Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

 

JE NE SUIS PAS CHARLIE

I will give you a brief resume of events that took place in France in January, not because you don’t already know them, but just so that I can establish exactly where I stand with regard to those events. Two Islamicist gunmen burst into the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and shot dead ten members of the magazine’s editorial team. In making their getaway they also shot dead two policemen. After a long chase, armed police cornered the gunmen in a factory. There was a firefight and the two gunmen were shot dead. Meanwhile another Islamicist gunman took hostages in a Jewish [Kosher] supermarket in Paris. Four hostages died in the gunman’s shootout with police before the gunman himself was shot dead. In a couple of days, then, nearly twenty people had died in violence initiated by Islamicists (please note carefully, I say “Islamicists”. I do not say “Muslims”.) Among other things, Charlie Hebdo was noted for cartoons ridiculing Mohammed and Islam.

So where do I stand on these events?

Obviously, I’m as appalled as you are by the massacre of the journalists (and the policemen and the hostages). Obviously I do not believe that people should be murdered for what they write or draw, any more than that they should be murdered for their race or beliefs. Like you, I could now produce a string of platitudes on the necessity of satire to offend and provoke; and on freedom of the press. I understand why the French police acted as they did and why there was such public outrage. There were condemnations of the gunmen’s actions ranging from Rotterdam’s “secular Muslim” mayor saying Muslims should “f**k off” if they don’t like satirical cartoons in the European press; to world leaders gathering in Paris and taking a photo-opportunity in solidarity with the French government and in support of “free speech”. (Yes. It was a “photo opportunity”. Despite the captions that appeared in some of the press, the world leaders – with no American representative present – in no way led any march or demonstration. As you may easily check, they were posed briefly on a closed street, swarming with security, with just a few hundred people behind them, far from the real demonstrations.)

I should add that many Muslims also publicly condemned the murders, often taking care to remind the wider public that one of the murdered policemen was Muslim. Right-wing pundits (in France, American and Britain) were quick to chastise Muslims for not condemning the attacks. Such pundits simply showed that they were not listening, as many Muslims did just that – and this is why I refer to the gunmen as Islamicists and not as Muslims.

Now I do not wish to get side-tracked into the hypocrisy of many people (especially political leaders) who claimed to be avid supporters of “free speech”. It’s easy enough to show how, in many states and in many ways, speech is (sometimes legitimately, sometimes illegitimately) circumscribed. Think carefully about such issues as slander, libel, incitement to riot, Holocaust-denial and the concept of “hate speech” before you suggest that speech is, or should be, completely “free”. But, while accepting the concept of “free speech” in a general sense, I do take great issue with the attempt to elevate Charlie Hebdo into the desirable standard of what “free speech” should be. There were massive demonstrations (literally millions strong) in Paris and elsewhere, adopting the slogan “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”)  - clearly modelled on “I am Spartacus” – to suggest their solidarity with the dead satirists. This is fully understandable in the immediate aftermath of the murders, just as is the fact that the “come-back” issue of Charlie Hebdo (produced in the offices of the centre-left newspaper Liberation) at once sold millions of copies, far exceeding any earlier print-run of the magazine.

But on longer reflection, I adopt the slogan “Je ne suis pas Charlie”. I believe the publication is at best a crass and puerile piece of deliberate provocation. Note very carefully, I am not in any way saying the editorial staff were “asking for it” or deserved to die. But I am saying that not everything freely expressed is to be applauded, endorsed or encouraged. And Charlie Hebdo was and is something conducted in the voice of the bullying playground loudmouth shouting scatological insults.

I am heartened to note that I am not the only person to argue this. In his op ed piece in the New York Times, “I Am Not Charlie Hebdo”, David Brooks noted the hypocrisy of the soi-disant defenders of  “free speech”, declaring:

“Public reaction to the attack in Paris has revealed that there are a lot of people who are quick to lionize those who offend the views of Islamist terrorists in France but who are a lot less tolerant toward those who offend their own views at home.” He goes on to list American campuses and newspapers that shut down debates on unpopular topics, or shut down unpopular voices. [Another op ed piece, “Je suis Charlie until je get scared”, noted how American newspapers such as the New York Times loudly supported Charlie Hebdo, but refused to run any of its cartoons as they were “offensive”.]

More to my point, however, Brooks also wrote of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonic methods:

“When you are 13, it seems daring and provocative to ‘épater la bourgeoisie,’ to stick a finger in the eye of authority, to ridicule other people’s religious beliefs….But after a while that seems puerile. Most of us move toward more complicated views of reality and more forgiving views of others. (Ridicule becomes less fun as you become more aware of your own frequent ridiculousness.) Most of us do try to show a modicum of respect for people of different creeds and faiths. We do try to open conversations with listening rather than insult.” He called for the ending of “speech codes” and more mature listening to the viewpoints of others.

More urgently, Mehdi Hasan, political director of the Huffington Post, wrote:

“Let's be clear: I agree there is no justification whatsoever for gunning down journalists or cartoonists. I disagree with your seeming view that the right to offend comes with no corresponding responsibility; and I do not believe that a right to offend automatically translates into a duty to offend.”

Hasan also remarked: “Lampooning racism by reproducing brazenly racist imagery is a pretty dubious satirical tactic.” In saying this, he was knowingly responding to the threadbare argument that overtly racist cartoons in Charlie Hebdo (of Muslims and Jews; of France’s first black justice minister Christiane Taubira, depicted as a banana-eating monkey) were really “ironic” and were ridiculing racists.

