tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/novel-29041/articles
Novel – The Conversation
2023-09-19T12:15:09Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/213602
2023-09-19T12:15:09Z
2023-09-19T12:15:09Z
This course uses ‘climate fiction’ to teach about the perils that a warming planet faces
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548581/original/file-20230915-35026-le1o7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Storytelling can be an effective way to impart lessons in science.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/global-warming-royalty-free-image/157419001">imagedepotpro/E+ Collection/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Text saying: Uncommon Courses, from The Conversation" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/uncommon-courses-130908">Uncommon Courses</a> is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.</em> </p>
<h2>Title of course:</h2>
<p>“Climate Change Literature”</p>
<h2>What prompted the idea for the course?</h2>
<p>After reading many fiction books that featured themes of climate change, I felt compelled to create a course that would allow students to do the same. The idea was to have students learn about our planetary crisis by exploring how it’s portrayed in literature.</p>
<p>At John Carroll University, students are required to take paired courses that are tethered together from two different departments. I approached a colleague who teaches a biology course about climate science to see if he wanted to link his course to mine. Students must co-enroll in both of our courses during the same semester. The combined courses give students both a scientific and literary view of climate change. In my colleague’s class, students learn about <a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2022">carbon dioxide emissions</a> and the like. Then, in my class, they study how fiction writers and poets incorporate concerns about the effects of rising temperatures into their work.</p>
<h2>What materials does the course feature?</h2>
<p>The major work of fiction we read is Barbara Kingsolver’s novel “<a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/flight-behavior-barbara-kingsolver?variant=32206054916130">Flight Behavior</a>,” about a low-income family in Appalachia. Millions of monarch butterflies become confused by warming temperatures and accidentally overwinter on the family farm, setting off much conflict. We also read lots of poetry and short fiction with themes of the impacts of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/13/global-heating-more-accurate-to-describe-risks-to-planet-says-key-scientist">planetary heating</a>. We read some fiction by Kim Stanley Robinson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Tommy Orange, Olivia Clare, Jess Walter and more. Poets include Matthew Olzmann, Nickole Brown, Ross Gay, Dante Di Stefano and Craig Santos Perez. </p>
<h2>What does the course explore?</h2>
<p>By reading climate fiction and poetry, students learn how overreliance on fossil fuels overlaps with issues of <a href="https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5632/">economic injustice</a>, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9363288/">racial disparities in climate impacts</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/15/magazine/climate-crisis-migration-america.html">climate migration</a>. We explore narrative voice, structure, imagery, plot, dialogue, style and other textual concerns in creative works influenced by living in the <a href="https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/anthropocene/">Anthropocene</a> – or the period, according to some scientists, when human activity began to significantly affect the planet’s climate and ecosystems. <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/when-did-the-anthropocene-actually-begin/">That period</a> is thought by some climate change experts to have <a href="https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/the-human-epoch-when-did-the-anthropocene-begin">begun in the 1950s</a>. Through classroom discussion, we share the collective experience of engaging with characters who navigate a threatened world.</p>
<p>To integrate the biology and English classes, the students’ final projects are pitches for a Hollywood movie that portrays a changed world due to planetary heating while also getting the science right. The assignment is harder than it sounds: Students must understand the harmful results of carbon emissions and craft a compelling story.</p>
<h2>Why is this course relevant now?</h2>
<p>Climate change is an existential crisis <a href="https://www.wri.org/insights/2023-ipcc-ar6-synthesis-report-climate-change-findings">affecting us all right now</a>. Many students do not study Earth science in high school; their first, and possibly only, exposure to evidence-based climate change happens in college. Authors address consequences such as warming temperatures, ocean acidification, desertification and sea-level rise. Thus, literature has become an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate disruption.</p>
<h2>What’s a critical lesson from the course?</h2>
<p>Literature helps us feel the immediacy of what’s at stake in a climate-changed world. The storytelling in fiction and poetry teaches us much that scientific and policy reports, charts, graphs and forecasts cannot. While data can predict rising sea levels, for example, a short story such as <a href="https://lithub.com/new-jesus/">Tommy Orange’s “New Jesus” </a> shows us how it feels to live in a submerged town where residents’ feet are always wet. Climate researchers predict the increasing desertification of the American Southwest. Through <a href="https://www.hcn.org/issues/325/tamarisk-hunter-Bacigalupi">Paolo Bacigalupi’s short story “The Tamarisk Hunter,”</a> readers experience what it looks like to see towns abandoned due to the lack of water, and golf courses where sand traps no longer exist because the entire course has turned to sand.</p>
<h2>What will the course prepare students to do?</h2>
<p>Analyzing fiction and poetry sharpens students’ critical interpretive skills and prepares them to think originally and creatively as they enter a workforce altered and threatened by climate change. For example, pre-health majors will see the impacts of climate change on the human body. Business majors will need to know how to operate when extreme weather and disrupted supply chains affect the bottom line.</p>
<p>Our two paired courses combine science and literature to equip students with expansive ways of asking questions about their role in the world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213602/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Debra J. Rosenthal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Poetry and prose are prominent features in this course about how climate change is affecting the world.
Debra J. Rosenthal, Professor of English, John Carroll University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/200863
2023-03-02T16:55:39Z
2023-03-02T16:55:39Z
Colette at 150: why the scandalous 20th-century writer remains a revered literary figure in France
<p><a href="https://bonjourparis.com/history/colette-the-great-writer/">Colette</a>, as British author <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/angela-carter">Angela Carter</a> pointed out in a <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n19/angela-carter/colette">wittily perceptive</a> article in 1980, is perhaps the only 20th-century woman writer to be commonly referred to by her surname only.</p>
<p>Of course that surname is her father’s – “you can’t subvert patriarchy that easily”, added Carter – but by a happy accident, it “doubles as a girlish handle”.</p>
<p>Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette first published as Colette Willy, pragmatically adopting the pen-name of her unscrupulous but well-connected first husband. During her second marriage to a famous newspaper editor and politician, she became the aristocratic Colette de Jouvenel. Once divorced for the second time, however, she gave up the patriarchal practice of taking her husband’s name and became simply Colette.</p>
<p>It was under this name that she moved on from being the <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6574825/How-Colette-seductress-shameless-scandalised-French.html">scandalous bisexual music-hall pin-up</a> of her early days, to the revered author and national treasure “notre grande Colette”. She was the first woman to preside over the notoriously misogynist <a href="https://www.academiegoncourt.com/home">Académie Goncourt</a> (whose all-male jury gave the prestigious Prix Goncourt <a href="https://womeninfrench.org/resources/Documents/bibliospring2017.pdf">only to men until 1944</a>) and was the first Frenchwoman to be granted a state funeral. But the whiff of frivolity – too many stories about dancers and gigolos – stymied her accession to canonical status.</p>
<p>Now though, as 2023 marks the 150th anniversary of her birth, Colette is being celebrated in France and internationally as a uniquely compelling figure in the French cultural landscape.</p>
<p>Several new studies have appeared, including <a href="https://editions.flammarion.com/notre-colette/9782080290601">Notre Colette</a> by Frédéric Maget, president of the <a href="https://www.amisdecolette.fr/">Société des Amis de Colette</a>. Maget is also the director of the restored childhood home, museum and study centre in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, the Burgundy village she made famous through her writing.</p>
<p>In January at the highly prestigious Institut de France, an “afternoon with Colette” involved readings by famous actors, presentations by academic specialists, music and a pop-up Colette bookshop. Exhibitions abound and several prominent magazines have devoted special issues to her life and works: Lire magazine’s headline was “Colette: tout feu, tout femme! – all fire, all woman!”.</p>
<p>Events are programmed in Italy, Germany, New York and beyond, new translations of her work are appearing and this year’s <a href="https://beyondwordslitfest.co.uk/">Beyond Words Festival</a> at the Institut Français in London will include a celebration of Colette and her writing.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Mqdyyk-iOvY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>A woman in a man’s world</h2>
<p>It is a pleasure to see a great woman and writer fêted in this way, but it is important that her colourful life story and personality do not upstage the splendour of her writing and the artistry it displays. </p>
<p>Her novels, to borrow again from Carter, represent some of the most “truthful expositions of the dilemma of a free woman in a patriarchal society”, and her work charts the struggles but also the resilience and pleasures of female lives from girlhood to old age.</p>
<p>And she is brilliant on the complexities of gender, caustically alert to masculine arrogance but also detailing the beauties of masculine bodies, and offering empathetic portraits of the male casualties of patriarchal law.</p>
<p>Colette was a social chronicler as a prolific journalist as well as a fiction writer, providing a highly original woman’s perspective on everything from fashion (as a comfortably built middle-aged woman she can be very funny about the whippet-thin styles of the 1920s) to murder trials and the material and moral hardships of both world wars.</p>
<p>If Colette’s famed attention to flowers, plants, animals and food have contributed to her exclusion from “serious” status as a writer – seen as sentimental, or as part of a conservative emphasis on “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/sep/04/france.france">la France profonde</a>” – this passionate attention to the natural world is surely ripe for reassessment in the light of the current ecological crisis: Colette as eco-feminist? </p>
<h2>Life, death and acceptance</h2>
<p>And there is the lovely, precise sensuality of Colette’s writing, the words themselves offering the sensory pleasures of sound and form (to a surprising extent captured in many good translations) even as they produce, in the reader’s mind and on their senses, the most vivid images of her imagined world.</p>
<p>Colette’s passionate engagement in life and language survived ageing and infirmity, eliding into her marvellous serenity about mortality. In the peerless <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/02/colette-break-of-day-rereading">Break of Day</a>, and the last works written in old age, <a href="https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2015/08/20/re-reading-colette-for-womenintranslation-month/">The Blue Lantern</a> and <a href="https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2015/08/20/re-reading-colette-for-womenintranslation-month/">The Evening Star</a>, she affirms life’s value as undiminished by mortality, and the individual as woven into the chain of generations – the world does not perish because we leave it.</p>
<p>Closely attentive to a present profoundly enriched by memories, she envisages death as a final journey of discovery:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Discoveries, ever more discoveries! […] Rest assured, nothing is decaying, it is I who am drifting … The open sea, but not the wilderness.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/200863/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Diana Holmes is affiliated with Women in French UK-Ireland.</span></em></p>
A social chronicler and prolific journalist as well as a fiction writer, Colette provided a highly original woman’s perspective on life in stultifying patriarchal times.
Diana Holmes, Professor of French, University of Leeds
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/199619
2023-02-15T12:21:41Z
2023-02-15T12:21:41Z
Salman Rushdie’s Victory City review: a storyteller at the height of his powers
<p>Victory City is an epic chronicle of the rise and fall of Vijayanagar (the capital city of the historic southern Indian Vijayanagara empire), which acquires the name “Bisnaga” through ill-fated attempts at pronunciation by a Portuguese traveller.</p>
<p>The story unfolds as a fictional retelling of Bisnaga’s history, premised on the archaeological discovery of the Jayaparajaya, a poem by a writer named Pampa Kampana. Readers are told that its title translates as “Victory and Defeat”.</p>
<p>The unnamed narrator’s voiceovers and alternative versions of stories alert readers to the intersections of memory, memorialisation and history. As the narrator explains: “We knew only the ruins that remained, and our memory of its history was ruined as well, by the passage of time, the imperfections of memory.”</p>
<p>Throughout the novel, Rushdie explores the process of writing history – how it is recorded and how significance is apportioned. As Pampa Kampana states: “History is the consequence not only of people’s actions but also their forgetfulness.” </p>
<p>Rushdie is interested in how history is argued over and rewritten in contemporary moments. In particular, he takes aim at the populist exploitation of historical narratives for political gain. We hear that “fictions could be as powerful as histories” and that – paradoxically – “they were no more than make believe but they created truth”.</p>
<p>Through her poem, Pampa Kampana generates in Bisnaga’s inhabitants a collective stake in the city and the civilisation it wants to build. The novel chronicles the fate of the city through successive rulers, who ultimately cause its downfall. </p>
<h2>Victory City’s place in Rushdie’s oeuvre</h2>
<p>Victory City takes an interesting position in Rushdie’s wider body of work. In some ways it could be read as a companion volume to ideas he explored in The Enchantress of Florence (2008), where a European traveller arrives at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar, claiming to be the son of a lost Mughal princess, Qara Köz, with magical powers. </p>
<p>Women take a central role in the world-building of both novels – Pampa, like Qara, is an enchantress.</p>
<p>Victory City also marks a return of sorts for Rushdie, who has not set a novel substantially on the Indian subcontinent for over a decade.</p>
<p>At a time of resurgent nationalism, Rushdie’s turn to the historical epic is interesting in its recourse to medieval history and the lineages he develops. </p>
<p>It’s reminiscent of Telugu historical film epics such as <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2631186/%22%22">Baahubali</a> (2015), or the historical worlds conjured by Hindi filmmakers such as Sanjay Leela Bhansali in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3735246/">Bajirao Mastani</a> (2015), or Ashutosh Gowariker in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449994/">Jodhaa Akbar</a> (2008). </p>
<p>Victory City – similar to The Enchantress of Florence – showcases Rushdie’s research. The novel includes a bibliography of the works he referenced, including the history of Vijayanagar from the early 14th to the late 16th century.</p>
<p>Rushdie’s training as a historian at Cambridge University resonates in his fiction. There are detailed descriptions of court life, city dwelling and of encounters with travellers. There is also an astute sense of the partiality of history and how perspective alters in the different telling and re-telling of the same event.</p>
<p>In this way, Victory City sharpens the reader’s understanding of the writing of history and how it can be used to serve certain agendas.</p>
<h2>Rushdie’s plea for tolerance</h2>
<p>Victory City is Salman Rushdie’s fifteenth novel and the first to be published since <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/salman-rushdie-wont-stop-telling-stories">he was brutally attacked</a> in August 2022, which left him with life-changing injuries. </p>
<p>Although completed before the attack, the work can be considered a riposte to what <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/salman-rushdie-alleged-attacker-reveals-reason-stabbing-1735100">Rushdie’s assailant</a> stands for in its appeal to kindness and tolerance. To think about Victory City purely in terms of this incident, however, does Rushdie’s marvellous epic novel an injustice.</p>
<p>Rushdie is an assured storyteller at the height of his powers, revealing once again how important India is as a fount of his imagination. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Salman Rushdie in a blue suit holding a microphone." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509229/original/file-20230209-16-ene9yk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509229/original/file-20230209-16-ene9yk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509229/original/file-20230209-16-ene9yk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509229/original/file-20230209-16-ene9yk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509229/original/file-20230209-16-ene9yk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509229/original/file-20230209-16-ene9yk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509229/original/file-20230209-16-ene9yk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Salman Rushdie in 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://epaimages.com/search.pp">Rafal Guz</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Victory City is profoundly humanist. Throughout, there is an appeal to justice, respect and equality – and perhaps a prism through which to reflect on how these ideals are increasingly under threat. Rushdie gives us the words and stories with which to defend them.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199619/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Florian Stadtler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Victory City marks a return for Rushdie, who has not set a novel substantially on the Indian subcontinent for over a decade.
