The Ambiguous Impact of Simone Weil

 I decided to read On The Abolition of All Political Parties by Simone Weil translated from French by Simon Leys because the title attracted my attention.  I also wanted to read a translated book by a woman during August which is Women in Translation month.

 

                                                                 

Simon Leys says in his translator's forward that "taking a conscience vote" in Parliament should be considered a pleonasm.  Pleonasm was an unfamiliar word to me.  I looked it up and discovers that it means redundancy.   

I wondered about Leys' perception.   Aren't members of Parliament supposed to be representing their districts, not themselves as individuals?  So therefore it's not true that they should always be voting according to their own beliefs.  They should be doing what their constituents want and need.  Representing their constituents is what's expected of members of Congress in the United States.  If  members of Congress don't do that, then the United States fails as a democracy. 

Leys, writing in 2012, says that although Weil wrote On The Abolition of All Political Parties 70 years ago, it's particularly relevant now.  Looking at politics in the United States in 2022, I think it's not just relevant but urgent.  I am an Independent who doesn't subscribe to political parties.   I realize that I am in the minority in my extremely partisan country.  

Weil writes that people join political parties in order to be politically effective even if the party doesn't represent their own beliefs and principles.  I don't understand why voters don't consider it counter-productive to achieve political success at the price of sacrificing their principles.  That isn't a victory for the voters.   It's a victory for the politicians who want to have power. 

Poet Czeslaw Milosz's essay "The Importance of Simone Weil" was included in this volume.  Milosz tells us that Simone Weil's support for labor unions caused her to go to work in factories for a year to experience what labor was like.  She contributed her pay to the labor unions.  Milosz says that Weil felt like a slave after having worked in the factories.  She died of malnutrition in a sanitorium.   I have questions.  Was her commitment to that institution voluntary or involuntary?  Did she die of malnutrition because she refused to eat or because the institution was starving her?   The answers to these questions would determine how I see Simone Weil.  

Weil apparently considered the Roman Empire a totalitarian society.  Totalitarianism was impossible until the existence of surveillance technology.  The Romans weren't capable of being totalitarians in our modern sense.  

Milosz said that both he and Albert Camus were drawn to Weil because of her certainty.  Camus was an atheist who doubted atheism and Milosz was a Christian who doubted Christianity.   Simone Weil had said that there were Pagans who were "naturally Christian" and Christians who were "naturally Pagan".  It seems to me that religious beliefs aren't innate.  There is no such thing as a natural adherent to a religion.   You are persuaded to become a religious adherent by your exposure to the religion and its beliefs.  

If I had to try to sum up the influence of Simone Weil on our present times, I don't think that I could do it.  There are unanswered questions that make her life and legacy unclear to me.  So I am inconclusive about Simone Weil at this point.

 

                                           

   

                              

                             

The Clerk's Tale: A Medieval Mystery With Too Many Characters

 I purchased a used copy of The Clerk's Tale by Margaret Frazer from a library sale cart.  It's the 11th book in a mystery series.  There have been 17 books in this series.  I've read a number of them long ago before I was online which was late in the 20th century.  I don't recall having read this particular book.  I'm sure it didn't exist when I was reading earlier books in this series.

I've seen reviewers complain about an excessive number of characters making a novel too complex to follow.  This is the first time that I thought so.  Maybe I'm losing the ability to track all these characters that I once had.  All I know is that I had to page back more than once to where characters were introduced in order to identify them. I also wished that I had been reading this book on Kindle so that I could find past references to characters more easily.  It occurs to me that Kindle features have made me a lazy reader.  I don't have to remember a long list of characters and who they are, if I can find that information using Kindle searches.  It's a possibility.   

Now I need to get into other aspects of The Clerk's Tale, so I can consider this a proper blog review. 

 

                                   

 

While I was reading this book, it seemed odd to me that characters mentioned that Nichola was rather young to be a wife at sixteen.  I've read that it was common during the medieval period to marry girls in their teens to men in their thirties or forties.  I've seen many references in  books to fourteen year old medieval wives. Yet in a search I did for this review, I found an essay here called "This Is What It Was Like To Be A Teenager in the Middle Ages" by Oxford history professor Rachel Moss that indicated that marrying adult men to teen girls wasn't a common practice during that period, and states that medieval people were aware that teenagers weren't fully mature.  So it seems that  The Clerk's Tale is more accurate than other medieval novels that I've read containing teen brides.

Lady Agnes asks protagonist Sister Frevisse to read aloud a Chaucer tale that I've never heard of called "The Tale of Sir Topas".  Apparently, Chaucer intended it to be humorous.  The characters who listened to Frevisse read it laughed.  So apparently Chaucer succeeded in conveying humor to them.  I'm not sure if I would have reacted similarly.  Chaucer might have been disappointed with my reaction. When I read the summary which said that it involved a search for the Elf Queen, I thought that I would have been more intrigued than amused.  But then, I'm a fantasy fan. 

Getting into the mystery aspect, which didn't interest me as much as the historical context, I wondered why the jury for one of the murders was formed from people who experienced an event associated with the murder.  Perhaps during the medieval period objectivity wasn't considered as important in the jury selection process as it is now. It seemed like trials were ad hoc affairs, and that having the trial take place ASAP was a much greater priority than it is now.  The trial took place before an investigation was called for which seems backwards to me. 

 I've read many medieval mysteries that didn't seem so alien as this one did.  I think that the mystery aspect wasn't as strong as the history content.  Yet there was also some good character development which increased my estimation of the book.