Naturally, there have been “replies” to Hasan, one from Dan Hodges in the Telegraph printed under the heading “This isn’t about free speech – it’s about the freedom to live in a secular society” and presenting the argument that in a secular society people must learn to grin and bear it if they are confronted with insulting rubbish. (To which I reply - quite so, but they are also entitled to point out that it is insulting rubbish.) There are also other lines of defence for Charlie Hebdo. One popular one is the claim that it is an “equal opportunity” offender – it doesn’t caricature and ridicule only Muslims, but it also caricatures and ridicules Jews and Catholics and all religious faiths. In the face of mounting (internet) awareness of the types of cartoons Charlie Hebdo routinely produces (bigoted, racist and sexually explicit), somebody posted a collection under the heading “The Charlie Hebdo cartoons nobody is showing you”, reproducing Charlie cartoons that ridiculed the military, the far right, national politicians and so forth. All good left-wing targets and therefore, apparently, “proof” that Charlie Hebdo is left-wing and progressive and entitled to attack whomsoever it will. This argument falls a little flat, however, if you look up the article by Olivier Cyran, translated as “Charlie Hebdo not racist? If you say so…”. Olivier Cyran is a former long-term cartoonist for Charlie Hebdo, who resigned in disgust some years ago. He wrote his piece for Le Monde in December 2013, over a year before the terrorist attacks. Basically he says that the magazine, despite its claims to be an “equal opportunity” offender of religions and cultures, really has gone over to a radical and deliberate baiting of Muslims

Which brings me at last to what I think is the most intellectually dishonest defence of Charlie Hebdo which I have yet read. It was written by the self-described left-wing and secularist pundit Olivier Tonneau in France’s Mediapart. Like many others, Tonneau tries to argue that Charlie Hebdo is mainly a left-wing, secularist publication and that it spends most of its time attacking Le Pen’s Right Wing National Front. Tonneau claims that Charlie Hebdo attacks all religions equally and argues “it fell well within the French tradition of satire – and was after all only intended for a French audience”.  Then his arguments become particularly foggy. Apparently “it is only by reading it or seeing it out of context that some cartoons appear as racist or homophobic”. Tonneau lectures us that “laicite” [secularism] “does not deny anybody the right to express their religious beliefs, but it aims to found a society on a political contract that transcends religious beliefs which, as a result, become mere private affairs.”

Alarm bells ring for me at this point. My experience tells me that secularists who say religious beliefs should become “mere private affairs” are really saying that they don’t like religions contesting their views publicly – and the word “mere” designates something of little importance. In other words, it’s a recipe for banning public expressions of religious belief and hence violating the very principle of free speech and expression which secularists claim to hold dear. Then there is the schtick about cartoons only “appearing” racist and homophobic because (silly old imperceptive us!), we’re not seeing them in “context”. Frankly, the cartoons either are or are not racist and homophobic, and the defence of “context”, like the defence of “irony”, doesn’t alter this fact. But most interesting is when Olivier Tonneau proclaims – probably revealing more than he intended to – that the magazine is “intended for a French audience”. Well yes indeed it is – an audience of white French men and women who enjoy belittling the Muslims, Jews and Christians in their midst. For at his point we have to ask what feelings the (cover) cartoons are intended to produce and who would most enjoy them and whom they are most intended to affect.

Ask yourself seriously how much the cover cartoons of Charlie Hebdo tend to promote reasoned and just debate. If it were only radical Islamic fundamentalists the cartoonists wished to attack, and if it is now insisted by sophists like Olivier Tonneau that Islam in general was not their target, then why did they draw cartoons that would be equally offensive to radical zealots and to millions of peaceable Muslims? (Though, of course, those peaceable Muslims would not resort to murder to register their discontent.) In what way do depictions of Mohammed sodomising a goat, or of pregnant Muslim women cheating the French welfare system [both of which have graced Charlie Hebdo covers], contribute to a reasoned public conversation on radicalism or terrorism? What’s the intended effect of an Easter issue which has a depiction of Jesus at the Last Supper with the caption “Le diner des cons” [The Dinner of Assholes – the name of a French comic movie]? For that matter, why have another cover depicting a group of cardinals in the Vatican dancing in a circle as they sodomise one another? Is the intention to make Catholics (or other Christians) say “Gosh, what a reasonable argument! How wrong I have been in my beliefs all these years!” Of course not. Like the pornographic propaganda that was produced in wartime, the aim is to titillate readers with smut and reinforce their prejudices. I’ll leave you to decide what is intended by the magazine’s habitual depiction of Jews as doddery old fools proclaiming that they are immune to criticism (another Charlie Hebdo cover)

Please let’s not have high-sounding phrases about satire always being provocative and always giving offence. The best satire gets us to look at ourselves, our habits and our society, in order to highlight what is wrong with them. The cartoons of Charlie Hebdo are designed to make its readers look down on others, feel superior to others, condemn and ridicule others, without any reasoning involved.

Accepting the production of crass, puerile and provocative cartoons may be one of the tests of “free speech”. But another is my right to say that they are indeed crass, puerile and provocative. Knowing full well that this slogan has now been used in Niger by Islamicist zealots who have burned down Christian churches, I nevertheless say  Je ne suis pas Charlie.

