A report on G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, part II
The newly-minted Thursday arrived at the breakfast meeting with much
trepidation, caused principally by the enormous face of the enormous Sunday,
the president of the Council, whose unflinching gaze convinces Syme that he is
about to be outed as a spy. As it turns
out, it is Tuesday whose identity as a policeman is revealed. The President dismisses “Gogol”[1]
before adjourning the meeting and the man who was Tuesday escapes
unharmed. During the meeting, a plot to
assassinate the Czar and the President of France in Paris with a bomb had been
discussed and the coordination of which had been entrusted to Saturday.[2]
Syme’s adventure continues
and one by one, each of the other members of the General Anarchist Council are
revealed to be…undercover detectives.
First Friday (Professor de Worms/Wilks[3]),
then Saturday (Dr. Bull), followed by Wednesday (the Marquis de St-Eustache/Ratcliffe)
and finally Monday (the Secretary) reveal their true identities to each other
by showing their “blue cards”. Thursday,
Friday and Saturday go to France to stop Wednesday carrying out the
assassination, only to discover that the Marquis is one of them. The scene where the Marquis removes his
prosthetic mask is particularly hilarious and illustrates another prominent
theme in the novel – un/masking. Each
member of the Council – except for Thursday/Syme – removes a “mask” as he
reveals his identity as a policeman (though in Saturday’s case, it is simply a
matter of removing his spectacles[4]). In the course of the narrative, both Gregory
and “the Professor” share with Syme their experiences in “dressing up” in the
attempt to play various roles and impersonate other people (a little too
successfully, in “Professor de Worms’” case…).
Irony, imitation, (self-)deception, duplicity, suspicion – in this tale,
“truth” becomes an elusive thing as the characters “play their parts”, more
often than not labouring under misconceptions of reality (Is Thursday The
Matrix of the early 20th century?).
This is how 4 English
detectives came to be running through a forest in Calais – horrified in their
certainty that Sunday had plunged the world into chaos – pursued by a mob led
by Monday, who was the last member of the Council to realize that they were all
policemen. After returning to London,
and finding Tuesday, the 6 detectives head back to the hotel where they had
breakfasted three days previous to confront Sunday and obtain some answers.
After the Secretary unleashes
a torrent of questions, Sunday replies, “I will go so far as to rend the veil
of one mystery. If you want to know what
you are, you are a set of highly well-intentioned young jackasses”. In response to Syme’s question, “What are
you?”, the President replies, “…Since the beginning of the world all men have
hunted me like a wolf…all the churches, and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet…I have given
them a good run for their money, and I will now”. As Sunday leaps off of the balcony, he admits
to being the man in the dark room, who had made them all policemen. A wild cab chase through the streets of London
ensues, during which Sunday throws letters and parcels from his cab containing
nonsense messages and riddles for the detectives to decipher. At one point, Sunday leaps from his cab onto
a fire-engine, only to take leave of it at the Zoological Gardens,[5] where
he proceeds to mount an Elephant, and thus continue his flight from his
underlings. Finally, Sunday sails away
from his pursuers in a hot-air balloon (God is not so easy to apprehend).
As the detectives continue to
give chase on foot, they all share their thoughts on “the man in the dark
room”. Interestingly, those who remember
their first meeting with the mysterious man all have different impressions of
the experience. Not all remember a dark
room – indeed, one recalls the man taking the time to listen to all his
grievances – only to laugh at the end; another recalls having met him in broad
daylight. Summing up their impressions,
Syme says, “Each man of you finds Sunday quite different, yet each of you can
only find one thing to compare him to – the universe itself”. Syme continues,
“When I first saw
Sunday, I only saw his back; and when I saw his back, I knew he was the worst
man in the world…then the queer thing happened…
his face
frightened me…but not because it was brutal, not because it was evil…
it frightened me
because it was so beautiful, because it was so good…
when I saw him
from behind I was certain he was an animal, and when I saw him in front I knew
he was a god”…
“Shall I tell you
the secret of the whole world? It is
that we have only known the back of the world.
We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal…Cannot you see that
everything is stooping and hiding a face?
If we could only get round in front—"[6]
The story rushes towards its
climax as the 6 draggled detectives watch the balloon descend behind a row of
trees, are approached by a man with a staff who, in the name of “his master”,
ushers each of them into a cushioned carriage that conducts them to a house
“mellow in the mild light of sunset”.
Later, all six friends would agree that the place reminded them of their
boyhood. The adventurers are shown to
their rooms and are dressed in individually-tailored “costumes” for a “fancy
dress ball”. Syme is decked out as
“Thursday”, in a garment “on the front of which was emblazoned a large golden
sun, and which was splashed here and there with flaming stars and
crescents”. When Syme realizes that he
is to wear a sword as part of his costume, “it stirred a boyish dream”. Each of the 6 companions is adorned with
“vestments” which correspond to what was created on his “day” (cf. Gn. 1).[7] “These
disguises,” says the narrator, “did not disguise, but reveal”. There is a correlation between each man’s
costume and his temperament: “Syme seemed to be for the first time himself
and no one else”.[8] The anarchists-detectives-wild goose
chasers have recovered something of the simplicity of childhood, and are thus
prepared for the “revelations” to come.
