ReadySteadyBook

Notes on 'Everything Passes'

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Robin Durie) — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:31:35 GMT

Although I know of Josipovici, and of his work, I haven’t, before now, read him. Of course, I know that he has written on Blanchot, and Everything Passes immediately reminded me of The Instant of My Death. In that short work, Blanchot evokes an instant which functions as an ‘immobility’, an immobility that ‘arrests time’, that holds the passing of time ‘in abeyance’. In that short work, the instant which arrests time, the immobility which holds the passing of time in abeyance, is ‘the instant of my death’.

In Everything Passes, it seems to me that the passing of time is at least part of what is at stake. And again, like Blanchot, it seems as if, for Josipovici, the instant of death, of Felix’s death, in fact holds the passing of time in abeyance. The room, with its silence, its bare floorboards, its greyness, its window with the cracked pane, and with his face at that window – that room is the moment of death. It is a moment in which time, and its passing, is stilled. But it is a moment which does not pass. Felix does not pass on. Although the door opens, he does not pass through it, out of the room.

What seems most interesting to me about this ambiguity between time’s passing, and its halting, is the issue of a certain openness within the instant, or, on the contrary, the closure of the instant. The openness, or closure, of the instant is expressed in the figures of the door of the room, and of the window of the room, with its cracked pain. Time stops for Felix as he looks at, or out of, the window. The instant does not pass. He does not die. But, if he goes through the door, if the instant passes, then he dies - and time stops, for Felix. And so, at the heart of the instant is a paradox – time appears to stop whether it passes or not. Thus, the passing of time in the instant, time’s stopping, the openness or closure of the instant – all of these apparent ‘moments’ of time are called into question in the instant of death, or of death deferred, held in abeyance. The passing of time itself is called into question.

This may be an overly abstract rendering of Everything Passes. I certainly wouldn’t want to claim of such a reading that it is the only, or the most significant, interpretation. However, it strikes me as significant within the context of the question that Mark has posed, regarding the relation between the work of fiction as Literature, and the work of fiction as (English) Establishment Literary Fiction (see e.g. here).

I was very surprised in reading Everything Passes by just how explicitly antagonistic Josipovici is towards ELF. The line of demarcation that Josipovici draws is adumbrated in the characterisation that Felix gives of Rabelais. Print removes the particularity of the audience for a work, it universalises the reader. At the same time, it denies the author a certain particularity, the particularity that derives from a direct contact with his or her audience. Rabelais’ insight is that the new medium of fiction entails the solitude of the depersonalised writer and the solitude of anonymous reader.

The failure of ELF is, of course, the failure to embrace this solitude. ELF writing is determined by the projection of a virtual audience – conjured up by the publisher, the agent, the book-seller, the metropolitan reviewers, the book-clubs, or even the creative writing course teachers & fellow students. ELF writing is thus worked from within by a false consciousness, the false consciousness of a general virtual reader. But it is this projected general, virtual, reader who serves to determine, and thus close down, the text of the ELF writer in advance.

As opposed to this closure, the work of Literature remains irreducibly open. This openness is grounded in the passing of the work between the solitude of the depersonalised writer and the solitude of the anonymous reader. Literature is written for no-one, and in being written for no-one, it remains fundamentally open. But it is, precisely, this very openness which allows the work of Literature to pass. The ELF fiction is already closed, closed by its general virtual reader, and thus does not, and cannot, pass. It has no dimension of passing.

And yet, even when things appear to be as clear as this, Josipovici allows a paradox to undermine from within this clarity of perspective.

In the wake of the discussions of literature which occur at the heart of the work, and on which these comments are based, Sal, Felix’s 1st wife, says to him, in exasperation: “You should hear yourself some time.. You don’t hear yourself.” And then, slightly later: “You don’t listen to anything except your own voice.”

Here, then, is the paradox which works the solitude of the depersonalised writer from within. Cut off from their audience, they have nothing to listen to, except their own voice. And yet, when you have nothing to listen to, except your own voice, then you are left unable to hear yourself.

In order to be able to hear yourself speak, you have to listen to a voice other than your own, to the voice of another.

In order that the writer may hear the voice of the other, there must be an opening within the solitude of the writer, within the moment of writing, within which the voice of the other may resonate.

Who speaks to the solitary writer in this instant whose closure is held in abeyance? And, in speaking, who calls on the solitary writer to respond?

Britannica Latina: 2000 Years of British Latin

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Barry Baldwin) — Tue, 11 May 2010 11:09:29 GMT

Along with Peter Jones, whose Learn Ancient Greek and Learn Latin courses (subsequently published in book form) enthralled many Daily & Sunday Telegraph readers some years back, and whose Ancient and Modern column continues to adorn The Spectator, Mark Walker should be declared a national treasure.

Walker, as the Greeks and Romans would have styled him, is an opsimath, coming to Latin as an adult. Having mastered it, he has devised a course, Latin For Everyday Life, which he now offers to fellow late learners through the Buckinghamshire Adult Education programme, combining this in true classical style with expertise in guitar and mandolin, also on his didactic menu.

For the Latin course, Walker has produced two books: Annus Horribilis (the Queen's most famous excursion into ancient tongues) and Annus Mirabilis (which I equate with whatever year England wins The Ashes), respectively sub-titled Latin for Everyday Life and More Latin for Everyday Life. Their readers will be hoping for Still More Latin, Yet More Latin, and (as Mrs Thatcher famously wished) to go on and on.

Now, Walker gives us Britannica Latina: 2000 Years of British Latin, proclaiming via the dust-jacket blurb "It is time for British Latinists who reclaim their heritage." It is, indeed, when we contemplate ignoramus philistines in departments and ministries of education who dismiss Latin and Greek as 'dead' and ancient history as 'elitist' and/or 'irrelevant'.

This elegant 'libellus' (except for the miniscule Latin print - you need the Hubble Telescope) provides a well-chosen miscellany of texts, from Julius Caesar and Suetonius for introductory background, via British historians (Bede, Gildas, Nennius) scientists (the two Bacons - The Two Ronnies don't qualify, Harvey, Newton), Renaissance Goonery (George Ruggles' Ignoramus playlet), poets (Bourne, Buchanan, Landor, Swift), down to modern Anglo-Latin verse, including Walker's own skilful paean to his stamping-ground of Coombe Hill.

I could have done with more of this last category, for instance something from the cleverest of modern practitioners, A.D. Godley, James Joyce's recently discovered Balia, and so on. On his own evidence, P.G. Wodehouse's favourite pastime at Dulwich was writing Greek and Latin verse. A fellow (though not overlapping) Dulwichian, Raymond Chandler, credited the Classics for his initimable English prose. So did that other lapidary stylist, Muriel Spark. I spent three years in the Classical Sixth doing verse composition in both languages. It is the best way to appreciating the originals' metrical dexterity, also the reason I can still quote chunks of English poetry by heart.

A lavish amount of Fortean material includes King Arthur's astonishing fightng feats and no less remarkable bodily preservation; Merlin the Magician; St Alban's martyrdom; the Loch Ness Monster's début; a mediaeval vampire; weird lunar phenomena. Plus, a dash of soft porn with Lady Godiva's bare-backing, as told by Roger of Wendover - surely here to be re-Christened Bendover.

The nine sections comport valuable biographica and historical background, tersely informative grammatical notes, bibliographical tips, nicely spiiced with humour. Tactfully tucked away at the end are English cribs for those who like Peter Cook don't have the Latin for the judging.

Verdict: Optimus hic liber est; necnon est optimus auctor. Mark's Mark, X out of X.

The Vanguard of Anti-Imperialism

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Richard Seymour) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 08:12:46 GMT

Richard Seymour (Lenin's Tomb) reviews Gerald Horne's The End of Empires: African Americans and India (Temple University Press, 2008)...

Gerald Horne is an historian who has been revealing neglected aspects of African American history for several decades, particularly those relating to class struggle, communism, and what W E B Du Bois referred to as the global ‘colour line’.

In The Deepest South, he disclosed the efforts by Deep South slavers to form a pact with Brazil and build a southern empire that would protect white supremacy. At the same time, he revealed, Lincoln and the northern establishment looked toward schemes that would result in the removal of former slaves from the United States, perhaps to indentured plantations in the British Empire. Again, in The White Pacific, he followed the trail of former slave-owners as they set out across the Pacific, to Australasia and the Pacific Islands, where they engaged in a form of slavery known as ‘blackbirding’. In Cold War in a Hot Zone, he demonstrated the links between African American struggles during the Cold War and militancy in the Caribbean as the British empire was replaced by American dominance. And in Black and Red, he anatomised the African American response to the Cold War, noting that “US Blacks have been among the vanguard of anti-imperialism”.

In this, his penultimate volume, African American anti-imperialism is at the fore again, as Horne assesses the relationship between the Indian struggle for independence from the British empire and the African American struggle against Jim Crow. It is reasonably well known that Martin Luther King was influenced by Gandhi’s doctrine of satyagraha (non-violent resistance), and perhaps less so that Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, Pauli Murray and others also drew on Gandhi’s doctrines. Nehru’s speech at the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement of Third World states paid moving tribute to the struggle of Africans, and particularly of African Americans, whose liberation he pledged India would support. A more recondite affinity drawn out by Horne is the influence of the Ahmadiyya movement of Indian Muslims on African Americans in the early 20th Century – an influence that would later be felt through the Nation of Islam.

Horne traces these connections, from prehistorical origins to the twentieth century, with the overwhelming focus on the decades leading up to Indian independence and the culmination of the civil rights struggle. The shared historical destinies of black America and India arguably began with the American revolution, when some revolutionaries looked to India as a potential anti-colonial ally. Their fate was subsequently bound together through the production of cotton and the circulation of slaves between south Asia, Africa and the United States. Opposing antebellum slavery in the United States, abolitionists in England deplored the country’s manufacture of cloths from slave-produced cotton when it might just as well have been obtained using free labour from the banks of the Indus, at less cost. The Indian rebellion of 1857 carried grave race warnings for the United States. For some, it showed the madness of trying to permanently rule over non-white people. Andrew Carnegie, visiting Lucknow in 1879, fretted that “these bronzed figures which surrounded us by millions” may once again “in some mad moment catch the fever of revolt”. It showed what a “dangerous game” it was for the US to try to conquer neighbouring islands populated by black majorities. Carnegie would go on to become a generous benefactor of the Anti-Imperialist League when it was founded in opposition to the Spanish-American war of 1898. Similarly, the Civil War of 1861-65 which was to end in the abolition of slavery (quite against the original intentions of the North) was closely determined by the availability of cotton from India, not least because it dissuaded English capitalists from throwing their weight behind the Confederacy to defend their cotton access.

Interwoven destiny

African American activists, cognisant of such an interwoven destiny, sympathised with the plight of Asia. Booker T Washington and Jawaharlal Nehru both sympathised with Japan in its 1905 war with Russia, hoping that victory for the former would boost Asian chances of independence from would-be racial oppressors. African American journals considered that a victory for the Tsarist empire would be a “triumph for color prejudice”. The grounds for direct solidarity with Indians were enhanced by the treatment of Indian labourers who migrated to the United States and were treated by racist politicians, including the presidential contender William Jennings Bryan, as a great “peril” to the American way of life. As a result of this oppression, Indian labourers tend to live among and associate with African Americans. But the first sign of a direct political connection between India and black America was the emergence in 1889 of the Ahmadiyya movement by Mirza Ghulam Ahmed. Early on, the movement despatched a mission to the United States, just as African American Christian missionaries had – with less success – visited the Indian subcontinent to find converts. The movement hinted at a new racial synthesis that was also increasingly emerging in the thoughts of Islamic modernists such as Jamal-al-din al-Afghani: a pan-Islamic alliance that would unite Indian anti-colonialism with Pan-Africanism.