Footnote: In the wake of the events in Paris, Kerre Woodham penned an opinion piece in the New Zealand Herald. It quoted the New Zealand cartoonist Tom Scott saying how necessary it is to nurture the satire of cartoonists. After all, he said, cartoonists in the 1930s were the first to see through Hitler and draw pictures ridiculing him. I assume Tom Scott was was thinking of David Low and the like. But I would have to say that cartoonists as a group are not necessarily seers and prophets. Perhaps you’d like to look up the work of another very influential cartoonist from the 1930s, Philipp Rupprecht. I found myself looking up his work as I was thinking about Charlie Hebdo. Rupprecht’s caricatures and constant sexual innuendo – bordering on pornography – are in the same tradition as Charlie Hebdo.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“PRENDERGAST: LEGAL VILLAIN?” by Grant Morris (Victoria University Press, $40)

When this blog was young, in July 2011, I wrote a very brief and inadequate notice of David V. Williams’s A Simple Nullity? – The Wi Parata Case in New Zealand law and history [look it up on the index at right]. Williams was concerned to give an exact account of the legal case in 1877 in which James Prendergast, New Zealand’s third Chief Justice, was said to have pronounced the Treaty of Waitangi “a simple nullity” – that is, something having no standing in New Zealand law. Since the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in the 1980s, and the new esteem in which the Treaty of Waitangi is now held, it has been the fashion to see Prendergast in a negative light, as an insensitive Pakeha official who did not respect Maori land claims. At least part of David Williams’s intent was to test how valid Prendergast’s words were at the time he was said to have spoken them. He also suggested that Prendergast did not really deserve the obloquy with which he had been loaded because, in Williams’ account, the words which now offend were probably written by his fellow judge William Richmond.

I am aware of how contested Prendergast’s reputation is. Recently I had the pleasure of reading [for review in Landfall] the essays of M.P.K.Sorrenson, gathered together under the title Ko Te Whenua Te Utu (Land is the Price). Models of clear expository academic prose, Sorrenson’s essays reflect on questions of Maori history, land and politics. Clearly Sorrenson has a low opinion of Prendergast. In his essay “Towards a Radical Interpretation of New Zealand History”, he suggests that Prendergast made his “simple nullity” call out of ignorance because he misread the Treaty of Waitangi in terms of international law rather than in terms of colonial law. (It’s a complicated argument – read Sorrenson to get the full flavour of it.)

Now, to modify such views, there comes a second book about Prendergast with a question mark in its title. Grant Morris’s Prendergast: Legal Villain? is, from its title on, an exercise in reconsidering a battered reputation. Unlike Williams’s A Simple Nullity? it does not focus on one case at law, but awards Prendergast a full biography. A modification of Grant Morris’s doctoral thesis, Prendergast: Legal Villain? takes Prendergast from his English childhood to his death in New Zealand, at the age of 94, in 1921. More than anything, Morris, a lecturer in law at Vic, wishes to contextualise Prendergast – to show how his values and judgments sprang from his environment and intellectual formation, and were in no sense unusual for that environment.

Born in 1826, James Prendergast was part of the English intellectual elite. His father (who had risen from a humble background) was a QC. Young James went to Cambridge, excelled at Mathematics and Classics and did a year of school teaching in Somerset before deciding to join his father in the legal profession. (It is interesting to be reminded by Morris that one went to the Inns of Court to study to be a barrister without needing a law degree.) He married Mary Jane Hall in 1852, but she plays very little part in this biography, and though the couple were happily married until Mary’s death in 1899, they had no children. At the very least, this was unusual for a Victorian couple. (Husband and wife did, however, look after the children of James’ less successful brothers, who were damaged by alcoholism and who both ended up in psychiatric institutions).

James Prendergast tried his luck in the goldfields of Victoria (Australia) in the 1850s, but met no success and ended up clerking, before going back, disillusioned, to Britain to be called to the bar. All the time he was greatly influenced by his eminent father, who had become a judge and before whom he sometimes appeared when he was a “special pleader”. But the English legal profession was notoriously overcrowded, so James Prendergast and his wife set off for New Zealand in 1862.

Here, then, we have a man nurtured and trained in a strictly English view of the law. Grant Morris is judicious in noting the very English nature of the legal system that was being set up in New Zealand when Prendergast arrived:

“A variety of aspects of the English legal system were brought to New Zealand by settlers, including the structure of the legal system, the English constitutional framework, substantive law, English legal procedure, dress, formalities, training methods and prejudices. Also transported to the colony was an intense focus on property rights and land ownership… Practising law on the other side of the world from 1862 onwards weakened the influence slightly, but in the statutes and legal decision created by James Prendergast from 1865 to 1899, the English influence is clearly evident. To a large extent, men such as Prendergast who constructed the New Zealand colonial legal system sought to recreate the environment they left behind in the ‘mother country’. ” (pp.15-16)

Reinforcing this worldview was the tight (and small) nature of the legal profession in New Zealand at that time. Prendergast practised as a barrister in Dunedin from 1862 to 1867. In 1865 he prosecuted murderer William Jarvey, the first man to be hanged in Otago. It is extraordinary how small the country’s legal elite was at that time. In Dunedin, Prendergast worked with Julius Vogel; and at one stage the future politician William Downie Stewart was his articled clerk. Morris says: “The Dunedin Bar, with some exceptions, saw themselves as a homogenous club which both worked and played closely together.” (p.38) Efficient in his chosen career, Prendergast was appointed Crown Solicitor in Otago. Grant Morris says that Prendergast’s experience as a successful barrister in gold rush Otago equipped him well for his legal career but “it did not prepare him for the Maori-Pakeha conflict in the North Island” (p.43). This is significant in the light of the judgment for which he is best known.

