The Republic of Dissent

The attractiveness of unattractiveness [in literature]

Sugary excerpt from Lionel Shriver, whose writing I find as sobering as a good cup of Kenyan coffee:

[...]do we always want to read about characters who conform to current political conventions – who don’t smoke, never say anything bigoted, and always recycle their yoghurt pots? Or who conform to our private code of behaviour – in which case, fiction writers might write for niche markets, their novels labelled “suitable for vegetarians” (no characters eat meat) or “does not contain nuts” (what a pity, a novel without nuts). Surely if fiction recorded the doings only of good campers who anguish about climate change and buy fair trade coffee, novels would be insufferably dull.(...)Goodness is not only boring but downright annoying. In fiction and reality both, multilingual, loftily-educated ponces on missions to save the rainforest are probably pains in the bum. Thus, however readily I might construct exemplars who pick up litter and volunteer at soup kitchens, this cheap courting of your approval might well backfire. Despite my heavy-handed stacking of the moral deck, you wouldn’t like them. Nick Hornby made exactly this point in his delightful novel How to Be Good, in which the main character’s determination to be virtuous – he gives away the family assets and invites homeless people to live in the house – is delectably repellent.

The real real thing

Sugary excerpt of the weekend from Elizabeth Lowry's review of Wendy Steiner's The Real Real Thing: The model in the mirror of art:

Today’s aesthetic controversies seem to turn specifically on the issues of truth-telling and the ethical treatment of the real in art. Oprah Winfrey’s indignation over authorial fraud can and often does make headlines – consider the furore when James Frey’s  account of his drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces (2003), and Herman Rosenblat’s Holocaust memoir, Angel at the Fence (2008), were revealed to have been less than scrupulously factual. “Readers demand their money back for memoirs that lie; publishers rush to withdraw unsold copies from bookstores; editors, denying collusion with their fraudulent authors, are nevertheless fired for their credulity.” The real thing is no longer enough – our touchstone now is the real real thing.

The unbearable futility of the erotic capital and of feminism

Nichi Hodgson 's 'review' of Catherine Hakim's Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital made me laugh to tears. Sugar except:

The reason women have failed to capitalise on their erotic capital, says Hakim, is the fault of feminism allied with Christian conservatism. Puritan Anglo-Saxon feminism, including post-feminism, Hakim claims, is "profoundly uncomfortable with sexuality, and frames it in a relentlessly negative perspective." As such, "feminists have been so brainwashed by patriarchal ideology that they have been quite unable to understand how sexuality and erotic capital can be sources of erotic power." Feminism has established a "false dichotomy" between beauty and brains.
While I doubt Hakim would recognise a post-feminist if fondled by one in a bi-curious flurry, she seems to be blaming mind-body dualism on feminists, despite identifying "Western thought" as its source elsewhere in the book. She also seems to have missed the point of what feminism has ever wanted from sex. A minority of radicals excepted, all feminists have ever asked for is women's stake in imagining and enacting sexual desire. Employing your erotic capital may be sensible opportunism but it's also pretty boring manipulating men whose sexual fantasies are predicated on the script for a "Girls Gone Wild" episode; depressing too, if these same men constitute your pool of potential life partners.(...)That erotic capital enhances professional, market-place performance makes perfect sense. But applying it to personal, intimate relationships overlooks one very important point. You don't need to be living in a tree house and swapping sacks of millet for acorns to want to leave commercial transactions at the bedroom door. In the Anglo-Saxon West, now that we don't need to marry to preserve family fortunes, secure male heirs or find someone to "keep" us, some things are worth more than erotic capital­-love, for example.

My view on Hodgson's take of Hakim is that it is unnecessary and a further indication that too many still don't understand that there is a difference between feminism and femininity and that feminism is to women's identity and rights (I have an deepening aversion for the term women's rights) what socialism is to liberalism/progressivism. It is tiresome even though often comically entertaining to see women still elevating and generalizing their personal views and differences as if speaking as a woman or as feminism means speaking for women and representing some other than an individual and therefore limited (and often irrelevant) viewpoint.

Philosophy can be literature

The sugary except on which I'm going to munch on to have a meaningful and productive weekend is from David Winters's review of Gary Gutting's on French philosophy, Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960:

It is perfectly possible to read works of philosophy as if they were works of literature. To read them without concern for their ‘truth content,’ attending instead to what leads them not to describe the world, but to create worlds, or to propose worlds at odds with our own. In the end, philosophy never really does succeed in describing anything. It tries to articulate what life is like, but it fails, at all times, in all places. This is the very thing that reveals and redeems it as literature.

The convenient time for outrage

Sugary except of a good and worth-reading review (better than the silly and petty one by Adam Kirsch in the New Republic) of Stéphane Hessel's Indignez-vous (translated as Time for outrage in the UK) by Sudhir Hazareesingh:

At the same time, in its denunciation of the moral order and conformism of official French institutions, this pamphlet succinctly captures the French zeitgeist (in a truly sinister fashion, Hessel’s alma mater the École Normale banned a meeting he was due to address in January on the issue of Palestine, on the grounds that it might threaten public order). Yet Hessel’s outrage also reflects the despair of many French progressives at the vapid and fissiparous state of the Left. He does not address or seek to transcend this fragmentation; indeed it might be argued that his appeal remains rooted in a moralist individualism which inherently limits the scope for effective collective action. But Time for Outrage! compensates for this political deficiency by consummating the French rupture with the practices and values of Sarkozism: its hollowness and vulgarity, its obsession with demonizing immigrants and Islam, its failure to tackle France’s endemic social and economic problems, and its consistent pandering to the neo-Vichyist rhetoric of the Front National. The latter policy has boomeranged spectacularly: the French President’s popularity has plummeted in recent months, while support for the extreme Right has grown correspondingly. In early March 2011 an opinion poll on voting intentions for next year’s presidential elections placed the new Front National leader Marine Le Pen ahead of Nicolas Sarkozy (and all other candidates) – a trend which adds another element to Hessel’s list of causes for collective indignation, and makes his analogy with the French Resistance even more compelling than perhaps he might have imagined.

Shocking confession: In spite of myself, I got a copy of Hessel's pamphlet. I haven't read it. I'm waiting to see if it is going to stand the test of time. That said I'm going to steal Hazareesingh's expression, French zeitgeist, it will stand the test of time!

Indignant Indignation

Adam Kirsch on France's number one best seller Stéphane Hessel's Indignez-vous:

If it was impossible to replace politics with righteous anger in 1944, it is surely all the more impossible in 2011. In fact, when Hessel tries to make “get angry” into a political platform, the results range from incoherent to sinister. For the attractive thing about anger is also the dangerous thing about it: It turns consensus, the basis of democratic politics, into a vice. All of France’s problems today, Hessel explains, can be attributed to the rich: “the power of money … has never been so large, insolent, and egotistical, with its servants even in the highest spheres of the State.” These are the same kinds of malefactors, he says, who were responsible for the defeat of 1940 and the rise of Vichy: “When I try to understand the origins of fascism, why were invaded by it and by Vichy, I tell myself that the rich, with their egotism, were terribly afraid of the Bolshevik Revolution.”
It follows from this equation that any attempt to cut back the French welfare state, such as Nicholas Sarkozy has been making with limited success, is the moral equivalent of Vichy. One of Hessel’s examples of the virtuous indignation he is calling for is the French teachers’ strike in 2008: The teachers who rebelled against proposed budget cuts “decided that these reforms departed too far from the ideal of the republican school, were too much at the service of a society of money.” Yet Hessel does not say anything at all about the content of the reform, which was extremely moderate—to shed 8,000 teaching jobs through attrition, by not replacing 50 percent of retiring teachers. Nor does he say anything about the motivation for it—to balance the French budget in line with European Union requirements, and to respond to falling class sizes. In other words, Hessel’s indignation does not allow for consideration of the trade-offs involved in every ordinary political decision. This kind of thinking, which makes every reform a conspiracy and every strike a defense of the Republic, explains why—as the education minister complained at the time—there were 33 French education strikes between 2000 and 2008.

My reaction to these words is amused bewilderment. I have to admit that I don't get this whole (too self-righteous not to be fabricated) indignation about Indignez-vous, an essay that I'm not planning to read. I don't need somebody to tell how to feel and when to be outraged, which  is a bling bling and self-involved emotion, which defines our times while reminding that politics is alas solely about the glitz. 

Adam Kirsch's critique of Hessel suffers from his insincerity for it is obvious that he wants/needs to pick a fight and sought out reasons to delegitimate Hessel for he doesn't have any argument than his Pavlovian outrage to his esssay. Kirsch looked desperately for reasons to be outraged in order not to have to get past the ideology question and to take the easy road and intellectual-cowardly road out by calling Hessel's essay dangerous. People usually label books as dangerous when they don't have the intellectual muscle to defeat its arguments and to make it irrelevant.