Marcus Garvey had direct links with the Ahmadiyya movement, which would go on to win up to 10,000 African American converts by 1940. Certainly, the critique of Christianity as a primary motive force in racial oppression had a profound influence on Garvey’s movement, though Garvey himself remained a Christian. The movement’s influence was not uncomplicatedly positive, for its leadership forbade revolt against London, and was seen by many in India as a British tool – and there is some evidence for the idea that Britain, as part of its traditional divide-and-rule strategy, promoted the Ahmadiyya movement among Indian Muslims. Nonetheless, Islam gripped the imagination of a minority of African Americans in part because it added to the political struggle a spiritual dimension, a war against Christian ideas, which were seen as the ideas of the slave masters. African Americans who were forming the most exploited layer of the working classes, and experiencing racism not just from their bosses but from white workers as well, were offered the option of a spiritual alliance with an East that, Ahmad said, had never seen the kinds of racial evils that were practised in America because “Islam knows nothing of segregation and discrimination”.

Revolution and anti-colonialism

However, more militant and leftist forms of international solidarity arose through the early decades of the twentieth century. Ideological sympathies were given some expression in, for example, the comradeship between the Indian socialist intellectual L L Rai and W E B Du Bois, himself a member of the National Council of Friends of Freedom for India. And as migration from south Asia to the United States increased in the 1910s, Indian migrants expressed astonishment at the severity of white supremacy as practised in the United States, particularly the treatment of African Americans. Rai himself, comparing India and the United States, considered the forms of oppression in both countries to be remarkably similar, arguing that America was “doubly caste-ridden”. The combined experience of racial oppression in the United States and British colonialism led to the formation of the California-based movement, Ghadar. It was a revolutionary movement for Indian independence which proclaimed socialism as its ideology and supported military actions against the British, which the latter invariably described as ‘terrorism’. It was influenced in part by the anti-racist leftism of the International Workers of the World, and among its founders was the anarchist Indian intellectual Har Dayal. The organisation was implicated early on in its existence in an alleged Kaiser-funded plot to time an Indian rebellion against British rule with Germany’s campaign in Europe. That such allegations touched on American anxieties about its own developing imperial role was indicated by Secretary of State Robert Lansing’s complaint that German Americans and British Indians intent on stirring revolt in India had arrived in the Philippines, the base of US colonialism in the region.

The Ghadar case aroused sympathy among African American journals, such as the NAACP’s The Crisis and A Philip Randolph’s The Messenger, especially as the suspects were convicted and deported to their fate at the hands of the British authorities. The Messenger also noted, with approval, the refusal of West Indians called on by the British to help quell growing Indian revolt, to raise arms against “the Hindu people in their struggle for freedom”, and referred to Haiti as “America’s India”. India and its emerging generation of Marxist intellectuals exerted a profound influence on African American militants such as Alain Locke. And while Tokyo had once been the lodestar of resistance to white world supremacy, the emergence of an anti-imperialist, socialist Russia came to unite south Asians and African Americans in opposition to racial oppression of all kinds.

The new anti-imperialist pole of opinion was given expression at the 1927 International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism. Nehru, in attendance, was impressed by the presence of both black and white Americans at the congress. The NAACP, surveying the new world situation created by the Russian revolution and the growing anticolonial revolts, exulted that the African American struggle now had two major allies in Russia and India. An African-American publication known as The Crusader, allied with the nascent communist movement, foresaw an “Afro-Asiatic League” which would oversee a coordinated response to imperialism. The forces of white domination could win, the publication argued, when rebellions broke out separately. But with “coordination and simultaneity of revolution”, “not all the might of Europe or the League of Damnations will be able to stop the onslaught for Freedom”. It urged African Americans to show solidarity with the Indians, where it saw soviets developing in opposition to an increasingly desperate imperial power. The same sense of the importance of global solidarity had led to the formation of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, in Chicago in 1920, with Indian delegates in attendance.

It was not just the left that was inspired by the new era of militancy. Garvey’s pan-Africanism drew on the example of Ghadar and its anti-sectarian approach to resisting white domination. “If it is possible for Hindus and Mohammedans to come together in India,” he averred, “it is possible for Negros to come together everywhere”. In general, the Garveyites focused considerably more attention on the fate of the British Empire and its consequences for African Americans, than most others. They also expressed profound admiration for Gandhi whom they, in the greatest compliment they could offer, compared to Garvey himself.

However, it was Du Bois and the NAACP that led the campaign to forge solidarity between African Americans and India. These relations were sometimes strained by the red-baiting of prominent members such as the Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes, who supported Indian independence but was deeply hostile to all communist influence in a way that was not true of the mainstream Indian anti-colonial movement. Nonetheless, the inspiration was reciprocated. Reading Du Bois’ work from London, the Indian activist A K Das wrote to ask why it was not possible to unite “what is called the coloured races”. A R Malik, writing from Punjab, saw Du Bois’ struggle to liberate “the Negroes from the bondage aristocrats and capitalists” as analogous to India’s struggle, declaring that Indians “naturally view the struggle of the Negros with great sympathy”. The NAACP provided information for Indians seeking to rebut myths of their racial inferiority, and Du Bois’ journal, The Crisis, became a sought after source of polemical nourishment in Punjab and elsewhere. Throughout the 1930s, a growing number of African Americans travelled to India to study its difficulties and draw lessons from its intricate race and caste order, and found an audience interested in the struggles of African Americans. And when India was traduced by the American writer Katherine Mayo, in a number of popular books rationalising British colonialism, Indian writers responded by pointing out the barbarism of the American racial order. America, they noted, claimed the right to independence from Britain despite maintaining a gruelling system of oppression – why should India, which did not have this flaw, be denied the same right?

A free and independent nation “of dark people”...

The perspective enjoining the unity of ‘coloured’ peoples faced a particular challenge during World War II. The African American left had largely been critical of Japan in the years prior to 1941, while Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist movement extolled a pro-Tokyo line, noting the implications of Japan’s rise for European control of China and India. Yet, much of the left, including Langston Hughes who had criticised Japan’s policies in China, sympathised with Japan’s unique status as a free and independent nation “of dark people”. Similarly, Indian journals such as The People and The Independent had covered Japan sympathetically, as part of the broader resistance to white world supremacy.

As Horne has previously covered in his Race War!, London and Washington were deeply concerned to counter this sympathy, and particularly the charge that a ‘war for democracy’ was hypocritical when India was not allowed to be free. Powerful voices in both capitals thought the best way to do this was to make some concessions to African Americans and to consider independence for India, but they were ranged against entrenched lobbies. At the very least, though, statesmen had to attenuate the force of any public sermons on behalf of white supremacy. Sensing the possibilities opened up by the war, African American leaders such as Walter White of the NAACP lobbied for Indian independence. White met personally with Lord Halifax to request a commission be set up for the purposes of determining the future of India, a proposal that did not amuse Halifax. He also urged the United States to support independence for India, noting that racial inequality was driving sympathy for Japanese propaganda and would potentially lead to Japan acquiring the Indian subcontinent. White also gave London headaches with his visit to India, and his expressed desire to see Nehru and Gandhi, at a time when Britain was jailing the Indian leadership. Throughout the war, African Americans and Indians pressed their demands in growing coordination. Thousands of African Americans applauded Paul Robeson and Kumar Goshal in the Manhattan Center in 1942 when they demanded a free India as the best condition for defending India against Japan. Goshal went on to write regularly for the Negro Quarterly, a journal for which Ralph Ellison was the managing editor, advising readers in the indissoluble link between the fate of African Americans and Indians, especially as the former defended the latter from Japanese conquest.

The US was sometimes capable of responding pragmatically to this situation, as when military top brass noticed that African American soldiers fighting in India demonstrated an ability to relate to Indian civilians that surpassed that of white soldiers, and were thus an asset – despite the generally racist perception of black soldiers as incompetent, lazy, and so on. Nonetheless, with a segregated army and a war in the name of a ‘freedom’ most African Americans did not receive, such understandings were of limited use. The situation of both India and African Americans would have to change if the dominant position of the US was to be secured. According to Horne, whatever the reality of Japanese policy, the perception that it was waging a ‘race war’ against the white world made conditions more favourable for Indian independence and improvements for African Americans.

From race war to Cold War

While the Cold War that followed WWII proved unfavourable for the African American Left, the NAACP emerged the strongest African American organisation in the US. The NAACP has often been belaboured for aligning with Cold War ideology, its leadership arguing that race reform was an integral part of the struggle against communism. Some historians, such as Penny Von Eschen, have argued that the NAACP’s decision shut down possibilities for raising more radical conceptions of social and economic justice that would later come to the fore, and limited the scope for international anticolonial solidarity. Manning Marable argued that the NAACP effectively acted as the “left-wing of McCarthyism” in the early Cold War period.

Horne has been known to share this broad line of argument, and here he acknowledges the limits placed on the NAACP by Cold War ideology, lamenting the decreasing internationalism in the African American movement at just the time that the Indian anti-colonial movement was denouncing apartheid, launching the Bandung Conference to give Africa and Asia a global voice, and founding the Non-Aligned Movement, to escape the restrictive embrace of anticommunism. The anticommunist leadership not only refused to show solidarity with those being put on trial by the state for communist activity, which included many African Americans. Its stance also meant that it had to depart from any idea of an independent foreign policy which would challenge the very global order that Washington was seeking to conserve and reform in its own image. The leadership rarely deigned to express a view that differed from established Washington opinion, and Walter White ended up effectively counselling President Truman on India, steering the NAACP toward a position of trying to influence India in favour of anticommunism. The old internationalism reached a nadir when W E B Du Bois was expelled from the NAACP for attempting to persuade an Indian delegation to the UN to raise the plight of African Americans before the body’s general assembly, a move that would have reflected poorly on Washington’s new stance as a global protector of human rights.

Still, the relationship to India did not vanish overnight. In the year preceding Indian independence, the NAACP was capable of a vigorous campaign on India. Outside the NAACP, African American missionaries to India tried to use their experiences to help overcome the communal divisions that ripped through the subcontinent at a cost of millions of lives as the British opted to ‘divide and quit’. The African American left was profoundly critical of the British division of India, and Congress militants themselves pointed to the evil of racial hierarchy in the US to warn against any attempt to exclude or subordinate Muslims in an independent India. Some worked through YMCAs to develop contacts with Indian militants. Bayard Rustin made contact with local capitalists the better to forge allies among India’s newly independent ruling class.

And there was still a profound awareness of the fact that thousands of Indians lived in the US and suffered racial oppression alongside African Americans. But even here, potential problems arose. A minority of Indian residents of the US chose to argue that their legal rights should be respected on the grounds that they were properly categorised as Aryans, which raised the question of whether anti-racist organisations should campaign for people of South Asian origin to be respect as ‘white’. The major barrier to sustained solidarity, though, was the atmosphere of anticommunism, a political perspective that did not bode well for relations with a country that had pioneered non-alignment, and which had two mass, influential communist parties. The fear of being charged with being communist sympathisers drove many internationally oriented African Americans away from even discussing global affairs. The era of internationalism would return with the next upsurge of the civil rights struggle, but it would come with the breakdown of the liberal Cold War consensus.

The fact that the African American struggle for liberation was compromised in the way that it was by Cold War repression does not mean that it was no longer dependent on global struggles. The very fact that millions of newly free Indians (and Asians of all backgrounds, and Africans) were open to the idea of a systemic alternative to Washington-dominated capitalism was, as Horne’s narrative makes clear, one of the main reasons that the destruction of Jim Crow became a political goal of the liberal wing of US power. America’s global standing became far more important to its long-term advantage than the preservation of its peculiar institution of white supremacy.

In keeping with his long-standing efforts to revive the forgotten international contours of African American history, Horne has done an enormous service in illuminating the anti-imperialism at the heart of black America’s struggle. He has also, in the course of this, brought to light a myriad of class, gender, national and caste issues that intersected with this story. There are times when one would wish for a more critical appraisal of the role of the USSR, whose conduct gave much succour to the anticommunists Horne berates, and whose international stance was often profoundly conservative – its long support for French colonialism in Algeria and Zionism in Palestine, for instance, suggests that it could hardly be depended on as an ally of the victims of white supremacy. At other times in the narrative, it is more evident that African Americans and Indians had a shared destiny, than that substantial political forces among either were aware of this. And it would have been useful to have an engagement with critics, such as Manfred Berg, who have mounted a defence of the NAACP’s position in the Cold War period. Nevertheless, these are minor criticisms. Horne has written another powerful ‘history from below’, as it were, in which the main agents of liberation are the oppressed themselves. Their stories, and their ideas, are so infrequently told that one can only welcome the fact that such a gifted historian as Horne has chosen to relate them.