Prendergast was Attorney-General from 1865 to 1875 and oversaw the drafting of much legislation. His “legal opinions demonstrate his breadth of knowledge and his reliance on English law and traditions” but  “his hard-line approach to Maori affairs is clearly demonstrated during this era.” (p.44) In his first two years as Attorney-General, he sat in the old upper house of parliament, the Legislative Council. There, surprisingly, he argued in favour of Maori representation in parliament, seeing Maori as British subjects. He also supported the abolition of the provinces. However, he did help to pass a bill indemnifying British soldiers against any legal action that might arise from their suppressing (Maori) “rebels” in the 1860s wars – in other words, suspending the common law when it came to suits for damages.

Grant Morris argues that Prendergast’s codification of New Zealand’s criminal law was his chief contribution to the law. But all the time, his racial views and his “actions, language and legal judgments clearly support the assertion that he believed Maori to be greatly inferior to Europeans.” (p.59) He would not recognise the legitimacy of Maori customary law relating to marriage; and he once ruled that Maori witnesses were not be given the same degree of credibility as Pakeha witnesses. He did quash the findings of hasty courts-martial that had ruled against those who were said to have participated in the murder of the missionary Volkner. Prendergast said that the rule of law had to be asserted. But Prendergast himself supported the vigorous prosecution of others who had been part of the murder, including Kereopa, who was hanged years after the event. Hence, says Morris, Prendergast is depicted as “a two-dimensional villain” (p.61) in Peter Wells’ Journey to a Hanging and in Maurice Shadbolt’s novel Season of the Jew. [Look up my take on Journey to a Hanging via the index at right]. Morris does note that Prendergast was certainly implicated in very harsh measures against Maori at the time of the guerrilla campaigns of Titokowaru and Te Kooti.  Showing his firm opposition to the perceived foes of the British Empire, Prendergast was also one of those who, in 1868, prosecuted the “Fenian” West Coast Irish who were accused of sedition and riot, although sentences they received were lenient.

Inevitably the longest chapter in this biography concerns Prendergast’s years as Chief Justice (1875-1899). Morris notes that there were only four Chief Justices of New Zealand between 1841 and 1926, and of these Prendergast was certainly the most conservative. We are aware that the author is a lecturer in law when he tells us how Prendergast’s judgments stood up in comparison with those of other Chief Justices. Of Prendergast’s judgments which went to Appeal, one in three was overturned – but then this was the same average as for Prendergast’s “liberal” successor as Chief Justice, Robert Stout; so there is no suggestion that Prendergast’s judgments were notably defective. Contemporaries gave Prendergast “praise for his reliability, diligence and leadership, and criticism for his lack of brilliance and bluntness of approach.” (p.96) Of course Prendergast was a hanging judge (as all nineteenth century judges trying murder cases were). He gave no reprieve for Minnie Dean, the only woman in New Zealand history to be hanged. Prendergast relied very heavily on English precedents in making decisions. But he was an “establishment” figure. His ignorance of Maori custom was profound. Morris lists Prendergast’s weaknesses as the vagueness of many of his decisions and his tendency to interpret legislation literally and conservatively.

Says Morris:

“While Prendergast was by all accounts an impartial judge, it must be noted that many of his decisions were in favour of established and powerful institutions such as the Crown, local government and high-ranking professionals. Fairly or unfairly he was not known as a judge for the underdog.” (p.113)

In 1881, in an appeal case, he quashed Thomas Hall’s conviction for murder. Gossip surmised that this was because Thomas Hall was the nephew of the sometime premier Sir John Hall.

Showing how much personalities in the legal profession influenced judgments, Chapter 7 deals with the “Barton Affair” of 1876-78. George E. Barton was a fiery advocate whom Prendergast had known in his days in the goldfields of Victoria. Barton accused judges of partiality in a commercial case he was defending. Later, a client of Barton’s was acquitted by another judge; but Prendergast and the senior bench found against this same client when he had gone about asserting his rights. Again the matter came to court. This time Barton had an open courtroom confrontation with Chief Justice Prendergast, who not only fined Barton for contempt of court, but had him imprisoned. The case became a cause celebre, especially as it had political overtones. Barton was elected member for Wellington while in prison, and Barton supported the “liberal” policies of George Grey as opposed to the “conservative” ones of Harry Atkinson, which Prendergast supported. The case split the legal profession, especially in Wellington. In further legal confrontations involving Prendergast, it basically ruined Barton’s career. Morris says “Few other cases in New Zealand legal history so vividly reveal the tension between bench and bar.” (p.151) He judges that Barton really was guilty of gross contempt of court; but he also says that we have to take this background (of a feud splitting the legal profession) into account when considering the case “Wi Parata v Bishop of Wellington”, about which Prendergast’s current reputation revolves. For in this case, it was Barton represented Wi Parata.

It is, at last, to this case that Morris turns in Chapter 8, which is inevitably called “The Treaty is a Simple Nullity”. Wiremu Parata, a Maori MP and Ngati Toa chief, took the Anglican Bishop of Wellington (Octavius Hadfield) to court. Some Nagati Toa land, which had been held under native title, had been given to the previous bishop (Selwyn) in 1850, under a Crown grant, for educational purposes. But no school had been established on the land, nor any other services beneficial to the Ngati Toa people as had been promised. Wiremu Parata was fully aware that this would be a test case for other trust properties that had not been used as intended. Says Morris “The case demonstrated that the issue of land ownership had the potential to unravel the delicate fabric of Pakeha society.” (p.155).