I'm grateful that I have enough weight not to be outraged by Kirsch's critique and to resist the childish temptation to buy a copy to Hessel's essay just to bug Kirsch.

Moralist like Tony Blair

Sugary excerpt from Lionel Barber's review of George W. Bush's memoirs Decision Points:

Like Tony Blair, painted in the book as a fervent supporter of the invasion of Iraq, Bush is a moralist. Like Blair, Bush insists all the major intelligence agencies thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and the threat of WMD falling into terrorist hands was too great to bear. Like Blair, he cannot understand why more people still do not accept the moral argument for removing Saddam. “I didn’t see how anyone could deny that liberating Iraq advanced human rights,” he writes.

I'm tempted to accept this excerpt with  a quote from John Steinbeck: only fools do not learn fro experience. However, neither Blair no Bush are fools, they are just complaisant moralists who believe that God made them kings because it/s/he knew they could make the right decision based on faith, on what it/s/he wanted them to do. What is the difference between Bush, Blair, other political leaders who believe religiously that God is on their side and  Ahmadinejad?

The meaning and creepiness of a fetus

Because I'm avoiding like the plague or just water-boarding the whole George W. Bush's 'I wasn't that bad' tour, I missed this:

Plugging his memoir Decision Points, Mr. Bush revealed the family secret (described in the book with his mother's permission) in an interview with NBC's Matt Lauer last night.

The former president said Barbara Bush asked doctors to save the fetus so she could show it to him. (He was a teenager.)

"There's no question that affected me, a philosophy that we should respect life," he told Mr. Lauer. "There was a human life, a little brother or sister."

I guess there is nothing stronger than the bond between a mother and her child. That said, I'm wondering whether 'values' can be said to be sacred and absolute when they are justified or rather legitimated without thought or analysis, but just with a 'being,' whether it is/was in itself or for itself.

Oedipus, guilt and fate

Sugary excerpt from J.M. Coetzee's review of Philip Roth's latest, Nemesis:

At the core of the Oedipus fable, and of the archaic Greek worldview enshrined in it, lies a question foreign to the modern, post-tragic imagination. How does the logic of justice work when vast universal forces intersect the trajectories of individual human lives? In particular, what is to be learned from the fate of a man who unwittingly carried out the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, a man who did not see until he was blind?

To respond that for one man to unwittingly (“by accident”) kill his own father and then unwittingly (“by chance”) marry his own mother is so statistically rare a sequence of events—even rarer than bearing the plague while seeming healthy—that it can hold no general lesson, or, to put it another way, that the laws of the universe are probabilistic in nature, not to be disconfirmed by a single aberrant individual case—to respond in this way would to Sophocles seem like evading the question. Such a man lived: his name was Oedipus. He experienced such a fate. How should his fate be understood?

I've always wondered whether guilt infects one's life no matter whether s/he was conscious of the morality her/his actions. Camus answered my question by asserting that human beings are solely guilty of their ignorance. It is because guilt isn't the same as responsibility that fate is mostly about faith. C'est simple mais c'est vrai.

Arousing literature

Mary Elisabeth Williams poses the question of the day:

Is it entirely possible that someone out there reading a fictional account of a rape could become aroused?

Is it just me, but doesn't that sound like a limited question, one that makes two gross assumptions, the first being that sexual pleasure is always pornographic and  the second that the only trouble with rape is the lack of jouissance or just enjoyment?

I have to say that I'm not convinced that a novel can be pornographic and artistic or that if it makes rape pornographic, it is ought to be placed in the cemetery of forbidden books.

Mean writers

The sentence of the day:

The irony is that writers are generally meaner to other writers than critics are.

I would say that Tahar Ben Jelloun's criticism of Michel Houellebecq's recent 'novel' La Carte et le Territoire proves the veracity of this sentence. I will add also that it is possible to be ferociously mean and to be on point and pertinent.

Being Bob Woodward out

Daniel Drezner asks a valid and important question:

(...)with Obama's Wars, has Bob Woodward demonstrated that he's about as irrelevant as the debutante circuit? 

My answer to that question is yes, but I don't think it happened with Woodward's latest but his books on the Bush years, which made it obvious that  he was limited by his desire to being the premier insider and to keep access to all of his important sources, to the powerful people in Washington, DC and elsewhere. When a reporter becomes more worried about access than about anything else, s/he has become irrelevant because he is no longer a journalist, but a confidante. We know from history that the confidante of the King's court and were most of the times also the King's jester because people knew that he was inoffensive and that he was first and foremost a courtisan.

Naipaul and writing about 'Africa'

Excerpt of Aminatta Forna's review of V.S. Naipaul's latest The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African belief in the Guardian:

It is a quest through the continent for the spirit of African belief, the belief systems that preceded the arrival of Christianity and Islam – which is very much in keeping with the legacy of Joseph Conrad, who is referenced several times in the book. Already this feels cliched and tiresome; one yearns for the day when an author from outside can approach Africa without invoking the "heart of darkness" mythology. In 1975, Chinua Achebe published an essay attacking Conrad's best-known work as racist and already the novelist Robert Harris has described The Masque of Africa as "toxic".

This review makes me feel uncomfortable for two reasons. The first reason is that again, it is assumed that there is a such a thing as an "Africa" populated by Africans, with a particular identity and beliefs, which make them atypical or rather which explain why their continent is conventionally believed to be unmodern or in the back of the train of civilization. The second reason is that it seems that too writer who wants to write about the African continent like to make it feel as if it is an unique undertaking that must be judge by different standards and that their work must be judge with compassion and while having a forgiving consideration that they are doing something too difficult by going to the barbarians. The trouble is that reviewers and critiques enable them more often than not and judge their work as if it is different, out of the margins of literature because the subject matter is particular and so dark and foreign.

Since having my book published, I have realized that in France, in particular, it assumed that Africa and Africans are so different and atypical that their writings have to be belittled or graded with a curve and that more importantly, they are only entitled to talk about darkness, africanity, colonialism, and post-colonialism. The trouble comes when you refuse to fit that mold...I have wondered whether Conrad's The Heart of Darkness would be such as classic if it had been written by one of the 'savages.' Culturalism is destroying literature.

Remembering before writing

Sugary excerpt of the day from Bill Benzon on the "art" of remembering before writing:

If our memories for life events are keyed to neurochemistry, then how can we possibly remember the events of our life at any time and place? The world of a person who is ravenously hungry is different from the world of that same person when he or she is consumed with sexual desire. Yet it is the same person in both cases. And the apple, which was so insignificant when sexually hungry—to the point where that apple wasn't part of the world at all—becomes a central object in the world once sexual desire has been satisfied and hunger asserts itself. Regardless of the person's biochemical state, it is still the same apple.

I have to say that although I trust my memories, I always know that what I remember more vividly is how what happened made me feel.

The only thing that I had to remember while writing my first novel, L'empreinte des choses brisées was not to use my memories to impose feelings, views, actions, or even a story of my characters, but rather to let what I remember bring me closer to my characters. It is for this reason that I like to say that my novel is a true story, not an autobiographical one.

A place that lets you breathe

Sugary excerpt is from  Harry Eyres on Artistic inspiration:

Artists, and others, are reluctant nowadays to talk about inspiration. It sounds highfalutin and vague, like some mysterious essence which floats above the earth. But inspiration in its deepest sense, far from being vague or abstract, is very intimate, physical and personal. There is nothing more intimate, physical and personal than breathing, or breathing in, which is the literal meaning of inspiration. An inspiring place is one that lets you breathe.

Paris lets me breathe, especially because it is the place where you can find the only person that marries perfection and chaos.

Paul Berman, Tariq Ramadan, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Josh Gohlke reviews Paul Berman's latest The Flight of the Intellectuals and highlights his views on 'Western Journalists' and their preference for Tariq Ramadan over Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Ramadan is attractive to Western journalists partly because he is moderate in manner, always seeking consensus and middle ground. But Berman encourages us to ask: A middle ground between which poles? Between stoning adulteresses and maybe not stoning them if we can come to an accord?
Berman figures Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali refugee-turned-activist who has unequivocally condemned mistreatment of women in the Muslim world, as Ramadan’s foil. Hirsi Ali is infallibly immoderate in tone. For that she has earned the backhanded admiration (at best) and disdain (at worst) of Buruma and other journalists. But at least some of her principles—a woman’s right to keep her genitals intact, for example—aren’t the sort on which democratic societies can afford to compromise.
How did Western journalists come to be more respectful of decorous fundamentalists than they are of brash secularists? For one thing, they fear that Hirsi Ali’s criticisms of her own tradition will embolden anti-Muslim bigots and xenophobes in America and Europe. Berman adds another answer that’s startlingly simple: rejections of Islamism have become life-threatening. 