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Robin Durie) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:50:42 GMT

Much post-modernist “meta-fiction” can seem, once you get to grips with the stylistic challenge to the assumptions about, and investments in, narrative with which you have been brought up, to be a bit of a one-trick pony; and, as consequence, that further experimentation is liable to succumb to a law of diminishing returns. Nevertheless, the best exponents of this, as of any other, genre are able to take the basic premises and concerns, and use them to fashion fictions which transcend the limitations of the genre – limitations as enabling constraints.

Meta-fiction lends itself particularly well to the culture of conspiracy, and it’s probably no surprise to have seen these two cultural phenomena grow more or less hand in hand in the United States from the 1960s onwards.

One of the less well known exponents of post-modernist meta-fiction in the UK is Robert Coover, whose main work is The Public Burning (1977), a multi-narrative tour de force which focuses on the case of Joel and Ethel Rosenberg, American communists executed in 1953 for espionage (they were alleged to have passed information about the US development of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union). Richard Nixon figures as a central character in alternate chapters, and Coover satirizes the failure of the media to interrogate the official accounts of the Rosenberg’s activities, and of the wider construction of a political context within which such prosecutions gain validity. The way in which language and narrative is, and can be, used to distort truth for political ends clearly lends itself to the techniques and ends of meta-fiction. Most recently, James Ellroy has been mining such a vein in his Underworld USA Trilogy. David Peace attempted something similar in GB84. Whether the efforts of the Blair government to engineer a consensus of support for the invasion of Iraq retains any potential for a similar treatment remains to be seen.

An earlier, and seemingly altogether more minor, work by Coover is The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (his second novel, published in 1968). Henry Waugh is a 56 year old loner, working out his time in an office of accountants. At home, he has designed a dice and chart based game in which he plays out season after season of baseball leagues. He’s not really interested in baseball as such – it’s the susceptibility of a whole world to his arbitrary control, and the endless accounting of the results, the averages, the whole minutiae of this created world, which really interests him. And as his world develops, he lives the lives of all the characters who inhabit this world with every greater degrees of vicarious intensity.

The main lines of critical response to this work focus either on the success of the novel as a work of sports fiction, and in particular, baseball fiction; or on the theme of Waugh as God-like creator of his universe (as other meta-fictions play with the idea of the narrator as more or less unreliable god of their literary creations).

The first thing to be said about this is that Coover has done an outstanding job of capturing the milieu of baseball at a certain moment in US history, and, in particular, the mindset of those in the US for whom baseball is an abiding passion, or even a living (players, ex-players managers, reporters, etc). Until you have lived in the US for any length of time, it’s virtually impossible to get a feel for the extent to which America’s ‘national pastime’ occupies people’s daily lives. At one level, Henry Waugh is simply taking this near-obsession to its obsessional conclusion.

With regard to the focus on Waugh as creator of his fictional world, I think the critical consensus is less precise. This may be a result of the fact that the responses to Coover’s work were determined by the time of their writing, at which point the meta-fictional theme of the fictional creator was still a relative innovation within literature. What strikes me reading the work now is the success with which Coover depicts Henry Waugh’s predilection for living his life within the fictional world of the Universal Baseball Association, and the way in which this offers an allegory for a certain tendency within American life to prefer living in more or less unreal worlds (whether this be the America of the movies or the American dream that fuelled the culture of ultimately fraudulent sub-prime mortgage lending).

Baseball provides the US with a rich stock of metaphors with which to create an understanding of itself, and to invent narratives about itself. The temptation, of course, is to allow these metaphors to become the means by which reality is understood and lived. The fiction takes over the reality.

This is just what theorists such as Baudrillard have been trying to depict when they have written about phenomena such as the simulacrum. We see it again in the way in which modern warfare is reduced to, or played out as, a Hollywood-style performance on the screen. Needless to say, it’s played out even more predominantly on the front pages of the tabloids, and in the glossy gossip magazines, where “celebrities’” lives are lived out on a daily basis. And, even more prosaically, we see it in the absurd phenomenon of all the various fantasy sports, in which players become “managers for a day”.

This is all pretty familiar territory today. And it’s to Coover’s credit that he anticipated all this over 40 years ago. So, aside from the superb depiction of a baseball world, is there any other reason to return to Coover, given how familiar we have become with the theoretical perspective which he develops in The Universal Baseball Association?

What I think Coover captures really well is the double sense of nostalgia and desire that works Henry Waugh’s relation with the baseball world he has created. Just as baseball itself figures as a more or less romanticised vision of an American world of the past – most strikingly embodied in such phenomena as ‘the seventh inning stretch’ and the communal singing of ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Park’, alongside the ritual of fathers taking sons to the game – so Henry Waugh’s world is depicted by Coover through Waugh’s own performance of this world, and the nostalgic investment in the characters from the ‘golden age’ of this world – a golden age which is modelled on US baseball’s own golden age around the turn of the century, but a golden age which, as the novel progresses, we realise has begun to pass for Henry Waugh (to the extent that he appears to be becoming disenchanted with his creation). The sense of desire is embodied in the character of a young pitcher, who seems to have the potential to rejuvenate Henry’s baseball world, a Christ-like saviour whom Henry is, inevitably, condemned to sacrifice according to the same necessity of the dice-throw by which he governs his world (though the element of chance represented in the throw of the dice means that Henry is not quite in complete control of the world he has created).

So it’s not just a case of baseball, or the created imaginary world, serving as a nostalgic representation of a better world; it’s also a case of that same imaginary world creating the hope of our being saved from this world of mundane reality. Seen in this light, Coover’s creation evokes the millenarian mind-set which appears to afflict much of contemporary America, uniting the worlds of the religious cults with the neo-con belief in the right of the US to make the world a better place by its ‘humanitarian’ interventions.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that Henry Waugh’s worlds will collapse around him. Just as the character Fenn McCaffree, something of a cross between the commissioner of baseball and J. Edgar Hoover (is there an echo of J. Edgar in J. Henry? if not, what about J.H.Wh? his only friend being a [Lou] Engel!), installs more and more surveillance tools in an effort to provide the means to control the events in the baseball world, yet all to no avail, so Henry Waugh starts interfere in his creation, trying to rig the games and the results, in an attempt to restore something of the order and rightness of things which had been lost with the death of the young pitcher. But the very means by which Henry had ensured the independence of his creation, its verisimilitude, and, ultimately, its interest for its creator, namely the throw of the dice, return to guarantee that his world cannot be controlled. The world of J. Henry Waugh cannot help but live the life that is its own. Henry Waugh himself is undermined, just as America is undermined, by his resenntiment, his ultimate inability to affirm the dice throw by which his world is created, and the chance by which his world is ultimately governed as a consequence.

Mark Fisher

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Rowan Wilson) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Mark Fisher has been writing an acclaimed blog as k-punk for some years now. Focussing on culture, especially music and literature, and politics. His writing also appears in the New Statesman, Frieze, The Wire, Sight and Sound and FACT. A founder member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, he now teaches at Goldsmiths University and the City Literary Institute in London.

In November last year he published his first book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, and also edited a collection of texts on the death of Michael Jackson, The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson, both published with Zer0 Books.

Rowan Wilson: Your blog, k-punk, is one of the leading blogs for cultural analysis. When did you first start writing it and why did you start?

Mark Fisher: Thank you. I started it in 2003. At the time, I was working as a Philosophy lecturer in a Further Education college in Kent - I reflect on some of my experiences there in Capitalist Realism. I was then quite badly depressed - not because of teaching, which I enjoyed, but for a whole series of long-term reasons - and I started blogging as a way of getting back into writing after the traumatic experience of doing a PhD. PhD work bullies one into the idea that you can’t say anything about any subject until you’ve read every possible authority on it. But blogging seemed a more informal space, without that kind of pressure. Blogging was a way of tricking myself back into doing serious writing. I was able to con myself, thinking, "it doesn't matter, it's only a blog post, it's not an academic paper". But now I take the blog rather more seriously than writing academic papers. I was actually only aware of blogs for a short while before I started mine. But I could quite quickly see that the blog network around Simon Reynolds’ blog [see the RSB interview with Reynolds] - which was the first network I started to read - fulfilled many of the functions that the music press used to. But it wasn’t just replicating the old music press; there were also sorts of strange, idiosyncratic blogs which couldn’t have existed in any other medium. I saw that - contrary to all the clichés - blogs didn’t have to be online diaries: they were a blank space in which writers could pursue their own lines of interest (something that it‘s increasingly difficult for writers to do in print media, for a number of reasons).

RW: You’re almost one of the elder statespeople of blogging now. How has it changed since you started?

MF: Blogging networks shift all the time; new blogs enter the network, older ones fall away; new networks constitute themselves. One of the most significant developments was the introduction of comments; a largely unfortunate change in my view. In the early days of blogs, if you wanted to respond to a post, you had to reply on your own blog, and if you didn’t have a blog, you had to create one. Comments tend to reduce things to banal sociality, with all its many drawbacks.

Yet blogs continue to do things that can't be done anywhere else: look at the way that Speculative Realism has propagated through blogs. Originally coined as term of convenience for the work of the philosophers Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant and Quentin Meillassoux, Speculative Realism now has an online unlife of its own. This isn't just commentary on existing philosophical positions; it's a philosophy that is actually happening on the web. Graham has his own blog, Object-Oriented Philosophy, but there are a whole range of Speculative Realism-related blogs, including Speculative Heresy and Planomenology. Reid Kane of Plamomenology has gone so far as to argue that Speculative Realism is “the first avatar of distributed cognition”, that, in other words, there is a natural fit between SR and the online medium.

RW: You were one of the co-founders of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), described by Simon Reynolds as the academic equivalent of Apocalypse Now’s Colonel Kurtz. Who did you form it with and what was its purpose?

MF: The main driving forces behind it were Sadie Plant and Nick Land. But Sadie Plant left quite quickly so the CCRU as it developed was much more shaped by Nick Land. Nick’s 1990s texts - which are to be issued in a collected edition this year, by Urbanomic, who publish the Collapse journal - are incredible. Far from the dry databasing of much academic writing or the pompous solemnity of so much continental philosophy, Nick’s texts were astonishing theory-fictions. They weren’t distanced readings of French theory so much as cybergothic remixes which put Deleuze and Guattari on the same plane as films such as Apocalypse Now and fictions such as Gibson’s Neuromancer.

Jungle was crucial to the Ccru. What the Ccru was about was capturing, (and extrapolating) this specifically British take on cyberculture, in which music was central. Ccru was trying to do with writing what Jungle, with its samples from such as Predator, Terminator and Blade Runner, was doing in sound: "text at sample velocity", as Kodwo Eshun put it.

RW: The writing of the Ccru seems very different to your current style. Are you still involved with the Ccru – and indeed is it still operating?

MF: It was never formally disbanded but then again it was never formally constituted. It's odd because, it's only a decade on that the stuff is starting to get published in book form. As I said, Nick's texts are just about to be published. Steve Goodman (aka Kode9) has just had his book Sonic Warfarepublished on MIT Press. As for the change of style, I suppose a number of things happened. One was the slowing of the UK cyberculture that had inspired the Ccru throughout the 90s. Gradually, the exorbitant hypotheses of the Ccru seemed to have less purchase on a culture that increasingly seemed to correspond more with Jameson’s ideas of retrospection and pastiche. In the 90s, it was possible to oppose a vibrant cyberculture to the malaise which Jameson identified. But in the 00s, the blight of postmodernism spread everywhere.

Also, I found that, as I started teaching regularly, and as I got used to writing for an audience - and there's no form of writing that makes you as aware of having an audience as blogging; print publications just don't compare - I rediscovered rhetoric, argument and engagement. The exhilaration of the Ccru-style was its uncompromising blizzard of jargon, text as a tattoo of intensities to which you just had to submit. But it's hard to maintain that kind of speed-intensity for longer writing projects; and I found that I enjoyed producing writing that was expositorier and which tried to engage the reader rather than blitz them. I like Zizek's line that the idiot he is trying to explain philosophy to is himself; I feel the same. Much of my writing now is me trying to explain things to/for myself.