David Williams’ book A Simple Nullity? made it clear that TWO judges made the final decision in this case, Prendergast and William Richmond, who had been a hard-line Minister of Native Affairs. However, Morris challenges Williams’ view that the judgment reflects Richmond’s views on Maori land ownership more than Prendergast’s, as the views of the two judges were basically the same. The eventual detailed decision was written by both Richmond and Prendergast. The gist was that Crown title overrode any customary Maori title. Of the two judges, Morris says:

“They used the Wi Parata decision as an effective vehicle for enshrining Eurocentric, imperialist views into law. To justify the opinion that New Zealand was acquired by occupation and discovery, Prendergast and Richmond had somehow to dispose of the Treaty [of Waitangi]… In the court’s view, New Zealand was peopled only by ‘primitive barbarians’ and ‘savages’ who had no sovereignty to cede, nor any existing body of customary law that could be legally recognised. The primitive race was to be quickly subdued as New Zealand was transformed into a ‘Better Britain’.” (p.158)

In reviewing this decision, Grant Morris does not pass judgment on whether, in formulating their judgment, the two judges were acting sincerely or were merely cobbling together only those precedents that buttressed their pre-existing views. However, Morris does note that their comment about the treaty being “a simple nullity” referred only to how the treaty related to the disposition of land. The judges were not contesting all the articles of the treaty.

Much of this chapter is a sort of interrogation of, or dialogue with, David V.Williams’ book. Perhaps to the annoyance of those who now enthrone the Treaty of Waitangi as an unassailable document, Morris remarks:

 “Williams and I have noted that in many ways the Treaty of Waitangi was, and still is, a nullity. This is primarily due to the fact that it cannot be enforced in courts until specifically incorporated into domestic legislation.” (pp.161-162).

Furthermore:

“If one agrees with modern ‘orthodox’ thought that the Treaty was one of cession, then Prendergast’s view that it was a ‘simple nullity’ is not correct, but in terms of its legal power, the Treaty remains limited. The Treaty does not, in the positivistic sense, have intrinsic legality. The legal recognition of the principles of the Treaty is a far different matter from the legal recognition of the Treaty itself.”(p.163)

            Morris remarks that, despite its subsequent vilification, the decision of Richmond and Prendergast, although at first queried by the Privy Council in London, was used as precedent in cases for the best part of one hundred years, before the new orthodoxy regarding the Treaty of Waitangi arose. As he says, Prendergast was nearer to the norm of Pakeha thought from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries than more pro-Maori judicial voices (such as Chief Justice Martin) were. In a sense, then, it is ahistorical to castigate Prendergast for making such a judgment.

Because they deal with those matters that have most kept Prendergast’s name alive, the chapters on the Barton case and the Wi Parata decision are probably the chapters that will most often be consulted by future researchers who read this book. The last two chapters are on how Prendergast, being Chief Justice, also had an official role as “acting governor” in the absences of governors; and on his retirement. Prendergast was seven times “Administrator of the Colony of New Zealand”, usually between the departure of one governor and the arrival of the next. However, there was one very controversial matter concerning Prendergast’s conduct in this role. This was his involvement in the invasion of Parihaka in 1881. It seems he rushed through a proclamation threatening Te Whiti with invasion in order to support wishes of the government ministers John Bryce and John Hall; and in the convenient absence of the governor, who would have disapproved of this action. To me, this seems a far more questionable act on Prendergast’s part than the “simple nullity” statement. In this case, Morris agrees that Prendergast has to bear responsibility for his part in these actions – but once again he notes that they echoed common (Pakeha) views at the time.

I do not believe that this book will change current received opinion on Prendergast. In many respects it simply reinforces the view that Prendergast refused to acknowledge any Maori perspective on the law or land ownership, and that he was indeed a reactionary Anglocentric figure whose views have now been superseded. What it does do, however, is to contextualise Prendergast. It shows that the views he upheld were really the Pakeha norm of his age, and were deeply embedded in both his formation and in the profession of which he was a leader. The implicit message is that it is pointless to rebuke him for holding such views, or for not holding views which did not become the norm until long after his time.

There are parts of Prendergast: Legal Villain? which do indeed read like a modified thesis, as when we encounter such deadly phrases as  “this section has dealt with….” Or when (pp.81-84) Morris comes close to simply “listing” the legislation which Prendergast oversaw as Attorney-General. Let me not whinge, however. This is a clearly written and well-documented insight into a defunct mentality, allowing us to see in the round a man who is more often caricatured.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

“A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR” by Daniel Defoe (first published 1722)

Once, when this blog was very young, over three years ago, I wrote a brief and inadequate comment on Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack [look it up on the index at right]. I noted the usual things that are said about Daniel Defoe, who was born about 1660 (his exact birth date is not known) and died in 1731.  I said that he had the characteristics of a prodigious liar, with his ability to string out his – always picaresque and episodic  - stories by fertile inventiveness. I noted that his best known tales have very dodgy chronology, with Defoe so often and so casually remarking that his main character has lived in such-and-such a place for so many years, and then in such-and-such another place for so many years, to the point where one academic wit was able to add up such statements and conclude that the said protagonist must be many hundreds of years old by the end of the novel.

