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Indiana Jones - and a great man
The BBC is broadcasting all three Indiana Jones films in successive evenings, and it has given me an opportunity to take a good long look at the series. So far, for one reason or another, I have never managed to see the whole of the first movie, and, of the others, only the one featuring Sean Connery (one of those actors I will make an effort to watch).
Well, my view is still negative. I find it a sweaty and charmless exercise in violence for its own sake. Calling it a homage to thirties adventure serials misses the point: rather should one say that it uses the breathless rhythm and uneducated wallow in cliches of those cheap and long-forgotten staples to excuse its own sadistic and mindless fantasizing. The pace may be similar (and that is not a compliment) but there is more violence, and more importantly more sadism, in five minutes of Spielberg's magnum opus than in any one episode of the old FLASH GORDON serials.
The choice of the Nazis as arch-enemies is particularly manipulative. Aside from flagrant unlikelihoods (would Egypt, an independent country with strong links with Britain, allow hundreds of armed and uniformed stormtroopers on its soil?), the truth is that there is no attempt to even identify Nazism as a particular evil. There are gross errors, such as identifying Hitler as being obsessed with the occult. (Himmler was; but Hitler, according to Alan Bullock, was a strong nineteenth-century kind of scientific atheist, convinced that planetaria would replace churches, and his whole ideology was based on a warped version of Darwinism.) The very premise of the Nazis wanting to possess the Ark of the Covenant as a source of power is highly dubious: surely, given their view of Jews, they would be likelier to want to destroy it. But all this is irrelevant, since the point is that the Nazis have simply and - I repeat - manipulatively been identified as a group whom it would not bother anyone to kill. They can be ripped to pieces by airplane propellers, burned alive, thrown out of speeding trucks, crushed to death by wheels, shot, stabbed, or (a particular favourite of Mr.Spielberg's) melted on screen like so many human wax candles; but since these dozens of victims, killed on screen for our entertainment, have the little red white and black swastika armband, therefore they can be killed them with impunity.
Perhaps the most morally monstrous moment in the movie is the one when Spielberg seems, for a moment, to be gaining consciousness of what he is doing. Jones and the driver of the Nazi truck see a terrified face in front of their windscreen. Then the face (of an innocent Arab) falls off. Jones and the driver grin at each other... and then Jones strikes the driver several times and throws him off the truck, likely enough to his death. For one second, Spielberg has managed to suggest that perhaps there was a common something, even a shared human identity, between two people who could laugh at the same things; and then he immediately snatched that realization away, plunging us back into the obsessive rhythm of his mass-death car and truck race. There is no argument, no explanation, no expansion of any kind: it is the infernal pace of the narrative, and nothing else, that takes our minds away from that one second of partial revelation.
But it is not only the murders. The repulsive atmosphere of this movie goes far beyond. The scene in which a screaming Karen Allen is thrown alive among dozens of moldering corpses, though brief, is as revolting as any I have seen in films; and, mind you, there is no constructive purpose to it. Allen herself is mostly there to provide the damsel in danger, with the inevitable overtones of bondage and rape; given the sadism of the whole story, this properly sexual part is, if anything, rather underplayed.
But the basic fact is that the story has no moral and no point. What do you take away from it, as you would take away from - say - Disney's FANTASIA, or CASABLANCA, or a Bergman or Visconti movie? Nothing. It has all washed over you, affecting your nerve-ends, not your brain, and not your soul. It exists purely to move us from danger to danger and from shock to shock, until, after a couple of hours of vicarious thrills, we are released. It is... entertainment. In roughly the same way as the ancient gladiator games were entertainment.
I could go on - about the insulting use of the Ark of the Covenant (and Mr.Spielberg is supposed to be a Jew!), about the grotesque, thieving, and implicitly imperialistic depiction of archaeology, about the general charlatanism of the movie; but I think it would be merely cumulative. This movie simply represents mass murder and the manipulation of the sacred as entertainment. It is in a direct line of paternity to such Hollywood filth as THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST.
However, this LJ is turning out to be too much about the things I hate and not enough about the things I love. So I enclose my account, written a few years ago, of the great historian who has led me to the work of my life.
