The following piece is by Edward Docx, novelist and journalist, which appeared the the Guardian Newspaper on Thursday 18th March 2021. It is a very good piece of writing and an excellent comment on the current situation in the United Kingdom. I thought I would reproduce it on the blog for those readers in the United States and Eastern Europe . It deserves a much wider readership. Not that I have that many readers, but I just felt it encapsulates a great many peoples thinking in the United Kingdom and is worth spreading around.
Boris Johnson is the archetypal clown, with his
antic posturing and his refusal to take anything seriously. So how did he end
up in charge?
by Edward
Docx
Thu 18 Mar 2021 06.00 GMT
Last modified on Thu 18 Mar 2021 14.06 GMT
The long-running German satirical show Extra 3
recently featured a sketch with the following voiceover: “From the people who
brought you The Crown – the epic saga of the Queen – now comes the ridiculous
story of this guy, a notorious buffoon at the head of a country … The Clown.”
The word “clown” has often been used in a flippant
or dismissive way with regard to Boris Johnson. But the underlying paradox is that
it is only as a clown – a fool in the oldest and deepest sense of the
word – that his character can truly be understood. What happens when you make
the clown king is what we in the UK have been witnessing in real time. With the
success of the vaccine, though, a new question emerges: can one archetype
transform into the other? Can Johnson creep away from his clownish past
altogether?
Clowns, of course, are very serious and important
people. At their simplest, they remind us of the silliness of things: that the
world we have created is ridiculous. They reassure us in this observation by
appealing to our innate understanding of the absurd. They relieve the endless
tension and trauma of reality.
At a deeper level, the clown is the mirror image of
the priest. Both represent two ancient sides of our nature. Both elucidate what
it means to be human. The priest summons, celebrates and interrogates the
sacred; the clown does the same with the profane. The one is concerned with the
eschatological, the other with the scatological. The priest propounds
abstinence and fasting; the clown gluttony and indulgence. The one solemnifies
sex, the other carnalises. As David Bridel, founder of the Clown School in Los
Angeles, says, clowns are often roundly welcomed because they “remind us that
we are as practised in falling over, shitting and humping, as we are in prayer
and purification”.
Would-be biographers of Johnson might do worse than
to read Paul Bouissac, the leading scholar on the semiotics of clowning. Clowns
are “transgressors”, he writes, cultural subversives who enact rituals and
dramatic tableaux that “ignore the tacit rules of social games to indulge in
symbolic actions that … toy with these norms as if they were arbitrary,
dispensable convention.” Clowns “undermine the ground upon which our language
and our society rest by revealing their fragility”. They “foreground the
tension” between “instinct” and “constraint”. Bouissac could be writing
directly of Johnson when he adds: “Their performing identities transcend the
rules of propriety.” They are, he says, “improper by essence”.
Observe classic Johnson closely as he arrives at an
event. See how his entire being and bearing is bent towards satire, subversion,
mockery. The hair is his clown’s disguise. Just as the makeup and the red nose
bestow upon the circus clown a form of anonymity and thus freedom to overturn
conventions, so Johnson’s candy-floss mop announces his licence. His clothes
are often baggy – ill-fitting; a reminder of the clothes of the clown. He walks
towards us quizzically, as if to mock the affected “power walking” of other
leaders. Absurdity seems to be wrestling with solemnity in every expression and
limb. Notice how he sometimes feigns to lose his way as if to suggest the
ridiculousness of the event, the ridiculousness of his presence there, the
ridiculousness of any human being going in any direction at all.
His weight, meanwhile, invites us to consider that
the trouble with the world (if only we’d admit it) is that it’s really all
about appetite and greed. (His convoluted affairs and uncountable children
whisper the same about sex.) Before he says a word, he has transmitted his core
message – that the human conventions of styling hair, fitting clothes and
curbing desires are all … ludicrous. And we are encouraged – laughingly – to
agree. And, of course, we do. Because, in a sense, they are ludicrous.
