Antagonisms

It would appear that Ridley Scott’s Napoleon movie is one of those phenomena, like the geopolitics of the Middle East, around which a whole load of incompatible and ultimately irreconcilable opinions coalesce.

These turn out to be unwinnable battles, rather like Borodino, where the victor is also a bit of a loser.

This is because no one position is ever able to assert itself as a reference point to all the others.

And sometimes this stokes a kind of death spiral of stroppiness amongst those tempted to participate, never more so than when the bulk of these are individuals that profess so-called “luxury’ beliefs, often grounded more in faith than fact — such as “Trans Women are Women” and “genocide in Gaza” — as they seem to want to have their cake and eat it e.g. they aspire to benefit from the status boost that such incongruous convictions appear to confer — to belong to an elite caste of conscience — yet at the same time they can’t stand it that not everybody else steps into line behind them, and that’s when the strop segues into bullying, and worse.*

Joseph Conrad remains my favourite author, in part because his fictional imagination emanated out of this crucial insight: “The only legitimate basis of creative work is the courageous recognition of all irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous, so full of hope. They exist!”

Truth, Conrad suggested, might only be approached by examining oppositions occurring at more relative, displaced positions.

The most obvious expression of this idea is the structure of his masterpiece, Nostromo, where the ‘incorruptible’ pile of silver is the symbolic equivalent of that unattainable Truth, a test of our own corruptibility and relativity, around which Conrad describes a big swirl of “every sort of fish”, a multiplicity of different opinions and behavioural responses.

One French critic of Napoleon I came across this week insisted that there were two rather distinct men begging to be tackled here, like a pair of biographies in a state of superposition, the eponymous Emperor and Bonaparte the reformer.

Is this a Conradian opposition or a bit of a cop out?

And with no sense of irony, British historian-reviewer, Andrew Roberts, has quipped that rather than being a proto-Hitler, Napoleon/Bonaparte was “the Enlightenment on horseback”, yet I am certain that philosopher John Gray would be inclined to answer back that Adolf was “the Enlightenment in a tank”.

Is the Enlightenment one shiny, durable, trustworthy thing which we can all agree on? Of course not.

Where do I stand on the matter to hand? Well, I haven't yet seen Ridley's epic, but my suspicion is that no matter how much money is thrown at the problem, no matter how many extras are expertly drilled, it will be hard to surpass Ian Holm's Boney in Terry Gilliam's The Time Bandits.

And this is because you are never closer to the Truth than when you are trying to be funny.

 

 

 

* Anyway, "Facts are the enemy of great entertainment," says Roger Lewis in a Telegraph review of Napoleon... which maybe why they have been disappearing from politics.