Shakespeare’s Pericles Lost & Found…in Milton’s Paradise & Lamb/Austen’s Prince of Whales!

Several days ago, I posted about what I called ”The Danteesque/Miltonian/Austenian/AcrosticTriumph of Charles Lamb’s Prince of Whales” http://tinyurl.com/nspggbn  In that post, I expanded upon Colleen Sheehan’s 2006 discovery of Jane Austen’s allusion (in her “courtship” charade in Chapter 9 of Emma) to Charles Lamb’s 1812 anonymous skewering of the Prince of Wales as “the Prince of Whales”. I concluded thusly:

“So when Jane Austen chose to mold her courtship charade around this Dante, Milton & Lamb imagery of Satan in hell, and to wink at the multiple acrostics in Lamb's poem with her two anagram acrostics on "Lamb", it tells us all she really meant it when she confided to close friend (and more) Martha Lloyd in 1812 that she really hated the Prince Regent. And it also tells us that she enjoyed the sacrilegious content of Lamb’s poem, and saw in it a kindred spirit to her own teenage Sharade on James I. And finally, it confirms to me what I have long believed, which is that Mr. Knightley is the Prince of Whales of Emma, and that Jane Austen is hinting to us that he swallows Emma whole at the end of the novel, to Emma's grave detriment.”

Subsequently, I did some followup delving into the allusive depths beneath Austen’s superficially trivial charade, and even I was amazed at where the trail led me. Turns out that Lamb’s satirical poem, and Austen’s allusion thereto, both sit at the convergence of several other significant threads of literary allusion, going both forward and backward in literary history from the Regency Era.

It would take a long post to explicate this multiple convergence in full textual detail, so today I’ll instead present an outline, with highlights, to give you the big picture in a few pages. But if anyone honors my work with a request for more details on particular claims, I’ll be glad to comply in a followup post.

Without further ado, then, here is my outline:

LAMB’S “PRINCE OF WHALES” IN AUSTEN’S EMMA: I just summarized this allusion, above, and spelled it out in detail in the above linked prior post.

SHAKESPEARE’S PERICLES IN AUSTEN’S EMMA: I’ve been claiming for a number of years that there is a complex allusion to Shakespeare’s late romance, Pericles Prince of Tyre  in Emma via the following subthreads, the Shakespearean common denominator of which has never been recognized before:

ONE: Garrick’s Riddle, which Mr. Woodhouse struggles to recollect, and which begins with “Kitty a fair but frozen maid” is a Jane Austen wink at Antiochus’s father-daughter incest riddle, which Pericles solves, thereby putting himself in mortal danger. Mr. Woodhouse’s horror of anyone, but especially Emma, getting married, is a dark black humor parody of Antiochus vis a vis his daughter.

    

TWO: In 1999, Jill Heydt-Stevenson demonstrated the lurid sexual subtext of Garrick’s Riddle, which hints at sex with virgins to cure syphilis, which is closely akin to Antiochus’s relationship with his daughter (and by the way, David Garrick, at his death in 1779, bequeathed to the British Library both a 2^nd and a  6^th quarto of Pericles).

THREE:  I first argued last year that Mr. Perry was actually Mr. Woodhouse’s imaginary friend, and that his surname is Jane Austen’s wink at both Shakespeare’s Pericles and also at the Peri Banou (“peri” being Farsi for “fairy”) in one of the famous Scheherazade tales.

            FOUR: I argued very recently that Jane Fairfax in Emma is closely modeled in several key aspects on Pericles’s daughter Marina, and, as a corollary, that the Bates residence is modeled on the Mytilene brothel where Marina resists being forced to sell her (human) flesh. This particularly fits with my longstanding claim that Jane Fairfax is the shadow heroine of Emma, given that Marina is the undisputed heroine of Pericles.

