tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/novels-10319/articlesNovels – The Conversation2024-03-21T12:24:46Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2254272024-03-21T12:24:46Z2024-03-21T12:24:46ZJames Clavell’s ‘Shōgun’ is reimagined for a new generation of TV viewers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582911/original/file-20240319-30-7y6fii.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=16%2C0%2C3754%2C2510&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Actress Anna Sawai, who plays Mariko in FX's 'Shōgun,' attends the Los Angeles premiere of the series on Feb. 13, 2024.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/anna-sawai-attends-the-los-angeles-premiere-of-fxs-shogun-news-photo/2009310007?adppopup=true">Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1980, when James Clavell’s blockbuster historical novel “<a href="https://www.blackstonepublishing.com/sho-gun-bhdr.html#541=2907599">Shōgun</a>” was turned into <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080274/">a TV miniseries</a>, some 33% of American households with a television <a href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2024/03/09/tv-streaming/shogun-hiroyuki-sanada-last-samurai/">tuned in</a>. It quickly became one of the most viewed miniseries to date, second only to “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075572/">Roots</a>.”</p>
<p><a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=M4O349MAAAAJ&hl=en">I’m a historian of Japan</a> who specializes in the history of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Tokugawa-period">the Tokugawa</a>, or early modern era – a period from 1603 to 1868, during which the bulk of the action in “Shōgun” takes place. As a first-year graduate student, I sat glued to the television for five nights in September 1980, enthralled that someone cared enough to create a series about the period in Japan’s past that had captured my imagination. </p>
<p>I wasn’t alone. In 1982, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/25/education/adapting-shogun-for-the-classroom.html">historian Henry D. Smith estimated</a> that one-fifth to one-half of students enrolled in university courses about Japan at that time had read the novel and became interested in Japan because of it. </p>
<p>“‘Shōgun,’” he added, “probably conveyed more information about the daily life of Japan to more people than all the combined writings of scholars, journalists, and novelists since the Pacific War.” </p>
<p>Some even credit the series <a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240305-shogun-tv-hit-fx-violent-japanese-history">for making sushi trendy in the U.S</a>.</p>
<p>That 1980 miniseries has now been remade as FX’s “Shōgun,” a 10-episode production that is garnering rave reviews – including a <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/shogun_2024/s01">near-100% rating from review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes</a>.</p>
<p>Both miniseries closely hew to Clavell’s 1975 novel, which is a fictionalized retelling of the story of the first Englishman, <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374706234/samuraiwilliam">Will Adams</a> – the character John Blackthorne in the novel – to set foot in Japan.</p>
<p>And yet there are subtle differences in each series that reveal the zeitgeist of each era, along with America’s shifting attitudes toward Japan.</p>
<h2>The ‘Japanese miracle’</h2>
<p>The original 1980 series reflects both the confidence of postwar America and its fascination with its resurgent former enemy.</p>
<p>World War II had left Japan devastated economically and psychologically. But by the 1970s and 1980s, the country had come to dominate global markets for consumer electronic, semiconductors and the auto industry. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12815-0_7">Its gross national product per capita rose spectacularly</a>: from less than US$200 in 1952 to $8,900 in 1980 – the year “Shōgun” appeared on television – to almost $20,000 in 1988, surpassing the United States, West Germany and France. </p>
<p>Many Americans wanted to know the secret to Japan’s head-spinning economic success – the so-called “<a href="https://hbr.org/1998/01/reinterpreting-the-japanese-economic-miracle">Japanese miracle</a>.” Could Japan’s history and culture offer clues?</p>
<p>During the 1970s and 1980s, scholars sought to understand the miracle by analyzing not just the Japanese economy but also the country’s various institutions: schools, social policy, corporate culture and policing. </p>
<p>In his 1979 book, “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/771294">Japan as Number One: Lessons for America</a>,” sociologist Ezra Vogel argued that the U.S. could learn a lot from Japan, whether it was through the country’s long-term economic planning, collaboration between government and industry, investments in education, and quality control of goods and services.</p>
<h2>A window into Japan</h2>
<p>Clavell’s expansive 1,100-page novel was released in the middle of the Japanese miracle. It sold more than <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/shogun-novel-japan">7 million copies in five years</a>; then the series aired, which prompted the sale of another 2.5 million copies.</p>
<p>In it, Clavell tells the story of Blackthorne, who, shipwrecked off the coast of Japan in 1600, finds the country in a peaceful interlude after an era of civil war. But that peace is about to be shattered by competition among the five regents who have been appointed to ensure the succession of a young heir to their former lord’s position as top military leader.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Black and white photo of middle-aged man sitting at a typewriter by the ocean." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582898/original/file-20240319-26-80u5ik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582898/original/file-20240319-26-80u5ik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582898/original/file-20240319-26-80u5ik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582898/original/file-20240319-26-80u5ik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582898/original/file-20240319-26-80u5ik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582898/original/file-20240319-26-80u5ik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582898/original/file-20240319-26-80u5ik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">‘Shogun,’ which James Clavell published in 1975, has sold millions of copies.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/james-clavell-on-typewriter-by-the-ocean-1977-news-photo/135869841?adppopup=true">Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>In the meantime, local leaders don’t know whether to treat Blackthorne and his crew as dangerous pirates or harmless traders. His men end up being imprisoned, but Blackthorne’s knowledge of the world outside of Japan – not to mention his boatload of cannons, muskets and ammunition – save him.</p>
<p>He ends up offering advice and munitions to one of the regents, Lord Yoshi Toranaga, the fictional version of the real-life Tokugawa Ieyasu. With this edge, <a href="https://www.japan-experience.com/plan-your-trip/to-know/japanese-history/tokugawa-ieyasu">Toranaga rises to become shogun</a>, the country’s top military leader.</p>
<p>Viewers of the 1980 television series witness Blackthorne slowly learning Japanese and coming to appreciate the value of Japanese culture. For example, at first, he’s resistant to bathing. <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-long-history-of-japans-tidying-up">Since cleanliness is deeply rooted in Japanese culture</a>, his Japanese hosts find his refusal irrational. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Bearded man with shoulder length brown hair wearing a kimono and holding a samurai sword." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582905/original/file-20240319-18-q4d2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582905/original/file-20240319-18-q4d2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582905/original/file-20240319-18-q4d2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582905/original/file-20240319-18-q4d2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582905/original/file-20240319-18-q4d2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582905/original/file-20240319-18-q4d2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582905/original/file-20240319-18-q4d2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Actor Richard Chamberlain as John Blackthorne in the 1980 NBC miniseries ‘Shōgun.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/richard-chamberlain-us-actor-wearing-a-kimono-and-holding-a-news-photo/120543334?adppopup=true">Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Blackthorne’s, and the viewers’, gradual acclimatization to Japanese culture is complete when, late in the series, he is reunited with the crew of his Dutch ship who have been held in captivity. Blackthorne is thoroughly repulsed by their filth and demands a bath to cleanse himself from their contagion. </p>
<p>Blackthorne comes to see Japan as far more civilized than the West. Just like his real-life counterpart, Will Adams, he decides to remain in Japan even after being granted his freedom. He marries a Japanese woman, with whom he has two children, and ends his days on foreign soil.</p>
<h2>From fascination to fear</h2>
<p>However, the positive views of Japan that its economic miracle generated, and that “Shogun” reinforced, eroded <a href="https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5880.html#1989">as the U.S. trade deficit with Japan ballooned</a>: from $10 billion in 1981 to $50 billion in 1985. </p>
<p>“<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/29/opinion/bashing-japan-isn-t-the-answer.html">Japan bashing</a>” spread in the U.S., and visceral anger exploded when <a href="https://sourcesforcourses.com/post/136624898100/american-auto-workers-smash-toyota-gm-in-protest">American autoworkers smashed Toyota cars in March 1983</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1987/07/13/boycott-toshiba-computers-but-dont-let-congress-force-you/a6130b8a-7be4-4737-8150-adc74e53443b/">congressmen shattered a Toshiba boombox</a> with sledgehammers on the Capitol lawn in 1987. That same year, the magazine Foreign Affairs warned of “<a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/1987-12-01/coming-us-japan-crisis">The Coming U.S.-Japan Crisis</a>.”</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582909/original/file-20240319-20-kiek7w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Newsweek magazine cover that reads 'Japan Invades Hollywood' and features a graphic of a woman in a kimono posing like the woman in the Columbia Pictures logo." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582909/original/file-20240319-20-kiek7w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582909/original/file-20240319-20-kiek7w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582909/original/file-20240319-20-kiek7w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582909/original/file-20240319-20-kiek7w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582909/original/file-20240319-20-kiek7w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582909/original/file-20240319-20-kiek7w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582909/original/file-20240319-20-kiek7w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Newsweek’s Oct. 9, 1989, cover describes Sony’s purchase of Columbia Pictures as an invasion.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://images.wolfgangsvault.com/m/xlarge/OMS793331-MZ/newsweek-vintage-magazine-oct-9-1989.webp">Newsweek</a></span>
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<p>This backlash against Japan in the U.S. was also fueled by almost a decade of acquisitions of iconic American companies, such as Firestone, Columbia Pictures and Universal Studios, along with high-profile real estate, such as the iconic <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2017/07/18/ma-flashback-the-takeover-of-rockefeller-center-capped-a-1980s-frenzy-now-a-new-mania-is-afoot/?sh=8f095">Rockefeller Center</a>.</p>
<p>But the notion of Japan as a threat reached a peak in 1989, after which its economy stalled. The 1990s and early 2000s were dubbed Japan’s “<a href="https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,984426,00.html">lost decade</a>.”</p>
<p>Yet a curiosity and love for Japanese culture persists, thanks, in part, to manga and anime. More Japanese feature films and television series are also <a href="http://interacnetwork.com/best-japanese-dramas-to-watch">making their way to popular streaming services</a>, including the series “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7256504/">Tokyo Girl</a>,” “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1882928/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_midnight%2520diner">Midnight Diner</a>” and “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16970638/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_6_tt_8_nm_0_q_sanctuary">Sanctuary</a>.” In December 2023, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Japan was “<a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/japan-content-boom-1235753598/">on the precipice of a content boom</a>.” </p>
