"The Scrupulosity of Old Maids"
For me, reading G. K. Chesterton’s The Club of Queer Trades was like returning to the home of a childhood friend many years after departing. Much of my childhood was spent spellbound by the books of British authors such as Kenneth Grahame (author of Wind In The Willows and my childhood favorite, The Reluctant Dragon), A.A.Milne (The House At Pooh Corner), and Arthur Conan Doyle (The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes). These works whetted my appetite for tongue-in-cheek witticisms, whimsy in the service of social commentary, characters limned through accretions of exaggerated detail, and understated urbanity. As time passed, I continued to discover other brilliant novelists or fantasists with similar abilities with the turn of a phrase: Barbara Pym, Mervyn Peake, and J.R.R. Tolkein. And, of course there was Dickens. Who else could have a character die of spontaneous combustion and manage to make it hilarious as well as macabre, as he did with the evil rag and bone merchant in Bleak House?
Elements of the plot of The Club of Queer Trades are reminiscent of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story, “The Red-Headed League”, in which a man is hired by a firm which turns out to be a front for a group of bank robbers. Conan Doyle was about 15 years older than Chesterton, and was clearly influential, but the main characters in the later work, two brothers, come at the task of resolving the mysterious events from two opposing points of view with the logical one always arriving at the incorrect conclusions. Chesterton writes, “His brother Basil said of him: ‘His reasoning is particularly cold and clear, and invariably leads him wrong. But his poetry comes in abruptly and leads him right.’”
More surprising was recognizing a passage in The Club of Queer Trades as a possible basis for the Monty Python skit named The Ministry of Silly Walks:
"Yes," replied the dead voice of the woman without an inflection to suggest that she felt the fantasticality of her statement. "He was standing on the left leg and the right drawn up at a sharp angle, the toe pointing downwards. I asked him if his leg hurt him. His only answer was to shoot the leg straight at right angles to the other, as if pointing to the other with his toe to the wall. He was still looking quite gravely at the fireplace.
Interestingly, the same gift for verbal caricature found in Chesterton is also found in the writings of Mervyn Peake, which may have something to do with the fact that both were accomplished illustrators as well as writers. Peake is best known for the Gormanghast Trilogy, consisting of Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone. Like Chesterton, Peake was known to illustrate his own unique literary contributions, and was able to paint very accurate pictures with words:
Barquentine, whose head was on a level with the banisters, put out a tongue like the tongue of a boot and ran it along the wreckage of his dry and wrinkled lips. Then he took a grotesque hop forwards on his withered leg and brought his crutch to his side witha sharp report. Whether his face was made of age, as though age were a stuff, or whether age was the abstract of that face of his, that bearded fossil of a thing that smouldered and decayed upon his shoulders- there was no doubt that archaism was there, as though something had shifted from the past into the current moment where it burned darkly as though through blackened glass in defiance of its own anachronism and the callow present.” (The Gormenghast Novels, 1995, p.528)
In my opinion, there is a similarity of the precise expression of detail and of humor in the work of both authors.
The structure of Chesterton’s piece, presenting stories leading to other stories, sets up possibilities for plot directions and character interactions that come about through tangential narratives. His playful approach to the story, employing plot twists and surprising conclusions, encourage the reader to come along for the ride with an open mind to possibilities. This may also be why Chesterton seems to have influenced authors ranging from Tolkein to Orson Welles to Neil Gaiman.
In a 2007 interview concerning the publication of her book, Chesterton and Tolkein As Theologians, Alison Milbank described how one author’s ideas built upon the others. A Lecturer in Literature and Theology at the University of Nottingham, she observes:
“It’s interesting that Tolkien is anxious to state that his view of the role of fantasy goes beyond that of Chesterton – this shows to me how closely influenced he feels himself to be. So Tolkien says that Chestertonian fantasy shows you the actual world from a new angle but thoroughgoing fantasy is like opening a box that allows out new things and releases them from our ownership of them. This is a really philosophical statement. The Enlightenment philosopher Kant said we have no access to things in themselves, and all we have is our own perception of the world. This leads to an alienated form of knowledge. Tolkien, following Chesterton, is a realist in a philosophical sense, because he thinks that we can be aware of a world beyond our own perceptions. Paradoxically, fiction – creating your own fantasy world – is not a way of owning your own private reality but setting the things in that world free”.
The idea of freeing one’s perception of reality and trying to see what is perceived from different angles, as in the work of Douglas R. Hofstadter, may be G. K. Chesterton’s most lasting contribution to the world of Interactive Storytelling.
Reference:
http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/press/Chesterton_and_Tolkien_as_Theologians.php
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