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Who or What is Sunday?

#116: Feb. - April 2013 (Fiction)
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stahrwe

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Who or What is Sunday?

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I have listened to TMWWT twice on audio-book, read the book once on Kindle, and once in a hard copy edition annotated by Martin Gardner, former writer for Scientific American. I have also read numerous interviews which Chesterton gave about TMWWT* and I am still not sure exactly who or what Sunday was.

Please share your ideas about who or what Sunday represents.

*I will publish those interviews shortly, as time allows.

Thank you.
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Re: Who or What is Sunday?

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Sunday is a day.

When this question is asked of Sunday he replies, "I am the Sabbath, I am the peace of God". On Sunday God rested, he was at peace with his work throughout the week creating the world. Sunday, the day, represents a day of rest, relaxation, and happiness. With this as a reference, if you were Sunday, the man, you would live a carefree life, without responsibilities or rules, laws or any regulations of any kind. Sunday is total freedom. A world full of Sunday's (days and men) would create chaos, maybe Sunday represents chaos?

There is an interesting mention of Memnon, I forget what chapter. Syme sees Sunday for the first time and is reminded of seeing a mask of Memnon in the British Museum because the face of Sunday is so large, so large in fact Syme at first feels it may not be a human face. He becomes afraid and decides he will never go to see that mask again. What is interesting about this mention of Memnon is that Chesterton does not clearly explain which Memnon he is referring to. It is very easy to assume Chesterton is speaking of the Ethiopian King, but why would Chesterton choose such an obscure warrior, why not pick Achilles? There is another Memnon, a Christian Saint, nicknamed the wonderworker. Saint Memnon practiced asceticism and lived in a monastery in Egypt. I bring this up because I find Chesterton to be very deliberate in his writing and he does us symbolism quite a bit. Things are not as simple as they appear to be in the novel. By mentioning Memnon Chesterton maybe bringing attention to aspects of the Christian religion, aspects such as abstinence and hard work for the pleasure of serving God. This is the opposite of what Sunday is. Sunday lives large, you can see it in his face! Whoever or whatever Sunday is, he is certainly not God.

Another good question is, who is Gregory?
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Re: Who or What is Sunday?

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A bit of a clarification, God rested on the 7th day which is Saturday not Sunday. The Jews and some Christian denominations still observe Saturday as the Sabbath. It is also true that many Christians refer to Sunday as the Sabbath and observe it as a day of rest.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT A CRITICISM OR EVEN A CORRECTION OF ANY POST. IT IS INTENDED ONLY TO PROVIDE CONTEXT.

The Mask of Memnon is mentioned twice in the text:

In Chapter 5
"The form it took was a childish and yet hateful fancy. As he walked across the inner room towards the balcony, the large face of Sunday grew larger and larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he was quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he would scream aloud. He remembered that as a child he would not look at the mask of Memnon in the British Museum, because it was a face, and so large."
and in Chapter 15
"He had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face of Sunday, which wore a strange smile.

"Have you," he cried in a dreadful voice, "have you ever suffered?"

As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?"
Whichare very similar to a portion found in Chapter 14
"The Professor spoke at last very slowly.

"I think something," he said, "that I cannot say clearly. Or, rather, I think something that I cannot even think clearly. But it is something like this. My early life, as you know, was a bit too large and loose.

"Well, when I saw Sunday's face I thought it was too large--everybody does, but I also thought it was too loose. The face was so big, that one couldn't focus it or make it a face at all. The eye was so far away from the nose, that it wasn't an eye. The mouth was so much by itself, that one had to think of it by itself. The whole thing is too hard to explain."