He goes further, though – pushing the clown’s confetti-stuffed envelope: isn’t
pretending you don’t want to eat great trolleys of cake and squire an endless
carousel of medieval barmaids … dishonest? Oh, come on, it’s so tiresome trying
to be slim, groomed or monogamous – when what you really want is more cake and
more sex. Right? I know it. You know it. We all know it. Why lie? Forget the
subject under discussion – Europe, social care, Ireland – am I not telling it
like it is, deep down? Am I not the most honest politician you’ve ever come
across? Herein the clown’s perverse appeal to reason.
Next, witness how, in the company of a journalist,
Johnson’s whole demeanour transmits the sense of him saying: “Aha! An
interview! How absurd! This is no way to find anything out! But, yes, if you
want, I will play ‘prime minister’ and you can reprise my old role – if that’s
what the audience is here for.” Notice how often he asks (knowingly) “Are you sure our viewers
wouldn’t want to hear … ?” or “You
really want to know this?” This is because the clown is always in a
deeper relationship with the audience than with his ostensible subject. See how
he rocks on his feet as if to lampoon a politician emphasising his words. Hear
how his speech is not – in truth – eloquent, but rather a caricature of
eloquence. The dominant mode is not fluency, but a kind of stop-start oratio
interrupta; hesitancy followed by sudden spasms of effusion. The hesitancy
is designed to involve us in the confected drama of his choosing the next word.
The sudden effusion that follows can then be marketed as clinching evidence of
his oratorical elan.
You do not have to be a dramatist to recognise the
clown archetype immediately. Johnson’s impulsiveness. The self-summoned crises.
His attitude to truth, to authority, to every construct of law and art and
politics, to power and to pleasure. His personal relationships and his
relationship to the public. The self-conscious ungainliness. His blithe
conjuring of fantasy and fairytale. The way he toys with norms – inverts,
switches, tricks, reverses. The collusive warmth oddly symbiotic with a
distancing coldness. Anything for a laugh. Everything preposterous. All of it
richly articulate of the antic spirit that animates his being. Indeed, Johnson
is an apex-clown – capable of the most sophisticated existential mockery while
simultaneously maintaining the low moment-by-moment physical comedy of the
buffoon.
Recall general election Johnson of 2019. Think of
the famous moment where he drove a JCB through a polystyrene wall on which
was written the word “Gridlock”. His union jack-painted digger burst through
the polystyrene with the legend “Get Brexit Done” written on its loader. His subsequent speech even mentioned custard: “I
think it is time,” he said, smirking, “for the whole country – symbolically –
to get in the cab of a JCB – of a custard colossus – and remove the current
blockage that we have in our parliamentary system.” This scene must surely be
as close to the actual circus as politics in the UK has ever come.
Consider what is actually going on here. The wall
is a wall that he helped create. Now he wants everyone to join him demolishing
it. And he’s the man to lead the charge. Why? Because he’s the only one who can
smash through the nonsense that is … the wall. Yet, he built the wall.
Most of this nonsense is his doing – figuratively, literally, in the studio, in
the country. And why are the hazard lights on? Because, of course, this is an
emergency, for the clown must forever be concocting drama. An emergency that he
has conjured and staged – to place himself in the cab of the rescue vehicle.
Which is not a rescue vehicle. But a JCB. (Paradox inside paradox; is he
destroying or rescuing?) A JCB painted as a union jack. Why? To celebrate the
flag? Not quite. To mock it, then? Also, not quite. But in order to toy with it
– to clown with it – to move back and forth across the borders of the serious
and the comic.
“Time for the whole country,” he says,
“symbolically – to get in the cab of the JCB.” Symbolically? Was ever a word
deployed with so many layers of foolery? What – we thought he might mean we all
get in the JCB? Of course, we didn’t. So who is he mocking with that word? He’s
mocking everything – the stunt, us, himself – even in the moment of
performance, he mocks his own performance. We cannot take him seriously and yet
we must take him seriously. And note how that word “symbolically” steps up from
the backstage of Johnson’s consciousness when talking of Brexit – which, as he
well knows, is an act of symbolism at the expense of everything else.