Florian Stadtler, Lecturer in Literature and Migration, University of Bristol
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/193449
2023-01-16T19:04:10Z
2023-01-16T19:04:10Z
Bret Easton Ellis’s ambitious new novel of sex, violence and adolescence in 80s Los Angeles is autofiction for our digital age
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504581/original/file-20230116-20-ayd74x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=29%2C11%2C3964%2C1982&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Image credits: (background) Vlada Karpovich/Pexels; (author photo of Bret Easton Ellis) Casely Nelson.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Halfway through Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel in 13 years, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Bret-Easton-Ellis-Shards-9781800752450/">The Shards</a>, the 17-year-old narrator, Bret (a fictionalised version of the author) pitches to a producer, Terry Schaffer. </p>
<p>This Bret, who is working on the debut novel the real Bret published in 1985 – <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9915.Less_Than_Zero">Less Than Zero</a> – describes the scenario he has developed.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[A] boy, his friends, young people in L.A.; sexy, a little bi, drugs, someone is killed, there’s a chase, violence and bloodshed, a mystery that the boy solves or maybe not, I preferred the downer ending but could make it upbeat as well, I’d offer, we could negotiate that.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To a certain extent, this pitch, which the narrator pretty much makes up on the spot, mirrors the plot of Less Than Zero (which, despite some biographical overlap, Ellis has always considered a work of fiction). </p>
<p>With a few changes, the scenario could also double as a summary of The Shards. The crucial difference is that this new novel – in ways Ellis’s debut does not – dissolves the lines between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: The Shards – Bret Easton Ellis (Swift Press)</em></p>
<hr>
<h2>Writerly imagination in overdrive</h2>
<p>The story is set in the autumn of 1981 and revolves around a cluster of wealthy students enrolled at Buckley College, an exclusive Los Angeles prep school.</p>
<p>Bret, who is gay but closeted, is dating Debbie Schaffer (who has justifiable doubts about her boyfriend’s friendships with Ryan Vaughn and Matt Kellner), and is friends with two teenage sweethearts, Susan Reynolds and Thom Wright.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504574/original/file-20230116-62628-czg0zi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504574/original/file-20230116-62628-czg0zi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504574/original/file-20230116-62628-czg0zi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504574/original/file-20230116-62628-czg0zi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504574/original/file-20230116-62628-czg0zi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504574/original/file-20230116-62628-czg0zi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504574/original/file-20230116-62628-czg0zi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504574/original/file-20230116-62628-czg0zi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The ‘real’ Bret Easton Ellis as a high schooler, in his yearbook photo from The Buckley School, Sherman Oaks California.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Bret who is writing this novel then introduces two more characters – a student named Robert Mallory and a serial killer called The Trawler – into the mix.</p>
<p>Not long after, Matt goes missing. The fictional Bret’s writerly imagination goes into overdrive. He suspects Robert is responsible, and that he is The Trawler. Things quickly spiral out of control. </p>
<p>As Ellis’s fans will anticipate, his latest is full of pop culture references (the Buckley clique are big New Wave fans), sex and drugs, and acts of grotesque violence rendered in tonally neutral prose. Some cultural commentary, too, on the purported perils of political correctness. Think: <a href="https://theconversation.com/joan-didion-for-sale-the-auction-of-the-authors-belongings-reveals-the-grand-fiction-of-her-image-194690">Joan Didion</a> meets <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000361/bio">Brian De Palma</a>. </p>
<p>When it comes to content, The Shards, with its cast of hedonistic and disaffected adolescents, aligns with three of Ellis’s earlier L.A. novels: Less Than Zero, 1987’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9912.The_Rules_of_Attraction">The Rules of Attraction</a>, and the sequel to his debut, 2010’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7519866-imperial-bedrooms">Imperial Bedrooms</a>.</p>
<p>In terms of length, however, The Shards, which is 600 pages long, is closer to Ellis’s New York fictions: 1991’s American Psycho (which I believe is the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-case-for-american-psycho-why-this-controversial-book-sold-here-in-shrink-wrap-still-matters-188463">most important novel</a> of the 1990s), and 1998’s <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/bret-easton-ellis-glamorama-book-890620/">Glamorama</a> (easily, for me, the best novel of the 1990s).</p>
<p>What, though, of form? To answer that question, we should turn to what once seemed a relative outlier in Ellis’ fictional oeuvre, 2005’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4031.Lunar_Park">Lunar Park</a>. This is from the first chapter: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was to deal primarily with the transforming events of my childhood and adolescence, ending with my junior year at Camden, a month before Less Than Zero was published. But even when I simply thought about the memoir it never went anywhere (I could never be honest about myself in a piece of non-fiction as I could in any of my novels) and so I gave up.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In an <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-autofiction-turns-the-personal-into-the-political-192180">autofictional move</a> that prefigures the central conceit of The Shards, Lunar Park’s narrator – a fictional version of Ellis in middle age – is discussing a memoir he didn’t write. This Ellis says he “had even given it a title without having written a single usable sentence: Where I Went I Would Not Go Back”. </p>
<p>Ellis’s interest in the creative treatment of actuality emerges in these extracts, as does his willingness to mine his youth for inspiration.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/g4oPo5BBxA8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Bret Easton Ellis’s debut novel, Less Than Zero, was a 1987 film.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-case-for-american-psycho-why-this-controversial-book-sold-here-in-shrink-wrap-still-matters-188463">The case for American Psycho: why this controversial book (sold here in shrink wrap) still matters</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The ‘fake enclave’ of the novel</h2>
<p>Now consider what Ellis says about that most recognisable of literary forms: the novel. This is from White, <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/bret-easton-ellis-interview-smiley-face-killers-b1770127.html">the contrarian essay collection</a> he published in 2019. Pay attention to his descriptions of Lunar Park and Imperial Bedrooms:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The desire to write prose had kept pulsing faintly within me for years but not within what I now saw as the fake enclave of the novel. In fact I’d been wrestling away from the idea of “the novel” for more than a decade, as evident in the last two books I published: one was a mock memoir wrapped within a horror novel, and the other was a condensed autobiographical noir I pushed through painfully during a midlife crisis, a story about my first three years back in Los Angeles futilely working on movies after I’d lived in New York for almost two years. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ellis’ dissatisfaction with the novel is palpable. “For those past five years I had no desire to write a novel and had convinced myself I didn’t want to be constrained by a form that did not interest me anymore.”</p>
<p>But why, given his apparent lack of interest in the form, did Ellis bother writing another novel? This is the explanation he gives in the “preface” to The Shards, which, to repurpose Ellis, reads as an expansive L.A. noir wrapped up as an ostensibly honest memoir:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It wasn’t until 2020 that I felt I could begin The Shards, or The Shards had decided that <strong>Bret</strong> was ready because the book was announcing itself to <strong>me</strong> – and not the other way round. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Bret speaking here is a fictional, older version of the novel’s narrator. He is reflecting on the traumatic events of The Shards: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I hadn’t reached out to the book because I spent so many years pushing myself away from The Trawler, and Susan and Thom and Deborah and Ryan, and what happened to Matt Kellner; I had relegated this story to the dark corner of the closet and for many years this avoidance worked – I didn’t pay as much attention to the book and it stopped calling out to me. But sometime during 2019 it began climbing its way back, pulsing with a life of its own, wanting to merge with me, expanding into my consciousness in such a persuasive way that I couldn’t ignore it any longer – trying to ignore it had become a distraction.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504578/original/file-20230116-26-xx6srm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504578/original/file-20230116-26-xx6srm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504578/original/file-20230116-26-xx6srm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504578/original/file-20230116-26-xx6srm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504578/original/file-20230116-26-xx6srm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504578/original/file-20230116-26-xx6srm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504578/original/file-20230116-26-xx6srm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504578/original/file-20230116-26-xx6srm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>(I should note, there is also a preface to the “preface”, where the “real” Bret – the one writing the novel in our hands, as opposed to the book within the book – thanks the reader for sticking with him over the years.)</p>
<p>It seems that, try as he might, Bret Easton Ellis - imagined or actual - simply cannot get away from the novel. </p>
<p>He admits this in White, while harking back to his experiences in the 1980s and 90s. “I rarely gave interviews between book publications because part of the process was still mysterious to readers,” Ellis ruminates, “with a kind of secret glamour that added to the excitement with which books were once received, whether negatively or positively.” </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-autofiction-turns-the-personal-into-the-political-192180">How autofiction turns the personal into the political</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Exploring analog v digital worlds</h2>
<p>To his credit, Ellis, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/bret-easton-ellis-thinks-youre-overreacting-to-donald-trump">who is quite cranky these days</a>, appreciates that things are different now. As he argues in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41429819-white">White</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But novels don’t engage with the public on that level anymore. I’d wistfully noted the overall lack of enthusiasm for the big American literary novels […] but I’d also realized that’s nothing to worry about. It’s only a fact, just as the notion of the great American studio movie or the great American band has become a smaller, narrower idea. Everything has been degraded by what the sensory overload and the supposed freedom-of-choice technology has brought to us, and, in short, by the democratization of the arts. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>For better or worse, there is, in Ellis’s reckoning, no going back. Hence the steps he took:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I started feeling the need to work my way through this transition - to move from the analog world in which I used to write and publish novels into the digital world we live in now (through podcasting, creating a web series, engaging on social media) even though I never thought there was any correlation between the two. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ellis knows better now. The Shards, which started as a year-long, hour-by-hour performance hosted on <a href="https://www.patreon.com/breteastonellispodcast">Ellis’s podcast</a> is proof there are points of correlation between the analog and digital realms, which he also defines in relation to - of all things - the concept of Empire:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If Empire was about the heroic American figure - solid, rooted in tradition, tactile and analog – then post-Empire was about people who were understood to be ephemeral right away; digital disposability doesn’t concern them – they’re rooted in traditions created by social media, which is solely about exhibition and surface, and they don’t follow a now dated path of cultural development.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This helps us understand The Shards, which is the best and most ambitious novel Ellis has published since <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9913.Glamorama">Glamorama</a>. Forget what Ellis said about being done with the novel. His latest, which unfurls, as the narrator states, across the “deep span of empire”, confirms that Ellis remains committed to the form, and the opportunities it affords him.</p>
<p>The Shards is a bold attempt to understand how the analog and digital interact. This accounts for the novel’s countless, obsessive descriptions of outmoded forms of analogue tech: the cassette, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax">Betamax</a>, and, most tellingly, the typewriter. It also explains Ellis’s bravura manipulation of genre (the age of the digital, as we know, is one where once-stable systems of classification tend to collapse).</p>
<p>With his latest, Ellis is, in essence, attempting to refashion and – to crib from the Trawler – <em>remake</em> the (analog) novel in our contemporary (digital) age. I think he succeeds. Others may disagree. Either way, The Shards is a timely reminder this is a writer willing to take risks. </p>
<p>Whatever one thinks about the other Brets floating around, it’s good to have this version of Bret Easton Ellis back.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/193449/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel in 13 years blurs fact and fiction, mining his youth for material. The result is Joan Didion meets Brian De Palma.
Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/190441
2022-10-12T19:01:56Z
2022-10-12T19:01:56Z
Ninety years on, what can we learn from reading Evelyn Waugh’s troubling satire Black Mischief?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487700/original/file-20221003-21-snffdi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C2%2C985%2C732&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Evelyn Waugh</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image: IMDB</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ninety years ago, in October 1932, the English satirist Evelyn Waugh published his third novel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mischief">Black Mischief</a>. He’d had a hit two years prior with <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-complete-works-of-evelyn-waugh-vile-bodies-9780199683451?cc=au&lang=en&">Vile Bodies</a>, a novel that made famous (even as it mocked) the slang and habits of the aristocratic <a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Bright_Young_People/GxGcgrlmF14C?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover">Bright Young Things</a> and propelled Waugh to literary stardom. The success of that novel and his later classic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brideshead_Revisited">Brideshead Revisited</a> (1945) meant Waugh would forever be associated with the hedonism of 1920s aesthetes and <a href="https://journals.h-net.org/jfs/article/view/20">party-goers</a>. </p>
<p>Waugh thought Black Mischief would be even more successful, particularly across the Atlantic. The novel wasn’t a failure, although it did not sell in the way he wanted. It did, however, ignite a scandal in English letters that reveals the values of 1930s Britain in some troubling ways.</p>
<p>Black Mischief is a dystopian satire like Aldous Huxley’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World">Brave New World</a>, published earlier that same year. Set off the coast of northeast Africa, on the fictional island of Azania, Waugh’s novel <a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Evelyn_Waugh_s_Satire/K6M9DAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover">satirises</a> the country’s conversion from tradition to modernity. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487692/original/file-20221003-39604-nwketf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487692/original/file-20221003-39604-nwketf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487692/original/file-20221003-39604-nwketf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=886&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487692/original/file-20221003-39604-nwketf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=886&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487692/original/file-20221003-39604-nwketf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=886&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487692/original/file-20221003-39604-nwketf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1114&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487692/original/file-20221003-39604-nwketf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1114&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487692/original/file-20221003-39604-nwketf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1114&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The first edition of Black Mischief (1932).</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Azania’s modernisation is captained by the foolish Oxford-educated Emperor Seth and Basil Seal, an Englishman on the make, who has stolen his mother’s jewellery to finance his travel. With no qualifications and no local knowledge, Basil is appointed Minister for Modernisation by Seth, who sees Basil, accurately, as a representative of “Progress and the New Age”. Coming from the arch-Catholic Waugh, that’s a cutting insult. </p>
<p>Basil oversees Seth’s modernising schemes, including a city inspired by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris">Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s remodelling of Paris</a>, currency reform, birth control, and compulsory <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto">Esperanto</a>. Eventually, the country collapses into civil war and Seth is killed by a rival faction. Basil escapes into the jungle and, in a grim twist, inadvertently eats his lover Prudence, who has been cooked in a cannibal stew.</p>
<p>Part of Waugh’s inspiration came from his travels in Abyssinia, British East Africa and the Congo in late 1930 and early 1931. He had been hired as a foreign correspondent for The Times and the Daily Express to cover Ras Tafari’s 1930 coronation as <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Haile-Selassie-I">Emperor Haile Selassie</a> of Abyssinia. Unlike the more experienced correspondents, Waugh waited to see the coronation before he wrote any stories about it. The result was that he was repeatedly scooped. He would later satirise journalistic ethics in his other African novel, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/10/100-best-novels-scoop-evelyn-waugh-robert-mccrum">Scoop</a> (1938). </p>
<p>Waugh wrote about his trip in his travel book <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/remote-people-9780718197728">Remote People</a> (1931), describing Abyssinia as “a tangle of modernism and barbarity”. At the time, Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia) was the only independent sovereign nation in Africa. European colonial powers were closely watching Selassie’s coronation. </p>
<p>Waugh was by turns amused and exasperated by what he saw as haphazard African attempts to modernise according to a European model of “civilisation”. But it is clear from the structure of Black Mischief, in which scenes set in England are intercut cinematically with scenes in Azania, that he also meant his English readers to draw <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0950236X.2016.1238003">parallels between home and abroad</a>. As he wrote in Remote People: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why go abroad?<br>
See England first.<br>
Just watch London knock spots off the Dark Continent.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/bloody-fool-evelyn-waughs-life-as-a-1920s-oxford-aesthete-57317">'Bloody Fool': Evelyn Waugh's life as a 1920s Oxford Aesthete</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Deep crisis</h2>
<p>When Waugh began writing Black Mischief in late 1931, England was in deep crisis. The 1929 financial crash and the Great Depression sparked political skirmishes over domestic and foreign economics. </p>
<p>At the general election of October 27, <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/history/past-prime-ministers/james-ramsay-macdonald">Ramsay MacDonald’s National government</a> was elected in a landslide. MacDonald had been prime minister of the minority <a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/How_Labour_Governments_Fall/GW2YAAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=ramsay+macdonald+national+government&pg=PP1&printsec=frontcover">Labour government of 1929-31</a>, which had been ineffective at staving off the worst effects of the crash. In 1931, MacDonald formed a coalition with Conservative MPs, including former prime minister <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/history/past-prime-ministers/stanley-baldwin">Stanley Baldwin</a>. This was widely seen as a betrayal of the Labour movement. When he met MacDonald in 1930, Waugh wrote in his diary that he thought him a “nasty and inadequate man”.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487690/original/file-20221003-54720-4kprfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487690/original/file-20221003-54720-4kprfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487690/original/file-20221003-54720-4kprfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487690/original/file-20221003-54720-4kprfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487690/original/file-20221003-54720-4kprfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487690/original/file-20221003-54720-4kprfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487690/original/file-20221003-54720-4kprfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487690/original/file-20221003-54720-4kprfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Evelyn Waugh in 1940.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Much campaigning in the lead-up to the 1931 general election centred around finance, including a debate over tariffs on imports. The Import Duties Act of 1932 imposed a tariff on goods not already subject to duties, <a href="https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20172020">effectively ending a long period of free trade in Britain</a>. England abandoned the gold standard in late September 1931, a previously unimaginable reversal of monetary policy. Evelyn’s brother Alec Waugh <a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Thirteen_Such_Years/C7SwhMUjpK0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover">wrote</a> that it “could not mean anything but an entire reassessment of long-held values”. </p>
<p>For Waugh, the financial uncertainty was another sign of the disorder wrought by modernity. When Waugh introduces Basil Seal in Black Mischief, Basil has recently resigned from his seat in parliament over a “tariff issue”. Later, the Emperor Seth reveals his limited understanding of modern monetary theory when he prints (rather than mints) new currency. Such references indicate that <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254956576_A_Little_Fiction_is_Good_for_You_Currency_Crisis_The_Nation_State_and_Waugh's_African_Texts">Waugh’s satire was pointedly turned towards home</a>. </p>
<p>Many of Black Mischief’s funniest scenes are set at the British Legation, whose residents are absurdly ignorant of Azanian daily life and customs. The head of the Legation is Sir Samson Courteney, father of the ironically named Prudence. Sir Samson is an old buffer who ignores diplomatic messages, preferring to play cards and take long baths. His wife Lady Courteney spends all her time in her garden, which was probably inspired by the garden at <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/madresfield-9781409009443">Madresfield</a>, the country house where Waugh wrote some of the novel. </p>
<p>Prudence Courteney is a silly girl writing a boring modernist epic, which she calls the Panorama of Life. Waugh may have modelled Sir Samson on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Barton">Sir Sidney Barton</a>, the English Envoy Extraordinary to Abyssinia. He disliked Barton’s daughter Esmé, so he might have relished imagining her being cooked in a stew.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488198/original/file-20221005-15-ur7rf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488198/original/file-20221005-15-ur7rf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488198/original/file-20221005-15-ur7rf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488198/original/file-20221005-15-ur7rf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488198/original/file-20221005-15-ur7rf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488198/original/file-20221005-15-ur7rf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488198/original/file-20221005-15-ur7rf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488198/original/file-20221005-15-ur7rf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Social activist Marie Stopes (1880-1958).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Waugh was also satirising social debates. A campaign for birth control was a major social movement in the interwar period. Its pioneer, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Stopes">Marie Stopes</a>, was a strong supporter of eugenics. In Black Mischief, Seth decides that a boulevard in his rebuilt capital city will be called “Place Marie Stopes”. To make way for it, he demolishes a cathedral. Admittedly, it’s an Anglican Cathedral, so Waugh probably thought destroying it was a good idea. </p>
<p>Seth and Basil stage a pageant for birth control in which a group of prostitutes appear under a banner that reads “FROM STERILITY TO CULTURE”. The link between birth control and eugenics is emphasised with a reference to the concept of <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/ectogenesis">ectogenesis</a> – growing embryos in an artifical environment – which had been popularised by the science writer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane">J.B.S. Haldane</a> in his 1923 book Daedalus. Aldous Huxley also uses the concept in Brave New World.</p>
<p>Halfway through the novel, Basil says that if they had been trying to modernise Azania 50 years earlier, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bi-cameral legislature, proportional representation, women’s suffrage, independent judicature, freedom of the press, referendums […] Just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In place of democratic change, the modernisers of Azania use propaganda, money printing, and political violence. It’s unsettling that <a href="https://staffblogs.le.ac.uk/waughandwords/2019/05/09/black-mischief-in-the-albatross-modern-library/">the novel was enthusiastically reprinted</a> for German readers by the European firm Albatross in 1933. The blurb for this edition describes the novel as both satire and Utopia.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/futurology-how-a-group-of-visionaries-looked-beyond-the-possible-a-century-ago-and-predicted-todays-world-118134">Futurology: how a group of visionaries looked beyond the possible a century ago and predicted today's world</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Violating standards of decency</h2>
<p>Black Mischief was the Book Society choice for October 1932. <a href="https://theconversation.com/book-clubs-and-the-blitz-how-wwii-britons-kept-calm-and-got-reading-135963">The Book Society</a> was an interwar subscription book club established in 1929. Members were often from non-metropolian UK or English dominions, such as Australia, and used the Book Society to access new English books that were otherwise hard to get. The result was that Waugh’s novel did quite well in the UK. </p>
<p>It was published simultaneously in the United States. For whatever reason, it failed to move US readers. But the novel’s financial failure in the US was only a small concern in the face of its critical savaging by the Catholic press at home.</p>
<p>For a reader today, the offensive parts of Black Mischief are its representations of race. This is a novel that uses racial slurs. It depicts its Oxford-educated African Emperor as a fool and a lunatic, susceptible to “the inherited terror of the jungle”. Africans are described as “black, naked, anthropophagous”. </p>
<p>When it was reprinted in 1962, Waugh included a series of his own illustrations, which had previously appeared only in a limited large paper edition issued to family and friends. In these, his drawings of African characters resemble the clichés of blackface minstrelsy, a staple of British music hall and US popular entertainment in the early 20th century. </p>
<p>The reviewers of 1932 did not have a problem with Waugh’s depiction of race. Instead, the major controversy of its publication centred on the question of his violation of standards of decency.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488227/original/file-20221005-25-puh0ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488227/original/file-20221005-25-puh0ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488227/original/file-20221005-25-puh0ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488227/original/file-20221005-25-puh0ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488227/original/file-20221005-25-puh0ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488227/original/file-20221005-25-puh0ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488227/original/file-20221005-25-puh0ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488227/original/file-20221005-25-puh0ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Almost immediately after the novel’s release, Waugh went on another international adventure, this time to Brazil and British Guiana – a journey he would eventually fictionalise in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Handful_of_Dust">A Handful of Dust</a> (1934). Before he left, as his biographer Selina Hastings <a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Evelyn_Waugh/QMpHPgAACAAJ?hl=en">describes</a>, he wrote to his friend Diana Cooper that he thought readers could enjoy Black Mischief “without any grave sacrifices of taste”. </p>
<p>Ernest Oldmeadow, editor of the Catholic weekly <a href="https://www.thetablet.co.uk/">The Tablet</a>, disagreed. He called the novel “nauseating” in its depiction of adultery and cannibalism. Oldmeadow argued that Waugh violated Catholic civility by showing Basil and Prudence’s loveless sexual affair (there’s a suggestive image of a cigar limply unfurling in a hip-bath), and Prudence’s grisly end, “stewed to pulp among peppers and aromatic roots”. He called into question Waugh’s good faith and even suggested the work was blasphemous. </p>
<p>For several weeks, controversy raged in The Tablet. Prominent Catholic writers sprung to Waugh’s defence in the name of artistic integrity, while Oldmeadow dug in his heels. </p>
<p>Waugh returned to London in May 1933, deeply insulted by Oldmeadow’s editorials. In response, he composed an Open Letter to his Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, a satirical diatribe that bears close resemblance to Jonathan Swift’s <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm">A Modest Proposal</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Tablet quotes the fact that she was stewed with pepper, as being in some way a particularly lubricious process. But this is a peculiar prejudice of the Editor’s, attributable perhaps, like much of his criticism, to defective digestion. It cannot matter whether she was roasted, grilled, braised, or pickled, cut into sandwiches or devoured hot on toast as a savoury.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This Open Letter was not published in Waugh’s lifetime, but was privately circulated among friends. It later appeared in Mark Amory’s 1980 edition of Waugh’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/mar/20/letters-evelyn-waugh-mark-amory">Letters</a>. </p>
<p>One of the notable aspects of the Tablet controversy was the way it centred on standards of <a href="https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/E2041102209000239">taste and politeness</a>. Neither side saw the novel’s problematic representation of Africans as anything worth fighting over. If it were published today, Black Mischief would have a very different reception.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ghoulishness-depravity-and-stupidity-welcome-to-the-world-of-ottessa-moshfeghs-lapvona-185864">Ghoulishness, depravity and stupidity: welcome to the world of Ottessa Moshfegh's Lapvona</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Types of barbarity</h2>
<p>In his 1962 preface to the third UK edition, Waugh identified the primary theme of Black Mischief as “the conflict of civilisation, with all its attendant and deplorable ills, and barbarism”. As the phrase “attendant and deplorable” suggests, no European character or institution is set up as a positive model. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488203/original/file-20221005-15-q6ubno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488203/original/file-20221005-15-q6ubno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488203/original/file-20221005-15-q6ubno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488203/original/file-20221005-15-q6ubno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488203/original/file-20221005-15-q6ubno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488203/original/file-20221005-15-q6ubno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488203/original/file-20221005-15-q6ubno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488203/original/file-20221005-15-q6ubno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Waugh the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0013838X.2016.1198119">Tory-anarchist</a> exposes the parallels as well as the conflicts between what he saw as two different types of barbarity: modern and traditional. For Waugh, neither European modernity nor African traditional culture was sufficient without the redemption of the Catholic faith. </p>
<p>Black Mischief is caustic about colonial modernity and in its mockery of European behaviours and morality, but racist in its caricatures of African people and <a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Radicals_on_the_Road/ytg27Q_euTMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover">culturally pessimistic</a> about African self-determination. In the closing pages of the novel, Azania becomes a protectorate of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-league-of-nations-was-formed-100-years-ago-today-meet-the-australian-women-who-lobbied-to-join-it-129185">League of Nations</a>, suggesting that Waugh saw European interference in Africa as inevitable. </p>
<p>Black Mischief is strangely ambivalent about this: vibrant but authentic chaos is replaced by neo-imperial regulation. This is underscored by the neutered Orientalism of Gilbert and Sullivan’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Mikado">Mikado</a> playing on a gramophone in the otherwise silent capital. </p>
<p>In reality, Abyssinia was invaded by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Italo-Ethiopian-War-1935-1936">fascist Italy in 1935</a>. The war of aggression showed the ineffectiveness of the League of Nations in the years prior to World War II. In his travel book <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/10/10/specials/waugh-abyssinia.html">Waugh in Abyssinia</a> (1935), Waugh sides with the Italians. In 2022, with culture wars dividing post-Brexit Britain and <a href="https://theconversation.com/giorgia-meloni-and-the-return-of-fascism-how-italy-got-here-190866">fascism returning in Italy</a>, Black Mischief is discomforting to read – not for its foresight, but because very little seems to have been learned from the past.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/190441/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Naomi Milthorpe is currently editing a scholarly edition of Black Mischief as part of the 42-volume Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, for Oxford University Press. </span></em></p>
Evelyn Waugh’s outrageous third novel was controversial, but not for the reasons you might expect.