<h2>Widening the lens</h2>
<p>As FX’s remake of “Shōgun” demonstrates, American viewers today apparently don’t need to be slowly introduced to Japanese culture by a European guide. </p>
<p>In the new series, Blackthorne is not even the sole protagonist.</p>
<p>Instead, he shares the spotlight with several Japanese characters, such as Lord Yoshi Toranaga, who no longer serves as a one-dimensional sidekick to Blackthorne, as he did in the original miniseries. </p>
<p>This change is facilitated by the fact that Japanese characters now communicate directly with the audience in Japanese, with English subtitles. In the 1980 miniseries, the Japanese dialogue went untranslated. There were English-speaking Japanese characters in the original, such as Blackthorne’s female translator, Mariko. But they spoke in a highly formalized, unrealistic English.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Japanese man wearing glasses and a suit." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583251/original/file-20240320-20-fql0t2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583251/original/file-20240320-20-fql0t2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583251/original/file-20240320-20-fql0t2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583251/original/file-20240320-20-fql0t2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583251/original/file-20240320-20-fql0t2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583251/original/file-20240320-20-fql0t2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583251/original/file-20240320-20-fql0t2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Actor Hiroyuki Sanada plays Lord Yoshi Toranaga in FX’s ‘Shōgun.’ Though Sanada’s character speaks in Japanese, there are English subtitles for viewers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/LAPremiereofShogun/b73143a975a7403bb99e91e837324d5d/photo?Query=Hiroyuki%20Sanada&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=127&currentItemNo=6">AP Photo/Chris Pizzello</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Along with depicting authentic costumes, combat and gestures, the show’s Japanese characters speak using the native language of the early modern era instead of using the contemporary Japanese that made the 1980 series so unpopular among Japanese viewers. (Imagine a film on the American Revolution featuring George Washington speaking like Jimmy Kimmel.) </p>
<p>Of course, authenticity has its limits. The producers of both television series decided to adhere closely to the original novel. In doing so, they’re perhaps unwittingly reproducing certain stereotypes about Japan. </p>
<p>Most strikingly, there’s the fetishization of death, as several characters have a penchant for violence and sadism, while many others commit ritual suicide, <a href="https://theconversation.com/japans-most-famous-writer-committed-suicide-after-a-failed-coup-attempt-now-new-photos-add-more-layers-to-the-haunting-act-151903">or <em>seppuku</em></a>.</p>
<p>Part of this may have been simply a function of author Clavell being a self-professed “<a href="https://www.columbia.edu/%7Ehds2/learning/index.html">storyteller, not an historian</a>.” But this may have also reflected his experiences in World War II, when he spent three years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. Still, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/13/magazine/making-of-a-literary-shogun.html">as Clavell noted</a>, he came to deeply admire the Japanese. </p>
<p>His novel, as a whole, beautifully conveys this admiration. The two miniseries have, in my view, successfully followed suit, enthralling audiences in each of their times.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/225427/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Constantine Nomikos Vaporis 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>Compared to its 1980 predecessor, the new FX series presents a more authentic portrayal of early modern Japan.Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, Professor of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore CountyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2251562024-03-15T12:31:02Z2024-03-15T12:31:02ZHow ‘Dune’ became a beacon for the fledgling environmental movement − and a rallying cry for the new science of ecology<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581996/original/file-20240314-18-4kv29v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C26%2C5983%2C3967&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Oregon's Umpqua Dunes inspired the desert planet Arrakis in Frank Herbert's 'Dune.'</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/sand-dunes-at-umpqua-dunes-oregon-dunes-national-recreation-news-photo/1150491467?adppopup=true">VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/AU8/dune/">Dune</a>,” widely considered one of the <a href="https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g39358054/best-sci-fi-books/">best sci-fi novels of all time</a>, continues to influence how writers, artists and inventors envision the future. </p>
<p>Of course, there are Denis Villeneuve’s visually stunning films, “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1160419/">Dune: Part One</a>” (2021) and “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15239678/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3_tt_7_nm_1_q_dune">Dune: Part Two</a>” (2024).</p>
<p>But Frank Herbert’s masterpiece also helped Afrofuturist novelist <a href="https://www.salon.com/2015/08/13/dune_climate_fiction_pioneer_the_ecological_lessons_of_frank_herberts_sci_fi_masterpiece_were_ahead_of_its_time/">Octavia Butler</a> imagine a future of conflict amid environmental catastrophe; it inspired <a href="https://www.inverse.com/article/46547-elon-musk-is-running-tesla-spacex-like-the-plot-of-dune">Elon Musk</a> to build SpaceX and Tesla and push humanity toward the stars and a greener future; and it’s hard not to see parallels in <a href="https://screenrant.com/star-wars-dune-story-concepts-ideas-lucas-copy/#people-survive-the-desert-the-same-way">George Lucas’</a> “Star Wars” franchise, especially their fascination with desert planets and giant worms.</p>
<p>And yet when Herbert sat down in 1963 to start writing “Dune,” he wasn’t thinking about how to leave Earth behind. He was thinking about how to save it. </p>
<p>Herbert wanted to tell a story about the environmental crisis on our own planet, a world driven to the edge of ecological catastrophe. Technologies that had been inconceivable just 50 years prior had put the world at the edge of nuclear war and the environment on the brink of collapse; massive industries were sucking wealth from the ground and spewing toxic fumes into the sky.</p>
<p>When the book was published, these themes were front and center for readers, too. After all, they were living in the wake of both the Cuban missile crisis and the publication of “<a href="https://www.nrdc.org/stories/story-silent-spring">Silent Spring</a>,” conservationist Rachel Carson’s landmark study of pollution and its threat to the environment and human health.</p>
<p>“Dune” soon became a beacon for the fledgling environmental movement and a rallying flag for the new science of ecology.</p>
<h2>Indigenous wisdoms</h2>
<p>Though the term “ecology” had been coined almost a century earlier, the first textbook on ecology was <a href="https://www.bioexplorer.net/history_of_biology/ecology/">not written until 1953</a>, and the field was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=false&endDate=1966-01-01&query=ecology&sort=best&startDate=1963-01-01">rarely mentioned</a> in newspapers or magazines at the time. Few readers had heard of the emerging science, and even fewer knew what it suggested about the future of our planet. </p>
<p>While studying “Dune” for a book I’m writing on the history of ecology, I was surprised to learn that Herbert didn’t learn about ecology as a student or as a journalist. </p>
<p>Instead, he was inspired to explore ecology by the conservation practices of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest. He learned about them from two friends in particular. </p>
<p>The first was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilbur_Ternyik">Wilbur Ternyik</a>, a descendant of Chief Coboway, the Clatsop leader who welcomed explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark when <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Lewis-and-Clark-Expedition">their expedition</a> reached the West Coast in 1805. The second, <a href="https://funerals.coop/obituaries/2018-obituaries/july-2018/howard-hansen.html">Howard Hansen</a>, was an art teacher and oral historian of the Quileute tribe.</p>
<p>Ternyik, who was also an expert field ecologist, took Herbert on a tour of Oregon’s dunes in 1958. There, he explained his work to build massive dunes of sand using beach grasses and other deep-rooted plants in order to prevent the sands from blowing into the nearby town of Florence – <a href="https://www.earth.com/earthpedia-articles/terraforming/">a terraforming technology</a> described at length in “Dune.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Beach grasses planted in sand dunes." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582000/original/file-20240314-24-jn6atf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582000/original/file-20240314-24-jn6atf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582000/original/file-20240314-24-jn6atf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582000/original/file-20240314-24-jn6atf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582000/original/file-20240314-24-jn6atf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582000/original/file-20240314-24-jn6atf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582000/original/file-20240314-24-jn6atf.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">Beach grasses and other plants help secure the sand dunes of Oregon’s coasts.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/dune-grass-along-the-coast-of-oregon-usa-news-photo/687657578?adppopup=true">Edwin Remsburg/VW Pics via Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>As Ternyik explains <a href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/3147/Turnyik.USDA_SCS.DunesManual.pdf?1710454532">in a handbook</a> he wrote for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, his work in Oregon was part of an effort to heal landscapes scarred by European colonization, especially the large river jetties built by early settlers. </p>
<p>These structures disturbed coastal currents and created vast expanses of sand, turning stretches of the lush Pacific Northwest landscape into desert. This scenario is echoed in “Dune,” where the novel’s setting, <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dune-planet-climate-plausible-science-sandworms">the planet Arrakis</a>, was similarly laid to waste by its first colonizers.</p>
<p>Hansen, who became the godfather to Herbert’s son, had closely studied the equally drastic impact logging had on the homelands of the <a href="https://quileutenation.org/history/">Quileute people</a> in coastal Washington. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/23/opinion/culture/dune-frank-herbert-native-americans.html">He encouraged Herbert</a> to examine ecology carefully, giving him a copy of Paul B. Sears’ “<a href="https://archive.org/details/wherethereislife0000paul/page/n7/mode/2up">Where There is Life</a>,” from which <a href="https://www.oreilly.com/tim/herbert/ch03.html">Herbert gathered</a> one of his favorite quotes: “The highest function of science is to give us an understanding of consequences.”</p>
<p><a href="https://screenrant.com/dune-movie-2021-fremen-origin-explained/">The Fremen</a> of “Dune,” who live in the deserts of Arrakis and carefully manage its ecosystem and wildlife, embody these teachings. In the fight to save their world, they expertly blend ecological science and Indigenous practices. </p>
<h2>Treasures hidden in the sand</h2>
<p>But the work that had the most profound impact on “Dune” was Leslie Reid’s 1962 ecological study “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Sociology_of_Nature.html?id=Ag22AAAAIAAJ">The Sociology of Nature</a>.”</p>
<p>In it, Reid explained ecology and ecosystem science for a popular audience, illustrating the complex interdependence of all creatures within the environment. </p>
<p>“The more deeply ecology is studied,” Reid writes, “the clearer does it become that mutual dependence is a governing principle, that animals are bound to one another by unbreakable ties of dependence.”</p>
<p>In the pages of Reid’s book, Herbert found a model for the ecosystem of Arrakis in a surprising place: the guano islands of Peru. As Reid explains, the accumulated bird droppings found on these islands was an ideal fertilizer. Home to mountains of manure described as a new “<a href="https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/27727">white gold</a>” and one of the most valuable substances on Earth, the guano islands became in the late 1800s ground zero for a series of resource wars between Spain and several of its former colonies, including Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador. </p>