The JCBs, the polystyrene walls, the stuck-on-a-zipwire-with-two-mini-union-jacks, the
hiding in fridges, the waving of fish, the thumbs up, the pants down, this is
the realm of the mock heroic – to which Johnson returns again and again. This
is where he’s most at home. This is where he’s world-king. And he urges us to
join him there. Nudges our elbows. Offers us a drink. Beckons us in. Smirks.
Winks.
Johnson’s novel Seventy-Two Virgins is one long tour of the
territory. The book is beyond merely bad and into some hitherto unvisited
hinterland of anti-art. More or less everything about it is ersatz.
Commentators who fall for his self-conjured comparisons to Waugh and Wodehouse
miss the point entirely and do both writers an oafish ill-service. Because here
again: Johnson is not seriously interested in writing novels at all. It’s not
that he’s a fraud. Rather, as ever, he is a jester-dilettante peddling parody
and pastiche. In truth, the attentive reader is not invited to take anything
seriously about the novel – not its title; not its handling of character,
dialogue, plot or point of view; not its dramatic construction, nor its stylistic
impersonations. And certainly not its thematic dabbling. In fact, for more than
300 ingenious pages, Johnson manages to commit to nothing in the art of writing
a novel so much as the attempt to be entertaining in the act of mocking a
commitment to the art of writing of a novel. There is no heroic; it’s all
mock.
“To a man like Roger Barlow,” Johnson writes of his
clownishly named hero in the book, “the whole world just seemed to be a
complicated joke … everything was always up for grabs, capable of dispute; and
religion, laws, principle, custom – these were nothing but sticks from the
wayside to support our faltering steps.”
Clowns have been with us through history. They turn
up in Greek drama as sklêro-paiktês – childlike figures. During the
Roman festival of Saturnalia, a clown-king was chosen and all commerce was
suspended in favour of a wild cavort. (“Fuck business.”) In Norse mythology,
the archetype is the figure of Loki – silver-tongued trickster and shape-shifter
who turns himself into horse, seal, fly, and fish. (Note the echo of the
reference by a close ally of Joe Biden to Johnson as a “shape-shifting creep”.)
In the Italian commedia dell’arte, there is the character of Pierrot.
There is Badin in France, Bobo in Spain, Hanswurst in Germany. And here in
Britain: Shakespeare’s many famous fools.
We need our clever fools, of course. Too much
solemnity is sickly. We need the carnival. We need reminders of our absurdity.
The culture should be subverted. The sacred should be disparaged.
Institutions should be derided when they become sclerotic. We live in an
age of posturing and zealotry and never needed our satirists and our clowns
more.
But the transgressor is licensed precisely because
they are not in power. The satirist ridicules the government – fairly, unfairly
– and we smile because (ordinarily) they are not in charge of the hospitals,
the schools, our livelihoods or the borders. We laugh and clap at the circus,
the theatre and the cinema because we can go home at the end of the evening,
confident that the performers are not in charge of the reality in which we must
live.
Previously, of course, this was Johnson’s
relationship to power. He was the clown-journalist tilting idly at straight
bananas, Tony Blair, political correctness gone mad. When he was made mayor of
London, he was in effect elevated to quasi-official court jester. There he was
stranded on the zipwire (the buffoon parodies the circus trapeze act) but real
power still remained elsewhere. Even during the referendum campaign, David
Cameron and George Osborne were the government … whereas Johnson was continuing
to perform the role of fool – holding up a kipper here, draped in sausages
there, arriving in town squares with his red circus bus and a farrago of
misdirection and fallacy. He was stoutly devoid of any real idea or concern for
what might replace the structures he disparaged. His humour, his glee, his
energy, his campaigning brilliance – it delighted and sparkled because he was
free of responsibility, free to be himself, free to throw the biggest custard
pies yet dreamed of in the UK.
Vanishingly few people had any serious idea of what
was involved in leaving the EU; and resoundingly not Johnson. But those who
simply wanted to leave because their gut instinct told them it was right to do
so would have failed and failed miserably without him. These men and women –
the likes of Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis, Steve Baker, Nigel Farage, Mark
Francois, John Redwood, Gisela Stuart, Kate Hoey et al – were never more than a
dim congregation of rude mechanicals. And what they required to win was someone
who instinctively understood how to conduct a form of protracted public masque.