Naomi Milthorpe, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Tasmania
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/188688
2022-08-18T16:26:24Z
2022-08-18T16:26:24Z
Canadian immigration: We sponsor spouses — why not friends?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479199/original/file-20220815-17-gddnz5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C0%2C3982%2C2658&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">IRCC should rethink how to protect our chosen families and value the interdependence inherent to couples as much as the independence cherished in friendship. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Joshua Sazon/Unsplash)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Faced with the winds of social change, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) redefined family reunification <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/transparency/committees/cimm-jun-02-2021/family-reunification-compassionate-exemptions.html">to include same-sex couples and unmarried partners</a>. </p>
<p>Though its concessions expanded the scope of <em>who</em> one can love and bring to Canada, the last step in our struggle for immigration rights remains to make clear <em>how</em> we love. Is a legitimate relationship necessarily sexual? Is love only between two people? Are friends different than lovers? </p>
<p>At the University of Toronto, I research rebellious historical figures because conservatives often dismiss calls for social change on the basis of their alleged novelty. So to challenge the narrow language of our immigration system, I invite us to return to two <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94456-8">bohemian women</a> who did not conform to traditional meanings of love: George Sand (1804 – 1876) and Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861 – 1937).</p>
<h2>Socially sanctioned love</h2>
<p>A claim for family reunification with the IRCC requires evidence that applicants normally <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/application/application-forms-guides/guide-5289-sponsor-your-spouse-common-law-partner-conjugal-partner-dependent-child-complete-guide.html#incanada">present themselves in public as a couple</a>. </p>
<p>Sand’s trailblazing literary debut, <em>Indiana</em> (1832), criticized the social spectacle expected in modern love. The novel’s happy ending saw Indiana and her cousin Ralph flee the salons of Paris, immigrate to a remote French colony and marry each other. </p>
<p>In her book <em>Lélia</em> (1833) — which the Vatican rushed to <a href="https://scholarworks.arcadia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=modern_lang_faculty_work">index in their list of prohibited books</a> — Sand depicted another independent woman who, willing to be neither single nor part of a couple, wavered between life as a prostitute and life in the desert. </p>
<p>Andreas-Salomé herself immigrated from Russia to continue her studies in Switzerland after her intellectual mentor wanted to marry her though she was still a teenager. Andreas-Salomé rejected two more marriage proposals before the age of 21 — Friedrich Nietzsche’s and his friend Paul Rée’s — and she <a href="https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501732515-005">instead offered them an alternative</a>. Although illegal at the time, she proposed a life together, all three, in one Berlin apartment. </p>
<p>Nietzsche and Rée dismissed her dreamed community as a folly of youth. Fifty years later, however, Andreas-Salomé <a href="https://www.google.ca/books/edition/_/y694AgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PP1&dq=Lebensr%C3%BCckblick:+Autobiographie">defended the principle</a> underpinning her <em>unholy trinity</em>: lovers ought to worship not one another but the same god. </p>
<p>Sand and Andreas-Salomé’s aversion to conventional relationships — and the public’s inability to understand their choices — illustrate how intimate relationships can come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Such examples of unconventional love should remind us that when evaluating its applications, Canada’s immigration system shouldn’t rely on society’s seal of approval.</p>
<h2>Friends without a sexual rapport</h2>
<p>The IRCC considers only relationships with a <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/application/application-forms-guides/guide-5289-sponsor-your-spouse-common-law-partner-conjugal-partner-dependent-child-complete-guide.html#incanada">physical nature</a>, as well as a significant <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/application/application-forms-guides/guide-5289-sponsor-your-spouse-common-law-partner-conjugal-partner-dependent-child-complete-guide.html#incanada">degree of commitment</a>. </p>
<p>Sand is known for her romantic vacations with Alfred de Musset and Frederic Chopin — but she insisted to <a href="https://www.seuil.com/ouvrage/histoire-de-chambres-michelle-perrot/9782020892797">them having their own bedroom</a>. Andreas-Salomé married Carl Andreas and remained his wife for more than 40 years — but <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1969/02/13/salome-unveiled/">they never had sex</a>. </p>
<p>Neither women were prudes and each collected a fair share of sexual partners: it was their notion of sexual pleasure and commitment which differed from our own. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Black and white portraits of two women" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479198/original/file-20220815-16-f124zo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=24%2C0%2C2736%2C1818&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479198/original/file-20220815-16-f124zo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479198/original/file-20220815-16-f124zo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479198/original/file-20220815-16-f124zo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479198/original/file-20220815-16-f124zo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479198/original/file-20220815-16-f124zo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479198/original/file-20220815-16-f124zo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">On the left is George Sand and the right is Lou Andreas-Salomé.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Nadar/Wikimedia Commons, Atelier Elvira/Wikimedia Commons)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“A woman has no other choice than to be unfaithful or to be only half herself,” Andreas-Salomé mused in her <a href="https://archive.org/details/freudjournal00andr">private journal</a>. “In her love she is like a tree awaiting the lightning which will sunder it, but also like the tree, she desires to put forth an abundance of blooms.” Andreas-Salomé conceived pleasure and commitment in organic terms: duty toward human nature, not our partners. </p>
<p>Sand similarly advocated for a collective love devoted to fraternal ideals, especially leading up to the 1848 French Revolution <a href="https://www.ohio.edu/chastain/rz/sand.htm">which she had ushered in</a>. In <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16286/16286-h/16286-h.htm"><em>Lucrezia Floriani</em> (1847)</a> she writes, “Love me as a sister, and not in any other way.” </p>
<p>In a letter to Andreas-Salomé, Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=17260">tapped into</a> a similar fraternal love: “we were rather like primal siblings.” </p>
<p>Sand and Andreas-Salomé’s championing of asexual — or differently sexualized — romantic relationships points to the importance in acknowledging different relationships and intimacy. This is something Canada’s immigration system should be equally open to considering when defining a physical relationship.</p>
<h2>Between independence and family</h2>
<p>The IRCC permits applicants to prove their relationship via a <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/application/application-forms-guides/guide-5289-sponsor-your-spouse-common-law-partner-conjugal-partner-dependent-child-complete-guide.html#incanada">demonstrated interdependence</a>. This requirement defies <a href="https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501732515-010">Andreas-Salomé’s theory of positive narcissism</a>. </p>
<p>She conceived a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/21674086.1962.11926232">natural egoism</a> central to ecosystem interdependence, “like the plant that remains attached to the ground, though it moves away from it so that it can grow in the light.” </p>
<p>IRCC applicants are finally granted their unification request <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/application/application-forms-guides/guide-5289-sponsor-your-spouse-common-law-partner-conjugal-partner-dependent-child-complete-guide.html#incanada">if they have children together</a>. “Marry a friend to have children,” Sand <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6575237m.texteImage">once advised</a> — and some Canadians are actually opting to have <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/2017/attention-canadian-singles-why-not-raise-a-child-with-your-best-friend-1.4097066">children with their friends</a>, but Sand’s <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1876/10/george-sand/630798/">poetic ideal</a> was more ambitious: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Let us love each other, not to be happy in a two-fold egoism, as some call love… but to seek together what us two, poor birds lost in a storm, can do, day by day, to avert this curse which disperses our race, and to gather under our wing a few fugitives crushed like ourselves by terror and distress.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The French novelist blurred the line between procreation and protection. Like Sand, the IRCC should rethink how to protect our chosen families and like Andreas-Salomé, it should value the interdependence inherent to couples as much as the independence cherished in friendship.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/188688/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rayyan Dabbous does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Canada’s immigration system should accept our chosen families and unconventional forms of love, such as friends with deep bonds.
Rayyan Dabbous, PhD Candidate, Center for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/181938
2022-06-14T19:57:20Z
2022-06-14T19:57:20Z
A dying earth and a lament for lost fathers: Sheila Heti strips back the novel and makes it new
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467638/original/file-20220608-22-95t0rh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=130%2C41%2C3363%2C2273&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image by rawpixel.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Sheila Heti’s slender, folkloric novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/pure-colour-9781787302815">Pure Colour</a> contains multitudes. It’s a love story, a lament. And it’s a philosophical enquiry into rupture: radical alteration caused by the death of a father, and a dying iteration of life on earth.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed itself into a different room, and trapped you in it without them.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Pure Colour by Sheila Heti (Harvill Secker)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>To convey this intense defamiliarisation, Heti once again remakes the novel, as she did in her debut work of autobiographical fiction, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/how-should-a-person-be-9780099583561">How Should A Person Be?</a> and its successor, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36203362-motherhood">Motherhood</a>. </p>
<p>As its title suggests, in Pure Colour, human life is stripped to its bare minimum. It’s a story about the cultural moment we’re in: life on earth as a flawed first draft, nosediving into oblivion. Protagonist Mira is one of the three categories of human born from the eggs of a tripartite God:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ready to go at creation a second time, hoping to get it more right this time, God appears, splits, and manifests as three critics in the sky: a large bird who critiques from above, a large fish who critiques from the middle, and a large bear who critiques while cradling creation in its arms.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Critics as God’s collaborators</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/466892/original/file-20220603-25-oiwv72.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/466892/original/file-20220603-25-oiwv72.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/466892/original/file-20220603-25-oiwv72.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466892/original/file-20220603-25-oiwv72.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466892/original/file-20220603-25-oiwv72.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466892/original/file-20220603-25-oiwv72.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466892/original/file-20220603-25-oiwv72.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/466892/original/file-20220603-25-oiwv72.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Humans are now critics: God’s creative collaborators, born to give feedback for his next draft of creation. They are lofty birds interested in beauty and meaning (Mira falls into this category); collective fish concerned with justice on earth; or warm bears who hug their few loved ones close. </p>
<p>Mira is training at the prestigious American Academy of American Critics. There, her pompous professor pronounces on the failings of Edouard Manet (Heti’s favourite painter, as revealed in her breakthrough 2012 novel How Should a Person Be?).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We should feel pity for this desperate and searching boy-painter, who lacks the essential thing, yet doesn’t even know it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As ever, Heti’s deadpan prose is funny, irreverent and sharp. Here, she is critiquing the critics.</p>
<p>The novel’s momentum is sparked by Mira falling in love with the cool, distant, fish-like Annie – an experience beautifully, viscerally evoked as a confusing, painful opening in her chest, “like a vagina was stretching for a very large cock” – and by her love for her bear of a father, whose sudden death transforms her world. Mira feels her father’s spirit</p>
<blockquote>
<p>ejaculate into her, like it was the entire universe coming into her body, then spreading all the way through her, the way cum feels spreading inside.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467086/original/file-20220606-24-t8bg6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a dead fish, oysters and a lemon on a table" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467086/original/file-20220606-24-t8bg6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467086/original/file-20220606-24-t8bg6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467086/original/file-20220606-24-t8bg6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467086/original/file-20220606-24-t8bg6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467086/original/file-20220606-24-t8bg6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467086/original/file-20220606-24-t8bg6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467086/original/file-20220606-24-t8bg6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fish Still Life, Edouard Manet (Original from The Art Institute of Chicago, digitally enhanced by rawpixel)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">rawpixel</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As this suggests – and it’s one of her great strengths as a novelist – Heti is willing to grapple as precisely and vividly as possible with mysteries too great to be expressed; with other, mystical realms. She incorporated a godlike figure – chance – into Motherhood (2018) through the repeated tossing of and conversing with three coins: metaphorically wrestling with angels. </p>
<p>In Pure Colour, her first-person plural narrator invokes spirit and God and the gods directly, unmediated by angels or coins. God is the divine artist-creator working on his next draft. The gods are his minions on earth, entering humans to draw them together – which they experience as instant, igniting love – and to observe their behaviours from within. They then report back to God on the progress of his creation, suggesting what might need improving or revising in his next draft.</p>
<h2>Heavenly and earthly fathers</h2>