He paused for a little, still trailing his stick, and then went on--

"But put it this way. Walking up a road at night, I have seen a lamp and a lighted window and a cloud make together a most complete and unmistakable face. If anyone in heaven has that face I shall know him again. Yet when I walked a little farther I found that there was no face, that the window was ten yards away, the lamp ten hundred yards, the cloud beyond the world. Well, Sunday's face escaped me; it ran away to right and left, as such chance pictures run away. And so his face has made me, somehow, doubt whether there are any faces. I don't know whether your face, Bull, is a face or a combination in perspective.
Perhaps one black disc of your beastly glasses is quite close and another fifty miles away. Oh, the doubts of a materialist are not worth a dump. Sunday has taught me the last and the worst doubts, the doubts of a spiritualist. I am a Buddhist, I suppose; and Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt. My poor dear Bull, I do not believe that you really have a face. I have not faith enough to believe in matter."
Last edited by stahrwe on Fri Feb 15, 2013 8:39 am, edited 2 times in total.
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stahrwe

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Re: Who or What is Sunday?

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What reason do we have to believe what Sunday says?
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Re: Who or What is Sunday?

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The only thing they can compare him to is the universe. The paticular universe they are inhabiting is an absurd dream. With each twist in the plot the world seems more absurd until finaly Sunday reveals himself as the man in the dark room. I think what they go through is a kind of baptisim into the absurd. When Sunday asks "Can ye drink of the cup I drink of?" It is an allusion to Jesus's question to his disciples "Can ye drink of the cup I drink of? And be baptized with the baptism I am to be baptized with?" Because of these things I view Sunday as the manifestation of the absurd.
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Re: Who or What is Sunday?

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Here is what G. K. Chesterton had to say about why he wrote TMWWT and who Sunday was.

Note, my comment inserted stating that Chesterton had suffered a bout of depression at a young age and it was that which moved him to write TMWWT.
From pages 96-100 of G.K. Chesterton's autobiography.

When I look back on these things, and indeed on my life generally, the thing that strikes me most is my extraordinary luck. I have already pleaded for the merits of the Moral Tale; but it is against all the proper principles that even any such measure of good fortune should have come to the Idle Apprentice. In the case of my association with Hodder Williams, it was against all reason that so unbusinesslike a person should have so businesslike a friend. In the case of the choice of a trade, it was outrageously unjust that a man should succeed in becoming a journalist merely by failing to become an artist. I say a trade and not a profession; for the only thing I can say for myself, in connection with both trades, is that I was never pompous about them. If I have had a profession, at least I have never been a professor. But in another sense there was about these first stages an element of luck, and even of accident. I mean that my mind remained very much abstracted and almost stunned; and these opportunities were merely things that happened to me, almost like calamities. To say that I was not ambitious makes it sound far too like a virtue, when it really was a not very disgraceful defect; it was that curious blindness of youth which we can observe in others and yet never explain in ourselves. But, above all, I mention it here also because it was connected with the continuity of that unresolved riddle of the mind, which I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. The essential reason was that my eyes were turned inwards rather than outwards; giving my moral personality, I should imagine, a very unattractive squint. I was still oppressed with the metaphysical night¬mare of negations about mind and matter, with the morbid imagery of evil, with the burden of my own mysterious brain and body; but by this time I was in revolt against them; and trying to construct a healthier conception of cosmic life, even if it were one that should err on the side of health. I even called myself an optimist, because I was so horribly near to being a pessimist.(This is Chesterton’s way of saying that he suffered from a bout of depression) It is the only excuse I can offer. All this part of the process was afterwards thrown up in the very formless form of a piece of fiction called The Man Who Was Thursday.. The title attracted some attention at the time; and there were many journalistic jokes about it. Some, referring to my supposed festive views, affected to mistake it for "The Man Who Was Thirsty." Others naturally supposed that Man Thursday was the black brother of Man Friday. Others again, with more penetration, treated it as a mere title out of topsyturvydom; as if it had been "The Woman Who Was Half-past Eight," or "The Cow Who Was Tomorrow Evening." But what interests me about it was this; that hardly anybody who looked at the title ever seems to have looked at the sub-title; which was "A Nightmare," and the answer to a good many critical questions.