Georges Dumezil
By habit, education and passion I am a historian. I fell in love with superhero comics at 16 thanks to some paperback reprints of Steve Ditko's Spider-Man - you can't say that my taste failed there! This means that, unusually, I got into comics at the age most people get out of them, and at an age when I already had a nodding acquaintance with C.G.Jung and Thomas Mann and a far more than nodding one with the study of history; therefore, the inferiority complex of many fans is completely alien to me. Among my other interests, mythology grew more important after I started thinking about superheroes, about my eighteenth year; and my conversion to Christianity is a slow process that was firm, if not complete, by my twenty-fourth year and had, at first, nothing whatever to do with my study of ancient religions.
I found my own area of research where two of my main concerns, history and mythology, converge. Georges Dumezil, now twelve years dead, may well have ben the greatest historian in any branch of history this century. His field (established, for all intents and purposes, by himself) is Indo-European origins. As you know, the word Indo-European refers to a group of languages whose similarity shows a common origin. Their relationship was discovered in the eighteenth century by Jesuit missionaries in India and then, separately, by the Englishman William Jones, one of the early English administrators of Bengal after Clive. (The Protestant English did not bother to read books about India published in Rome, and so had to rediscover everything over again when they established their Indian empire.) It is in fact obvious to anyone who knows Latin and studies Sanskrit, its Indian equivalent, but no European had done so before the eighteenth century.
Despite English interest in India, it was in German universities that Indo-European languages were most vigorously studied, and a swarm of great pioneering German philologists, undisturbed by the Napoleonic wars, made a magnificent series of discoveries, establishing the new linguistic knowledge as one of the great nineteenth-century advances in learning - as significant as electricity or evolution; you can find the evidence of its impact in dozens of works of literature and criticism. It revolutionized the study of history, opening up prospects far beyond the Biblical-Classical schemes that had dominated Europe until then; it became clear that the Indo-European Greeks and Romans, which had been so far the limit of historic knowledge, did not originate in Greece or Italy, but reached their countries after lengthy migrations from some prehistoric Central Asian motherland, from which related tribes had spread over Persia and India.
However, only these tribes' language could be reconstructed (as early as 1810 a German professor tried to write a fable in "original Indo-European"); the culture or cultures seemed terribly vague. A number of attempts failed, some disastrously - it was from such failed essays in culture history that the German Right got its notion of the "Aryan" man, "Aryan" being a typical blunder for "Indo-European". (The Aryas, in fact, are the Ossetic, Persian and Indian language groups - not tall blue-eyed blonde master men, but small brown black-haired types any good Nazi would have identified as degenerate!) By the nineteen-twenties, Indo-European comparative mythology, despite the popular success of Nazi pseudo-science, was a discredited field among academics. In general, the nineteenth century was more concerned - and more successful - in reconstructing the historical origins of the great civilizations and rearranging its inherited Greece-centred culture, than in understanding the Indo-Europeans themselves.
Georges Dumézil, the son of an army general, was a linguistic enfant prodige who spoke Arabic at nine and Sanskrit at fifteen. Asked later in life how many languages he knew, he said he thought he had known about forty at one time or another; he usually had about twenty at any given time, but whenever he needed one he had forgotten, he just went back and studied it for a couple of weeks. Early in his life he undertook to reconstruct the grammar and vocabulary of Ubykh, a vanished, unwritten Caucasian language whose speakers had been dispersed by Tsarist Russia in 1859. Tracing a few old men to three back-of-beyond Turkish villages, he picked it all up from their lips, rescuing the whole language from oblivion, with a complete grammar and vocabulary; and just to make things easier, it turns out that Ubykh has one of the oddest sound systems known, with an alphabet of 80 consonants and only 2 vowels, for many of which he had to invent new letters.
Surviving by the grace of God the horrors of WWI trench warfare, it might have been thought that this astoundingly gifted man would soon have made his mark; but in fact it was not until 1938 (apart from the rescue of Ubykh, that took place in the 1920s when he taught at the University of Istanbul) that he began his most important and productive cycle of discoveries. For this there are a number of reasons, but the essential point is that he had to create for himself all the instruments of his discipline. The nineteenth century had established no proper method to study the content or structure of a myth, to compare two different myths or to relate a myth to a ritual. Dumézil was in the situation of a surgeon envisaging operations for which he needs quite new instruments. He says he did not learn to properly "read" a text until he took a course in Chinese culture in 1934 with the great French Chinese scholar Marcel Granet. Only four people took that course - Dumezil himself, Kaltenmark, Rodinson, and Rolf Stein - and every single one of them became a major figure in his field, so M.Granet must have had something.
But once he had got the right sow by the tail, there was no holding him. Between 1938 and his death in 1985, he wrote some sixty books and countless articles, and absolutely established a discipline that had not existed before him, and in so far as it had been attempted, had been discredited. There is something of God's humour in that Dumezil's great enterprise started just as the Nazis were at the peak of a venture of their own which might well – but for his genius - have destroyed Indo-European studies as a field of research for ever, giving the very word the smell of barbarism and murder, like Wagner can't be played in Israel to this day. Dumezil, of course, regarded Nazism with a scholar's distaste as well as a French patriot's hatred; their doctrine was to him not only vicious but ignorant; not that this saved him from some contemptible smears, coming, alas, from countrymen of mine.
His discoveries come from regarding myths as significant structures, built so as to have a particular meaning. Nineteenth-century scholars had tended to take out striking incidents from stories from various countries to build misleading similarities. This resulted from a mistaken evolutionary model of human rationality, that saw the history of human culture as the assembling of originally irrational, separate elements according to a process that has much to do with free association or even dream logic, until, from the successive accumulation of disparate cultural elements, from trial and error, and from the growth of civilized society, "reason" emerged as a kind of late bloom. The foundation of nineteenth-century cultural anthropology lay in an unrealized circular reasoning: what was (or seemed) mystical, irrational and dreamlike, was ipso facto ancient, primitive, primeval, and what was clearly rational and reasonable was recent. They sought, but did not agree on, the roots of mythology, in mystical links with agrarian spirits, with the sun, with totem spirits, and so on. A late and singularly vicious instance of the genre is Robert Graves' The White Goddess; but long before Graves, intelligent outsiders like Andrew Lang and G.K.Chesterton had perceived that the emperor had no clothes.
This is Chesterton's biting and entirely just comment on the anthropology of his time: "Almost all forms of popular science shine chiefly by shallow parallels. For instance, the whole business of Comparative Mythology is made up of shallow parallels; that is, of superficial resemblances which cover deep and lasting divisions. I have legs and a table has legs; if I am large and round, it is also possible for a table to be large and round. Therefore I am the legendary counterpart, or possibly the mythical origin, of the Round Table." (Chaucer, p.262) Chesterton refers to popular science, the kind of thing you find on the daily press (today it would be UFOs and alternative medicine); by his time, comparative mythology was discredited in academic circles. But it had been living science only twenty or thirty years earlier, and its influence lingered on - among other things, in that most unfortunate popular success, Frazer's Golden Bough. Many times, reading the definitive English version of some Indian or Old Irish text, I had to suffer from notes and commentaries so wrong-headed as to come near idiocy. And the saddest thing is that you might then get, immediately after, some just and shrewd remark, still valid today; but those old scholars simply had no way to tell the difference between sense and nonsense.
Dumezil does not single out individual features of a story without very good cause; he treats stories as wholes, and examines them, for preference, alongside other similar ones, to bring out similarities and differences. He has written fascinatingly about the difference between cultures as shown in different versions of the same story, and has probably a sharper sense of the individuality of Latin, Greek, Germanic or Indian culture than a lot of Latinists, Hellenists, Germanists, or Indianists. His discoveries are too formidable in bulk to be summed up here, but I may say that the first and fundamental one, achieved that distant summer of 1938 while Europe shivered at the threat of war, is that of the so-called Three Functions.
Dumezil perceived that the most archaic layers of Indo-European cultures tended to structure all sort of things - numbers of castes, trinities of gods and of goddesses, etc. - in threes. Of these the first term was concerned with law, learning, sanctity, and magic; the second with strength, kingship and war; the third with fertility, wealth, abundance of men and things, and (an obvious derivation) male and female beauty. A typical case (though he himself, oddly enough, misinterpreted it) is structure of the old Kingdom of France into three Estates: Clergy (which until the sixteenth century included learning and law as well as holiness), Nobles (always, ideally, warriors) and Bourgeoisie (the free citizens, often identified with wealth and large numbers). Another is the top triad of Norse paganism: Odhinn the king-wizard and prophet, Thorr the god of strength, and Freyr the god of peace, love, wealth, and sex. A third is the Indian structure of Varnas - not properly castes, but super-castes, more fundamental categories - that, apart from the slave Sudra, includes the Vaisya - men of free rank but not warriors, seen to this day as the Varna of merchants - the Kshatriya or warrior aristocracy, and the Brahmana, the brahmins - priests, teachers, wise men.
The idea of the Three Functions was in a sense the key that unlocked the gate to an immense amount of further discoveries, and the finger-print that certified to Dumezil and his followers the archaic Indo-European value of, for instance, a medieval English romance or a Latin epic. I mean that where you can find a trifunctional structure in any context whatever, you may be sure that the text or cultural artefact in question is Indo-European, and you many analyze it accordingly. The famous anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss found a similar structure in some Pacific tribe whose name I forget, but in general the pattern is absolutely distinctive. It is even the case that when some piece of mythology or ritual crosses over from an Indo-European area to a non-Indo-European one, however many aspects it may retain, it tends to lose the trifunctional ones. A typical case would be the adoption of Hindu legends in Buddhist East Asia, or (less known but better researched) the spread of the heroic legend-cycle of the Narts (a word meaning "heroes") across the northern Caucasus, from the Indo-European Ossetes to their non-Indo-European neighbours, in which all the functional aspects were lost. (The same thing tends to happen with loans from an Indo-European province to another).
A lot of post-Dumezilian research has reduced itself to a rather sterile and unimaginative hunt for more and more trifunctional features. This is a very satisfactory sort of research in that, once you get started, there is apparently no limit to the amount you can find from Iceland to India: as the tripartite structure, in various guises, dominated the early stages of twenty or so major cultures, the list keeps growing. But the real work is to my mind to be done elsewhere.
I fell in love with Dumezil's writings and his system at about twenty, while doing National Service. This was not only a scheme for understanding mythology better than any I had yet come across, but also history, and history as I liked it - not niggling or arrogant or precious, but broad, ambitious in scope, covering two or three continents, and yet humble in that Dumezil loved his subjects and treated them with respect (too many historians like to treat the people of the past like a lot of dim and vaguely despicable schoolchildren). Apart from anything else, the man wrote like an angel. Welcoming him to the French Academy, Levi-Strauss compared his prose to that of Voltaire, the highest compliment a French writer can pay another, and well-deserved; I learned writing from him as well as historical methodology.
While still in the Army, I happened to make a little discovery that could help to expand Dumezil's own comparison of Indian and Norse mythologies. I have no idea where I got the bloody cheek to write to him; I must have been bored in those barracks! I know I could never do it again. But I did send him a short note, care of the French Academy (I didn't bother finding out the address, rightly expecting that the postmen of Paris would know it) outlining my idea and my reasons for it. Now what I didn't know, and I found out only later, was that the old gentleman was not only respected and admired, but greatly loved, a happy, unconventional and very generous old sage (one of the main sections of his masterpiece Mythe et Epopee, written about 1970, opens with a long quotations from Leonard Cohen's Suzanne!). Years later, breezing through the Acknowledgments section of a brilliant book by an American scholar, I practically screeched to a halt when the usual polite noises about dozens of colleagues gave way to what I can only call an outpouring of love and gratitude for "Professor Georges Dumezil", to whom the author felt an immense personal debt he was not shy of expressing. Time and time again I was to come across this sort of personal warmth in those who knew him. There is about his school (though he always hated to feel he was "chef d'ecole", as he put it) the same sort of fierce personal loyalty that Jack Kirby gathered through an equally long and useful life, and for the same reason: he was not only a great scholar, but a great man.
I was soon to find it out, though; for a couple of weeks later I received a letter in French, written in a small neat hand on notepaper with a little block-letter logo on the top left corner - Academie Francaise (the world's foremost academic institution needs no elaborate letterheads). And the contents were such that I don't think I ever set a foot on the ground for a good couple of weeks; I slept hovering above the bed. Thinking of them, even today, still makes my heart swell. For here was this splendid, legendary giant, whose greatness I was only to appreciate more and more as time went on, writing to some unknown kid in Rome with not so much as a university education (that was to come later), in terms that made my cheeks glow. Typically, my little suggestion (of which he said "I am as though thunderstruck", Je suis comme eclaire) opened to him a vast vista of possibilities that I had neither the insight nor the knowledge to suspect; but what really had made him happy was the evidence that his work had gone beyond the magic circle of academics, that a young member of the public was so stimulated by it as to be capable of "creative thought". (His soul in Paradise must be singing to see that Christin and Mezieres had built a clear Three Functions motif into one of the finest Valerian comics, Heroes of the Equinox.)
He expressed all this with the magical directness and power that a master of the art of words can reach when he is stirred; and a part of my future was settled there and then. I was going to do Indo-European research.
Well, my view is still negative. I find it a sweaty and charmless exercise in violence for its own sake. Calling it a homage to thirties adventure serials misses the point: rather should one say that it uses the breathless rhythm and uneducated wallow in cliches of those cheap and long-forgotten staples to excuse its own sadistic and mindless fantasizing. The pace may be similar (and that is not a compliment) but there is more violence, and more importantly more sadism, in five minutes of Spielberg's magnum opus than in any one episode of the old FLASH GORDON serials.
The choice of the Nazis as arch-enemies is particularly manipulative. Aside from flagrant unlikelihoods (would Egypt, an independent country with strong links with Britain, allow hundreds of armed and uniformed stormtroopers on its soil?), the truth is that there is no attempt to even identify Nazism as a particular evil. There are gross errors, such as identifying Hitler as being obsessed with the occult. (Himmler was; but Hitler, according to Alan Bullock, was a strong nineteenth-century kind of scientific atheist, convinced that planetaria would replace churches, and his whole ideology was based on a warped version of Darwinism.) The very premise of the Nazis wanting to possess the Ark of the Covenant as a source of power is highly dubious: surely, given their view of Jews, they would be likelier to want to destroy it. But all this is irrelevant, since the point is that the Nazis have simply and - I repeat - manipulatively been identified as a group whom it would not bother anyone to kill. They can be ripped to pieces by airplane propellers, burned alive, thrown out of speeding trucks, crushed to death by wheels, shot, stabbed, or (a particular favourite of Mr.Spielberg's) melted on screen like so many human wax candles; but since these dozens of victims, killed on screen for our entertainment, have the little red white and black swastika armband, therefore they can be killed them with impunity.
Perhaps the most morally monstrous moment in the movie is the one when Spielberg seems, for a moment, to be gaining consciousness of what he is doing. Jones and the driver of the Nazi truck see a terrified face in front of their windscreen. Then the face (of an innocent Arab) falls off. Jones and the driver grin at each other... and then Jones strikes the driver several times and throws him off the truck, likely enough to his death. For one second, Spielberg has managed to suggest that perhaps there was a common something, even a shared human identity, between two people who could laugh at the same things; and then he immediately snatched that realization away, plunging us back into the obsessive rhythm of his mass-death car and truck race. There is no argument, no explanation, no expansion of any kind: it is the infernal pace of the narrative, and nothing else, that takes our minds away from that one second of partial revelation.
But it is not only the murders. The repulsive atmosphere of this movie goes far beyond. The scene in which a screaming Karen Allen is thrown alive among dozens of moldering corpses, though brief, is as revolting as any I have seen in films; and, mind you, there is no constructive purpose to it. Allen herself is mostly there to provide the damsel in danger, with the inevitable overtones of bondage and rape; given the sadism of the whole story, this properly sexual part is, if anything, rather underplayed.
But the basic fact is that the story has no moral and no point. What do you take away from it, as you would take away from - say - Disney's FANTASIA, or CASABLANCA, or a Bergman or Visconti movie? Nothing. It has all washed over you, affecting your nerve-ends, not your brain, and not your soul. It exists purely to move us from danger to danger and from shock to shock, until, after a couple of hours of vicarious thrills, we are released. It is... entertainment. In roughly the same way as the ancient gladiator games were entertainment.
I could go on - about the insulting use of the Ark of the Covenant (and Mr.Spielberg is supposed to be a Jew!), about the grotesque, thieving, and implicitly imperialistic depiction of archaeology, about the general charlatanism of the movie; but I think it would be merely cumulative. This movie simply represents mass murder and the manipulation of the sacred as entertainment. It is in a direct line of paternity to such Hollywood filth as THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST.
However, this LJ is turning out to be too much about the things I hate and not enough about the things I love. So I enclose my account, written a few years ago, of the great historian who has led me to the work of my life.
Georges Dumezil
By habit, education and passion I am a historian. I fell in love with superhero comics at 16 thanks to some paperback reprints of Steve Ditko's Spider-Man - you can't say that my taste failed there! This means that, unusually, I got into comics at the age most people get out of them, and at an age when I already had a nodding acquaintance with C.G.Jung and Thomas Mann and a far more than nodding one with the study of history; therefore, the inferiority complex of many fans is completely alien to me. Among my other interests, mythology grew more important after I started thinking about superheroes, about my eighteenth year; and my conversion to Christianity is a slow process that was firm, if not complete, by my twenty-fourth year and had, at first, nothing whatever to do with my study of ancient religions.
I found my own area of research where two of my main concerns, history and mythology, converge. Georges Dumezil, now twelve years dead, may well have ben the greatest historian in any branch of history this century. His field (established, for all intents and purposes, by himself) is Indo-European origins. As you know, the word Indo-European refers to a group of languages whose similarity shows a common origin. Their relationship was discovered in the eighteenth century by Jesuit missionaries in India and then, separately, by the Englishman William Jones, one of the early English administrators of Bengal after Clive. (The Protestant English did not bother to read books about India published in Rome, and so had to rediscover everything over again when they established their Indian empire.) It is in fact obvious to anyone who knows Latin and studies Sanskrit, its Indian equivalent, but no European had done so before the eighteenth century.
Despite English interest in India, it was in German universities that Indo-European languages were most vigorously studied, and a swarm of great pioneering German philologists, undisturbed by the Napoleonic wars, made a magnificent series of discoveries, establishing the new linguistic knowledge as one of the great nineteenth-century advances in learning - as significant as electricity or evolution; you can find the evidence of its impact in dozens of works of literature and criticism. It revolutionized the study of history, opening up prospects far beyond the Biblical-Classical schemes that had dominated Europe until then; it became clear that the Indo-European Greeks and Romans, which had been so far the limit of historic knowledge, did not originate in Greece or Italy, but reached their countries after lengthy migrations from some prehistoric Central Asian motherland, from which related tribes had spread over Persia and India.
However, only these tribes' language could be reconstructed (as early as 1810 a German professor tried to write a fable in "original Indo-European"); the culture or cultures seemed terribly vague. A number of attempts failed, some disastrously - it was from such failed essays in culture history that the German Right got its notion of the "Aryan" man, "Aryan" being a typical blunder for "Indo-European". (The Aryas, in fact, are the Ossetic, Persian and Indian language groups - not tall blue-eyed blonde master men, but small brown black-haired types any good Nazi would have identified as degenerate!) By the nineteen-twenties, Indo-European comparative mythology, despite the popular success of Nazi pseudo-science, was a discredited field among academics. In general, the nineteenth century was more concerned - and more successful - in reconstructing the historical origins of the great civilizations and rearranging its inherited Greece-centred culture, than in understanding the Indo-Europeans themselves.
Georges Dumézil, the son of an army general, was a linguistic enfant prodige who spoke Arabic at nine and Sanskrit at fifteen. Asked later in life how many languages he knew, he said he thought he had known about forty at one time or another; he usually had about twenty at any given time, but whenever he needed one he had forgotten, he just went back and studied it for a couple of weeks. Early in his life he undertook to reconstruct the grammar and vocabulary of Ubykh, a vanished, unwritten Caucasian language whose speakers had been dispersed by Tsarist Russia in 1859. Tracing a few old men to three back-of-beyond Turkish villages, he picked it all up from their lips, rescuing the whole language from oblivion, with a complete grammar and vocabulary; and just to make things easier, it turns out that Ubykh has one of the oddest sound systems known, with an alphabet of 80 consonants and only 2 vowels, for many of which he had to invent new letters.
Surviving by the grace of God the horrors of WWI trench warfare, it might have been thought that this astoundingly gifted man would soon have made his mark; but in fact it was not until 1938 (apart from the rescue of Ubykh, that took place in the 1920s when he taught at the University of Istanbul) that he began his most important and productive cycle of discoveries. For this there are a number of reasons, but the essential point is that he had to create for himself all the instruments of his discipline. The nineteenth century had established no proper method to study the content or structure of a myth, to compare two different myths or to relate a myth to a ritual. Dumézil was in the situation of a surgeon envisaging operations for which he needs quite new instruments. He says he did not learn to properly "read" a text until he took a course in Chinese culture in 1934 with the great French Chinese scholar Marcel Granet. Only four people took that course - Dumezil himself, Kaltenmark, Rodinson, and Rolf Stein - and every single one of them became a major figure in his field, so M.Granet must have had something.
But once he had got the right sow by the tail, there was no holding him. Between 1938 and his death in 1985, he wrote some sixty books and countless articles, and absolutely established a discipline that had not existed before him, and in so far as it had been attempted, had been discredited. There is something of God's humour in that Dumezil's great enterprise started just as the Nazis were at the peak of a venture of their own which might well – but for his genius - have destroyed Indo-European studies as a field of research for ever, giving the very word the smell of barbarism and murder, like Wagner can't be played in Israel to this day. Dumezil, of course, regarded Nazism with a scholar's distaste as well as a French patriot's hatred; their doctrine was to him not only vicious but ignorant; not that this saved him from some contemptible smears, coming, alas, from countrymen of mine.
His discoveries come from regarding myths as significant structures, built so as to have a particular meaning. Nineteenth-century scholars had tended to take out striking incidents from stories from various countries to build misleading similarities. This resulted from a mistaken evolutionary model of human rationality, that saw the history of human culture as the assembling of originally irrational, separate elements according to a process that has much to do with free association or even dream logic, until, from the successive accumulation of disparate cultural elements, from trial and error, and from the growth of civilized society, "reason" emerged as a kind of late bloom. The foundation of nineteenth-century cultural anthropology lay in an unrealized circular reasoning: what was (or seemed) mystical, irrational and dreamlike, was ipso facto ancient, primitive, primeval, and what was clearly rational and reasonable was recent. They sought, but did not agree on, the roots of mythology, in mystical links with agrarian spirits, with the sun, with totem spirits, and so on. A late and singularly vicious instance of the genre is Robert Graves' The White Goddess; but long before Graves, intelligent outsiders like Andrew Lang and G.K.Chesterton had perceived that the emperor had no clothes.
This is Chesterton's biting and entirely just comment on the anthropology of his time: "Almost all forms of popular science shine chiefly by shallow parallels. For instance, the whole business of Comparative Mythology is made up of shallow parallels; that is, of superficial resemblances which cover deep and lasting divisions. I have legs and a table has legs; if I am large and round, it is also possible for a table to be large and round. Therefore I am the legendary counterpart, or possibly the mythical origin, of the Round Table." (Chaucer, p.262) Chesterton refers to popular science, the kind of thing you find on the daily press (today it would be UFOs and alternative medicine); by his time, comparative mythology was discredited in academic circles. But it had been living science only twenty or thirty years earlier, and its influence lingered on - among other things, in that most unfortunate popular success, Frazer's Golden Bough. Many times, reading the definitive English version of some Indian or Old Irish text, I had to suffer from notes and commentaries so wrong-headed as to come near idiocy. And the saddest thing is that you might then get, immediately after, some just and shrewd remark, still valid today; but those old scholars simply had no way to tell the difference between sense and nonsense.
Dumezil does not single out individual features of a story without very good cause; he treats stories as wholes, and examines them, for preference, alongside other similar ones, to bring out similarities and differences. He has written fascinatingly about the difference between cultures as shown in different versions of the same story, and has probably a sharper sense of the individuality of Latin, Greek, Germanic or Indian culture than a lot of Latinists, Hellenists, Germanists, or Indianists. His discoveries are too formidable in bulk to be summed up here, but I may say that the first and fundamental one, achieved that distant summer of 1938 while Europe shivered at the threat of war, is that of the so-called Three Functions.
Dumezil perceived that the most archaic layers of Indo-European cultures tended to structure all sort of things - numbers of castes, trinities of gods and of goddesses, etc. - in threes. Of these the first term was concerned with law, learning, sanctity, and magic; the second with strength, kingship and war; the third with fertility, wealth, abundance of men and things, and (an obvious derivation) male and female beauty. A typical case (though he himself, oddly enough, misinterpreted it) is structure of the old Kingdom of France into three Estates: Clergy (which until the sixteenth century included learning and law as well as holiness), Nobles (always, ideally, warriors) and Bourgeoisie (the free citizens, often identified with wealth and large numbers). Another is the top triad of Norse paganism: Odhinn the king-wizard and prophet, Thorr the god of strength, and Freyr the god of peace, love, wealth, and sex. A third is the Indian structure of Varnas - not properly castes, but super-castes, more fundamental categories - that, apart from the slave Sudra, includes the Vaisya - men of free rank but not warriors, seen to this day as the Varna of merchants - the Kshatriya or warrior aristocracy, and the Brahmana, the brahmins - priests, teachers, wise men.
The idea of the Three Functions was in a sense the key that unlocked the gate to an immense amount of further discoveries, and the finger-print that certified to Dumezil and his followers the archaic Indo-European value of, for instance, a medieval English romance or a Latin epic. I mean that where you can find a trifunctional structure in any context whatever, you may be sure that the text or cultural artefact in question is Indo-European, and you many analyze it accordingly. The famous anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss found a similar structure in some Pacific tribe whose name I forget, but in general the pattern is absolutely distinctive. It is even the case that when some piece of mythology or ritual crosses over from an Indo-European area to a non-Indo-European one, however many aspects it may retain, it tends to lose the trifunctional ones. A typical case would be the adoption of Hindu legends in Buddhist East Asia, or (less known but better researched) the spread of the heroic legend-cycle of the Narts (a word meaning "heroes") across the northern Caucasus, from the Indo-European Ossetes to their non-Indo-European neighbours, in which all the functional aspects were lost. (The same thing tends to happen with loans from an Indo-European province to another).
A lot of post-Dumezilian research has reduced itself to a rather sterile and unimaginative hunt for more and more trifunctional features. This is a very satisfactory sort of research in that, once you get started, there is apparently no limit to the amount you can find from Iceland to India: as the tripartite structure, in various guises, dominated the early stages of twenty or so major cultures, the list keeps growing. But the real work is to my mind to be done elsewhere.
I fell in love with Dumezil's writings and his system at about twenty, while doing National Service. This was not only a scheme for understanding mythology better than any I had yet come across, but also history, and history as I liked it - not niggling or arrogant or precious, but broad, ambitious in scope, covering two or three continents, and yet humble in that Dumezil loved his subjects and treated them with respect (too many historians like to treat the people of the past like a lot of dim and vaguely despicable schoolchildren). Apart from anything else, the man wrote like an angel. Welcoming him to the French Academy, Levi-Strauss compared his prose to that of Voltaire, the highest compliment a French writer can pay another, and well-deserved; I learned writing from him as well as historical methodology.
While still in the Army, I happened to make a little discovery that could help to expand Dumezil's own comparison of Indian and Norse mythologies. I have no idea where I got the bloody cheek to write to him; I must have been bored in those barracks! I know I could never do it again. But I did send him a short note, care of the French Academy (I didn't bother finding out the address, rightly expecting that the postmen of Paris would know it) outlining my idea and my reasons for it. Now what I didn't know, and I found out only later, was that the old gentleman was not only respected and admired, but greatly loved, a happy, unconventional and very generous old sage (one of the main sections of his masterpiece Mythe et Epopee, written about 1970, opens with a long quotations from Leonard Cohen's Suzanne!). Years later, breezing through the Acknowledgments section of a brilliant book by an American scholar, I practically screeched to a halt when the usual polite noises about dozens of colleagues gave way to what I can only call an outpouring of love and gratitude for "Professor Georges Dumezil", to whom the author felt an immense personal debt he was not shy of expressing. Time and time again I was to come across this sort of personal warmth in those who knew him. There is about his school (though he always hated to feel he was "chef d'ecole", as he put it) the same sort of fierce personal loyalty that Jack Kirby gathered through an equally long and useful life, and for the same reason: he was not only a great scholar, but a great man.
I was soon to find it out, though; for a couple of weeks later I received a letter in French, written in a small neat hand on notepaper with a little block-letter logo on the top left corner - Academie Francaise (the world's foremost academic institution needs no elaborate letterheads). And the contents were such that I don't think I ever set a foot on the ground for a good couple of weeks; I slept hovering above the bed. Thinking of them, even today, still makes my heart swell. For here was this splendid, legendary giant, whose greatness I was only to appreciate more and more as time went on, writing to some unknown kid in Rome with not so much as a university education (that was to come later), in terms that made my cheeks glow. Typically, my little suggestion (of which he said "I am as though thunderstruck", Je suis comme eclaire) opened to him a vast vista of possibilities that I had neither the insight nor the knowledge to suspect; but what really had made him happy was the evidence that his work had gone beyond the magic circle of academics, that a young member of the public was so stimulated by it as to be capable of "creative thought". (His soul in Paradise must be singing to see that Christin and Mezieres had built a clear Three Functions motif into one of the finest Valerian comics, Heroes of the Equinox.)
He expressed all this with the magical directness and power that a master of the art of words can reach when he is stirred; and a part of my future was settled there and then. I was going to do Indo-European research.