<p>If Motherhood was preoccupied with the narrator’s relationship to her mother and deciding whether or not to have a child, Pure Colour is concerned with fathers: heavenly and earthly. </p>
<p>To focus herself at her father’s deathbed, Mira recalls Hamlet’s words: “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Of course, that play is similarly occupied with fathers: its protagonist (like Mira) consumed by grief and aimlessness following a father’s death. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-shakespeares-hamlet-the-everest-of-literature-164070">Guide to the classics: Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Everest of literature</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This is a novel about creation – of art and worlds. It explores the role of the creator as God, as human artist and as parent. It also explores the relationship between creator and creation, and the role of critics and criticism.</p>
<p>True to the etymological roots of the word “novel”, Heti continues to push the novel form and make it new, filling its capaciousness with the questions and problems that obsess her and her narrators. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467088/original/file-20220606-16-t8bg6u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467088/original/file-20220606-16-t8bg6u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467088/original/file-20220606-16-t8bg6u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467088/original/file-20220606-16-t8bg6u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467088/original/file-20220606-16-t8bg6u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467088/original/file-20220606-16-t8bg6u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467088/original/file-20220606-16-t8bg6u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467088/original/file-20220606-16-t8bg6u.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>How Should a Person Be? was a generic mash-up of self-narration, self-help, biblical motifs, a play, art, emails, edited tape-recorded conversations with friends. </p>
<p>In Motherhood, Heti eschewed the novel’s customary male ejaculatory plot structure – exposition, rising tension, climax, denouement, resolution – and invented a new, female, literary form from the rhythms of the menstrual cycle. Sections were titled Ovulation, PMS, Bleeding, Follicular, Alternate Cycles of Hope and Despair. </p>
<p>In Pure Colour, Heti has stripped away the last of the novel’s artifices – fleshed-out characters, plot, the conventional restraints of the material world – and created a story with all the shapeshifting, transmutation and cosmic fluidity of Ovid’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-ovids-metamorphoses-and-reading-rape-65316">Metamorphoses</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-ovids-metamorphoses-and-reading-rape-65316">Guide to the classics: Ovid's Metamorphoses and reading rape</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Life, love and the meaning of a leaf</h2>
<p>Aesthetically, Pure Colour recalls Heti’s first work of fiction, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/608283.The_Middle_Stories">The Middle Stories</a> (2001), which was inspired by children’s literature. It’s a bedtime story with elements of fairytale, fable, religious texts and 18th-century philosophical novels such as Jonathan Swift’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7733.Gulliver_s_Travels">Gulliver’s Travels</a> and Voltaire’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1156110.Micromegas">Micromegas</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467089/original/file-20220606-14-t8bg6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467089/original/file-20220606-14-t8bg6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467089/original/file-20220606-14-t8bg6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467089/original/file-20220606-14-t8bg6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467089/original/file-20220606-14-t8bg6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467089/original/file-20220606-14-t8bg6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467089/original/file-20220606-14-t8bg6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467089/original/file-20220606-14-t8bg6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hand drawn caladium Carolyn Whorton leaf. (Original from Biodiversity Heritage Library, digitally enhanced by rawpixel)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">rawpixel</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Micromegas, the scale is set by a conversation between giant galactic beings who tower over the earth, rendering humans mere specks. In Pure Colour, a single leaf becomes the site of dialogue about the universe and the nature of life on earth.</p>
<p>This unstable fictional world also perfectly conveys the <a href="https://syntheticzero.net/2013/05/27/timothy-clark-derangements-of-scale/">derangements of scale</a> (a phrase coined by eco-critic Timothy Clark) newly evident in this era of planetary transformation. Microscopic, global and universal scales all count here: microbes have presence and agency, as do macro forces such as climate and evolution, and supernatural beings such as gods and the dead – roused from their afterlife peace to converse with the living.</p>
<p>Pure Colour traverses vast arenas of <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05095-z">spacetime</a>, from the creation of the universe to the earth’s possible futures. Everywhere, life and love are conflated. And where we stand in relation to those we love – especially fathers and daughters – is this novel’s most pressing question of all. Which implies there are degrees of distance, and that stepping back is possible: from creation, from a work of art, from a beloved. </p>
<p>For me, this idea of the distance of love and its proper measure is the book’s emotional core, achingly conveyed in this beautiful passage: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What was the riddle that Mira had been sent out into the world to answer? Maybe, What is the actual distance of love?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are many such moments of truth, of shining insight and candid observation, in this novel. At times it felt like a series of cool and brilliant provocations strung loosely together like the coloured glass, candies, lights that recur through the text. </p>
<p>On first reading – as a PDF on my laptop – I was alternately nonplussed and compelled; it felt surprisingly meagre, especially for a Heti novel. Perhaps because the flesh of fairytale is enchantment and this novel serves up only its bones, polished though they are. </p>
<p>But on second reading – as a paper book in my hands – I was mesmerised, and moved to tears by the ending. Immediately on finishing, I wanted to read it again. On that second reading, Pure Colour called to me, exemplifying its own jewel of a truth: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>An artist is driven to make art by the spirit inside them, making an artwork like a signal or flare calling out, beckoning its kin to come near.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In 2022, who could ask for more from art than this gathering of kin? Pure Colour confirms Sheila Heti as one of the most inventive, searching, scintillating and mind-bending writers working today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/181938/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jane Gleeson-White does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Pure Colour confirms Sheila Heti as one of the most inventive, searching, scintillating and mind-bending writers working today.
Jane Gleeson-White, Adjunct Lecturer, UNSW Canberra, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/94050
2018-03-29T09:41:45Z
2018-03-29T09:41:45Z
Will Self: why his report on the death of the novel is (still) premature
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212217/original/file-20180327-109172-tp3izl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C8%2C780%2C471&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:13323-Will_Self_Reading_-1786.jpg">Texas A&M University</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Will Self has declared the novel is “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/17/will-self-the-books-interview-alex-clark-phone-memoir">absolutely doomed</a>” – ironically, in an interview to promote Phone, his latest outing in the very medium he is condemning to death. Even casual readers will note that this isn’t the first time that the reigning Eeyore of British literature has announced the imminent passing of our most popular literary form. </p>
<p>Since 2000, Self has used the occasion of the release of his own books to repeatedly argue that the novel <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/17/will-self-the-books-interview-alex-clark-phone-memoir">is destined to</a> “become a marginal cultural form, along with easel painting and the classical symphony”. During his promotional duties for Umbrella, Self asked whether we are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/25/will-self-humans-evolving-need-stories">evolving beyond the need to tell stories</a>, while in 2014 he announced the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/will-self-novel-dead-literary-fiction">declining cultural centrality of the novel</a> due to the digitisation of print culture in an article to promote Shark.</p>
<p>Self’s obsession with killing off the novel might be more about ego than revenge, but his repeated attempts to plot its downfall form part of a much wider lament. For centuries, writers have been proclaiming the imminent passing of the novel form. More than 60 years ago, JB Priestley called it “a decaying literary form” which “no longer absorbs some of the mightiest energies of our time”. More recently, Zadie Smith complained of <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/11/20/two-paths-for-the-novel/">novel-nausea</a>, while <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/david-peace">David Peace</a> has asked how it is still possible to “believe in the novel form” because “<a href="http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2016/03/09/peace-preferisco-le-storie-brevi-il-dallindividualismoMilano14.html">storytelling is already quite ruined</a> by the individualism of Western society”.</p>
<h2>Difficult reading</h2>
<p>Reading beyond the exhausted sentiments and sensationalist headlines provided by self-harming novelists, what these sentiments collectively highlight is not the death of the novel at all, but the decline of “literary fiction”. Self’s explicit cultural fear is that a serious kind of novel – novels such as his own – that confront us with “<a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/111963/will-self-umbrella-novel">difficult reading</a>” are destined for relegation to the realms of classical music and fine art. What Self’s repeated attempts on the life of the novel actually articulate is a deep-seated fear of the devaluation of literary fiction and its dethroning from a position of economic, popular and critical dominance as a result of the new contexts provided by a social media age.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"975399102849650688"}"></div></p>
<p>Prophesying the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33717596">imminent demise of the novel</a> at the hands of digital technology has become popular in contemporary critical discourse, especially as the form entered the new millennium. Self is one of many authors who have publicly debated the challenges of writing novels in a digital era. </p>
<p>Andrew O’Hagan recently argued that the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/17/privacy-literature-social-media-andrew-ohagan">intense personal perspective</a> offered by platforms such as Twitter and Facebook means that the novel has nowhere left to go in offering an inside account of the lives of others. The crux of both O’Hagan and Self’s sandwich-board arguments ultimately lie in a belief that future readers will be unwilling to disable connectivity and engage only with a physical form of text in relative isolation from the hyper-networked society around them.</p>
<p>But the “death” of literary fiction does not have to come at the expense of the rise of the popular – or of the digital. Smartphones and streaming can sit alongside literary awards and “difficult” novels and offer us vital insights into, and ways of representing, contemporary experience. The novel is perhaps the most hospitable of all forms and opens itself willingly to new voices, languages and technologies. And not all writers are hostile to the impact of the digital on literary form – in their use of social media to tell stories in new ways, both <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/great-american-twitter-novel">David Mitchell and Jennifer Egan</a> have proved that the novel has an innate ability to ingest and adapt to a rapidly changing world. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212623/original/file-20180329-189813-1w11f4o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212623/original/file-20180329-189813-1w11f4o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=623&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212623/original/file-20180329-189813-1w11f4o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=623&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212623/original/file-20180329-189813-1w11f4o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=623&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212623/original/file-20180329-189813-1w11f4o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=783&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212623/original/file-20180329-189813-1w11f4o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=783&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212623/original/file-20180329-189813-1w11f4o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=783&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The novels of a Self-publicist.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ebay</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Importantly, the novel also presents us with perspectives and experiences different from our own. In its contemporary concern with the trope of an “other” who transgresses the boundary of the domestic home, the 21st-century novel offers a vital consideration of the implications of a <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/in-conversation/interviews/2016/oct/ali-smith-on-autumn/">post-Brexit Britain</a>. The novel disrupts and challenges, and in turn elicits responses from readers to, the contemporary concerns it presents.</p>
<h2>Understanding the world</h2>
<p>The etymology of the word “novel” lies in the “new” – and all evidence suggests that the form will continue to evolve – and ingest, rather than ignore, the new languages of the contemporary. The novel – whether in the form of literary or “popular” fiction – helps us to understand the world in which we now live and informs our attempts to navigate both the past and the future. As well as its long-argued innate value, this capacity of the novel to help us negotiate the changes of the present is also key to its survival – and evolution – in the coming century.</p>
<p>As a case for its vitality, Self’s pervasive campaign against the novel couldn’t be more helpful. In repeatedly citing the death of the novel, Self and his band of merry naysaying novelists whip up resolve and resurrection of the form in a context of challenge and change. In doing so, their comments remind us to value this familiar, yet continually innovative form that continues to adapt, ingest and shape-shift, remaining relevant to each generation of readers – and writers. </p>
<p>Literary snobbery and Modernist nostalgia aside, Self’s headline-grabbing soundbites encourage new understandings of wider shifts in novel writing and reading in the 21st century. With writers continually sticking more nails in its half-open coffin, the novel seems destined to remain stuck in critical debates that remain wilfully oblivious to its sustained success in the new millennium. </p>
<p>Emerging from a long winter of discontent, perhaps it is the strange fate of the novel to exist in a permanent state of imminent demise and doom, with an innate awareness of itself as the one genre that literature simply cannot do without.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94050/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Katy Shaw does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Literary fiction is robust enough to withstand the challenges the 21st century throws at it.