I agree with Berman's main point about the attractiveness of Tariq Ramadan and the fact that he has acquired a legitimacy because he is moderate in tone while Ayaan Hirsi Ali isn't. I think that such a disparity in treatment shows that the notion of difference is so ingrained in certain elites that they are willing to apply different moral values to unacceptable situations as long as one is able to agree on them one some issues and thus to reassure that they are on their side, which means being on the left politically. Tariq Ramadan is perceived as being a lslamic leftist while Ayaan Hirsi Ali as radical conservative, which isn't as attractive. To use a telling comparison, I would say that in the mind of most journalists, Ramadan is close to Barack Obama while Ayaan Hirsi Ali is closer to Sarah Palin. That explains the difference in their treatment by the media. However, these realities don't lead me to the same conclusions as Berman.  I think that the mistake is always to draw a line in the sand and to chastise those such as Ian Buruma who are uncomfortable with absolutism. In short, Paul Berman is unable to accept the idea that there isn't just one way to fight extremism and that confrontation can be about something other than a brutal clash and the castigation of the wolves in sheep clothing. That inflexibility may be a sign of moral rectitude, but is problematic because it strengthens one's intellectual status without providing  solutions that change reality. But again, Berman's problem might be that he isn't interested in changing reality, but simply in condemning abnormalities and atrocities while scolding those who don' t do i with the same vigor as him.

Books, memory, and identity

Quote of the day from Fernando Báez cited by Scott McLemee in his post on book destruction:

The book is an institution of memory for consecration and permanence,and for that reason should be studied as a key element in society’s cultural patrimony.... There is no identity without memory. If we do not remember what we are, we don’t know what we are. Over the centuries, we’ve seen that when a group or nation attempts to subjugate another group or nation, the first thing they do is erase the traces of its memory in order to reconfigure its identity.... Only through the destruction of books can the murder of memory be accomplished.

The novel and absolute intimacy

Paul Auster on the novel:

a novel is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. The reader and the writer make the book together. No other art can do that. No other art can capture the essential inwardness of human life.

Sexualizing Gandhi

Only an Anglo-saxon, in this case Jad Adams,  would write a book about Gandhi and reveal  details his sex life, Gandhi:  Naked Ambition believing that he is giving revealing and capital information:

Gandhi found it easy to embrace poverty. It was chastity that eluded him. So he worked out a series of complex rules which meant he could say he was chaste while still engaging in the most explicit sexual conversation, letters and behaviour.
With the zeal of the convert, within a year of his vow, he told readers of his newspaper Indian Opinion: "It is the duty of every thoughtful Indian not to marry. In case he is helpless in regard to marriage, he should abstain from sexual intercourse with his wife."
Meanwhile, Gandhi was challenging that abstinence in his own way. He set up ashrams in which he began his first "experiments" with sex; boys and girls were to bathe and sleep together, chastely, but were punished for any sexual talk. Men and women were segregated, and Gandhi's advice was that husbands should not be alone with their wives, and, when they felt passion, should take a cold bath.
The rules did not, however, apply to him. Sushila Nayar, the attractive sister of Gandhi's secretary, also his personal physician, attended Gandhi from girlhood. She used to sleep and bathe with Gandhi. When challenged, he explained how he ensured decency was not offended. "While she is bathing I keep my eyes tightly shut," he said, "I do not know ... whether she bathes naked or with her underwear on. I can tell from the sound that she uses soap." The provision of such personal services to Gandhi was a much sought-after sign of his favour and aroused jealousy among the ashram inmates.
As he grew older (and following Kasturba's death) he was to have more women around him and would oblige women to sleep with him whom – according to his segregated ashram rules – were forbidden to sleep with their own husbands. Gandhi would have women in his bed, engaging in his "experiments" which seem to have been, from a reading of his letters, an exercise in strip-tease or other non-contact sexual activity.

Why do I feel disgusted by this information? It isn't because I believe that Gandhi was a saint or unlike any other human being, but rather because I feel that sex has become the way to bring people down to declare not that they are misogynistic, but hypocrites, but rather to caste them in a group of people that should be ostracized and are abnormal. However, it's possible  that I'm unfair to Adams and that his book offers a broader context, which explains why Gandhi's sex life matter or rather is essential to dissect today. 

An Infuriaiting book

Sugary excerpt form Ian Leslie's review of Dan Pink's Drive which made my day sunnier:

Daniel Pink’s Drive is one of 2010’s most high-profile non-fiction books. It has a timely thesis: that people are primarily motivated to work hard and achieve great things not by money, but by their own passion for what they do. It’s a good point, worth making. But I found Drive infuriating. This had nothing to do with its argument, or with Pink’s writing, which is fluent and lucid. Actually, it’s Drive that has the problem with itself, not me.
The author takes 146 pages to make his case. The remaining 80 or so pages, named “The Toolkit,” consist of what you might call meta-content or, in plain language, padding. Much of this padding seems to exist on the assumption that the reader won’t have time to read the first part–you know, the actual book.

I have to admit that I have a hard time reading self-help, self-motivating or whatever else they are call. More often than not, they are, yes, infuriating, because the author assumes that he is talking to someone who Isn't smarter than a fifth grader.

Tocqueville, America and individual interest

Sugary excerpt from Sean Wilentz's must-read review of Leo Damrosch's book on Alexis de Tocqueville and his views of America, Tocqueville's Discovery of America:

Early on, Tocqueville rejected the idea dear to the Constitution's framers and mourned by later patricians that disinterested civic virtue would animate the new republic. In its place, Tocqueville said, the Americans had found a way for individual interest (understood in the French, intérêt, as including everything that matters to an individual) to take the place of virtue, to make, he wrote, "a sort of refined and intelligent egotism" into "the pivot on which the whole machine turns." Interest properly understood required no grand sacrifices of station or treasure, but it did require a fundamental sense that individual well-being actually required foresight, small daily compromises, and acts of cooperation, lest disorder turn into chaos. Interest could provide no spirituality, but it could provide ethics and ethical habits that, even if based in utility, could reinforce morality and enhance political stability.

I'm still amazed to realized that Tocqueville was more right than wrong about America and to realize that Americans are probably unique in their belief that individual interest can be a source of virtue. An example of this belief is that Americans are most willing to believe that the ones who fight for their individual interest successively and become right are good people who deserve what they earned than the French.

On sin

Quote of the afternoon from Gary  A. Anderson who has written a book on sin:

I think the dominant language of sin and forgiveness is that of the therapeutic. And this would go both for evangelical and mainline Christians: the seriousness of sin is often dramatically underplayed. What might have been seen as sin in the past is now understood as something reflecting my upbringing or other formative circumstances. It's much easier to talk about fulfillment and human flourishing than it is to talk about sin.
Having said that, though, the evidence of horrible human sinfulness is still present, and from the most unlikely quarters one will find a return to the biblical idiom.
In what was to become a celebrated address on racism, then-candidate Barack Obama referred to slavery in this country as our original sin—a sin that had left a stain on our national character. Well, there we have an individual rhetorically reaching back into the Bible to make the point that sin really has a certain "thingness" to it—it has a very unfortunate habit of hanging around long after it has been committed. So even within the contemporary realm, the need to reach for biblical metaphors can still be found.

Rehabilitating Social Democracy

Oliver Kamm on Tony Judt's latest book Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents:

Judt claims too much from limited evidence. That would matter less if his account of the breakdown of social democracy and the rise of free-market economics were reliable. But it’s flawed. Throughout the book you struggle to gain an insight into why expansive welfare states and interventionist industrial policies fell out of favour in the 1980s. The nearest you get to an answer is the power of ideas — malign and acquisitive ones, in Judt’s depiction — and the rise of individualism. This is not wrong, and Judt is astute in noting parallels between the counterculture of the 1960s and the appeal of economic libertarianism. But it is question-begging. Why, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, did some ideas gain political traction and some fall out of favour? The reason is that social democracy appeared to have reached natural limits. Economic planning had turned into an unaccountable system of corporatism. Legal immunities had turned the trade unions into “insiders” against the interests of the public. The quadrupling of the oil price in 1973 by the Opec cartel and wage claims by powerful unions caused accelerating inflation. It is extraordinary that the word “inflation” appears only twice in Judt’s book, and each time in a specific technical context (the effect of inflation in pushing workers into higher tax brackets). The notion that the great inflation of the 1970s damaged working-class living standards and was a source of social discontent is absent from the book.

