Bread and Circuses Trivia Quiz

Answer: Roman Empire

"...For the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions - everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses." -Satire X

Decimus Junius Juvenalis published his "Satires" around the year 100 A.D. Very little is known about Juvenal's personal life, but by his works alone, he ranks among the great satirists of Rome, along with Horace. When he translated the "Satires", John Dryden wrote that "Horace meant to make his reader laugh, [but] Juvenal always intends to move your indignation." Many of Juvenal's targets cut to the jugular of Roman society: moral lassitude, prostitution, aristocracy, inequality, anti-intellectualism, and the institution of marriage. The basic argument of Satire X is that every ambition - money, pleasure, beauty, and health - has a corrupting influence, a theme we'll see throughout this quiz.

Several other common phrases come from Juvenal as well: "rare bird," referring to a good wife, and "Who watches the watchmen?" Oddly, footwear brand Asics is an abbreviation for "Anima Sana In Corpore Sano" ("healthy mind in a healthy body"), a Juvenal phrase.

Answer: The keys of a piano

"...In order to prove to himself - as though that were so necessary - that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar."

A piano key has no free will, no variability, no unpredictability. On the other hand, not only is man liberated in this way, he feels compelled to REMIND himself that he is liberated. In other words, if you give men all the bread, or cakes, and circuses he could want, he would subvert, disrespect, or destroy them, simply to prove that he has free will and whimsy ("his fatal fantastic element," in Dostoevsky's phrase). In a sense, then, Dostoevsky is arguing that the "bread and circuses" that stimulate us cannot be literally just that; there must be an element of frivolity, of "absurdity," of danger or destruction. A tightrope walk is not very interesting if the tightrope-walker is in a harness. The Underground Man describes the whole of art this way: "the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!"

Among Dostoevsky's works, the Underground Man wasn't alone in his observation: Dostoevsky's books are laden with drunkards and gambling addicts. His novella "The Gambler" features a series of characters who become addicted to casinos in Germany, and while the hero of that story is perfectly capable of reasoning out the perils of his addiction, he's hopeless to control himself. Of course, the irony is not lost on the reader: Dostoevsky himself was hopelessly addicted to gambling throughout the 1860s.

Answer: The Cocktail Party

Based on the ancient Greek tragedy Alcestis, "The Cocktail Party" is a written in blank verse. It centers around a recently separated couple. Rather than cancel the titular party, the character Edward hosts anyway to keep up appearances. A few revelations later, we learn that several of his guests are angels, sent to manipulate the couple back together. The play is ultimately a morality play that contrasts the path of "the hearth," the comfortable obliviousness entered into with a partner, and the path of "the saint." Eliot's description of "the hearth" retreads his recurring concerns of distraction, superficiality, and cooled passions:

"Everyone's alone - or so it seems to me.
They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;
They make faces, and think they understand each other..."

While Eliot's plays were far less successful than his poems, "The Cocktail Party" was overall probably the biggest success, running for 400 performances on Broadway and being well-received by critics.

"The Threepenny Opera" is a play set to music by Bertolt Brecht, first performed in 1928. "The Glass Menagerie" was written in 1944 by Tennessee Williams. "Picnic" by William Inge debuted in 1953.

Answer: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald struggled to make money on his much better-known novels like "The Great Gatsby" during his lifetime. He was extremely well-paid as a short story writer, and many critics unfairly dismiss them hack jobs. The theme "Gatsby" expounds on reappears again and again in Fitzgerald's stories, not just because it parallels Fitzgerald's hard-drinking, high-society life, but because he thought it defined "the Jazz Age" as a whole.

"Babylon Revisited," named for the ancient city of unparalleled decadence and depravity, follows the expatriate Charlie Wales on the occasion of his return to America. Charlie and his wife, Helen, were party maniacs in Paris in the 20s. They partied too well. In a few short years they burned through Charlie's entire fortune and destroyed their health, resulting in Helen's death from pneumonia. Charlie spends the next several years reestablishing his finances and sobering up. When he returns home, he tries to regain custody of his daughter, but finds that his reputation is damaged beyond repair, destroying any chance he has of truly reforming.

