Mohamed-Alioum Fantouré, the Guinean exile whose real name is shrouded in secrecy, is one of the most politically committed and artistically innovative of the second generation of writers in Francophone Africa. This essay focuses on his second novel, Le récit du cirque…de la Vallée des Morts (The Tale of the Circus…of the Valley of Death), which reveals his political stance and also demonstrates his stylistic originality. However, it should be noted that even though our main concern here is with the limitation of the author's stylistic innovations, it is necessary to dwell very briefly on the theme of the novel in order to give better attention to the primary focus of our essay.

Like his first novel, Le cercle des Tropiques (1972), Le récit du cirque… is a biting satire of dictatorship. But unlike the former, it does not stop at exposing and ridiculing dictatorship. Rather, it goes further to castigate the victims and observers of dictatorship whose indifference facilitates its establishment and sustainability. The novelist's strictures against them stem from his conviction that timely resistance can stifle the growth of an incipient dictatorship. As he puts it: ‘En vérité, ce ne sont pas les injustices dans les sociétés de notre époque qu’on doit combattre, c’est l’indifférence qu’on devrait attaquer’ (25) (‘In truth, it is not injustice of our time that we must fight against, it is indifference that we should attack’).

This observation brings back to mind part of Emperor Haile Selassie's reminiscences of his country's invasion and occupation by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini from 1936 to 1941, in his address to the League of Nations, here reproduced from the website en.wikisource. org:

Equally, ‘the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing’ (attributed to Edmund Burke).

In Le récit du cirque…, a country simply named Ce-pays (This Country) is ruled by a ruthless dictator – Rhinocéros-Tâcheté. The members of the ruling class have created around him the myth of invincibility which they exploit to discourage social groups or individual citizens from challenging the excesses of the regime.

Counter-roll of Adam of Chesterfield, controller of the king's works at the palace of Westminster and Tower of London, concerning expenditure made by William of Lambeth, king's clerk of works at the same, on building works at Westminster.

Physical description: A roll of five membranes, sewn end-to-end; soiled on m. 1, with minor staining throughout the rest; in reasonably good condition and wholly legible. The account is similar in organization to the particulars for no. 42 (for 1353–54): mm. 1–3 give details of the wages paid over the period, with the dates worked by each workman; mm. 4–5 provide a list of purchases of materials, with transport costs, and the wages of the clerk of works and controller.

Scope of transcription: Entries relating to St Stephen's chapel, the ‘claustrum le Pue’ and other chapels in the palace.

[m. 1]

Contrarotulus Ade de Chestrefeld contrarotulatoris operacionum Regis infra palacium Westm’ et Turrim London’ de omnibus expensis factis infra palacium predictum a v die Junij anno xxxj usque iiij diem eiusdem mensis anno revoluto

Idem computat in vadiis domini Edmundi canonici magistri talliatorum operantium super stallis pro capella Regis a v die Junij anno dicto anno xxxj [usque] iiij diem eiusdem mensis anno xxxij per ccclxiiij dies primo die computato capienti per diem xviij d.: xxvij li. vj s.

Et Johanni Drax [illegible] et talliatori operanti ibidem a predicto v die Junij usque ix diem Octobris proximum sequentem per cxxvj dies primo die computato capienti per diem xij d.: [vj s. vj d.]

Et Willelmo de Patrington’ talliatori operanti ibidem a predicto v die Junij usque xxiiij diem Julij proximum sequentem per xxxvj dies operabiles et per ij dies festivales pro medietate festorum accidentalium per idem tempus primo die computato ipso capienti per diem xij d.: xxxviij s.

Et eidem Willelmo operanti ibidem a predicto xxiiij die Julij usque xxix diem Augusti proximum sequentem per xxvij dies operabiles et per iij dies festivales pro medietate festorum ut supra utroque die computato capienti per diem viij d.: xx s.

In the proposal defining this colloquium's objective and framework, Monsieur Le Goff posed the following questions: ‘Is heresy a matter for simple people or for the learned? Were there popular heresies and learned heresies? Did they play the same roles in the process of spiritual awareness? How did learned theorising and popular belief relate to the development of that heresy?’

Without a doubt, there were learned heresies throughout the Middle Ages – that is to say, dogmatic, theoretical and intellectual heresies that were the work of theologians or philosophers such as Abelard, Gilbert de la Porée, the Latin Averroists of the thirteenth century and many others. After being accused of divergence from Church orthodoxy, they were condemned as heretics. In view of such learned heretics, one cannot generally assert (as did Monsieur Le Goff) that ‘there is no such thing as an isolated heretic’. To be sure, learned heretics could have followers who were not disciples in heresy, and thus could teach without a heretical sect necessarily being formed. And since the Church sought at all costs to isolate learned heretics, the inverse could also take place; in other words, learned heretics belonged to a social group composed not of fellow heretics, but rather of fellow learned persons. They vied with each other for intellectual standing (‘more wise than it behoveth to be wise’, as St Paul said in Romans 12. 3), without consciously opposing either the faith of the Church or Catholic dogma.

