The Way of All Flesh

When I was reading this book for my Ph.D. exams in a coffee shop, a guy came up to me and asked, "Who's forcing you to read Samuel Butler?" "Uh, I guess I am," I replied, because no one suggested I put The Way of All Flesh on my exam list... except myself! He told me he pitied me. That's actually the main thing I remember about The Way of All Flesh, to be honest, other than a vague sense that it's sort of a less good rip-off of Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (even though Way of All Flesh came first).

Even though it was published only two years after the Victorian era ended, it seems very modernist in its take on reason/logic, but also an extension of George Eliot's ideas in some ways. The book points out that we think we live in a show more world defined by reason, but we resolutely do not, despite the trappings of it: "They [reasonable people] settle smaller matters by the exercise of their own deliberation. More important ones, such as the cure of their own bodies and the bodies of those whom they love, the investment of their money, the extrication of their affairs from any serious mess – these things they generally entrust to others of whose capacity they know little save from general report; they act therefore on the strength of faith, not of knowledge" (306). The book ends up concluding that it is impossible to separate the subjective from the objective, the inner from the outer, the fact from the feeling:

The trouble is that in the end we shall be driven to admit the unity of the universe so completely as to be compelled to deny that there is either an external or an internal, but must see everything both as external and internal at one and the same time, subject and object – external and internal – being unified as much as everything else. This will knock our whole system over, but then every system has got to be knocked over by something.
     Much the best way out of this difficulty is to go in for separation between internal and external – subject and object – when we find this convenient, and unity between the same when we find unity convenient. This is illogical, but [...] all philosophies that I have ever seen lead ultimately either to some gross absurdity, or else to the conclusion already more than once insisted on in these pages, that the just shall live by faith, that is to say that sensible people will get through life by rule of thumb as they may interpret it most conveniently without asking too many questions for conscience sake. Take any fact, and reason upon it to the bitter end, and it will ere long lead to this as the only refuge from some palpable folly. (327-8)

Forget modernist, this seems downright postmodernist: the Grand Narratives have failed us, so all you can really do is muddle through with the stories you've got, and they'll help you as much as they do, and not only is that okay, but maybe even it's for the best?

I vaguely remember the philosophy of the book, as thankfully I took notes, but do not at all remember the actual events of the book, even upon rereading those notes, so take that as you will. I seem to recall it belongs to that genre of post-Victorian takes on the Victorian era that still seems a little too Victorian for its own good (like Rachel Ferguson's Alas, Poor Lady). That is to say, it's trying to push a new philosophy, but it's married to the most tedious aspects of the old plotting. The modernists would do this kind of thing much better. show less

Witty, sarcastic attack on the institutions of Victorian England published in 1903 (but written decades earlier). Most of the humor still holds up, and I really enjoyed most of the book. I don't seek out novels of that period as a rule, because I generally dislike their prolixity and find their themes dated and uninteresting. This is an exception. It's on the 5 side of 4 stars.

SORTA SPOILER ALERT

I found the description of how alcohol destroys one poverty-stricken female character to be annoying, but perhaps Butler was just trying to avoid being overly politically correct (i.e., because opponents of religion, say, also had to believe that the poor were more virtuous than the wealthy).

Love it. Remarkable that a man can make such cold, heartless observations and still create characters that one loves and misses when they are gone. There is one image from the beginning of this book that will stay with me for the rest of my life. I even sat and read passages aloud to Megan so that someone else could enjoy them as much as I did.

Reading a book written over a century ago is a very different experience than reading our modern, high-impact, explicit stories of today. This book is a bit wordy. It is filled with the author's philosophy on life, morals, and religion. However, the characters are wonderful and full of life, and the message that men and women are mere mortals and full of flaws remains the same no matter how the text is worded. Poor Ernest Pontifex lives a interesting, eventful , and sometimes tragic life. Raised by parents who seemed to care more for money than their children, he suffers from poor self-esteem and a loss of identity. After enduring incarceration, an alcoholic wife, and many years of searching, he finally finds peace in following his heart.

Wasn’t really sure what to expect as I started this after having read Butler’s Erewhon but I was surprised to find not only that I liked it but that I also wanted to keep reading at night when I should have been letting my body get back the vast amounts of energy it had expended cycling around on the Tonda Survey.

It’s the story of two generations of a family that, for the most part, you just want to corner in a narrow space and kick around so infuriating are the actions of the father and son who are the central characters here. The book starts off with the grandfather raising the father and, about a third of the way in, moves on to focus more on the life of the son as he grows up under clergic tyranny.

I really liked it. It was show more written so tongue in cheek. It was one of the most subtle satires I’ve ever read and had a huge amount to say about families and relationships and how we cope with life without once shouting its message from the rooftops. I really liked it.

