If time is the first dimension of history, then space is its second, so the saying goes. Time is the more obvious axis against which to plot histories, but historians obviously have to make choices as to which geographical areas to cover. A traditional conundrum for historians of antiquity was how to reconcile a variety of theatres of war with the single course of time. For the narrative to remain coherent, a continuous account was required, but this entailed shifts in geographical focus that threatened the narrative’s clarity.1 One solution was to divide the story into geographical sections, seen in its most explicit form in the Wars of Procopius (mid-sixth c.).

In late antiquity, there was no single conception of Armenian space. Instead, there were different notions of what constituted Armenia, each contingent on date, context and perspective. For authors operating within an Armenian cultural milieu, Armenian space was automatically defined in terms of the land occupied by an imagined community because the standard expression for the land of Armenia was ašxarh/erkir Hayoc‘, the homeland of the descendants of Hayk, the eponymous ancestor of the Armenian people.1 This social construction, therefore, created Armenian space wherever those who identified as Armenians were settled. It was not tied to a specific territory with fixed boundaries. At the same time, however, Armenian space was understood in terms of a political landscape, albeit a historic one, comprising the lands of the Arsacid kingdom before its demise in 428 AD.

In his panegyrical description of Hagia Sophia, delivered between 24 December 562 and 6 January 563, Paul the Silentiary praises Justinian for having domesticated seas and rivers. ‘These things’, he continues, ‘together with Western, Libyan, and Eastern triumphs, honour your power beside the rim of the Ocean’.1 This is reminiscent of the praise of Pseudo-Themistius for an emperor tentatively identified with Justinian.2 Such statements are topical, for imperial power was inherently universal: the claim to dominate the entire world is the spatial expression of the Roman Empire.3 As C. Nicolet has shown for Augustus, claims of world domination go hand in hand with claims to knowledge about that world.4

The title of my chapter asks a seemingly innocuous question. Why do no examples of a formal written genre of Syriac pilgrimage from late antiquity survive to today? Various answers could be offered to quickly dismiss the question: Syriac authors simply chose not to write about pilgrimage; or, they did write about it but their texts have not survived; or further, they did write about it, but chose to do so only within the context of other literary arenas, such as hagiography or historiography. These responses, as we shall see, all have some descriptive truth to them, but they do not offer a completely satisfactory answer. The genre of pilgrimage literature was vibrant in late antiquity in neighboring languages and cultures.

If we were to make a list of films by established directors that do not seek to engage the audience by means of noble or even acceptable sentiments, films that use grotesque imagery and situations, tend to abrasive and violent scenes, deal in paradox and extreme satire, and evince a philosophical concern with evil, the list would not be long. Eric Von Stroheim's Greed (1924), Tod Browning's Freaks (1932), and John Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust (1975) are three well-known films that fit this description, but they are so different from one another that we cannot characterize them as belonging to any particular school of thought or tradition. All we can say is that none of these films gives us an easy, or easily classifiable, viewing experience, yet each has proven to be of lasting interest. Schlesinger's film— my subject here— is taught in film schools today.

The following pages attempt to do justice to the vexing moral demands Locust makes on the viewer. Up to the present, the most common approach to the film has been to point out where it fails to please the audience, rather than to consider that audience pleasure is precisely what Schlesinger has in mind to expose— which is to say, deconstruct. Locust continually confronts the viewer with images that are both grotesque and elegant and with characters that are as abhorrent as they are touching. It is not a conventionally “viewer-friendly” film, any more than the work of fiction upon which it is based— Nathanael West's acclaimed novel of 1933— is a conventionally “reader-friendly” novel. Schlesinger read the novel in 1967, two years before coming to Los Angeles for work on Midnight Cowboy, and greatly admired the writing. Then, after moving to Hollywood himself, he was struck by the enduring truth of West's vision. He devoted six years to bringing the film to the screen and did not expect it to appeal to audiences. “I knew it was going to be controversial, but I was very proud of it— and still am, incidentally,” he said in an interview in 1978, “I felt that we had […] [an] extraordinary film which by no means was going to be popular” (qtd. in Riley 1978, 113).

Although Schlesinger was loosely associated with Free Cinema early in his career, in interviews he insisted that he did not share the more tendentious and ideological aesthetic of Free Cinema's most notable artists. When asked by Buruma if he thought the more political directors of his era like Lindsay Anderson might have considered his humanism bourgeois, Schlesinger replied, “Oh, yes, I'm sure they all thought I was bourgeois, which I probably was and am. But I wasn't going to ask forgiveness for what I believed interesting and valid. Humanistic cinema was something I was very attached to” (Buruma 2006, 44).

