although in that work the doomed protagonist is more of a courtesan whereas as used during the second half of the century, the term really wasn’t applied to that class and was most associated with women on the margins of “respectable society” who lived lavishly thanks to wealthy patrons; subtly different from a courtesan.  The literal translation “half-world” implied an existence halfway between the “proper" world and that of the disreputable and that was the sense in the late Victorian era of the Belle Époque era: glamorous but morally ambiguous women, living on the margins of high society in a state of the tolerably scandalous.  Social mores and moral codes are of course fluid and in the first half of the twentieth century the meaning shifted to encompass some other marginalized or shadowy subcultures and ones which encompassed not only women and the association was no longer of necessity associated with sexual conduct.  Thus bohemian artists, the underground nightlife, those who live by gambling and later the counter-cultural movements all came to be described as demimonde.  What that meant was these was less of a meaning shift than an expansion, the word now applied to many groups existing in some way not wholly outside the mainstream but neither entirely in conformity.  There were thus many demimondes and that use persists to this day although the air of the glamorous depicted by Dumas is now often absent, some demimondes distinctly squalid and definitely disreputable.

By the late nineteenth century the notion of the demimonde had attracted the avant-garde and non-conformists, their circles of artists, writers and intellectuals in their own way vested with the edgy glamour of the type attached to the salons the well-kept mistresses conducted in parallel with those of the establishment ladies and it’s easy to draw parallels with Andy Warhol’s (1928–1987) Factory in the 1960s which was a magnet for New York’s non-mainstream “creatives” as well as the flotsam and jetsam of the art schools.  Sometimes too, there are echos, the demimonde of Berlin after the fall of the wall (1989) drawing comparisons with that described in the city during the last years the Weimar Republic (1918-1933).  So, the track of demimonde has been (1) mistresses, and women not quite respectable but with funds enough to defy conventions (nineteenth century), (2) the more subversive of the avant-garde added (early twentieth century), (3) bohemian subcultures, various “underground” scenes (mid-late twentieth century) and (4) reflecting the implication of post-modernity, anyone who likes the label.

Sarah Bernhardt (1876), oil on canvas by Georges Clairin (1843-1919).

The Parisian Belle Époque (beautiful era) was the time between the late 1800s and the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918).  For more than a century the period has been celebrated (accurately and not) in art and literature, the great paintings mush sought by collectors.  The Belle Époque is considered still one of Europe’s “golden ages” and although its charms would have escaped most of the working population, for the fortunate few it was a time of vitality and optimism and in some ways modernity’s finest hour until ended by the blast of war.  One trend was the way the cultural hegemony of the private salons of the networks of artists, aristocrats and intellectuals lost some its hold as discourse shifted to the more public (and publicized) realm of the stage, cabriolets and cafés, lending a new theatricality to society life and an essential part was the demimonde, those who operated in the swirling milieu yet were not quite an accepted part of it, their flouting of traditional mores and bourgeois politeness perhaps a little envied but not obviously embraced.  While it could be said to include drug-takers, gamblers and such, the classic exemplar in the spirit of Dumas’ demimonde was the demimondaine, those thrusting women who maintained their elevated (if not respectable) position by parlaying their attractiveness and availability to men willing to pay for the experience.  It usually wasn’t concubinage and certainly not prostitution (as understood) but it was clear les demimondaines belonged with the bohemians and artists of the avant-garde and they were known also as les grandes horizontals or mademoiselles les cocottes (hens) among other euphemisms but for youth and beauty much is tolerated if not forgiven and in all but the inner sanctums of the establishment, mostly there was peaceful co-existence.  Among the demimondaines were many actresses and dancers, a talent to entertain meaning transgressions might be overlooked or at least not much dwelt upon.  Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) benefited from that and her nickname monstre sacré (sacred monster) was gained by her enjoying a status which proved protective despite her life of ongoing controversy.  The Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) also found a niche as an amusing proto-celebrity with a good stock of one-liners and being part of the demimonde of the not quite respectable was integral to the appeal although being convicted of the abominable crime of buggery proved social suicide. 

Marthe de Florian (1898), oil on canvas by Italian-born society portraitist Giovanni Boldini (1842–1931).  The painter’s style of brushwork saw him dubbed le maître du swish (the master of swish) and he was another of Mademoiselle de Florian’s many lovers.