My only observation is that the biggest trouble with social democracy is that it has  lost its meaning and that social democrats in order to circumvent this limitation have try to become all things to all people and more importantly by solely defining themselves against a Right that knows what it is and what it will never agree to be.

Foreignness and the marketability of fiction

Astute observation from Russell Smith on the difficulties of naming local places and to sell books in America:

When situating fiction in your hometown, you risk relying on street names as a kind of shorthand, a code for those in the know who will immediately situate the characters and action in terms of social class and ambience. But that relies on what’s called extratextual knowledge on the part of the reader. I know Queen and Broadview as rather seedy, for example. I have done this rather lazily in my own fiction: I have mentioned Yorkville, a shopping district in Toronto, as shorthand for rich, which is a message lost to anyone who doesn’t know Toronto. I have had editors suggest I take out street names to make the city a less specific one: If you replace College Street with “a street of cafés near the large university” you sum up the atmosphere of the place in a way that’s accessible for a foreigner.
But then you also lose a certain amount of pride. Let’s be honest: We all know the primary reason for such erasures. It’s to make the book more saleable to Americans. We all want our books and films and TV shows to be published in the United States, and we know a large proportion of their entertainment-consuming population is not interested in looking beyond their borders. The story might be set in Ottawa, and it might be recognizable to Canadians as Ottawa, but if the Americans think it’s a nameless northeastern U.S. city, they’re more likely to buy it, so let’s not scare them off by naming it. Toronto in particular is a good stand-in for urban U.S. life anywhere, as we’ve seen in a thousand movies; you just blur out the CN Tower and you’ve got instant everywhere.
It’s pretty common to run into Americans, even at literary conferences, who love Alice Munro and who have not yet realized her Midwestern settings are in a foreign country. She doesn’t always identify her settings as Canadian, but one does recognize them if one is from here. It’s an extra layer of meaning that’s available to you, but you can be moved by the story without it.

I wonder whether what Smith is talking about with regards to American taste hasn't everything to do with the fact that Canada isn't exotic enough to Americans to read its literature and to be engaged by the foreignness of its context. Moreover, my sense is that for too many Americans, Canada is lesser America, a country that wishes it were the United States, in other words the main difference between Canada and America in the 'American' mind is power, which makes the most powerful nation, the better country.
I suspect that Belgian, Luxembourger, and Swiss writers who write in France have the same concern when it comes to their French audience which in my opinion would be more open to reading about London, New York or even Bamako than about Chaleroi or Berne. 

The intolerance of the liberal literati

Pertinent observations from Terry Eagleton:

For a long time, they were quite divergent politically: Hitchens was still some kind of socialist and Amis was vehemently anti-communist in an uninteresting, cold war kind of way. But they've since converged. And now they're old cronies backing each other up - instant responses to attacks on the other.
I'm interested in the way a whole stratum of the liberal literati (Rushdie, to some extent Ian McEwan, A C Grayling, obviously Amis and Hitchens) - the very people you'd have expected to be guardians of the liberal flame of tolerance and understanding - have, at the very first assault, rushed into these caricatured postures driven by panic. I'm very struck by how those who are making ugly, illiberal, supremacist noises about the superiority of the west are precisely the sort of literary and liberal characters from whom you'd expect more imagination, openness and sensitivity.

My opinion on the matter is that it's too challenging for the members of what Eagleton calls the liberal liberati to remain liberal all the time and to remain radicals, bold and fresh writers. It helps when you write to be angry and to feel the need to aim it intolerantly at somebody.

Nonfiction as something other than the real thing

I disagree with Rob Nixon on this:

Nonfiction has long been treated as the lutefisk on the literary menu, unlikely to be the special of the day. The genre emits a whiff of the déclassé, served (especially in literature departments) with a garnish of condescension. The problem starts with the word: Like "childless" (why not "child-free"?), "nonfiction" packs a lot of social judgment. Nonfiction may be real, but in matters of creativity, it's not quite the real thing.

I disagree with Nixon because it is my conviction that, although nonfiction may not be considered as totally literary , it has become in recent years especially since we are settled within the Me age as the real thing, as something that shows that a writer isn't just a self-indulgent recluse finding ecstasy within her/his imagination, but a real hard worker who just like a journalist investigates things and make sure that s/he describes what happened and not what s/he would like to have happened. All we have to do is to remember what happened to James Frey and others to realize that people hold nonfiction as the best category of literature because they believe that it is or at least ought to be truthful absolutely.

Trouver Derrida

Sugary excerpt from David Kaufmann's review of the latest biography of Jacques Derrida, Who was Derrida: an Intellectual Biography by David Mikics.

Derrida constantly took contrarian, if not outright rebellious, stances. He did not like assuming the protective coloring of his surroundings. When he arrived in the early 1950s at the most elite of French universities, the École Normale Supérieure, he chafed against the Marxist orthodoxy of his professors and refused to join the cult of Jean-Paul Sartre—a philosopher whose influence he called “nefarious” and “catastrophic.” Derrida did not follow the path of political engagement favored by his colleagues. Rather, by close and often inventive readings of major texts from the philosophical and literary traditions, he sought to blow up philosophical certainty.
But there were limits to his subversion. Mikics locates one of the major fault lines in Derrida’s thought in the philosopher’s prophetic tones, his “fondness for apocalyptic drama,” which works against his reluctance to imagine the apocalypse itself. According to Mikics, Derrida might have aspired to the end of Western metaphysics and he might have adopted the language and some of the practices of the avant-garde, but he could not run full-out at the future. He wrote like a radical in favor of the moderate.
Derrida’s split persona—revolutionary and ultimately conservative at the same time—goes a long way toward explaining his influence in the American academy. His insistence on close reading made him congenial for literature departments, and his pronouncements made close readings appear consequential. What is more, Derrida’s timing was perfect. His reputation in the United States grew at that point when being a hippie was not a political statement but a “lifestyle choice” and when many of the energies of the late ’60s had become merchandised or bogged down in economic stagnation. At a time of retrenchment, Derrida promised a kind of liberation that did not depend on ethnic or gender identity, a freeing of thought that was intellectually disruptive and could, if need be, serve politically progressive ends.

I have to admit that I have never know what to make of Derrida and Deconstruction because they never got to me. Reading Derrida's felt to me like watching Ingmar Bergman's movies, LI know that I'm watching something that is artistic and philosophical, but I'm unsure about the reasons why it should matter and therefore the question of relevance becomes both an obsession and a distraction. That said, I have always like watching Derrida's speak especially when he isn't given a lecture, because then one gets the sense of somebody who is totally caught up in his work and that must have been a great teacher. 

Camus, Sartre and Moral fetishism

In his indispensable article in the Philosophers Magazine  on the fetishism of morality, Jonathan Rée has a section on the quarrel that ended Camus and Sartre's friendship:

Exactly a hundred years after Mill’s attack on Whewell, Jean-Paul Sartre launched a similar assault on his old friend Albert Camus. His target was Camus’s book L’homme révolté (The Rebel, published in 1951), which argued that the “prophetic dream of Marx” had led directly to the creation of a “terrorist state”. As editor of the magazine Les Temps modernes, Sartre assigned the book to his colleague Francis Jeanson, who denounced Camus as a self-hating liberal “humanist” who wanted to substitute a lachrymose “red-cross morality” for serious political analysis. Camus wrote a feeble response which appeared alongside Jeanson’s hatchetry in August 1952, and Sartre weighed in by accusing Camus of a monstrous form of racism – the “racism of moral beauty”. Sartre was prepared, up to a point, to acknowledge the horror of the Soviet concentration camps – they were, he said, “a challenge for us all” – but unlike Camus he was not prepared to make common cause with bourgeois Commentators who were seizing on them with glee in order to “give themselves a good conscience”. Sartre was horrified by “the ease with which you handle your indignation,” he told Camus. “Is it my fault if these procedures remind me of the criminal court?” he inquired. “Perhaps you should have been appointed as Chief Prosecutor of the Republic of Beautiful Souls.”
Sartre’s belligerence is appalling; but when he talks about the temptation of casting oneself as “Chief Prosecutor for the Republic of Beautiful Souls” he surely has a point. And Camus, though deeply hurt by the attack, tacitly acknowledged that there was some truth in it. His late book La Chute is a first-person story of a drifter in an Amsterdam bar, who tells us how he fled in disgust from his former existence as a fashionable Parisian lawyer who specialised in the defence of widows, orphans, refugees and anyone else who gave off the sweet odour of victimhood. He had been offered public honours, but turned them down, he recalls, “with a quiet dignity in which I found my true reward”. He began each working day by giving alms to a beggar or two; then he would earn the gratitude of another fragrant victim with a heart-stopping speech in court, and in the evenings he would relax with his elegant literary friends, complacently denouncing “the heartlessness of the ruling class and the hypocrisy of our politicians”.
Gradually he came to be revolted by his own precious sanctity. (“Just think how many crimes have been committed because the perpetrator could not bear to be in the wrong.”) He gave up the glamour of human rights activism in favour of a chastened practice of forgiveness, describing himself as a juge-pénitent, a penitent judge or perhaps a recovering morality-fetishist. “I favour every theory that denies human innocence, and every practice based on the presumption of guilt,” he says: “I am, dear boy, a disenchanted partisan of slavery.” And when he gets to the end he turns to us, his listeners, and enters a gentle plea: “I hope at least,” he says, “that you are a little less pleased with yourself than you were.”
It was of course leftism that provided the context of this famous quarrel; and it seems to me that leftism, together with politics, has been a casualty of the fetishism of morality.

