J.G Riewald's Zulieka Dobson

Sir Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is- at least for Indglish literature- a Platonic parable of a Sufi type. The Victorian relish for translations from the Persian masters- like Fitzgerald's Salaman/Absal in 1856 or Griffith's 1882 version of Jami's Yusuf/Zuleikha- had earlier been cultivated and catered to by industrious Civil Servants in Calcutta, the Empire's second city. At that time, Oriental, or Ishraqi, Platonism was seen through an Unitarian, and later, a Theosophical lens. This meant that maiuetics was disembodied and abstract when it wasn't simply vacuous.

Perhaps, if foundational texts- e.g. Ahmad Ghazali's Sawaneh- had been translated with a perspicacious commentary, this new genre of literature could have been read in the light of contemporary developments in STEM subjects- e.g. Grassmann's prize winning 1846 essay which moved beyond Leibniz's faith in form as determining everything else, to a theory of extension which recognized a space as itself a 'production factor'. This embodies and variegates maieutics rather than consigning it to a transcendental horizon. Sadly, there was a disconnect between classical paideia and the new mathematical and scientific ideas and thus there was ideological calcification rather than a circulation of ideas. This was reflected in a widespread fear of 'stasis', or class (or indeed gender) conflict of a zero sum type. Platonism- or indeed the Academy- was assumed to be of and for an increasingly embattled elite. Thus, for people like Beerbohm, what threatened the Ivory Tower was the Board School not to mention women- even of their own class- traditionally denied much in the way of education. 

E.G Browne, in the second volume of his History of Persian literature, which came out in 1906, treats Ahmad Ghazali as an ecstatic mystic rather than a systematic thinker whose work complemented that of his elder brother. I believe it was only about 40 years ago that any work published in the English language sought to correct this error. Thus, the key to such work- viz. the 'love dialectic' between Sultan Mahmud and the Slave Ayaz, which is the reverse of the Hegelian Master/Slave 'struggle for recognition'- was not generally accessible till much later. Briefly, this is the notion of a Relational Grothendieck Yoga, i.e., a praxis of unification on the basis of greater and greater generality, wider and wider 'equivalence of categories', whereas the mainstream Idealistic Hegelian dialectic converges to a unique 'concrete universal'. For the latter, arbitrariness is a scandal. For the former, 'naturality' is far to seek- save for some narrow purpose we find ephemerally utile but eternally futile.  

Setting aside such sophomoric speculation, the fact is, for European literature, Zuleika was a 'hyena woman' rather than a potential Hypatia, or maieutic midwife. 

This is how J.G Riewald's depicts Zulieka in his magisterial 'Sir Max Beerbohm: Man and Writer: A Critical Analysis with a Brief Life and a Bibliography'.

The heroine of the 'novel' is a reckless Bohemian,

No. She is of the highly respectable English middle class. True, she has made a very successful career for herself as a stage-magician. But, there is no suggestion that she takes lovers or drinks too much or is surrounded with louche characters from the demi monde.  

a hyena woman,

The Duke does thus picture her- but only after she had poured a jug of cold water on his head. But, soon enough, he understands his death is predestined. 

I may mention that female spotted hyenas possess a "pseudo-penis"—an enlarged clitoris—through which they urinate, copulate, and give birth. This unusual anatomy contributed to ancient myths that they were hermaphrodites.

However, in the novel, there is no suggestion that Zuleika is manly or a 'man-eater' or, indeed, not perfectly chaste. But she is strong. But, like the typical undergraduate, she is still in search of a proper field for the exercise of that strength. Recall, she isn't a thaumaturge by vocation. It is just something she chanced to take up- a pose, if you like- till she settled on what she actually wanted to do with her life. 

whose fabulous theatrical career is only rivalled by her incredible successes with men —

she does not set out to entrap men. Beerbohm compares her to Cervantes's Marcella, a shepherdess, who never wished that any swain fall in love with her or die of a broken heart on her account. 

which, however, merely disgust her.

She, quite naturally, feels some little vanity on the score of her looks. It turns out that her grandfather, a very handsome curate in his youth, had been equally flattered by the attentions of parishioners of  the fair sex. Still, if that meant Church services were better attended, what great harm had been done? 

The reason is that, though all her happiness depends on the admiration of men,

Her career may depend on her beauty rather than her talent, but happiness is independent of success in one's career. Pagliacci was a very successful clown. He wasn't happy.  

she cannot love a lover, that is, a man who has debased himself before her.

Who could? I'd be thrilled if a woman showed an interest in me. I'd be alarmed and would run away if she threw herself at my feet and said that she loved me more than life itself. This is because I would assume she was mad. What we look for is a partner, sensible enough in most matters, who thinks 'this person will do for me. We can make a life together. Be it Sunshine or Sorrow, whatever comes our way, we can share together.'  