The 6 dressed-up Days are led
into a “very large old English garden”, where “a vast carnival of people” are
dancing in motley dress. Syme seemed to
see every shape in Nature imitated in some crazy costume. On one side of this lawn was a green bank,
along which stood the thrones of the seven days. Once the six wanderers are seated, Sunday
assumes his place in the central chair; the 6 adventurers are indeed members of
a Council, a heavenly Council, before which all of creation dances in
celebration. Once the crowd of revelers
disperses, Sunday addresses the men on his flanks:
“Let us remain
together a little, we who have loved each other so sadly, and have fought so
long. I seem to remember only centuries
of heroic war, in which you were always heroes—epic on epic, iliad on iliad,
and you always brothers in arms…I sent you out to war. I sat in darkness…and to you I was only a
voice commanding valour and an unnatural virtue”.[9]
At this
point, each of the 6 heroes plays the part of Job[10],
and voices his complaints to the one in their midst who is “the Sabbath, the
peace of God”. Sunday listens but says
nothing. Some of the warriors, even in
the midst of their questionings, say that they are now happy. As Chesterton said concerning Job, “the
riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man”.[11] Finally, Gregory, “the real anarchist”/poet
of Saffron Park, presents himself before the thrones, as Saturday groggily
quotes this biblical line: “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to
present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them” (cf. Job
1.6). “You are right,” concedes Gregory,
“I am a destroyer. I would destroy the
world if I could”.[12] The would-be destroyer rails against “the
seven angels of heaven”: “you have had no troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that
rule all mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a
real agony such as I—”
In
response, Syme cries:
“I see everything
that there is. Why does each thing on
the earth war against each other thing?
Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world
itself?...So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this
blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this
man, ‘You lie!’ No agonies can be too
great to buy the right to say to this accuser, ‘We also have suffered’”.
Syme then
turns to Sunday and asks “have you ever suffered?” All goes black and as Syme’s consciousness
fades, he hears a voice “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?”[13]
(cf. Mt. 20.22). If suffering is the principal
argument against the existence of a good God, Syme says that universal
suffering is also a defense of the intelligibility of a good Creator – it is
part of the warp and woof of the world at this point in its story[14],
and even God himself descended from his throne into the depths of hell, having
drained the cup... Perceived from “the front”, God will be seen to have a face
wreathed with thorns, and we will know that He is good.[15]
Syme awakes
to find himself walking and talking with Gregory near Saffron Park. As the sun rises[16],
he arrives outside a fenced garden, where he sees Rosamond “cutting lilac, with
the great unconscious gravity of a girl”.[17] In a brilliant example of his childlike
delight in monotony, God has told the sun to “do it again”,[18]
as a new day breaks over the ever-being-created cosmos. The world is wild and beautiful, meant to be
loved rather than understood. Thursday
is an invitation to embrace life as a “romance” – i.e. a hazardous and glorious
adventure – aware that what may strike us as nonsensical is simply evidence of
God’s “immortal creative activity”[19]. As it was in the beginning, so it is now –
God creates out of chaos, and one day “the sea will be no more” (cf. Rev.
21.1).
[1] Nikolai
Gogol was a Russian novelist who wrote a short story called “The Nose” (1836),
about a man who wakes up one morning without his nose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nose_(Gogol_short_story).
[2] Uncanny
“foreshadowing” of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in
Sarajevo in 1914. The fact that it was
an act of anarchy which sparked (served as a pretext for) the greatest
mass-slaughter to date in the history of humanity lends a chilling realism to Thursday…
[3] Formerly
an actor by profession, who has stolen the identity of de Worms, a German
professor of nihilism!
[4] An object
designed to improve the vision of the wearer is used, in this case, to
obfuscate the vision of the beholder.
[5] Cf. Robert
Wild, The Tumbler of God: Chesterton as Mystic, Tacoma: Angelico Press,
2013 [2012], p. 184.
[6] Cf. Ibid.,
p. 101.
[7] Cf. Ibid., pp. 30-31.
[8] Cf. the
reductionist account of human nature offered by historian Yuval Noah Harari:
“both the ‘self’ and freedom are mythological chimeras borrowed from the fairy
tales of ancient times…the ‘self’ is a fictional story that the intricate
mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update, and rewrite. There is a storyteller in my mind that
explains who I am…my inner propaganda machine creates a personal myth with
prized memories and cherished traumas that often bear little resemblance to the
truth…Even though all these big stories are fictions generated by our own
minds, there is no reason for despair.
