Saturday, September 30, 2017
Three Eternal Modern Gospels in Time of War: Wells - Eliot - Lewis
WE ARE BEING TRUMPED OUT OF THE GAME
Dr. Jacques Coulardeau follows H.G. Wells, T.S. Eliot, and C.S. Lewis on the roads of perdition: WW1, WW2, and COLD WAR.
H.G Wells got lost between eugenics and Josef Stalin.
T.S. Eliot got puzzled between historical necessity and peace.
C.S. Lewis got called to the fantasy side of our life.
And yet they were able to foresee the future after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War. The ambition of one power to take over the world will lead that world to an impasse so blind and so dead that even a rat could not get out of the end of this alley, let alone the aging muskrat in Washington DC and the youngish Raccoon in Pyongyang.
If you do not believe me just ask National Geographic about raccoons: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/r/raccoon/.
THREE ETERNAL MODERN GOSPELS IN TIME OF WAR
H.G. WELLS – T.S. ELIOT – C.S. LEWIS
TRUMP DENIED SALVATION
A Series In One Introduction And Five Parts
TABLE OF CONTENTS OF THE WHOLE SERIES
(A full book of 128 typed pages, 61,925 words, published in six instalments on https://medium.com/@JacquesCoulardeau)
THREE ETERNAL MODERN GOSPELS IN TIME OF WAR
H.G. WELLS – T.S. ELIOT – C.S. LEWIS
TRUMP DENIED SALVATION
INTRODUCTION
(1,139 words)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
0- T.S. ELIOT, The Hollow Men
THREE ETERNAL MODERN GOSPELS IN TIME OF WAR
H.G. WELLS – T.S. ELIOT – C.S. LEWIS
TRUMP DENIED SALVATION
PART ONE: GOD’S DEATH AND SUBSEQUENT RESURRECTION
(8,332 words)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1- GOD’S DEATH AND SUBSEQUENT RESURRECTION, FROM FAUST TO APOCALYPTO (Université Catholique de Lille, 2007)
THREE ETERNAL MODERN GOSPELS IN TIME OF WAR
H.G. WELLS – T.S. ELIOT – C.S. LEWIS
TRUMP DENIED SALVATION
PART TWO: H.G. WELLS, THE TIME MACHINE
(7,446 words)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
2- H.G. WELLS, THE TIME MACHINE, (Guide de la littérature britannique des origines à nos jours, eds Jean Pouvelle & Jean-Pierre Demarche, Ellipses, Paris, 2008)
3- THE TIME MACHINE, A DYSTOPIC UTOPIA (2007)
THREE ETERNAL MODERN GOSPELS IN TIME OF WAR
H.G. WELLS – T.S. ELIOT – C.S. LEWIS
TRUMP DENIED SALVATION
PART THREE: T.S. ELIOT, MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL
(13,594 words)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
4- T.S. ELIOT, MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL, (Guide de la littérature britannique des origines à nos jours, eds Jean Pouvelle & Jean-Pierre Demarche, Ellipses, Paris, 2008)
5- THOMAS BECKET ET THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT, ou PEUT-ON AVOIR FOI EN L’HISTOIRE ? (Théâtres du Monde, n° 18, Avignon France, 2008)
THREE ETERNAL MODERN GOSPELS IN TIME OF WAR
H.G. WELLS – T.S. ELIOT – C.S. LEWIS
TRUMP DENIED SALVATION
PART FOUR: C.S. LEWIS, MARTYRDOM VERSUS EUGENICS
(10,469 words)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
6- A CONTRADICTORY BACKDROP FOR C.S. LEWIS, MARTYRDOM VERSUS EUGENICS (Université Catholique de Lille, 2011)
THREE ETERNAL MODERN GOSPELS IN TIME OF WAR
H.G. WELLS – T.S. ELIOT – C.S. LEWIS
TRUMP DENIED SALVATION
PART FIVE: C.S. LEWIS, THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA IN SHADOWLANDS
(9,099 words)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
7- C.S. LEWIS & THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, BBC REWRITING AND ADAPTATIONS, RADIO AND TV
8- SHADOWLANDS, LIVING WITH JOY, LOVING JOY WITH LOVE AND HOPE
INTRODUCTION
I will dedicate this series of studies to all the Hollow Men of the world and I will borrow the dedication from T.S. Eliot, my middleman here, the only one who could lead us beyond the eugenics believer in social Darwinism, H.G. Wells, and to the kingdom of peace, empathy and love of the Lion Aslan, aka C.S. Lewis.
