The Red Thread

Forty-odd years ago, I was reading for an examination paper on that all-purpose man of German letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Nothing unusual in that, other than the fact that I was supposed to be studying English, not German language and literature. But, as I've explained before, we had to choose a special paper from a long and rather eccentric list of options and, as it happened, one of the options was "Goethe". So, as I had studied Faust Part 1 as a set book at German A-Level and had grown a little bored with my monolingual diet, it seemed like it might be fun. In fact, only one student made that particular choice that year, and the exam paper in finals had to be compiled and printed for that single candidate, me. I also had to be "farmed out" for this paper, as my own college lacked anyone suitably qualified (or perhaps willing) to tutor me. In one of those intriguing but probably meaningless coincidences, the chosen tutor was Kenneth Segar of St. Edmund Hall who, I discovered a couple of years ago, now owns a property in Sauve, France, where he has become a good friend of one of my home-town "elective family", a musician who settled there some years ago [1].

Anyway, one of the works I studied with Dr. Segar was the novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften, traditionally translated as Elective Affinities, a wonderful yet baffling title, which refers to an old chemical theory that particular substances are driven to combine with certain other substances, as if they were "naturally" electing (choosing) to do so. One of the passages that struck me at the time was this, where Goethe reaches for an image to convey the family resemblance between the entries in one of the character's diary:

"We have heard about one particular custom of the British Navy. All the rope used by the Royal Fleet, from the thickest to the thinnest, is twined in such a way that a red thread runs through all of them; it is impossible to remove the thread without undoing the rope, and that means that even the smallest piece of rope can be identified as property of the Crown".

The idea of a "red thread" (ein roter Faden) as a kind of thematic connection running through something subsequently became a figure of speech, especially but not only in German, eventually deadening into one of those cliches, beloved of the pompous, that gesture toward quotation – expressions such as "grew like Topsy" or "like a curate's egg" – without requiring any awareness of their actual source.

However, in recent times I have noticed something odd. Obviously, most people have not read Elective Affinities, and so will only have at best a second-hand appreciation of the "red thread" expression. Unless, of course, they have been in the Royal Navy or for some other reason are aware of the old so-called rogue's yarn anti-theft device. As a consequence, most people will have read, heard, and used the expression with zero appreciation of its original referent. So it seems that attributional vacuum has been filled by the assumption that the "red thread" refers to Ariadne's thread, the one that guided Theseus out of the Labyrinth after slaying the Minotaur. Which, as far as I'm aware, was never actually described as "red".

But it seems the redness of Ariadne's thread has firmly established itself in the public mind. For example, recently two books on the subject of mazes were reviewed together in the TLS (Forking Paths, by Peter Thonemann, August 24 & 31, 2018). One book is actually called Red Thread, and the other, more graphical book, Follow This Thread, has a single red line running through the entire book "twisting and turning into impressionistic single-line images of mazes, Minoan bull-leapers and ... the horse from Picasso's 'Guernica'". The reviewer is quite caustic about the way "both authors have been led disastrously astray by the imp on their shoulder whispering why not structure the book itself like a labyrinth?", but at no point questions whether Ariadne's original thread was actually red. Which I found both annoying and intriguing.

I've since done my best to check the sources for the "Ariadne's thread" thing (or Stoff, as the comparative literature people like to call a thing). I'm no classicist, but so far I've checked out Catullus 64, Plutarch's Life of Theseus, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Diodorus Siculus, the Fabulae of Hyginius, and found no mention of the colour of the thread. Its thinness and fragility, yes; its redness, no. So, unless someone better informed can tell me otherwise, I think this is a case of the creation of a genuine factoid, a false or unreliable statement repeated so often that it has come to be regarded as true.

1. Sauve seems an intriguing place, having become something of a 21st century "artists' colony". Among other notable residents the American cartoonist Robert Crumb lives there, creator of Mr. Natural, the "Keep on Truckin'" meme, and numerous other figures familiar to the counter-culturally inclined of the late 1960s. One of these days I must pay it a visit.