Classical and literary allusions

This arising from a reading of reference 1, a book written in 1944, a chance pick-me-up at the Raynes Park platform library, written as it happens by the brother of a one-time director general of MI5. A brother who scatters a lot of classical and literary allusions through his text and the present post is some thoughts about the value of such - and about Gemini's success (or otherwise) in unravelling them. Gemini being Google's AI/chat/assistant offering at reference 3 - an offering which I might say I much prefer to that from Microsoft, the irritatingly intrusive Copilot. I also think it is better.

Most of these allusions take the form of Latin quotes, but we also have Dante, Dickens and the Bible. No French and no German, this last perhaps because the war was on.

The book takes the form of a fictional memoir, which I have not yet finished, probably containing a fair amount of autobiographical material, of someone from the comfortable middle classes in the middle of the second world war. At the War Office in Whitehall for the duration. Proper notice of the book will follow in due course.

Despite regarding myself as fairly well educated and fairly well read, I was somewhat uncertain - not to say completely at sea - about most of the classical and literary allusions, both as to what they alluded to and as to why they had been included in the present book. What was the value add? So I checked some of them, a business which both intruded on reading the book in question and generated more interesting information that I could comfortably process on the fly. 

A sample of those checks follows. The white letters on black being the raw Gemini, the black letters on white being the archived version.

I start with King Charles' head which crops up on page 62 in conversation between the narrator and an old acquaintance, probably from his school days, with my simple interchange with Gemini reproduced above. I am told the phrase comes from Mr. Dick, an important character in the Dickens' novel 'David Copperfield' and might be loosely translated at preoccupation or obsession.

Now although I read a fair bit, I have never got on very well with Dickens, although I did spend quality time with 'Bleak House' a few months ago. I don't think I have ever read David Copperfield, so the present allusion was completely lost on me. No copy in the house, but I was able to turn up a pdf at Project Gutenberg which was searchable, and so better.

15 instances of 'King Charles', a quick perusal of some of which suggests that Gemini has got it more or less right. On the other hand, without getting to grips with Dickens, which is not going to happen, I do not feel I have really got hold of the phrase. Obsession or hobby-horse gives the general idea, but does not capture the character of Mr. Dick.

But at least it was easy enough to check Gemini's reponse.

Next stop, Jesus on the Cross on page 56. I think I might have vaguely known that 'Eloi, lama sabachthani' were more or less his last words before expiring on the Cross, but it was quicker and easier to ask Gemini than try and delve in my memory. And Gemini gets the biblical references right - Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34. And the quote from Psalm 22.

Interesting, in that the phrase is Aramaic, the everyday language of the time and place, while the psalm from which it is taken was written in Hebrew. But Gemini covers that off well enough when prompted. Perhaps Google has hoovered up a lot of Bible studies from the Bible belt of the US.

On a quick read, Psalm 22 is David trying to deal a deal with the deity: so, taking a few liberties, 'if you get me out of this terrible fix, I'll build you the biggest temple the world has ever seen'. I was also struck by the verse about the soldiers dividing up your clothes - while you are still around enough to watch. All a bit grim - and borrowed by all four New Testament accounts of the crucifixion - with St. John adding that his outer coat was made of a single piece of cloth, and not liking to cut it, they threw dice for it. I believe Hindus have special regard for single pieces of cloth, made on a single pass of the loom, too. While the much shorter Psalm 23 is the more pastoral 'The Lord is my Shepherd'.

Which is all very well, but I still don't see the point that Hollis is making in using the phrase in the way he does. Either the narrator is showing off his biblical knowledge or he is being a bit cheeky in comparing his problems to those of our Lord on the day he was crucified.

Next up a phrase in Latin from page 19, which I managed to spell slightly wrong. And which turns out to be a well known motto, associated with, but not tracked down in, Virgil. So if Gemini has got this right, it is really just a bit of private slang, known only to the initiated. Nothing terribly deep about it at all. 