Katy Shaw, Professor of Contemporary Writings, Northumbria University, Newcastle
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/83740
2017-09-13T08:57:18Z
2017-09-13T08:57:18Z
A Legacy of Spies: John le Carré’s Smiley still has much to teach us
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185703/original/file-20170912-3750-1p2re3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">h</span> </figcaption></figure><p>In the early decades of his novel-writing career, John le Carré’s most iconic character was the ageing spymaster George Smiley, an intelligence officer associated a fictionalised version of MI6 known as “the Circus”. Appearing in such acclaimed novels as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Smiley came to epitomise a more cerebral model of the fictional spy.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lJWKfnMrAco?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">John le Carré made a rare public appearance at London’s Royal Festival Hall on 7 September 2017, looking back over his career and discussing his new novel.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At the conclusion of the Cold War, however, le Carré had decisively retired this character. In his final appearance in The Secret Pilgrim (1990), Smiley concluded a series of lectures to new recruits by declaring: “Time you rang down the curtain on yesterday’s cold warrior … The new time needs new people. The worst thing you can do is imitate us.”</p>
<p>Subsequently Le Carré’s post-Cold War work has largely consisted of standalone books with no connection to the world of Smiley or the Circus. New novels looked outwards from this institutional culture towards a range of wider geopolitical concerns. These have included, for instance, the international arms trade in The Night Manager, (1993) and the conduct of the “war on terror” in Absolute Friends (2003).</p>
<p>As a result, the announcement that le Carré’s 25th novel, A Legacy of Spies (2017), would constitute his first return to Smiley’s world in 27 years seemed a curious reversal. Did Smiley, against his own protestations, have a valuable lesson for the post-Cold War world after all?</p>
<p>It has become a recurrent convention in modern spy fiction for characters to long nostalgically for the supposed moral certainties of the Cold War. The James Bond film <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kw1UVovByw">Skyfall</a> (2012), for instance, saw M (Judi Dench) brought in front of an inquiry to defend MI6 against accusations that traditional agents have become “irrelevant”. In response, M argued that spies are more necessary than ever in an age when enemies are supposedly no longer identifiable by a uniform or a flag.</p>
<p>Is A Legacy of Spies, then, a more literary take on the same idea, with Smiley returning to champion old methods in the contemporary world?</p>
<h2>Moral certainties</h2>
<p>The viewpoint character in Legacy is Peter Guillam, Smiley’s longtime protégé, now an aged figure himself. The novel has fun juxtaposing two eras of intelligence through his eyes. He reminisces on the service headquarters he used to know, the “Victorian eyesore” with its “cranky old lifts” and “worm-eaten wooden staircases”. This is contrasted with the “shockingly ostentatious new headquarters”, where suspicion is directed at the tracksuits, the airport-style security measures and corporate speech patterns.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6HBytoAJn0Y?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The old Circus of the 1970s was evoked memorably in Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Le Carré himself made a rare public appearance at the Royal Festival Hall to promote the book. Here, however, he specifically denied longing for the supposed moral certainties of the Cold War. Indeed, in his novels from the Cold War, he had regularly critiqued a nostalgic glance back to earlier traditions of heroic espionage from World War II and earlier. It would therefore be surprising indeed if le Carré himself succumbed to this very nostalgic trap.</p>
<p>In many ways, Legacy operates in a similar manner to Tinker Tailor, the iconic novel in which Smiley and Guillam had root out a Soviet mole in the highest echelons of the Circus. Like the earlier novel, Legacy adopts a complex structure based around flashbacks, as Guillam searches the files and his own memory in order to reconstruct an obscured past.</p>
<p>Yet the mystery at the heart of Legacy centres specifically on events depicted in le Carré’s initial breakthrough, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, with Guillam driven to re-examine his role in this intelligence case from early in his career. Le Carré’s latest bestseller, therefore, makes a surprisingly direct link with a novel from 54 years ago. In so doing, it offers startling new perspectives and interpretations of what long-time readers might have considered a cold case. </p>
<p>This may reflect how The Spy, despite its high critical profile, is retrospectively somewhat anomalous in the Smiley series. Its author described it as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/12/john-le-carre-spy-anniversary">asking the question</a> of “how far can we go in the rightful defence of our western values, without abandoning them along the way?” While this theme never entirely disappears from his work, The Spy remains arguably its starkest and most uncompromising examination, frame in what J.B. Priestley memorably described as “an atmosphere of chilly hell”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bD_ubBlZ-FM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’s ‘atmosphere of chilly hell’ was effectively conveyed in the stark monochrome of Martin Ritt’s 1965 film adaptation.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For many, its mood of moral darkness provides a sense of unfinished business. As <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/24/carre-spy-came-cold-boyd">William Boyd muses</a>, “there is something troubling about The Spy that draws you back again and again”. Indeed, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/12/john-le-carre-spy-anniversary">le Carré’s own 50th anniversary retrospective</a> gives a sense of wanting to revisit the story, and to situate its events within a broader context of the German intelligence war of the late 1950s and early 1960s.</p>
<p>Certainly, le Carré takes its central moral lessons to be of relevance to the modern world. Quoting the cynical end-justifies-the-means philosophy of the spy chief “Control”, he also commented that “today, the same man, with better teeth and hair and a much smarter suit, can be heard explaining away the catastrophic illegal war in Iraq, or justifying medieval torture techniques as the preferred means of interrogation in the 21st century”.</p>
<p>Perhaps the message is, therefore, the antithesis of that offered by Skyfall. The Cold War period may indeed hold vital moral lessons for the contemporary world, but these tales should be regarded cautionary rather than affirmative.</p>
<p>And yet whatever failures Smiley’s Circus might possess in its morality, its continuing value may alternatively lie in its sense of methodology. Le Carré recently <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/jul/02/why-we-should-learn-german-john-le-carre">expressed his anxiety</a> regarding Donald Trump, “a man at war with both truth and reason”, championing “lucid, rational language” as a line of defence. Against the backdrop of Brexit too, the evocation of the European Cold War subtly questions which “western values” are worth defending today.</p>
<p>Like the earlier generation of le Carré novels, Legacy is fundamentally concerned with finding an appropriate balance between the truth of the documentary record and factual data, and the truth of human experience and empathy. In a time when both are threatened, this is an area in which Smiley and his people still have much to teach us.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83740/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joseph Oldham does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Far from grasping at Cold War certainties, Le Carré’s Smiley embraces the changing role of the British spy.
Joseph Oldham, Associate Fellow in Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/81658
2017-08-03T00:04:13Z
2017-08-03T00:04:13Z
Worth reading: Future visions of women, war, time and space
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180090/original/file-20170727-8492-1uz4jp3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3000%2C1998&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Former Globe and Mail newspaper reporter turned novelist Omar El Akkad contemplates his debut book _American War_ in his publisher's Toronto office in this 2017 file photo. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.cpimages.com/fotoweb/cpimages_details.pop.fwx?position=3&archiveType=ImageFolder&sorting=ModifiedTimeAsc&search=omar%20and%20el%20and%20akkad&fileId=7ED4E565C8CEED276553137C3F07278F0211563F5E7047DF3AAB663AE59BB0CF1642B0B80D34257E6710EC2568FB7698B59B4D70A14C35A58152C97161CDE0D6B04E7CE9AA485A90E4AEC54C277A369E3B7CAC16A4D3910C42F841C1FF39A6F82A1B1FF576DC98DF2CBC8470DC9E2A6ECB3FE13564EA8A05F21FEEB4402E3B87313C2338D9C9BAFAFBE8F7FDA2D826E5">(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young)</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Editor’s note: The Conversation Canada asked our academic authors to share some recommended reading. In this instalment, Bryan Gaensler, an astronomer who wrote about how an <a href="https://theconversation.com/humans-in-2167-internet-implants-and-no-sleep-79402">life will change for people in 150 years</a>, highlights a few of his recent picks.</em> </p>
<p>My passion is science fiction. Here are my favourite sci-fi books that I’ve read this year:
</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180248/original/file-20170728-1529-562oq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180248/original/file-20170728-1529-562oq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180248/original/file-20170728-1529-562oq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180248/original/file-20170728-1529-562oq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180248/original/file-20170728-1529-562oq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180248/original/file-20170728-1529-562oq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1192&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180248/original/file-20170728-1529-562oq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1192&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180248/original/file-20170728-1529-562oq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1192&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"><em>The Power</em> by Naomi Alderman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Handout</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29751398-the-power"><em>The Power</em></a></h2>
<p>by Naomi Alderman (Fiction. Hardcover, 2016. Penguin.)</p>
<p>Women around the globe spontaneously develop the ability to deliver electric shocks through their fingertips. As they begin to use this power to intimidate, control and kill, the world order is turned upside down.</p>
<p>A spectacular novel, and surely the favourite to sweep all the sci-fi book awards for 2017. People can be both cruel and good-intentioned, often at the same time. Introduce a new power imbalance, and society is abruptly transformed. Wonderful writing, and a whopper of a story twist. Turns <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> on its head.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180097/original/file-20170727-8516-3e4mh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180097/original/file-20170727-8516-3e4mh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180097/original/file-20170727-8516-3e4mh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180097/original/file-20170727-8516-3e4mh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180097/original/file-20170727-8516-3e4mh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180097/original/file-20170727-8516-3e4mh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180097/original/file-20170727-8516-3e4mh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180097/original/file-20170727-8516-3e4mh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"><em>American War</em> by Omar El Akkad.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Handout</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32283423-american-war"><em>American War</em></a></h2>
<p>by Omar El Akkad (Fiction. Hardcover, 2017. McClelland & Stewart.)</p>
<p>A hundred years from now, Florida has vanished under the seas, the Bouazizi Empire is the new world superpower, and the United States has begun its second civil war. In the South, a young woman ends up in a refugee camp and is slowly radicalized into terrorism.</p>
<p>An intense, moving portrait of a future America that maybe isn’t the future after all. The characters are complex and the story is all too real. A spectacular debut.</p>
<p> </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180245/original/file-20170728-23788-7gyilq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180245/original/file-20170728-23788-7gyilq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180245/original/file-20170728-23788-7gyilq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180245/original/file-20170728-23788-7gyilq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180245/original/file-20170728-23788-7gyilq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180245/original/file-20170728-23788-7gyilq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180245/original/file-20170728-23788-7gyilq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180245/original/file-20170728-23788-7gyilq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"><em>All Our Wrong Todays</em> by Elan Mastai.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Handout</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27405006-all-our-wrong-todays"><em>All Our Wrong Todays</em></a></h2>
<p>by Elan Mastai (Fiction. Hardcover, 2017. Doubleday Canada.)</p>
<p>Tom Barren travels back in time, accidentally alters the course of history, and returns to a horrifically changed, dystopian present day. The catch? Tom grew up in a utopia of flying cars and moon bases, and the dystopia that he finds himself trapped in is <em>our</em> timeline, warts and all.</p>
<p>A gem of a story that provides several new twists on time travel. If you’ve screwed up the timeline, should you fix it? What if there were two different ways to travel through time, with different rules and different consequences? And under all of this is the classic sci-fi question writ on the scale of billions of lives: Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of a few? Hard to put down, with a lovable lead character.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180414/original/file-20170731-22175-qpxhub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180414/original/file-20170731-22175-qpxhub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180414/original/file-20170731-22175-qpxhub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180414/original/file-20170731-22175-qpxhub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180414/original/file-20170731-22175-qpxhub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180414/original/file-20170731-22175-qpxhub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180414/original/file-20170731-22175-qpxhub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180414/original/file-20170731-22175-qpxhub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"><em>4 3 2 1</em> by Paul Auster.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Handout</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30244626-4-3-2-1"><em>4 3 2 1</em></a></h2>
<p>by Paul Auster (Fiction. Hardcover, 2017. McClelland & Stewart.)</p>
<p>The life story of Archibald Isaac Ferguson, born in 1947 in Newark, N.J. Except that this is the story of four identical Fergusons, each of whom take divergent paths as their lives play out.</p>
<p>A tour de force story of adolescence and the path not taken. It’s hard to believe a single author could possibly cram so many real-life details, emotions and characters into a single book. Extraordinarily memorable and engaging.</p>
<p> </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180094/original/file-20170727-8516-1thea9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180094/original/file-20170727-8516-1thea9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180094/original/file-20170727-8516-1thea9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180094/original/file-20170727-8516-1thea9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180094/original/file-20170727-8516-1thea9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180094/original/file-20170727-8516-1thea9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180094/original/file-20170727-8516-1thea9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180094/original/file-20170727-8516-1thea9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"><em>The Collapsing Empire</em> by John Scalzi.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Handout</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30282601-the-collapsing-empire"><em>The Collapsing Empire</em></a></h2>
<p>by John Scalzi (Fiction. Hardcover, 2017. Tor.)</p>
<p>Humans have spread throughout a galactic empire, our worlds interconnected by faster-than-light wormholes. But what happens to trade, the economy and civilisation itself when the wormholes start to break down?</p>
<p>A fun and fast-spaced space opera, centred on some forthright women and some fresh ideas. In the spirit of Asimov’s <em>Foundation</em>, Scalzi explores the theme of the downfall of empire on a galaxy-spanning scale.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/81658/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bryan Gaensler receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and from the Canada Research Chairs Program.</span></em></p>
Astronomer Bryan Gaensler picks five speculative and science fiction novels worth reading, including Omar El Akkad’s American War.