There were also political schisms. The Ccru defined itself against the sclerotic stranglehold that a certain moralizing Old Left had on the Humanities academy. There was a kind of exuberant anti-politics, a ‘technihilo' celebration of the irrelevance of human agency, partly inspired by the pro-markets, anti-capitalism line developed by Manuel DeLanda out of Braudel, and from the section of Anti-Oedipus that talks about marketization as the "revolutionary path". This was a version of what Alex Williams has called "accelerationism", but it has never been properly articulated as a political position; the tendency is to fall back into a standard binary, with capitalism and libertarianism on one side and the state and centralization on the other.

But working in the public sector in Blairite Britain made me see that neoliberal capitalism didn't fit with the accelerationist model; on the contrary, pseudo-marketization was producing the pervasive, decentralized bureaucracy I describe in Capitalist Realism. My experiences as a teacher and as trade union activist combined with a belated encounter with Zizek - who was using some of the same conceptual materials as Ccru (the Freudian death drive; pulp culture, technology), but giving them a leftist spin - to push me towards a different political position. I guess what I'm interested in now is in synthesizing some of the interests and methods of the Ccru with a new leftism. Speculative Realism has returned to some of the areas that the Ccru was interested in. What I'm hoping will happen in the next decade is that a new kind of theory will develop that emerges from people who have been deep-cooked in post-Fordist capitalism, who take cyberspace for granted and who lack nostalgia for the exhausted paradigms of the old left.

RW: One of the most exciting things to happen in publishing last year was the development of the Zer0 Books imprint. Can you explain how that came about and the purpose of the project?

MF: The imprint was set up by the novelist Tariq Godard. He asked Nina Power and me if we'd like to do books, and we suggested a range of other people. What we wanted was to produce the kind of books we'd want to read ourselves, but which weren't being published anywhere. In mainstream media, the space that had drawn Tariq and myself towards theory in the first place - the music press, areas of the broadcast media - had disappeared. Effectively, that kind of discourse had been driven into exile online. So part of what Zer0 was about was harvesting the work that has been developed on the blog networks. Zer0 is about establishing a para-space, between theory and popular culture, between cyberspace and the university. The Zer0 books are a reminder of what ought to be obvious, but which the imbecilic reductionism of neoliberal media would like us to forget: serious writing doesn't have to be opaque and incomprehensible, and popular writing doesn't have to be facile.

RW: Your first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, was published by Zer0 in November. Why do you think that capitalism, even in the wake of the financial crisis, has such a grip on our consciousness?

MF: I’m not sure that it has a grip on our consciousness so much as on our unconscious. It shapes the limits of what we can imagine. It does so because it has enjoyed 20 years of unchallenged domination, blitzing our nervous systems with its intoxicants, paralysing thought. Put at its simplest, capitalist realism is the widespread idea that capitalism is the only "realistic" political economic system. The response to the financial crisis only reinforced this belief - it was (on every level) unthinkable that the banks could be allowed to crash. The problem is imagining an alternative that anyone believes could be actually attained. Which isn't to say that an alternative can't ever come about; in fact, after the financial crisis, we're in the bizarre situation at the moment where everything - very much including the continuation of the status quo - looks impossible. But this is already an improvement from how things seemed only two years ago. The financial crisis forced capitalist realism to change its form. The old neoliberal story was no longer viable. But Capital has not yet cobbled together much of a new narrative, or come up with any economic solution to the problems that led to the crash in the first place. It's as if capitalism has suffered its own version of shock therapy.

RW: How is your argument different from that put forward by Fredric Jameson in his work on the culture of postmodernism?

MF: Well, as I say in the book, in many ways what I’m calling "capitalist realism" can be contained under the rubric of Jameson’s theorization of postmodernism. Yet the very persistence and ubiquity of the processes that Jameson identifies - the destruction of a sense of history, the supersession of novelty by pastiche - meant that they have changed in kind. Postmodernism is now no longer a tendency in culture; it has subsumed practically all culture. Capitalist realism, you might say, is what happens when postmodernism is naturalized. After all, we've now got a generation of young adults who have known nothing but global capitalism and who are accustomed to culture being pastiche and recapitulation.

RW: In the book you move from describing the problems of capitalist society to how it is making us mentally ill. What do you think are the central lasting effects of neoliberalism on our psyches and, with its collapse, how do you see these unravelling?

MF: Neoliberalism installs a perpetual anxiety - there is no security; your position and status are under constant review. It's no wonder that, as Oliver James shows in The Selfish Capitalist, depression is so prevalent in neoliberalized countries. Widespread mental illness is one of the hidden costs of neoliberal capitalism; stress has been privatized. If you're depressed because of overwork, that's between you and your brain chemistry!

I do think that the financial crisis killed neoliberalism as a political project - but it doesn't need to be alive in order to continue to dominate our minds, work and culture. Even though neoliberalism now lacks any forward momentum, it still controls things by default. So, sadly, I don't see the deleterious psychic effects of neoliberalism waning any time in the immediate future.

RW:You identify the madness of managerial bureaucracy, the incessant and pointless ‘auditing culture’, in contemporary public services, specifically education. You discuss how this auditing culture is now, along with capitalism’s PR network, a new big Other, a replacement for God. It’s the ideological matrix that we all cynically dismiss (not just privately – this cynicism is now the accepted public language; see the Guardian’s G2 section for daily examples) but nonetheless remains the binding authority. Why are we not simply able to shrug it off?

MF: PR is not limited any more to specific promotional activities - as I say in the book, under capitalism, all that is solid melts into PR. In so-called "immaterial" labour, the effect of auditing is not to improve actual performance but to generate a representation of better performance. It's a familiar effect that anyone subject to New Labour's targets will know all too well.

Neoliberalism reproduces itself through cynicism, through people doing things they "don't really believe". It's a question of power. People go along with auditing culture and what I call "business ontology" not necessarily because they agree with it, but because that is the ruling order, "that's just how things are now, and we can't do anything about it". That kind of sentiment is what I mean by capitalist realism. And it isn't merely queitsm; it's true that almost no-one working in public services is likely to be sacked if they get a poor performance review (they will just be subject to endless retraining); but they might well be sacked if they start questioning the performance review system itself or refusing to co-operate with it.

RW: So now we move from the critique to the positive proposals. In an interview with Matthew Fuller for Mute you tentatively suggest that the left needs to come up with a new big Other, one that is more representative of Rousseau’s ‘general will’. How is this to be distinguished from the capitalist big Other and how would it be prevented from becoming reified, a new system of mystical dominance?

RW: Reification isn’t a problem per se; in fact, it’s something we should hope for. Evan Calder Williams, whose book Combined and Uneven Apocalypse is coming out on Zer0, talks of an "anti-capitalist reification", and I think that’s what we need to develop. It’s capitalism that poses as being anti-reification; it’s capitalism that presents itself as having dissolved all illusions and exposed the underlying reality of things. Part of what I’m arguing in Capitalist Realism is that this is an ideological sleight of hand; it's precisely neoliberal capitalism's ostensible demystifications (its reduction of everything to the supposedly self-evident category of the free individual) that allow all kinds of strange, quasi-theological entities to rule our lives. But I don't think the aim should be to replace capitalism's fake anti-reification with a "real" anti-reification. Reification can't be entirely eliminated. I take this to be one of the important lessons that Lacanian psychoanalysis has to teach. Being a speaking subject at all involves a minimal reification; the big Other is coterminous with language itself. But this is very far from being a problem for the left. It's the left that needs to insist on the reality of something in excess of individuals, whether you call it the "general will", the "public interest", or something else. When Mrs Thatcher famously denied the existence of society, she was echoing Max Stirner's claim that all such abstractions are "spooks". But we can't ever rid ourselves of these incorporeal entities - neoliberalism certainly hasn't. As I argue in Capitalist Realism, neoliberalism hasn't killed the big Other - for who is the consumer of PR (which no actual empirical individual believes) if not the big Other? The point now - and I would affirm this forcefully, not tentatively - is to invent a leftist big Other. This doesn't mean reviving authoritarianism; there is no necessary relation between the big Other and a strong leader. On the contrary, in fact, authoritarianism happens when there is a confusion between the big Other (as virtuality) and an empirical individual. What we need are institutions and agents that will stand in for - but cannot be equated with - a leftist big Other.

RW: You talk about the re-formatting of memory that is a symptom of capitalist realism, where history can be altered almost instantly (as in a Philip K. Dick novel) as we stand agog before the supposed ceaseless innovation of capitalism. You were also one of those to start using the concept ‘hauntology’, the idea that there was a cultural meme that acknowledged the collapse of a moment and picks through the remains for the lost futures buried within (it’s probably fair to say that Owen Hatherley’s Militant Modernism, the first Zer0 Book, is operating within this terrain). Similarly, we are in a political landscape littered with ‘ideological rubble’ (as you quote Alex Williams). My suspicion is that for you the ‘moment’ that has collapsed is the politics of ’68, one that was perhaps guilty of the re-formatting of history and memory in its own way, before many of its ideas were taken up by a post-Fordist capitalism. So what is the detritus that you are picking through? What of the discarded remnants of left politics would you dust off? And is it possible to give old ideas new momentum?

MF: I would say that, in many ways, the politics of '68 haven't collapsed enough. '68 is a spectre which still hangs over theory. Yet the forces which '68 railed against no longer exist; there is no Stalinist Party or State that we need to blow apart with a Cultural Revolution. Which isn't to say that we should want to return to Stalinist authoritarianism, or that it is possible to do so; the oscillation between these two options is the sign of a failure of political imagination. It's necessary to go all the way through post-Fordism, to keep looking ahead, especially at times when there seems to be nothing ahead of us. Part of the importance of the concept of hauntology is the idea of lost futures, of things which never happened but which could have. On one level, late capitalism is indeed all about ceaseless reinvention, nothing is solid, everything is mutable; but on another level, it is about recapitulation, homogeneity, minimally different commodities. Some of Jameson's best passages are about this strange antinomy. Deleuze and Guattari, too, emphasize the way in which capitalism is a bizarre mix of the ultra-modern and the archaic. The failure of the future haunts capitalism: after 1989, capitalism's victory has not consisted in it confidently claiming the future, but in denying that the future is possible. All we can expect, we have been led to believe, is more of the same - but on higher resolution screens with faster connections. Hauntology, I think, expresses dissatisfaction with this foreclosure of the future.

So it's not now a question of giving old ideas new momentum, it's a matter of fighting over the meaning of the words "new" and "modern". Neoliberalism has made it seem self-evident that “modernization" means managerialism, increased exploitation of workers, outsourcing etc. But of course this isn't self-evident: the neoliberals fought a long campaign on many fronts in order to impose that definition. And now neoliberalism itself is a discredited relic - albeit, as I argued above, one that still dominates our lives, but only by default now. Part of the battle now will be to ensure that neoliberalism is perceived to be defunct. I think that's already happening. There is a change in the cultural atmosphere, small at the moment, but it will increase. What Jim McGuigan calls "cool capitalism", the culture of swaggering business and conspicuous consumption that dominated the last decade, already looks as if it belongs to a world that is dead and gone. After the financial crisis, all those television programmes about selling property and the like became out of date overnight. These things aren't trivial; they have provided the background noise which capitalist realism needed in order to naturalise itself. The financial crisis has weakened the corporate elite - not materially so much as ideologically. And, by the same token, it has given confidence to those opposed to the ruling order. I'm sure that the university occupations are the signs of a growing militancy. We need to take advantage of this new mood. There's nothing old fashioned about the idea of rational organisation of resources, or that public space is important. (The failure to rationally organise natural resources is now evident to everyone; and the consequences of letting the concept of public space decline are equally obvious to anyone living in Britain, with its violent crime and drunkenness, both of which are symptoms of a kind of despair that is as unacknowledged under capitalist realism as it is ubiquitous). Similarly, what is intrinsically "modern" about putting workers under intolerable stress? The pseudonymous postal worker Roy Mayall put this very well in his LRB blog:

We used to be told that there were three elements to the postal trade: the business, the customers and the staff, and that all were equally important. These days we are clearly being told that only the business matters. So now the ‘modernisers’ are moving in. They are young, thrusting, in-your-face and they think they know all the answers. According to them, the future is the application of new technology within the discipline of the market. But the market doesn’t tell us what to do: people tell us what to do. The ‘market’ is essentially a ploy by which one group of people’s interests are imposed on the rest of us. The postal trade is at the front line of a battle between people’s needs and the demands of corporations to make ever increasing profits. That’s what they mean by ‘modernisation’, and it’s not ‘nostalgia’ to remind ourselves that things used to be different.