What I should have noted – but didn’t – was the immense energy of this man. After a lifetime of hack journalism, pamphleteering and versifying Defoe, who is certified in all the histories of Eng Lit as one of the founders of the novel, turned to fiction only when he was nearing 60 years of age. But in the extraordinary five years between 1719 and 1724 he turned out all seven of the books by which he is best known: Robinson Crusoe, Memoirs of a Cavalier, Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack, A Journal of the Plague Year, Moll Flanders, and Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress. I should also have noted the strong influence of Defoe’s non-conformist (i.e. non-Anglican Protestant) upbringing. All his novels are first-person narratives purporting to be authentic autobiographies, and some were accepted as such by their original readers. This follows on from the tradition of “spiritual confession” as practised by non-conformists like John Bunyan (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners etc.). So we have the compulsion to write something “true”, and therefore non-frivolous, and yet the paradox that Defoe’s apparently truthful stories are all fictions.

Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in A Journal of the Plague Year, or, to give it its full title, A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations and Memorials of the most Remarkable Occurrences as well Publick as Private which happened in London during the last Great Visitation in 1665. Written by a Citizen who continued all the while in London. Never made publick before. (Let us remember that when it was published, title pages often functioned as blurbs.) For many years printed without Defoe’s name on the title page, this book was taken to be the authentic memoirs of a survivor of the plague that hit London in 1665. It was no such thing. Defoe quoted a few genuine documents such as the lists (“bills”) of the numbers who had died, which London’s government produced during the plague, and the Lord Mayor’s proclamation. But in the main, the book was made up of what Defoe’s fertile imagination could piece together from popular stories he had heard about the plague. His narrator was his own invention. Defoe would have been a very small child at the time of the 1665 plague, and there is no way that he himself was the observer whom he concocted.

It is this element of creative and persuasive lying which most interests me about A Journal of the Plague Year, but this is not the only interest that it holds, as a recent reading told me.

One obvious thing to strike me is that, despite its title, this fictitious memoir is NOT a journal – that is to say, it is not a diary-like day-to-day account of events, but a general narrative interspersed with sets of reflections. Another thing is how shadowy a figure Defoe’s fictitious narrator is. Early in the piece he tells us that he is single and childless at the time of the plague, but a prosperous businessman and “sadler” who has a warehouse of goods to protect and therefore does not wish to leave the plague-stricken city. He is also concerned to protect the property of his brother, who has fled the plague with his family. Much later, the narrator tells us “I had in my Family only an ancient woman, who managed the house, a maid-servant, two apprentices and myself.” [p.75 – like all Defoe’s novels, this one is not divided into chapters and my page references are according to a paperback edition that runs to 234 pages]. He and his dependents manage to avoid eating pestilence-infected meat by staying indoors with much cheese and salted butter and making their own bread and brewing their own beer. Unlike the narrators of Defoe’s other fictions, this narrator is not in any way affected in his personal circumstances by what happens in the course of the book. In other words, there is no “plot” as such, apart from the development, intensification and eventual abatement of the plague. A Journal of the Plague Year consists of what the narrator observes and hears as he wanders about the city, quite unharmed, conversing with citizens.

So what are the things that are observed and heard?

There are his speculations on how the plague reached London from Holland, with pseudo-medical information on effluvia and contagion by breath or contact with sweat or ingesting the stench of rotting corpses; his initial accounts of the plague first striking the poor suburbs outside the city walls and only later reaching the City itself; a reference to how London’s population had been swollen by the influx of servants and traders at the time of the Restoration in 1660; and of how the court retired to Oxford at the first hint of plague, and thus saved itself.

There are his accounts of the panicked way in which the unlettered poor reacted, seeing portents on comets and clouds, and of the quack doctors who preyed upon them with useless “cures” such as the wearing of amulets. Pitiful tales are told of whole families dying while confined to their homes by the official attempts to impose quarantine. Violent tales are told of watchmen, charged with keeping houses closed and their occupants confined within, being attacked and beaten by families who wished to escape. Yet all the escapees managed to do was to carry the plague into country areas. Then there are the death carts carrying off corpses and the huge pits dug in parishes, into which scores of naked bodies are dropped while the bereaved look on and wail.

Tales are told of eccentrics and loonies whose minds cracked under the mental anguish that the plague brought. Says the narrator: “I suppose the world has heard of the famous Solomon Eagle, an Enthusiast: he, though not infected at all, but in his Head, went about denouncing of Judgment upon the city, in a frightful manner; sometimes quite naked, and with a pan of burning charcoal on his head…” [p.100]

Later, there is another story of an infected man raving and dancing naked in the street [pp.163-164]. Defoe notes “there was a seeming propensity, or a wicked inclination in those that were infected to infect others” [p.147]. He then proceeds to a long discussion about what “Physicians” have said about this – whether it is a kind of irrational rage brought on by the plague’s weakening of the brain or desperation and the desire to share the disease with others.

There are anecdotes of increased lawlessness and of foolish accidents. One man, carried off in a death cart, proves not to be either infected or dead, but only dead drunk. The warehouse of the narrator’s brother is looted by women seeking luxury items such as hats. The narrator argues that petty crime increased because of the widespread unemployment occasioned by the plague, with many goods no longer being manufactured in the city, with few people going out to buy things, and with servants having been turned out into the streets as their employers escaped to the countryside. Many of those who worked the dead carts themselves became infected and died and, says the narrator, had there not been so many unemployed men to take their places, bodies would have rotted in the streets, unburied.

Ships on the Thames remain anchored in mid-stream, being provisioned only by trusted people from the shore, to keep their crews uninfected. Infant mortality soars as babies contract the plague from their mothers. (Defoe describes living infants sucking at the breasts of their dead mothers). Sometimes midwives smother children.  There are grimly ironical tales, such as the one about the uninfected family confined to their home because one member of the family had a minor, and non-plague-related, disease. The family were wiped out when they were visited by sympathisers who did not realise that they themselves were in the early stages of plague-infection.