But the fact that this snap is white rather than black illustrated one of the good features of Gemini. It seems to keep all your conversations and you can go back over them, should you want to, as I do on this occasion. What I can't do is fiddle with the size of the panel so that I get both the prompt and the reply on the same snip. But both are there.

Another one from the same page. Which leaves me wondering how this particular quote bears on the war against Hitler. Is it just another case of members of the club chucking these phrases about to show each other how clever they are?

And last but not least, on page 76, we have a quote from Dante about Beatrice. For a change, I try Microsoft's Copilot, getting the response top left. Which is near enough for me to turn the quote up, not from Canto XXIII but from Canto XXVII. And when I point this out to Copilot, mistakenly typing XXVIII for XXVII, I get the following grovel, just the sort of thing I quite often get from Gemini: ‘My apologies for the oversight! You are absolutely correct. The line you shared is indeed from Canto XXVIII of Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy.” Thank you for pointing that out! If you have any more literary inquiries or need further assistance, feel free to ask’. You can't really trust these things at all!

A different sort of difficulty is that we have three different translations above and Hollis offers a fourth. How on earth is one supposed to make anything useful of this when one knows more or less nothing about Dante, the language he wrote in or his Beatrice?

To round matters off, I thought I would ask Gemini about the book as a whole. First sentence right. Second sentence wrong, first because we have a memoir of one Peter Hartington-Smith, once a close friend of the by-then late Fossett, and second because it is not set in an English public school at all, although some of the material is drawn from having been at one. The summary of the author not too bad, although it misses out the first half of his life, including his conversion to Catholicism as a young man. The reception section is plausible, but could just as well have been made up from a few hints scattered around the Internet.

And when I corrected him, I got just the same guff as I got from Microsoft, as included above. Is it any more trustworthy? 

Conclusions

Looking this sort of stuff up as you go along is no substitute for a proper grounding in the classics and in literature, both from home and the near-foreign - that is to say the bigger countries of western Europe. Replacing proper classical baggage - to which I have few pretensions - with one or two word translations - is not the same as knowing the original on its home ground. 

Much the same could be said of all the Shakespearian allusions to be found in Agatha Christie, most of the value of which lies in the shared cultural background, in which many of the people reading her books had at least a nodding acquaintance with the Bard. The less attractive take would be that such allusions foster a false sense of belonging to some kind of literary free masonry; they stroke our vanity without adding much of real value.

Of course, it may be that Hollis is just poking fun at people who let fly all the time with these allusions. Although, even if that were the case, he would still need to be a fairly cultured chap himself to come up with all this stuff, which does, after all, more or less check out.

And it is also true that even when people who know their Shakespeare come to read him again, they quite often like the support of learned commentary. I quite like, for example, the support offered by the Arden editions. If you try and read stuff as old and complicated as Shakespeare, you are going to need a guide because his world and its language have moved on and you will have trouble on your own.

In sum, at the time of writing this, I think, as a writer, you are better laying off the allusions. If you have got something to say, say it in the public language of the realm, on the spot. Do not rely on pointers to the work of other authors, pointers which may or may not get lost in translation. But note also that one cannot carry this very far: you can only aspire to being completely self contained if you write at great length - the length of most of the standard texts used in universities being witness to this fact.

From where I associate to a problem which arises in the study of consciousness. If we suppose, which many who know do not, that the contents of consciousness at any one point in time are entirely derived from some small, dedicated, discrete patch of storage in the brain, a patch that has been put together for the occasion by some tricky process of compilation, that patch has to contain everything. Pointers to somewhere else or something else will not do.

A problem which the authors of the once fashionable computer language Algol-68 knew all about. They were clearly fascinated by the possibilities of long and complicated chains of reference. And when exactly was the right time to call in those chains and turn them into a real value - to a string of bytes that you could do real work with.

PS: the image at the top is from Amazon. My copy did not come with a dustjacket, but this one looks as if it might well have been the original. Focusing on the cod-rural rather than the urban part of the story.

References

Reference 1: Fossett’s memory – Christopher Hollis – 1944.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/05/songs.html. Provenance, with picture.

Reference 3: https://gemini.google.com/app?hl=en-GB.