Guilt by John Carroll

This odd little book could be a worthy antipodean entry in the Bead Game, the semi-religious competitive ritual that Herman Hesse in his Magister Ludi (1945) saw steadily engrossing the high intellects of the West as we neared the year 2000 CE. Players were challenged to confront the full breadth of human culture and compose a personal Hand, a sequence of allusions to past high moments of faith, science or art, whose novel juxtaposition and hidden correspondences would both deeply inform and spiritually enrich. Because they lived impotent and dejected amid the rubble of an exhausted civilisation, Hesse’s players had no more gratifying occupation, and, of course, the introduction of new beads treating of the culture of the recent past or anything faintly contemporary was severely discouraged. Since it is easier to give the provenance than the import of Carroll’s ‘beads’, let us start with that. He is strongest on Ancient Greece and almost all he has to say about cultural themes from Homer to Socrates (much of it prompted by Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy) is striking and stylish; sound on the Hebrew prophets, Calvin and Kierkegaard; nimble on Shakespeare. He does his best, as his case demands, to kindle to the eighteenth century – he puts a Vermeer young woman on the cover and finds much good sense in Jane Austen – but his heart seems hardly in it. Hawthorne, Melville, and Faulkner flash up, but his great quarries turn out to be Dostoevsky and Kafka, on both of whom he is, indeed, magisterial. Beyond them silence, though there are alarmingly respectful notes on some Hollywood movies of the 1960s. In short, romanticism and modernism are anathema, since both have registered and promoted our fall. All Carroll’s readings are bare and slightly ruthless, out single-mindedly after the theological stance of the work and unconcerned with texture, appeal or the artistic integument. It is a style of criticism likely to earn respect rather than gratitude. And he does not spare himself: only chapters seven and ten of this book, best stringing the beads, he declares in a late footnote, are worth bothering with, the others represent ‘merely a set of training exercises for a task with unforeseeable demands’. ‘Mere’ exercises or not, they are certainly diverse and merit brief individual attention before we submit to the sermon. The book’s largest argument is that guilt is not only the personal emotion attesting to tension between ego and inner conscience, but a portentous social, and, indeed, culture-shaping, one. An initial 100-page psychological essay quite successfully launches this concept of ‘cultural guilt’, and we are usefully warned that, as with envy, we will rarely observe guilt directly, but will have to infer its presence and agency through symptoms and even defences against its arousal, though, as it turns out, the author will get most mileage from direct literary depictions. Soon enough, too, we will see it is ‘spiritual guilt unappeasable due to the death of God’ that he most wishes to discuss, and questions of proof or tests of strength cease in any way to matter. The introduction provides, however, a conventional and plausible account of family settings likely to foster tile guilt-ridden adult,’ an atlas of Scandinavian guilts, and a bravura sorting of the seven ‘basic stories’ in world literature – ‘it is extraordinary just how few basic stories there are’ – which he gives as Oedipus, Cain, Jane Eyre, Cinderella; the Amazons, Hamlet and the Ugly Duckling into the still deeper categories (following Mrs Klem) of persecutory and depressive guilt. An anthropological and historical essay follows, examining the nonguilt or pre-guilt societies of the Indigenous Australians, modern Hinduism and the early Middle Ages, and tracing the superficial impact of mediaeval Catholicism and the profound impact of seventeenth century Puritanism on the development of the English character. The chronicle stops abruptly at 1800, which seems odd, but Carroll is a non-collegial writer and to proceed further would have required him either to improve on or at least acknowledge a debt to G. Rattray Taylor’s The Angel Makers (1958), a work not cited in his bibliography, though summarised in this chapter’s final pages. It was, in fact, Taylor, who first proposed possibly dire cultural consequences in the steady modern shift from father-centred to mother-centred modes of childrearing, the grisly slide as Carroll now paints it, from civility, responsible politics, justice and economic competence to our present swinish – orally indulgent, sexually permissive and consumption-oriented – cultural habits. Ronald Conway’s enterprising adaptation of Taylor’s family-culture-and-modern-history theses to the analysis of Australian society in The Great Australian Stupor (1971) also passes unacknowledged in Carroll, though his two chapters (eight and nine) knuckling down to this very task, cannot be thought to much differ from, nor improve, on Conway. Carroll admits in the end that he is not terribly interested in investigating anything: he is a ‘moralist’ and so knows in advance what has to be said about whatever is ‘found’ by the social investigator or ‘sceptic’: [The sceptic] can see many things that the moralist blinkers out … on the other hand [he] is not a good man: he does nothing for either the community’s vitality or the individual morale. Only the moralist, who is right, can signpost the road: to the good life, and that road is the all-important one. So, what must we do to be saved (or to use his own horrid, insistent term, partially ‘remised’)? Six things, he tells us: re-awaken conscience, promote masculinity (‘a long and perhaps tragic war’ might be ‘effective’), make work a vocation, cherish the home, shame and humiliate criminals, and learn to love nature. But the big task is resolutely negative: ‘to arm ourselves against the humanist values … of compassion, nurture and tenderness … deeply embedded in our hearts’. It is perhaps not the reviewer’s job to forecast the applause for such a Hand, but less baldly disclosing its peroration like this should, as with naming the culprit in a detective story, quite put potential readers off, a final word of praise must go to the stylish way Carroll has played the game throughout the book, which is certainly his best. There are moments, especially when contemporary Australia is under the glass, where the Quadrant tone surfaces (that unmistakable note of gerbils trying to come on as lions), but they are rare and the writing is predominantly urbane, supple, exact, high-toned, even winning, while the literary and theological ‘beads’, concentrated and highly polished, are most artfully strung. And these virtues shine, indeed, clearest in his self-recommended ‘spiritual guilt’ chapters seven and ten; this last achieving a special intensity as he conjures almost hypnotically with a narrowing set of vivid images, which have accumulated force through repeated use – the girl on the diving board, the monster glimpsed in the deep – beautiful and inviolably malignant, the bronze bull of Phalaris, Rilke’s acrobats, Kafka’s singing mouse, Josephine … but the effect is also claustrophobic, one feels locked inside a rather chill and obsessive sensibility, one that might indeed, belong to (another vivid recurrent image) Hawthorne’s quixotic ‘minister in the black veil’, a man apart from men, shrouded in dismal suspicion of omnipresent guilt, accusing and shunned. This book shows courage, high intelligence, great learning – and pathos, in its protestation of ‘post-Christian puritanism’ and its inevitable attempt to make religion out of little more than art.

A.F. Davies

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