But the fight will only be won when we can say with confidence, not only that things used to be different in the past, but that they can be different in the future too. I'm hoping that, before long, the neoliberal era will be seen for what it was: a barbarous anti-Enlightenment atavism, a temporary interruption of a process of egalitarian modernization.

RW: At the end of last year you edited a collection of essays, The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson, brought out almost at the speed of John Blake Publishing! What was so important about Michael Jackson’s death that made you put such energy into this project?

MF: Yes, it's rapid-response theory! There's no doubt that Jackson's death arrived at a punctual moment. A whole thirty year reality system had just collapsed with the bank bail-outs. Obama had been elected. There was no-one who personified that thirty year period more than Michael Jackson. In the few days after Jackson died, I found myself watching his videos over and over again. I surprised myself by moved from a position of detached cynicism to feeling increasingly sad. There was something in those videos - particularly the Off The Wall clips - which afterwards disappeared from Jackson personally and from the culture in general. So I listened to Off The Wall and "Billie Jean" obsessively. I probably listened to "Billie Jean" forty times, but it was like listening to it for the first time; there were depths to it I'd never got to before. I wrote a post on my blog which elicited some positive responses; and it struck me that the network around Zer0 - which includes many of the world's music writers as well as theorists - was in an ideal position to produce a book that could deal with MJ as a symptom. Which isn't to say that the book is some desiccated analysis that doesn't engage with the sensuous qualities of Jackson's music - there are some wonderful descriptions of the tracks and Jackson's dancing. The book was put together very quickly, but I'm extremely pleased with the results. It was heartening to see what music writers can do when you give them space and let them pursue their interests. There are some pieces in the book - such as Chris Roberts' and Ian Penman's - that are so sui generis that it is difficult to imagine them appearing anywhere else.

RW: You’ve had a busy year, what with the blog, teaching, finishing a stint as reviews editor at The Wire, conference papers, marriage, Zer0 and the publication of two books – is it time for a rest now or will 2010 be just as busy?

MF: This is not the time for a rest. On a personal level, a rest is impossible. Most of what I do doesn't make me much money, so I have to keep working at a furious rate to keep my head above water. On a wider cultural and political level, this is a highly exciting time, not a moment to be convalescing. This year, in addition to the teaching, blogging, freelancing and editing for Zer0, I will be putting out Ghosts Of My Life, which will bring together my writings on hauntology and lost futures; in some ways, it's the other half of Capitalist Realism. There's another big project that I'm involved with which I have high hopes for, but we're not ready to go public on that yet.

RW: And finally, I hope it’s not too late to ask what were your favourite books of last year?

MF: Apart from the Zer0 books - and I've almost certainly forgotten something really important - they would be:

Fredric Jameson, Valences Of The Dialectic. A genuinely monumental work that I expect to be referring to for many years.
Graham Harman, Prince Of Networks. A stunning reinterpretation of Bruno Latour's work that is also Graham's most lucid account yet of his object-oriented philosophy
Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Jodi's sharp analysis of the impasses of the left is also a kind of requiem for much the 2.0 bluster of the last decade.
Slavoj Zizek, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. Much more focused than some of Zizek's recent books, this was a reminder of his supreme relevance to the current conjuncture.

RW: Thanks Mark.

False quantities: on Martin Amis’s hobbyhorse

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Anthony Cummins) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 08:54:53 GMT

What’s most revealing about Prospect’s recent interview with Martin Amis isn’t his opinion of JM Coetzee – “he’s got no talent” – but the evidence he cites to support it. (It’s hardly a surprise, after all, that the cool wit of a writer whose PhD thesis looks at the manuscript revisions to Samuel Beckett’s Watt should hold no appeal for a man whose aversion to Beckett, vented after “a couple of hundred glasses of wine”, once drove Salman Rushdie to the brink of violence.) Put to one side what Amis says about the Nobel laureate being no fun,* since that’s a matter of taste, and in any case isn’t exactly an original point to make about an author whose best-known book pivots on a gang rape. Of greater interest – because it suggests how blithely Amis can pass off wilful ignorance as critical rigour – is the moment where he tries to convince his interviewer, Tom Chatfield, that cliché is the enemy of literary value:

MA: These are two quotes from Coetzee. How does it go. Oh, yes. A woman is watching him closely. “She watched me like a…”

TC: “… hawk.”

MA: Next sentence. He had said these words in “a voice loud enough to wake…”

TC: “… the dead.”

“Consecutive sentences,” tuts Amis. The passage he’s thinking of comes near the end of Waiting for the Barbarians, where the novel’s narrator, the Magistrate, recounts the fallout from a shaming liaison with a girl who’s supposed to be in his custody. You assume Amis must know – as a loud admirer of Nabokov if nothing else – that we can’t in any straightforward sense assign the Magistrate’s words to Coetzee, but never mind: by simply zeroing in on two phrases from page 149 of a 170-page work published thirty years ago, he avoids having to think about anything meatier than Coetzee’s merits as a neologist (such as – for instance – the way, in Youth and Summertime, he mocks the myth-making of the lit-celeb memoir, or how, in Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year, he casts doubt on the entitlement of famous writers to pontificate on whatever subject takes their fancy). (E.g.)

Pseudo-punctiliousness of this sort was on show last summer when Amis reviewed John Updike’s posthumous collection My Father’s Tears. His piece began with an invitation to discover “if you have what is called a literary ear” by reading a quote from the story Personal Archaeology.

The following wedge of prose has two things wrong with it: one big thing and one little thing – one infelicity and one howler. Read it with attention:

Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his land. In the prime of his life, when he worked every weekday and socialised all weekend, he had pretty much ignored his land.

The “minor flaw”, said Amis, Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester University, is “the proximity of prior and prime”: it gives us “a dissonant rime riche on the first syllable; and the two words, besides, are etymological half-siblings, and should never be left alone without many intercessionary chaperones”. To say nothing of the “major flaw” (look it up if you must).

On Amis trudged, through the horror of sentences that contained both “walking” and “sidewalk”, “knowing” and “knew”, “year”, “yearbook” and “year”, before confronting, from behind his hands, the climactic ruin of this (admittedly plopping) formulation: “The grapes make a mess on the bricks in the fall; nobody ever thinks to pick them up when they fall.”

Such clumsiness was submitted as evidence of Updike’s late-life decline. That’s to say, for Amis, Updike wasn’t so good any more because in his prose he forgot not to repeat words and sounds too often. But the grim consequence of this logic is that it reduces the A-game Updike whom Amis so admires to little more than a sentient thesaurus with a feeling for rhythm: Amis even implied as much (unwittingly, I guess) once he eventually saw fit to assess My Father’s Tears not as a exercise in elegant variation but as a collection of stories – or “mere narratives” – and found that “denuded of a vibrant verbal surface, they sometimes seem to be neither here nor there”.

Maybe that university professorship is partly to blame for the apparent narrowing of Amis’s vision as a critic. Creative Writing emphasises craft – what else can you teach? – and of his own pedagogy he has stated: “It’s always detail, detail, little things, trying to work on the surface... That’s what I think the job is... By clearing away all the second hand stuff – the clichés, the dead sentences – I think you can make people a lot more alert, and if talent is there” – that word again – “it will emerge quicker if the surface is very strictly attended to”. (Perhaps Coetzee ought to dip into that million-quid Nobel haul and stump up the twelve grand for a course at Manchester.)

It’s impossible to argue with what Amis is saying – essentially, do not be lazy – but such common-sense advice scarcely warrants elevation to the status of a one-size-fits-all critical philosophy. The bathos seems unintended when, in his interview with Chatfield, discussing the merits of Orwell, Amis concedes that Nineteen Eighty-Four, despite being “journalistic” and “non-genius”, is after all a decent novel with “few false quantities” – his term for those unwitting rhymes and repetitions of the sort he finds everywhere in Updike’s last work.

Elsewhere in the interview Amis nods approvingly at Flaubert; not for his famously strenuous efforts to avoid the false quantity, but because he’s “funny”. Well, quite. Flaubert’s sense of humour let him ridicule even his own perfectionism. He once asked his friend Edmond de Goncourt if there was “anything more stupid than struggling to eliminate the assonances from a sentence or the repetitions from a page”. What was the point? Goncourt, for his part, thought there wasn’t one. “Style,” he wrote, in a journal entry for 3 March 1875 – the translation is Robert Baldick’s – “has become so affected... as to make writing practically impossible”:

It is bad style to place fairly close to one another two words beginning with the same syllable; it is bad style to use the word /of/ twice in the same expression, and so on and so forth... This excessive fastidiousness dulls the minds of the most gifted of writers, and distracts them – busy as they are with the intricate manipulation of every phrase – from all the vital, great, warm things that give life to a book.

* But – for what it’s worth – the belief that Coetzee lacks a sense of humour is an obvious canard. C, the Coetzee-ish writer in Diary of a Bad Year, says: “I cast my mind back over the new fiction I have read in the past twelve months, trying to find one book that has truly touched me, and come up blank.” The real JM Coetzee is a notably obliging provider of enthusiastic jacket quotes.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Natasha Tripney) — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 03:53:07 GMT

The protagonist of Percival Everett’s latest novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, is called Not Sidney Poitier. Got that? He’s not Sidney Poitier, he’s Not Sidney Poitier – his name is a negative. His mother, after an unusually long gestation period, called her eventual offspring Not Sidney and his entire young life has been spent in calmly deflecting questions about his name.

Percival Everett’s novel is a coming of age narrative with an absurdist twist. As in his 2001 novel, Erasure, the writing is threaded with commentary on blackness and black American identity. Though Not Sidney is not Sidney Poitier he does look uncannily like the Oscar-winning Hollywood statesman who is the embodiment, to many Americans, of safe, acceptable blackness, and the physical resemblance only increases as Not Sidney grows up.

When he is eleven, Not Sidney’s mother dies and, since the identity of his father is unknown, he becomes an orphan. Fortunately his mother, being a business savvy woman, had invested most of her savings in a budding media company and subsequently become one of the chief shareholders in CNN; as a result Not Sidney is invited to live on Ted Turner’s Atlanta estate.

He discovers that is mother’s investment has made him unfathomably wealthy (so rich, his actual total wealth changes by the hour). This does not stop him being a regular punching bag for schoolyard bullies infuriated by his passive demeanour and distinctive name, and so the well read Not Sidney acquires hypnotic powers in lieu of more conventional self defence skills.

These prove only intermittently useful, for almost the very second he leaves the confines of the Turner estate he is arrested, solely on the grounds of having the wrong skin colour, and ends up on the run while chained to a white convict. He escapes, eventually, and makes it to college, where his lighter skinned girlfriend invites him home for Thanksgiving, resulting in a skewed riff on Guess Who’s Coming For Dinner? in which his girlfriend’s conservative parents fret over his ‘darkness’ but then soften their attitudes when they discover he’s loaded. In a nice subversion of the source material, Not Sidney then realises his girlfriend is really not such a catch, and is in fact using him for his shock value, so he lets the family know exactly what he thinks of them.

Even though Everett employs many devices that could be labelled postmodern, his novel’s sheer narrative tug counters - and even occasionally eclipses - his experimentation. This is a highly readable book, with a thriller’s insistent rhythm, and though it’s possible to register the various levels on which a scene is working (there are numerous references to Poitier’s work – to A Patch of Blue, The Defiant Ones, and the racially dubious, Clark Gable-starring 1957 film, Band of Angels and, of course, In the Heat of the Night), this never gets in the way of the need to know how Not Sidney will extract himself from the various predicaments Everett pitches him into, the various encounters with Deep South stereotypes.