<p>At the heart of the plot of “Dune” is a battle for control of the “spice,” a priceless resource. Harvested from the sands of the desert planet, it’s both a luxurious flavoring for food and a hallucinogenic drug that allows some people to bend space, making interstellar travel possible. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A pencil drawing of two men standing in a sea of birds." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581978/original/file-20240314-23-fbl8im.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581978/original/file-20240314-23-fbl8im.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581978/original/file-20240314-23-fbl8im.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581978/original/file-20240314-23-fbl8im.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581978/original/file-20240314-23-fbl8im.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581978/original/file-20240314-23-fbl8im.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581978/original/file-20240314-23-fbl8im.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In the 19th century, guano from Peru was a valuable commodity used for fertilizer.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/an-illustration-of-birds-and-guano-on-an-island-off-the-news-photo/615336378?adppopup=true">Corbis Historical/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There is some irony in the fact that Herbert cooked up the idea of spice from bird droppings. But he was fascinated by Reid’s careful account of the unique and efficient ecosystem that produced a valuable – albeit noxious – commodity.</p>
<p>As the ecologist explains, frigid currents in the Pacific Ocean push nutrients to the surface of nearby waters, helping photosynthetic plankton thrive. These support an astounding population of fish that feed hordes of birds, along with whales. </p>
<p>In early drafts of “Dune,” Herbert combined all of these stages into the life cycle of the giant sandworms, football field-sized monsters that prowl the desert sands and devour everything in their path. </p>
<p>Herbert imagines each of these terrifying creatures beginning as small, photosynthetic plants that grow into larger “sand trout.” Eventually, they become immense sandworms that churn the desert sands, spewing spice onto the surface.</p>
<p>In both the book and “Dune: Part One,” soldier Gurney Halleck recites a cryptic verse that comments on this inversion of marine life and arid regimes of extraction: “For they shall suck of the abundance of the seas and of the treasure hid in the sand.”</p>
<h2>‘Dune’ revolutions</h2>
<p>After “Dune” was published in 1965, the environmental movement eagerly embraced it.</p>
<p>Herbert spoke at Philadelphia’s first Earth Day in 1970, and in the first edition of the <a href="https://wholeearth.info/">Whole Earth Catalog</a> – a famous DIY manual and bulletin for environmental activists – “Dune” was advertised with the tagline: “The metaphor is ecology. The theme revolution.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Black and white photo of beareded man sitting in a chair and posing for the camera." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581973/original/file-20240314-20-zaaj5r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581973/original/file-20240314-20-zaaj5r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581973/original/file-20240314-20-zaaj5r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581973/original/file-20240314-20-zaaj5r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581973/original/file-20240314-20-zaaj5r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581973/original/file-20240314-20-zaaj5r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581973/original/file-20240314-20-zaaj5r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Frank Herbert spoke at Philadelphia’s first Earth Day in 1970.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/FrankHerbert/c8e4e5b356c240aaac0b6ff27fe17c33/photo?Query=frank%20herbert&mediaType=photo&sortBy=creationdatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=1&currentItemNo=0">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the opening of Denis Villeneuve’s first adaptation, “Dune,” Chani, an indigenous Fremen played by Zendaya, asks a question that anticipates the violent conclusion of the second film: “Who will our next oppressors be?”</p>
<p>The immediate cut to a sleeping Paul Atreides, the white protagonist who’s played by Timothée Chalamet, drives the pointed anti-colonial message home like a knife. In fact, both of Villeneuve’s movies expertly elaborate upon the anti-colonial themes of Herbert’s novels. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, the edge of their environmental critique is blunted. But Villeneuve has <a href="https://theplaylist.net/dune-messiah-denis-villeneuve-says-florence-pugh-anya-taylor-joy-give-him-the-will-do-another-one-20240311/">suggested that</a> he might also adapt “<a href="https://prhinternationalsales.com/book/?isbn=9780593098233">Dune Messiah</a>” for his next film in the series – a novel in which the ecological damage to Arrakis is glaringly obvious.</p>
<p>I hope Herbert’s prescient ecological warning, which resonated so powerfully with readers back in the 1960s, will be unsheathed in “Dune 3.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/225156/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Devin Griffiths 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>When Frank Herbert sat down in 1963 to start writing ‘Dune,’ he wasn’t thinking about how to leave Earth behind. He was thinking about how to save it.Devin Griffiths, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and SciencesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2225882024-02-27T19:40:15Z2024-02-27T19:40:15ZBetty Smith enchanted a generation of readers with ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ − even as she groused that she hoped Williamsburg would be flattened<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577625/original/file-20240223-28-ht6czh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C11%2C3691%2C2714&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Betty Smith's novel sold millions of copies in the 1940s.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/group-of-young-women-smile-as-they-crowd-around-another-who-news-photo/119076541?adppopup=true">Weegee/International Center of Photography via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Eighty years ago, in the winter and spring of 1944, Brooklyn-born author <a href="https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/smith-betty">Betty Smith</a> was entering a new chapter of life.</p>
<p>A year earlier, she was an unknown writer, negotiating with her publisher about manuscript edits and the date of publication for her first book, “<a href="https://archive.org/stream/ATreeGrowsInBrooklynByBettySmith/A+Tree+Grows+In+Brooklyn+by+Betty+Smith_djvu.txt">A Tree Grows in Brooklyn</a>,” a semi-autobiographical novel about the poor but spirited Nolan family. </p>
<p>Now she was one of the lucky few. Her book was spotted in cafes, on buses and in bookstores all over town. The following year, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038190/">when it was being made into a film</a> directed by Elia Kazan, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=H1MEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA43&dq=A+Tree+Grows+in+Brooklyn&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj25depp-CDAxXiSTABHYd3C6YQ6AF6BAgKEAI#v=onepage&q=A%20Tree%20Grows%20in%20Brooklyn&f=false">Life magazine reported</a>, “Betty Smith’s ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ (2,500,000 copies sold) has become one of the best-loved novels of our time.”</p>
<p>New York in the 1940s was not the city we know today. The Empire State Building had not reached its <a href="https://www.esbnyc.com/about/history">full height</a>, nor had the statue of <a href="https://www.centralpark.com/things-to-do/attractions/alice-in-wonderland/">“Alice in Wonderland” taken up residence in Central Park</a>. And it would be decades before anyone was humming along to a tune that brashly commanded, “Start spreadin’ the news, I’m leavin’ today, I want to be a part of it: New York, New York!” </p>
<p>Brooklyn, too, was still becoming itself – and no other 20th-century American novel did quite so much for the borough’s reputation.</p>
<h2>Readers fall for Brooklyn</h2>
<p>During World War II, writes law professor <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/when-books-went-to-war-molly-guptill-manning">Molly Guptill Manning</a>, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” was one of the most popular books among the Armed Services Editions, which were mass-produced paperbacks selected by a panel of literary experts for distribution to the U.S. military during World War II. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Green horizontal copy of 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' with creases along the cover." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577644/original/file-20240223-28-x187bq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577644/original/file-20240223-28-x187bq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577644/original/file-20240223-28-x187bq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577644/original/file-20240223-28-x187bq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577644/original/file-20240223-28-x187bq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577644/original/file-20240223-28-x187bq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577644/original/file-20240223-28-x187bq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Armed Services Edition of ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://blogs.lib.unc.edu/ncm/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2017/03/A-Tree-Grows-in-Brooklyn-ASE.jpg">UNC Libraries</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>It seemed like everyone wanted to declare some affiliation with the novel-turned-film and, by extension, with Brooklyn. Even readers who had never set foot in the borough nonetheless found themselves enchanted by it through Smith’s portrayal. </p>
<p>As one reader wrote to Smith, “Raised as a ‘rebel of the old South,’ Brooklyn has long been my symbol of all yankee, thus learning to hate it; but now I have learned to love it through Francie’s eyes … as Francie loved it.”</p>
<p>Advertisers also took note, riffing on Smith’s title with tags such as, “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=SlMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA8&dq=A+Tree+Grows+in+Brooklyn&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjgn8vbp-CDAxU6RDABHX3uAF44ChDoAXoECAkQAg#v=onepage&q=A%20Tree%20Grows%20in%20Brooklyn&f=false">A Dress Grows on Peggy</a>,” or Rheingold extra dry lager – the “beer that grows in Brooklyn.”</p>
<h2>Poverty loses its sheen of shame</h2>
<p>Meanwhile, readers who had grown up in the borough responded enthusiastically to Smith’s evocations of their favorite neighborhood haunts, writing to her to share their own memories of the shops and streets that she had included in the novel. </p>
<p>“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” had done something remarkable for them: It removed the veil of shame that surrounded tenement living and, as historian Judith E. Smith has written, <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/visions-of-belonging/9780231121712">helped them reclaim their humble origins</a>.</p>
<p>And not just reclaim them. The novel affirmed the desire to move beyond poverty, as the protagonist, Francie, had done, and Betty Smith, too.</p>
<p>Francie’s wanderings through Brooklyn lead to her discovery of a more inviting public school than her own. With her father’s help, she manages to enroll in the school, which is better funded but farther from home. Despite the extra-long schlep, Francie sees it as “a good thing” to have found this new school: “It showed her that there were other worlds beside the world she had been born into and that these other worlds were not unattainable.” </p>
<p>It was a feeling that people of many backgrounds could understand, and not just in Brooklyn. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Red and white brick apartment buildings in Brooklyn." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577637/original/file-20240223-16-quqvex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577637/original/file-20240223-16-quqvex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577637/original/file-20240223-16-quqvex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577637/original/file-20240223-16-quqvex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577637/original/file-20240223-16-quqvex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577637/original/file-20240223-16-quqvex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577637/original/file-20240223-16-quqvex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">702 Grand Street in Williamsburg, where Smith spent part of her childhood and which served as the setting for ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,’ pictured in 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.compass.com/listing/702-grand-street-brooklyn-ny-11211/265170627315403233/">Compass Real Estate</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Smith certainly understood the importance of broadening her horizons: Although she never finished high school, when her marriage to a University of Michigan graduate student brought her to Ann Arbor, she was able to audit classes as a special student.</p>
