The Multi-Layered Meanings of "A Maggot"

It must have been sometime in the mid-1990's when I gifted myself The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.  Since then, I have cracked it maybe three or four times.  

It may be the shorter Oxford dictionary, but it is by no means short.  It comes in two heavy tomes, each of almost 2000 pages, and the print is fine.

On page 1661 of the first volume one may find the definition(s) of the word "maggot," both the contemporary -- "Any soft-bodied limbless larva, esp. of a housefly, blowfly, or other dipteran fly ...," and that derived from the old Middle English -- "A whimsical or perverse fancy."

"A Maggot" is the title of the last-published (1985) novel of the celebrated English writer John Fowles.  Fowles makes it plain at the very beginning of the book that in reading it our eyes should be more focused on the second and older meaning, suggesting that someone's "whimsical and perverse fancy" will be a driving force in the novel, and also that for him to write it arose from a whimsical fancy.  And yet, the more unsettling, one might say disgusting associations that the word "maggot" brings to mind hang over the novel that follows like a sinister white cloud.  (And what of Fowles' choice of the indefinite article in the title?  Does it reinforce the old historical meaning? (This, after all, from the author of "The French Lieutenant's Woman," not "A French Lieutenant's ...))

In any event, so it is that a perverse fancy, albeit a shifting one, is at the center of the novel.  The story is set in 1736.  A young English lord has had a falling out with his father, an eminent but unnamed duke, over the former's unwillingness to marry according to the wishes of His Grace.  His Lordship departs London for Devonshire in the company of four others, but in the guise of a wealthy merchant, one "Mr. Bartholomew."  The others are: a middling actor who pretends to be his uncle, "Mr. Lacy," a still lesser actor in the role of a retired soldier, "Sergeant Farthing," there to provide protection with his blunderbuss, "Dick," who alone carries his own real name and is the manservant of Bartholomew, though he be deaf, dumb and otherwise mentally feeble, and "Louise," who in fact has been hired out to His Lordship for the duration of the trip by Miss Claiborne, the keeper of the most notorious "bagnio" or brothel in all of London.  "Louise," sometimes also "Fanny," and in reality "Rebecca," plays the role of maid to a fine lady of whom His Lordship is deeply enamored and who, we are first told, is the object of his journey, for the purpose of elopement.

But as the novel unfolds, we are asked repeatedly to abandon our understanding of what sort of perverse fancy drives His Lordship, only to replace it with a more outlandish one.  Is he tormented by his own impotence, and does he hope to cure it both by witnessing Fanny and Dick in wild copulation and by "taking the waters" in a certain place in Devonshire that specializes in a cure for this particular ailment?  Is he on a quasi-scientific pilgrimage of some kind, to Stonehenge and beyond, with a Rosicrucian or other occult orientation to it?  Beyond that still, but in the same direction if you will, is he a practitioner of Black Arts whose intention is to win favor with Satan himself by offering up Fanny, in helpless sacrifice, to be ravaged by the Devil?  Or is he a high priest, in practical station if not in name, in a benevolent and powerful religion the likes of which we have never before seen, and is his purpose in such capacity to shake Fanny to her spiritual foundations so that she can break free of her sinful past and reconcile in piety with her Quaker parents?

We never discover the answer to this riddle.  His Lordship never returns from his journey, and his fate and his whereabouts remain unknown.  The fate of his servant, on the other hand, is to have been found hanging from a tree, dead by his own hand as far as we can tell.  For a denouement we don't have an unravelling of the riddle but rather finally, at novel's end, we see Fanny, now Rebecca, in late winter of 1736-7, married to an impoverished blacksmith and giving birth to a daughter, not by her husband but by Dick.  The daughter, we are told, is Ann Lee, who many years later will be buried in Watervliet, New York, near Albany, having risen to prominence as the second, female incarnation of the Christ, or at least said to be such divinity in the Shaker movement that she led!

Much of what we learn about the competing fancies of His Lordship we learn not in conventional description of the Devonshire pilgrimage but rather in long depositions of key characters, depositions taken by the lawyer Henry Ayscough, who has been engaged by the duke and charged with solving the central mystery and, more to the point, finding his son.  These depositions are posted to His Grace, as enclosures to obsequious letters in which Ayscough candidly explains his estimation of each witness and his tentative theory of the case.