As well as the character of Turner, who is presented as an amiable if easily distracted figure - in no way a paternal stand-in – Not Sidney also encounters an academic by the name of Percival Everett, a sometime novelist who teaches a college course in the art of nonsense and makes weighty and erudite statements that are, for the most part, entirely devoid of any real meaning.

While the novel is very funny, it’s also acute in its examination of the expectations and pressures related to being black in America, it doesn’t however replicate (not that it’s attempting to) the emotional charge of Erasure. In that earlier novel there was a real sense of poignancy in the way the protagonist, Thelonious Ellison, was gradually obliterated; the way he was taken over by a character of his own creation and forgotten by those he held most dear. I Am Not Sidney Poitier is a snappier, sharper piece of writing, though more episodic in structure, and Everett really has to shove and jab and twist his story in order to squeeze in all the film references – he ends up resorting to dream sequence for the Band of Angels interlude. But while this new novel is less weighted with anger and loss than its predecessor, the central character’s fate is in many ways the same: he loses track of what makes him Not Sidney Poitier; already a negative, something more of him gets lost and he ends up becoming what he has always been at pains to point out he is not.

Erasure

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Natasha Tripney) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:06:52 GMT

Names and labels matter in Percival Everett’s novel, Erasure. So the fact that his protagonist is called Thelonious Ellison – known as Monk to both family and friends – with all the cultural connotations that such a name carries, makes a statement from the start.

Ellison is an academic and writer whose work is repeatedly rejected for not engaging with the African-American experience, for not being ‘black enough’ to sell. His books, which draw on Greek myths rather than ghetto struggles, have been failing to fly off the shelves at Borders (where they are predictably, if unimaginatively – and rather pointlessly – filed under the banner of ‘Black Fiction’).

Though Monk has "brown skin, a broad nose, (and) some of my ancestors were slaves", his experiences – that of a man from a middle class, suburban family; the son and brother of doctors; an academic – are deemed invalid, or at least, of little interest to readers.

Erasure, published in the UK in 2004, is a book full of anger. Everett takes targeted swipes at an America that likes its black literature to fit a very narrow definition of what blackness entails, an America that likes its ‘black writing’ to conform to certain tropes and clichés.

Ellison does not write about urban hardship and poverty, as a result the publishing industry is rapidly losing what little interest it had in his work. Facing financial difficulties after the death of his sister and with his mother’s health failing, Monk adopts the pseudonym of Stagg R. Leigh and pens his own ghetto novella, My Pafology (eventually re-titled Fuck to highlight its utter absence of creative worth).

This novella, which is Russian-dolled in its entirety in the centre of Erasure, is brutal, minimal and expletive-strewn. The protagonist of My Pafology, Van Go Jenkins, is a jobless father of four (by four separate mothers); he is groin-driven and bristling with anger, and his main motivation, apart from getting laid, is the acquisition of a ‘piece.’ Sample line: “The T-shirt I'm wearin' be funky as shit. But I don't give a fuck. The world be stinkin' so why not me?” The whole thing is a one finger salute to a certain kind of fiction, which Everett finds exploitative and offensive. Fuck is written as an admission of defeat, as an act of sadness and desperation, an act of creative self-destruction: so inevitably it is a huge success.

The decision to include the novella-in-a-novel in this manner is an interesting one. While it succeeds in illustrating why Everett is angry – at this constant celebration of brutality, acquisitiveness and small-mindedness as the archetypal African American experience – it’s just too obviously satirical to plausibly spark the literary success that follows. Critics everywhere are soon gushing about the ‘realness’ of it and it becomes a contender for a major literary prize. The Fuck section is also very readable, not purely as pastiche: Huck Finn has growed up and got hisself a gun and the whole thing has a definite degree of narrative appeal. This is necessary as it nears 70 pages in length and one might simply be tempted to flick through it until the novel-proper begins again if it didn’t throw a few treats to the reader.

Following Fuck, Everett does return to Monk’s world, which is growing increasingly bleaker. His mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and ceases to recognise him. There is a vacancy in her eyes and her periods of lucidity shorten. At the same time his surviving sibling, his brother Bill, whose marriage has recently collapsed after he came out as being gay (though Monk knew of his sexuality for years), is becoming increasingly frustrated and angry with Monk. Never particularly close, their mother’s illness, instead of bringing them together, drives the brothers further apart. Monk also manages to torpedo his budding relationship with a woman he is attracted to.

A neat parallel is set up. As Stagg becomes a literary sensation, Ellison fades from the picture, his life curls into itself, growing ever smaller and emptier. He is forced to impersonate his creation, first on the phone, then in person (which leads to some barbed and amusing, though perhaps not entirely justified, swipes at a certain talk show host with a popular book club segment, here named Kenya Dunston).

Everett is an academic, Professor of English at the University of Southern California, and the world of academia is also the source of some of the novel’s humour. He also finds the space to target the excesses of post-modern writing, and the book is peppered with little exchanges between various historical figures and artists of the past, the most seemingly significant of which includes Jackson Pollock in a discussion about the creation, erasure and possession of a work of art.

For all its bitter bite the novel – intentionally, I suspect – works best, or is at least at its most potent and affecting, when it is at its simplest and Erasure contains within it, beneath the satirical blanket, a moving portrait of a son coming to terms with his mother’s life – her having lived a life he will never fully know and appreciate – and her impending death. Monk discovers his father had a longstanding affair (which resulted in a child, though this is revelation is rather thrown away) and comes to understand more about the reality of his parents’ marriage. This helps him to understand his mother as a person just as she ceases to be that person, just as the woman she once was is obliterated, and, with it, her memories of her son. Memories, identity, creative output – all are eroded, all fall away, until, for Monk, there is nothing left.

The Things We Do To Make It Home

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Leora Skolkin-Smith) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:20:19 GMT

First published by Random House in 1999, and then in paperback in 2000 by Ballantine Books, Seven Stories Press has wisely chosen to reissue Beverly Gologorsky's highly-praised The Things We Do To Make It Home.

In the light of the recent Iraqi War, the shadows from America’s recent past in Vietnam have proven to be inescapable phantoms, coming out of the darkness of our collective, repressed memory banks once again mercilessly to show us their legions of unhealed wounds. The era of the Vietnam War is a timely choice, both for literature, and for American consciousness, as we face the damages and national trauma of yet another tragedy of errors.

“For the prose artist, the world is full of other's people’s words,” wrote Mikhail Bakhtin, in his 1984 essay collection Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, “among which he must orient himself and whose speech characteristics he must be able to perceive with a very keen ear. He must introduce them into a plane of his own discourse.” David Lodge, drawing on Bakhtin’s essay in his own collection (After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism) adds to this: “an important rider: that the signifying system of the novel cannot be limited to the surface of the text... another aspect of the art of the novel... is dialogue... the representation of direct speech in prose fiction.” Lodge ties in the abilities of a novelist who can truthfully render human dialogue as real and moving and still able to serve the novelist’s plane of discourse, with a profound gift, and feel for the novels’ highest capabilities. That is a novelist who can give us dialogue is able to fulfill Bakhtin’s “possibility of employing on the plane of a single work discourses of various types with all their expressive capacities in tact, without reducing them to a single common denominator in a way that this plane is not destroyed. He works with a very rich verbal palette.”

The brilliantly crafted dialogue has everything to do with the success of Gologorsky’s affecting novel. Her writing, so resonant in different voices, records the devastated lives of those irrevocably marred from the war. Because the novel is also a medley of voices spoken from the bewildered women impossibly confronting the changes in their returned husbands and lovers, the book is an exceptionally “rich verbal palette” indeed. And Gologorsky gives her empathetic writer’s heart to both equally -- the men returned and the women returned to -- drawing the reader into a compelling and complex balance of sympathy and distance. The novel holds its own as a polyphonic text, with little third person narration. Traditional “plot” is only sparsely sprinkled in and plays a secondary role. For me, this was such a refreshing and alerting reminder as our current climate in publishing and reviewing continues to tout the thickly plotted, genre-bender. The small, lean book is shining proof that a novel wrought with emotional depth and real skill will endure, in fact, it will even show us how the current trends are limiting.

As the story begins, we are introduced to a group of men all returned from combat in Vietnam to their wives. It begins in 1973, shortly after Rooster, Frankie, Nick, Sean, Rod, and Jason first try to readapt themselves to civilian life. The characters are from lower-middle-class neighborhoods New York, the Bronx and the South Shore of Long Island. They all meet for a party to watch a TV program on Nixon and Watergate. Unsentimentally and precisely, through dialogue, the novel comes upon one as if one is spending a night in a run-down bar, listening in several simultaneous, raucous, and intimate conversations. Though taut, pitch-perfect dialogue, and a series of vignettes which overlap and escalate in different ways, the first section culminates into a kind of collective orgiastic chaos. Already, from the beginning of this book, we feel the threats around the anguished of the families about to become broken and dissolved. Gologorsky opens the chapter with this short introduction:

“We were in bed.
We were sauced.
We were plastered.
We were stoned.
We were drumming floors.
We were bathed in TV light.
We were alive.
We were together.
We were back in the world.”

As the scenes progress, all the men hold one goal in common: a reckless desire to get drunk and stay drunk as the news reports the Watergate Crimes of the government sound and echo on the TV.

“Jason's using the TV as an armrest,” Gologorsky writes, “Paper plates are strewn around his feet; potato chips mashed into the carpet.” You know what I think I think?” He says. “Nixon's men are afraid to show up today. And they're right because we aimed our guns in the wrong direction."

All the behavior of men quickly slides into a collective oblivion, drunkenness, and sex, a sort of reverse death, perhaps, a desire for death aimed in the other direction, like the guns. Their libidinous hunger is out of control.

For the women, bewilderment and helplessness soon replace the simple joy and hope they felt when their husbands first returned to them from the war.

“Ida's words float around in her head,” Gologorsky writes (and Ida’s thoughts and feeling here could be any of the other women’s, too). “She (Ida) doesn't want to hear them, deal with them, doesn't want to know what she knows that much is wrong that much is there to worry about... it worries her now to speak things aloud. Naming things can give them life.”

Ida further explains to the women in the same position as she, that her husband, Frankie, has begun to talk to himself, referring to an imaginary friend called “Papa-san.” "Something's out there is threatening him,” Ida explains to the other women. “He doesn't want to be found. He's a fugitive." In another passage Ida continues: “Gone,” she says, “Like that rabbit that disappeared down that hole. He'd dug a tunnel somewhere to sleep in or keep drugs in or stolen goods or body parts. How do I know? God, I don't. I don't.”

Plot devices alone would not have been able to convey the depth and scope of the devastation at hand. As the country moved on, they all moved apart and, more or less, moved off the radar of the times. Some of characters drifting through America’s trailer parks and homeless shelters. Some lost their house mortgages, some lost their wives who leap for air, the right to their own lives and identity and desires. The wives and daughters discover they could not, after, all exist as Gologorsky describes their role has dictated. They cannot be the women who “Take what we can get, all of it, whenever it’s offered. Like camels storing water for the long haul through the desert.”

Grieving a past with their husbands which cannot be recaptured, the women struggle to make it home, too. And then, they all seem to fight just to make a home, with or without their men. Each of the women characters in turn, succeed or fails at this effort. Each bears a private story, but all the stories are intertwined and decked in with the bitter realization that they are struggling inside a country that simply does not provide for, and refuses to recognize as victims the families that directly bore the wounds and traumas of the Vietnam War. The unraveling of sorrows, the frustrations, and hopeless roaming of mind and body, like all the real plots of life usually are, become heart-crushing, I was thoroughly shaken by them. The stories come from a writer who refuses to compromise what she has learned about life in America after the Vietnam War. More than 20 years later, each characters’ fall into the tumults homelessness, mental illness, and in two cases, physical death and sickness are riveting. What is gained by the abrupt shift in time, (The novel jumps ahead from 1973, straight to 1993) is a breadth of scope, offering us the opportunity to see all these interlocking lives as a collection of casualties we can’t turn away from. Both the sheer multiplicity of characters, and the extremes in their situation create a sort of alternate nation. They are the ones who couldn’t keep their houses, couldn’t repair themselves, or their marriages, who have died already from sorrow or are dying now. Ultimately, most of Gologorsky characters cannot make it home. All but very few were able to make a home, either.