By “humanistic cinema,” a phrase that Schlesinger repeats in his conversations with Buruma, he generally means cinema in which an illuminating focus on the relations among individuals is of greater concern to the director than advancing a particular set of political beliefs. Schlesinger's examples include the films of De Sica— “I absolutely worshipped the ground De Sica walked on,”— Kurosawa and Federico Fellini (Buruma 2006, 41, 75). In answer to Buruma's observation that directors like Anderson “wanted to change the world or change society, which was perhaps never your main concern,” Schlesinger agrees, but insists that he was nonetheless determined “to shake it up […] and to deal with topics that were not the-run-of-the-mill” (45). He gives the example of Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), a film set in London of the seventies about a Jewish homosexual doctor's relations with a young man who is also involved with a woman. Another example of course would be Midnight Cowboy, originally given an “X” rating for its nudity, explicit homosexuality and obscene language, a classification that was changed to “R” after the film won the Academy Award for Best Film of 1969.

In The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, Raymond Williams writes that much of the “serious art of the past hundred years— in film as clearly as anywhere— is in fact the work of dissident bourgeois artists” and that in the practice of popular cinematic art, in particular, we see radically different cultural tendencies overlapping. It is possible to “go on from [the work of dissident bourgeois filmmakers] to socialism,” he insists, or to “go back from it to variously idealized pre-capitalist social orders: hierarchical, organic, pre-industrial, pre-democratic” (Williams 1989, 114– 15).

When Schlesinger's film about a love triangle involving an older man, a woman and the feckless, bisexual young man whom they adore appeared in 1971, it was universally praised by reviewers for its skill in portraying a love triangle “very much of today,” as Judith Crist put it in New York Magazine (Crist 1971, 74). Impressed by the film's open treatment of contemporary sexual practices and its innovative portrait of homosexuality, major reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic— Archer Winsten, Vincent Canby, Rex Reed, Pauline Kael, Kathleen Carroll, Newton North, Molly Haskell— seemed to write as if Sunday Bloody Sunday was the first work in history to explore an unconventional love triangle. As the somewhat complacent reviewer of the Wall Street Journal expressed it, “This is, of course, a triangle inscribed by an emphatically contemporary pen” (Boyum 1971, 14).

It's also a triangle inscribed by a somewhat older pen. The film's recollection of Shakespeare's love sonnets, in which the poet's young friend and his mistress betray him by having an affair together, is not simply a matter of subject (the insoluble truths of desire) and point of view (that of the older man) but of Schlesinger's artistic method of dividing the film into increments of time, marked by days of the week, temporal and emotional units that resemble the discreet lyrics within a sonnet sequence or the chapters of a novel. In the words of Schlesinger's biographer, Sunday Bloody Sunday can give one “the sense of reading rather than watching” (Mann 2005, 378). Pauline Kael described it as a “novel written on film” and, in being so, an entirely new achievement: “It has never been done before— not successfully, that is— and so this movie is instantly recognizable as a classic.”

Other earlier works of art reverberate in Sunday Bloody Sunday. The music of the film is taken from a Mozart opera and its vision of the city as a total environment derives from classic documentary films of urban life. These resonances distinguish the film from others of the period, providing it with a kind of aesthetic deep focus that distances the viewer from the contemporary story it has to tell and, perhaps for that reason, makes it possible for viewers today to derive something from the film beyond a time-bound portrait of the sexual and romantic quandaries of the well-to-do in seventies London.

Isaiah Berlin's famous division of writers into two categories— foxes, or those who know many things, and hedgehogs, or those who know one important thing— does not apply to film directors. Good directors know many things— about editing, acting, production design, cinematography, writing, music, sound technique, finance and much more— and great or “auteur” directors know all of these things in addition to one important thing. They have a personal vision of life that transcends and yet unifies the material elements of their art, and that develops over the period of their creativity.

I believe that John Schlesinger was one such director. Fox-like, he understood all aspects of filmmaking. Billy Williams, the great British cinematographer who directed the photography for Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), described Schlesinger as the “most complete” director he ever worked with (Sunday Bloody Sunday, DVD Interview). As the many stories of people who worked with Schlesinger attest, his ideas about the screenplay, art direction, music, cinematography and acting were so uncompromising, abundant, well-integrated and specific that, from the beginning of his career, they led often to conflicts with other artists and technicians on and off the set. When Schlesinger had full control over the making of his films, and when all the other things necessary to putting together a film worked in his favor, he was capable of creating brilliant art.

This is because Schlesinger was also a hedgehog. He knew one important thing: the importance of survival, of just getting through the day and of trying to make the best of what one has. This conviction ran deep in his family background, and it informs all of his films. He pursued it as a philosophical problem and proposition in the context of modern, urban life. When Schlesinger tried to engage the past directly, as in Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), which is set in rural Victorian England, he was less successful in communicating this theme because it was something he understood in modern, urban terms. “I think that what makes John's films so wonderful is that he has always been so in tune with life,” said Glenda Jackson (Mann 2005, 345).

In Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust, a big budget Hollywood epic of the Battle of Waterloo is being filmed that epitomizes the industry's superficial idea of history. “Waterloo” is a meticulously rendered period piece that views the past as a series of discrete events on a horizontal continuum. The viewer is invited to look back in admiration and/ or horror at these events without being distracted by their possible relation to the present. The flattened view of history Schlesinger satirizes in Locust is the opposite of the vertical, simultaneous grasp of both past and present at work in his masterpiece, Sunday Bloody Sunday, the film most central to any discussion of Schlesinger's use of the human past.