<p>There, her work for her playwriting classes led to a prestigious playwriting prize, and then an invitation to study at Yale School of Drama. Divorced at that point, Smith was free to pursue her education in theater at Yale. The theme of self-improvement through education made “A Tree Grows” relatable for readers of modest origins.</p>
<p>Readers were quick to see the novel as a paean to Brooklyn, and often sought to bond with Smith over their presumed shared love of Brooklyn.</p>
<p>“I hope you will give us further stories of the Brooklyn which you know, and, I am sure, love so well,” wrote one reader. </p>
<p>“Some day, if you have time, it might be fun to chew the fat a bit about old Williamsburgh (sic),” journalist Meyer Berger wrote to Smith after reading and reviewing her novel. </p>
<p>“Betty Smith obviously loves Brooklyn and is proud of it,” Orville Prescott declared in his <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1943/08/18/issue.html">glowing New York Times review</a>.</p>
<h2>Smith scorns the borough’s new arrivals</h2>
<p>But did Betty Smith love Brooklyn? </p>
<p>After all, she wrote the novel while living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina – years after having moved away from New York. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.bkmag.com/2021/08/20/priced-out-the-2020-census-throws-brooklyns-affordable-housing-crisis-into-relief/">Like so many who leave Brooklyn today</a>, Smith did not return to take up residence, in part because she could not afford to live there on her own. By the time she had earned a windfall from “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” she had come to love Chapel Hill.</p>
<p>Smith also left Brooklyn with mixed feelings about her hometown. <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/visions-of-belonging/9780231121712">She wrote to her publishers in 1942</a>, “If Hitler’s bombers should ever get over and if any portion of this great city has to be wiped out, it would be a blessing if it were (Williamsburg).” </p>
<p>“Evil seems to be part of the very materials that the sidewalks are made out of and the wood and the brick of the houses,” she added. </p>
<p>Although writing about Brooklyn had brought her fortune and fame, she had no desire to return. </p>
<p>As she explained in her 1942 letter, Smith perceived Brooklyn’s current situation as the result of a changing population and growing crime: “A hundred years ago, it was a quiet peaceful village settled by hard-working, sturdy, honest burghers,” Smith reflected in her letter, adding that even 25 years ago, Williamsburg was a gentler place. “But now it’s a fearful one.” </p>
<p>Smith offered her own analysis of the situation: “The feuds in the neighborhood came about because most of the Italians originally came from Sicily and were fierce and murderous. The Jews in the neighborhood were mostly Russian Jews, conditioned to pogroms and much fiercer and more ready to fight.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Kids tug and pull at one another while a woman cries in the background and another woman tries to keep order." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577631/original/file-20240223-26-2gw4kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577631/original/file-20240223-26-2gw4kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577631/original/file-20240223-26-2gw4kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577631/original/file-20240223-26-2gw4kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577631/original/file-20240223-26-2gw4kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577631/original/file-20240223-26-2gw4kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577631/original/file-20240223-26-2gw4kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A crowd gathers in Williamsburg in 1941 to see the corpse of a man shot twice by an unknown gunman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/premium-rates-apply-a-crowd-gathers-in-the-williamsburg-news-photo/2716771?adppopup=true">Weegee/International Center of Photography via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like many Americans at the time, Smith held some entrenched and intolerant views about immigrants and their character. Since she was often invited to contribute guest essays to publications during the height of her fame, she had ample opportunity to express her worldview. </p>
<p>After World War II, Smith directed this hostility toward foreigners at America’s wartime enemies. In her August 1945 essay “<a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1945/08/26/305533912.html?pageNumber=104">Thoughts for These Days of Victory</a>,” she encouraged readers not to forget their anger at wartime enemies: “Let us hold this bitterness so that we’ll not again be lulled into a false sense of security. The war proved conclusively that not all men are brothers and that not all nations are sisters.” </p>
<p>A full understanding of the Betty Smith behind the novel that changed how Americans felt about Brooklyn – and their humble origins – are complicated by Smith’s own views and her experiences away from Brooklyn. </p>
<p>As Smith knew, making something of yourself often requires leaving home. It’s hard to tell whether distance made her heart grow fonder. In leaving Brooklyn, Smith had not suddenly started seeing her hometown through rose-colored glasses.</p>
<p>In Chapel Hill she was finally able to see Brooklyn – and write about it – in a way that brought readers of all kinds closer to Brooklyn and legitimized their own origin stories. That, in and of itself, is a kind of love, even if it’s not the unconditional kind so many had imagined.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222588/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rachel Gordan 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>No other 20th-century American novel did quite so much to burnish Brooklyn’s reputation. But Smith rarely saw her hometown through rose-colored glasses − and even grew to resent it.Rachel Gordan, Assistant Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies, University of FloridaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2221602024-02-21T19:11:58Z2024-02-21T19:11:58ZGuide to the classics: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We inspired Orwell and influenced the Western imagination<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575490/original/file-20240213-16-bwem2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3394%2C2376&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Wassily Kandinsky – Composition 8 (1923).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wassily_Kandinsky_Composition_VIII.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>This year is the centenary of Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/we-9780241458747">We</a> – a major influence on George Orwell’s dystopia 1984, as well as an important early contribution to the burgeoning genre of science fiction. </p>
<p>We and 1984 (published in 1949) were crucial influences on Cold War western imagination of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state. But Orwell had never been there, and Zamyatin wrote his dystopia in 1920, a time of chaos and civil war just three years after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and two years before the Soviet Union formally came into being. </p>
<p>Both novels portray a state in which the individual has been merged into the collective: “I” has become indistinguishable from “we”. The state is run by a remote but all-seeing leader (the “Benefactor” in Zamyatin, “Big Brother” in Orwell), who is revered as the font of wisdom and universal wellbeing. The leader is backed up by a secret police (the Guardians, the Thought Police), who organise the disappearance of potential trouble-makers. </p>
<p>Life is meticulously regulated according to a state plan, leaving only a minimal personal sphere. In Zamyatin’s novel, houses are all glass. The only time the blinds can be lowered is for the regular hour of sex with a registered partner. Thinking differently is an offence against the state. </p>
<p>In both novels, falling in love is the fateful assertion of an “I” that is not part of “We.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-orwells-1984-and-how-it-helps-us-understand-tyrannical-power-today-112066">Guide to the classics: Orwell's 1984 and how it helps us understand tyrannical power today</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<h2>An instinctive satirist</h2>
<p>Zamyatin wrote his novel while living in a special House of the Arts in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) under the protection of the writer <a href="https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Maxim_Gorky">Maxim Gorky</a>, who used his clout with Bolshevik leaders to shelter writers and artists from the worst privations of the Civil War period and the newly established revolutionary police, the <a href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/state-security/state-security-texts/the-all-russian-extraordinary-commission-for-struggle-with-counter-revolution/">Cheka</a>. </p>
<p>It might be assumed that Zamyatin was one of many members of the Russian intelligentsia who, having been fashionably radical under the Tsar, recoiled from the reality of rampaging mobs and social and political breakdown that led to the Bolsheviks taking power in October 1917. In fact, Zamyatin had been a Bolshevik, although he was no longer an active party member.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Yevgeny Zamyatin c.1919.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zamjatin.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He was born in 1884 in Lebedian, a town 370 kilometres south of Moscow, undistinguished except for its race track. His father was a priest (the lower rungs of Orthodox clergy were allowed to marry) and his mother, surprisingly, a pianist. This would have made them provincial intelligentsia, marginal to almost all their neighbours. </p>
<p>Judging by his bleak memories of Lebedian, Yevgeny was a lonely child who took refuge in reading. Having become a socialist as a teenager, he joined the Bolshevik party in time to participate in the revolutionary upheavals of 1905 in the capital, where he was a student at the St Petersburg Polytechnic. </p>
<p>Arrests and exile to the provinces followed, but he nevertheless managed to graduate as a ship-building engineer. He also started writing, winning praise from the critics for his vivid portrayal of provincial boredom and inertia in a novella, <em>Uyezdnoye</em> (A Provincial Tale), published in 1913. </p>
<p>The Russian government sent Zamyatin to England in 1916 to work on the building of ice-breakers at the Newcastle docks, so he missed the February Revolution and the ferment that followed. He returned just before October in an “antiquated little British ship”. The journey took about 50 hours, the passengers in lifebelts the whole time due to the threat from German submarines. </p>
<p>His late arrival for the revolution was something he always regretted – it was like “never having been in love and waking up one morning ten years married”. But it is difficult to imagine Zamyatin succumbing to the euphoria that gripped the Russian intelligentsia in 1917. He was a born loner and instinctive satirist, whose usual response to collective enthusiasm was to dissent. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/world-politics-explainer-the-russian-revolution-100669">World politics explainer: the Russian revolution</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>It was the oddness of the situation after October that struck Zamyatin first. He remembered the winter of 1917-18 as “merry, eerie […] when everything broke from its moorings and floated off somewhere into the unknown”. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mikhail Bulgakov (1928).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%9C%D0%B8%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BB-%D0%91%D1%83%D0%BB%D0%B3%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2.jpg">Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Revolutionary Russia, with its privations, dysfunctions, identity adjustments and lofty rhetoric, provided many opportunities for satire. The genre flourished throughout the 1920s in the work of writers such as <a href="https://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/literature/mikhail-zoshchenko/index.html">Mikhail Zoshchenko</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mikhail-Bulgakov">Mikhail Bulgakov</a>, and <a href="https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ilf_and_Petrov">Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov</a>. </p>
<p>This was for the most part the satire of insiders, rueful and affectionate, rather than that of regime critics. Bulgakov, to be sure, ran into political trouble in the late 1920s with his novel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita">The Master and Margarita</a>, but the books of Ilf and Petrov, featuring their Soviet conman hero <a href="https://russiapost.info/culture/ostap_bender">Ostap Bender</a>, became Soviet classics, loved by generations of Soviet children as well as adults. </p>