            So, you see there are four independently discovered threads that all connect Emma to Pericles, thereby making each of them more likely to reflect Jane Austen’s intention. But I must conclude this section with reference to a massive “Trojan Horse Moment” of Margaret Doody in this regard. I.e., she could have seen this allusion 20 years ago, had her scholarly philosophy dreamt of Jane Austen as a subversively brilliant Shakespeare scholar. Here’s the relevant excerpt from Doody’s The True Story of the Novel (1996)  about “Ap;ollonius of Tyre…Fathers and Daughters, and Unriddling Mother’s Plot”  [Doody was referring to the original Latin novel Apollonius, the likely ultimate source for Gower’s 14^th century adaptation that Shakespeare relied on]:

;

“The worst things done in Apollonius are done within the family or in the name of its values. … Apollonius, I would suggest, is about rendering visible or knowable the psychosocial abuses that lie beneath the cultural surface. To render such open secrets knowable is to engage in the heavy psychic labor of unriddling. This labor oversets Apollonius.…Should we take Tharsia’s riddles as an example of --and thus a collusion with—incest itself? On the contrary, Tharsia’s riddles reenact some of the elements of incest, but as an antidote. As the novel has shown us, what is depressing is the normality of the breaking of the assumed taboo. In order to break out of the dull and painful normality created by the patterns of possessiveness, we need to look at everything as if we had no ready-made understanding or definition of it—and that is what riddles do. Riddles figuratively enact the possibility of radical redefinition. Rhetorically they are paradoxes, in every sense, including the sense of surprise…When Tharsia uses riddles, she engages in a serious erotic activity of self preservation, for her father and herself. She represents the desire of the mind to move outside the prison of custom…IN JANE AUSTEN’S EMMA, SILLY OLD MR. WOODHOUSE (a comically depressive father) laments ‘that young people would be in such a hurry to marry—and to marry strangers too”. But fiction is heartily in favor of union with the stranger…ANTIOCHUS CARRIED MR. WOODHOUSE’S POSSESSIVE GREED TOO FAR. In his perverse cutting out of the stranger who might take his daughter from him. (Mr. Woodhouse, too, is enveloped in riddles, but he is too foolish to pose any.). …”

Wow! Did Doody simply blank on the fact that Mr. Woodhouse DOES (as I wrote earlier) specifically recall Garrick’s Riddle? Doody just could not conceive of a Jane Austen who’d intentionally foreground this disturbing incestuous subtext from Pericles! And yet, Doody’s analysis of the role riddles play vis a vis “psychosocial abuses [such as incest] that lie beneath the cultural surface” is chillingly applicable to my longstanding interpretation of Mr. Woodhouse as a former serial incestuous sexual abuser!

SHAKESPEARE’S PERICLES IN LAMB’S “TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE”:

Susan Allen Ford, editing Sheehan’s “Prince of Whales” article, pointed out that Lamb’s poem alluded to Paradise Lost, and my above-linked prior post mentioned that Lamb’s poem alluded to Dante’s Inferno (which of course was itself an obvious source for Milton’s epic), but now I also have determined that Lamb’s poem also alluded to Shakespeare’s Pericles, with the epicenter of that allusion being as follows:

The beginning of Lamb’s poem, with the unusual word “finny”, and including a stanza about a human whale swallowing people a la the Biblical Jonah (who was also an obvious source for Shakespeare’s Pericles vis a vis shipwrecks, washing up in Tarsus, etc)…

;

Io! Paean! Io! Sing

To the FINNY people’s King.

Not a mightier WHALE than this

In the vast Atlantic is;

…as well as the acrostic “FIN” which I identified in my previous post, are both Lamb’s winks at Act 2, Scene 1, of Pericles, when Pericles is rescued by fishermen after washing up onshore in Tarsus:

THIRD FISHERMAN   Nay, master, said not I as much when I saw the PORPUS how he bounced and tumbled? they say they're half fish, half flesh: a plague on them, they ne'er come but I look to be washed. Master, I marvel how the FISHES live in THE SEA.

FIRST FISHERMAN   Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones: I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a WHALE; a' plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful: such WHALES have I heard on o' the land, who never leave gaping till they've swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all.