The most noteworthy and, to me, impressive stylistic feature of the book is its immersion in the language of the time and place in which it is set.  In truth, I should say that I am as ignorant as the next person about what, in fact, the patois of that time and place sounded like, and so I can only say that Fowles' language has the ring of linguistic truth!

Here is a representative sample from Ayscough's deposition of David Jones, who played the role during the trek of Sergeant Farthing:

Q.  I would have you tell me what you made of Mr. Bartholomew's servant Dick.

A.  I made nothing of him, sir.  That 'twas beyond an Irishman's belief, a gentleman thinking to employ him for what he was.  He was strong enough, well set, for a good lackey, but naught else, see you.

Q.  Not a gentleman's servant, you would say?

A.  He did what he was bid, sir, well enough.  And I'll allow his master's secrets was safe enough with him.  And his belongings.  He would not even let me touch the little chest we had upon the packhorse, that weighed so heavy.  Our first day out I would help him carry it up, he pushed me off, and so for the rest.  He was more jealous cur than serving-man in that.

Q.  Marked you nothing else peculiar in him?

A.  That he would not laugh, nor even smile, not even when the company was as merry as cup and can.  There was a maid at Basingstoke one morning at the well, where Dick and I and others was standing by, and would dowse the stableboy for some impertinence, and ran after him with the bucket but fell, and dowsed herself, which a dead man would have laughed to see how droll it was.  But not he.  He stood always at the coffin's side, as the saying goes.  Ever found sixpence, and lost a shilling.

Fowles employs a clever conceit to buttress this our immersion in the language.  He reproduces and intersperses with the narrative facsimiles of actual publications that were popular at the time his tale takes place.  They are rather difficult to read, but worthy of the effort.  Here, from "The Gentleman's Magazine," the news of Tuesday, 19 Oct 1736 includes this entry:

Dublin.  A Woman big with Child going into the Country to lie in, was taken with her Labour on the Road, no body being near but a blind Man and a Boy, she begg'd the latter to go for Help, he refus'd unless paid beforehand, she pull'd out her Purse, in which was some Silver and a small Piece of Gold, which the Boy seeing told the Blind Man of, he immediately knock'd out her Brains with a Staff, took the Purse and went off : A Gentleman coming by, and seeing the Woman murder'd, rode up to the Boy, and threatening to kill him, he confess'd the Fact, and both were sent to Kilmanham Gaol.

Fowles' narrator qua narrator does not purport to be speaking from a perch in 1736, but rather in Fowles' own time.  For example, at one point he contrasts two characters as emblematic of left- and right- "brainedness."  Nevertheless, the narrator's own voice carries a modest level of formality that we may associate with times past, as here, where he inserts an aside after telling us that Rebecca has just hastened to use her chamber pot, "quickly raising her skirts":

She did not have to remove any other garment for the very simple reason that no Englishwoman, of any class, had ever worn anything beneath her petticoats up to this date, nor was to do so for at least another sixty years.  One might write an essay on this incomprehensible and little-known fact about their under-clothing, or lack of it.  French and Italian women had long remedied the deficiency, and English men also, but not English women.  All those graciously elegant and imposing upper-class ladies in their fashionable or court dresses, whose image has been so variously left us by the eighteenth-century painters, are -- to put it brutally -- knickerless.  And what is more, when the breach was finally made -- or rather, covered -- and the first female drawers, and soon after pantalettes, appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they were considered grossly immodest, an unwarranted provocation upon man, which is no doubt why they so swiftly became de rigeur.

If it weren't clear before now, I have great admiration for "A Maggot" and the audacious imagination that spawned it, and this without having explained its most audacious turn of all, one that places it, for some, in the category of science fiction instead of, or in addition to, the category of historical fiction. What was that turn? The last of the motivations of His Lordship, the benign one related by Rebecca to Ayscough in her deposition, remarkably has her enter a mysterious cavern with the nobleman, there to witness an oblong white craft that she calls a maggot!  A door drops down, she enters the craft, and then she is transported to the skies above a new and glorious world that she characterizes as the "Eternal June."  This and other visions from the cavern and its environs she incorporates into her still evolving religious perspective, which we might call "proto-Shakerism."