'I could no more marry a man', she says, 'about whom I could not make a fool of myself

for a bit- sure.  The fact is, with any luck, soon there will be a baby. Everybody goes out of their way to make a fool of themselves to entertain that Imperial personage of limited interests and exacting moods. There's a good reason that people preparing to pair off in matrimony indulge in a lot of baby-talk. They are mentally preparing themselves to wheedle laughter or stem tears in a manner even a Prussian General might consider infra dig when it came to soothing the frets of the Kaiser.  

than I could marry one who made a fool of himself about me' (p. 68).

Zuleika is young and beautiful. A man who makes himself a fool over her is likely to make himself a bigger fool over some younger or more beautiful woman in five or ten years time.  

This utterance not only identifies her as the exaggerated embodiment of das Ewig-Weibliche,

Goethe's 'eternal feminine' which ever draws us on high. But, unbeknownst to all, at that time, there were also harpies itching to hand out, to those not in khaki, nor otherwise marked out as carrion for the Valkyries, white feathers while, for more blood yet, Britannica shrieked like a banshee.

i.e. of all that is coquettish and frivolous in woman;

Max's 'decadent' buddies were more coquettish and frivolous than any woman. This is because boys can't get preggers.  

it also proves that, in her, Max wanted to caricature the independence and hardness of the modem girl, the 'New Woman', to whose emergence in the Nineties the old files of, say, Punch bear such ample testimony.

Max's wife was an actress who had played Ibsen's Rebecca West. Ibsen's point was that Norway could not become independent till its woman, too, became strong and autonomous. Joyce learnt Norwegian because he appreciated Ibsen's point. England was richer than Ireland or Norway, but an increasing number of men of Max's own class simply didn't earn enough to marry. There was no alternative for educated middle-class girls but to rise up in the same manner as their brothers.  

The first two qualities account for Zuleika's vain search for a man who shall be proof against her charms;

She hadn't met a bloke with a career and broad interests of his own who admired her and saw that a marriage between them would have 'synergy'. It would be a partnership which yielded mutual profit and benefited society.  

Beerbohm contrived a 'chameleon on a mirror' type dynamic between the Duke & Zuleika. But it is Zuleika who has made something of herself by being willing to be remade by something outside herself. The Duke is as much part of a clockwork as the two black owls which must come and perch upon the battlements of his ancestral castle on the eve of his death. Zuleika reaches for the Railway time-table and departs. But General Schlieffen, too, had his Railway Time-table. Indeed, every Army did. Once the clockwork was set in motion, nothing could avert a general holocaust. 

the last two seem to predestine her for the Lamia-like role she plays in the extinction of a whole generation of undergraduates.

After 1914, and the Gadarene rush of an entire cohort to the Gehenna of the trenches, it was more usual to speak of Gabriel Tarde's theory of mimetics- people imitate their 'superiors'- not to mention Gustave Le Bon's theory of crowds. We may well blame the Duke- a bad shepherd to his flock- for egotistically revealing a preference he was loath for any or all of their number to adopt. Thus, he is the reverse of Christ or Socrates as the pharmakos, or scape goat, which Rene Girard believes 'mimetic desire' requires to maintain its Katechon and hold the Eschaton at bay.

 What is interesting is that Zuleika is presented as- like a Sociologist of the new type- seeking statistical confirmation that her beauty really was as fatal as some had claimed. It is well that she quits Oxford for Cambridge where Karl Pearson had been third Wrangler and which Ronald Fischer would soon adorn. Thus, it my fond belief, her part in this sorry business did not go unpunished. 

Needless to say that, like everything else in this extravaganza, Zuleika's outward circumstances are exaggerated ad absurdum. This is especially striking in the account of her spectacular career on p. 15 ff. But Zuleika Dobson is not a caricature of the aristocrat, or the dandy, or the New Woman as such. According to Beerbohm's own statement in a note to the 1947 edition of the book, the story should be seen as a fantasy based on the solid reality of old Oxford.

Where undergraduates might suddenly grow crazy about some new (or very old) theological idea.  

But in the author's representation of reality the margin between fancy and fact is not constant; it varies with the object represented.

We are living in a fairy-tale world where statues sweat and daisies speak.  

Roughly speaking the line may be drawn at the active participants in this farce.

The human beings depicted have no supernatural powers.  

It is they whose every feature and action is exaggerated ad absurdum,

No. They are creatures of habit. But just as the passion to enlist during the Great War overbore any other consideration for so many young men in 1914 without altering their habits in any other way, so too was it with Zuleika. She was fair to look at and since everybody was drowning himself for her, one might as well do so too. But, this didn't mean one could skip lectures- if one was studiously inclined- or forego one's physical training, if you had a place on the rowing team. 

so that even such a wholesale tragedy as the death of all the undergraduates leaves us absolutely unmoved.

Not after Ypres. Not after Passchendaele. Then, everybody was moved and moved so deeply that rancour itself was displaced.