 I have been more of a Camusian than a Sartrian because that I have always admired the fact that although Camus agreed mostly with Sartre that Marxism was "l'horizon indépassable de notre temps" (the inescapable philosophy of our time), he was unwilling to get blood on his pen to defend it. He was also reluctant to forgive the left's moral contradictions by using the pretext that the end justifies the means and that since the ends of the left were just, it was free to use unjust means to achieve them. I believe that the reason that pushed Sartre to pick a fight with Camus after the publication of L' Homme Révolté was simply because it was his most moral work. In that masterful essay, Camus affirms that existence doesn't absolutely precede essence for some human tendencies exist before the beginning of one's existence that make the obligation to make moral decisions even greater and more fundamentally that makes it necessary to human being to refuse to be a God, to fetishize morality, to transcend it in order to accept to be people. Sartre wanted to be a God because he needed to be right absolutely.

Ayn Rand's demons

Cathy Young in the Globe and Mail on what she calls the darker sides of Ayn Rand:

(...) Ms. Rand's work also has a darker, more disturbing aspect – one that, unfortunately, is all too good a fit for this moment in America's political life. That is her intellectual intolerance and her tendency to demonize her opponents. Speaking through her hero John Galt, Ms. Rand declared, “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.” She lambasted free-market theorists such as Friedrich A. Hayek for their lack of purity in allowing the government a legitimate role in alleviating poverty and its effects. In her novels, supporters of various forms of collectivism – moochers and looters – are shown as acting by stealth to take over and corrupt society and culture.
Ms. Rand's detractors have often branded her a fascist. The label is unfair, but her work does have shades of a totalitarian or dictatorial mentality. To refute this charge, Ms. Rand's defenders point to her explicit statements that force is acceptable only in self-defence. Yet her fiction sometimes seems to contradict this principle.
Particularly troubling is a passage in Atlas Shrugged in which bureaucratic incompetence and arrogance lead to a deadly train wreck. Ms. Rand sarcastically notes that many people would regard the dead passengers as innocent victims of a tragedy and then, in a series of brief character sketches, endeavours to show that they were far from innocent: All had benefited from evil government programs, promoted evil political or philosophical ideas, or both. Especially chilling is Ms. Rand's casual mention of the fact that one of these evildoers, a bureaucrat's wife, is travelling with her three young children.
Ayn Rand does not advocate these people's murder, yet she clearly suggests they had it coming. Both in Atlas Shrugged and in her nonfiction essays, political and ideological debates are treated as wars with no innocent bystanders.

Americans almost always have trouble accepting that the people they idealized can be complex figures instead of just being people whose purity would force the Vatican should offer them  up for sainthood. That said, I think that Young's point about war and innocence is both poignant and relevant because it may explain the reason why so many Rand's true believers are never troubled by the violent inequalities of liberal capitalism whitewashing them with the assertion that life is Hobbesian and there is nothing that even politics can do or should attempt to do. In any case, the point is that Ayn Rand's work is relevant, but also limited because she was such a defender for the market that she was unwilling to even acknowledge that its imperfections were great enough that it had to be addressed by society not just through charity, but politics and yes, Government. For after, having a Government who actually focuses on what it can fix instead of managing people's lives and making them happy cannot be proof of the beginning of the Apocalypse.

To sip isn't to drink

I laughed out loud when I read this distinction without a difference made by Paul Johnson, who has written a biography of Churchill in attempt to debunk the myth that he wasn't a heavy drinker:

The book includes refutations of many of the negative myths that have grown up around Churchill. For instance, that he was drunk for much of World War II. "He appeared to drink much more than he did," Mr. Johnson insists. "He used to sip his drinks very, very slowly, and he always watered his whisky and brandy."

Official high priests of intelligence and American presidents

Sugary excerpt from Jurek Martin's review of Garry Wills's Bomb Power:The Modern Presidency and the National Security State in the Financial Times:

The cult of secrecy has afflicted every president since, not merely the paranoid, such as Richard Nixon. Even Jimmy Carter was not entirely immune – the abortive 1980 rescue mission to extricate the US hostages in Tehran was executed without advising even his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, who resigned. Wills is particularly hard on the Kennedy brothers’ obsession with deposing Fidel Castro, a mindset so blinkered that it failed to acknowledge the reality that Cubans liked their president (ditto Salvador Allende in Chile, etc). That fits with Robert McNamara’s much later admission that the US knew nothing of Vietnamese culture even as it was losing nearly 60,000 troops in the war.

Presidents, Wills persuasively argues, have fallen into the trap of listening only to the official high priests of intelligence. Those without prized security clearance are somehow considered inferior, if not ignorant, even if proved right. That was the proposed sanction against Oppenheimer for opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb. To be in-the-know is to be omniscient. The Pentagon Papers, the in-house review of the Vietnam War published only after the Supreme Court so ordered, contained no state secrets. But they were highly classified and thus, for government, unfit for consumption by friend or foe.

But the organic growth of the national security state needed theoreticians and they comprise Wills’s large Hall of Infamy. It was the (ironically conservative) Reagan justice department, under attorney-general Edwin Meese, that developed the theory of the “unitary executive” – which basically says that the law is anything that the president says it is. This produced a welter of “signing statements” in which a president says he can disregard, for whatever reason, any section of a duly passed congressional bill he has just, er, signed.

Sniffing the ashes of Communism

Sugary excerpt from Enda O'Doherty's review of Uncivil Society by Stephen Kotkin in the Dublin Review of books:

The chief practical flaw of communism, however, has not been the absence of public-spirited individuals, or even the failure of Socialist Man to develop into a perfect being, but the persistence of the need for repression. Many individuals, whether fortunately or unfortunately, have a tendency to put themselves and their families first in any economic calculation. They may also have a little room in their hearts for their neighbours, or even “society” ‑ but it will not normally be the best room. Such people of course, particularly if they are stubborn, stand in the way of creating a classless society and may have be dealt with, through expulsion, intimidation, imprisonment or, in extreme cases (or just to be sure), liquidation. These measures will be carried out by a new class of servants of the regime, whose most prized quality will be loyalty, and who will be decently rewarded for that loyalty. It would be equally foolish to entrust administration of the state’s industrial or agricultural enterprises or indeed of its education system or entertainment channels to people who because of their known attitudes or class backgrounds are unlikely to be completely reliable. Here too loyalty, rather than drive or intelligence, will be the key requirements. And thus we are well on the way to a creating a society where, in the analysis of its most virulent opponents, stupidity rises to the top (but perhaps we should be a little sceptical of that reading too: extreme stupidity is unlikely to make it quite to the top in any society). Excessively stupid or not, we will have a non-performing society, and one where the abuse of power is routine and goes unpunished.

 (...) The collapse of the communist states has also, more or less, entailed the collapse of communism as an ideology and of communist parties and with that the disappearance of the idea that capitalist society could be destroyed or replaced. Social democracy has (at best) a meliorist programme; Trotskyism, which retains a certain ability to recruit among the young, is politically little more than a joke (though at times an annoying one). There are many people nevertheless whom the triumph of capitalism (seen in its ability to survive politically virtually unchallenged even at a time of severe systemic crisis) does not fill with unalloyed joy. Where communism wants to give you butcher’s shops called “Meat”, capitalism gives you five thousand brands of shampoo (not to mention talk radio). It seems, however, that the only practical choice is between bearing this idiocy cheerfully and engaging in a form of personal inward withdrawal. If capitalism ever does collapse it will have been due to an inability to master its own anarchic tendencies. And we may well like even less what we get instead.