"Winter Dreams" is another tragic love story. Dexter Green, a man from humble roots in Minnesota, gets a job caddying at an exclusive country club. He falls in love with the daughter of one of the members, Judy Jones. The club's extravagance draws him in, and he becomes dedicated to the pursuit of this lavishness. However, Judy's kind of a floozy; this drives Dexter away, but not indefinitely. Years later, Dexter has attained the wealth he sought, but he still pines for Judy. They reconnect in New York City. It's a Daisy and Gatsby situation, where Dexter repeatedly sacrifices while Judy flees from any commitment. The story ends with Dexter overhearing that Judy has settled down, and her beauty has faded. Dexter realizes he's spent his life chasing "winter dreams" of excessive luxury and fleeting beauty.

Answer: Vapid entertainment

"Prolefeed" only appears in the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-four, called "The Principles of Newspeak." According to Orwell, many Newspeak words mean "almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean." For example, the names for the Ministries (Minipax, Miniluv, Minitrue and Miniplenty) indicate the opposite of their real function: respectively, war-mongering, fear-mongering, propaganda, and rationing. Other words "displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of Oceanic society." "Prolefeed" is one of these, meaning "rubbishy entertainment and spurious news." The point of Newspeak is to maintain covert ideological control over how people speak and write, and to create barriers for the free exchange of information. Nobody in the year 1984 speaks in Newspeak; writing a whole newspaper article in Newspeak "could only be carried out by a specialist." However, as the Newspeak Dictionary is constantly revised, more and more words are deleted from the language, and more and more Newspeak euphemisms become common parlance.

A few words about the incorrect answers: the major spirit quaffed in the book is not grain alcohol but rather the harsh, oily Victory Gin. In Oceania, "Nothing is cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin." The lottery is also a popular pastime, "the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive." We learn that the big Lottery winners are all fictitious, and the only prizes actually awarded are pittances. Gladiatorial games don't feature in Nineteen Eighty-four; there is a lot of mention of the "boring, exhausting games" that occupy citizens, but notably little mention of athleticism.

Answer: The ritual of carousel

Fittingly, these are all examples of the many amusements that make the world of "Brave New World" a disturbingly efficient, happy, yet empty society. The name "feelie" is obviously related to the terms "movie" and "talkie." Feelies are something like a halfway point between films and holograms. Using smell, touch, and motion to enhance the experience, they resemble a "4D" movie. Huxley personally campaigned against the addition of sound to film, believing it reduced its emotional complexity while cheaply enlarging the magnitude of simple emotions, hence why the feelies of BNW all involved titillation or pornography.

Orgy-porgy (a play on the nursery rhyme "Georgie Porgie") is a pseudo-religious mass sex ritual where the participants imbibe the euphoric drug soma, recite chants celebrating Henry Ford, and "give" one another to "everyone else", inducing an ecstatic feeling of togetherness. Finally, the "centrifugal bumble-puppy" is a playground game where kids stand around a chrome pole, throw a ball in at the top, and try to guess what hole it will shoot out of. It's extremely similar to a real-life playground toy called a funnel ball.

Postman's argument was that the bread and circuses of "Brave New World" better reflect the reality of our society. "Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. [...] As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.' In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure." Of course, the Party in Nineteen Eighty-four used pleasure as well as pain as a mechanism of control; Postman is only suggesting that the pain was overkill.

The "ritual of Carousel" is the elaborate, spectacular death-ritual that appears in "Logan's Run." Another hyper-efficient dystopian society, the novel features a world where anyone who reaches the age of 21 is killed. It would've been a perfect feature for this quiz; to my disappointment, "Carousel" was invented for the movie adaptation.

Answer: Lovely Ludwig Van

The societies of "Nineteen Eighty-Four", "Brave New World", and "A Clockwork Orange", three of the greatest dystopian novels, all keep their citizens content in different ways. As we said before, Huxley's future is much less brutal than Orwell's, in the sense that people are given an excess of pleasures. Orwell, meanwhile, imagines the destitute people of Oceania entertained with propaganda and lotteries that give them false hope.