PERICLES  [Aside] A pretty moral.

THIRD FISHERMAN  But, master, if I had been the sexton, I would have been that day in the belfry.

SECOND FISHERMAN  Why, man?

THIRD FISHERMAN  Because he should have SWALLOWED me too: and when I had been in his belly, I would have kept such a jangling of the bells, that he should never have left, TILL HE CAST bells, steeple, church, and parish up again. But if the good King Simonides were of my mind,--

PERICLES  [Aside] Simonides!

THIRD FISHERMAN  We would purge the land of these drones, that rob the BEE of her HONEY.

PERICLES [Aside]

How from the FINNY subject of THE SEA
These fishers tell the infirmities of men;
And from their watery EMPIRE recollect
All that may men approve or men detect!
Peace be at your labour, honest fishermen.

You can, as easily as I did, detect the half dozen parallels between the Miltonian aspects of both the Shakespeare and the Lamb passages, most of all in that Pericles has washed up on shore in Tarsus, after in effect being cast out of “heaven” (i.e., Antioch, with “heaven” used several times in that scene to refer to both Antioch and Antiochus’s daughter) for what Antiochus perceives as a kind of presumptuous insurrection, just as Lamb has specifically alluded to the part of when Satan has washed up in Hell after being cast out of Heaven for his insurrection.

And Charles and Mary Lamb’s 1807 Tales of Shakespeare includes Pericles, and has the following very obliquely avoidant way of addressing Antiochus’s incest in their opening paragraph:

“Pericles, prince of Tyre, became a voluntary exile from his dominions, to avert the dreadful calamities which Antiochus, the wicked emperor of Greece, threatened to bring upon his subjects and city of Tyre, in revenge for a discovery which the PRINCE had made of A SHOCKING DEED which the emperor had DONE IN SECRET; as commonly it proves DANGEROUS TO PRY INTO THE HIDDEN CRIMES OF GREAT ONES.”

The second half of that long sentence could serve perfectly as a description of the fate of the Hunt brothers in 1812, who not only published Lamb’s poem, but also wrote an openly satirical editorial about the Prince Regent, which earned them both two years in prison. I.e.,, for them, it did indeed “prove dangerous to pry into the hidden crimes of great ones”!!!

And beyond Lamb, my recent research shows that both Byron and Shelley were also very much actively involved in the loose association of disaffected authors who took on the Prince Regent with various levels of overtness, in tandem with the Hunts, Lamb, and Jane Austen. And finally…even Edgar Alan Poe gets into the act, in his 1845 poem “Hop-Frog”, which also points to Lamb’s poem!

And as a final link in that later literary lineage—for now, at least---there is also:

AUSTEN’S EMMA & LAMB’S “TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE” IN MELVILLE’S MOBY DICK

A few years ago, I posted about Melville’s having alluded to Lamb’s poem (which Melville actually reproduced a portion of in Moby Dick) and also to Emma. Whether Melville saw the connection between Lamb’s poem and the charade in Emma –at present, I can’t say, but I am still looking….

All of this puts Jane Austen’s covert satire of the Prince Regent in a much larger social and literary context---it was not merely her private beef with his abuses of power, she was part of a great covert tradition involving the greatest writers.

GOWER’S CONFESSIO AMANTIS & MIRROR OF MANKIND in PERICLES & PARADISE LOST

And finally, the other big news I have is that the common root of all of these works (including the obvious allusion in Shakespeare’s Pericles), are John Gower’s 14^th century works Confessio Amantis &  The Mirror of Mankind, the former of which includes more than one tale about incest.

In particular, Milton scholars have missed the significance of Pericles in Paradise Lost, and have failed to connect the dots from that allusion to the well recognized striking parallel between Paradise Lost and Gower’s Mirror, re Satan, Sin, and Death being in an incestuous family relationship. They are all of a piece, and demonstrate that Milton knew his literary history well.