As the son grows, you see the increasing hypocrisy of a father who preaches love but hasn’t the faintest idea what it means in practice. You wonder at how the son takes this but Butler paints him so sympathetically (the POV is the son’s godfather as narrator) that you can’t help but side with him even though he makes some ridiculous decisions.

It was a book that I think you could simply enjoy as a story of someone growing up and disentangling themselves from the apron strings. In this regard it had elements of Great Expectations or The Corrections in it, a kind of comic bildungsroman. But aside from this, I think what makes the book much more significant is that, underneath, it has to be a critique of the types in society that the father and son represent. Butler was no friend of organised religion and the father, a parish priest, gets absolutely no sympathy from him. The son seems to represent what is dysfunctional about the educated middle-classes.

So, as I said, I really liked it. show less

This is a peculiar and partly autobiographical book. Butler explicitly drew on his own family and childhood experiences in this tale of the Pontifex family and, in particular, the passage of young Ernest Pontifex to adulthood. It tackles what Butler saw as the hypocricies of the church and society - moral, sexual, educational and personal - and puts young Ernest through a testing workout of tribulations before (spoiler) ending in a state of equilibrium and contentment. Parts of the novel are sharp and comic - Butler is harsh but comically fair on Ernest's parents, showing the social constraints that lead to heavy-handed Victorian paternalism, while making the parent-child relationship both harrowing (Ernest's oppressed childhood) and show more comic (his mother's rich fantasy life, as one example). The book has a rather peculiar first person narrator, who acts as a sort of patron to Ernest, but a misanthropic and manipulative one at that.
Perhaps the most contentious aspect of the book - certainly when it was written - is the negative portrayal of religion. Again we get sharp satire of all the different types and manifestations of Christianity in Victorian England - the parson who seeks only interest; Puseyite hypocrites, evangelical fervour and Ernest's own brand of inept vacillation, before breaking with the church and resigning from holy orders.
Overall, it's a very interesting read; the structure is rambling and the characterisation broad brush, but it is teeming with ideas and satire being thrown out on to the page at a great rate. Worth a read for anyone with an interest in C19th culture and literature. show less

The story follows several generations of the Pontifex family but eventually settles on the young Ernest Pontifex. Ernest is dominated by parents we would today call "passive aggressive", using a pious and seemingly loving demeanor to bend the young man to their will, which seems to be a determination to ensure their first-born son never knows a moment of happiness in his life. He is manipulated into becoming an Anglican priest, like his father, and much of the novel follows his struggles to adapt himself to the Church or adapt the Church to himself. The disasters that befall his rebellions provide Butler much opportunity to express dissent about both the Church and religious beliefs in general.
There has never been more vehement show more indictment of parental stupidity than that of Samuel Butler in his novel The Way of All Flesh. That much of the material is drawn from Butler's own life, especially his relationship with his father, we know from his statement about his father to his biographer, Henry Festing Jones:
He never liked me, nor I him; from my earliest recollection I can call to mind no time when I did not fear him and dislike him . . . the fact remains that for years and years I have never passed a day without thinking of him many times over as the man who was sure to be against me, and who would be sure to see the bad side rather than the good of everything I said and did.
The Way of All Flesh is perhaps the most devastating and relentless literary assault by a son upon a father ever written. The father, Thomas Butler in life and Theobald Pontifex in the book, stands accused (and of course convicted) of many odious sins. A vicar, he is a complete sententious humbug, utterly selfish, snobbish, mean, and avaricious, unfeeling about anyone except himself, a philistine who delights in cruelty to his own children in the name of supposedly necessary character-formation. He is an unctuous, sadistic, bullying hypocrite, all of whose learning is mere pedantry, and all of whose opinions are handed down to him by his ancestors and predecessors, which he was too lazy and self-interested ever to examine for their truth or otherwise. The slightest opposition or disagreement over anything is insupportable to him, and interpreted by him much as a general interprets a failure of soldiers to obey his orders.

Theobald’s wife, Christina—modeled on Butler’s mother—is a much weaker character, not without natural kindness, who nevertheless becomes cruel and hypocritical because of her subordination to her husband. Ernest’s two siblings, his brother and sister, are odious sycophants of Theobald, pure toadies, though they hate him just as much as Ernest does. Ernest so comes to dislike his sister that he finds it physically nauseating even to give her a peck on the cheek when he meets her again after a long interval. Theobald’s vile character poisons and embitters the atmosphere of the whole household and all who have ever lived in it.
This book is an encyclopedia of virtually all the social pathology that is to be seen in a clinical setting. show less