<p>Zamyatin’s satire was colder and harsher. To be a heretic, whether the regime was Tsarist or Soviet, was an internal necessity for him – and, he argued, for “true literature”. He despised the “nimble” writers and artists – “futurists”, “proletarians”, and so on – who jumped on the Bolshevik bandwagon and curried favour with the new regime, proclaiming themselves “the court school” and filling the air with their “yellow, green and raspberry red triumphant cries”. </p>
<p>In the highly political and factionalised world of the arts in early Soviet Russia, this disdain was energetically returned. Denunciation in the literary journals was one of Zamyatin’s perennial problems. He had trouble with the Cheka, too, which arrested him several times. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The first edition of We (1924).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Weyevgenyzamyatin.png">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Written in 1920, We was turned down for publication by Soviet censors. An American publisher, E.P. Dutton, would produce the first complete edition in 1924, in Gregory Zilboorg’s English translation. The novel would not be published in the Soviet Union until 1988.</p>
<h2>Cogs in the machine</h2>
<p>We depicts a future society in which almost everyone willingly, even eagerly, sacrifices their individuality to become cogs in the machine, with the Guardians there to deal with any dissenters. </p>
<p>Clearly, Zamyatin’s experiences with the Cheka, the censors and his conforming writer colleagues were part of his inspiration. The Benefactor’s “socratically-bald head” was no doubt a swipe at Lenin, but his moral smugness probably owes something to <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Feliks-Edmundovich-Dzerzhinsky">Felix Dzerzhinsky</a>, the first head of the Cheka. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575500/original/file-20240214-16-m4big2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lenin – Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lenin_(Petrov-Vodkin).jpg">Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For educated contemporaries, however, the Benefactor had loftier literary antecedents: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Inquisitor">Legend of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov</a> and Vladimir Solovyev’s Antichrist in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Solovyov_(philosopher)">Tale of the Antichrist</a>. </p>
<p>Both of these stories have a spokesman for institutionalised collective wisdom (the established Christian church) make the argument against a heretic (Jesus), with whom the authors’ sympathies lie. Zamyatin – a priest’s son, though he had abandoned Christianity in his youth – called the emerging orthodoxy of the Bolshevik Revolution “a new branch of Catholicism, which is as fearful as the old of every heretical word”.</p>
<p>The totalitarian society described in We may have been the Soviet future, but it was far from the Soviet reality when Zamyatin wrote. In the first years after the revolution, the Bolsheviks were trying to run Soviet Russia under an improvised system later called “War Communism”. This meant nationalising everything in sight and using force, rather than market relations, to extract grain from the peasantry and feed the cities and the Red Army, which was fighting foreign-backed White Armies on multiple fronts. </p>
<p>Soviet Russia was indeed cut off from the world, as Zamyatin’s dystopia is by the Green Wall, but at this point that was not the Bolsheviks’ choice. It was the result of war, foreign intervention and economic sanctions. The Bolsheviks believed in economic planning, but it would be ten years before they would seriously try to implement it. </p>
<p>In other words, the Bolshevik government in 1920 was as incapable of achieving the seamless regimentation of We’s dystopia as it was of building the space-craft that provides the novel with its science-fiction theme.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575491/original/file-20240213-30-3eko9t.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"></span>
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<p>Zamyatin’s novel is often read as a prescient foretelling of Stalinism, ten to 15 years before it came into being. That could be. But Zamyatin was also drawing on a more immediate source: the vision of a regimented and mechanised Soviet society of the future – seen as a utopia, not a dystopia – that was being trumpeted by the same futurist and “constructivist” artists whose embrace of the Bolshevik Revolution Zamyatin found so suspect. </p>
<p>A particular target, mentioned several times in We, was the worker poet <a href="https://monoskop.org/Aleksei_Gastev">Alexei Gastev</a>. Like Zamyatin, Gastev was a longtime Bolshevik revolutionary. In 1920, he set up a Central Institute of Labour whose mission was to train workers to function like machines. </p>
<p>This revolutionary version of the American capitalist concept of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/Taylorism">Taylorism</a> was aimed at maximising worker efficiency to increase productivity and profit. It did not go down well with the Soviet industrial ministry, still less with Soviet trade unions. It was closed down at the end of the 1920s, about the time serious industrialisation got underway. </p>
<p>But revolutionary regimentation of life, the cult of the machine, and submerging of the individual in the collective were staples of the “futurist” imagination, explored not only by Gastev, but the poet <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/vladimir-mayakovsky">Vladimir Mayakovsky</a>, the theatre director <a href="https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Vsevolod_Meyerhold">Vsevolod Meyerhold</a>, and constructivist artists like <a href="https://www.theartstory.org/artist/tatlin-vladimir/">Vladimir Tatlin</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Vladimir Mayakovsky c.1920.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Majakovszkij.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>The revolutionary avant-garde had great artistic achievements to its credit, but tolerance was not one of its characteristics. It bullied writers and artists who did not conform to its ideas, frequently appealing to the authorities (usually the Communist Party, but sometimes the Cheka) to put their opponents out of business. </p>
<p>That is one of the subtexts of Zamyatin’s 1921 essay <a href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1921-2/death-of-a-poet/death-of-a-poet-texts/zamiatin-i-am-afraid/">I Am Afraid</a>, as he was one of the major targets. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Association_of_Proletarian_Writers">Russian Association of Proletarian Writers</a>, a group claiming (with only partial accuracy) to represent the Party, imposed a dictatorial local rule on literature in the 1920s. It gave Zamyatin a relentless bashing – particularly after parts of We were published (perhaps without Zamyatin’s knowledge) in bourgeois Czechoslovakia. </p>
<p>This was the context of Zamyatin’s famous <a href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1929-2/proletarian-writers/proletarian-writers-texts/zamiatins-letter-to-stalin/">letter to Stalin</a> in 1931. Stalin was already looking more like the Benefactor than Lenin had ever done, but he occasionally intervened to protect writers who were the Association’s victims. Zamyatin asked permission to go abroad with his wife because he was unable to work in the “atmosphere of systematic persecution that increases in intensity from year to year”. He named, in particular, the Association’s Leningrad branch and the weekly literary journal it controlled. </p>
<p>Zamyatin phrased the request to leave, which Stalin approved, as a temporary one. He left open “the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men”. </p>
<p>In fact, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers was dissolved by government decree on Stalin’s initiative the next year. Zamyatin’s sometime patron, Maxim Gorky, who had departed for Europe earlier, returned to the Soviet Union. Zamyatin did not. </p>
<p>Perversely, although English was his best language and he was often called “the Englishman” in Russia, he went to France, a centre of Russian émigré culture, whose opinion-makers he anticipated would boycott him because of his Bolshevik past. </p>
<p>After some unhappy and lonely years, still a Soviet citizen, Zamyatin died of a heart attack in Paris in 1937 – the year of the Great Terror which, had he remained in the Soviet Union, would probably have killed him.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-stalins-great-terror-can-tell-us-about-russia-today-56842">What Stalin’s Great Terror can tell us about Russia today</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222160/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sheila Fitzpatrick 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>Yevgeny Zamyatin was a born loner and instinctive satirist, whose usual response to collective enthusiasm was to dissent.Sheila Fitzpatrick, Professor of History at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2211832024-01-24T17:21:13Z2024-01-24T17:21:13ZFive books about the COVID pandemic to look out for in 2024<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569571/original/file-20240116-26651-g7hw7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=89%2C89%2C5901%2C3898&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/beautiful-blonde-woman-wearing-face-mask-1857379738">Luis Monasterio/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Vi-fi, short for virus fiction, describes contemporary fiction that features the devastating events of world-changing outbreaks and epidemics. Rooted in science fiction, vi-fi draws on bio-thrilling realism and parallel worlds with multiple, dystopian possibilities.</p>
<p>Since 2020 there has been an exponential rise in vi-fi by a new COVID generation of authors who came out of isolation having experienced a pandemic in real time. </p>
<p>We <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/4AlmyluJOBTdreBkx8YvX6">present a podcast</a> about the latest in pandemic fiction. Here are five books about COVID we’ll be looking out for in 2024:</p>
<h2>1. Day by Michael Cunningham, released January 18</h2>
<p>Published 25 years after his literary masterpiece, The Hours, Cunningham’s new book, Day, taps into the COVID genre’s sense of a distortion of time. </p>
<p>The plot recounts the troubles of married couple, Dan and Isabel, and their children, Nathan and Violet and Isabel’s younger wayward brother, who lives a secret life on Instagram in the attic, as they navigate the pressures of lockdown in a brownstone townhouse in Brooklyn. </p>
<p>The narrative is built around the events of three separate days, each a year apart. The first is just as the pandemic is about to hit in 2019, the second during the middle of the lockdown in 2020, and the third as they are coming out of the lockdown in April 2021. </p>
<p>COVID is never mentioned by name, but the narrative promises tumultuous themes of incarceration and isolation, the extremely difficult accommodations that families had to make and the ways that so much is left unspoken between people.</p>
<h2>2. Fourteen Days by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston, released February 6</h2>
<p>Inspired by Italian Renaissance writer Giovanni Boccaccio’s book, The Decameron (1353), and a short story collection by the New York Times called The Decameron Project (2020), comes this much anticipated collaborative pandemic novel. </p>
<p>Beginning on the first week of lockdown in March 2020 the narrative takes place in a rundown New York City apartment complex where tenants share stories on the rooftop. </p>
<p>The book features different chapters written by A-list authors such as Emma Donoghue (Pull of the Stars), John Grisham, Celeste Ng (Little Fires Everywhere) and Weike Wang (Joan is Okay). </p>
<p>The book vows to be packed with secrets, ghost tales and sensational revelations from self-isolation, when the residents’ outlook on their situation is forever altered by the story of the newest, anonymous tenant: the Super.</p>
<h2>3. Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru, released May 16</h2>
<p>Kunzru’s portrait of the pandemic is tipped to be the most gripping COVID-noir novel yet. </p>
<p>Twenty years after graduating from a London art school, Jay is working as a delivery driver in New York in 2020. Having just returned to work afer the first lockdown, he unknowingly collapses on the porch of an enormous mansion in the middle of a remote woodland. There, his former lover from art school, Alice, is living with Rob, the man she she left him for and who was also his former best friend, as well as with Marshal, a gallery owner, and his girlfriend. </p>
<p>Exhausted with sickness, Jay is confronted by the personal history he has tried to shove into the rearview mirror. But this chance encounter in the middle of lockdown begins to unravel the secrets of his darkly destructive past with fateful consequences.</p>