No Lamb scholar has ever realized that “Triumph of the Whale” alludes not only to Paradise Lost, but also to Pericles. And Charles Lamb’s correspondence reveals a strong familiarity with Gower’s works as well.

And at the top of the pile, no Austen scholar has ever peered down beneath the surface of Emma and identified all these sources, all of them connected by the common thread of incestuous sex.

And somewhere in among all of this we also have Jane Austen’s epistolary reference to “sisters in Lucina” (Lucina being not only a Greek goddess of childbirth, but also the name of Pericles’s wife in Gower’s Confessio Amantis) and also the strange character Mr. Gower in JA’s juvenilia Evelyn, who shows up at the home of a young heiress, and is promptly (and absurdly) given both her hand in marriage, and also her parents’ family estate---just like Pericles when he marries Thaisa.

And there I will leave off from my Ahabian obsessive quest for all of the Prince of Whales subtext in Jane Austen’s Emma.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Mr. Woodhouse’s Gruel—an Unusual Punishment

As I was just working on the NY Times crossword puzzle yesterday morning, one clue was for an 8-letter word meaning "arduous"--as soon as I got the first letter "g", I realized the answer was "GRUELING".

Which, for reasons which would not surprise any serious Janeite, got me wondering for the first time about the etymology of that word, in light of the meaning of the word "GRUEL" as thin cooked cereal in which receives such comic emphasis in the following famous passages in Emma:

Such another small basin of thin GRUEL as his own was all that he could, with thorough self-approbation, recommend...
"...You must go to bed early, my dear—and I recommend a little GRUEL to you before you go.—You and I will have a nice basin of GRUEL together. My dear Emma, suppose we all have a little GRUEL."
Emma could not suppose any such thing, knowing as she did, that both the Mr. Knightleys were as unpersuadable on that article as herself;—and two basins only were ordered. After a little more discourse in praise of GRUEL, with some wondering at its not being taken every evening by every body...
...The GRUEL came and supplied a great deal to be said—much praise and many comments—undoubting decision of its wholesomeness for every constitution, and pretty severe Philippics upon the many houses where it was never met with tolerably;—but, unfortunately, among the failures which the daughter had to instance, the most recent, and therefore most prominent, was in her own cook at South End, a young woman hired for the time, who never had been able to understand what she meant by a basin of nice smooth GRUEL, thin, but not too thin. Often as she had wished for and ordered it, she had never been able to get any thing tolerable. Here was a dangerous opening. "Ah!" said Mr. Woodhouse, shaking his head and fixing his eyes on her with tender concern.—The ejaculation in Emma's ear expressed, "Ah! there is no end of the sad consequences of your going to South End. It does not bear talking of." And for a little while she hoped he would not talk of it, and that a silent rumination might suffice to restore him to the relish of his own smooth GRUEL.

…Mr. John Knightley, ashamed of his ill-humour, was now all kindness and attention; and so particularly solicitous for the comfort of her father, as to seem—if not quite ready to join him in a basin of GRUEL—perfectly sensible of its being exceedingly wholesome…

So….did the negative connotation of “arduous” arise in some way from the word for nutritious cooked food? According to a number of sources on the Internet, it did, and here is the most detailed explanation I found:

http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/gruel

“Gruel is a truly unpleasant food — weak and runny, consisting of oatmeal or cornmeal boiled in milk or water. It's the kind of "slop" prisoners and other inmates of institutions were historically forced to eat.

Gruel was made most famous by Dickens's Oliver Twist, the little orphan boy in the workhouse, who was so hungry he even asked for seconds of it: "Please sir, I want some more." Gruel's reputation, not great to begin with, never recovered. From this delightful substance comes the adjective grueling, describing an experience that's exhausting and punishing. "To get one's gruel" was 1700s slang meaning "to receive one's punishment." Even back then gruel had a bad rap.”

