Word: napoleons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...attitude and policies regarding the German states, for example, actually helped drive the Teutonic princes together. As a result, Napoleon helped lay the foundation for German nationalism and France's conqueror, Bismarck...
Burgess grants Napoleon both genius and idealism, but he has great fun exploring the Emperor's lack of moral sensitivity and aesthetic judgment. As the torch carrier of the Enlightenment, a kind of social engineer who believed man was perfectible through political institutions, Burgess's Napoleon ignores the intransigent nature of evil...
Burgess, the Christian moralist, appears to agree. His reasons are worked out in a fugue of ideas at the book's end where the exiled, cancerous-perhaps even dead-Napoleon encounters a mysterious female apparition. Since she coldly puts Napoleon in his place, she may well be Clio, the Muse of history...
...case, she declares that Beethoven's art is more important than Napoleon's military skill-"an art," she unkindly notes, "highly wasteful of its materials." Napoleon, whose mind or spirit at this point is soaring like the last movement of "The Eroica, "appears to get the message: musical forms may reveal divine essences, while his own kinetic life has been shaped by a gargantuan but finite will, whose only form was eventually a form of selfdelusion. Napoleon Symphony is, in some sense, an entertaining and elaborate joke. What the punch line comes down to is the simple fact...
Burgess has strong, not to say brash, opinions on practically everything of importance and is not overly modest. "If I may say so, writing Napoleon Symphony was probably more difficult than writing a War and Peace, which can go on as long as it likes, and does." He kicks another sacred Russian cow in Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "The most swollen reputation of our day," he observes of the Nobel-prizewinning exile. "They say he is a great writer because he is a great...