It will certainly take a lion to help us step over the roaring showing-off of the muskrat and the raccoon strutting on the stage of our apocalypse as if they were Zeus and Apollo. Who will be the four knights who will put an end to the strife and commit a modern murder in the cathedral, or should we say it is a mosque, a Buddhist temple or maybe a synagogue?
After the war of words, there is always either the competition at who will spit longer and farther or the sudden public befriending that leads to some compromise. Such a compromise was not possible with Hitler and Chamberlain. Will it be possible with Trump and Kim? Stalin stayed on the penalty line, watching and correcting the absurd treaty of Versailles as for the borders of the USSR with Poland. Will Putin and Xi stay on the penalty line much longer? And what can they bring on the table to pacify the aging muskrat and the youngish raccoon? It will take more than a pound of flesh to solve the problem.
No matter what may happen, one thing is sure the world order of 1989 or 1990 is finished, over, terminated and he who was first will probably not be last but he will be at best second or third. For many reasons, some clear, some not clear at all, what we call today the west which was only Christian Europe in the 15th century, became preeminent in the world, tilting it away from Asia which had been the most dynamic region before the expansion of the Portuguese and the Spanish along with slavery, trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, all of these meaning the deadly exploitation of the rest of the world by the European minority, with the Muslim world in-between, controlled without being controlled by the west, under the protection or protectorate of the west.
As Hal Brands writes on September 27; 2017, in “America’s New World Order Is Officially Dead, China and Russia have fully derailed the post-Cold War movement toward U.S.-led global integration.” (https://medium.com/bloomberg-view/americas-new-world-order-is-officially-dead-8ad17ada0b6): “The age of integration is thus over, in the sense that there is no realistic, near-term prospect of bringing either Russia or China into an American-led system.” Hal Brands obviously does not realize that what he calls integration is perceived as assimilation or even homogenization by everyone else in the world and that appears to people as being nothing else but an advanced form of colonialism generally referred to as imperialism.
The USA does not seem to understand that the railroads built by the Chinese with some financing from Japan connecting Mombasa in Kenya to Central Africa (Uganda and Rwanda among others) and to Ethiopia (Addis Ababa and further) are one thousand more important for the world, and particularly Africa, than one thousand US drones in Yemen and 60 Tomahawk missiles in Syria, thirty-six of which were hi-jacked by Russian military hackers and never reached their target. The show of strength turns into a farcical vaudeville that kills quite a few collateral victims who have asked nothing.
And the US menace North Korea with “fire and fury,” and a few other bird names, knowing that anyway they will not do it, or if they did they would be rejected by the global community, including the Brexiteers of Britain and the AfD Teutonic Musketeers of Germany, since it would mean a nuclear third world war that would break the record of casualties of the second world war. It could even reach one trillion victims, not to mention the long-term contaminated and genetically perverted victims already alive or to be born.
The world cannot go on living in that kind of domination. Colonial empires have fallen. The West is jumping from one financial crisis to the next, growing backward as compared to what it used to be. Asia is growing so fast that it might take less time for it to overtake the west than to imagine this event.
Is it the interest of the west to crush Asia under bombs? Is it even, the interest of the USA to crush Asia under bombs. Shouldn’t we speak of getting out of the Middle East, out of Central Asia and not putting our fingers in the rest of Asia? Apparently, Uncle Sam is divided, though the top man there seems to favor a good old show of power in fury and fire, and other four-letter words like grab (like land grab) and a few more he used in Alabama recently against NBA professional players, reinventing at the same time the meaning of “fire” and rediscovering that it may mean dismiss or discharge. Who under the sun ever likes four-letter F-words?
I thus give you the following compilation of studies on three authors who were confronted to the first half of the 20th century, or slightly more, and have become the three gospel writers of this time. H.G. Wells and his fascination for eugenics, social Darwinism, and Stalin. T.S. Eliot and his own fascination for violence in history and the call for justice and peace. C.S. Lewis and his very own fascination for a children’s world of adventure, struggle for freedom, and liberation.
Eugenics is only the current form of genetic cleansing and as such is not much different from colonialism, imperialism and other slavery systems that exploit all “genetically inferior” beings to death in order to produce a profit as long as they are able to survive. The principle is the belief that all human beings should be identical and those who cannot for any reason (skin color, religion, language, gender, or whatever) have to be exploited to death, and even after death everything has to be used and recycled in the corpses for the benefit and profit of those who are genetically normal.
Thursday, September 28, 2017
Entertaining detective sitcom
BBC – HETTY WAINTHROPP – COMPLETE SERIES ONE TO FOUR - 1996
This is a detective sitcom. It has all the charm of small criminal cases that deal with no murders or crimes of that type, but only with small crimes in local neighborhoods in Lancashire and from time to time a little bit in Yorkshire.