What tends now to be forgotten is that among the demimonde it was only figures like Bernhardt and Wilde who were well known outside of society gossip.  The once obscure Marthe de Florian (1864–1939) joined the “half worlders” by being, inter-alia, the one-time lover of four subsequent prime ministers of France (a reasonable achievement even given the churn rate in the office) although she took the name she adopted from a banker; nothing really matters except money.  When the details of her life emerged, they inspired the novel A Paris Apartment (2014) by US author Michelle Gable (b 1974), a theme of which was une demimondaine could be distinguished from a common prostitute because the former included (at least as a prelude) romance with the le grande acte (acts of intimacy) and ultimately some financial consideration.  That seems not a small difference and unlike the transactional prostitute, the implication was that to succeed in their specialized profession (debatably a calling), a demimondaine needed the skills associated with the Quai d'Orsay: tact, diplomacy, finesse, daring, low cunning and high charm.  It needed also devotion to the task because for Mlle de Florian to get where she did, she inspired “some three duels, an attempted suicide and at least one déniaisé (sexual initiation) of one lover’s eldest son”.

Friday, April 18, 2025

Accidie

Accidie (pronounced ak-si-dee)

Sloth; apathy, in the sense of both (1) a general listlessness and apathy and (2) spiritual torpor.

1200–1250: From the Middle English accidie, from the Anglo-Norman accidie, from the Old French accide & accidie, from the Medieval Latin accidia (an alteration of Late Latin acedia (sloth, torpor), from the Ancient Greek ἀκήδεια (akdeia) (indifference), the construct being ἀ- (a-) (in the sense of “not”) +‎ κῆδος (kêdos).  It was a doublet of acedia, still cited as an alternative form and replaced the Middle English accide.  The word was in active use between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries and was revived in the nineteenth as a literary adornment.  Accidie and acediast are nouns and acedious is an adjective; the noun plural is acediasts.

The alternative literary words include (1) ennui (a gripping listlessness or melancholia caused by boredom; depression), an unadapted borrowing from the French ennui, from the Old French enui (annoyance), from enuier (which in Modern French persists as ennuyer), from the Late Latin inodiō, from the Latin in odiō (hated) and a doublet of annoy, (2) weltschmerz, used as an alternative letter-case form of the German Weltschmerz (an apathetic or pessimistic view of life; depression concerning or discomfort with the human condition or state of the world; world-weariness), the construct being Welt (world) + Schmerz (physical ache, pain; emotional pain, heartache, sorrow) and coined by German Romantic writer Jean Paul (1763–1825) for his novel Selina (published posthumously in 1827) and (3) mal du siècle (apathy and world-weariness, involving pessimism towards the current state of the world, often along with nostalgia for the past (originally in the context of French Romanticism) (literally “disease of the century”) and coined by the French writer Alfred de Musset in his autobiographical novel La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century (1936)).

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December, 2011.

In Antiquity, the Greeks seemed to have refined accidie (which translated literally as being in “a state so inert as the be devoid of pain or care”) to be used of those who has become listless and no longer cared for their own lives or their society, thus distinguishing it from other conditions of melancholy which tended to be individually focused although in surviving medical texts, what’s being diagnosed was something like what might now be called “depression”.  Predictably, when adopted by moral theologians in Christian writing, it was depicted as a sin or at least a personal flaw.  Others wrote of it as a “demon” to be overcome and even a temptation placed by the Devil, one to which “young men who read poetry” seem to have been chronically prone.  It can be thought of as falling into the category of sloth, listed in the Medieval Latin tradition as of the seven deadly sins and appeared in Dante Alighieri’s (circa 1265–1321) Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy (circa 1310-1321)) not only as a sin worthy of damnation & eternal punishment but the very sin which led Dante to the edge of Hell.  In his unfinished Summa Theologiae (literally Summary of Theology), the Italian Dominican friar, philosopher & theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) noted accidie was a spiritual sorrow, induced by man’s flight from the Divine good, “…on account of the flesh utterly prevailing over the spirit”, the kind of despair which can culminate in the even greater sin of suicide.

Google ngram: Accidie 1800-2020.

Google ngram: Because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.

Etymologists note that between the mid sixteenth and mid nineteenth centuries the word acedia was close to extinct and whether it was the revival of interest in the Romantic poets (often a glum lot) or the increasing number of women becoming novelists, there was in the late 1800s a revival with the term, once the preserve of theologians, re-purposed as a decorative literary word; in the “terrible twentieth century” there was much scope for use and it appears in the writings of Ian Fleming (1908–1964), Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) and Samuel Beckett (1906-1989).  Intriguingly, in The Decline and Fall of Nokia (2014), Finnish-based expatriate US writer David J Cord introduced the concept of corporate acedia, citing the phenomenon as one of the causes of the collapse of Nokia's once dominant mobile device unit.