But there are also moving and uplifting exceptions, stories from which one can derive faith and hope. At the very end, the character Sara-Jo, the daughter of Millie and Rooster leaves Millie, dying of cancer in the hospital and she also leaves a boyfriend who has perpetuated her inherited conflicts in relationship and sex. Her father, Rooster is now an alcoholic drifter of the streets, but she is about to find a place within herself to at least halfway cope with him. Sara-Jo becomes, by virtue of her sheer youth and energy a symbol, perhaps, of some future for the next generation. And we believe she is finally able to escape a legacy of hopelessness, submission to destructive impulses, and self-destruction which her parents have left to her. But, there is an important condition placed on this hope. As Sara-Jo enters a diner, just having left her boyfriend for good, certain the dying Millie will no longer need her by her side, she spots an old woman across the aisle.

“The woman sits alone,” Gologorsky writes, “her long white brain braided and wrapped around a large head. One feathery earrings her shoulders her shoulders. The woman leans towards her (Sara-Jo) and whispers, “Give me some money and I’ll tell you your fortune. At your age, it’s mostly good luck.”
“I don’t believe in luck. How much?” (Sara-Jo tells the woman.)
“Whatever you can spare is my good luck,” (The woman answers)
“Sara-Jo smiles.
With effort, the woman inches her large bulk out of her booth and into the seat facing Sara-Jo. She holds a pack of cigarettes.
“No smoking in here, right?”
“These are Mickey Mouse.” The woman shifts closer.
“Excuse me?”
“Not real. Five-and-dime store, make-believe chocolate cigarettes. You live around here?”
“For the time being. Does the owner know you tell fortunes?”
“I don’t do it in front of his face. I dishwash three mornings a week for a few bucks, and get to sit here all winter. Make a fist.“”
Sara Jo obeys. The woman weighs it in her hand. “Good heft. You need heft when you’re young, also when you’re old. It’s not important in middle age.”
“Why?” Sara Jo asks her.
“You’re on top of the hill. You need it going up and you need it coming down. “The woman taps her fist. “Unclench.“
“Do I have a long life-line?”
“I don’t believe in life-lines,” the woman says, “Just journeys. First you must know where you have been.” The woman turns her hand over, massages the knuckles. “You have fighter’s bones.”
“I do, don’t I?” She (Sara-Jo) says more to herself than to the woman. “Am I leaving soon?”
“Only the old leave.” the woman’s dark eye beneath thick white brows looks past her. “The old leave everything, even their breathing.”
I don’t understand.”
“You’re not tired enough to understand.” The dark eyes settle on her.
“Are you putting me on?”
Again the woman studies her palms. “Your journey began last night.”
“What?” She hears her own quick breathing.
“You manage without being prepared. that’s your strength. It always will be,” Suddenly the woman sits back, plucks out a cigarette, sticks it between her lips, takes it out again. “If I concentrate, I can imagine a few puffs.”
“Why not smoke the real stuff?”
“Too expensive”
Sara-Jo feels around inside her jacket pocket, pulls out a twenty dollar bill and hands it to her.
“I’ll bring you coffee. It costs nothing.”
She watches the woman shuffle towards the counter, then her eyes slide to the window, to the flat unbroken gray sky, to the naked tree limbs between tall black telephone poles. When she reaches the top of the hill, her view is going to be spectacular. That’s for damn sure.”

It could be the author meant this last image as a way to express the potential of a different, wiser America. A kind of Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry Thoreau America where once, long ago, retreating into a solitude of silences, building an individual castle filled with family and bonds -- a Walden Pond of the spirit so to speak -- was our political isolationistic life. And not the political expansionism, the unwelcome penetration, and invasion of other people’s lands.

But, however, the author meant her ending; it left me with the sense that an open road was being illuminated with the possibility of hope. And in every way, emotional and literary, this is a novel to cherish for its openness. It deftly awakens us again to the spoils of war. And to an awareness of how the suppression of truths about the lives led after war has stopped us from examining war’s long-reaching, more subtle devastations. This theme is more urgent now, the lessons in the novel all too vivid and threatening, especially if we do not heed its warnings.

1984: Minitruths and Maxiluv

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Barry Baldwin) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:25:19 GMT

2003 marked the centenary of George Orwell's birth, an anniversary preluded by Christopher Hitchens' welcome eulogy, Why Orwell Matters (2002), and consolidated by two new biographies from Gordon Bowker and D.J. Taylor. Back in 1999, fifty years after the publication of 1984, the Waterstone's poll for the (pseudo-)millenial novel put it in third place in tandem with The Lighthouse, behind the winner Ulysses and runners-up Proust and The Great Gatsby. As is still too often forgotten - his 1991 biographer Michael Sheldon well calls it his most misunderstood work - the novel is satire, not prediction. As political satire, it ranks second only to his own Animal Farm. The "profound and terrifying" (Lionel Trilling's New Yorker verdict) impression left on the reader will not be dimmed by nit-picking. Still, to work fully, satire (like farce) depends upon coherent detail and inner logic. Writers on Orwell, even admiring ones, tend to disparage his novels, an attitude encouraged by Orwell himself who, while composing 1984, wrote (10 May 1948) to Julian Symons, "I am not a real novelist anyway." All this, plus a re-viewing of Michael Radford's generally excellent film version with Richard Burton in his last role as O'Brien - the 1954 BBC effort with Peter Cushing, Yvonne Mitchell, and Andre Morell, which I remember seeing, now seems forgotten, while Michael Anderson's 1956 abomination, despite the presence of Michael Redgrave, ending with a defiant Winston Smith (Edmond O'Brien) shouting "Down With Big Brother", deserves to be - led me back to the book itself and some consequent ponderings, now (2009) cued in by the 50th anniversary of 1984's publication.

Is there anything new to say? The Sunday Telegraph (18 May 2003) recently came up with a pseudo-novelty, the 'revelation' that Orwell thought he had killed a fellow pupil at Eton through voodoo. The source given is a letter by his school friend, the great Byzantine historian Sir Steven Runicman. In fact, a version of this story was given by Shelden (pp.65-6), who takes it from the 1956 Orwell biography by Christopher Hollis.

How Orwell would have laughed at this! But Runciman, with whom Orwell kept in post-school touch, might have a more real relevance to 1984. Namely, its opening sentence with the clocks famously striking thirteen. It may not be easy to visualise a 24-hour clock dial, much less the one later mentioned on Winston's wrist-watch. Yet Jacopo Dondi's pioneering 1344 Padua clock had such a one; cf. Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine (Penguin, 1976, pp.160-1). Orwell might have known of this via Runciman. At all events, he would have been horrified by the philistine remark of Labour Education Minister Charles Clarke (quoted in the Spectator, 17 May 2003) that mediaeval historians are mere "ornaments", undeserving of state support (Mini-Ed, indeed!). Orwell would have preferred Oxford don K.B.McFarlane's (Alan Bennett's tutor) contention that mediaeval studies are "just a branch of the entertainment industry."

At school, Orwell was a prize-winning classicist. There are some visible elements of this that go generally unremarked in 1984. The old codger in the pub who tells Winston that one advantage of age is "no truck with women, and that's a great thing" is actually repeating a well known observation by Sophocles. O'Brien's Party-approved astronomy has a lot in common with both the relativist Protagoras' "Man is the Measure of All Things" and the beliefs of both the pre-Socratic Anaxagoras and the Greek atomists (a major influence on Karl Marx whose doctoral dissertation was devoted to them) that the sun and stars were just bits of fiery stone, no nearer or further away than they seemed to be and no bigger than the human hand which could blot out their sight by covering the eyes. For good measure, O'Brien adds the doctrine of Aristotle and others that the sun revolves around the earth, an item uncannily anticipated in Winston's thoughts much earlier in the book: "At one time, it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun."

We all know, or thought we did, that the title 1984 simply reverses the digits of 1948, the year of its completion. However, Sally Coniam in the Times Literary Supplement (31 December, p.14), exhumed a poem entitled 'End of the Century 1984' published in 1934 in her school magazine by Orwell's first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, and concluded that "surely nothing before has so directly suggested the influence of his clever first wife as this poem." Shelden was attracted to this notion, Bernard Crick (one of Orwell's other most distinguished biographers) and Peter Davison (editor of the 20-volume complete Orwell) less so. At least, the idea of an uxorious Orwell does something to dispell the nonsense still pedalled (e,g, in Philip Hensher's Spectator review of Bowker and Taylor) about his supposed misogyny: "women are repeatedly humiliated in small ways throughout his work, and from time to time he gives full rein to a fantasy of ugly violence," a striking example of the 'biographical fallacy'. The "ugly fantasy" is illustrated by Winston's early thoughts about Julia when he suspects she is a Thought Police agent: "He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian." The only thing worth a word here is actually Winston's surprising remembrance of the Sebastian story itself. The fantasy suits Smith, not his creator: "Winston disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones."

Despite Coniam and media-manufactured images of 'the dreaded year', 1984 remains a simple reversed 1948, with no other significance. When his American publishers, Harcourt Brace, jibbed, an unconcerned Orwell said they might call it whatever they liked. H ehimself had been talked out of his own original title by his British publisher, Fredric Warburg. When he began drafting the novel in 1946, it was to be called The Last Man in Europe. There is a remnant of this in the Ministry of Love torture scenes where O'Brien sarcastically says to Winston "You are the last man."

But how could Winston Smith be the last man in Europe? He lives on Airstrip One (Britain), third most populous province in Oceania. According to 'The Book', The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, supposedly written by the arch-traitort Emmanuel Goldstein but actually the work of O'Brien and the Inner Party, Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atllantic Islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. The whole of continental Europe is subsumed into Eurasia.

London is still London (and Colchester, the only other island city mentioned, is still Colchester), but Britain is now Airstrip One. Why? Apart from France and Germany, whose new designations are not given, all other countries and cities have kept their old names Probably the reason was to help the subsequent joke of Nelson's Column being replaced by a statue of Big Brother commemorating his vanquishing of Eurasian aeroplanes in the Battle of Airstrip One. The parody of World War II iconography is obvious, the logic less so, since the War is Peace chapter of Goldstein's book states categorically that "no invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken." And was the statuary changed every time Oceania switched alliances between Eastasia and Eurasia? Julia may have been right to suspect that the rocket bombs falling daily upon London were actually fired by the govenrment "just to keep people frightened" - nowadays, that would be an Internet conspiracy theory. Here, she is brighter than Winston, to whom this idea "had literally never occurred." Was The Last Couple in Europe ever contemplated as a title? Probably not. It is remarkable that Julia should never have heard of The Brotherhood, since we have earlier been told that everybody else has, while her notion that the war was not really happening leaves unexplained the parading and executions of captives since "foreigners, whether from Eurasia or Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners." Perhaps they were fakes, a trick allegedly pulled throughout history from Caligula and Domitian to Idi Amin. Something else left unexplained is how the atom bombs dropped on Colchester and an unspecified rural spot in1953, also the hundreds that fell all over Europe and North America, had apparently no radio-active effect at all. Outside Goldstein's book, America is virtually never mentioned, apart from the tell-tale Times photograph of the former leaders Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford attending "some Party function in New York." Canadians, by contrast, might be flattered that this treacherous trio flew on their perfidious mission to Eurasia from a secret airfield in their country, less so by the Party's version of capitalist times in Britain when recalcitrant workers might be "shipped off to Canada, like cattle." The rest of Oceania is completely marginal.

According to Goldstein's book, the basis for Oceania was laid by the British Empire's absorption into the United States. As Orwell frequently mentions in his journalism, his notion of the three superstates was inspired by the post-1945 carve-up of the world. America is evidently the biggest country in Oceania. As Shelden puts it, "this does not necessarily mean that Big Brother himself is American - simply that his empire is dominated by his largest possession, and its standards have been imposed on smaller places. But Big Brother is neither a capitalist nor a communist."