To me it is striking and mysterious that Fowles, an unwavering atheist, would in a historical novel paint for us a picture nearly 40 years ago that bears such close relationship to the "tic tac" phenomena that our US Navy pilots described before Congress, under oath, just last year.  But for their hard shells, they might well have been called maggots rather than lozenges.  Perhaps, then, it all bubbles up from our still-opaque and Jungian "collective unconscious."

 

On the Impossibility of Policing Social Media Content

Consider the following:

• A "Road Runner" cartoon in which Wile E. Coyote is first crushed by an anvil and then burnt to bits by an exploding box of dynamite.
• A "Three Stooges" short in which Moe pokes everyone in the eyes with two fingers and smacks Curly over the head with a frying pan.
• A security camera film from Latin America in which a would-be thief in a bodega is shot three times in the stomach, leaves a trail of blood on the floor, and falls dead in the bodega's revolving door.
• "Un Chien Andalou," the 1929 surrealist collaboration between Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, which opens with a woman, in close up, apparently having her eye sliced open with a straight razor (the eye of a dead calf was used in the making of the film according to Bunuel).
• An Instagram film of about 15 seconds length in which a series of toddlers scream their heads off until, from off camera, someone sails a slice of Kraft American cheese in such a way that it lands on, and adheres to, the tops of their heads, which immediately calms them.

Which of these films should pass muster on social media? The standards are different.  On X/Twitter, all of them would pass I think.  On Facebook, the first two would pass, and the second two likely not.  The last would be rejected, based on my own personal experience over the weekend, when I tried to put the clip on my Facebook feed together with a suggestion that I would try the "cheesehead" technique on my wife the next time she gets ornery.

And how would one write an algorithm that would rationally separate wheat and chaff here, taking into account historical and cultural context, the importance of preserving humor and sarcasm in a free society, and all of the other things that the courts have placed under the rubric of "redeeming social value" in judging, for example, whether pornography may be prohibited by law?  It seems to me impossible, but perhaps AI can tackle this challenge in our world to come like so many others.

I want to say (my overriding point really) is that it should be done, if at all, via the discipline of market forces, and most certainly not by the government, or else we will find ourselves on an Orwellian slippery slope of the most troubling kind.  This would be what you might call "a threat to democracy."

 

Hornblower Hamstrung

In my dream I was a British Navy captain, of a sloop it seems; she was smaller than a frigate, of 26 guns only.

She was a capture from the French, nee "Princesse de Cleves," but now "Aurora."  She was tethered to a grimy dock on the Thames, roughly midway between London Bridge and the Observatory at Greenwich.  In fact, it was always so; in all my time as captain she never moved under her own power.  And yet, one bright spring morning I stood on her quarterdeck and peaked up at the sun through her forest of cordage, and all seemed right with the world on that day.

On another day, we were compelled to host a small group of dignitaries on board for dinner in our cramped quarters.  We were so short manned that I was left alone to polish the silver myself in advance of the repast.

The strangest thing.  The Navy permitted me to share my cabin, indeed to share my bunk, with a beautiful young woman -- Pamela Liffey from the North Country.  She was slender and blonde, and her disposition was fiery and headstrong.  I loved her, and yet she never let me embrace her in the dark.  It was like a game we played between us; I would reach out to her over and over, and each time she rebuffed me.

Thus I was, and became known throughout the Service as, an emblem of futility.  I was The Little Admiral in Lead, painted white and black, and blue.

 

A Small Story With Profound Implications

I feel compelled to explain yet again why I feel "cosmologically shattered," "ontologically shocked," "existentially adrift," whatever you may call it in our common big-word vocabulary.  The feeling is most pressing in the dead of night, but it often spills over now into the daylight hours as well.  (I welcome technical tax work in part because it offers a respite from such thoughts.)

A small story may suffice, but it will only suffice for those with an open heart and an open mind.

Peter Levenda is a genial and unprepossessing man of about my age.  He is, more than most, intelligent and articulate.

Peter is the author, with a bona fide rock star of whom I had never heard -- Tom Delonge -- of a "high strangeness" trilogy called "Sekret Machines -- Gods, Man and War."  The last volume -- "War" --has just been published.  Peter is making the rounds, in part to promote it.  He appeared just yesterday on a radio talk show hosted by Las Vegas journalist George Knapp, during which Knapp asked him to recount the following story.