Joan Didion (1934-2021) and cigarette with her Daytona Yellow (OEM code 984) 1969 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray (on the C2 Corvette (1963-1967) and in 1968 the spelling had been "Sting Ray”).  The monochrome image was from a photo-session commissioned in 1970 by Life magazine and shot by staff photographer Julian Wasser (1933-2023), outside the house she was renting on Franklin Avenue in the Hollywood Hills.  To great acclaim, her first work of non-fiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), had just been published.

Writing mostly, in one way or another, about “feelings”, Joan Didion’s work appealed mostly to a female readership but when photographs were published of her posing with her bright yellow Corvette, among men presumably she gained some “street cred” although that might have evaporated had they learned it was later traded for a Volvo; adding insult to injury, it was a Volvo station wagon with all that implies.  She was later interviewed about the apparent incongruity between owner and machine and acknowledged the strangeness, commenting: “I very definitely remember buying the Stingray because it was a crazy thing to do.  I bought it in Hollywood.”  Craziness and Hollywood were then of course synonymous and a C3 Corvette (1968-1982) really was the ideal symbol of the America about which Ms Didion wrote, being loud, flashy, rendered in plastic and flawed yet underpinned by a solid, well-engineered foundation; the notion of the former detracting from the latter was theme in in her essays on the American experience.

A 1969 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray in Daytona Yellow.

Disillusioned, melancholic and clinical, Ms Didion’s literary oeuvre suited the moment because while obviously political it was also spiritual, a critique of what she called the “accidie” of the late 1960s, the moral torpor of those disappointed by what had followed the hope and optimism captured by “Camelot”, the White House of John Kennedy (JFK, 1917–1963; US president 1961-1963).  In retrospect Camelot was illusory but that of course made real the disillusionment of Lyndon Johnson (LBJ, 1908–1973; US president 1963-1969) leading the people not to a “great society” but deeper into Vietnam.  Her essays were in the style of the “new journalism” and sometimes compared with those of her contemporary Susan Sontag (1933-2004) but the two differed in method, tone, ideological orientation and, debatably, expectation if not purpose.

Susan Sontag (1962), monochrome image by Village Voice staff photographer Fred McDarrah (1926–2007).

Ms Didion’s used accidie to describe a society which the troubled 1960s seemed to have bludgeoned into a state not of acquiescence but indifference, a moral exhaustion.  Her writings were observational (and, as she admitted, sometimes “embellished” for didactic purposes), sceptical and cool, her conception of the failure of contemporary politics a matter of describing the disconnect between rhetoric and reality, understanding the language of theatre criticism was as appropriate as that of the lexicon of political science.  In a sense, 'twas ever thus but Ms Didion captured the imagination by illustrating just how far from the moorings of reality the political spectacle of myth-making had drifted.  Ms Sontag’s tone was declarative and distinctly authoritative (in the way of second-wave feminism), tending often to the polemic and the sense was she was writing in opposition to a collective immorality, not the kind of moral indifference Ms Didion detected.  Both were students of their nation’s cultural pathology but one seemed more a palliative care specialist tending a patient in their dying days while the other offered a diagnosis and suggested a cure which, while not something to enjoy: "would be good for them".  While Ms Didion distrusted ideological certainty, Ms Sontag engaged explicitly with “isms”, not in the sense of one writing of the history of ideas but as a protagonist, using language in an attempt to shape political consciousness, the former a kind of secular moral theologian mourning a loss of coherence in American life while the latter was passionate and wrote often with a strident urgency, never losing the sense that whatever her criticisms, things could be fixed and there was hope.  The irony of being an author to some degree afflicted by the very accide she described in others was not lost on Ms Didion.

Susan Sontag, circa 1971, photographed by Jim Cartier.  The pop-art portrait of comrade Chairman Mao Zedong (1893–1976; chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 1949-1976) was a print of Roy Lichtenstein's (1923–1997) Mao (1971) which had been used as the cover for US author Frederic Tuten's (b 1936) novel The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971).  Ms Sontag had written a most favourable review of the book and the framed print was reputedly a gift.

Joan Didion with Corvette, another image from Julian Wasser’s 1970 photo-shoot.  The staging in this one is for feminists to ponder.