Reality still exists…The big question facing humans is… ‘how do we stop
suffering?’…the realest thing in the world is suffering”: 21 Lessons for the
21st Century, Penguin Random House Canada, 2019 [2018], pp.
306-13. What does Harari suggest one do
in the face of the reality of suffering?
His answer would not have surprised Chesterton – the subject of the last
chapter of his book is Eastern-style meditation. As Chesterton would say, “The riddles of God
are more satisfying than the solutions of man” (cf. n. 20 below).
[9] In
Chesterton’s 1905 work, Heretics, he said: “Life is always a novel…not
with the most gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest or silliest
story, and be certain that we were finishing it right. That is because a story has behind it, not
merely intellect which is partly mechanical, but will, which is in its essence
divine. The narrative writer can send
his hero to the gallows if he likes in the last chapter but one. He can do it by the same divine caprice
whereby he, the author, can go to the gallows himself, and to hell afterwards
if he chooses…But in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it
is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us
without our permission…A man has control over many things in his life;
he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there
would be so much hero that there would be no novel…to be born into this
earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a
romance”: The Three Apologies of G.K. Chesterton:
Heretics, Orthodoxy & The Everlasting Man, Mockingbird Press, 2018, p. 70
(emphasis mine).
[10] Cf. Robert
Wild, The Tumbler of God: Chesterton as Mystic, Tacoma: Angelico Press,
2013 [2012], pp. 177-92.
[11] “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. 99; it
seems to be a fundamental aspect of Chesterton’s thought that existence is a
“riddle” to which Christianity is the answer: cf. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy,
Nashville: B&H Academic, 2022 [1908], pp. 104-05. In Chesterton’s fiction, the protagonists
seem to become either detectives – whether they be (anti-modern) philosophers (Thursday)
or priests (Fr. Brown) – or the subject of investigation (Innocent Smith). For Chesterton, the world is fundamentally
and wonderfully mysterious, not absurdly so but creatively so.
[12] The
argument could be made that Thursday consists of a fictional exposition
of chapter 5 of Orthodoxy: “The Flag of the World”. The pessimist (Gregory) is thwarted by the optimists
(philosopher-detectives) and they are all of them thwarted by Sunday. However, a dilemma remains – how does one go
about thwarting an anarchist without resorting to chaos/violence? Interestingly, Syme was in the habit of
dressing like an anarchist when he was recruited into the New Detective
Corps. Monday confesses, “I was a fierce
fellow, and a trifle morbid from the first… (Sunday) chose me because I had all
the crazy look of a conspirator…there must have been something in me that
answered to the nerves of all these anarchic men”. All those who would fight hell are themselves
singed by its flames. This sheds light
on the President’s ploy of having an Anarchist Council composed of cops. After all, the only way to defeat evil is to
drink the cup… When Syme is recruited by
the policeman on the riverbank – the sunset atmosphere of which is positively
hellish – he is told that the nihilist conspirators desire for humanity to be
destroyed in a universal mass suicide; when he is later accepted into
the Corps by Sunday, the President tells Syme that he is a martyr; cf. G.K.
Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Nashville: B&H Academic, 2022 [1908], pp.
101-04.
[13] Cf. “The
Book of Job” (1907), p. 102.
[14] “God says
that if there is one fine thing about the world, as far as men are concerned,
it is that it cannot be explained”: “The Book of Job” (1907), p. 100.
[15] In his
1905 essay “Leviathan and the Hook”, Chesterton said “It is significant that in
the greatest religious poem existent, the Book of Job, the argument which
convinces the infidel is not a picture of the ordered beneficence of Creation;
but, on the contrary, a picture of the huge and undecipherable unreason of
it…Nonsense and faith are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that
to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out
Leviathan with a hook. The well-meaning
person who, by merely studying the logical side of things, has decided that
‘faith is nonsense’, does not know how truly he speaks; later it may come back
to him in the form that nonsense is faith”: quoted in Robert
Wild, The Tumbler of God: Chesterton as Mystic, Tacoma: Angelico Press,
2013 [2012], pp. 191-92.
[16] Cp. this
to the “sadder” dawn which had greeted the newly elected Thursday as he sailed
up the Thames to meet the other members of the Central Anarchist Council.
[17] Chesterton’s novels often end with man/woman in a garden; cf. The
Ball and the Cross and Manalive. Cp. Chesterton’s line in The
Everlasting Man: “without [an artist to tell its tale] the blind
unconscious beauty of the world stands in its garden like a headless statue”: The
Three Apologies of G.K. Chesterton: Heretics, Orthodoxy & The Everlasting
Man, Mockingbird Press, 2018 [1905, 1908, 1925], p. 289.
[19] Robert Wild, The Tumbler of God: Chesterton as Mystic,
Tacoma: Angelico Press, 2013 [2012], p. 20.
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