What I find fascinating is that although Communism (and I believe Socialism) is dead, it's still very much alive in people's mind. The reason for this fact is that Neoliberalism gave it, willingly in my opinion, a new legitimacy in order to create new monsters to slay and to make the perpetual point that Fukuyama was right and that we are indeed living the end of history since even the most brutal regimes believe in some form of the market. Unlike Alain Badiou and others who are living in the past in order to create the possibility of a new future, I don't believe that history is solely about repetitions (I have Hannah Arendt and René Char to thank for that conviction) or continuity and that it is impossible to create something new without  sniffing some of the ashes of Communism by trying to perfect its old model or trying to humanize it or perfect it. I'm coming to the conclusion with some regrets that the relevance of Communism or of even socialism is a proof that our times has run out of imagination, at least in the political sphere and that explains what it is focusing either on fear, the old, the past or simply and more alarmingly in my view fluff.  At some point, I hope somebody of influence will simply stop the discussion and say in more convincing manner than Walter Mondale in 1984, "Where is the beef?"

The globalization of literature

I agree with Tim Parks on this  (hat tip : Amtava Kumar) even though the same realizations take me some place else:

As a result of rapidly accelerating globalization we are moving toward a world market for literature. There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon. This change is not perhaps as immediately evident in the US as it is in Europe, thanks to the size and power of the US market and the fact that English is generally perceived as the language of globalization, so that many more translations go away from it than toward it. However, more and more European, African, Asian and South American authors see themselves as having “failed” if they do not reach an international audience.
In recent months authors in Germany, France and Italy—all countries with large and well-established national readerships—have expressed to me their disappointment at not having found an English language publisher for their works; interestingly, they complain that this failure reflects back on their prestige in their home country: if people don’t want you elsewhere you can’t be that good. Certainly, in Italy where I live, an author is only thought to have arrived when he is published in New York. To appreciate how much things have changed one only need reflect how little it would have dented the reputations of Zola or Verga had they not achieved immediate publication in London.

The key point here is that globalization has widened not only the literary market, but it has also  shrunk it in the sense that taste has been homogenized and diversity hollywoodized. "International" writers write thinking about what they hope would be the english translation of their work and their "foreign" audience. In the Time of Zola and of Verga, writers didn't have the pressure to sell and more importantly, they didn't have the example of some of their peers who became incredibly financially successfully and widely influential by giving the masses what they want: "fast literature."

Reading lousy books

Over at Language Hat, it's interesting to see that  there can be a point, for some,  to reading lousy books:

I'm reading a lousy Iraqi novel called Papa Sartre (a 2009 translation of the 2001 original); it's only 178 pages long but feels like War and Peace, and I'm skimming more and more as I zip through its repetitive and heavy-handed mockery of schemers, ne'er-do-wells, and fake philosophers. Why do I keep reading, you ask? Because I'm fascinated with Baghdad, as I am with all ancient cities, and it's rare to read fiction set there.

Reading to me is like eating, it is as difficult for me to get through a lousy book as it is to get through a lousy meal just to experience something else. I am reminded of American tourists who force themselves to eat frog logs or escargots just to say that they experience French cuisine, but who have to fill themselves with French wine to force their stomach to accept what they consider filth.

The age of Botulism

Scott McLemee whose writings are addictive has an interesting take on Bernard-Henri Lévy and the now famous Botul affair:

A friend who has read La vie sexuelle tells me that the author’s tongue is very conspicuously in his cheek. That BHL cited it as a serious work of scholarship would strongly suggest that he has an employee or two toiling in the erudition mines for him. If so, it is an interesting question whether the person who actually read Botul misunderstood the nature of the book -- or passed along the citation as an act of sabotage. Either way, it seems like a fireable offense. (Of course, nothing like that ever happens in the academic world.)
Finally,the incident poses an important question about intellectual history. Michel Foucault once said of Gilles Deleuze that his friend’s work was so important that one day the century might be known as Deleuzean. The convergence of judgments between Bernard-Henri Lévy and Jean-Baptiste Botul regarding Kant has important implication -- even in the United States, where BHL has, of late, been vigorously colonizing the media system. He is a regular guest on Charlie Rose, his articles appear at The Huffington Post, and Random House is publishing another of his books in a few months.
Doesn’t BHL’s prominence reveal something about the nature of the period? Are we not living, perhaps, in the age of Botulism?

The answer to Mclemee's last question is of course yes. BHL is going to be at ease and like a fish in water in the America media world because nobody will ever require him to show more than photogenic flair and frenched fluff. America doesn't really take intellectualism seriously for it always assumed that if it isn't accessible, it isn't worth much and that it is too elitist. The trouble with BHL is that his admirers are too in love with him to criticize his tendency to take up easy causes and to dumb down complex subjects and that his dandysm impedes his detractors from taking him seriously. That's said, BHL is being the emblem of our age of Botulism, he is nevertheless useful like a burger from McDonald's. What would America,  our world be without fast food?

The mediocrity of terror

Sugary excerpt from  Costica Bradatan's review of Herta Müller's The Appointment in the Globe and Mail:

Terror can be mediocre, even idiotic, yet omnipresent. Terror can be terribly banal, utterly un-Romantic, but never-ending. Terror is when the secret police persuade your best friend to inform on you; when objects start moving around your room in your absence; when the secret police interrogator tells you, right before you leave his office after a day-long interrogation, that “accidents do happen,” or when your friends start committing (poorly) staged suicides.
That's why Herta Müller's work is so important: It maps out, with surgical precision, this mediocre yet sinister face of European totalitarianism, which is something that has been largely unaccounted for. Her novels document the oppressive fears and anxieties of a world turned upside-down, a world where the secret police do not necessarily kill you, but mess up your life enough to make you lose your mind.

The intellectual appeal of Nazism

Quote of the morning from Max Dunbar's review of Emmanuel Faye's book Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy:

Writers and thinkers still alive after the fall of the regime were confronted with that ultimate question: what did you do in the war? Academic supporters of Nazism could see several ways to postwar respectability. They could plead indulgence. It must have be easy in the mid-thirties to get caught up in the propaganda whirl of it all: tomorrow belongs to me! Alternatively, one could plead cowardice or pragmatism. Many had to make compromises to spare themselves and to protect family and friends.
The mistake is to see fascism as strictly a yob phenomenon that addresses the short-term frustrations of the poor and ignorant. The mistake is to believe that it cannot possibly appeal to educated men and women. Yet even before Hitler’s takeover there were true believers inside the academy’s lustrous gates. No one now remembers Schmitt, Wolf and Rosenberg but Martin Heidegger continues to be read, studied and quoted.

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On Africanity and literature

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Chinua Achebe and his influence on "Africa":

As a university student in the 1950s, in addition to reading Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Coleridge, Achebe also read Joyce Carey’s "Mister Johnson," a novel set in Nigeria, which Time magazine had named the "best book ever written about Africa." Achebe disagreed. Not only was the Nigerian character in the novel unrecognizable to him and his classmates but he also detected, in the description of Nigerians, "an undertow of uncharitableness ... a contagion of distaste, hatred, and mockery."
There has been much written about Chinua Achebe’s "Things Fall Apart" as a response to Mister Johnson, and one likes to think that Achebe would have written his novel even if he had not read Cary’s. Still, the prejudiced representation of African characters in literature could not but have had an influence on Achebe’s development as a writer. He would, years later, write a famous essay about the portrayal of Africans in Joseph Conrad’s classic novel "Heart of Darkness," arguing not that Conrad should not have written honestly about the racism of the time, but that Conrad failed to hold an authorial rejection of that worldview.
The strangeness of seeing oneself distorted in literature – and indeed of not seeing oneself at all – was part of my own childhood. I grew up in the Nigerian university town of Nsukka in the 1980s, reading a lot of British children’s books. My early writing mimicked the books I was reading: all my characters were white and all my stories were set in England. Then I read "Things Fall Apart." It was a glorious shock of discovery, as was "Arrow of God," which I read shortly afterwards; I did not know in a concrete way until then that people like me could exist in literature. Here was a book that was unapologetically African, that was achingly familiar, but that was, also, exotic because it detailed the life of my people a hundred years before. Because I was educated in a Nigerian system that taught me little of my pre-colonial past, because I could not, for example, imagine with any accuracy how life had been organized in my part of the world in 1890, Achebe’s novels became strangely personal.