Someone who could distract, charm, rouse and delight with mischief and
inversion and a thousand airy nothings. (The clown was ever the perfect
ambassador of meaninglessness.) But even Puck sends the audience home with an
apology and the reassurance that all we have witnessed was but a dream.
We, however, have made our clown a real-world king.
And from that moment on, we became a country in which there was only the
mock heroic – a “world beating” country that would “strain every sinew” and
give “cast-iron guarantees” while bungling its plans and breaking its promises.
A country “ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles” and
act “as the supercharged champion” of X, Y, Z. A country on stilts – pretending
that we had a test and trace system that was head and shoulders above the rest
of the world. A country performing U-turns on the teetering unicycle of
Johnsonian buffoonery – A-levels, school meals, foreign health workers and
more. A country of tumbling catastrophes. Trampolining absurdities. Go to work.
Don’t go to work. A country proroguing parliament illegally here, trying to
break international law there. Paying its citizens to “eat out to help out” in
the midst of a lethal pandemic. A country testing its eyesight in lockdown by
driving to distant castles with infant and spouse during a travel ban. A
country whose leadership stitched up the NHS in the morning and then clapped
for them at night. A country opening schools for a single day, threatening to
sue schools, shutting schools. A country on holiday during its own emergency
meetings. A country locking down too late; opening up too early. A country
sending its elderly to die in care homes. A country unwilling to feed its own
children. A country spaffing £37bn
up the wall one moment and refusing to pay its own nurses a decent
salary the next. A country doing pretend magic tricks with the existence of its
own borders – no, there won’t be a border in the sea; oh yes there will; oh no
there won’t; it’s behind you …. A country of gimmicks and slapstick and
hollow, honking horns.
This is Eastcheap Britain and Falstaff is in
charge. It is in the two Henry IV plays that Shakespeare most clearly
illuminates the gulf between his great, theatre-filling clown, Falstaff, and
the young Prince Hal who will go on to become the archetype of the king – Henry
V. At the mock-court of Falstaff’s tavern, we are invited to laugh and drink
more ale, pinch barmaid’s bottoms, dance with dead cats and put bedpans on our
heads while Falstaff entertains us with stories of his bravery and heroism that
we all know are flagrant lies. Says Prince Hal to the portly purveyor of
falsehoods: “These lies are like their father that begets them, gross as a
mountain, open, palpable.” Meanwhile, the realm falls apart.
Since we have no Hal and have crowned the clown
instead, the play we are now watching in the UK asks an ever more pressing
question: can Falstaff become Henry V and lead his country with true
seriousness and purpose? Or is the vaccine-cloaked transformation now being
enacted merely superficial – a shifting of the scenery?
The lies themselves are the problem. The kingly
archetype embodies at least the ambition of sincerity, meaning and good purpose
at the heart of the state. Whereas deceit continues to be the default setting
on Johnson’s hard drive. Rory Stewart calls Johnson “the best liar ever to serve as
prime minister” but writes that “what makes him unusual in a politician is that
his dishonesty has no clear political intent”. But Stewart does not quite see
that Johnson is the purest form of clown there is – “improper by essence” – and
that truth and lies are like two sides of the argument to him: equally tedious,
equally interesting, equally absurd, both a distant second in their service of
tricks, drama, distraction, invention, manipulation.
He will write you two columns, four, 10, 100 –
pro-Marmite, anti-Marmite; pro-EU, anti-EU. And then he’ll tell you all about
them. All about how he couldn’t decide. Because not deciding is where
all the drama is to be found and who cares about the arguments anyway? No, what
the trickster wants is neither your agreement nor your disagreement. (For he
himself agrees and disagrees.) What the trickster wants most of all … is for
you to admire his trickery. Heinrich Böll, the German Nobel-prize winner and
author of the truly great novel The Clown, answers Stewart’s question when he
says: “You go too far in order to know how far you can go.”
The difficulty for the clown is that once truth and
seriousness have been merrily shattered, they cannot be put back together and
served up anew. Or, to put it another way, the buffoon who has just entertained
the audience by smashing all the plates cannot now say that he proposes to use
them to serve up a banquet in honour of himself becoming a wise and honest
king. Everyone can see: the plates are all in pieces on the floor.