Bryan Gaensler, Director, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Toronto
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/81356
2017-07-27T06:33:21Z
2017-07-27T06:33:21Z
Arundhati Roy’s new novel lays India bare, unveiling worlds within our world
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179461/original/file-20170724-7881-1l3tyen.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Arundhati Roy, in 2010.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/people/49503077999@N01?rb=1">jeanbaptisteparis/Flickr" </a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Wearing two hats at once can be an uncomfortable fit, but it does not seem to bother the author <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/2002/03/07/stories/2002030706060100.htm">Arundhati Roy</a>, who for most of her life has <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/profsaibabas-bail-cancelled-contempt-notice-against-arundhati-roy/article8022484.ece">railed</a> against <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/aug/22/kashmir.india">state excesses</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnTS9gHCZoI">corporate exploitation</a> while also <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/aug/22/kashmir.india">wielding the pen</a>.</p>
<p>Maybe she does not think of these two jobs as different, but rather as extensions of each other. </p>
<p>This, at least, is the impression Roy gives her readers in her latest novel, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/305323/the-ministry-of-utmost-happiness/">The Ministry of Utmost Happiness</a> (Hamish Hamilton), which came out in early June. Two decades in the making, the book records the story of India as it transpired over those 20 years. </p>
<p>This contemporary history is told and retold by myriad voices: those of <em><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/488683?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">hijras</a></em>, people who identify themselves as belonging to the third gender or as transgender; of a dalit man (of the lowest castes) who pretends to be Muslim; of Kashmiris, of Indian civil servants, cold-blooded killers and puppet journalists; of <em>adivasis</em> (tribal populations) and of artists, of owls and kittens and of a dung beetle named Guih Kyom.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179220/original/file-20170721-28512-3wqz0h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179220/original/file-20170721-28512-3wqz0h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179220/original/file-20170721-28512-3wqz0h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179220/original/file-20170721-28512-3wqz0h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179220/original/file-20170721-28512-3wqz0h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179220/original/file-20170721-28512-3wqz0h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179220/original/file-20170721-28512-3wqz0h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Roy’s second fiction work was 20 years in the making.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.amazon.com/Ministry-Utmost-Happiness-novel/dp/1524733156">Penguin/Amazon</a>, <a class="license" href="http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en">FAL</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Locales are similarly wide-ranging. Roy takes readers from a graveyard in Old Delhi to civil war-torn Kashmir and to central Indian forests, where Maoist insurgents fight India’s army. Some of the book transpires too in the 18th-century astronomical site, <a href="https://books.google.fr/books?id=QyI6tKjRhdgC&redir_esc=y">Jantar Mantar</a>, the only place in Delhi where people are allowed to protest. </p>
<p>Those are just a few of the backdrops in this panoramic novel, which touches on the various Indian social movements that have captured global attention in recent years, from <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/23/anna-hazare-anti-corruption-protest">the 2011 anti-corruption Anna Hazare protests</a> to the <a href="https://thewire.in/58820/the-dalit-fightback-at-una-is-indias-rosa-parks-moment/">2016 Una dalit struggle</a>. </p>
<p>Roy uses the internal contradictions of the movements and the locales to mirror her meandering plotlines, which knit all these skeins together into a kaleidoscopic larger narrative. </p>
<p>It’s an uneasy fit, and the book often feels like it is about to burst at the seams. Still, Roy somehow holds it all together, clumsily yet passionately, leaving no one and nothing out. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179459/original/file-20170724-11666-1mltff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179459/original/file-20170724-11666-1mltff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179459/original/file-20170724-11666-1mltff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179459/original/file-20170724-11666-1mltff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179459/original/file-20170724-11666-1mltff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179459/original/file-20170724-11666-1mltff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179459/original/file-20170724-11666-1mltff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Old Delhi is among the settings featured in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/India_-_Delhi_old_man_-_5053.jpg">© Jorge Royan/ Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Between a graveyard and a valley</h2>
<p>Both the margins and the marginalised speak in the Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a feat Roy has also sought to achieve with both her activism and <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/arundhati-roy-the-next-novel-will-just-have-to-wait-2371609.html">her non-fiction work</a>. </p>
<p>The story follows two characters: Anjum, nee Aftab, a <em>hijra</em> who rejects the politically correct term “transgender”, and Tilo, a Delhi-based architect turned graphic designer who kidnaps a baby from Jantar Mantar. </p>
<p>Anjum’s life is a lens onto an alternate <em>duniya</em>, or world, one <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17542863.2011.570915?src=recsys&journalCode=rccm20">where <em>hijras</em> live and learn together</a>, cloistered, following their own rules, regulations and hierarchies. </p>
<p>That changes forever when Anjum travels to Gujarat, a western Indian state that is known for its recent history of <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7t0nz">religious violence between Hindus and Muslims</a>, and witnesses a <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1356788020821?journalCode=tstc20">massacre</a>. Shortly thereafter, Anjum moves to a graveyard in Old Delhi. </p>
<p>As always, Roy’s brilliance shines most in her choice of locales and the imagery they invoke. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179219/original/file-20170721-28483-73nus0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179219/original/file-20170721-28483-73nus0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179219/original/file-20170721-28483-73nus0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179219/original/file-20170721-28483-73nus0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179219/original/file-20170721-28483-73nus0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179219/original/file-20170721-28483-73nus0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179219/original/file-20170721-28483-73nus0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Conflict-beset Kashmir, which Roy has covered extensively in her non-fiction work, features in her latest novel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/kashmirglobal/5166832834">KashmirGlobal/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/25/reviews/970525.25truaxt.html?mcubz=0">The God of Small Things</a> (1997), the banks of the Meenachil River in southern Kerala served as the space of deviance for the protagonists, where Ammu and Velutha have their escapades and Estha and Rahel get up to mischief. </p>
<p>In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the author gives us two contrasting, contradictory settings: a graveyard that becomes a place of life and the verdant Kashmir valley, a space of death and misery.</p>
<p>Anjum starts a guesthouse in the old graveyard, with each room enclosing a grave. Holding feasts for festivals, she invites her friends over to dine regularly at the graveyard-guest house. Later, Tilo moves in permanently with the baby.</p>
<p>The reader understands this resplendent graveyard, which features not just living humans but an impressive stock of animals too, as an ode to tolerating (or, more correctly termed, to accommodating) plurality, a blunt contrast to the truth of modern-day India, with its increasing intolerance towards religious and social differences.</p>
<p>For this, for trying to etch out a semblance of hope, for showing broken things and shattered people coming together to carve out a niche of their own, Roy deserves applause. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"869501985493585922"}"></div></p>
<h2>Disparate and intertwined tales</h2>
<p>At times all these voices, places and problems escalate into a dissonant cacophony that leaves the reader perplexed, exhausted and grasping at the multiple threads of the plot. But the novel’s brilliance lies in how it captures subtle moments, with attention to detail and sharp compassion. </p>
<p>For instance, the <em>Ustad</em> (master) Kulsoom Bi takes Anjum and the other newly initiated <em>hijra</em> residents to a light and sound show at the Red Fort in Delhi just so they can hear the fleeting but distinct coquettish giggle of a court eunuch. She explains to them that they, the <em>hijras</em>, were not “commoners, but members of the staff of the Royal Palace in the medieval period.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179453/original/file-20170724-28293-17jrr2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179453/original/file-20170724-28293-17jrr2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179453/original/file-20170724-28293-17jrr2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179453/original/file-20170724-28293-17jrr2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179453/original/file-20170724-28293-17jrr2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179453/original/file-20170724-28293-17jrr2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179453/original/file-20170724-28293-17jrr2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hijras, or transgender women in New Delhi’s Panscheel Park.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hidras_of_Panscheel_Park-New_Delhi-1994-2.jpg">R D´Lucca/Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These nuggets of everyday history and poetry keep readers hooked, gradually lowering us through each of the story’s many layers and offering moments of clarity in an otherwise tangled mesh.</p>
<p>Some have called Roy’s novel a “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/arundhati-roys-fascinating-mess/528684/">fascinating mess</a>”, but frankly when one decides to write a shattered story about all things, the narrative(s) is bound to get fuzzy. </p>
<p>The book may be difficult for those who have not been following Roy and her causes in the long years since God of Small Things. But those who get <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2017/6/26/arundhati_roy_on_the_rising_hindu">her intellectual moorings</a> and understand her role as a voice of dissent in today’s climate of “<a href="http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8560.html">saffronisation</a>” – the spread of extreme-right Hindu values across India, a nation veering hazardously towards authoritarianism, know that the author and her work are one. </p>
<p>Roy’s novel, much like her role as a public intellectual, is a reminder that the world we inhabit is a composite one – a <em>duniya</em> of <em>duniyas</em> – where invisible people, their unrepresented struggles and their unacknowledged yearnings have the right to exist. </p>
<p>The Ministry of Utmost Happiness tells their story, extolling everyone’s right to be heard, even if only fleetingly, in the coquettish giggle of a court eunuch.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/81356/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Malavika Binny has received the Erasmus Mundus IBIES Fellowship from the European Union and the Junior Research Fellowship from the Union Grants Commission of India.</span></em></p>
Author and activist Arundhati Roy proves once again that she is a passionate voice of dissent in a nation that’s tilting towards authoritarianism.
Malavika Binny, Researcher, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/74857
2017-03-23T15:03:21Z
2017-03-23T15:03:21Z
From London to Harare: an activist yearning for an ounce of practice
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162049/original/image-20170322-31217-whydte.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Leo Zeilig's latest novel is set in the Robert Mugabe-ruled Zimbabwe.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>-<em><strong>Book Review</strong>: Leo Zeilig; An Ounce of Practice; Hope Road Publishing, London, February 2017</em></p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161993/original/image-20170322-31203-o2wmji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161993/original/image-20170322-31203-o2wmji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161993/original/image-20170322-31203-o2wmji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161993/original/image-20170322-31203-o2wmji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161993/original/image-20170322-31203-o2wmji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1116&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161993/original/image-20170322-31203-o2wmji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1116&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161993/original/image-20170322-31203-o2wmji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1116&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The cover of ‘An Ounce of Practice’.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Writer and Researcher <a href="http://leozeilig.com/">Leo Zeilig</a>’s new novel tells a gripping tale of an intellectual leftie from London, a group of southern African activists in Zimbabwe and England, and the emotional battles of living and acting in the struggles of the 21st century. </p>
<p>Viktor lives in London. His life is bedevilled by inertia, a sense of dying really. His family life disintegrates. It doesn’t help much that he spends his days immersed in his computer. He connects with the world through Facebook and Twitter, writing blogs and posting them on a website of radical politics. </p>
<p>He longs for practice, for life in action. But he remains stuck in theorising, with his comrades at the university, even in his connection with his young daughter. </p>
<p>Tendai is Viktor’s friend. Now trailing a London university campus as a reading worker and strike organiser; he’s been steeled through a life lived in the southern African struggles against colonialism and apartheid. Tendai believes in practice to prevail over theory. He challenges Viktor:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you haven’t seen and lived, what good are you?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Anne-Marie is in Harare. She works with the development NGO set of expats, though deeply cynical about their politics and lavish lifestyle. Her life finds more clarity and radical action through her involvement with the “Society of Liberated Minds”, a small band of self-styled revolutionaries who rename themselves “Lenin”, even “Stalin”, but also “Biko” and “Cabral”. </p>
<p>Anne-Marie’s double predicament is her prominent Congolese family’s expectations towards her womanhood and her unpredictable lover, the Society’s leader. Biko is an activist in Bulawayo. He burns with desire, rage and action. Biko lives the practice and action that Viktor longs for and, at once, shirks. In his personal life he craves connection with his family, his past, his throbbing loneliness driving him to more and more dangerous action. </p>
<p>Zeilig’s characters connect, at first tentatively, in virtual space. Then Viktor, pushed ever deeper into his crisis and persuaded, cajoled and seduced, travels to Zimbabwe. There he hopes to find “some bloody practice”, grabbing a chance to write “at last for a movement, a people struggling against dictatorship and neoliberalism”. And to meet Anne-Marie … </p>
<p>The action heats up in Harare and Bulawayo. Hotter, more raging, more engaging, more dangerous, more violent than he could have ever imagined.</p>
<h2>Credible characters</h2>
<p>As in his 2013 debut novel “Eddie the Kid”, Zeilig draws his characters with a close eye, deep psychological insight and extraordinary empathy. When I interviewed him, he emphasised that he wanted to avoid portraying activists as “iron Lenins”, which he sees as “an unfortunate tendency in left-wing fiction”. </p>
<p>His characters are enormously credible. Description and dialogue convey inner reflection and outward expression in words and action. In their different ways each of the left-wing activists – from the bumbling Viktor through to the passionate if somewhat dangerously zealous Biko – is well-meaning and flawed. </p>
<p>Even the white Zimbabwean businessman and coffee shop owner Louis, who befriends Viktor in Harare, while portrayed as crudely racist is also vulnerable and capable of love. This appears as the main thrust of this beautifully written novel: in the end, it’s love that’s at the heart of resistance and revolution. Of life itself. This is vividly imagined in Viktor’s loving relationship with his young daughter, which, even though somewhat hapless, is depicted in scenes of moving tenderness. </p>
<h2>Breathing authenticity</h2>
<p>Zeilig’s novel breathes authenticity with a superbly crafted cast of characters and poignant dialogue. He also impresses with acute, sensuous observations of place. The sights, smells and sounds of Harare take the reader into the dilapidated resilience of this once opulent, colonial city. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161994/original/image-20170322-31169-1isiega.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161994/original/image-20170322-31169-1isiega.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161994/original/image-20170322-31169-1isiega.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161994/original/image-20170322-31169-1isiega.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161994/original/image-20170322-31169-1isiega.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1093&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161994/original/image-20170322-31169-1isiega.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1093&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161994/original/image-20170322-31169-1isiega.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1093&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Leo Zeilig.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hope Road Publishing</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For “An Ounce of Practice”, Zeilig – who has been an academic and an activist in left-wing politics in both the UK and southern Africa – has drawn inspiration from two seemingly unconnected social and political struggles. When he was working at the University of London a few years ago, he became involved with a <a href="http://www.solfed.org.uk/catalyst/london-cleaners-strike-and-win">strike of cleaners</a> at the university. </p>
<p>His second theme is the “catastrophic fall” of Zimbabwe, caused by the “twin evils” of IMF/ World Bank <a href="http://newsrescue.com/how-the-imf-world-bank-and-structural-adjustment-programsap-destroyed-africa/#axzz4c2iP4k4F">structural adjustment policies</a> and President Robert Mugabe’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/28/record-levels-of-assault-abduction-and-torture-reported-in-zimbabwe">dictatorship</a>. In Zimbabwe he also witnessed the courageous resistance of small groups of activists. In the novel he connects these stories through crafting a cast of Zimbabwean migrants at the heart of the labour action in London. </p>
<p>Zeilig explained during the interview, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the story is about the connections of the Global North and South, the link between how we live, love and struggle. It also looks at the ‘neo-liberal’ hurricane in both parts of the world.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He emphasised the connection of personal and political crisis and, “the hope, if we are to become truly human, of breaking down the barriers to action, connection and hope”.</p>
<h2>Engagement with political activism</h2>
<p>“An Ounce of Practice” succeeds as an imaginative engagement with the predicament of global political activism today. It elegantly weaves nuanced philosophical reflections on the opportunities and dangers presented by social media and the <a href="https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/the-impossibility-of-precarity">precarity</a> of existence in the neo-liberal academy through a vivid narrative of an individual journey, intimate love and life that never loses sight of the “bigger us”. </p>
<p>As the main protagonist of this African <a href="http://www.dictionary.com/browse/bildungsroman">Bildungsroman</a> slowly begins to live by a saying attributed to <a href="http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj65/german.htm">Friedrich Engels</a> that, “an ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory”, Zeilig shows the exhilaration and hope that comes with activism. At the same time we see excruciating pain, despair and loss emerging in the encounter with violent dictatorship and repression. </p>
<p>“An Ounce of Practice” is a brilliant work of literary imagination that takes the reader to new realities in an engaging, moving read, hilariously humorous at times. Zeilig’s new novel is a page turner for readers interested in the profound questions of radical politics and humanity in today’s world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74857/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Heike Becker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Leo Zeilig’s novel features a superbly crafted cast of characters. It’s a page turner for readers interested in the profound questions of radical politics and humanity.