And, in an 1805 edition of Samuel Johnson’s famous Dictionary,  I found the following quotation under his definition of “gruel”:

Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,
Make the GRUEL thick and slab:

Of course, that “gruel thick and slab” is part of the recipe for some very unpleasant concoction, courtesy of the Third Witch in Macbeth!

So, what does this mean for our understanding of Mr. Woodhouse’s obsession with thin gruel? I think it’s part and parcel of the veiled allusion to Swift’s Modest Proposal that Diane pointed out a few months ago--- Jane Austen’s close readers would have recognized that beneath the veneer of Mr. Woodhouse’s solicitude for the health of his family members, he is offering them an arduous form of punishment, with more than a hint of the demonic via Macbeth's weird sister.

My friend Diane Reynolds then responded to the above in Janeites & Austen L as follows: 

“The word gruel also sounds like cruel, the kind of wordplay Austen, as we know, liked--and there is something cruel about serving your guests, especially those who might be depending on you for a meal, something like poorhouse gruel.”

And I replied as follows:

I did some further Googling, and saw that my friend Jenny Allan had posted the following back in 2010 in her blog:  http://janeaustendiet.blogspot.com/2010/01/inevitable-gruel-post.html

“So last night I was making wheat flour by milling up wheat berries in a coffee grinder (like ya do) . I had about a quarter cup of wheat pieces that the grinder just couldn't tackle and they were too coarse to go in my pie crust. I was about to throw it out for the birds when I thought to myself, "Gruel!" So I put those wheat bits in about a cup of boiling water for twenty minutes and they developed into a small Emma-sized token portion of water gruel.
You're not going to believe this but I'm totally a gruel fan, now. It had a nice, nutty flavor that tasted just fine without sugar, as opposed to oatmeal which I can't choke down without lots of additional flavoring. I can see myself making gruel for breakfast or as a snack when I get home from work. Mr. Woodhouse would be pleased.”

And I also saw, to my surprise, that I had replied to her at the time, with tongue firmly in cheek:

“I must say, young lady, that this latest post might better have been entitled "Gruel and Unusual Punishment"

And today, I realized that could be better rendered as in my Subject Line, “Mr. Woodhouse’s Gruel- an Unusual Punishment”!

But on a more serious note, which actually connects to my little joke, it is interesting to note the following two among the four usages of the word “cruel” in Emma:

“How could she have been so brutal, so CRUEL to Miss Bates! How could she have exposed herself to such ill opinion in any one she valued! And how suffer him to leave her without saying one word of gratitude, of concurrence, of common kindness!”

“In such a party, Harriet would be rather a dead weight than otherwise; but for the poor girl herself, it seemed a peculiarly CRUEL necessity that was to be placing her in such a state of unmerited PUNISHMENT.”

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Lydia’s Fieldingesque Claims to Reputation in Pride & Prejudice

“[Wickham and Lydia] were always moving from place to place in quest of a cheap situation, and always spending more than they ought. His affection for her soon sunk into indifference; hers lasted a little longer; and in spite of her youth and her manners, she retained all the CLAIMS TO REPUTATION which her marriage had given her.”

Annotation on the above passage found by Nancy (is it Shapard’s?):  

"Being married would by itself add to a woman's  public standing, and since Wickham was a military officer, a position of prestige, Lydia would be able to assume a reasonably prominent position in society."

Nancy: “I haven't found that being a naval or military officer led to any social prestige unless one was a senior officer. Usually, it was one's family and connections that counted. It is true that being married gave one some freedom and a bit of prestige in company. Again, it depended partially on whom one married and one's own family. On the other hand, married women got away with a great deal that would be the ruination of an unmarried woman. If the husband didn't complain, others often turned a blind eye.”

Jane: “I always thought that the claim to reputation her marriage gave her referred to her ruining her reputation by running off with Wickham.”

Nancy, I think it fair to say that the narrative reference to Lydia’s “claims to reputation” has been understood by most Janeites they way Jane just described, and more so—I think it is dripping with irony and sarcasm. So the annotator you quoted clearly has a tin ear for irony.