Meanwhile the realm really is still falling apart.
Johnson’s predicament could not be more starkly illuminated than by the next
existential challenge he faces: to do with the very nature of the union of
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The other home nations have long
seen him as a pantomime king and they are certainly not going to believe in any
kind of transformation of character – vaccine or no. After all the centuries of
blood and trauma, the Northern Irish are unusually united in feeling that they
have been treated like stooges at his circus. Meanwhile, Scottish nationalists
need only plaster their advertising hoardings with Johnson’s picture to swell
their ranks with the as-yet-undecided. For too long, the other nations have
witnessed the business of the kingdom being conducted clownishly – by bluster,
mishap, side-effects, the unforeseen consequences of the last trick but one.
How, then, can Johnson now present himself as a conscientious envoy of the
union?
The ironies thicken here. Johnson is a
lackadaisical student of history and he has entirely misunderstood his own
destiny. (His book on Churchill is nothing so much as a plastic clown trumpet
masquerading as a bugle.) Instead of uniting his country, he now finds himself
facetiously hastening its breakup. And it is the Conservative and unionist
parties that have facilitated him. They licensed their comforting fool and told
themselves that he could restore a glorious past. But a leader who personifies
tomfoolery and nostalgia is eloquent about sharpening decline not renaissance.
You send in the clowns when something has gone wrong and you need to distract
the audience. Too late, the Conservatives now see that the same transgressive
spirit they empowered has been childishly tearing at the very fabric of the
kingdom they wish to conserve. In this paradoxical way, Johnson’s very essence
summons the end of everything Conservatives most revere – everything that began
with the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and the Act of Union in 1707. And, true to
his nature, Johnson invites this ending in the slapdash manner of a clown:
inadvertently, by accident, as the result of a series of improvisations.
And so, at the last, we come to death. Which even
the clown cannot toy with or mock. The figures are stark – 126,000 dead at the
time of writing. In terms of total numbers, the four countries above us have
much greater populations – the US, Brazil, Mexico and India. We have by far the
highest death toll in Europe and the fourth highest death rate per million of
the population in the world. There is no serious discussion that does not
arrive at the conclusion that the UK has lost tens of thousands of men and
women whose death was not inevitable. Not all of the losses are Johnson’s
fault, but many of them are the direct result of his calls and his character.
Research by Imperial College shows that up to 26,800 deaths could have been
prevented had the first lockdown come just one week earlier. Then came the care
homes disaster, the premature lifting of the first lockdown, the ignoring of
Sage throughout September. And only a clown would begin the October
announcement of a second lockdown with the phrase “good evening and apologies
for disturbing your Saturday evening with more news of Covid” when the nation
was already stiff with the legions of dead and had been waiting all day to hear
from its leader. The run-up to Christmas was a catastrophe of mismanagement
that all-too-inevitably became the January of 30,000 more people dead. Are we
supposed to forget this legacy and “move on”? That is what Johnson is now
tacitly suggesting. Like all storytellers, he knows the public remember
endings, less so beginnings and seldom the middle. He did all he can, he says.
He knows it’s not true, but that is what he is selling.
In dramatic terms, just as death reveals the life
of the kingly archetype as noble and purposeful, so the clown is revealed as foolish
and meaningless. When Hamlet takes hold of Yorick’s skull (another popular
clown) in the graveyard, he asks: “Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your
songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not
one now, to mock your own grinning?”
And there’s another moment in Hamlet that’s germane
here – the scene where Shakespeare has the prince instruct the visiting actors.
Where Hamlet explicitly warns them about clowns. Warns them not to allow the
clowns to distract the audience and make them laugh while important issues are
being settled. Warns them that there are certain clowns who seek to do this
merely to remain in the limelight – with no regard for either the meaning of
the play, nor the understanding of the audience.
“Let those that play your clowns speak no more than
is set down for them,” Hamlet says. “For there be of them that will themselves
laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in
the meantime, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered:
that’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.”
Masks change, not archetypes. The fool still holds
the stage. And pitiful ambition is precisely what we are watching.