I pause upon the point here, because it is of some importance to the understanding of that time. I have often been asked what I mean by the monstrous pantomime ogre who was called Sunday in that story; and some have suggested, and in one sense not untruly, that he was meant for a blasphemous version of the Creator. But the point is that the whole story is a nightmare of things, not as they are, but as they seemed to the young half-pessimist of the '90s; and the ogre who appears brutal but is also cryptically benevolent is not so much God, in the sense of religion or irreligion, but rather Nature as it appears to the pantheist, whose pantheism is struggling out of pessimism. So far as the story had any sense in it, it was meant to begin with the picture of the world at its worst and to work towards the suggestion that the picture was not so black as it was already painted. I explained that the whole thing was thrown out in the nihilism of the '90s in the dedicatory lines which I wrote to my friend Bentley, who had been through the same period and problems; asking rhetorically: "Who shall understand but you?" In reply to which a book-reviewer very sensibly remarked that if nobody understood the book except Mr. Bentley, it seemed unreasonable to ask other people to read it.

But I speak of it here because, though it came at the beginning of the story, it was destined to take on another meaning before the end of it. Without that distant sequel, the memory may appear as meaningless as the book; but for the moment I can only leave on record here the two facts to which I managed somehow and in some sense to testify. First, I was trying vaguely to found a new optimism, not on the maximum but the minimum of good. I did not so much mind the pessimist who complained that there was so little good. But I was furious, even to slaying, with the pessimist who asked what was the good of good. And second, even in the earliest days and even for the worst reasons, I already knew too much to pretend to get rid of evil. I introduced at the end one figure who really does, with a full understanding, deny and defy the good. Long afterwards Father Ronald Knox told me, in his whimsical manner, that he was sure that the rest of the book would be used to prove that I was a Pantheist and a Pagan, and that the Higher Critics of the future would easily show that the episode of the Accuser was an interpolation by priests.

This was not the case; in fact it was quite the other way. At this time I should have been quite as annoyed as any-body else for miles round, if I had found a priest interfering with my affairs or interpolating things in my manuscript. I put that statement into that story, testifying to the extreme evil (which is merely the unpardonable sin of not wishing to be pardoned), not because I had learned it from any of the million priests whom I had never met, but because I had learned it from myself. I was already quite certain that I could if I chose cut myself off from the whole life of the universe. My wife, when asked who converted her to Catholicism, always answers, "the Devil".

But all that was so long afterwards, that it has no relation to the groping and guesswork philosophy of the story in question. I would much rather quote a tribute from a totally different type of man, who was nevertheless one of the very few men who, for some reason or other, have ever made head or tail of this unfortunate romance of my youth. He was a distinguished psychoanalyst, of the most modern and scientific sort. He was not a priest; far from it; we might say, like the Frenchman asked if he had lunched on the boat, "au contraire". He did not believe in the Devil; God forbid, if there was any God to forbid. But he was a very keen and eager student of his own subject; and he made my hair stand on end by saying that he had found my very juvenile story useful as a corrective among his morbid patients; especially the process by which each of the diabolical anarchs turns out to be a good citizen in dis¬guise. "I know a number of men who nearly went mad," he said quite gravely, "but were saved because they had really understood The Man Who Was Thursday." He must have been rather generously exaggerative; he may have been mad himself, of course; but then so was I. But I confess it flatters me to think that, in this my period of lunacy, I may have been a little useful to other lunatics.
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Re: Who or What is Sunday?

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I'm so busy, but getting interested enough to want to read this book. My compliments to the DL.
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Re: Who or What is Sunday?

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stahrwe wrote:A bit of a clarification, God rested on the 7th day which is Saturday not Sunday. The Jews and some Christian denominations still observe Saturday as the Sabbath. It is also true that many Christians refer to Sunday as the Sabbath and observe it as a day of rest.
I wrote that the Sabbath was on a Sunday because of something Syme said. When Syme is introduced to the other delegates for the first time he says, " The truth is I am a Sabbatarian. I have been specially sent here to see that you show a due observance of Sunday". This statement produces fear in the other delegates and Syme is offered a seat at the meeting. Gregory hears this dialogue and Chesterton describes it as a dangerous dialogue to Gregory.This would suggest to me that Gregory starts to see Syme as a dangerous obstacle.