Heike Becker, Professor of Anthropology, University of the Western Cape
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62010
2016-07-20T18:30:10Z
2016-07-20T18:30:10Z
Under the influence of … novelist Ishtiyaq Shukri’s debut, ‘The Silent Minaret’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/131380/original/image-20160721-32623-1cw8pf0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Cover of The Silent Minaret.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jacana</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is the fourth in a weekly series called “Under the influence”, in which we ask experts to share what they believe are the most influential works of art in their field. Here, Neelika Jayawardane introduces Ishtiyaq Shukri’s first novel, “The Silent Minaret”, published in 2006 by Jacana.</em></p>
<p>“The Silent Minaret” is <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2005-02-04-written-in-secret">Ishtiyaq Shukri</a>’s first novel. It centres around the unexplained disappearance of a young South African-born student, Issa Shamsuddin, in London. We never learn of the reasons behind the disappearance.</p>
<p>Through the use of a variety of narrative techniques, Shukri links colonial-era tactics used to subdue people and control their resources with similar strategies employed in both apartheid-era South Africa and the post 9/11 world. </p>
<p>After reading “The Silent Minaret”, there’s no mistaking that the tactics used by 16th- and 17th-century empires – including the abduction, transport and imprisonment of dissenters in distant island-gulags – are parallel to those that have been used by the empire-builders of the 21st century. </p>
<p>We realise, as we follow Issa’s intellectual trajectory, that during the so-called global “<a href="http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4679.htm">war on terror</a>”, the US and its powerful allies have similarly confiscated vast swathes of land, displaced millions of people and forcibly taken over access to this century’s most valued resource – petroleum. </p>
<h2>Why is/was it influential?</h2>
<p>This novel resonated with me in a way few books have. I would even venture to say that my scholarship is based on the initial research I did for my scholarly writing about Shukri’s first novel.</p>
<p>Issa Shamsuddin, Shukri’s protagonist, begins his political journey in South Africa as social, intellectual and political outsider, as an in-between <em>Other</em> who identifies with no ethnic or national group. His position as an <em>Other</em> allows him to question easy nationalism, revealing the ways in which the privilege of belonging is made possible, most often, using violence and exclusion.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129462/original/image-20160705-820-1agmyh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129462/original/image-20160705-820-1agmyh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129462/original/image-20160705-820-1agmyh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129462/original/image-20160705-820-1agmyh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129462/original/image-20160705-820-1agmyh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=678&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129462/original/image-20160705-820-1agmyh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=678&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129462/original/image-20160705-820-1agmyh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=678&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">South African-born author Ishtiyaq Shukri.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jacana Media</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Shukri <a href="http://www.litnet.co.za/interview-i-see-you-by-ishtiyaq-shukri/">has said</a> in a Litnet interview that he is, in some ways, “homed” in many places, be it Palestine, Oman, London or South Africa. He declares, very clearly, “I don’t believe in the nation state.”</p>
<p>He details why a passport does not make a person, nor give a person an identity or sense of belonging. That’s especially something that becomes apparent when you realise that your passport “belongs to the South African government, and […] can be withdrawn at any time”, he said in the LitNet interview. His novel is a challenge to such easy, go-to sorts of identity locators.</p>
<h2>My relationship with the book</h2>
<p>These are the issues I’ve dealt with as a person who was born in one country (Sri Lanka), raised in another (Zambia), educated in yet another (the US), and lived somewhat itinerantly in about five countries (a list that includes South Africa). That’s without having any sense of national pride in any one of them.</p>
<p>I have a visceral reaction to being asked “Where are you from?” That question usually comes from those who wish to circumscribe you through the category of nation – and then, by the mythologies of race, gender and the like that the questioner associates with the location you are supposedly “from”. </p>
<p>The question assumes, with the 20th century’s false elevation of nation above all else, that one’s nation will determine one’s loyalties and cultural and psychic belonging, as well as what one will be like, in general. Shukri gets us to question that powerful political-cultural myth of being tied to nation – it’s a remarkable achievement in fiction.</p>
<h2>Why is it still relevant today?</h2>
<p>“The Silent Minaret” follows the ways in which empire reproduces itself in different locations, with different actors. For instance, there is a section where we learn about how Israel is systematically eradicating entire Palestinian villages by diverting flowing bodies of water into Jewish settlers’ farms. This, while building a vast, snaking concrete <a href="http://www.stopthewall.org/the-wall">wall</a> across lands that once belonged to Palestinians.</p>
<p>Shukri shifts the reader’s line of thought from one war and contested location to another, creating layers that reveal the ways in which imperialism, conquest and erasure work, rather than creating easy parallels.</p>
<h2>Birds of a feather</h2>
<p>Similar books incude:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Shukri’s second novel, “<a href="http://www.jacana.co.za/component/virtuemart/i-see-you-detail?Itemid=0">I See You</a>” (Jacana, 2014), published eight years later;</p></li>
<li><p>“<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/23/fugitive-pieces-anne-michaels">Fugitive Pieces</a>” by Anne Michaels (Vintage, 1998); and </p></li>
<li><p>“<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/09/biography.nicholaslezard">Out of Place</a>” by Edward Said (Vintage, 2000).</p></li>
</ul><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62010/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Neelika Jayawardane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The protagonist in the novel ‘The Silent Minaret’ gets us to question that powerful political-cultural myth of being tied to nation. That is a remarkable achievement in fiction.
Neelika Jayawardane, Associate Professor of English, State University of New York Oswego
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62374
2016-07-13T20:57:01Z
2016-07-13T20:57:01Z
Under the influence of … the Black Consciousness novel ‘Amandla’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130440/original/image-20160713-12389-e1910l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Portrait of Miriam Tlali as part of Adrian Steirn's 21 Icons South Africa project. Date: 15.10.2014
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.21icons.com">Adrian Steirn/Courtesy of 21 Icons South Africa</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>South African novelist <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/miriam-tlali">Miriam Tlali</a>’s “Amandla” is one of a handful of Black Consciousness novels that renders in fiction the June 1976 <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">Soweto uprising</a>.</p>
<p>Published in 1980 by <a href="http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3781">Ravan Press</a>, it was only the second novel authored in English by a black woman to be published within the borders of apartheid South Africa (her 1975 debut, “<a href="http://www.postcolonialweb.org/sa/tlali/mukhuba3.html">Muriel at Metropolitan</a>” was the first). Predictably, “Amandla” was <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/miriam-tlali">banned</a> upon publication.</p>
<p>“Amandla” offers a richly detailed fictional account of the 1976 Soweto uprising, when the township’s youth rose up against the decision to make Afrikaans compulsory as a medium of instruction in black schools. “Amandla” is written from the perspective of a number of young revolutionaries of the time. </p>
<p>Based on Tlali’s experience as a Soweto resident in 1976, the novel depicts the uprising and its aftermath. It vividly sketches the mechanics of the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/introduction-black-consciousness-movement">Black Consciousness</a> ideology in the service of anti-apartheid activism. “Amandla” does so while teasing apart gender relations between men and women activists, and within the larger community.</p>
<p>It is one of four novels considered “Soweto novels”, works of fiction depicting the June 1976 uprising. The others are Mongane Serote’s “<a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02564710308530320">To Every Birth its Blood</a>” (1981), Sipho Sepamla’s “<a href="https://africainwords.com/2014/02/18/teaching-africa-sipho-sepamla-literary-realism-and-a-ride-on-the-whirlwind/">A Ride on the Whirlwind</a>” (1981) and Mbulelo Mzamane’s “<a href="http://www.mml.co.za/children-of-soweto-review-bookchat">The Children of Soweto</a>” (1982).</p>
<p>These novels are heavily influenced by Black Consciousness ideology. They are also shaped by <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/stephen-bantu-biko">Steve Biko</a>’s writings on a unified black populace that would decolonise itself from racist indoctrination.</p>
<p>However, “Amandla” departs from these novels in an unprecedented attentiveness to the <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10130950.2013.778620">gender politics</a> of the day. It engages in the mimetic work of reflecting black gender relations in Soweto. The novel also constructs a new vision of black masculinity.</p>
<h2>Why is/was it influential?</h2>
<p>Tlali uses Black Consciousness discourse as a launching point for this vision of masculinity. The novel tracks the life of the student leader, Pholoso, and a range of minor characters.</p>
<p>The reader follows Pholoso as he becomes a leader of the youth. In this role he has conscientising sessions in the cellar of a church with young people active in the struggle. Here Tlali allows him long streams of dialogue. He outlines several position statements from the underground resistance movement on how society should be organised.</p>
<p>Relationships between black men and women is one area where he “instructs” the youth on ethical behaviour. In one scene, Pholoso addresses a room of 22 activists as “Ma-Gents”, making it clear that the room is filled with young men. Within this masculinised space, Pholoso articulates, among other things, a strong position on gender equality and relationships with women.</p>
<p>First, he addresses the absence of women from the “innermost core” of the underground movement this gathering represents. He attributes women’s absence to the high levels of sexual harassment to which women are subject whenever they move around Soweto.</p>
<p>Pholoso names this scourge of molestation as an impediment to women’s participation in political activity. He believes it should be countered through educating the public at large.</p>
<p>Critics such as <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/463784?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Cecily Lockett</a> and <a href="http://www.english.uct.ac.za/professor-kelwyn-sole">Kelwyn Sole</a> have critiqued Pholoso’s centrality as a student leader. They have also scrutinised the masculine space wherein he operates as reifying women’s subservient positions within the anti-apartheid struggle. <a href="https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-34153224/forms-of-resistance-south-african-women-s-writing">Margaret Miller</a> makes the case that Pholoso’s utterances confirm the marginal role women seemingly played in the 1976 uprising in his “patronising and contradictory” speech. </p>
<p>What critiques such as Miller’s ignore are the reasons Tlali may have for recruiting a black man in the role of gender conscientising. He is equated with Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, to disseminate a message of gender parity through the community.</p>
<p>In addressing the “Ma-Gents” on the sexual harassment, treatment and education of women, Pholoso advocates an oppositional black masculinity to counter dominant iterations of masculinity in Soweto. He exhorts the men to “go out and educate the people”. Pholoso is reliant on a ripple effect his message will have as it spreads out in concentric circles among the township’s men.</p>
<p>It is important to note that he is not addressing white men or women and their treatment of black women, but black men specifically. A black man himself, he holds black men as a group accountable for the safety, education and equitable treatment of women. He is gesturing to a time as yet unknown, in the future, when black subjects will be free of the oppression of apartheid.</p>
<p>Pholoso infers that women will not only be instrumental in fighting for this new, racially equitable social order. Black men also need to prepare for this time of freedom by ensuring that women and men are fully prepared and able to partake in its fruits.</p>
<h2>Why is it still relevant today?</h2>
<p>Another vignette from the novel deals with the sexual abuse and rape of young women activists while in detention. Here Tlali chillingly notes that rape and sexual abuse in prison is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the price we have to pay for our liberation. We have to fight hard and free ourselves, otherwise these things will always happen to us.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These words seem an uncanny foreshadowing of the high rape and sexual abuse rates women would experience after apartheid. It draws into question whether the revolution against apartheid has been fully completed through overcoming only racial oppression.</p>
<p>It also carries a deliberately ambiguous meaning – while the “we” having to fight hard to free “ourselves” signifies the struggle against apartheid, it additionally invokes black women’s gendered struggle against sexual violence. Here, women are being called to simultaneously fight racial oppression while fighting the sexist oppression that spawns rape and sexual abuse. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Oarkgx4ekb0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A short documentary on Miriam Tlali.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In “Amandla”, Tlali thus negotiates Black Consciousness ideology by producing a critique of apartheid rooted in Black Consciousness. Simultaneously she complicates the discourse by showing the gendered experiences of sexual harassment that are singular to black women during the 1976 uprising. </p>
<p>“Amandla” provides a rich historical rendering of one of the turning points in the anti-apartheid struggle. It also gives an insightful analysis of the gender politics of the time. Given this content and context, the novel has great potential to contribute to contemporary discussions of violence against women, especially within national student movements.</p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africa-student-movement-splinters-as-patriarchy-muscles-out-diversity-57855">Disagreements</a> about the role of gender and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and questioning (LGBTIQ) students’ role within the most recent student protests seems to have split the movement. Tlali’s novel provides an instructive critique of the gender politics of Black Consciousness, an ideology that has been forcefully reasserted in these most recent protests.</p>
<p>With its strong position on gender relations within Black Consciousness organising, “Amandla” is worth revisiting by student activists seeking to negotiate an ethical path between economic, racial and gender equity demands. Its didactic aims, instead of being dismissed as aesthetically unappealing, could be well utilised in reframing, for young men in particular, the historical events of the 1976 uprising. It could also be a blueprint for avoiding a repeat of the mistakes then made regarding women’s participation in political movements.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62374/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barbara Boswell is a board member of the Triangle Project.</span></em></p>
A South African novel, published in 1980 and dealing with the Soweto student uprising four years earlier, still provides lessons for students today.
Barbara Boswell, Senior Lecturer, English, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.