There is the real horror of desolation as the city empties out and parts of it become deserted:

“Many houses were then left desolate, all the people being carried away dead, and especially in an Alley further on the same side, beyond the bars, going in at the sign of Moses and Aaron; there were several houses together which (they said) had not one person left alive in them, and some that died last in several of those houses, were left a little too long before they were fetched out to be buried; the reason of this was, not, as some have written very untruly, that the living were not sufficient to bury the dead, but that the mortality was so great in the Yard or Alley, that there was nobody left to give notice to the buriers or sextons, that there were any dead bodies there to be buried. It was said, how true I know not, that some of those bodies were so much corrupted, and so rotten, that it was with difficulty that they were carried…” [pp.165-166]

In general, Defoe’s (and the narrator’s) tone is one of support for the Lord Mayor and magistrates and city authorities, whom he tends to depict as keeping the city supplied with bread and ensuring that corpses were buried as quickly as possible, despite the widespread hostility of the population to the quarantines that were imposed.

There is some drooping of Defoe’s inventiveness in the middle sections of this narrative, where he dwells far too long over a company of healthy young city men who took the opportunity to go into the country and extort charity out of country towns by threatening their inhabitants with violence. The last sixty pages, however, turn to general reflections after all the anecdotes are done. The narrator opines that “The best Physick for the plague is to run away from it” and says that sending the uninfected out of the city was a sound stratagem. He (revealing his very middle-class perspective) denounces the boisterous and unruly poor for continuing to live rowdy and debauched lives and therefore being careless about spreading the plague. He again speculates on how the plague started and he suggests some parish clerks falsified records to minimise the general panic, pretending that many people had died of causes other than the plague. He commends many Londoners for keeping up with religious observance. Then he considers the whole impact of the plague on English trade, and foreign ports were closed to English ships bearing goods from London.

As the plague abates, doctors and clergy who had skulked away into the country, and thus ignored the pastoral care of their patients and flock, are said to be despised by those who had remained throughout in London. Dissenters claimed the Anglican clergy were the worst in this respect, while Anglicans blamed Dissenters. But Defoe closes on a note of charity, claiming no one religious faction was more guilty than another, and praising true doctors (as opposed to quacks) who gave real service.

He closes his account with a doggerel verse:

 “A dreadful Plague in London was

In the year sixty-five,

Which swept an hundred thousand souls

Away – yet I alive!” [p.234]

Just before he does so, however, he ascribes the abatement of the plague to the merciful hand of God.

This is one of the chief features of A Journal of the Plague Year. Like others of Defoe’s fictions, it is filled with sententious moralising and frequent speculations on the role of God. God is apparently the author of the narrator’s initial decision to stay in London:

“It came very warmly into my mind one morning…. That as nothing attended us without the direction or permission of Divine power, so these disappointments must have something in them extraordinary; and I ought to consider, whether it did not evidently point out, or intimate to me, that it was the will of heaven I should not go. It immediately followed in my thoughts, that if it really was the will of God that I should stay, he would be able to effectually preserve me in the midst of all the death and danger that would surround me; and that if I attempted to secure myself by fleeing from my habitation, and acted contrary to these intimations, which I believed the be Divine, it would be a kind of fleeing from God…” [pp.15-16]

The plague is sometimes presented as a chastisement, serving the purposes of God in making people repent:

 “Many consciences were awakened; many hard hearts melted into tears; and many a penitent confession was made of crimes long concealed.” [p.37]

Defoe gives an account of the “atheistical” mockers and scoffers at a particular tavern, who ridiculed those who went to church in atonement for their sins or said the plague was God’s judgment for our sins. With some satisfaction he suggests “it could not but seem reasonable to believe, that God would not think fit to spare by his mercy such open declared Enemies, that should insult his name and being, defy his vengeance and mock his worship…” [p.68]

At one and the same time, Defoe’s narrator seeks rationally to find the physical and medical causes of the plague AND attributes it to the inscrutable will of God. At times it is seen to ameliorate the moral temper of the populace, for he declares that the plague made for unwonted amity between Dissenters and Anglicans [p.167]. But after plague:

“It was not the least of our misfortunes, that with our Infection, when it ceased, there did not cease the spirit of strife and contention, slander and reproach, which was really the great troubler of the Nation’s peace before: it was said to be the remains of the old animosities, which had so lately involved us in blood and disorder.” [pp.221-222]

Stylistically, though, far more interesting is this matter of creative and persuasive lying. Remember that, despite making use of some historical documents concerning a real historical disaster, A Journal of the Plague Year is essentially a work of fiction passing itself off as an authentic memoir. Defoe’s aim is to persuade us of its truth. Sometimes he does not succeed in this aim. There are some instances where what his narrator overhears or reports strikes me as very unlikely. There is, for example, a long and very improbable conversation he claims to have had with a man who had confined his family to his home and needed provisions [pp.102-106]. Even as we read it, we wonder why a man in this condition would have conversed at such length with a mere spectator to his woes.