The main interest is the family background of the characters. Hetty and Robert Wainthropp are two older citizens who have reached retirement age but would find it difficult to go on living in good conditions on their two pensions. So they look for extra-activities. They start a private detective business and lead us into some squalid, sordid or simply sorry situations of hatred and jealousy, envy and rivalry, small demeanors and traffic. Though they do not do drugs. Later on, Robert Wainthropp will manage to get a regular column in the tabloid.
But the producers wanted to change the situation from what it was in the previous fabulously popular series with the same main actress, “Keeping Up Appearances.” In both cases, the son of the married couple (forty years of marriage) was away from the family home and a younger man and eventually a young couple were needed to open them up to the younger generations and their problems.
So Hetty Wainthropp selects a hardly of age young man who is more or less unemployed and trying to get away from his possessive mother who seems to be an alcoholic or something of the sort. Hetty and her husband Robert will make him an associate, a partner in the business soon after.
And then this young man who is as virginal as a lily will soon get in touch with a female mechanic who will sell him a second-hand car when he finally gets his license. And with some ups and downs, they will slowly move into a relationship, one apartment, and a future common life.
The criminal cases are there to show how disrupted the English society is up north. We are twenty years ago and you will then understand why they voted for Brexit. Closed upon their communities that are very small, with a lot of underground black market economy that is half criminal and half illegal. It is well known they could not accept European regulations that became little by little so hefty that people more or less thought they could not take a shower without paying an extra-tax and having to use no more than a gallon of water.
Not to speak of all sorts of marginals, gypsies or not, who are roaming around. And the police are just helpless most of the time, to the point of employing now and then Hetty Wainthropp to penetrate and infiltrate some dubious circles to get some information from the inside.
And they stopped the series marvelously after four years when the agency is in full bloom, Jeffrey, the younger partner, and his girlfriend are moving slowly towards some kind of an official relationship and after Robert has reestablished normal relations with his own brother. The family circle is slightly larger, though it looks a lot like a recomposed family. Parents in their older age are led to choosing the younger people who will be their side-kick children, and these younger people find in an older couple some sidekick or substitute parents of a new sort: mental parents and not blood relatives.
Frankly, who gives the slightest straw about blood!
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Sex, Philter, Magic, Love?
Tristan, Yseult & Jacques Coulardeau @Academia.edu (25 + 97)
Is love sex or is sex purely possession by some philter?
The eternal debate to know if sex and love are the same thing. Note this love affair is sexual but sterile and the result of a curse cast by some philter.
Obnoxious heritage.
LE DÉFI DE LA CHRISTIANISATION
D’UN MYTHE ORAL CELTE
TRISTAN ET YSEULT
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Synopsis Paie, Nice
What follows in this document is the article (no illustrations)
published in July 2015
In Théâtres du Monde
[23,400 words/mots]
Université d’Avignon, France
This article is in French.
You will also find on Academia.edu
Les notes de recherche / The research notes
25 Reviews / Critiques – 153 pages
(richly illustrated / abondantes illustrations)
Mythical Mythological Tristan and Iseult
Tristan et Iseut, un récit mythologique
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Si vous aimez le cochon, vous serez gâté et vous apprendrez que l'amour n'est que cochon et truie, mais on vous apprendra aussi que le cochon est un animal divin, de l'autre côté de la barrière du réel. Ne parlons pas de la truie puisqu'elle est l'entremetteuse entre l'homme et la salvation suprême. Ah ! le péché originel ! Revu et corrigé à la graisse de saindoux, de sein-doux, de Saint Doux.
mè misié la
poko dacor
kite bonm saint doux y soti
y ka soukoué tèt li
o souè pa ni bonm saint doux
osouè la sé bon gaz ki ni
y décidé sé pou y chapé éé
http://www.greatsong.net/PAROLES-EDITH-LEFEL,BONM-SAINT-DOUX,105210573.html
poko dacor
kite bonm saint doux y soti
y ka soukoué tèt li
o souè pa ni bonm saint doux
osouè la sé bon gaz ki ni
y décidé sé pou y chapé éé
http://www.greatsong.net/PAROLES-EDITH-LEFEL,BONM-SAINT-DOUX,105210573.html
If you like old legends and how they change through centuries, if you consider these old stories have roots in older civilizations, often disappeared, or completely transmuted by time, you will find this Tristan and Iseult story particularly inspiring. People have written so much about it that we have a forest of visions (hiding the simplest trees of common sense) brought by a relatively reduced methodological approaches and methods.