Yet at times learned heretics were indeed at the origin of a popular heresy or of a heretical sect. For example, John Wyclif was certainly a very learned theologian, a master of Oxford University, who only became a heretic after a long life as a professor and without ever wishing to create a heretical sect. Wyclif had almost no learned disciples in England, and it was only after his death that the Lollards became sectaries. On the other hand, despite his posthumous condemnation, his doctrines became popular in Bohemia through professors at the University of Prague. Likewise, Jan Hus died on the pyre at Constance in 1415 without having founded a heretical sect; the group that derived from his doctrines and bore his name did not form until several years after Hus's death. What is certain is that neither Wyclif nor Hus were members of any heretical community, belonging instead to their clerical university group.

THE SWORD HAS ACCOMPANIED human civilisation since the Bronze Age. Treasured both for its functionality as a weapon and its symbolic power, we have never lost our fascination with it. Even though now obsolete in military terms, it remains part of the insignia of soldiers all over the world. Together with the scales, it is recognised as a symbol of justice. It is featured in national flags and coats of arms. Just as in the literature of earlier centuries, modern pop-culture puts the sword in the hands of the righteous hero and villainous antagonist, most famously in its incarnation as the lightsaber. Martial arts and combat sports concentrate on the use of the sword, be it the Japanese national sport of kendo, Olympic fencing, or the quickly growing community of Historical European Martial Arts. Antique originals and high-quality replica swords are sought-after items among enthusiastic collectors.

But from what springs the fascination that the sword holds for the human mind? Fundamentally, from its materiality. A polished blade of metal, be it bronze or steel, is an object that transcends ordinary experiences; reflecting the sun, it resembles a ray of light held by the hands of its wielder. Its sharp edges threaten and attract at the same time. A child learns to fear the blade from the first time of being cut, a fear that soon becomes intuitive, like the fear of fire. Yet at the same time, children love to hold a blade in their hand: the blade promises empowerment, a possibility to change and dominate the world around them. The promise stays with them while they grow older; once taken in the hand, the sword seems to bestow an aura of invincibility to its wielder. An aura which is sometimes paid for with the horror the weapon instills in those it threatens. The sword is, one could say, an answer to our fear of our own weaknesses – even if that means to project the fear unto others.

All of this results in the sword's reputation as the “Queen of Weapons” through the millennia and across the continents. Given its outstanding status in human culture, it is no wonder that the weapon, its production, symbolism and usage also attracts the attention of researchers from various academic backgrounds. The volume brings together several such approaches to the history and meaning of the sword.

Ideas, some say, do not belong to a single person, not even the one who originally voiced them. True, unlike palpable products such as books, they call for more sophisticated legal efforts to be protected, or discerned at all, than private property. But regardless of whether ideas might naturally, as it were, tend towards a sort of software communism, it remains beyond dispute that some of them are primarily associated with at least two persons. The history of ideas, particularly in German literature and philosophy, offers a few outstanding examples of intellectual couples: Goethe and Schiller, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Marx and Engels, or, a little less illustrious, Horkheimer and Adorno. Or—as the present volume suggests—Benjamin and Brecht. What again did they share?

Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, who first met in 1924 and became friends by the end of that decade, have indeed been friends, above all else; and in some ways perhaps also comrades, though neither of them ever joined the untouchable Party they both marvelled at from afar. However, they never co-authored a single piece of text, at least not publicly. If they had done so, they would have probably come up with a play of two peculiarly stubborn characters. A likely stage design for a performance of that would-be drama can be found on the frontispiece of this beautifully illustrated book, picturing two chess players sitting back to back, staring at the chequerboard on the table or at the invisible photographer (the audience, respectively), but never looking at each other.

Brecht, more or less overtly, drew his inspirations from many different sources among which the writings of Benjamin played only a minor part, at best. Most of what Benjamin brought up remained fairly enigmatic to him, as Brecht quite bluntly, or ironically, admitted. Who knows if, or in which regard exactly, he might have recognized his friend's genius, as did, from different angles, Gershom Scholem, Theodor W. Adorno, and Hannah Arendt. Benjamin, in turn, was very much impressed, almost awed, by Brecht, both his personal demeanour and his works. And he wrote articles on some of these works which are now considered among the best ever written on Brecht.

Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676) is best known for her decades-long battles to inherit the huge northern estates of her father, George Clifford, 3rd earl of Cumberland. In 1643 she finally outlived all those who stood between her and her inheritance. Her Great Books of Record and her Great Picture both celebrated what she saw as the providential justification of her resistance to the authorities, including a king, archbishops, great lords, a husband and father, who had continually demanded she relinquish her claims. In 1643 she triumphed over these men, but could do little to insist upon what she believed to be her divinely ordered destiny, to embody her lordship over these lands in Westmorland and north-west Yorkshire. Yet, through her work on the Great Books of Record, with its six hundred year history of the Cliffords in the region, Anne Clifford derived a firm sense of her rights and a clear understanding of the challenges facing her. Her experience of regal courts, especially that of Elizabeth I, reminded her of the necessity of display and reciprocity. Watching Charles I's will flouted and the country devolve into civil war taught her the dangers of losing authority. These, along with her wide reading in history, theology, philosophy and literature, contributed to the strategies she developed for exercising her own authority in what she always termed ‘the lands of mine inheritance’. When she arrived in the north in 1649 she faced a number of challenges but was determined to undermine those individuals who claimed a separate authority in the region. In the following years, often facing down great difficulties, she established a network made up of people and places, movement and action, which allowed her authority to circulate in the north and to radiate southward, including to London, and even in the halls of Charles II's government.

Anne Clifford's twentieth-century biographer, Richard T. Spence, remarked that Anne Clifford enacted the role of ‘surrogate northern royalty’ in Westmorland. In this he was acknowledging a tradition that had survived for over four centuries. In 1691 Anthony Wood reminded his readers that ‘it must be noted that this Anne Countess of Pembroke was the same person who lived like a Princess’. Later writers reveal that this reputation did not diminish.

THERE IS BROAD CONSENSUS that the First Republic—and with it Red Vienna—failed because of the violent conflicts between political camps, above all between the Christian Socials and the Social Democrats. Historian Gerhard Botz compiled a “Timeline of Acts of Political Violence,” which is by no means comprehensive, although it lists 242 incidents occurring between November 12, 1918, and February 11, 1934. These incidents— motivated, with few exceptions, by domestic political objectives—led to deaths, serious injuries, and a substantial number of minor injuries, and included coup attempts, riots, clashes, assassination attempts, and attacks.

Alongside political motives, it was the political actors—either directly or indirectly involved—who gave the individual acts of violence their political dimension. There were paramilitary groups, in particular the Heimwehr, which united Christian Socials as well as Pan-Germans, and the Republican Protection League (Republikanischer Schutzbund), controlled by the Social Democrats. Later came the SA and the SS. Individual actors also contributed to political violence. Walter Riehl, for example, was a Viennese lawyer whose allegiance vacillated between the National Socialist and Christian Social parties. Riehl represented in court not only the Schattendorf shooters but also the murderers of the writer Hugo Bettauer and the man responsible for a failed assassination attempt on Vienna Mayor Karl Seitz. What all of these groups and individuals had in common was that they fundamentally challenged the state's monopoly on the use of force.

Latent violence represents just as much of a provocation as overt violence when it comes to the state's monopoly on the use of force. Many a political activist has wished death on a political opponent. “We will not truly have won until the head of this Asian rolls onto the sand.” This is what Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, newly appointed federal leader of the Heimwehr, had to say about Hugo Breitner, Red Vienna's city councilor of finance, in October 1930. The Vienna-born Breitner had his Jewish heritage—and Starhemberg's outspoken anti-Semitism—to thank for the fact that he was transformed into an Asian in Starhemberg's violent fantasy. It is not fantasy, however, but the potential to implement that fantasy that characterizes latent violence.

