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summary: =As it turns out, everyone loves law and order, and it’s more chaotic than anarchy could ever be= Folks – Lucian Gregory, the first poet . . .

As it turns out, everyone loves law and order, and it’s more chaotic than anarchy could ever be

Folks

• Lucian Gregory, the first poet of Saffron Park, who turns out to be the only real anarchist; introduces Gabriel to the Central Anarchist Council
• Gabriel Syme, the new dandyfied poet of Saffron Park, who is really a policeman going undercover to investigate; is elected Thursday; very bourgeois, he loves law and order; has intuitive flashes of truth
• Rosamond Gregory, who is Gabriel’s silent motive, only appears briefly twice, sandwiching the book (the only woman)
• Sunday, the massive and massively clever head of the organization; leads both the anarchists and the policemen against them; calls himself “the peace of God” (who can be on both sides at once, directing everything even though they seem opposed); people see in him what they want to see (cf Kurtz in Heart of Darkness)
• Monday, the obsessed Secretary, the last uncovered
• Tuesday, the Pole, who is the first one uncovered
• Wednesday, the rich and sensual Marquis who turns out to be in disguise (challenged by Thursday to a duel)
• Friday, Prof. de Worms, actually a young actor who stole Worms’ identity (he chases Thursday in a snowstorm in London)
• Saturday, the doctor whose dark glasses are the only thing sinister about him

Themes

• Against paranoia: no one is out to get you
  • Everyone was just spying against each other, like a gossip ring
• Hiding out in the open: no one suspects you are who you say you are!
  • Yet clothes seem to make the man: so they are disguised, yet out in the open (“I am a portrait,” says de Worms 89)
  • You can’t tell the real from the fake (the actor is so good that the real de Worms is called an imposter)
• Reason: 97 is “hideous,” more hideous than unreason
  • 88: Twice two might be four for math, but in real life, having two more of anything makes the problem multiply exponentially (straight math isn’t helping)
• Suburbs: Saffron Park, the “artistic” planned community
• Anarchism: it’s the rich who want anarchy (just another plot by the rich)
• Nightmare: Chesterton said he wanted it to be like a nightmare
  • All the switches, disguises, plot reverses, and problems with light
  • “having strayed into a new world” (54)
• Literary Impressionism
  • Chiaroscuro: the walk in the woods in France throw changing pastilles of light over them, which Chesterton calls “Impressionism” as “that final skepticism” that leads to nihilism
  • Also the snowstorm did this effect too
  • Compared to the “cinematograph” (126)
  • Makes you doubt reality (“Was anyone anything?”)
• New criminals are thinkers and philosophers, radicals and artists, not the poor, thieving, or killing (closing in on the thought police and Big Brother)
• New Language
  • He and Prof de Worms make up a new language with hand gestures, and Gabriel seems to love the language more than anything
  • He tries to communicate ridiculously descriptive, biographical, and philosophical sentences, not the practical short directives that the Prof wants
  • He loves the new language to excess, loving it for itself and not for its active powers

Quotes

• “The philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the finite” (176)
  • “Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten” (127) (on impressionism being a depressing way to live)
• Realism: the pattern of his tweeds, grew and expanded outrageously, as such things grow to important in a realistic novel” (99) (and a page before he called materialism “murderous”)
• Definition of anarchists: people “who believe that rules and formulas have destroyed human happiness” (47)
  • Two kinds of anarchists: the ones on the outside who conform to the definition above, but the “inner ring” who are more dangerous and just want to kill people because they hate humanity