<h2>4. Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes, translated by Frank Wynne, released in September</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569579/original/file-20240116-29-og0e3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Author Virginie Despentes, a white woman with brown hair." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569579/original/file-20240116-29-og0e3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569579/original/file-20240116-29-og0e3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569579/original/file-20240116-29-og0e3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569579/original/file-20240116-29-og0e3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569579/original/file-20240116-29-og0e3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569579/original/file-20240116-29-og0e3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569579/original/file-20240116-29-og0e3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Virginie Despentes.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Virginie_Despentes_2012.jpg">Georges Biard/WikiCommons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p><a href="https://pledgetimes.com/virginie-despentes-on-dear-asshole-be-radical-with-ideals/">Dubbed</a> “a French punk on the literary scene” and the “literary Balzac”, Virginie Despentes – who was shortlisted for the The Man Booker International Prize 2018 for her novel Vernon Subutex 1 – takes on #MeToo, COVID and social media cancel culture in Wynne’s translation of her new book. </p>
<p>A writer threatened by the public scrutiny of his “flirtations” with women, Oskar Jayack, finds himself at the centre of an Instagram hate when he rants on social media about the 50-year-old declining actress, Rebecca Latte, blaspheming her in a string of brutal insults which degenerates her as a dirty, worn-out, loud old woman. </p>
<p>Despentes uses email exchanges between the characters, but the author’s real message comments on a string of modern social problems: on transphobia, addiction, abuse and the effects of COVID policies.</p>
<h2>5. Real Americans by Rachel Khong, published April 30</h2>
<p>Khong’s take on the popular genre of generational saga ushers us into the past, across three continents and onto a post-pandemic Washington island. </p>
<p>This is an expansive social novel about the lives of three members of a Chinese American family, spanning 70 years: May (who we meet in 2030), Lily (in 2000) and Nick Chen (in 2021). </p>
<p>Nick is only 15, but he can’t help feeling that his mother, Lily, is hiding something from him. The only thing Nick knows about himself is that his dad is white and has never wanted to be in his life. He sets out to search for his biological father and get some answers. </p>
<p>Khong queries modern concerns through questions which plague her cast of characters. How much of our lives come from a spark of chance? Are we destined, or made, and if so, who gets to do the making? What makes a real American?</p>
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/221183/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Since 2020 there has been exponential rise in ‘virus fiction’ by a new COVID generation of authors who came out of isolation having experienced a pandemic in real time.Lucyl Harrison, PhD Candidate, School of Humanities, University of HullCatherine Wynne, Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise, Faculty of Arts, Cultures and Education, University of HullLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2185192024-01-02T20:16:26Z2024-01-02T20:16:26ZJaws turns 50: reading Peter Benchley’s novel, you barely mind if its self-loathing characters are eaten by a ‘genius’ shark<p>How many times have you come out of the cinema and heard someone snidely remark they preferred the book, as though this somehow connects them to a richer, more highbrow tradition?</p>
<p>This might ring true when it comes to literary masterworks like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, adapted into <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343092/">so-so</a> <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071577/">versions</a> nearly four decades apart (equally dull, for almost opposite reasons). But the reverse is often the case with popular fiction, which benefits from the immersive, visceral quality of the cinema.</p>
<p>Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781447220039/">Jaws</a>, which turns 50 this year, was a smash. Despite critics’ reservations, it was on the New York Times bestseller list for 44 weeks. Yet when we think of Jaws, images from Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film adaptation are what come to mind – along with John Williams’ <a href="https://youtu.be/E-sX2Y0W8l0?si=7H4TUsSRrImq_eh-">iconic theme music</a>. </p>
<p>Spielberg’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073195/">Jaws</a> keeps the simple – and stunning – narrative architecture of Benchley’s novel intact. A shark terrorises a small beach community that depends on wealthy tourists for sustenance. Brody, the chief of police, keeps the beaches open due to political pressure from Mayor Vaughan; when more attacks occur, marine biologist Matt Hooper comes to help. Together, they contract wild shark hunter Quint to help them kill the great white. </p>
<p>But the tone of grand adventure that defines Spielberg’s film marks a major departure from the novel. In Benchley’s work, more energy is directed towards exploring the minor social and political lives of its small-town denizens than in staging an epic showdown between man and beast – and, crucially, it differs radically from the film in its characterisation. In Spielberg’s world, the main characters are likeable, heroic, whereas in the novel they’re petty, broken and bitter, wading through the messes their personal lives have become. </p>
<p>These differences are not simply evidence of a young director’s desire to make the material his own. They map the changing consciousness of American popular culture in the 1970s, from a resolute focus on the violence simmering within United States society and policy (the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War) to an attempt to forget about these things through spectacular, anodyne entertainment. </p>
<p>As we know, Spielberg’s film reshaped Hollywood, virtually single-handedly inventing the “blockbuster” and marking a significant shift away from the existentially charged, sometimes nihilistic, ever self-critical films of the previous decade or so. </p>
<p>Yet the two dominant themes situating Benchley’s novel in a rich American literary tradition also underpin the film: its biting look at small-town politics and economics, and its reverent study of a wilderness awesome and sublime. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-jaws-to-star-wars-to-harry-potter-john-williams-90-today-is-our-greatest-living-composer-176245">From Jaws to Star Wars to Harry Potter: John Williams, 90 today, is our greatest living composer</a>
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<hr>
<h2>‘The shark material is brilliant’</h2>
<p>At the novel’s core is a swift, economically told tale of human versus beast: a classic American adventure in the vein of Jack London’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/white-fang-9780241652664">White Fang</a> or Herman Melville’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/moby--dick-9780451532282">Moby-Dick</a>. </p>
<p>Benchley punctuates this drama with a keen interrogation of the social dynamics of small American communities in the context of the economic pressures of capitalism. </p>
<p>A career journalist, Benchley is effective in describing actions, events and scenery: shark hunting, the ocean, Quint’s boat. The shark material is brilliant – the few times it cuts to the shark’s point of view (recalling Spielberg’s redeployment of the creature’s point of view from <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046876/">Creature from the Black Lagoon</a>), the writing becomes electric, effortless. Benchley is at his best when describing the movements of the shark in the water. </p>
<p>For example, when Hooper is cage diving, towards the end of the novel: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The head was only a few feet from the cage when the fish turned and began to pass before Hooper’s eyes – casually, as if in proud display of its incalculable mass and power. The snout passed first, then the jaw, slack and smiling, armed with row upon row of serrate triangles. And then the black, fathomless eye, seemingly riveted upon him. The gills rippled – bloodless wounds in the steely skin.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But the material about people is less confident – the writing is uneven and trite in places, with moments between characters sometimes strained in order to generate the necessary action. </p>
<p>This includes two subplots Spielberg and team wisely cut from the film. </p>
<p>The first involves a murky connection between Mayor Vaughn and the Mob that is partly responsible for his desire to keep the beaches open, despite Brody’s warnings. It seems both underdeveloped – we don’t find out much about it – and strangely present, with the majority of the novel’s scenes involving the mayor gesturing towards it. </p>
<p>The second, which probably would have been fatal to the film, involves an affair between Brody’s wife Ellen and Matt Hooper. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-moby-dick-by-herman-melville-52000">Guide to the classics: Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Characters ‘loathsome in places’</h2>
<p>One of the great joys of the film is the developing friendship between Hooper and Brody, culminating in their delightful final exchange. After the shark is dead and they are kicking their way back to shore, Brody laughs: “I used to hate the water.” Hooper replies, “I can’t imagine why”. Both men are happy to have survived, and to have each other. </p>
<p>In the novel, it’s more or less hate at first sight, with Brody immediately resenting Hooper because he grew up as a “summer person” in the area. Brody is ashamed he’s not one of the wealthy summer people, and tries to hide this through a kind of pathetic machismo, which emerges most visibly in his competitiveness with Hooper. </p>
<p>This obsession with summer people defines much of the dialogue between Brody and Ellen, with Brody’s resentment of the summer people’s nonchalant and emasculating wealth matched by Ellen’s resentment of the fact she used to be a summer person before she married this oaf of a police chief.</p>
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<p>The characters in the novel are thus thoroughly unappealing – even loathsome in places. Spielberg famously stated the shark was his favourite character in the novel. </p>
<p>The film’s Brody, anchored by the effortless charisma of Roy Scheider, is a steadfast, stoic working man who loves his wife and children and isn’t ashamed to show it in a gentle, unassuming way. </p>
<p>In the novel, Brody is “jealous and injured, inadequate and outraged”, a chauvinistic beer-guzzling bully, an obsessive – and often self-loathing – jerk. One of our first forays into his consciousness makes this immediately apparent: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sometimes during the summer, Brody would catch himself gazing with idle lust at one of the young, long-legged girls who pranced around town – their untethered breasts bouncing beneath the thinnest of cotton jerseys. But he never enjoyed the sensation, for it always made him wonder whether Ellen felt the same stirring when she looked at the tanned, slim young men who so perfectly complemented the long-legged girls.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ellen is also much less sympathetic in the novel (though admittedly in the film she’s a cardboard cutout of virtuous motherhood and wifedom). </p>
<p>She moves around as a shell of a person, a terrible snob disappointed by her social status and too embarrassed and ashamed to do anything about it, “tortured by thoughts she didn’t want to think – thoughts of chances missed and lives that could have been”. Like Brody, she is drowning in self-loathing: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>She made sure that everyone she met knew she had started her Amity life on an entirely different plane. She was aware of what she was doing, and she hated herself for it, because in fact she loved her husband deeply, adored her children, and – for most of the year – was quite content with her lot.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Hooper of the novel is similarly transformed by the film from an arrogant show-off, vaingloriously pursuing fame as a scientist at the expense of everything else, into a smart, responsible and energetic ball of fun, fully embodied by dynamo actor Richard Dreyfuss. </p>
<p>Only Quint – the mythical, Ahab-esque hunter (“Brody saw fever in Quint’s face – a heat that lit up his dark eyes, an intensity that drew his lips back from his teeth in a crooked smile”) – remains fundamentally unchanged, even though his unyielding brutality seems more appealing in the novel than in the film, with Robert Shaw portraying him as an antisocial maniac. </p>
<p>This revision includes the whole dynamic of the Brody family. The delightful moments between the kids and their parents, reflecting Spielberg’s superpower as a director (his talent for bringing sentimental family moments to life), are absent from the novel. </p>