Burgess's vision is something else again: a future in which the impulses of young men are completely misdirected, apparently due to the incompetence of the law. Deliquency has become the dominant pastime among teenagers. The milk bars are a perfect symbol for this: a substance for nourishing children, laced with freely served hard drugs. The "droogs" (Alex and his gang) display a strange mix of immaturity and creative maliciousness. On just the first night of the story, the droogs get high, rob a store, steal a car, beat several people, break into an elderly couple's house, beat the man, rape the woman, and destroy the draft of the man's novel.

An extra wrinkle is that Alex seems to be quite intelligent and at times even sensitive. His love of Beethoven is genuine; it somehow seems more genuine than anything else about him. I believe Burgess's implication was that no young man is completely savage by nature; or alternatively, that any young man could be made this savage. "A Clockwork Orange" doesn't point the finger at Alex as much as it does the society which has made him a monster, or failed to prevent him becoming one.

When Alex is eventually arrested, he's subjected to the "Ludovico technique", a "therapy" which uses conditioning to make Alex sick at the thought of violence. It also renders him incapable of enjoying Beethoven again. As careless as this over-correction seems, it does wear off in a short period; however, his passion for music never returns.

Answer: Barbie

In the story, there are huge hovels on Mars, an extremely impoverished planet where people live among tall junk-heaps. They placate themselves by using Can-D to reassociate into "layouts", playsets for their Perky Pat dolls. The women associate as Pat, and the men associate as the hunky Walt (Pat's Ken). A couple can then enact wild romantic fantasies at exotic destinations, right from the comfort of their squalor.

Several of the book's main characters make their money from the sale of trendy objects for the layouts - decor, appliances, and so on. Despite the mountains of post-consumer junk that surround them, there's still lots of advertising for new pieces for the layouts.

Obviously, the book is a critique of hyper-consumption, drug abuse, and the objectification of sex. Dick explained the satire in this way: "It was the Barbie-Doll craze which induced this story, needless to say. Barbie always seemed unnecessarily real to me. Years later I had a girl friend whose ambition was to be a Barbie-doll. I hope she made it."

(Quotation accessed at "The Days of Perky Pat", a page on PhilipKDick.com.)

Answer: A movie people keep watching until they die

The book has a meandering and convoluted structure - maybe not surprising given its insane length. Few have read it, and I am not among them. It takes place in "The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment", an ultra-consumerist future where basically everything can be sold as an advertisement. The film "Infinite Jest", created (perhaps through means not of this world) by James Incadenza, is so engrossing that it can barely be described. It apparently depicts the comforting image of a rather Freudian-sounding mother figure. People exposed to the movie become absorbed in it, detach from reality, until they become unbothered with caring for themselves.

"Infinite Jest" lies at the center of several major plot-lines. Incadenza's younger brother, Hal, is a high school tennis prodigy. He goes from a precocious student to someone incapable of passing a college interview, probably because of his exposure to the movie. Another plot line follows a group of Quebec separatists attempting to infiltrate a drug rehab center, where they think "Infinite Jest" is hidden. The center, of course, is a thematic mirror to the addictive effects of the film.

Wallace, who also wrote essays about movies and TV, was concerned with the pacifying, ultra-compelling, and downright addictive qualities of modern entertainment.

A website with endless content and a joker logo... hmm...

Answer: Panem

The Latin for "bread and circuses" is "panem et circenses". Panem is one of the districts that make up a heavily impoverished United States in "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins. Every year, each district submits two competitors as "tribute" to fight to the death in the Games. These games are televised for the enjoyment of the Capital, the extremely lavish, image-obsessed upper class. The Roman connection runs deep through the series. The Games themselves have an obvious gladiatorial spirit, not only in the killing but also the actual ruleset. Popular competitors can win unfair advantages from paid sponsors, while animals are inserted directly into the arena to make things unpredictable. Many of the characters' names, especially the upper class, are also Roman: Octavia, Cornelius, Brutus, Plutarch, Cinna, and Caesar all appear.

Hogwarts, I probably don't need to tell you, is the school in "Harry Potter". The Glade is the name of the maze in "The Maze Runner". Carvale is the walled city in "Six of Crows".