After the article you will find in French first and in English second the reviews of 23 Black plays from the USA published in the same issue of Théâtres du Monde.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Synopsis Paie, Nice
Il semble peu utile de résumer le mythe ou la légende ou même les œuvres elles-mêmes, nombreuses et variées. La première version écrite (loin encore d’imprimée) le fut en 1165 par Béroul. Celle-ci fut suivie d’un bouquet de traductions ou adaptations sur les cinquante années suivantes, la plus récente étant de 1226 en norrois, la langue de la Norvège. […]
Published on Sep 28, 2017
Abstract:
Mon objectif ici est de mettre Tristan et Yseult, la légende en perspective contextuelle de son temps et donc de prendre cette légende dans le temps long du passage de la civilisation celte dont elle est issue à l’établissement complet et final du féodalisme chrétien vers la fin du 12ème et le début du 13ème siècle, période qui correspond parfaitement aux premières versions en franco-normand, en allemand ou en norrois. Cette approche se justifie uniquement par le fait que l’Angleterre, le Pays de Galles et la Cornouaille ont vécu à partir du 5ème siècle un vaste processus de christianisation dans le cadre d’une société orale parce que l’immense majorité des gens ne savaient ni lire ni écrire, parce que la disparition du papyrus égyptien a fait disparaître tout support d’écriture non biodégradable et léger jusqu’à l’apparition du Vélin au milieu du 12ème siècle comme nous le verrons. Il a fallu attendre cette invention du papier ramené de l’Orient par les croisades pour que l’écriture puisse redevenir un moyen de communication et de circulation des œuvres.
Research Interests:
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Wells and Lewis are so different in their similitude
H.G. Wells and C.S. Lewis
Abstract:
Two authors so different and yet so close because they had the same backdrop on the stage of their lives, the backdrop of totalitarian regimes, of genocide, mass killing, and war; the backdrop of the desire never to see it again.
And yet both will not be the prophets they might have wanted to be. H.G. Wells engulfed his work in eugenics and social Darwinism. C.S. Lewis invented a fantasy world for children.
Both have become crucial to our modern consciousness, all the more now some western leaders openly speak of war as if it were necessary. It sure reveals their weakness in front of the challenges of a globalized world.
And yet both will not be the prophets they might have wanted to be. H.G. Wells engulfed his work in eugenics and social Darwinism. C.S. Lewis invented a fantasy world for children.
Both have become crucial to our modern consciousness, all the more now some western leaders openly speak of war as if it were necessary. It sure reveals their weakness in front of the challenges of a globalized world.
Research Interests:
Film Studies, History Of Eugenics, Children's and Young Adult Literature, Cinema, Time Perception, Film, Cinema Studies, and Social Darwinism
Time Travel is the utmost adventure
Jacques Coulardeau & H.G. Wells at Academia.edu (21)
H.G. WELLS
THE TIME MACHINE
THE NOVEL AND THE FILM ADAPTATIONS
Dr. Jacques Coulardeau
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Université Paris Dauphine
Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne
Herbert Georges Wells (1866-1946) witnessed eighty years of our developing industrial world during which all basic productive activities bloomed to produce our present mass consumer society based on mass production and the industrial and agricultural, financial, services, communications, entertainment and labor mass markets. He witnessed the growth of the two extreme ideologies produced by this industrial world, communism (or Stalinism) and Nazism (or fascism). He also witnessed the development of biology and particularly Darwinism and his evolution of species, the survival of the fittest, and the birth and elaboration of the theory of relativity and the physics that emerged from it or at the same time. Finally, he witnessed, both in Europe and the USA, the junction of the analysis of society in two antagonistic classes and their class struggle for domination, even reduced to the American simplified approach of the rich and the poor, what he calls himself the “haves” and the “have-nots” (53) on one hand, and Darwinism on the other hand. He died in 1946 after witnessing the fall of the extreme racist form of this social Darwinism (Nazism and fascism) but also the seemingly triumphant expansion of the second form of it, Stalinism.
The Time Machine was published in 1895.We should also consider Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897). Wells first warns us about the biological-and-social-danger of our social Darwinism in The Time Machine and about the plain criminal danger of the uncontrolled development of science in The Invisible Man.
I will concentrate on the ideological message of The Time Machine along with two adaptations of this short novel to the silver screen. George Pal’s (1960) shows how the book was read before 1968, the turning point towards mass-consumerism and mass-communication. Simon Wells’ (2002) shows how it is read after the no-return turning point of globalization, September 11 and the war on terror. These two adaptations deviate from the original novella in concordance with their times. I will consider these two films in Marshall McLuhan’s perspective that states the message is the medium, which implies the meaning of the films can only be considered from the moment the films meet an audience. The audience gives meaning to the film that is nothing but a hollow shell otherwise. Note this approach is similar to Kenneth Burke’s dramatist theory. This implies that a film’s meaning will change through time along with the audience that builds meaning into the film.