Well, Big Brother could be Uncle Sam rather than Uncle Joe, though his heavy black moustache points more to Stalin. Clement Attlee is not a contender. Orwell insisted "My novel is NOT intende as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party of which I am a supporter," an affidavit wasted on Hensher for whom the book "can only posibly be read as a vicious satire on the depivations of Attlee's England." Airstrip One's currency is now the dollar, not the rouble, but it also has the metric system, which to this day America refuses to adopt. Are the Americans the unspecified "buggers" who dropped the atom bomb on Colchester (why this small provincial town?)?. If so, why is Oceania governed by the principles of Ingsoc rather than Yanksoc? Whatever its national origin, the imposition of this ideology with its attendant textbook emphasis on the evils of capitalism surely puts Big Brother firmly into what used to be called the socialist camp.

Big Brother's empire has no capital, yet when Julia talks of the "government of Oceania," Winston does not correct her. How does this vast state extending from Britain to New Zealand work? Especially when it is said that the Party's faking of big lottery winners is facilitated "by the absence of any real inter-comunication between one part of Oceania and another." Not that this prevents "spontaneous demonstrations all over Oceania this morning when workers marched out of factories..." - how would London know this, and have time zones been abolished?

We are told in the opening pages that "Nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws." This comes straight after the information that the Ministry of Love maintains Law and Order, and before the remark "There was no law, not even an unwritten one, against visiting the Chestnut Tree Cafe." Later on, Party-produced pornography is purveyed to proletarian youths "under the impression that they were buying something illegal." In general practice, there is nothing to distinguish between laws and the frequently mentioned "rules", e.g. the one against consorting with prostitutes which carries a penalty of five years in a labour camp.

Talking of sex, we all know the old line which claims it is good for the complexion. This seems to have worked for Winston, whose running leg sore cleared up after he began sleeping with Julia. According to 'The Book', nothing is efficient in Oceania save the Thought Police, a cue for the famous telescreens, remarkable devices in a society otherwise so tehcnically primitive, in whose Newspeak there is no word for Science. These transmitting-receiving communicators are a giant advance on Dick Tracy's two-way wrist-radio with which Orwell, well versed in American comics, will have been familiar. Winston says they are "Quite delicate enough" to detect any irregular heartbeat. Supposedly, they watch people all the time: the Physical Education instructress on them can pick Winston out by name and number from the entire thirty-to-forty segment of the population, as can the screen watcher in a crowded cell in the Ministry of Love. Overall, in Oceania, the Inner Party has six million members, about 2% of the total population; 85% are proles; the rest belong to the Outer Party, to which Winston probably should not have been admitted, since both his parents had been purged back in the 1950s. An impressive feat of 24-hour electronic invigilation. Perhaps this is why the "great majority" of proles do not have telescreens in their homes, even though the Thought Police had agents "moving always among them." Winston is surprised by the absence of a telescreen from Mr Charrington's antique shop in the prole district, but blithely accepts the explanation "I never had one of those things. Too expensive," even though this implied notion of choice is utterly alien to an Outer Party member. And how did the proles pick up and take a fancy to the new Hate Week song, disseminated by "endless plugging" on the telescreens most of them hadn't got?

Regarding Mr Charrington, later revealed to be a Thought Police spy, was Orwell having a bit of quiet inner semantic fun here? Some years ago, a newspaper item revealed that 84 Charing Cross was used for wartime security work. As our earlier classical allusions showed, the novel is rich and varied in its linguistic and literary nuances. Many previous writers have connected the Ministry of Truth with Orwell's wartime experiences of BBC bureaucracy and censorship. One further matter has escaped attention, namely the 1948 (of all years!) BBC Variety Programmes Policy Guide for Writers & Producers, with its absolute ban on: jokes about lavatories, effeminacy in men, immorality of any kind; also on suggestive references to honeymoon couples, chambermaids, fig leaves, prostitutes, ladies' underwear (e.g. "winter drawers on"), animal habits (e.g. "rabbits"), commercial travellers. This makes an ironic counterpoint to the Ministry's Porno Section where Julia works.

At a higher level, after the marathon rewriting of history in Hate Week, to cover up the latest sudden switch of alliance from Eastasia to Eurasia, "A deep and as it were secret sigh went through the Department. A mighty deed, which never could be mentioned, had been achieved." Phraseology and sentiment are strikingly similar to those of Himmler's speech of 4 October 1943 (in volume 4 of the Nuremberg documents on Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression) apropos The Final Solution: "This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written."

Winston realises that renting Mr Charrington's spare room to pursue his affair with Julia was a fatal folly. Not to mention leaving his incriminating diary with the words DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER open for all to see - "An incredibly stupid thing." All too typical, though. He knows that the Newspeak lexiographer Syme is ill-advised to frequent the Chestnut Tree Cafe, disreputable haunt of the old discredited Party leaders. So, why had he been sitting there in mid-afternoon back in 1966, in the midst of its telescreens, at the next table to the arch-traitors Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford? Little wonder that, after his arrest, he learns from O'Brien that the Thought Police had had him under surveillance for seven years, although no key incident for 1977 appears in the novel - Winston dwells only on 1973, when he saw the Times photograph that proved the trio's confessions were false. Dates, though, are not Winston's strong point: at one moment he reflects that Big Brother was unheard of till the middle Sixties, the period of the great purges when "the story really began;" yet his own parents had been "swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the Fifties." Given such imprecisions, it is no great shock that, having twice reflected that the Thought Police always came for you in the middle of the night, he and Julia are actually arrested by them at 20.30 of a summer evening while it is still light.

If Syme was vaporised for being "too clever", how has O'Brien himself survived so long? Everything Syme predicts to Winston about language and thought is repeated at greater length by O'Brien in the interrogation scenes. Mind you, O'Brien is a difficult character to weigh up. He is introduced as "a member of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature" - Winston had seen him "perhaps a dozen times in as many years." Not formally named as a Party Leader, O'brien leads a versatilely busy life: he helped to write the fake Goldstein book, he was an interrogator not only of Winston and Julia but of victims ranging from the Jones-Aaranson-Rutherford trio to Syme, as well as these annual visits as agent provocateur to the Ministry of Truth. In the Ministry of Love, Winston does not understand the first reference to Room 101; neither does a co-prisoner, his fellow-worker, the poet Ampleforth. Yet when she is ordered there, a female cellmate "seemed to shrivel and turn a different colour," while its mention drives another prisoner hysterical with terror. According to O'Brien, "Everyone knows what is in Room 101:" how anyone could, before being in it, is not explained.

Winston is not the last man in Europe or wherever. Julia was "in some ways far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda" - as she says, "One knows the truth is all lies anyway." Moreover, "She took it for granted that everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hate the Party and would break the rules if he thought it safe to do so." This certainly applied to her many previous lovers, while (as seen) everyone in the Party knew the lottery prizes were faked. It is not clear why the Thought Police release some and not others. This conundrum is acknowledged ("Sometimes people were released and allowed to remain at liberty for a much as a year or two years") but not explained. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford are tried, convicted, set free, re-arrested, re-tried, and shot. Most, like Syme and Withers, are simply vaporised and become 'unpersons'. Julia is quite literally (to use a favourite Orwell adverb) a burnt-out case in terms of her rebelliousness and sexuality: how many other such - neither persons nor unpersons - were walking the streets of Oceania? As Winston wonders, how could Goldstein continue to attract so many followers? Even if all were innocent, the phenomenon implies a mass ability to disbelieve. Winston himself is not only released but given a sinecure sub-sub-committee position with four others "all very similar to himself" at the Ministry of Truth relating to the Eleventh edition of the Newspeak Dictionary - what happened to the Tenth, still months away from publication just before his arrest? - dealing with the question of putting commas inside or outside brackets.

The famous finale is also problematic. At face value, the 'cured' Winston loves Big Brother: "Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache," albeit earlier he could not recall hearing of Big Brother before sometime in the Sixties, not to mention the fact that he is himself only thirty-nine. But, a couple of pages before, in his last, chance meeting with Julia, both understand very well what has been done to them: their love has been destroyed by consciousness of mutual betrayal, not diverted to Big Brother.

Various other things jar. Is it really credible, at any level of satire, that Julia, while aware of oranges, does not know what a lemon was? Or that neither she nor Winston had ever seen or tasted wine? O'Brien remarks "Very little of it gets to the Outer Party;" the constituent states of Oceania are full of wine-producing countries. There are also slack repetitions, e.g. we hear twice at some length in almost identical language about the interdict on proles drinking gin and the kaleidoscopes and versificators that mechanically produce their songs and pornography. I dare say some of this is attributable to the conditions of the novel's final production. As described by Shelden, as late as November 1948 the manuscript was still too disorganised to send to the printers, so the desperately ill Orwell re-typed the whole thing himself in three weeks. On the other hand, he was subsequently unwilling to accept any alterations to the text of the American edition; and one wonders (we are not told) if none of this was noticed or queried by the sub-editors and proof-readers at Secker & Warburg? These are all amiable puzzlements. I should like to think that Orwell, for whom my admiration is almost boundless, would welcome them for debate. Perhaps I am simply insufficient at Doublethink. There is no need to redo Shelden's excellent account of Orwell's sources, especially Cyril Connolly's little-remembered short story Year Nine. On the documentary side, it may be noted that when O'Brien threatens Winston with the caged rats, he observes that it was a common torture in imperial China, whereas we now know (E. Nolte, Der Europaische Burgerkrieg 1917-45, Berlin 1987, pp. 115,564n24) that it was a method practised by the Cheka. The demented confessions extracted by the Thought Police find a black farcical antecedent in the one produced at the Moscow Trials of 1937 admitting to "placing broken glass in workers' butter" - V.Z.Rogovin, 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror, London 1988). When he has Winston reflect on how Party histories of the Revolution were pushing Big Brother's role ever further back into the past, Orwell anticipates North Korea where Kim Il Sung's supposed leading of anti-Japanese guerillas has been officially dated to 1926 - when he was just 14.

It seems wryly appropriate that at least one famous Orwellian scene should be plagiarised in a recent novel, The Concert (English tr. 1994) by the wildly-overpraised Albanian writer and fake dissident Ismael Kadare, whose native land was for half a century under the surrealist, quasi-1984 regime of Enver Hoxha - the Ministry of Plenty's favourite slogan "Our New and Happy Life" was actually ubiquitous in communist Albania. Kadare describes a Chinese committee engaged in the invention of Lei Feng, that famous (in real life) paradigm of all virtues of the communist 'New Man'. This copies Winston's fabrication of the cynosure of Party virtues, Comrade Ogilvy - is the name a tribute to his fellow St Cyprian's pupil, advertising mogul David Ogilvy? When his job is done, Winston reflects that "It is curious that you could create dead men but not living ones," loudly echoed by Kadare's punchline "They'd just given birth to a dead man." On the big issue, Winston was right: "If there is hope, it lies in the proles." How Orwell would have enjoyed watching the Berlin Wall come down and the general collapse of what passed as communism. Albania, again, can be invoked. I have seen two editions of Hoxha's book Conversations with Stalin. The first (1979) contains a sentence lavishly praising his senior colleague and fellow wartime resistance leader, Mehmet Shehu. The second, rushed out after Shehu's mysterious death and denouncement for simultaneously spying for at least six countries (how did he keep all these treasons straight?), omits the sentence - he is now an unperson. Despite holding all the military, police, and secret police (Sigurimi) aces in 1990, the Party and all it works were (in Winston's hopeful words) blown to pieces by a few peaceful demonstrations of workers and students. Quite simply, the Party had lost its voodoo - Doubleplusgood!

Canadian novelist-critic Margaret Atwood, in her collection Moving Targets (Toronto 2004, pps. 331-337, reproducing her talk 'Orwell and Me', given June 13, 2003, on BBC Radio 3 and published in 'The Guardian' (June 16), writes: "The essay on Newspeak is written in standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen and that language and individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of 1984 is over. Thus, it's my view that Orwell has much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he's usually been given credit for."

Atwood's point had (apparently unknown to her) been anticipated by David Smith & Michael Mosher, Orwell for Beginners (London 1984), p. 178: " The Party tries hard to seem invincible and permanent. However, in the Newspeak Appendix Orwell indicates that this appearance is unjustified - Newspeak, the Appendix says, was the bizarre product of a failed dictatorship, which gave rise to a better society afterwards." This unusual interpretation is well worth discussing. How else might we take the Newspeak Appendix? What do other Orwellians think?