Adichie's assertions bug me. They do because she focuses on differences, which to her seem to be fundamental. Her use of the expression "unapologetically African" is problematic (it would have been less controversial is she had said used the word Nigerian even though the use of the word unapologetically would have remained a problem). Africanity doesn't exist. In fact, it has never existed. It wouldn't presumptuous to presume that Chinua Achebe is very different than his ancestors and that in fact, when he wrote Things Fall Apart he focused on his desire to be himself rather than on his Nigerianity or Africanity (although for him, being Achebe might have meant be a true Nigerian and African). What I'm trying to see is that people cleverly used Africanity to defend their individuality and unfortunately often to justify differences that reason and decency (due seldom to their lack of imagination and knowledge) cannot. The point is Achebe's greatest achievement wasn't the affirmation of an identity, but the creation of one, one, which was solely his. People who look like him or have commonalities with him don't have to embrace it, but solely to recognize and not to delegitimate. At the same time, those who do as Adichie shouldn't equate with Africanity as a way to argue that there is just the Chinua Achebe's way to show that one comes from Africa. Adichie conveniently ignores that issues of identity have plagued Africans precisely for the  reason that because they is no agreement on a definition, the focus is placed on  resentment, victimization, the colonizers, and the fact that Africanity means to "unapologically" be different than them and to confront their contradictions.
The reason why I have argued that there is not such a thing as "African literature" or even as "African writer" is simply those popular and narrow categories don't mean anything. I have the strong suspicion that writers from the continent have too many essential differences to be put in one narrow categories and that when they are not ideologues or marketers would acknowledge that neither their nationality nor the fact that they are from a vast and heterogeneous continent defines their writing.

For Women, it is always about love and pain

For some reason, Toril Moi's review of the latest English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe in the London Review of Books bugs me . I shouldn't say "for some reason" for I know what it bugs me. It seems that the fact that Beauvoir is the author of Le Deuxième Sexe has given all of her biographers the manly obligation to prove that she was a woman first and foremost and thus very much guided by her womanhood, not her brain or any type of rigorous analytical enterprise. The presumption is that those "facts" should lead to the logical conclusion that her work is secondary to the one of Sartre because when she thought or wrote, she never stopped to be the Castor, a woman with a big derrière who sought love everywhere else even in literature and philosophy when he refused to give it to her. Outrageous excerpt:

The roots of The Second Sex are here, in Beauvoir’s realisation that her life had been affected in countless ways by her having been born a girl. This massive book was written fast: the first volume appeared in Paris in June 1949, the second five months later. But Beauvoir did not spend all the intervening time on her analysis of women’s condition. In January 1947 she travelled to the United States for the first time, and in 1948 she published America Day by Day, a deeply perceptive book about the experience. Moreover, she met Nelson Algren there. The writing of The Second Sex thus coincided with her discovery of America and with her passionate affair with Algren. It also coincided with Sartre’s transatlantic affair with the New York-based Frenchwoman Dolorès Vanetti, which caused Beauvoir much pain.
That much of Beauvoir’s personal experience went into the making of her investigation of the situation of women is beyond doubt. Judith Okely has drawn attention to Beauvoir’s ‘hidden use of herself as a case study’ in The Second Sex. The urgency of her style, the conviction that every scrap of evidence must be piled up to show the world the truth about women’s condition, surely comes from a sense that she was, after all, writing a kind of confession, offering the public intimate and unsettling truths about herself, and about other women.

Boy, women really do have trouble taking each other seriously or rather they have this disturbing notion that seriousness is equated to manliness and womanhood (I hate that word) is a particularity. I have yet to see Sartre's sex life been given the same dehumanizing and belittling treatment.

Spinster fear and sterile, but eternal musings

Before quoting Jessa Crispin's article on Elizabeth Gilbert and her two books, I have to say that I like Gilbert. I like listening to her talk because she gives good lectures. The trouble is that I just don't like reading her books because they make me want to slam my head against the wall while crying in a Nancy Kerrigan fashion "why? why?" What I'm trying to say is that we are in 2010, women should just get over the perpetual quest for self, perfection, candid feminitude, balance, and just embrace complexity and their imperfections while just living their life the way their want to without making excuses, without needing to bash others on the head with their deep, but sterile thoughts.  Here is the sugary excerpt:

These are the accusations against Elizabeth Gilbert I have read: treacly, annoying, feminist, insincere, spoiled. Then there are the more brutal ones: bitch, dyke, cunt. The most common, however, was "selfish." How dare she? How dare she leave her husband to travel? How dare she write a book about it? How dare she fall in love again? And with a Brazilian! How dare she... what? Attain happiness? Or at the very least, put a stop to her death wish? That bitch, that dyke, how dare she walk away from her man?! Doesn't she understand that this is the shameful masculine territory? It's just as bad when men do it — we're not saying it isn't! — but women are supposed to be above all that, all of that free will stuff. Really. How dare she?
Now of course there is the follow-up, a book examining the state of marriage after Gilbert discovered she had to marry her Brazilian lover for him to attain citizenship. As a history of marriage, Committed is a thoroughly unnecessary book. There are a ton of books on the market telling us that marriage is a raw deal for women. Men thrive in marriage, they are healthier, they earn more money, they are happier. These gains appear to be at the expense of women, as they do not thrive in marriage. Quite the opposite. There are the added hours of housework, a decline in earning power, the depressed libido. Then there are the rates of divorce and infidelity, that sticky statistic about the chances of a woman being murdered by her husband. We know all this, and we get married anyway. If this is the paradigm, why do we cling so tightly to it? And why do we freak out when someone rejects it?

Churchill and the British Empire

Piers Brendon reviews Richard Toye's upcoming book, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made in the Literary Review:

The Empire, indeed, was the main bone of contention between Churchill and Roosevelt during the war. The President found it hard to believe that they were fighting Axis tyranny but not working to free people all over the world from colonial oppression. He openly disagreed with Churchill's assertion that the promises of self-government in the Atlantic Charter did not apply to the British Empire. The Prime Minister thought it was 'pretty good cheek' for the Americans, who had blood on their hands in the Philippines, to try 'to school-marm us into proper behaviour' in the Empire. And with the Empire behind him, he felt able to stand up to the Great Republic. According to Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's plea that India should be allowed to rule itself wrung from Churchill a 'string of cuss words [that] lasted for two hours in the middle of the night'.
Young Winston had vowed to devote his life to the maintenance of the British Empire. As warlord during the struggle against Hitler he fought to preserve it even though that meant testing the Anglo-American alliance, which he also championed. As an old man he lamented that his life had been for nothing: 'The Empire I believed in has gone.' In view of all that it is remarkable that no substantial scholarly work on this subject has hitherto appeared. There have been essays and a couple of partial studies, and the topic has been aired in some of the many volumes about Churchill published since the opening and electronic cataloguing of his papers. But Churchill's Empire is the first book to cover all the ground. It does so in a masterly fashion, drawing on much fresh evidence, teasing out the nuances of Churchill's attitudes and providing a marvellously illuminating appraisal.

Well, at least and at last, Churchill has something in common with Charles de Gaulle, but should we expected that men who grew in times when empire is synonymous not to say equaled to their nation's grandeur are reluctant to give it up and to see decolonization as a plus?

Loss and blandness

The Times Literary Supplement has a review of Martin Amis's latest The Pregnant Widow, which left me wondering why Amis writes about love when he seems to feel the same about it than Christopher Hitchens feels about religion. In any case, here is a sugary excerpt of the review:

However, if the friction between the novel’s layers doesn’t always generate excitement, the conceit of layers does contribute to its greatest strengths. At the very beginning of the story, Keith in 2006 is described as entering “the great dig of London”, and The Pregnant Widow works best as an archaeology of the ageing body, an analysis of what Helen Small has pointedly described as “the failure of a preferential version of the future in which one’s own freedom was the overriding object”. In this regard, the novel’s multiple time frames give Amis the chance to measure Keith’s increasing physical frailty and stretchedness unsparingly against his younger self (“As you pass the half-century, the flesh, the coating on the person, begin to attenuate. And the world is full of blades and spikes”), raising the uncomfortable possibility that it may be worse for a man’s ageing body to be parodically recognizable than changed utterly.
Nor is this the only kind of wasting that sets Amis’s imagination going: The Pregnant Widow stands alongside novels such as Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and Philip Roth’s Indignation as part of a contemporary subgenre, the elegy to wasted opportunity. As in McEwan’s novella, the last section of the story fast-forwards through the future lives and losses of some of the characters, a trajectory of unfulfilment and mis-fulfilment that is deliberately braced against the unsuspecting world of 1970, as if the sheer weight of narrative itself could somehow preserve the ghostly energy of what didn’t go on to happen.

I'm going to wait (well after after May 2010 when it gets published in the States) to read The Pregnant Widow. It needs to age because it is ready for me. I will eventually get to it as I know that I'll get around to eating more tofu just to have the illusion and the self-satisfaction that I'm a healthier and better person.