Decades ago, Peter was having a normal day in his house in a little town in northwest Rhode Island.  The day was normal, that is, until he noticed that there was a black Cadillac of a certain age parked near his house, with two men inside.  One appeared to be looking at the house, or at him, through a camera with a telephoto lens.  Peter decided to approach the car and ask the men what they were doing, but the Cadillac abruptly drove away.

More intrigued than frightened, Peter jumped in his car, in the driveway, to give chase the best he could.  But immediately after he got in, another car, an old wood-paneled station wagon or "woody," pulled in behind him, blocking his path.  In it were two young, smiling women.  They got out of the car and asked Peter if a certain "Mr. X" lived there, using a name that was peculiar and unusual.  Peter noticed that the women's clothing was "off" somehow, of a different cut and perhaps of a different era.  He informed them that he did not know Mr. X, at which point they got in the car and it "disappeared."  Thus Peter's goal to follow the "Cadillac men" (dare I say "Men in Black?") was thwarted.

This incident of high strangeness was a burr in Peter's consciousness, but it faded over time.  However, several years later Peter was posted by his corporate employer at a stint in Malaysia.  One day in that capacity he was rushing through the bustling Singapore airport to catch a connecting flight when he felt a tap on his shoulder.  He turned around to discover that he had been tapped by one of the two women in the woody!  As quickly as she had appeared, after a smile and a subtle wave, she disappeared into the crowd despite Peter's efforts to confront her.

Peter's story involves no saucers or grey aliens, no cattle mutilations or sightings of Sasquatch in the Oregon forest.  And yet it is another, more subtle sign of the Tearing of the Veil, a sign that we are not alone and we are not in charge.

I grow weary of otherwise intellectually curious people who say "Why should I think about such things when there is nothing I can do about it?"  I want to say to them "You are worried about climate change, for example.  Should you not also be concerned about the world that your children and your grandchildren will inherit, with or without the company of overlords that are beyond our comprehension?"  We should, in the 21st century, be more than high-functioning, but blind, mole rats.

 

Dead Reckoning

Or rather I should say "the reckoning of the dead," or "the reckoning that awaits the dead."

Some of the nuns (but by no means all of them!) told us that those unworthy to stand in the Light of the Lord will see that they are unworthy and recoil from the Light.  Surely, with all of the remorse that I have accumulated in this life, I will be among them.  What wilderness awaits me then as a consequence?  And what company will I keep in this the Netherworld?

Justice requires that, in making this reckoning, we see ourselves through a clear lens.  Otherwise, the worst among us, including the members of our political class, in their narcissism and supreme self-regard, would pass through the Gate of Regret.  And those who deserve Heaven -- the Dalai Lama, Fred Rogers, and countless single mothers, widowed and divorced, would join me in the ranks of the Netherworld.

 

From Moral Failings Fled

So many of Stalin's victims hoped, against hope, that if only they confessed to their crimes -- even, and perhaps especially, to crimes that they did not commit -- the system and the great leader would spare them.  But we know that there was no such absolution.

From my own moral failings, real moral failings, fled, I adopted a different strategy.  Glimpsing out of the corner of one eye the shadow of Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities, I decided to hide in his shadow.  And indeed with some difficulty I managed to occupy this space, but as if in an ill-conceived spelunking, with my arms outstretched without recourse into a narrowing funnel.  

Occupying that space itself was, for me, the severest of punishments.

 

Disturbances

A small pebble tossed into a large, still pond.

The philosopher L Wittgenstein might call our attention to the fact that it is impossible to identify the precise time when the pond will return to perfect stillness.  And yet we can still talk coherently about "disturbed" and "undisturbed" waters.  The categories function fine even though there is no fixed boundary between them.

The continental "big boys," people like Sartre and Nietzsche, will say something more "big picture" -- that the ripples that our own lives make in the cosmic pond are quite annihilated when we go.  This is the source of our most profound freedom to act; we should be grateful for it.  (No; I don't get it either.)

A new generation of philosophers -- is it right to call them neo-platonists? -- insists that each of us leaves behind a vibrational signature when we go, one that persists forever in the fabric of an "informational" universe that is beyond vast. 

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi used to refer to "Cosmic Consciousness."  It was, indeed, a brand for him.  It is something like that, but secularized, if you will, by passage through the lens of information technology, transhumanism, ones and zeroes at the end of the day.

Let us all bow down to the Algorithmic Golden Calf.