<p>There’s something depressing about Brody’s relationship with his family. He has virtually no interaction with his children, and when he does, it’s like this: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The oldest boy, Billy, lay on the couch, leaning on an elbow. Martin, the middle son, age twelve, lounged in an easy chair, his shoeless feet propped up on the coffee table. Eight-year-old Sean sat on the floor, his back against the couch, stroking a cat in his lap. “How goes it?” said Brody. “Good, Dad,” said Bill, without shifting his gaze from the television.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Is ‘easy to swallow’ better?</h2>
<p>Of course, populating a novel with unlikable characters and depressing family scenes is not a problem in and of itself. Popeye from William Faulkner’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/sanctuary-9780099541028">Sanctuary</a> is hardly likeable, neither is pompous Nick Carraway from <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-great-gatsby-9781784877088">The Great Gatsby</a> – and you’d be hard pressed to find a Dickens novel that doesn’t feature some degree of family strife. </p>
<p>But in Jaws, a “man versus beast” tale, a melodramatic thriller, it creates a flat feeling: we don’t wholly mind the prospect of these characters being eaten by a shark. At the same time, Benchley – despite occasional flaws in the writing – does capture something of the dismal inconsistencies and banalities of being human. The complex self-loathing of the characters contrasts with the brutal and unthinking power – the genius for action and killing – of the shark. </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/U1fu_sA7XhE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Spielberg ‘buffed out the scratches’ in Bentley’s novel for his film.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The film redacts the frailties and faults of the characters, turning an adult (albeit imperfect) novel into family-friendly fodder. Spielberg took a low-key thriller doubling as a study of a small American community and turned it into the kind of blockbuster that would get people back into – and keep them in – cinemas. </p>
<p>It comes as no surprise that the film also excises much of the novel’s pointed class critique. Note, for example, this description of the summer people early in the book, the haves to the local have-nots: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Privilege had been bred into them with genetic certainty. As their eyes were blue or brown, so their tastes and consciences were determined by other generations. They had no vitamin deficiencies, no sickle-cell anaemia. […] Their bodies were lean, their muscles toned by boxing lessons at age nine, riding lessons at twelve, and tennis lessons ever since. They had no body odour. When they sweated, the girls smelled faintly of perfume; the boys smelled simply clean.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Most, I’m sure, would hold the novel up as an inferior work. At a technical level, they’d probably be right. But while it’s pretentious, it’s also much more ambitious than the film. </p>
<p>Is something easy to swallow necessarily better for the digestion? Only a shark could answer that. The novel is ugly in places. But where it works, it works at the level of great literature.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/surfers-share-their-waves-with-sharks-but-fear-not-193395">Surfers share their waves with sharks, but fear not</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Benchley’s novel lingers longer</h2>
<p>One of the outcomes of Jaws was at least a couple of generations of people who, if not exactly afraid to go back in the water, had a tendency to hum the film’s theme to themselves when wading into the surf alone. </p>
<p>Benchley, horrified by the bad rap his novel gave sharks, would go on to become an ecological activist focused on shark protection. In 2015, a shark was named after him: <a href="https://hakaimagazine.com/news/meet-new-ninja-lanternshark/">Etmopterus benchleyi</a>.</p>
<p>Benchley’s Jaws may not immediately grab one as easily as Spielberg’s, and it’s certainly not as technically accomplished. Its position in American literature is minor compared to the film’s in Hollywood cinema. </p>
<p>But despite – or, perhaps, because of – its flaws, the novel is worth reading at a time when the blockbuster has virtually decimated the middle of American cinema, churning out masses of pleasurably forgettable, interchangeable films that float like a thick slick of chum on the water’s surface.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218519/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ari Mattes 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>Peter Benchley’s classic 1974 ‘man versus beast’ blockbuster novel doubled as a scathing critique of 1970s America. Spielberg’s film made its characters likeable – and its tone into a ‘grand adventure’.Ari Mattes, Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2157002023-12-19T19:01:35Z2023-12-19T19:01:35ZKnausgaard’s ambitious new novel imagines Europe’s last decades – ending with an ominous star and the return of the dead<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566457/original/file-20231219-27-g8m1rc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=29%2C37%2C4962%2C3697&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Karl Ove Knausgaard</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sam Barker/Penguin Random House</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard is a 21st-century literary phenomenon. Talked up as a <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/167921/will-win-2022-nobel-prize-literature">contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature</a>, he has been compared to some of the greatest writers of all time: Fyodor Dostovesky, Marcel Proust, Roberto Bolaño. His work challenges conventional assumptions about content and form, and resonates with readers across the world. </p>
<p>Knausgaard’s magnum opus – the six-volume, 3,600-page autofictional epic <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/a-death-in-the-family-9780099555162">My Struggle</a> (<em>Min Kamp</em>) – has been translated into 35 languages. It’s sold half a million copies in Norway alone – a remarkable statistic, as Norway’s population is roughly five million.</p>
<p>Cultural commentator <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/12/26/completely-without-dignity-an-interview-with-karl-ove-knausgaard/">Jesse Baron</a> summed up its impact: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Knausgaard has written one of those books so aesthetically forceful as to be revolutionary. Before, there was no My Struggle; now there is, and things are different. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In 2020, Knausgaard followed up his “revolutionary” bestseller with <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-morning-star-9781784703301">The Morning Star</a> (<em>Morgenstjernen</em>), the first in a new cycle of novels. </p>
<p>By turns didactic and entertaining, the action of this enormous novel revolves around the sudden appearance of a massive new star in the sky, which may or may not herald the arrival of Lucifer on planet Earth. The dead seem to be coming back to life. Norwegian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_metal">black metal</a> might have something to do with it all. (And yes, you did read that last sentence correctly.) </p>
<p>Knausgaard’s new, unabashedly formidable novel, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-wolves-of-eternity-9781787303362">The Wolves of Eternity</a> (<em>Ulvene fra evighetens skog</em>), is set in the same fictional universe. In terms of plot, however, this only becomes fully apparent near the end, when the mysterious star appears in the sky – and it’s revealed there haven’t been any registered deaths in Norway for three whole days. </p>
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<p><em>The Wolves of Eternity – Karl Ove Knausgaard (Harvill Secker)</em></p>
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<h2>Early joy at ‘being able to write’</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566203/original/file-20231218-21-l3q7vz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566203/original/file-20231218-21-l3q7vz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566203/original/file-20231218-21-l3q7vz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566203/original/file-20231218-21-l3q7vz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566203/original/file-20231218-21-l3q7vz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566203/original/file-20231218-21-l3q7vz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566203/original/file-20231218-21-l3q7vz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566203/original/file-20231218-21-l3q7vz.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>
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<p>Knausgaard, who is arguably the most famous Norwegian writer since <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henrik-Ibsen">Henrik Ibsen</a>, was born in Olso on 6 December 1968. He was raised on Tromøy, the largest island in southern Norway, and studied at the University of Bergen. </p>
<p>As a student of creative writing, Knausgaard was taught by <a href="https://theconversation.com/jon-fosse-wins-the-2023-nobel-prize-in-literature-for-giving-voice-to-the-unsayable-215143">Jon Fosse</a>, the 2023 Nobel Laureate. After graduating from university, he taught at high school in northern Norway and spent time working in a psychiatric hospital. He also had a stint labouring on an oil rig.</p>
<p>In 1998, after moving to Sweden, Knausgaard released his first novel, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/420071/out-of-the-world-by-karl-ove-knausgaard/9781846558269">Out of the World</a> (<em>Ute av verden</em>). In part concerned with Knausgaard’s relationship with his alcoholic father, this autobiographically inflected book was a hit in Norway. It received the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature: the first time in the award’s history a debut novelist walked away as winner.</p>
<p>Knausgaard is now critical of his first novel. “It is the work of the beginner,” <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/so-much-longing-in-so-little-space-9781787300545">he says</a>, “and it is blemished by an at times obtrusive self-infatuation, the joy of being able to write.” </p>
<p>He is much fonder of his second book, which appeared to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/nov/08/karl-knausard-time-every-purpose">mixed reviews</a> in 2004. In <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-karl-ove-knausgaard-cant-stop-writing-1446688727">Knausgaard’s words</a>, A Time for Everything (<em>En tid for alt</em>) is a novel “about angels, like angels do exist, they really were around. The mystery in the book is where did they go? It’s a retelling of the stories in the Bible.” </p>
<p>Yet he readily concedes “nobody else is interested in [it] because it’s the most fictional” of his novels.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/jon-fosse-wins-the-2023-nobel-prize-in-literature-for-giving-voice-to-the-unsayable-215143">Jon Fosse wins the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature for giving 'voice to the unsayable'</a>
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<hr>
<h2>My Struggle changed the novel</h2>
<p>Knausgaard is nodding in the direction of My Struggle, which launched him into the literary stratosphere. This <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-name-your-book-after-hitlers">provocatively titled</a> autobiographical novel cycle spans six books, published between 2009 and 2011. Taken together, it is the longest novel in Norwegian history.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566182/original/file-20231218-18-zx6i61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566182/original/file-20231218-18-zx6i61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566182/original/file-20231218-18-zx6i61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566182/original/file-20231218-18-zx6i61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566182/original/file-20231218-18-zx6i61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566182/original/file-20231218-18-zx6i61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1189&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566182/original/file-20231218-18-zx6i61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1189&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566182/original/file-20231218-18-zx6i61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1189&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Academic <a href="https://sunypress.edu/Books/K/Knausgaard-and-the-Autofictional-Novel">Claus Elholm Andersen argues</a> this monumental work “has become the preeminent example of autofiction and has changed how we conceive of novels”.</p>
<p>Knausgaard has been <a href="https://electricliterature.com/opening-a-world-an-interview-with-karl-ove-knausgaard/">candid</a> about the fact that My Struggle, which traffics in the minutiae and rhythms of daily existence, “came out of a great frustration” in his life. </p>