The character Tod, who works for the studio art department in Locust, understands the past in a way that brings us closer to the director's own view. He pours over reproductions of past art in search of inspiration for deeper human content. When the studio set collapses and the producers refuse responsibility for the injuries it causes, we get a glimpse of the moral indifference that characterizes the entire production. Human beings are as extraneous to the epic Waterloo as the injured extras are to its producers. In Hollywood epics generally, the lead characters can seem oddly ornamental— mere celebrities in costume, unable to convey a vital relation to either nature or history. The sweeping scope of the epic can overshadow even a very good actor's contribution. One reason for this is that film epics are characteristically not interested in historical remembrance, or in capturing the particulars of what is “lost without recovery,” as Carlyle phrased it (Carlyle 1971, 54). They are more often nostalgic celebrations of our grand myths of the past. From the silent era to the present, Hollywood epics have attempted to revive myths (heroic, romantic, historical and religious) and some have succeeded, but the complexity and magnitude of the task is such that good directors have also failed at it.

One wonders if Schlesinger did not occasionally smile to himself as he filmed the film-within-the-film, noting certain resemblances to the epic he himself made eight years earlier, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (1874).

The local and familial contexts in which the hero of the traditional Bildungsroman struggles to mature are vacated in Darling and, like Diana Scott, Joe Buck must make his way in a national environment. Madame Sousatzka, the story of a young piano prodigy and one of Schlesinger's most poignant films, proves once again that the Bildung tradition retains its meaning even in a globalizing city like London. It was Schlesinger's last British film and final contribution to the genre of coming of age. Over sixty years old when he made it, he brought to the screenplay and visual language of the film the wealth of his knowledge of the youthful process of maturation together with his long experience as an artist living in a commercial age. “I think that what drew me to the story was, in a sense, what I was going through,” said Schlesinger, “Opportunity, commercialism, and the perhaps rather oldfashioned approach of the music teacher, Sousatzka, who won't let her pupil perform before he's absolutely ready. It's about artistry, and I took that very seriously” (Buruma 2006, 157– 58). “Sousaztka was very close to my heart and my experience, so it was largely a labour of love” (Mann 2005, 515).

As one would expect, Schlesinger's meticulous evocation of the London music scene of the eighties, as experienced by a young and gifted outsider trying to compete, is completely convincing in the way it captures the interconnections among the teachers, promoters and well-known London venues. Yet much of what gives the film its power is an archaic subtext, for the young artist, who is nurtured by his sensual mother, taught piano by an older and wiser teacher and sexually initiated by an enchanting young woman, is born of the Triple Goddess: maiden, mother and krone. Oscar Wilde once said that if a man wants to enter society, he needs women behind him, and that is certainly true of the young artist in Madame Sousatzka, in more than a social sense. The knowledge that the artist gains from the three women, each of whom symbolizes a stage in the female life cycle, is rooted in bodily life.

Snatching Victory from the Jaws of Defeat: A Kind of Loving

Before making his first feature-length film, A Kind of Loving, John Schlesinger made 24 documentaries for British television in addition to Terminus, the award-winning thirty-minute documentary for British Transport Films (BTF) about Waterloo Station. Over lunch with BTF's producer-in-charge, Edward Anstey, a protégé of the pioneering documentary maker John Grierson, Schlesinger came up with the idea of a day in the life of a railroad station, speaking as if a railroad station were a living person. “It's a microcosm of what's going on in a city,” he said (Mann 2005, 168). Schlesinger never lost this sense of the city as a protean space. Documenting the urban landscape, which meant recognizing the essential strangeness and vitality of what was completely familiar, was the jumping off point of his entire career and of many individual films. In Billy Liar, Schlesinger's second feature-length film, Billy's daily existence in a dreary Yorkshire town is established before we share his outrageous fantasies, because it is the supposedly dull reality that spawns the fantastical.

Unlike Billy Liar, A Kind of Loving is focused exclusively on the concrete, everyday lives of characters whose inner fantasies are not shown. We are given a sense of what those fantasies might be when the male office workers look at magazines of nude women and when women office workers gaze into shop windows. (One shop window contains a manikin of a woman in a bridal dress.) On the surface, the film conforms to the realist conventions of Free Cinema films of the period, but, as we shall see, Schlesinger's unique style may also be felt in the film's subtle characterizations and muted comedy.

By the time Schlesinger signed a contract with Producer Joseph Janni to do the film, several films by the now well-known Free Cinema directors had already appeared and been successful. Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961), a film that Schlesinger admired, bears certain resemblances to A Kind of Loving in that both were shot in poor neighborhoods in and around Manchester in the grainy documentary style of Free Cinema, in which deep focus shots hint at the totality of the environment restricting the characters’ lives.