The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Butler may not have adhered to any school of thought but I found in this a strange quasi-mixture of both existentialist and naturalist thinking. The damnest thing that Butler has done is to trace lineal history, as some kind of psychoanalytic background, in order to create a mesh that would explain the particularity of the main character Ernest’s upbringing.
In fact, the climax of the work, if there is indeed one, comes in pretty late when Ernest is forced into prison and nearly dies because he is forced to face the complex contradictory impulses of those around him. Ernest learns that he has to lead his life rather than relying on the life-narrative of others who would seek to justify him as being this way or that. That is to say, for Butler, coming onto his own is synonymous with being self defining.
Butler fiddles with some vague notions of evolutionarism, to explain lineage, in this case, a kind of genealogy of discourse, but really, for Butler, Ernest is able to come onto his own as an enlightened figure when he steps out of the discourse of church and state; to see political domination as the goal of the very power structure claiming to be enlightened. This seems to be enough for Butler to claim that Ernest has a kind of null point of view now; one that allows him both to see through the BS of his family and the BS of the institutions and culture that surround him in Victorian England.
What’s really kind of stupid about this is that of course Butler has it in for store that Ernest should become wealthy and independent. Without this kind of independence he could never come onto his own. He could never truly stand validated to write books that are reviled by critics but acclaimed by a public… that Truth is always visible to the masses even if individuals cannot see it; that social validation through publication must also equate with economic validation (the freedom to travel and be truly an international citizen, unbeholden to any kind of culture or wage-slavery)… the ending is too easy. A real critique of Ernest’s new ideas would be for him to have to live in a kind of hellish double-vision, seeing the fraud of his Victorian Era but still needing to make a living in it. Butler avoids this complicated ending though, because he wants to establish Ernest as seeing the way out (of his personal and cultural history) but not ever challenging Ernest to really live up to a particular content.
Because, it may be too hard to say, that for Butler just getting by was important enough… validation, once it was thrown out, was no longer needed by Ernest. He could then be rich without ever getting tied up in the validation game that others enslaved him with, all his life. So
Having, then, once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed ere long into an amiable indifferentism which to outward appearance different but little from the indifferentism from which Mr. Hawke had arosed him
This brings us to the font of nihilism; that ghost of existentialism which lay us bare to one another. In this, perhaps survival was enough, depending on however you wanted it. Perhaps this was too easy an ending; but then Butler didn’t seem to want to set out an answer to the query; he just wanted to point out the critique of there ever being a standard answer to the question in the first place.
Over all, this is a very materialist book, but one in which we can get no answer from, other than, gee, how nice is is to be rich and not care about anything…and in that sense, Butler can be seen to be far more conservative than he already is as he sees political domination to be a separate issue from economic privilege.
After all, it’s very easy to criticize everything if you can be independent of it all.
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