We are living an extraordinary time and many people don’t seem to see it. When the Soviet bloc fell down the historical chute, Gadoosh!!!, the USA suddenly found themselves alone as a superpower since Russia was in the hands of a drunk and China was just starting its emergence.
Today nearly thirty years later things are so different that we definitely feel angst and experience dizziness in the present fuzziness. And some politicians have taken advantage of this situation to conquer power though they do NOT know what to do with it, which is extremely dangerous: the populists are the worst war mongers you can imagine.
The USA should be the second economy in the world within one or two years and maybe the third one within ten years or less. China will be first soon (though it is already first in PPP, according to IMF). India will be second within a few years. Sorry, USA, you will be third before the 2024 elections.
Trump was elected on the myth that he could turn the clocks backward and make America great again, that is to say, #1 forever. And to do that he drops all multilateral cooperation in the world and menaces all those he cannot drop, isolating himself in the world and dragging the second populist hell, Great Britain, down with him. Even Canada or Mexico cultivate their relationship with the European Community and China.
That’s when C.S. Lewis becomes interesting since he imagines a world of cooperation and unity instead of a world of competition and war. It is high time Trump and Theresa May hear the call of the Lion Aslan, otherwise, they will be the playthings of the Witch in the wardrobe of in-between transmutation, sucking on their Turkish delight, or Luqum since they prefer Sunni Arabs.
C.S. Lewis is more present, alive and pregnant today than even in 1950 when he brought Narnia out of his mind into the reality of the dream of a world without dictators and wars, of a world out of the Cold War.
A CONTRADICTORY BACKDROP FOR C.S. LEWIS
MARTYRDOM VERSUS EUGENISM
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
UNIVERSITÉ CATHOLIQUE DE LILLE
FACULTÉ DES LETTRES ET DES SCIENCES HUMAINES
Colloque C.S. LEWIS - 2-3 juin 2011
C.S. LEWIS & THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA
BBC REWRITING AND ADAPTATIONS
RADIO AND TV
And other films
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
All Amazon reviews of CS Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles
and various adaptations for TV and the cinema
A CONTRADICTORY BACKDROP FOR C.S. LEWIS
MARTYRDOM VERSUS EUGENISM
I would like to say from the very start that I will only consider The Chronicles of Narnia in their seven volumes (1950-1956), and the four BBC adaptations. So I will not consider the various cinema adaptations and the other works by C.S. Lewis (1898-1963). The second thing I want to be very clear about is that I am not going to psychoanalyze neither the author nor The Chronicles. It would be interesting to do so from a certain point of view. This is not mine here.
I will concentrate on the political and ideological model that can be found in The Chronicles. But I want to be clear about one thing before starting. For me, children’s literature is just as mature as any other form and type of literature and it deserves to be analyzed exactly the same way as any other fiction. We do not have to suspend our disbelief but as C.S. Lewis says himself: “You cannot know. You can only believe or not.”
And I have chosen to believe what C.S. Lewis tells us, no matter how creative and imaginative it may be. I will start with the background I have chosen, i.e. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and H.G. Wells (1866-1946). T.S. Eliot, particularly in his play Murder in the Cathedral (1935) deals with the question of martyrdom when a church official is confronted to an attempt at limiting the church’s freedom from the state or any other institution.
This vision of martyrdom became a real backdrop for C.S. Lewis because of the play at the end of the 1930s in the Canterbury Festival, then the film at the beginning of the 1950s and finally the opera by Pizzetti in Italian and in German (for Karajan) at the beginning of the 1960s, too late for The Chronicles.
H.G. Wells defends a eugenic vision of the world and he is a backdrop for C.S. Lewis because of the vast and lasting success of his early novels like The Time Machine (1895) or The Invisible Man (1897) at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century and because of his commitment to eugenics all his life in many writings, in film with his 1936 Things to Come by Alexander Korda and William Cameron Menzies in which he envisaged the end of the world we know by a universal war in 1940 and the rebuilding of a truly human society.
The Time Machine was adapted a first time by George Pal in 1960, an adaptation that may have come across to C.S. Lewis though too late for The Chronicles. Of course, the second adaptation by Simon Wells in 2002 does not have to be considered, though the great-grandson of the author corrects part of the eugenics of his great-grandfather.