While a stretch to say that in trading-in the Corvette for a Volvo station wagon, Ms Didion was tracking the nation which had moved from Kennedy to Richard Nixon (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974), it’s too tempting not to make.  Of the Corvette, she used the phrase: “I gave up on it”, later recounting: “the dealer was baffled” but denied the change was related to moving after eight years from Malibu to leafy, up-market suburban Brentwood.  While she “…needed a new car because with the Corvette something was always wrong…” she “…didn’t need a Volvo station wagon” although did concede: “Maybe it was the idea of moving into Brentwood.”  She should have persevered because as many an owner of a C3 Corvette understands, the faults and flaws are just part of the brutish charm.  Whether the car still exists isn't known; while Corvette's have a higher than average survival rate, their use on drag strips & race tracks as well as their attractiveness to males aged 17-25 has meant not a few suffered misadventure.

Joan Didion with Corvette, rendered as oil on canvas with yellow filter.

The configuration of her car seems not anywhere documented but a reasonable guess is it likely was ordered with the (base) 300 horsepower (hp) version (ZQ3) of the 350 cubic inch (5.7 litre) small-block V8, coupled with the Turbo-Hydramatic 400 (TH400) (M40) three-speed automatic transmission (the lighter TH350 wouldn't be used until 1976 by which time power outputs had fallen so much the robustness of the TH400 was no longer required).  When scanning the option list, although things like the side-mounted exhaust system (N14) or the 430 hp versions (the iron-block L88 & all aluminium ZL1, the power ratings of what were barely-disguised race car engines deliberately understated, the true output between 540-560 hp) of the 427 cubic inch (7.0 litre) big-block V8 would not have tempted Ms Didion, she may have ticked the box for the leather trim (available in six colors and the photos do suggest black (402 (but if vinyl the code was ZQ4)), air conditioning (C60), power steering (N40), power brakes (J50), power windows (A31) or an AM-FM radio (U69 and available also (at extra cost) with stereo (U79)).  Given she later traded-in the Corvette on a Volvo station wagon, presumably the speed warning indicator (U15) would have been thought superfluous but, living in Malibu, the alarm system (UA6) might have caught her eye.

An emo with 1977 Volvo 245 station wagon; if she had a Corvette to pose with she’d be smiling because Corvettes can make even emos happy.  This is Emma Myers (b 2002) as Pippa "Pip" Fitz-Amobi in A Good Girl's Guide to Murder (Netflix, 2024).

Quintessential symbols of France, Bridget Bardot (b 1934), Citroën La Déesse and a lit Gitanes.

The combination of a car, a woman with JBF and a cigarette continued to draw photographers even after smoking ceased to be glamorous and became a social crime.  First sold in 1910, Gitanes production in France survived two world wars, the Great Depression, Nazi occupation but the regime of Jacques Chirac (1932–2019; President of France 1995-2007) proved too much and, following the assault on tobacco by Brussels and Paris, in 2005 the factory in Lille was shuttered.  Although Gitanes (and the sister cigarette Gauloise) remain available in France, they are now shipped from Spain and while in most of the Western world fewer now smoke, Gitanes Blondes retain a cult following.

Emily Labowe with Mercedes-Benz 300 TD (S123), photographed by Kristin Gallegos.

An image like this illustrates why, even if no longer thought glamourous, smoking can still look sexy.  The 300 TD is finished in Manila Beige and for the W123 range Mercedes-Benz also offered the subdued Maple Yellow and the exuberant Sun Yellow which was as vivid as the Corvette's Daytona Yellow. 

No images seem to exist of Ms Didion with her Volvo station wagon but Laurel Canyon's Kristin Gallegos (b 1984) later followed Julian Wasser’s staging by photographing artist Emily Labowe (b 1993) with a Mercedes-Benz 300 TD station wagon and that once essential accessory: a cigarette.  One of the last of the “chrome Mercedes”, the W123 range was in production between 1975-1986 and the station wagon appeared in 1977 with the internal code S123 (only nerds use that and to the rest of the world they’re “W123 wagons”).  The designation was “T” (the very Germanic Tourismus und Transport (Touring and Transport)) or TD for the diesel-powered cars and the S123 was the company’s first station wagon to enter series production, previous such “long roof” models coming from coach-builders including many hearses & ambulances as well as station wagons.  The English still call station wagons "estates" (a clipping of "estate car") although a publication like Country Life probably still hankers after "shooting brake" and the most Prussian of the German style guides list the compound noun Kombinationskraftwagen which for decades has usually been clipped to the semi-formal Kombiwagen, (plural Kombiwagen or Kombiwägen) or, in general use: Kombi.

