State of dejection

The Siege of Krishnapur: Chapters 24–27

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Hello and welcome to this slow read of The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell. To get these posts in your inbox, turn on notifications for ‘2025 The Siege of Krishnapur’ in your subscription settings.

Chapters 24–27

Lucy gives another tea party, but with tea in short supply, it is just a lot of hot water. The Magistrate considers Lucy’s amativeness, the back of her neck, and its potential for phrenology. Lucy considers making him one of her favourites.

Meanwhile, the Collector gives up on civilisation. In a bid to stop the mud ramparts from washing away, he orders all the furniture and unessential possessions to be used to bolster the fortifications. Harry Dunstaple breaks up chains for shot to clear the jungle growing up around the enclave. The Collector retires to his bed, leaving the Magistrate in charge.

Cholera sweeps the garrison, and the great controversy takes place between the two doctors. Dr Dunstaple demands Dr McNab provide evidence for his belief that the disease is spread through infected water.

The Collector revives in time for an auction of the private stores accumulated by the dead. Rayne, the opium agent, attempts to buy everything up to sell back at a profit. When it transpires that everyone is buying against future income, the Collector replaces Rayne and requisitions all the stores for the Commissariat.

The auction over, Dr Dunstaple reprises his feud with Dr McNab. McNab presents logical and rational evidence, to the entertainment of the Magistrate, who is confident that the enclave residents are beyond sensible reasoning. Dr Dunstaple settles the argument by drinking ‘rice-water’: the stool of a cholera patient.

The food is rationed out. Chloé uncovers a sepoy, and Fleury has both of them shot. Dr Dunstaple falls ill and is treated against his wishes by Dr McNab, on the request of his daughter Louise. Despite, or because of McNab’s interventions, Dr Dunstaple dies.

The Stag at Bay (From Incidents in a Stag Hunt), ca. 1495–1515. Source.

Footnotes

1. The sleep of reason

… near him, in the lumber of possessions, was an oil painting of a stag at bay: that was just how he felt himself … Reason being savaged by a pack of petty stupidities which, because of their number, would in the end bring him down. His ginger-clad lips parted and he belched again, more dejectedly than ever.

JG Farrell may have had in mind Sir Edwin Landseer’s 1846 painting ‘Stag at bay’. We often talk figuratively about keeping things ‘at bay’; a threat, like a disease, is contained but not eliminated. When an animal is ‘at bay’ it is cornered and about to be caught. In a hunt, the beast may be brought down by a pack of hounds. ‘Petty stupidities,’ the Magistrate calls them.

The besieged garrison is ‘at bay’, but so is the idea of civilisation in the minds of the Collector and the Magistrate. This week, both men are overwhelmed by disillusionment and dejection. The Collector feels his belief in reason crumbling from within; the Magistrate sees its impossibility in other people:

People were stupid. The poor were just as stupid as the rich; he had only contempt for both of them. His interest in humanity now was stone dead, and probably had been for some time.

The sleep of reason produces monsters, Francisco Goya, 1799. Source.

2. Acts of sacrifice and magical thinking

In due course the black goat was sacrificed with the appropriate ceremonies to appease the river and nobody was in the least surprised when, little by little, the river began to fall. By the following morning, aided by another black goat for good measure, it had dropped several inches and the worst was over.

The Magistrate despairs at the superstition of the zemindars, but the goat sacrifice is followed by the enclave’s own ‘bonfire of the vanities’: the sacrifice of the garrison’s ‘possessions’ in the service of holding up the ramparts. The Collector is un-collecting, decluttering civilisation, and ‘It was almost as if he enjoyed what he was doing.’

And only then, at long last, when almost everything was gone, did the terrible rain relent just enough for the ramparts to stop their melting.

Have you ever walked past a house guarded by a dog? The beast barks and goes on barking until you are out of sight and smell. From the canine point of view, those scary sounds had the desired effect and deterred the intruder. Since a passerby will always eventually pass on by, the guard dog will always eventually feel it’s done its job.

So it is with magical thinking. The river water will recede, the rain will stop. And we will know we’ve done enough.

The dearest possessions are hauled off in ‘tumbrils’, a reference to the cart favoured by the revolutionaries of Paris for transporting their enemies to the guillotine. The French Revolution turned on itself, sending its most bloodthirsty Jacobins to the blade. So it is that the Collector of the things of civilisation has become its chief destroyer, its Angel of Death:

The only idea that seemed feesible was for the Collector to put on the rusty suit of armour which stood in the banquesting hall and to go out there with a scythe.

Fame Adoring Shakespeare's Tomb, embroidered picture after Angelica Kaufmann. Source.

The Collector saves a few of his precious possessions, including an image of Fame Scattering Petals on Shakespeare’s Tomb. This will have been based on a print by the Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman, which became a popular embroidery piece in the nineteenth century. It encapsulates both a celebration of the bard and voguish expressions of romantic sorrow. Graves and tombs have followed us through The Siege of Krishnapur.

• More: Fame at the tomb of Shakespeare (Victoria and Albert Museum)

• Listen: The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare (Shakespeare Unlimited)

A meeting of the College of Physicians, 1808. Source.

3. Cholera Wars

   Many supporters of Dr McNab exchanged glances of dismay at the words they had just heard. They had not realized that Dr Dunstaple had the support of the Royal College of Physicians ... and felt distinctly aggrieved that they had not been told that such an august body disagreed with their own man.

I discussed Cholera in Week 5, and I’ll share again Sam Goodman’s essay on ‘Colonial Medicine and Imperial Authority in J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur.’

In his notes, Farrell described this week’s confrontation as ‘The Great Cholera Controversy Scene’. It shows tradition and ignorance victorious and science and knowledge vanquished. This is the reverse of the Collector’s prized possession: a bas-relief in marble called The Spirit of Science Conquers Ignorance and Prejudice.

In his essay, Sam Goodman writes:

By making his colonial Victorians ridiculous, Farrell strives not just to lampoon them and their views but also to make his contemporary audience consider how their own actions and judgments may one day too be assessed.

The Krishnapur garrison is shocked to learn that Dr Dunstaple’s outdated and erroneous views of cholera have the backing of the Royal College of Physicians. The revelation triggers immediate defections from Dr McNab’s camp. This is far more persuasive than Dr Dunstaple’s theatrical coup de grâce of drinking a bottle of water from a cholera patient’s stool.

We would like to feel more enlightened, but we are no less dependent on the consensus of experts. Like the Collector and the Magistrate, we would like to draw clear lines between knowledge and ignorance, truth and falsehood. In the siege, these distinctions are complicated by our emotions, our senses, and our critical need for certainty and meaning.

The heat, too, was atrocious; the air in the hall was stagnant and the audience stinking. Every time you took a breath of that foul air you could not help imagining the cholera poison gnawing at your lungs. Even Fleury, who was perfectly conscious of the force of McNab’s arguments, nevertheless gave a visceral assent to those of Dr Dunstaple.

• Read: Why we trust experts – even when they admit they don’t know the answer (The Conversation)

Thank you

Thank you for joining me on this slow read of JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur. Please share your own footnotes and tangents in the comments, and let us know what you thought of this week’s reading.

Next week will be the final week of our slow read. We will read chapters 28–32 of The Siege of Krishnapur.