That passage is in exactly the same vein as the other passages (so characteristic of P&P in particular) in which, as Kishor Kale so aptly pointed to many years ago, the superficial appearance of authorial approval is undercut by apparent irony and sarcasm—allowing the character to damn him/herself by his/ her own words:

Mrs. Bennet: "My dear Mr. Bennet, you must not expect such girls to have the sense of their father and mother"
Mr. Bennet to Lizzy re her marrying Darcy: "If this be the case, he deserves you. I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to any one less worthy"
Mr. Collins re Lady Catherine: "She is the sort of woman whom one cannot regard with too much deference."

In 2010, I also pointed out the following re Lydia’s claims to reputation:

“I am reminded by all this of a prior English literary generation, which somehow JA is paying homage to---Samuel Johnson and his heart-rending Rambler pieces about prostitutes; Henry Fielding and his satirically witty raunch viewed through his frantically winking eye. I also mentioned Johnson and Fielding for another reason---they  BOTH used the phrase "claims to reputation" in material they each wrote 60 years before P&P was published, and both of which, I believe, JA likely read.”

Here is the relevant portion of the scene from Fielding’s Grub Street Opera  (1731), in which Robin, a butler, is in love with Sweetissa, a waiting-woman of strict virtue, also in love with Robin, whom Robin now mistrusts because he has been tricked by a forged letter supposedly from Sweetissa, which makes her seem to be a prostitute (and isn’t that interesting vis a vis Lydia?):

Robin. Where is my wealth, when the cabinet it was lock'd up in, is broke open and plunder'd?

Sweetissa. He's here!—love would blow me like a whirlwind to his arms, did not the string of honour pull me back—Honour, that forces more lies from the mouth of a woman, than gold does from the mouth of a lawyer.

Robin. See where she stands! the false, the perjured she. Yet guilty as she is, she would be dearer to my soul than light—did not my honour interpose—

…MY HONOUR, WHICH CANNOT SUFFER ME TO WED A WHORE…

I must part with honour, or with her—and a servant without honour, is a wretch indeed !—How happy are men of quality, who cannot lose their honour do what . they will ? — Right honour is tried in roguery, as gold is in the fire, and comes out still the fame.

AIR 50. Dame of honour.

Nice honour by a private man

With zeal must be maintained;
For soon 'tis lost, and never can

By any be regained.
But once right honourable grown,

He's then its rightful owner;
For tho' the worst of rogues he's known

He still is a man of honour.

Sweetissa. I wish I could impute this blindness of yours to love. But, alas! love would see me, not my faults; ——You see my faults, not me.

Robin. I wish it were possible to see you faultless— but alas! you are so hemm'd in with faults, one must see through them to come at you.

Sweetissa. I know of none, but loving you too well.

Robin. That may be one, perhaps, if you wear great with William.

Sweetissa. Oh Robin! if thou art resolv'd to be false, do not, I beseech thee, do not let thy malice conspire to ruin my reputation.

Robin. There, Madam, read that letter once more, then bid me be tender of your reputation, if you can –

…THO’ WOMEN HAVE ALWAYS THE BOLDEST CLAIMS TO REPUTATION WHEN THEY HAVE THE LEAST PRETENSIONS TO IT…

—for virtue, like gunpowder, never makes any noise till it goes off—when you hear the report, you may be sure its gone.

Sweetissa. This is some conspiracy against me—for may the devil fetch me this instant, if ever I saw this letter before.

Robin. What! and drop it from your pocket?

Sweetissa. Oh base man!—If ever I suffer'd William to kiss me in my life, unless when we have been at questions and commands, may I never—be kiss'd while I live again. And if I am not a maid now

—may I die as good a maid as I am now.—But you shall see that I am not the only one who can receive letters, and drop them from their pockets too. There, if thou art guilty, that letter will shock thee— while innocence guards me.

AIR 51. Why will Florella.