More often, though, Defoe’s lying is most persuasive. His narrator takes every opportunity to assure us of his concern for truth, and is scrupulous in discrediting false rumours. When he deals with the wild rumours that circulated in this time of severe distress, he gives a very good analysis of what we would now call an “urban legend”. He tells the reported story of a nurse who was supposed to have suffocated her plague-ridden patients, but he adds:

“.. wherever it was that we heard it, they always placed the scene at the farther end of the town, opposite, or most remote from where you were to hear it. If you heard it in White-chapel, it had happened at St Giles’s; or at Westminster or Holborn or that end of town; if you heard it at that end of town, then it was done in Whitechapel or the Minories, or about Cripple-gate parish; if you heard of it in the City, why, then in happened in Southwark; and if you heard it in Southwark, then it was done in the city and the like…. Of what part soever you heard the story, the particulars were always the same, especially that of laying a wet double clout on a dying man’s face, and that of smothering a young gentlewoman; so that it was apparent, at least to my judgment, that there was more of Tale than Truth in those things.” [p.83]

He sometimes claims to have delicate feelings about people who survived, and so practises the art of evasion, as when he tells the pitiful story of a rich plague-stricken merchant who hanged himself: “This person was a merchant, and a deputy alderman, and very rich. I care not to mention the name, though I knew his name too, but that would be an hardship to his family, which is now flourishing again.” [p.80]

Defoe’s killer technique, however, it to create verisimilitude by claiming to be “uncertain” about details, as in the comment he appends to a wrenching story of a family death: “It is so long ago that I am not certain, but I think the mother never recovered, but died in two or three weeks after.” [p.58]

Or again he says:

“…it was reported, that the Buryers were so wicked as to strip them [the corpses] in the cart, and carry them quite naked to the ground, but as I cannot easily credit anything so vile among Christians, and at a time so filled with terrors as that was, I can only relate it and leave it undetermined.” [p.63]

A very good example of this reculer pour mieux sauter technique is after he has been telling various stories of the desperate measures people took to cure themselves of the burning pain, such as the distracted man who plunged into the Thames and swam across it, gaining some relief:

“I have only to add that I do not relate this any more than some of the other, as a fact within my knowledge, so that I can vouch for the truth of them – and especially that of a man being cured by this extravagant adventure, which I confess I do not think very possible; but it may serve to confirm the many desperate things which the distressed people, falling into deliriums and what we call light-headedness, frequently run upon at that time, and how infinitely much more there would have been, if such people had not been confined by the shutting up of Houses…” [p.155]

In introducing the Folio edition of this fiction in 1960, Kenneth Hopkins described Defoe’s clever stratagem as “to profess ignorance on some corroborative point, or to give differing versions of the same story; and sometimes to be excessively particular”.

Quite so. This book is excellent lying – so excellent that it is understandable so many people took its vivid fiction to be documentary truth.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

IN PRAISE OF OLD ROADS

In the weeks before Christmas, my wife and I paid a long overdue visit to the Ureweras. In spite of both being born-and-bred New Zealanders, we had neither of us been to that part of the country before. We spent three nights in a rented house next to the small Lake Whakamarino, and each day we drove the few miles over the hills to the great Lake Waikaremoana. We did not do the famous three-day hike around the western side of the lake, which I am saving for a future visit; but we took daily tramping excursions up shorter tracks on the eastern side of the lake. The best was the tramp up to Lake Waikareiti, at a higher altitude than Waikaremoana – a beautiful little lake dotted with small islands that are bird sanctuaries. One of the greatest pleasures of this Tuhoe country is the loud and frequent sound of native birdcalls as you tramp through the forests of kahikatea and beech and rimu.

But I’m not writing this to make you envious of how I spent my pre-Christmas break.

What really intrigued me was the matter of roads.

There are very few roads that lead into the Ureweras.

We drove in on State Highway 38, skirting the northern side and then coming down the eastern side of Lake Waikaremoana.

Most of State Highway 38 is unsealed. Indeed, after we’d enjoyed our vacation, we discovered that State Highway 38 is the longest stretch of unsealed state highway in the country.

It had been raining shortly before we reached this section of our journey in. Therefore the dust had been settled and we raised no clouds. There were many sharp bends under overhanging cliffs. On three or four occasions, we passed head-sized rocks that had been dumped on the roads by minor landslides caused by rain. We couldn’t help thinking about what would have happened to us if we had been passing when the rocks were falling. There were many one-way bridges over streams. There was also that odd phenomenon of short stretches of sealed road for a couple of hundred metres either side of each small village or settlement.

When we made our short daily trips from our Lake Whakamarino base, we did of course raise clouds of dust, like every other vehicle. We passed a grader whose job it was to even out the erring gravel across the surface of the road, but which, on its first pass, succeeded in creating a high ridge of gravel on the crest of the road. Before we passed the grader, we could feel the stones scraping the underside of the car.

Yet in spite of all this, I soon found myself getting quite used to these unsealed roads. We had no mishaps, the roads were perfectly safe, they served their purpose and a strange thought occurred to me. One hundred years ago, for most people even in developed parts of the word, roads structured like these would have seemed state-of-the-art and broad highways. It took a lot of engineering skill (and muscle-power) to survey them, structure them and build them, and they were as much a sign of industrial development as railways were. In Europe, even main arterial roads, before the nineteenth century, were far rougher and more primitive affairs than the unsealed state highway through the Ureweras.

I thought of all those movies we’ve seen which show horse-drawn coaches rolling merrily along smooth highways, and I realised they were pure visual fictions. In the days of stagecoaches, passengers would have bumped over potholes and laboured over muddy routes that were not even lightly covered in gravel. In comparison, State Highway 38 is a miracle of modernity and another thing to admire in an area where most of the admirable things are purely natural.