STAYING POWER: THE OZYMANDIAS FACTOR

 

In Shelley’s great sonnet, a tyrant has a colossal statue made of himself, and beneath it is  this challenge to his rivals:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair...

 

Later, a traveller to “an antique land” sees the statue collapsed in ruins.  The mighty are now invited to despair at this evidence of what happens to those who claim lasting power.

            A similar sort of principle seems to me to operate within literary criticism.  Sometimes, those who set themselves against the might of popular opinion by attacking revered figures themselves vanish; while the objects of their hatred remain.

            This concept is brilliantly explored in George Orwell’s essay on Kipling.  “During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.” This is not to say that Orwell is a particular admirer of Kipling.  Orwell, clears Kipling of the charge of being a Fascist, but substitutes instead that he was “a jingo imperialist, morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting”, “horribly vulgar” and with “a strain of sadism” to boot.  Despite this, he is preferable to his critics.  “He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks.  Even his worst follies sound less shallow and less irritating than the ‘enlightened’  utterances of the same period.”  The message seems to be that if you ignore sufficiently what ordinary people think and believe, then what you write won’t survive the writings of those who are more in touch with  what used to be called ‘the common man’.

            Orwell explores this phenomenon again in Tolstoy’s attack on Shakespeare: the difference being that in this case Orwell admires the object being attacked.  Thus in   ‘Tolstoy and Shakespeare’:  “He asks himself how it is that this bad, stupid and immoral writer is everywhere admired, and finally he can only explain it as some world-wide conspiracy to pervert the truth.”  (Orwell himself has a different explanation).  In ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’, Orwell narrows Tolstoy’s hatred down to the fact that Tolstoy sees himself in Lear and reacts accordingly.  Despite the savagery of the attack, “Forty years later, Shakespeare is still there, and of the attempt to demolish him nothing remains except the yellowing pages of a pamphlet which hardly any one has read.”  The conclusion Orwell draws is the same as in his essay on Kipling: “Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself merely an index to majority opinion.” 

       

The same principle can be seen in figures from history.  Socrates has worn rather better than those who condemned him to death: we know about most of the latter only because of their condemnation of Socrates.    

            The Risen Christ is another survivor, who has resisted attacks to put him back in the tomb.  To date, the risen Christ has survived – this is merely a sample –  the story that the corpse was stolen by the disciples (Matthew);  Arianism, and all the other isms of the Ancient World;  Gnosticism; Deism and The Enlightenment; Nietzsche’s obituary on God, The Higher Criticism, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, Modernism, liberal theology, The Death of God School, The Jesus Seminar, and Postmodernism.  The Risen Christ may be set to outlast even the assaults of Richard Dawkins and Philip Pullman. 

 

The Chronicles of Narnia are another interesting instance of survival.  David Holbrook subjected them to Freudian analysis with a view to discrediting them.  But lots of people have still heard of the Narnia stories, whereas there are professors of English who have never heard of Holbrook. 

            A.N. Wilson demolished their creator with a powerful blend of pity, mockery and condescension, but there are those who have heard of Lewis who seem never to have heard of Wilson, never mind being able to cite anything he’s written.   (St Paul and Christ seem set to outlast Wilson too, despite his reductions of them, with their original status intact).

Philip Pullman rounded on Narnia with the sort of anger Tolstoy reserved for Shakespeare.    Despite this, in a 2008 survey of children’s books conducted among parents, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was still the Number One favourite.  Pullman’s books, by contrast, didn’t even feature.