Fundamental questions

Jytte Klausen, the author whose book, The Cartoons that Shook the World, was censured by Yale University Press by removing the Muhammad cartoons gave a great interview available on Eurozine in which she explains the motives behind her book and why she thought the cartoons were a necessary addition:

My idea was not to engage the provocation of: "Do I now dare to print these bad pictures or not?" That would never be my purpose. My purpose was to get the whole page from the newspaper as it was reprinted that day. There have been many misunderstandings and often the online versions of the cartoons have incorrect translations of the captions. In the book, and it was written with this purpose, I ask the reader to put on different glasses and look at the images and analyse them from the vantage point of the different arguments that were made against and for the cartoons at the time. What would a Danish reader see? What did the cartoonist intend to show? Why would a secular Muslim say they were Islamaphobic? Why would a religious Muslim say they were blasphemous? These are all different readings of the meaning of the cartoons and I wanted my readers to look at how no illustrations, and no caricature, is read in the absence of context. And I do describe some of them actually as anti-Semitic in a classical European style.

Degendering Writing

Claire Messud on Women, literature, and the need to degender writing so that they can be considered as writers, plain and simple and to give them the opportunity to be read.

Just over ten years ago, the Modern Library compiled a list of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century: only nine of them were by women, and Edith Wharton accounted for two books. Were there really only eight women writers of major significance in those 100 years? Not in my personal canon, at least. When, in 2006, the New York Times ran a list of the best American fiction of the past twenty-five years, Toni Morrison’s Beloved was pronounced the winner; but she and Marilynne Robinson (for Housekeeping) were the only women out of twenty-two titles (and that’s counting Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy and McCarthy’s Border trilogy as a single book each). Just last September, when the international literary magazine Wasafiri solicited responses from twenty-five global writers about the work that has most shaped world literature over the past quarter century, just four women—Elizabeth Bishop, Mildred Taylor, Toni Morrison, and Quarratulain Hyder—were on the list. And this is in a world where women account for 80 percent of fiction readers. See “Why Women Read More Than Men,” by Eric Weiner.
Here’s the deal: men, without thinking, will almost without fail select men. And women, without thinking, will too often select men. It’s a known fact that among children, girls will happily read stories with male protagonists, but boys refuse to read stories with female protagonists. J.K. Rowling was aware of this: if Harry Potter had been Harriet Potter, none of us would know about her.
(…)American literature is world literature. This is fiction for a global generation. Here are some fine examples of it, by a diverse group of immensely talented young writers who just happen to be women. I’d like to think that Elizabeth Bishop could not object.

Books not to read

I'm going to make it a point this year of not reading Game Change, the book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin on the 2008 campaign and The Politician the one by Andrew Young on the Edwards and their frailties. My honor, my soul, and the health of my brain are at stake. Just thinking about them makes me feel dirty. What's the point of reading sleaze in book when you glance at it in most US magazines. Why do Americans need their politicians to be unlike them, that is to be good people, who never had bad thoughts, never gossip, never hurt anybody, never lie and more importantly have perfect marriages? At some point, this century, I hope America gets cure from its puritanism.

Resfreshing silliness

Unlike some people, I love the fact that Martin Amis attempts to pick a fight with Coetzee by asserting that he has no talent. Coetzee is a big boy. He can defend himself. Writers don’t have to have a disingenuous deference to their peers. Hearing one saying that another sucks even when it comes out of bad faith, is refreshing and good for the writing soul. That said, I’m going to wait before I read Amis’s latest while enjoying Coetzee’s Summertime.

The ownership of words

Interesting sugary excerpt from Stanley Fish responding to the criticisms for his positive review of Sarah Palin's Going Rogue:

”Law and Order” creator Dick Wolf could not possibly supervise, never mind write, every script churned out by his production company, and yet TV critics have no hesitation in saying about a particular episode that it conveys Wolf’s usual message or embodies his vision of society. In his new book, “The Audacity to Win,” David Plouffe, campaign adviser to Barack Obama, recalls that when Obama decided to write his famous “race” speech, he said, “I know what I want to say,” and added that he would call the speechwriter “and give him some initial guidance.” The rest is history and everyone refers to the speech as Obama’s. In the same way, “Going Rogue” is Sarah Palin’s book, for good or ill. If I may mix metaphors, the issue of ghost writing is a red herring, a point made inadvertently by those posters who both deny Palin the title of author and excoriate her for her lies. If she didn’t write the book, she can’t be lying in it, and if she can be called either a liar or a truth-teller, she wrote the book.

As someone who skimmed Going Rogue, I have to say that it makes Sarah Palin likable, but it doesn't doesn't scare me or make willing to agree with her politics because on the contrary to the majority of Americans, I don't believe that likability is the key component to electability and to ideological discussions. May be the reason why I have never been able to hate or to despise Palin is that one of the most important lessons that I have learned the last few years is that people who hold beliefs, which I find ridiculous and despicable can be decent individuals and people who agree with me can be despicable and intolerant people. That doesn't stop the debate or make their view point acceptable, it just stops discussions from becoming petty, personal, superfluous, and apolitical and to become too infected to be productive.

Fiction and Darkness

Chinua Achebe on Conrad's Heart of the Darkness and its racism:

I did not see myself as an African in those books. I took sides with the white men against the savages. In other words, I went through my first level of schooling thinking I was of the party of the white man in his hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. The white man was good and reasonable and smart and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid, never anything higher than cunning. I hated their guts.
But a time came when I reached the appropriate age and realized that these writers had pulled a fast one on me! I was not on Marlowe’s boat steaming up the Congo in ‘Heart of Darkness’; rather, I was one of those unattractive beings jumping up and down on the riverbank, making horrid faces.”

I've always wondered how much racism is acceptable for books who written in times when the prejudices which they transcribe were the norm. In other words, should we be able to read Conrad, Voltaire, or Céline without feeling not only guilty, but dirty? Can any work of fiction ever be equated to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Mein Kempf ? My only problem with The Heart of Darkness has always been the chosen limitations, which Conrad placed on the story because he was aware on his superfluousness and the subjectivity of his experience in the Congo and of the fact that he needed to give his readers what they wanted. I would have love The Heart of Darkness to have been more graphic, that is for example for "the savages" to either eat the "whites" on the boat or for the "civilized" people to just massacre them.  What I'm trying to say is that fiction has a right to racist, grotesque, vile or whatever else, the problem is its infeudation to biography or reality, when it is asked to represent the world as it should be or even as it is. Achebe seems not to be able to accept the fact that racists or rather prejudiced people can be good and even great writers and that to me is disappointing.

Conservatism

Sam Tanenhaeus's latest, The Death of Conservatism is on my must-read list for the end of the year even though I find the title of his book io be a pompous cliché designed to create buzz. Anyway, he is fun to listen to, which I hope means that he will be fun to read for those things don't always go together.

African literature

Interesting thoughts from Aaron Bady:

(...) after all, what is African literature? The more one thinks about it, I find, the more it falls apart as a category. Which is to say, while it certainly exists in a phenomenological sense, trying to place that phenomenon in any kind of empirical context is a project of fast diminishing returns: the more seriously you attempt to group the literary production of an entire continent into a single term, the more you occlude the fundamental fictions of that categorization from your vision. I’m not going to go over all the different kinds of linguistic, cultural, historical, geographical, and racial categories that different critics have tried out in their search for a securely definable field of “African literature” (each of which is at least usefully wrong) but to treat any of them as anything but imperfect fictions is to naturalize (and thus sacrifice the ability to think critically about) those very discursive narratives.
If once wishes to wax Foucaultian, though (and “one” does wish, in this case), it does exist as a set of institutional practices that produce a coherent discourse. And if we are invested in thinking empirically about the basis on which the literary production of African literature happens, that institutional discourse certainly does exist as an expression of a commercial desire mediated by a particular messy set of critical taste-making devices. Which is to say, somewhere between the publishing industry’s attempt to create a product to market (and a market for their product) and the desire by writers and readers to have a relationship through by that marketplace we find the effort by critics of all sorts to make it happen, and concrete institutional structures through which they do it.

There isn't such a thing as African literature because there isn't such a thing as an African identity or even as Africanness, Africanity or an African citizenship. The fact is although there is a continent called Africa, there are no Africans and therefore African writers don't exist.There is as wide a gap between Chinua Achebe and J.M. Coetzee as there is between Philip Roth and Gabriel García Márquez. It might be worth our while to wonder why some are obsessed with defining non-whites by what sets them apart rather than by what they have in common with the rest.
Marie Ndiaye won the Goncourt prize yesterday and although she is very much a French writer, at the beginning of her career librarians wanted to classify her work in the African literature part of their bookstores because she had a Senegalese name and because she looks black since her father was in fact Senegalese even though she has grown up in France and never went to Senegal until she was an adult. Already the Los  Angeles Times literary blog has called her the first black woman (Americans have a problem with race and with the idea that métisse doesn't mean black and that black doesn't mean much) to win the prize even though she isn't black and doesn't describe herself as such (to the contrary of Obama who did for political reasons), which shows that she refuses to be defined by what  race conscious people perceived as essential existential categories.