Thalia, the Comic Muse, had made Max incomparable in that what he was doomed to foretell, did not afterwards repel, rather it continued to enchant. After all, not he had played false with Apollo. Moreover, it was the Past into which he wished to peek and it was to Clio he paid his devoirs. For men of his class, the future could only be a calamity.  

the 'novel' may justly be called a caricature of that complex reality denoted by the word Oxford.

There had been such a thing as 'the Oxford Movement' which in turn influenced the Pre-Raphaelites who in turn influenced the Aesthetes of the Nineties. Max, perpetually preoccupied with the past, proved, instead, to be chillingly prescient. The Duke, marrying his own image in the waters of the Isis, mirrored the fate of the European Aristocracy which destroyed itself in a looking-glass war. Aristeia, henceforth, would be Scientific and Statistical, not Stately or, for never sufficiently so, Satirical or Soteriological. The Humanities were destined to become sub-human as the Graces departed and Graduate Studies grew ever more dispiriting.  

A further analysis of the elements which participate in this exaggerating process may prove this. Roughly speaking these elements may be reduced to three classes: the undergraduate world, the world of the dons, and tradition, the governing principle of these two worlds.

Nonsense! There is the Town- London & the wider world. There is the Gown- which undergraduates too wore. And then there are families- even the Warden has a grand-daughter- scattered across the countryside. As for 'governing principles'- perhaps they have such things on the Continent. J.G Riewald, it will be remembered, was Dutch. 

The undergraduate world is represented by three types of students: the aristocratic and dandyish type, embodied in the Duke of Dorset;

he stands alone. He only nominates a few other members of his club in his third year so that it will remain in existence after he departs from the University.  

the plebeian type, typified in poor, cowardly, hard working Noaks

There had always been 'sizars' at the University. They kept apart from the fee-paying students.  

who, as the Duke's 'foil and antithesis', is the last of the undergraduates to die for Zuleika; and the American Rhodes scholar who, not being able to take Oxford as a matter of course, strikes an equally discordant note in the person of Mr Abimelech V. Oover.

Nonsense! He fits right in. Those who aspire to be future Cabinet Ministers will be careful to make his acquaintance. He is bound to become either a Senator or a member of the board of J.P Morgan, or both simultaneously.  

A fourth, but as yet almost negligible class of students, is briefly dismissed with the significant remark that 'beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied' (p. 89).

One might equally say this of the 'hearties'. But some might achieve great things in athletics. Indeed, it was not unknown for a hearty to achieve academic renown. 

Max takes a tolerant view of the students and the Dons. He doesn't like Noakes because Noakes isn't likable. Indeed, it is only the Duke who talks to him. One might say, Noakes, like the Duke, is an egoist. The other young people may be thoughtless or selfish in a childish manner but they believe in something higher than themselves. Most ordinary people do. We might be inclined to shed a tear for the imaginary families of these imaginary young men. Then we remember Ypres & Passchendaele & the ghastly images conjured up by those bitter lines of Wilfred Owen's which end-

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. 

Max told a fairy tale- but it contained no lie. Oxford- or Paideia idealized- must not imbue you with the desire to martyr yourself for some abstract truth precisely because witness can only be borne by those living their own life in their own way. Zulieka Dobson, we may say, learnt all that could be learnt from Oxford and moved on. In Cambridge, I firmly believe, Mahalanobis or some other such Statistician would have pointed out to her that though, on available evidence, infatuation with her fair form was highly correlated with the death of a considerable number of young men, this did not imply a causal link of any kind. What was required was a Structural Causal Model integrating facts about Biology and Sociology and Economics. But to acquire such a thing would also be, for the fair Zulieka, to bid farewell to Participation (μέθεξις) in the Platonic form of her own pulchritude. It would be, so to speak, a sentence of exile in a place where Echo lends the image of Narcissus an, alas!, unintelligible tongue with which to respond to his own heart-broken lament & farewell. 

I suppose, for Indians,  Zulieka is the embodiment of the 'cruel-fair' invoked by Khwaja Mir Dard's couplet- 'qatl-e-aam kisi mashuq se kuch dur na ta/ par tere ahd se aage to ye dastur na ta'. 

Though any beloved could become the cause of death of every swain, prior to the advent of our particular Zulieka, this had never been de rigueur. 

This may be mere hyperbole. But it would be no exaggeration to say that Europe was soon to witness a spectre, as beautiful and as terrible, enormously multiplied by the myriad mirrors of Tardean Mimetics, jealously stalking each street seeking the extinction of every last specimen of ardent young manhood. 

 What of Max? Did he, like Plethon, reject the Eschaton? Did he think the rending of the Veil would only reveal that Wrath too has had its Day? I like to think so. Though his novel foreshadows the horrors of the trenches- and perhaps our own Nuclear Armageddon- yet its elegance is irenic and points ever to that second Eden, Memory fabricates to fill the void where once was love.