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The History of Literature
793 The Secret Order of Shandeans: Laurence Sterne in Early Soviet Russia (with Peter Budrin) | My Last Book with Edward Watts
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A
The History of Literature Podcast, is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Insurance isn't a one size fits all, and shopping for it shouldn't feel like squeezing into something that just doesn't fit. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name your price tool for years. With the Name your price tool, you tell them what you want to pay and they show you options that fit your budget enough, Hunting for discounts, trying to calculate rates and tinkering with coverages. Maybe you're picking out your very first policy, or maybe you're just looking for something that works better for you and your family. Either way, they make it simple for you to see your options. No guesswork, no surprises. Ready to see how easy and fun shopping for car insurance can be? Visit progressive.com and give the Name your price tool a try. Take the stress out of shopping and find coverage that fits your life on your terms. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law it's time to bring on the blooms at the Home Depot with Spring Garden deals. Find savings on hanging baskets and flowers to brighten your backyard or any space that needs instant color. Then get everything you need to plant and protect them, with low prices guaranteed on soil and mulch. Dig into Spring garden deals for four days at the Home Depot, now through May 10th. Exquisite supply. See homedepot.com pricematch for details. Hello, Russia in the 1920s was a time of great upheaval, as a nation careened from the aftermath of the October Revolution to the establishment of the Soviet Union, the death of Lenin and the slide towards Stalinist totalitarianism that would dominate so much of the 20th century. And yet this was a nation that had reached the pinnacle of literature, its greatest masters still in the very recent past. Chekhov died in 1904, Tolstoy in 1910. We might expect that the people in the 1920s would turn to Dostoevsky and Gogol and other writers from tumultuous and absurd times to help them adjust to the swirling chaos around them. And yet they turned to a different figure, one that might surprise you as much as it surprised me, Lawrence Sterne, an 18th century Anglican clergyman who preferred ambivalence and paradox to rationalizing schemes. We know Stern best as the author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey in Russia in the 1920s. They knew him for what Viktor Shklovsky called Sternianatsvo self conscious narration and play with narrative time. Why did a people gripped in the throes of revolutionary political events turn to this extreme revolutionary of form, as Shklowski put it. We'll ask our guest today to explain. Plus Anna East Nin on the power of reading. And Edward Watts, historian of ancient Rome, stops by to tell us what he would choose as the last book he will ever read. That's all coming up today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. I'm Jack Wilson. Welcome to the podcast. She is a controversial figure, to say the least. An inveterate writer of diaries. An author, a counterpoint to the male dominated literary world of the 20th century. A valuable voice, say some, a con artist, say others, a psychopathic. Pick me. Someday we'll do an episode on Anais Nin. But in the meantime, let's stay on neutral territory and just say this much. She loved literature and authors too, in her own writing, of course. But she did love reading. It was essential for her. It unlocked things, which is inspiring. Here's Nin talking about the power of books in her diaries of 1931. Quote, you live like this, sheltered in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book, Lady Chatterley, for instance. Or you take a trip, or you talk with someone and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable. First, restlessness. The second symptom when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death. Absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this or die like this without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place. A person, a book, a song. And it awakens them and saves them from death. End quote. Shades of Kafka's frozen sea within and the ax that literature can be to crack you open. And sometimes books can help you make sense of the world. They help restore order. They calm and soothe. They can serve as secret messengers, uniting people who are in need of networks. Just what were the early Soviet Union residents doing with their obsession with Lawrence Stern? Why him? What did they gain from it? Our guest today is here to explain. Okay. Joining me now is Peter Budran, an early career fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Peter has a doctorate from the University of Oxford and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and he's here today to discuss his new book, Lawrence Stern and his Readers in Early Soviet the Secret Order of Shandians. Peter Budrin, welcome To the history of literature.
- [06:36]
B
Thank you so much for having me.
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A
So I love the 18th century, but it's often overlooked, falling between the age of Shakespeare and the juggernaut Victorians. What drew you to that period? Was Laurence Stern your entry point? And what do you find compelling about it?
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B
Well, indeed, it was Stern who first kind of piqued my interest in that period. It was because of Stern that I got so interested in that time. For me, the 18th century is interesting as a time when many forms of modern literary culture were taking shape. Not only literature itself, but institutions such as literary magazines, modern newspapers. But it is also a period, I think, that for literary history exclusively, that, you know, many directions were set, certain words. Sometimes it was contingent in a way, depending on little things, like, say, if things went differently, we wouldn't call a novel. For example, if we're talking about English literature, you know, terminology developed, generic, you know, ideas about genre, ideas about literature. Also, new writers of different kinds emerged. Some voices appeared that we never heard before, some of them very unexpected. But it was also, well, 18th century always seemed interesting to me also as a period when the kind of literature was at the crossroads. Classical learning and this kind of Renaissance style learned with was very much alive, but it was also rapidly losing its relevance. But even beneath this discourse of, like, late 18th century discourse of politeness and sociability, we can still hear echoes sometimes of the kind of baroque aesthetics of something very early modern. And so, as a kind of transitionary time, 18th century is especially interesting for me. And for that very reason, I find Stern so intriguing.
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A
Right, okay, so let's talk about Stern. We've done some episodes on him before, but let's remind people of who we're talking about here. Who was Lawrence Stern?
- [09:00]
B
That's a big question. As a Stern scholar, it always difficult for me to find the right word.
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A
And he doesn't make it easy for us. Right. I mean, it's hard to untangle his life from his writings and his creativity. And the sort of the way he played fast and loose with biographical fact makes it a bit of a hard question. But we know a few things about him. He was a Yorkshire clergyman, for example, and he had some English and Irish roots, but he wasn't exactly famous when he started writing.
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B
No, no, he wasn't. In fact, he was quite. He was a relatively obscure figure. He was definitely an obscure figure for people in Lond. Never heard that name before, but it was somewhat noticeable as a Yorkshire clergyman. But he was not at all a superstar that he became after the publication of the first volume of Tristram Shendy
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A
when he was in his 40s.
- [10:01]
B
He was in his late 40s, yes. He originally came from a very influential Yorkshire family, but nevertheless, he's childhood was quite difficult and not particularly secure when come to family finances. His father was a military man. They, they traveled, so his regiment had to move from place to place. During Lawrence's childhood, their family had several children, but all of them, all but Lawrence and his sister died in infancy. And there's this very sad note in Stern's memoirs when he talks about his early family history. Through his influential uncle, he managed to get a scholarship to study at Cambridge. And ironically, the scholarship which was aimed specifically at people from Yorkshire, was in fact established by Stern's grandfather, Archbishop Stern. And it was there that he made some lifelong friendships and I think that many aspects of his intellectual outlook performed. This was also a time when, I think the kind of Oxford and Cambridge education was for many, you know, in the kind of new commercial society was somehow losing relevance. The kind of medieval knowledge and theological debates. It was a place, however, that one will go to if this person wants to become a clergyman and that's what. Or he wants a career in church, and that's what Stern did. So he ended up becoming a clergyman and worked in Yorkshire. He had one of his uncles, Jake Stern was a very influential figure in the church and a weak politician who tried to bring him into Lawrence, into politics, to use his literary talent. But I think the early Cambridge years were especially important for Stern because he got used to that. He was, in fact, you know, we tend to sometimes understate his erudition, but I think he was quite, quite knowledgeable when it came to theology or the classics.
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A
Now, everything that we've said so far about him might suggest that he's a writer who writes novels with a strong moral center or a strong point of view, a kind of, you know, I'm going to educate people and improve them and so on. And yet he's, he's most famous for his irreverence and for his. For being transgressive and, and almost, you know, for almost exploding the novel genre open, even though it was still pretty young today. We might think of him for his metafiction qualities. And I'm wondering, I mean, to have the background that he had and then to write like that, how do we combine the two? Was he a skeptic as a clergyman as well? Was he somebody who was known for, you know, having unusual opinions, or was it just when he turned to novels that he said, I think there's more that can be done than what we're previously seeing here.
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B
Oh, that's a very interesting question. Well, I think there's a lot in Stern in his writings that was intentionally shocking. He knew what he was doing. And his writings still retained this power to shock, even now that we're reading it, to frustrate as well and to annoy quite a few people. But at the same time, when it comes to religion, it becomes a way more like. It becomes a very difficult question that scholars argued about for quite a while. And was his writing actually find a way to his audiences to find a new way of speaking to them in this time that traditional forms such as sermons, while it's still extremely important, were gradually losing relevance? Some people may claim that as well. And it's very difficult because CERN and he knew that very well, had a great power of being extremely ambiguous. And sometimes you. You wonder whether you understand his intents clearly, because sometimes he can. You think he's preparing you for certain things and suddenly thing, you know, it ends with something completely unexpected. A melancholy, sentimental passage can end with a provocative joke or sometimes the other way around. So I think he was a great master of the unexpected. And in that sense he was also an advocate of narrative and individual freedom. But I don't think, in contrast at his views as a clergyman, which were based in many ways on common sense. He was a critic of Catholicism as many intellectuals in the church of his times, and he believed that the mercy, that the kind of love and all these things, they should be understood by the common sense. So he had a very, I think he was, in a way, he was a rationalist, but he was not an atheist.
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A
Yeah, yeah. You know, it almost reminds me of television. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and there was a type of television show, even on a situation comedy, they would have these special episodes where they would have a character who's dealing with alcoholism or a character who's dealing with child abuse or something like that. And it was well meaning and well intentioned and everybody agreed with it. But it also, it felt like, you know, the people who made the shows were smarter than that and the people who were watching the shows were smarter than that. And it wasn't really clear why we were engaged in this almost like a performance of like, now we're going to watch this very special episode that deals with a very serious subject. And then by the time shows like the Simpsons came along and they just, they basically said this is not meeting the audience on the audience's level. We're all too smart for this now. We're too wised up. And it's not as if the Simpsons were saying, so we're in favor of alcoholism and child abuse, but they were saying, if we're going to get a message across, any kind of message, we have to meet the audience where they are. They're too wised up for us to pretend like the old rules are going to apply. And it almost seems like Stern may have kind of taken that sort of approach to saying, yes, everybody's reading these novels, but we all know there's pretense here. We all know that there are devices that authors use. And so let's cut through that, and let's talk about readers and give them credit for being as intelligent as they are. And I'm willing to be the author who will talk to them like I know they're ready to listen.
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B
I think so, too. And what's so shocking about Stern, in a way, is that with all his digressiveness and kind of wordiness, he is extremely direct, at least in certain things.
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A
Right, okay. So I want to take a break, but before we do that and jump to the Soviet Union, I was wondering about Russian writers and readers in the 18th and 19th centuries when they started to discover Stern and what they thought of him. I know Tolstoy, for example, was a fan. Was he widely known in Russia, you know, before the period that we're going to be talking about?
- [18:07]
B
Well, Sturm was greatly admired in Russia in the late 18th century when his works first arrived there. Educated readers, nobility, and the elites could read him in French and German translations. And that's even before the first Russian translations came out in the late 1780s. The Empress Catherine the Great, for example, was one of Stern's early readers, and she. She read him in. In her native language, in German. So it was also the time, late 18th century, when modern Russian literary language was still forming. So it was a transformative period that Stern kind of came into the picture, and he was extremely popular all across Europe. And that, of course, emanated into Russia and influences Russian. And was it. He was extremely fashionable at the time in France as well, when people were talking about Stern's craze. Some French critics, for example, even accused Stern of an increase in the rate of divorces.
- [19:20]
A
Right. And they loved. I know Nietzsche loved Stern for his freedom. It seems like they. They saw a freedom in. In the style that he was writing with, but also that his views that were Coming across were those of individual liberty. He was a critic of slavery. You know, I don't know if he was ever able to really become political or to be working in society to try to remake them, but he seemed to stand for freedom through his personality and through his narrators and kind of the positions that his. He was taking through his humor and so on.
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B
That's true. So if we return to Russia in the 18th century, the two major prose writer of the 1790s, essentially the founding figures of modern Russian prose, Nikolai Karamzin, the writer and journalist, and the kind of Russia's first European style literary celebrity, or the writer and political dissident. Alexander Radishev, the author of A Critic of Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, a book that was very critical of the Russian monarchy, were both great admirers of Stern. But I think for them, Stern not only offered a set of narrative devices that they could follow. So a genre of this kind of subjective sentimental journey when the narrator could think about different things and, and digress quite, think about, quite freely about other matters and not even the sentimental subject matter that is present in Stern sentimental journey, but also this image of a kind of free roaming European intellectual who could engage with things in a kind of, you know, who could show a kind of. Yeah, so this kind of image of a European intellectual and an inherently free person. And I think that in many ways it was not only the matter of literary influence, but also influence of Stern as an author, as an image, as a way of self fashioning.
- [21:42]
A
Right. Because as we were saying, this is when a lot of things in literature, the institutions of literature and the mechanisms of literature is changing and, and people were able to earn money from their writing and be independent of, of patrons or, or institutional support. They can, they can call it as they see it and be like a freelancer, not defined by their nationality or defined by the aristocrats who are supporting them and that kind of thing, but just be kind of out there on their own. And Stern kind of stands for that. So let's take a quick break and then we'll come back with more. We'll talk about Stern in early Soviet Russia. Hey, folks, launching a business is fun, but there's so much to do and so much risk. What if I put out a podcast and nobody listens? What if nobody buys my products? That's why it's great to have one. Go to partner on your side. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, from household names like Heinz and Mattel to brands just getting started like Gymshark and Death Wish Coffee. Choose one of Shopify's hundreds of ready to use templates to build a beautiful store that matches your brand and benefit from all of Shopify's behind the scenes tools like campaigns, inventory, shipping, payments, analytics and more. If you get stuck, Shopify is there to help with their award winning 24. 7 customer support. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com literature go to shopify.com literature that's shopify.com literature ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer All Day Play? You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play Red Bull Redbull gives you wings. Visit RedBull.com BrightSummerAhead to learn more. See you this summer. Hello. Do you ever wish you could step away from the noise of the world for a little while? Stories from the Village of Nothing Much takes you there. Each episode invites you into the Village, a soothing place where life moves gently. From the Inn on the lake to the downtown bookshop, from the Farmer's market to a cabin in the woods, you'll hear warm, family friendly stories designed to help you slow down, breathe easier and feel at home. It's a bit like a grown up version of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood Gentle, thoughtful and full of everyday magic. From the creator of the internationally beloved podcast Nothing Much Happens. This series expands the Village into a rich, ongoing world. It's not about falling asleep. It's about comfort, calm, and the joy of a good story. If you're new, try episode 84, all animal edition. It's a delightful introduction to the Village's gentle pace and whimsy. You can listen to Stories from the Village of Nothing Much wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back. So Peter, you note in your introduction that that Stern has kind of a whimsical world sometimes, and it doesn't always seem like that would be a natural fit for readers who've just gone through the political upheaval of something like the Bolshevik Revolution. Before we talk about why and what appealed to them, let's just talk about how prominent his work was in the first two decades of the Soviet Union. Was he read by a small group of devoted people or was his work widely read in Russia? How can we Measure his popularity.
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B
Well, to respond to this question, we'll have to jump back to immediate pre revolutionary times when Stern was not at all a household name. He would be known to literary historians for people who would know this name from textbooks primarily associated with 18th century sentimental writings. 18th century sentimentalism. So he was known, say, as an influence on Russian sentimentalism, on Nikolai Kremzin for example. But there were a couple translations that came out just at the very end of the 19th century. But he was not very well known. And the 1920s in particular saw a major and unexpected reversal of his kind of literary fate in Russia. There was an. An unexpected revival of interest. Stern began to be discussed quite widely in critical articles. His books, well, A Sentimental Journey first and foremost, was published in large print runs. There were four editions of A Sentimental Journey that were published between 1922 and 1941, and two translators were working on Tristram Shendy as well. So not that this work was out of the pictures, but due to various circumstances that did not appear in the 30s, he was also reread in a completely new way. His name in the 1920s became a synonym for narrative experiments, kind of self conscious play with literary form. There was this new word that was coined which means sternism, which was sometimes used to mean subversive kind of parodic literary practices. Even when there was no direct influence of Stern. It just became the kind of term that in a way anticipated the word metafiction that is used in Lucy criticism today.
- [28:14]
A
Right now it's hard to look back at those early years in the Soviet Union while knowing what came after with, with Stalinism and, and the rest of the Cold War period and so on. But if we look back in the first couple of decades, things might look kind of different to the people who were living then and reading them. And so I was kind of wondering, was Stern's popularity driven by people who were excited about the new Soviet state and saw it as a fresh start or a new beginning and saying, well, here's a writer who embodies our new ideals? Or were they already critics of the state and saying Stern is our response to things that we're seeing here that we don't like, that this is a development that looks like it's going to be problematic and Stern is kind of our antidote to that?
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B
That's a great question. I think the answer is, in a way, both. So I think that many early Soviet Stern readers didn't really think about it in the categories of necessarily of intellectual descent. However, if we think about Stern, that there's something inherent in him that on a philosophical level, you can't really imagine hardcore Bolshevik being aligned with Stern on a philosophical level, because Stern was so opposed to that idea of thinking about people as abstract masses. You know, there's this episode in A Sentimental Journey when he imagines himself a captive after hearing a bird. Well, in a way, it's a moment when. Which is also quite challenges what is egotistic and what is actually genuine and human motivations. But he hears a bird in the cage, and at the moment, he is very worried that he was just told that he may be arrested because he doesn't have proper documents. He doesn't have a passport, in a way, a visa, a visa to be in France. And he hears a bird in a cage saying, I can't get out. So he. And the sound of the bird sticks in his mind, and he keeps thinking about it. So he starts thinking about slavery, and he's trying to imagine the millions of creatures that were born to slavery. Like, that's his wording. Like, my minions, my fellow creatures born to no inheritance by slavery. But finding, he writes, how affecting the picture was that I couldn't bring it near me and that the multitude of set groups and it did but distract me. So he's unable to feel compassion to an abstract mass. So he has to imagine a single captive. And I think this is what is, on a fundamental kind of philosophical level, is what is so different. But said that. I think that for many readers of Stern, regardless of their political orientation, his liberating spirit was refreshing. It offered some sort of alternative reality, which they may not even know they needed, in a way. But there were readers who would talk about how Stern also offered a sense of consolation to them.
- [31:35]
A
Did the state allow the sales to continue and the publications and so on, or did this have to be done kind of secretly? Was there any sort of crackdown or ban on his books?
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B
Not really. In fact, Stern offers us a very exciting window on the history of early Soviet translation and publishing. Because in many ways, there was obviously no necessity or like, there was no demand on behalf of the state in publishing Stern's works. There was no way you could use him as a means of propaganda, for example. But on the other hand, the idea of the kind of Soviet world literature, the publishing foreign classics in enormous print runs, was there from the very early days of the Soviet regime. And this idea, you know, of Soviet world literature, the Soviet kind of the new Soviet readers have to be introduced to classics of world literature. And this that this, with the Soviet Union, will be a world leader in this kind of global internationalist culture also provided a sort of niche where writers like Stern could be smuggled in a way and published. But I think the process was largely driven by individual fans, by individual admirers who wanted to return Stern onto reading lists, to introduce the readers to his works, to have an occasion to create a new translation.
- [33:11]
A
So your title refers to the Secret Order of Shandians. Is that metaphorical, or do you mean that literally? Were there clubs and societies and so on where people were discussing his works?
- [33:27]
B
So when I talk about the Secret Order of Shandians, I mean primarily an informal network of Stern's readers that may not necessarily have been institutionalized, though there were in history. Many literary societies found that kind of in Stern's name. Even in Soviet Russia, in the late. In the late Soviet period, there was a literary society named after Lawrence Stern. It was founded by the writer Alexander Jatinsky. But I'm more interested, I guess, in this informal identification that happens in reader's mind when they. When they're reading Stern, because Stern has this quality of fashioning his readership as a kind of secret club or a virtual community, secret learned society. And I think that many readers. And I think that resonated with quite a few Soviet readers.
- [34:32]
A
Right. So we sometimes think of a writer like Stern and Metafiction as being kind of a luxury item or a sign of decadence, you know, to kind of say, well, things must be going pretty well if you can take this kind of whimsical approach to literature and and so on. It's sort of a sign of, you know, that everything must be going well for you. And it seems like this example of early Soviet Russia might suggest kind of the opposite, that there's something more essential about Stern that is, speaking to people who aren't in a. In a stable society who are kind of bored with the status quo, but people who are going through this kind of upheaval. Is that how you see the importance of Stern to the Russians of this time period?
- [35:26]
B
Yes, I think so. And if we look at the history of Stern's reception, even globally, he did quite well, unexpectedly well, in rather tragic times. And I think there is something in Stern that makes him attractive to people approaching him when, well, in stressful or dramatic circumstances. For example, in my book Somewhere, I cite the German writer Ernst Junger with a very problematic political view, which kind of adds to this idea of the reception of Stern as being sometimes above the politics in a way. But he describes how he became, and it is his words, the secret order of Shandians, that he first read Stern when he was in a hospital during bombings and he was under morphine. And for him, somehow in these circumstances, you know, Stern's Yorick and Uncle Toby felt as more real than the actual reality around him. And Junger is a problematic figure. But if we look at Stern's reader in Soviet Russia, some of them thought of Stern as a kind of. As some fresh air in a way, not necessarily conceptualizing their reading of Stern as an act of intellectual descent, but definitely talking about Stern as a way to find some kind of inner freedom. I think that's what appealed to them in Stern.
- [37:01]
A
And maybe we've already kind of discussed this, but it seems like when you have political leaders who are talking about systems and isms, it's refreshing to encounter an author who is so devoted to an individual and to a human being and to say, you know, whatever is going on with these large movements and with the institutions that are around us and threaten to dominate every aspect of our lives, we can still be a human being who sees things and notes things and has opinions and who makes their way through the world as an individual human.
- [37:45]
B
Yes. And I think this sense of liberating individualism was what informed and kind of informed his popularity in that time. Though, of course, Stern was approached from so many different angles. He was read as a philosophical writer, as an experimental writer. But whatever the readings were, the sense of freedom, whether discussed in a positive or negative way, was always central to the early Soviet readings.
- [38:20]
A
Okay, well, the book is called Lawrence Stern and His Readers in Early Soviet the Secret Order of Shandians. Peter Budrin, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [38:32]
B
Thank you very much.
- [38:44]
A
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- [39:00]
B
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A
Get started@redfin.com, own the dream. And finally today, Edward Watts was here to discuss the 2000 year history of Rome. What a monumental achievement his book is taking on a historical sweep like that. Riveting stuff. After we finished talking about it, that was back in episode 764, I asked Edward a special question. Okay, joining Me now is Edward Watts, author of the A 2000 Year History. Edward, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [40:11]
C
So I have been a huge fan of the Ender game series and I would love to read the Hive Queen. So this is a book, the Ender game series is about a child who defeats an invasion by, I suppose you would call them insects. And after he defeats the invasion, he learns what their perspective was and how they as a society function and what their mentality was. And the book in the Ender game series, the book is called the Hive Queen and it totally revolutionizes the way that people think about this war and also the way that they think about, you know, these, these insects. I would love to read that book and to actually catch capture this mentality of another way of just understanding the world and understanding kind of interactions and thought and perception. So if I could read that book before I died, I think I'd be completely ready to go to the next plane.
- [41:11]
A
Okay, so I haven't read the Ender's game books. Do you get hints of, I mean, are there quotations from this book or do you have a. Other than just the description of how it, how people respond to it, do you know anything about it or are you completely forced to imagine what it must be like?
- [41:32]
C
So the way that this works is so Ender is a child who's brought in to fight a war against the. They're called the Formics, these, these ant like invaders. And he's not told that he's actually fighting the war. He thinks he's playing a game and so he commits genocide, basically destroys the entire species. But there is one queen who's left. And it's a species that basically governed by these, these ant like queens. And all of their consciousness flows, it's a communal consciousness that flows through the queens. So when the queens die, the entire society just collapses. And the Hive queen is written by Ender after he finds one chrysalis with a living queen in it. And so the queen communicates the way that this, this sort of communal consciousness works. And the entire way that you can have one entity that has the entire history of a species locked away and shares it with billions and trillions of other little creatures. And what Ender does is he writes the history of perception of this other species. And so, you know, kind of that it's about that, right? That it is about a different conception of what individuality is, about what identity is, about how communities function, and basically about how perception works and how thought works. And so, you know, all of these things are in that book, but you don't actually have passages of this book. But you also know the effect of the book because the. The book is so profoundly effective that it creates a new religion, it changes people's perspective on what the Formics were and what these wars were. And ultimately, you know, Ender is able to reestablish the species on a different planet. And people are supportive of this because now they understand the collective consciousness that these ant like creatures shared. So I think, you know, kind of how the book works, but I don't think there's any direct quotations from it. You just have a sense of, wow, this is super profound. And it shifts the way you understand everything.
- [43:42]
A
Now do you imagine that you would read it and you would think, well, this is the perfect capper, because I loved that series of, you know, the Ender's Game so much, and this is like a treat. That's part of my reading experience of that. Or are you imagining. Well, if I read that book, I may learn things about myself and about my mind and about the way I, you know, my consciousness and so on. I'll have a kind of enlightened experience reading it.
- [44:13]
C
I will say that as someone who spends a lot of time reading Platonism, I've sort of been imbued with this idea of a kind of Platonic dichotomy between the body and soul. And if this is the last thing I'm reading, you know, I like to read. So this is probably near the end. I'm about to lose the body. And without the body, I feel like the soul has lots of possibilities to be in a different fashion. And so having a sense of how you can be in a fashion that isn't restricted by body, you know, I think someone who adheres to a Platonic idea of a soul, this has got to be just so intoxicating, right? You're about to lose this physical thing that constrains your ability to do things and interact with ideas and interact with others. And if you lose that, you know, what happens when your soul is liberated? What happens when your soul is able to kind of interact however it interacts. And if you have this other sense of a kind of collective consciousness where you can plug in as just part of a larger unit, I think that would be, you know, really cool. Maybe my soul would benefit from that. And Maybe not.
- [45:21]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Or maybe it would give you a few timely tricks where you think like a how to manual.
- [45:29]
C
Yeah. A way to dominate the afterworld. Yeah.
- [45:33]
A
Are you thinking that this will be something that you would be privileged to get a copy of that is. Is especially prepared just for you, or are you thinking, well, this is, you know, maybe the book will come out and it'll be all of society. You'll just be one of a lot of people in society who will be reading it at the same time, and you can participate in kind of a mass movement of readers of the Hive Queen.
- [45:59]
C
I would love to do that. I would love to sort of be able to enter the Ender game universe and, you know, be able to read this alongside everybody else. I think it would be sort of weird to just be the only one to have it.
- [46:11]
A
Yeah. Right, right. Because what if it. I mean, if it really is full of all kinds of wisdom and you probably would feel a little bit have a tinge of sorrow that you were the only one who was going to benefit from it and at such a late stage?
- [46:29]
C
Well, I think what's cool about this in the Ender Game series is he actually, the author, Orson Scott Card, goes into, like, what it means to have this different perception, you know, this. This different way of understanding the world and thinking you don't think linearly and you don't think in the same way as people who do think as individuals and humans. And so he gets into, you know, the perceptive differences that, you know, this mode of being kind of creates. So I think if you were the soul that was liberated, that read this and then is liberated, and you're the only one, you'd be really confused, you know, and this is what you see from the Hive queens when. When you do see them interacting with humans, they just. First of all, they don't understand how we think. They have very significant difficulties communicating how they think they are not reflexive in the way that we are. They don't think about the implications of what they're doing in any way that doubts that they're going to actually achieve what they aim to achieve. There's just a whole different manner of being that can't really be communicated to humans, because humans just start with basic assumptions that Hive queens don't. So I think it'd be really lonely to be the only soul that knows this.
- [47:49]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, okay. What a great choice. Edward Watts, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [47:57]
C
Thank you. This was so much fun.
- [48:03]
A
Okay. There we go short and sweet. That's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to Edward Watts and Peter Budden for joining me. I will be back soon. German romantic writer E.T.A. hoffman is on Monday. And then some old favorites as the History of Literature podcast swerves from cyberspace into reality on his first ever podcast tour. The old favorites will help remind those of us on the tour of the people whom we're going to be meeting in London and Oxford as our Magical Mystery tour journeys through Britain. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.