A report on G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, part I
The Man who was Thursday[1] (1908)
This is a vertiginous
dream-narrative (subtitled “A Nightmare”) that reflects Chesterton’s
intellectual battle as a young-adult with Impressionism and Pessimism[2],
and ultimately turns out to be a theodicy inspired by the book of Job.
The story begins in the ambiguous
setting of “Saffron Park”, a suburb of west London. It was described, says the narrator, as an
artistic colony, “though it never in any definable way produced any art”. Indeed, the place was perfect, so long as the
first-time visitor “could regard it as a dream”. We are told that this “attractive unreality”
fell upon the neighbourhood about nightfall.
Mr. Lucian Gregory, one of the denizens of the village, is “not really a
poet; but surely he was a poem”; the old gentleman with the wild white beard
“was not really a philosopher, but he was the cause of philosophy in others”;
the scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head “had not discovered
anything new in biology, but what biological creature could he have discovered
more singular than himself?” “The place
had to be regarded not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but
finished work of art. A man who stepped
into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy”. As we shall see, this is a metaphysical
declaration on Chesterton’s part – though the characters of the novel take
themselves for artists (i.e. creators) or detectives, in reality, they are
creations of a mysterious cosmic artist.
They are assigned roles in life – which involve constantly pretending to
be someone else – and are made to believe that this ruse is for the good of
humanity but in the end, they have the impression of having been the butt of an
absurd joke. The characters control very
little of what happens to them; most of the time, they are at the mercy
of…circumstances, deception, someone pulling the strings from behind the
scenes.
Already the reader has been
initiated into the story’s secret – nothing is as it seems/no one is who they
seem (believe themselves) to be. Towards
the end of the tale, as four members of the General Council of the Anarchists
of Europe flee through a forest “full of shattered sunlight and shaken shadows”,
the protagonist is said to have found in that wood “the thing which the modern
people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final skepticism
which can find no floor to the universe”.[3] The plot is a disorienting one, as the
characters attempt to determine each other’s identities and try to comprehend
why they have been sent on their mission.
Ultimately, the question is, “Who can tell us who we are?”[4]
Part and parcel of this
dilemma is the issue of the kind of story the characters find themselves
in. Mid-way through the tale, during an
exchange between the protagonist and “the Professor”, the latter insists that
they are caught up in a tragedy to which the former responds, “Always be comic
in a tragedy”. One of the elements of
“comic relief” throughout the tale is the frequent (attempted) pulling of noses,
attempts which don’t always “come off”.
Back to Saffron Park. The “poet” Gregory’s physical appearance is
depicted as that of a “walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape”.[5] Gregory habitually holds court in his back
garden in the evenings, expounding his anarchist philosophy to a predominantly
female audience, which includes his sister Rosamond (who wonders just how
seriously she should take her brother’s revolutionary rhetoric). On one memorable evening, characterized by a
strange sunset which made it feel “like the end of the world”, the resident
anarchist is challenged by an outsider, a Mr. Gabriel Syme (protagonist =
Chesterton?), who claims to be “a poet of law, order and respectability”. Syme engages Gregory in a debate concerning
the nature of poetry, at the end of which Syme expresses his doubts as to the
seriousness of his opponent’s anarchism, suggesting that it is purely aesthetic. After a long talk with Rosamond, whom he
finds intoxicating, Syme – described as a sincere and humble man, whose lack of
self-consciousness leads him to talk too much – bids her farewell and steps out
onto the gathering darkness. At this
point, we are told that “what followed was so improbable, that it might well
have been a dream”.
As he leaves the Park, Syme
finds Gregory waiting for him under a street lamp. Gregory offers to prove the sincerity of his
anarchist convictions and – after obtaining an oath from Syme that he will not
reveal what he sees to the police – invites Syme to accompany him to a pub,
beneath which is the Headquarters of the London branch of the Central Anarchist
Council. Gregory explains that there are
7 members on the Council, named after the days of the week. “Thursday” has always been selected from the
London branch, and as fate would have it, the incumbent has recently died and
the election to replace him will be held that very evening, and Gregory is
confident of occupying the vacant post.