When guilt within the bosom lies,

A thousand ways it speaks,
It stares affrighted thro' the eyes,

And blushes thro' the cheeks.

But innocence, disdaining fear,

Adorns the injur'd face,
And while the black accuser's near,

Shines forth with brighter grace.

Robin. Surprizing!—sure some little writing devil, lurks in the house. Ha! a thought hath just shot thro' my brain.—Sweetissa, if you have virtue —if you have honour—if you have humanity, answer me one question.—Did the parson ever make love to you?

Sweetissa. Why do you ask me that?

Robin. These two letters are writ by the same hand— and if they were not writ by William, they must have been by the parson —for no one else, I believe, can write or read in the house.”  END QUOTE

Regardless of Henry Austen’s patent falsehood in claiming that Jane Austen did not enjoy the raunchiness of Fielding’s fiction, this is, to me, another clear example of how closely she really did read his writing, not just Tom Jones.

And there’s more to this veiled Fielding allusion in P&P than just Lydia’s claims to reputation, but that is a topic for another day.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

CitizenFour really IS must-see (sur)reality TV: The Snowden Show: Watch yourself being watched

I’ve just watched CitizenFour for the first time, and one thing I know for sure is that Laura Poitras deserved her Academy Award—she has done nothing short of turning The Truman Show on its head.

I.e., she has cast Edward Snowden as himself, the ultimate whistleblower –or was it Snowden who actually cast her as Laura Poitras, muckraking filmmaker? Or both? Every minute that he is onscreen has a surreal intensity, as we realize that we are watching history as it was made 2 years ago. Poitras and Snowden, by turning the camera on themselves, have simultaneously turned the camera around on Big Brother…and on all of us. The little guy with ingenuity can indeed change the spin of our world.

In an era in which mind-numbing, moronic reality tv scores high ratings by appealing to the lowest denominator of human schadenfreude, stupidity, and peeping-tomism, here we have a documentary which makes us look in the mirror and ask if we have really taken the time to determine what is right and what is wrong, about one of the most difficult and most crucial moral issues of our time.

So this really is “must see” reality television—or rather, surreality television—because it’s not just The Snowden Show—Snowden was very careful NOT to encourage a cult of personality or demonization to form around him as a person--the whole point of his lonely Quixotic crusade—and I think he succeeded --- was to bring home to all of us, dozing on sofas with remotes glued to our hands, that we are the “show”, but there is only one viewer of our collective Truman Show, and it is Big Brother (or Big Blue). Those are “ratings” we don’t want!

Beyond that, I don’t want to say anything else about the film, as it deserves to be watched, and no synopsis by myself can capture the experience of watching it. I will only add a “woo woo” personal note re the way I came to watch CitizenFour today. At 12:30 PST I turned on the TV to watch tennis at the Madrid Open, but was bored by the match on air, and by the other live TV offerings, so I turned instead to my cable provider for a movie to watch from among those I had identified just the other day as available. The only one that was free to watch at that moment was… CitizenFour, and so it was that random sequence that led me to turn it on and start watching.

After watching for more than an hour, surprised at how spellbound I was, I went to Twitter to check out the Twitter feed from Glenn Greenwald (the reporter whom Snowden first contacted, who is another “star” in the film), and what did I see?  His Tweet, sent after I began watching the film, which read: “James Clapper lied and denied the existence of a program which a US appeals court said was illegal. Anyone arguing he should keep his job?”

Illegal? I quickly learned what those following the news cycle more closely than I, already knew—which is that today turned out to be another milestone in the process that Snowden set in motion 2 years ago.

What made me watch CitizenFour  at the very moment that the US appeals court decision was being handed down? Was I the proverbial 100^th monkey? I can’t say, but I am glad I finally took my head out of the sand, and decided it was time to start watching myself being watched. If I induce a few of you to do the same, then I’ll be glad. If Shakespeare and Jane Austen were alive today, perhaps they would make something more of the deep absurdity of this spectacle. But while we’re waiting for them to return, see CitizenFour.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter