Peter Weir’s Master and Commander out of the Aubrey-Maturin novels; Jane Austen v Byron’s perspective

A heroic scene done exquisitely realistically in Weir’s Master and Commander (2003)

The contrasting geologizing scene on the Galapagos Islands

Dear friends and readers,

As it was more than 2 weeks ago now that I spent three nights as much mesmerized by the features about Peter Weir’s Master and Commander as by the movie itself, I had better write now before I lose contact with what made the movie the meaningful experience it is, and (as I am told) reflects the poetic center of Patrick O’Brian’s historical adventure fiction. It’s this: it combines utterly incompatible feelings (Robert Graves wrote about this regarding verse): on the one hand, the worship necessarily blind to reality of violence on behalf of securing power (and with it wealth, privilege, status, the ceremonies of admiration), and on the other, the realization this demands death, maiming, torture (whipping, flogging, whatever it takes to enforce discipline to be cruel) when what makes life worth living is friendship, imaginative arts, knowledge and immersion in the natural world. Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe in the film) enacts the thrust of the first, and Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany) the activities and point of view of the second, with all the characters arranging themselves variously on a continuum between them.

This kind of intense quiet music-making punctuates the sequences

I seem to remember best a wholly naturalistic (it was filmed not computer generated) of Russell Crowe as the captain going for a swim, and everyone aboard watching him with bated breathe lest they lose him.

Russell Crowe as hero

Also the horror of the ship hospital, the operating table as the maimed men were amputated, sewn, and on beds left to die. Richard McCabe as Mr Higgon’s surgeon’s mate’s anguished terror at making a mistake as he imitates Maturin as surgeon whose arm is too hurt to perform himself.

The boy has lost his arm, we watch him follow Maturin around the Galapagos; he is groomed to be a captain himself

I have listened to a marvelous reading aloud on books-on-CD of the third book of the series, H.M.S. Surprise by Patrick Tull where the character of Stephen Maturin emerges fully for the first time as sceptic, objector, doubter, sensitive soul, the alternative voice, and have now placed the first book high on a TBR pile of historical fiction.

Paul Bettany as questioner

I’ve also looked up on my Eighteenth Century World at Yahoo list to see if there was any commentary on the film in 2003 when I saw it with Yvette. I had gone to a session in a ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) panel on film where:

A young Spanish professor, Diego Tellez Alarcia, gave a remarkably well-organized, lucid, and detailed exposition on Master and Commander, an adaptation of several novels by Patrick O’Brian. Mr Alarcia went over the type of film M&C represents, the real historical & contemporary events (one involving the USS Essex) it alludes to, its relationship to O’Brian’s novels, and how it functioned to whip up patriotic emotion after 9/11. Mr Alarcia first used Krakauer, an important film critic (who I’ve read) to argue that films provide a new way of studying history: we can study our culture as an engine of history itself as well as a mirror of society. Films are a new way of writing history as valid as speech and the written word. Mr Alarcia went on about how much effort was put into making the details of the film historically accurate (ship, food, clothes &c). The genre this film belongs to also is the swash-buckler, the rebellious adventure film, the tongue-in-cheek (Captains Courageous, Mutiny on the Bounty, Billy Budd, Pirates of the Carribean). I learned something new about O’Brian’s career: I had thought the Jack Aubrey novels are a roman fleuve, but did not know that O’Brian also translated 30 books from French.

I’ve appended as the comments I received on that listserve some 12 years ago on the film, beginning with a person who loved the books to someone who differed on the film but was glad of the attention repaid to journalism at the time.

We can connect this to Austen in various ways because of her sailor-brothers: here I choose to compare her with her brother’s Francis’s viewpoint on a renegade hero of the time, and Byron’s ironic understanding.

One chapter in Southam’s JA and the Navy is about a little known satire by Austen which shows her to have been a narrowly partisan amoral imperalist Tory type. Southam prints a little known and until now Austen’s little understood satire in the manner of Pope, Swift and others:

Of A Ministry Pitiful, Angry, Mean Of a Ministry pitiful, angry, mean, A gallant commander the victim is seen. For promptitude, vigour, success, does he stand Condemn’d to receive a severe reprimand! To his foes I could wish a resemblance in fate: That they, too, may suffer themselves, soon or late, The injustice they warrent. But vain is my spite They cannot so suffer who never do right.

In brief, Popham was court-martialed for disobeying an order to protect ports in the Cape of Good Hope. Instead he took his ships and attacked some ports in Argentina in order to steal their cargo and help friends upset the Argentinian gov’t and eventually take over. Among other helpmates were the revolutionaries: politics makes temporary bedfellows this way. There’s a long chapter in Southam’s JA and the Navy which shows that in this case Austen was fiercely on the side of an amoral thug-pirate type, Popham.

Why? because he was supported by her brothers; for among other things, his relationship with Moira and others to whom Henry had (very unwisely, but trying hard to make money from money) lent big sums of money. It’s a good instance of her narrow Toryism. The man was out for himself to make huge amounts of money; left his post to go over to another country and simply grab it. One of the sorts of people that make the world miserable for the average person. Even Nelson thought him a horror: Nelson, we have to give this to him, did not seek wealth personally except as it came as part of actions he thought genuinely for the good of the people and land of England.

People like to ignore or not talk about how Wentworth is presented as making money from his ships; we are not told what this actually means in reality. He, though, is not the charlatan type Popham was.

Now Southam keeps saying that the brothers (Francis and Charles and in this case Edward and Henry) would have approved of Popham, but while Henry clearly has behaviors that resemble Popham’s (and Edward is fiercely partisan on behalf of his property, will not help other landowners), not Francis and the two passages that Southam quotes are filled with comments that were they turned to look at Popham would judge him “horrible” and very wrong. In the chapter he registers the idea that it’s just “horrible” for people to bomb others. Popham was an early inventor of the equivalent of today’s drones (drop it on the ship and blow it up), but it was real claptrap and when used as often killed those using it. Nonetheless, he tried it and destroyed four ships in the process.

A drawing-illustration made from the movie — the officers studying maps, planning strategy

Given the continual dropping of bombs on people helpless against them and the targeting of civilians since WW2, it’s worth it to quote some of Francis’s words here. He speaks first (at length, a long sentence) of how impossible it is to “direct” the bombs with “any tolerable precision.” When people drop drones, we are often told a single “terrorist” is killed; not so; you cannot direct them that way; the drone drops the bombs on a house and destroys the house and anyone in it plus usually the whole street. Hundreds are killed and maimed and lives destroyed. Francis Austen:

“This horrible mode of warfare seems scarcely justifiable in principle (amongst civilized nations) short of self-preservation and perhaps its entire want of success may have been a fortunate circumstance for England who could not have expected to be the only power to use such machines and whose shipping would be constantly liable to similar attacks with much greater facility from the exposed situations of the anchorages then used.”

In other words, such bombs could be used against England’s ships. The second is a long passage where he says one must obey the orders of one’s commander. When one is ordered to stay and protect a port, one must. Francis always behaved that way and he missed Trafalgar (which he regretted all his life because it meant less money and less prestige and fewer connections he could pressure) because he obeyed an order. Jane Austen was taking precisely the opposite position. Throughout her letters we see her usual mockery (Southam calls this joking) and adversarial positions to whatever is happening.

Here Southam cavalierly says that Austen liked Popham because her brothers did. One can see parallels with Henry’s banking and loan practices and who he was more than willing to be friendly with but all the evidence suggests Francis would have judged Popham fiercely and said he should be court-martialed.

During this time Jane Austen was reading Charles Pasley’s Essay on Military Policy (you can download this as an ebook and I have) and we find in her letters one of these short phrases, but it is in full admiration. The man advocates the most ruthless of imperalist policies, the sort that leads to what Belgium did in the Congo. I wondered what Austen would have thought of Maturin.

Byron provides a rejoinder to Jane Austen, Pasley, and Popham: Wellington: The Best of Cut-Throats (1819)

Though Britain owes (and pays you too) so much,
Yet Europe doubtless owes you greatly more:
You have repaired Legitimacy’s crutch,
A prop not quite so certain as before:
The Spaniard, and the French, as well as Dutch,
Have seen, and felt, how strongly you restore:
And Waterloo has made the world your debtor
(I wish your bards would sing it rather better).

You are ‘the best of cut-throats’: – do not start;
The phrase is Shakespeare’s, and not misapplied;
War’s a brain-spattering, wind-pipe-slitting art,
Unless her cause by right be sanctified.
If you have acted once a generous part,
The world, not the world’s masters, will decide,
And I shall be delighted to learn who,
Save you and yours, have gained by Waterloo?

I’ve done. Now go and dine from off the plate
Presented by the Prince of the Brazils,
And send the sentinel before your gate
A slice or two from your luxurious meals:
He fought, but has not fed so well of late.
Some hunger, too, they say the people feels: –
There is no doubt that you deserve your ration,
But pray give back a little to the nation.

Never had mortal man had such opportunity
Except Napoleon, or abused it more:
You might have freed fallen Europe from the unity
Of tyrants, and been blest from shore to shore:
And now – what is your fame? Shall the Muse tune it ye?
Now – that the rabble’s first vain shouts are over?
Go! hear it in your famished country’s cries!
Behold the world! and curse your victories!

To return to the 21st century film, Stuart Klawans, the film critic of The Nation provides a perceptive commentary on this film helps explain why it’s alluring experience. His argument is that it has a

deeply erotic charge … which turns out to be powerful and strange.” “It’s there from the first wordless, nocturnal sequence, in which the camera follows a prowling character through the sleeping quarters below deck, where rows of hammocks, seen from below, swing from the ceiling like multiple scrotums. Perhaps the penis is Russell Crowe himself, who makes his first appearance semi-dressed, bursting erect from the captain’s quarters through doors that part like a loosely buttoned fly. Never mind that the Surprise, like all ships, is calls ‘she.’ Weir conceives of it as a huge male body, whichis literally suffused with its crew’s blood. [Klawans was puzzled to read reviews claiming the picture was “stupendously entertaining” and “thrilling”.] You might have thought these writesr were describing The Adventures of Robin Hood rather tnan movie that lingers over the amputation of a young boy’s arm. Sailors are lavishly blown apart; a skull is opened and the brains probed before a fascinated crew; in one extended scene Maturin even performs surgery on himself, digging into his own guts while watching the spectacle in a mirror. Even during the longueurs, when male bodies are not being ripped into, Weir reminds you of the permeability of flesh by providing all the actors with highly visible scars. So it came to me: This penetration of male bodies is what’s thrilling about Master and Commander. How’s that for an S&M title? The infliction and endurance of pain is the sex …

Klawans isn’t “belittling the grandeur, the magnificence, the meticulous recreation” of details of “nautical life, or neglecting “Crowe’s wonderfully assured performance, which is as self-amused as it is amusing.” He agrees with Crowe “that M&C is one enormously expensive art movie.”

I was struck by the emotionalism of Maturin’s intellectual senstive-physician sidekick. I liked how the film questioned and exposed the values behind the male world. Yvette said to that they are the same pair of A Beautiful Mind. Maybe it’s a woman’s emotion picture shot into the center of a swashbuckler by way of Captain Hornblower. It is also siimply a bunch of men enjoying themselves enormously, pretending they are the men at sea, in danger, winning battles, exploring, watching punishment of those who risk all, or betray or undercut the rules. All this under the cover or rational of historical accuracy.

And given my return to historical fiction (Poldark novels, Wolf Hall) and its relationship to historic fiction (older), biography, our understanding of history, now I would like to read a few of the novels

Ellen