Chiasmus and Samuel Butler: an Introductory Sketch

The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler, ed. Henry Festing Jones and A. T. Bartholomew, 20 vols (London: Jonathan Cape; and New York: E. P. Dutton, 1923–5) xii: The Authoress of the Odyssey, p. xxi. (This edition is hereafter referred to as ‘Shrewsbury’, with volume and page numbers as appropriate.) Other people, in mediaeval or modern times have detected feminine influence both in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Not so Butler. What he longed for was complementariness, and that longing would not have been satisfied by a theory of female authorship of both poems. One may still come across, however, the misconception that ‘Butler thought Homer was a woman’. That misconception not only reveals ignorance of the facts, but also unfamiliarity with Butler’s temperament and his way of thinking. That Butler would not at all have been satisfied with a theory of female authorship of both poems can be seen in, for instance, Shrewsbury, xii xx: he [Eustathius] was trying to prove too much, because by attributing both the finished poems to the result of Homer’s having consulted the works of Phantasia, he must have detected the influence of woman in the Iliad as much as in the Odyssey, which of course will not do at all. Cf. also Ibid., p. 8.Google Scholar

Samuel Butler’s Notebooks, selections edited by Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill (London: Jonathan Cape, 1951) p. 58. I have decided to quote Butler’s notes from this collection. It is widely available, and sufficiently extensive for my purposes. The original master copy of Butler’s Notebooks, in 8 volumes, is in the Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, Mass. Keynes’s and Hill’s selection will hereafter be referred to as Notebooks. To save space I shall incorporate the titles of notes into the text of the quotation. Titles of notes will be given in italics, and senparated from the rest of the note by a colon.Google Scholar

Critics often call Butler a ‘controversialist’. See, for instance, Streatfeild, in Shrewsbury, iii xi; John F. Harris, Samuel Butler Author of ‘Erewhon’: The Man and His Work (London: Grant Richards, 1916) p. 59 (‘And Butler’s mind was above everything a controversial mind’). For an excellent study of the subject,Google Scholar

see Ruth M. Gounelas, ‘Some Influences on the Work of Samuel Butler (1835–1902)’ (diss., Oxford, 1977) Part III, pp. 184–249 (‘The 1890s: Butler as Controversialist’).Google Scholar

Similarities between the pragmatistic beliefs of Butler and William James should probably be explained to a large extent as resulting from the chiasticistic habits of thought that the two had in common. Several critics have, with varying degrees of insight, commented on Butler’s and William James’s pragmatism. Cf., for example, Clara G. Stillman, Samuel Butler: A Mid-Victorian Modern (New York: Viking, 1932) pp. 224–8;Google Scholar

Adam John Bisanz, ‘Samuel Butler: A Literary Venture into Atheism and Beyond’, Orbis Litterarum (Copenhagen), xxix iv (1974) 316–37, and ‘Samuel Butler’s “Colleges of Unreason”’, Orbis Litterarum, xxviii i (1973) 1–22;CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Lee E. Holt, Samuel Butler (New York: Twayne, 1964) pp. 51, 90, 94, 152, 159.Google Scholar

For a discussion of this see Michael C. Corballis and Ivan L. Beale, The Psychology of Left and Right (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1976) esp. 11, pp. 160–76.Google Scholar

See Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler: Author of ‘Erewhon’ (1835–1902). A Memoir (London: Macmillan, 1920) i 264–5. (This memoir is hereafter referred to as ‘Jones’.)Google Scholar

Cf. also Jones, i 151 (‘Giles, who has brains, read it through, from end to end, twice…’), and ii 125 (‘Mrs, Beavington Atkinson did Narcissus the week before last, from end to end…’); Shrewsbury, xii 6(‘I read it [the Odyssey] through from end to end…’); letter to Robert Bridges, 3 Mar 1900 (‘I shall read all your plays from end to end’), in Donald E. Stanford, ‘Robert Bridges on His Poems and Plays: Unpublished Letters by Robert Bridges to Samuel Butler’, Philological Quarterly, L ii (Apr 1971) 289. The expression ‘end to end’ is quite a favourite in Butler, at the expense of ‘beginning to end’.Google Scholar

I wish to point out that here, as everywhere in this study, my interpretations are not necessarily offered as an alternative to those of other critics. My only interest is to find out in what way chiasticism was responsible for the end-product. For further interpretation of the equation illness—crime, see, for instance, Thomas L. Jeffers’s brilliant study Samuel Butler Revalued (University Park, Penn., and London: Pennsylvania University Press, 1981) pp. 48ff.Google Scholar

Critics have realized this. Cf., for instance, Dieter Petzold, ‘This Blessed Inconsistency: Bemerkungen zu den Paradoxien in Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon”’, Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift (Heidelberg), xxvii ii (1977) 196: ‘Es ist ein kennzeichnendes Paradoxon dieses an Paradoxien so reichen Buches, dass man beiden entgegengesetzten Ansichten eine gewisse Berechtigung zuerkennen muss’; Holt, Samuel Butler, p. 29: ‘Indeed, a trap lies open for any reader of Butler who concludes from a single statement he may make that this is his considered opinion, even at the time he makes it’; Stillman, Samuel Butler: A Mid-Victorian Modern, pp. 179–80: But a contradiction more or less was not likely to disturb him, for he saw contradiction as essential to life. He was penetrated with the sense of ambivalence that is far more common in our day than it was in his. Nature abounded in fluctuating and opposing values, in relativities and contradictions, in an eternal is and is-not. Every truth was both truth and falsehood, every virtue pushed too far became a vice, every thought pursued to its conclusion ended in its opposite.Google Scholar

The word ‘no’ plays an important role in the kind of dualism that characterizes Butler’s thought. For Butler the simplest way of creating the longed-for dualism was negation. Everything is complemented with its own negation; everything comes in pairs of the ‘something’ and the ‘not-something’. This ‘not-something’ was for Butler never an absence; it was an alternative form of presence. Butler was one of those people to whom negation represents not a void, but a concrete, almost tangible complementary form of presence. Cf. also Ch. 3, section ii, on Erewhon. For an orientation into some aspects of the philosophy of the word ‘no’, see Gaston Bachelard, La philosophie due non: essai d’une philosophie du nouvel esprit scientifique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973).Google Scholar

Cf. Jones, ii 74: ‘There will be no comfortable and safe development of our social arrangements — I mean we shall not get infanticide, and the permission of suicide, nor cheap and easy divorce — till Jesus Christ’s ghost has been laid; and the best way to lay it is to be a moderate churchman.’ P. N. Furbank, in Samuel Butler (1835–1902), 2nd edn (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1971) p. 34, comments on this passage, The desire to shock that dictates the passage does not make it the less remarkable how completely destructive and negative the programme is. Butler’s anarchism is so genuine as to be unobtrusive. His adoption of the title of Conservative in politics and his dislike of Liberals or Radicals is really the indifference of the pure anarchist. Infanticide, suicide and divorce are as self-contained a programme as liberty, equality and fraternity. Furbank’s study, although short, is by far the best book that has been published on Butler.Google Scholar

Edmund Wilson, in ‘The Satire of Samuel Butler’, The Triple Thinkers: Ten Essays on Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1938) pp. 210–19, advocates a Freudian interpretation of Butler’s lifelong habit of rebelling against figures of authority: The Freudian would be able to show how, even after Butler had escaped from the domination of his father, he was still forced to keep putting in his father’s place other persons of high authority, and, identifying himself with some lesser person, to insist on the latter’s superior claims. Dante, Virgil, Bach, Beethoven and Darwin had all to play the role of the old Butler, while Handel, Giovanni Bellini, Tabachetti and Gaudenzio Ferrari figured the snubbed young man. When he did admire accepted reputations, as in the case of Shakespeare and Homer, he had to invent original heretical theories as to who they had really been and what they had really meant. And though in ‘Erewhon’ and ‘The Way of All Flesh’ his revolt against his father had inspired him to his most brilliant work, his controversies with substitute fathers became less and less interesting as he grew older, and he himself turned into a kind of crank. (p. 211)Google Scholar

Butler’s resentment against his parents is a constant theme, directly or indirectly, in most of his works. In Bernard Shaw’s phrase from ‘Samuel Butler, the New Life’, Manchester Guardian, 1 Nov 1919 (quoted in Stillman, Samuel Butler: A Mid-Victorian Modern, p. 196), Butler is ‘the only man known to history who has immortalized and actually endeared himself by parricide and matricide long drawn out’.Google Scholar

Cf. for instance, R. F. Rattray, Samuel Butler: A Chronicle and an Introduction (New York: Haskell House, 1974) p. 18.Google Scholar

Martin Gardner, The Ambidextrous Universe: Mirror Asymmetry and Time-Reversed Worlds, 2nd updated ed, illus. John Mackey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979).Google Scholar

Hermann Weyl, Symmetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952). See in particular the section on bilateral symmetry, pp. 3–38.Google Scholar

The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. Barbara A. Babcock (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

The reader interested in the symbolism of left and right, a subject tangential to symmetry, is referred to the standard work on this subject: Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification, ed. Rodney Needham (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973). Though undoubtedly excellent, this collection of essays also raises the question of to what extent dualism is inherent in reality. Can the amount and importance of dualism that an investigator finds in a culture be influenced by the fact that dualism is what he studies?Google Scholar

See George S. Tate, ‘Chiasmus as Metaphor: The “Figura Crucis” Tradition and “The Dream of the Rood”’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, LXXIX ii (1978) 114–25.Google Scholar