Why would Syme say that he is there to show due observance of Sunday? No day of the week is specified when this meeting is taking place. Syme has not met the man Sunday at this point, he only knows what Gregory has told him. I can't help but think that Sunday represents some type of philosophy. Something important to Syme that he wants to protect.

Sunday says," I am the Sabbath, I am the peace of God". I can't help but think that the meaning of the Sabbath, the day of rest, or more importantly maybe, the day of freedom the Sabbath represents is what Syme finds valuable. Syme's comment that he is a Sabbatarian and Sunday's comment that he is the Sabbath is somehow connected.
stahrwe wrote:What reason do we have to believe what Sunday says?
Interesting question. I believe that Sunday may represent a philosophy. I can choose to believe in that philosophy or I can choose to disregard it. Since I do not know what the philosophy of Sunday is, I have no reason to believe him, I can't answer this question right now.
Ptimb wrote:The only thing they can compare him to is the universe. The paticular universe they are inhabiting is an absurd dream. With each twist in the plot the world seems more absurd until finaly Sunday reveals himself as the man in the dark room. I think what they go through is a kind of baptisim into the absurd. When Sunday asks "Can ye drink of the cup I drink of?" It is an allusion to Jesus's question to his disciples "Can ye drink of the cup I drink of? And be baptized with the baptism I am to be baptized with?"
Although I do think that the universe is a theme in the novel, I think it is in the context of the behavior of the people inhabiting the universe and not the universe as a whole. The quote, "Can ye drink of the cup I drink of"? is an important one, and I agree that it is connected to the same quote made by Jesus. What Sunday is saying here is, "Can you behave how I behave? Can you believe in what I believe? Can you behave and believe differently?" Although Chesterton used this quote, I don't think he is asking his delegates, or disciples, to choose, or to be baptized. Baptism insinuates a religion. Jesus never asked his disciples to change their religion, only their attitudes and behavior and beliefs. I agree with you that the nightmare is a bit absurd, but the meaning of it may not be.
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Re: Who or What is Sunday?

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I suggest God in this book is a God of mercy and free will. He allows man to do as he will, but feels sorrow for the pain man causes himself and others. In this scenario, Gregory is man who cannot understand how God can do anything and yet doesn't stop anything bad from happening. How can God be a caring God, and allow so much pain? So Gregory hates God and wants to deny his existence and his hand in the universe. Gregory is saying he wants to be entirely free of all yokes put upon him, and that the only response to the world as it is is to refuse all meaning.

Meanwhile, Sunday is the Sabbath, a day of peace and reflection. Sunday is the acceptance of man and of all his sins. By not stopping those that do evil, God receives some of the blame for his actions. As well he must feel a terrible rage at how humanity squanders itself and his gifts. So Sunday is a day to mourn the suffering of man, to bear the burden of his pain, but also to accept it as how it must be and find peace where one can.

At one point Monday says "I can forgive God His anger... but I cannot forgive Him His peace". I think this shows the difficulty in accepting God may ever be at peace when the world is so messed up. And so that resentment falls to Sunday.

When Thursday asks Sunday if he has suffered, Sunday replies with that quote "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?". I think Sunday is saying while one can drink of his cup, they cant know his burden, which I think is what Jesus is saying in that passage as well. Jesus responds to those that want to sit beside him by telling them they don't know what they are asking. He grants them to drink and symbolically accept blessing, but he does not grant them to sit beside him. The suffering of Jesus was too great for anyone else but the son of God to bear. Similarly, I think Sunday is saying his suffering has been so vast that no one could handle it... Though they could drink of his cup, they cannot bear what he bears.
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