1978 Mercedes Benz 280 TE (S123).

That Mercedes-Benz in the mid-1970s decided their first station wagon in regular production should be a “T” (and understood as a Tourenwagen (touring car) rather than a “K” (ie Kombiwagen, the designation used by other manufacturers) reflected the prevailing German view of such cars.  Unlike the US where station wagons had long been emblematic of middle-class respectability (often as a family’s second car for the wife & mother) or England where the style enjoyed an association with the upper class HFS (huntin’, fishin’ & shootin’) set, to Germans the utilitarian long-roofs had a down-market image, bought only by those unable to afford separate vehicles for business & pleasure.  Coach-builders had of course used Mercedes-Benz saloons as the basis for station wagons, ambulances and hearses but these were always expensive and thus not tainted by association with thriftiness by necessity.  In their alphanumeric soup of model designations, Mercedes-Benz had previously used “K” to mean either Kompressor (supercharged) (eg 770 K) or Kurz  (short) (eg SSK) and other letters had also done double-duty, “L” standing for either Lang (long) (eg 500 SEL) or Licht (light) (eg SSKL) and “S” could mean both Super (300 SL) or Sports (300 SLR) so for the S123 “K” wasn’t avoided because of fears of confusing folk; it was just an image thing: "Don't mention the kombi".  That all changed in the 1980s when the Germans decided wagons were sexy after all, the high performance arms of Audi, BMW & Mercedes-Benz all producing some remarkably fast ones.   

Mercedes-Benz G4s: Gepäckwagen (baggage car, top left) & Funkauto (radio car, top right) and 300 Messwagen (bottom left) at speed on the test track, tethered to a W111 sedan (1959-1968, bottom right).

The factory did though over the decades build a handful including a brace of the three-axle G4s (W31, 1934-1939), one configured as a Gepäckwagen (baggage car), the other a Funkauto (radio car).  In 1960 there was also the Messwagen (measuring car), a kind of “rolling laboratory” from the era before technology allowed most testing to be emulated in software.  The capacious Messwagen was based on the W189 300 “Adenauer” (W186 & W189 1951-1962) and was then state of the art but by the 2020s, the capabilities of all the bulky equipment which filled the rear compartment could have been included in a single phone app.  Students of design will admire the mid-century modernism in the curve of the rear-side windows but might be surprised to learn the muscle car-like scoop on the roof is not an air-intake but an aperture housing ports for connecting the Messwagen’s electronic gear with the vehicle being monitored, the two closely driven in unison (often at high speed) on the test track while being linked with a few metres of cabling and although we now live in a wireless age, real nerds know often a cable is preferable, the old ways sometimes best.  The Messwagen remained in service until 1972 and is now on display at the factory’s museum in Stuttgart.   

1956 Mercedes-Benz 300c (W186 "Adenauer") Estate Car by Binz.

The factory's Messwagen wasn't the first use of the big W186/W189 for long-roof variants, hearses and ambulances having appeared in several European countries and there was at least one station wagon, proving consumption can be conspicuous yet still subtle, achieved usually if a bespoke creation is both expensive and functional.  The 300 saloons and four-door cabriolets were large, stately and beautifully built, the 1956 example pictured was delivered to a customer in the US who for whatever reason prized exclusivity over capacity or speed, all the major US manufacturers at the time offering station wagons able to accommodate more people and more more luggage while going much faster.  The 300 certainly would have delivered better fuel economy but that wouldn't have crossed the mind of the purchaser who would have been deterred from something like a Chrysler New Yorker or Ford Country Squire because they were, by comparison with her one-off, cheap and common whereas a custom built 300 “dripped money”; even to the uninformed they would obviously have been expensive and it was thus a classic "Veblen good" a quirk in the supply & demand curve of orthodox economics in that for a certain (ie the "1%") demographic demand for an item can increase as its price rises.  The car still exists, traded between collectors to be exhibited at concours d'elegance.

1957 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser (left), details of the apparatuses above the windscreen (centre) and the Breezeaway rear window lowered (right)

The 1957 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser was notable for (1) the truly memorable model name, (2) the “Breezeway" rear window which could be lowered and (3) having a truly bizarre assembly  of “features” above the windscreen.  There’s no suggestion that when fashioning the 300 Messwagen the engineers in Stuttgart were aware of the Turnpike Cruiser but had they looked, it could have provided an inspiration for the way access to ports in the roof could have been handled.  Unfortunately, the pair of “radio aerials” protruding from the pods at the top of the Mercury’s A-pillars were a mere affectation, a “jet-age” motif embellishing what were actually air-intakes.  They were though a harbinger of the way in which future “measuring vehicles” would be configured when various forms of wireless communication had advanced to the point at which a cable connection was no longer required.