As they await the arrival of the delegates, Syme makes Gregory swear not
to reveal his secret. Once
Gregory agrees, Syme reveals his identity as a police detective. Before the vote is taken, Gregory,
intimidated by Syme’s presence, decides to give an extremely non-inflammatory
speech – in which he compares the anarchists to the early Christians who hid in
the catacombs – in the hopes that Syme will not take the anarchist threat seriously
and therefore not investigate the group further. However, Syme takes advantage of the
delegates’ disapproval of Gregory’s address to put himself forward as a
candidate for the post of Thursday, and to that effect, gives a rousing speech defending
an anarchist “hard-line”. In the end,
Gabriel Syme, double-agent of the Secret Police Service, is elected and departs
in a steamboat for a breakfast meeting of the Central Anarchist Council.
As the tug makes its way
along the Thames, the narrator relates how Syme became a policeman. The account of Syme’s upbringing has an
autobiographical flavour; he had been recruited into the New Detective Corps
after a period of poverty, during which he had composed countless
anti-anarchist articles for the newspapers, all this motivated by his having
witnessed a dynamite outrage first-hand.
The policeman who recruited him had told him that a department-head at
Scotland Yard believed that a purely intellectual conspiracy would soon
threaten the very existence of civilisation, and that a special corps of
policemen was required, composed of officers who are also philosophers. The most dangerous criminal now, it was
believed, is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. “Murderers respect human life”, his recruiter
had told him, “they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of life by the
sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But modern philosophers hate life itself,
their own as much as other people’s”.[6] The policeman had concluded, “They have but
two objects, to destroy first humanity and then themselves”. Syme had been taken into a dark room, where a
man of massive stature, who sat with his back to him, had commissioned Syme as
a martyr to the cause of saving the world from nihilism.
[1] G.K.
Chesterton, Chesterton Fiction Collection: The Napoleon of Notting Hill
(1904), The Man who was Thursday (1908), The Ball and the Cross (1909),
Manalive (1912), The Man who knew too Much (1922), pp. 103-202.
[2] Cf.
Chesterton’s 1912 novel Manalive, in which the protagonist, Innocent
Smith, compels his nihilistic university professor to confess what he truly
believes about the viability of existence; cf. Robert Wild, The Tumbler of
God: Chesterton as Mystic, Tacoma: Angelico Press, 2013 [2012], pp. 177-80.
[3] “The first
of the intellectual beauties of the book of Job is that it is all concerned
with this desire to know the actuality; the desire to know what is, and not merely
what seems”: “The Book of Job” (1907) in G.K. Chesterton, In Defense of
Sanity: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton, San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
2011, p. 96; cf. Chesterton’s remarks from The Everlasting Man: “We
accept the Creed; and the ground is solid under our feet and the road is open
before us. It does not imprison us in a
dream of destiny or a consciousness of the universal delusion…it makes the
incredible earth credible”: The Three Apologies of G.K. Chesterton:
Heretics, Orthodoxy & The Everlasting Man, Mockingbird Press, 2018, p.
385.
[4] As the
plot approaches its climax, Syme says “I think it is (a matter of) six men
going to ask one man what they mean”.
[5] Cf. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Nashville: B&H
Academic, 2022 [1908], p. 223, n. 8, where Chesterton makes reference to a
debate on Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1864, during which future
British PM Benjamin Disraeli quipped: “is man an ape or an angel? My lord, I am on the side of the
angels”. Here, Chesterton is offering a
critique of a spiritualism that was often wedded to Darwinism in the 19th
century, i.e. a naïve optimism that evolution would automatically result in
greater virtue, that human nature would always evolve from ape to angel; it may
just as well, Chesterton insists, go from ape to devil.
[6] The same
is said of burglars and bigamists; cf. Manalive.
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