JOHN Donne's “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” opens with an elaborate conceit that asks the reader, in what Thomas Sloane calls “the language of a geometrical theorem” to imagine the inner workings of man's soul as a Ptolemaic Universe where devotion should be the prime mover. The speaker in this poem appears to be the same as the speaker in Donne's “Holy Sonnets,” a stand-in for the poet himself, and also, according to Sloane, a stand-in for the Roman god Janus, a two-faced deity, “a juxtaposition, of two directions” whose very being “suggests multiple, even incongruous perspectives, looking backward and forward” simultaneously. Sloane argues that “the speaker experiences pulls in opposite directions”—vocalized in arguments from the mouths on either side of his head—the end result of which is the “paradoxical expression of [his] inability to act … within which the poem's present is defined.” But the poem's present, of course, is defined by action. The present progressive form of the verb “to ride” in the poem's title conjures the image of a poet in the very act of “Riding Westward.” As Joe Glasser points out, “Donne is not only looking but moving in the opposite direction” from that which he thinks is correct. The speaker is capable, then, of acting, but not of acting in the way he believes he should because his body and the mortal world that surrounds it limit this type of action. Yet the speaker has not actually accepted “pleasure or business”—or both—as his soul's “first mover” as he claims to have done in line 9, for this poem is—in and of itself—an act of devotion, which is for this speaker, as he explains in line 2, “the intelligence that moves.” Instead of Sloane's “curiously Janus-faced man,” I suggest that we find a devoted man, consumed with thoughts of Christ and the crucifixion. Though, like all mortal men, this man cannot help but ride westward toward death. This poem, therefore, as many of Donne's poems, doesn't call for something to happen, but seeks to explain why something is currently happening. It is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. If the speaker in “Good Friday” continues riding westward, he will eventually circumnavigate the globe and wind up back where he started.

To Morgan Walter Jones

Truro. September 23, 1799

Dear Jones,

Be so good as to tell my bedmaker that I shall be in Cambridge about the latter end of next week. This is the object of my letter, but I may as well fill up the rest of the paper by writing down all the nonsense I can think upon. I make no doubt but that you have made such advances in the mathematical way, that you will have no more occasion to read before you take your degree whereas I, poor forlorn youth, have long since given up the idea of being classed at all next examination. This is my case. I very foolishly deferred beginning study [damaged – until?] the latter part of the vacation, consoling myself in my idleness, and idleness will always find some excuse; that perhaps I should remember. Some time ago, I sent off the few books I brought down to Cambridge by the waggon and the Newton by accident was put in; before I discovered it, it was too late. Can you withhold your pity from such an unfortunate wight? You are of course no longer to consider me as a reading man.

Have you heard from Cotterill lately? I promised faithfully to write to him but I never have. Tho I shall see you so soon, yet I must beg the favor of your answering me immediately and let me know who are in college. You may as well too say something about Ms T5 – tho I have seen thousands better than she, yet I have still some small curiosity respecting her. Remember your usual punctuality in correspondence. When you receive a letter from Cotterill or Cook, you answer it on the spot, double up your letter, put it in the superb breeches pocket and away with it to post-office. Be sure to treat me in the same manner.

My time had been so taken up with the nice girls that I now never think of Cambridge without silent horror. Indeed I dread to begin to read again, as the intense fag necessary to restore me is indeed truly terrific in the prospect. By this time I should think, the players must be with you. I did mean at first to be there in time, but home has many more attractions.

CINEMA AND PHOTOJOURNALISM did not just rise in popularity in Vienna after the end of World War I. Already during the war, both media had demonstrated their usefulness as a political tool in war reporting. The propaganda of the war years offered two lessons for the theory and practice of film and photography during the Red Vienna period: at the explosive core of the photograph was its ability to document, its ability to capture and penetrate the surface of the world. This conception of photography, however, also entailed a struggle for interpretation that went beyond the individual image and involved its mass audiences.

Viennese Social Democrats only reluctantly took part in this debate. Their leading figures subscribed to a concept of culture that had little use for the photographic media. Organizations aligned with the party, such as the Friends of Nature (Naturfreunde), promoted photography to workers more as a hobby than as a means for cultivating oppositional consciousness. In the years immediately following the war, Social Democratic writers broadly condemned the cinema as capitalist mass stupefaction. At the same time, the entertainment tax on cinema admissions—set at 40 percent, much higher than the tax on the popular theater—provided the city with an important source of revenue starting in 1921.

It was not until 1923 that the Viennese Social Democrats emphatically embraced film: the Central Office for Workers’ Education (Zentralstelle für das Bildungswesen, aka Arbeiterbildungszentrale) set up a film office, which recommended politically or aesthetically valuable films to party organizations and audiences and established a party-run distribution service, and Fritz Rosenfeld began to write for the culture section of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and soon became a leading, passionate Social Democratic film critic. In October 1923 Social Democrats also made their first large-scale use of film in an electoral campaign. In addition to electoral advertising—including the feature-length Das Notizbuch des Mr. Pim (Mr. Pim's Trip to Europe, 1930) and Die vom 17er Haus (The people from house no. 17, 1932)—the films that they commissioned consisted primarily of documentaries of party activities, such as May festivals and parades. These films were produced by private companies. The party neither established its own independent production infrastructure (like that of the Communist-aligned Prometheus Film in Germany) nor inspired artists to develop a sophisticated politics of form to rival those found in German or French cinema.