<p>The writer, who had recently become a father, was suffering from a severe case of writer’s block. Knausgaard was also stuck in what he <a href="https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-light-behind-the-bookshelves/">subsequently characterised</a> as a midlife crisis:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Another thing is that when I turned forty it was kind of like I was dead. I thought “This is it and it’s going to be like this for the rest of my life”. And the only way for me to deal with that was through literature. It’s difficult to explain but I had to attempt to get closer to life, which is a stupid thing to do but that’s what I was trying to do, to avoid all the structures and forms of the novel.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Knausgaard realised he had to change his approach to writing in order to get closer to life. Speed of composition became “the most important thing” for Knausgaard. He recalls that speed served a practical function</p>
<blockquote>
<p>because I am a perfectionist in my writing, in my way of thinking, and I want to make it into real art, real literature. But I had to fight against that thing in me because I became so critical of my own writing, and I needed to get over that, and the only way I could do it was by speeding up because then you don’t have time to be critical at all. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The goal he set himself was to write a specific number of pages every day. “In that way I simply wouldn’t have time to think, to plan or to calculate,” <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300248517/inadvertent/">Knausgaard explains</a>, “I would have to go with whatever appeared on the screen in front of me.” </p>
<p>The number of pages per day soon started to go up. Five, ten, twenty. <a href="https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-light-behind-the-bookshelves/">Knausgaard holds</a> that this allowed him </p>
<blockquote>
<p>to escape the notion of knowing what to write. If you know what you’re going to write then that’s death for me, then nothing is happening. If I plan something it’s just dead. And almost everything I write is dead in that sense really, but if I speed up then something, all of a sudden, is happening because I can no longer control it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But this new method came with risks. Quality control was an issue. Knausgaard is the first <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThCB9lFvzhY">to admit</a> there is “a lot of bad writing” on display in My Struggle, which deliberately privileges quantity over artistic quality. </p>
<p>This shift became more pronounced as he went along. “When the books started to be published,” <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/karl-ove-knausgaard-the-duty-of-literature-is-to-fight-fiction">Knausgaard remarks</a>, “I had incredibly tight deadlines, which was a great help. Then I couldn’t afford to think about quality, only quantity mattered.” </p>
<p>Knausgaard is underselling himself a bit here. In the reckoning of the literary critic <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/08/13/total-recall">James Wood</a>, Knausgaard’s hypnotic prose is</p>
<blockquote>
<p>intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties, unafraid to appear naïve or awkward. Although his sentences are long and loose, they are not cutely or aimlessly digressive: truth is repeatedly being struck at, not chatted up.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/tying-the-knausgaardian-knot-struggle-scandinavian-style-36135">Tying the Knausgaardian knot: struggle, Scandinavian-style</a>
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<h2>‘No topic is off-limits’</h2>
<p>Knausgaard’s candour is part of his appeal, but he seems to have been genuinely taken aback by the public’s response to My Struggle. <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-karl-ove-knausgaard-cant-stop-writing-1446688727#:%7E:text=Of%20writing%20'My%20Struggle%2C',before%20his%20children%20got%20up">He confessed</a> as much to the journalist Liesl Schillinger:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s bad. I wrote it rather blindly, I didn’t think it was exceptional. I thought this would be a minor literary book, I thought it would be a step down from my other books, I thought maybe it was boring and uninteresting and really about nothing.</p>
</blockquote>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566204/original/file-20231218-21-2eobur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566204/original/file-20231218-21-2eobur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566204/original/file-20231218-21-2eobur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566204/original/file-20231218-21-2eobur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566204/original/file-20231218-21-2eobur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566204/original/file-20231218-21-2eobur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566204/original/file-20231218-21-2eobur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566204/original/file-20231218-21-2eobur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Knausgaard in 2011.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Karl_Ove_Knausg%C3%A5rd.jpg">Soppakanuuna, via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>Knausgaard’s many readers would beg to differ. We warm to what we might describe as his radical openness, and appreciate his willingness to discuss subjects society tends to regard as <a href="https://lithub.com/karl-ove-knausgaards-feats-of-shame-and-openness/">shameful</a> and taboo. Sexual inadequacy, self-harm, Adolf Hitler. No topic is off-limits, everything is up for discussion.</p>
<p>This has occasionally made life difficult for Knausgaard. Some of his nearest and dearest have <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/10/linda-bostrom-knausgard-i-would-like-to-be-seen-as-a-person-and-author-in-my-own-right">taken umbrage</a> at the way they are presented in My Struggle. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.boilerhouse.press/product-page/dear-knausgaard-by-kim-adrian">Feminist commentators</a> have been troubled by Knausgaard’s opinions about sexuality and gender relations in contemporary Europe. For example, in the second volume of My Struggle, he expressed scepticism about how “modernised and feminised” parameters of “equality and fairness” impact on masculinity.</p>
<p>Knausgaard <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThCB9lFvzhY">acknowledges</a> the criticism his work has generated in some quarters: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am accused of being right-wing and antifeminist or antiwoman even – all kinds of things – but I think if you read the whole book and see it … what I seek is complication.</p>
</blockquote>
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<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>
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</em>
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<p>My Struggle famously ends with Knausgaard declaring he is no longer a writer. However, his output across the past decade directly contradicts that statement. </p>
<p>He’s been a consultant on a new Norwegian translation of the Bible and published several nonfiction books, on subjects as diverse as <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/home-and-away-9781473523906">football</a> and the art of <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/so-much-longing-in-so-little-space-9781787300545">Edvard Munch</a>.</p>
<p>And he has contributed a novel, The Blind Book (<em>Blindenboken</em>), to the ecologically inspired <a href="https://www.futurelibrary.no/">Future Library</a> initiative, a series of original works printed on paper made from a thousand freshly planted trees. It will be held in trust, unpublished, until 2114, when it will be printed and released.</p>
<p>“From a writer’s perspective,” <a href="https://www.futurelibrary.no/#/years/2019">Knausgaard reflects</a>, “it is incredibly fascinating to do something and to know that it is [going to] be published in a completely different setting in a completely different world probably.” </p>
<h2>The Morning Star ‘divided critics’</h2>
<p>The Morning Star, Knausgaard’s first stab at fiction since My Struggle, is a speculative novel set in the here and now, in a recognisable version of our world. It has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/01/the-morning-star-by-karl-ove-knausgard-review-bloated-and-inconsequential">divided</a> <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/karl-ove-knausgaards-haunting-new-novel">critics</a>. Bloated and inconsequential, compulsive and haunting – people can’t seem to make up their minds about it.</p>
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<p>Part of the problem, I think, has to do with the sheer scope of the work – which is exactly 666 pages long.</p>
<p>Divided into three sections and featuring nine narrators, the novel, much like My Struggle, is punctuated by a dizzying number of theological and philosophical detours. </p>
<p>Take the following example. One of the narrators, Kathrin, has invited a couple of friends – Sigrid and Martin – for dinner. Martin is a perennial student. By the time we meet him, he has already failed to finish degrees in philosophy, computer science and biology. To Sigrid’s despair, he now wants to write about trees. Here is Martin’s almost painfully earnest take on the topic:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The mind is a kind of place where we become visible to ourselves. But why? What’s it good for? When we see ourselves, we see ourselves from without – the way others see us, in other words. That was what Nietzsche understood, that the mind exists for the good of the community. It’s there for what goes on between people. And that’s where some scholars believe there to be other kinds of consciousness too. Other forms of intelligence. The forest, for instance. The point being that those kinds of consciousness – intelligence, if you will – are so alien to us that it’s hard for us to see that they even exist. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is how characters in Knausgaard’s novels tend to talk. The question being asked here is basically: can a tree think? The answer, according to Martin, is not clear cut:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“So a tree can’t think,” Martin went on. “But the trees can. The ecosystem as an entity can. The fact that such an idea is being talked about now is probably down to people trying to construct forms of AI. We don’t know what that’s going to look like either.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>These passages are typical of Knausgaard, who <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2022/10/why-novel-matters-imperialism-absolute-karl-ove-knausgaard">believes</a> the power of the novel resides in its unique ability to pull </p>
<blockquote>
<p>any abstract conception about life, whether political, philosophical or scientific in nature, into the human sphere, where it no longer stands alone but collides with myriad impressions, thoughts, emotions and actions. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This accounts for the wildly digressive shape of The Morning Star, which is best understood as a contemporary spin on a tried and tested literary genre: <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/06/25/the-gimmick-of-the-novel-of-ideas/">the novel of ideas</a>. </p>
<h2>Wolves of Eternity: ‘deliberately challenging’</h2>
<p>Published in 2022 and translated into English in 2023, The Wolves of Eternity shares several thematic and formal traits with The Morning Star. Like its immediate predecessor, the novel, which starts in 1986, contains a number of first-person narratives. Two in particular stand out. </p>
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<p>Syvert Løyning has been released from Norwegian military service. He has just moved back home and needs to earn some cash. He eventually finds work as an undertaker. One day, while at home, he happens upon a stash of old letters from his late father to a lover living in the Soviet Union. He gets them translated, and discovers he has a half-sister, Alevtina, who works as a scientist. They eventually meet up in Putin’s Moscow. </p>
<p>The novel ends on an ambiguous and vaguely ominous note, with Syvert leaving Russia and heading back to Norway, which is in the throes of an extreme heat-wave. The morning star is hanging in the sky:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I slung my jacket over my arm, picked up my suitcase and bag and went down to the lobby, where my taxi was already waiting for me. Outside, the light from the new star shone in the grey sky above us, as if through a shroud. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>If anything, The Wolves of Eternity is even more ambitious than the book that came before it. The Morning Star is set in Norway and takes place over two consecutive days in late August. The plot of The Wolves of Eternity unfolds across Europe over decades. </p>
<p>Clocking in at a formidable 789 pages, it dwarfs its predecessor in length, too. Like The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity looks to tackle the most daunting and momentous of topics. </p>
<p>The meaning of life and the undoing of death. Scientific and political revolution. The nature of atoms and the history of the cosmos. <a href="https://theconversation.com/where-have-all-the-luddites-gone-exploring-what-makes-us-human-and-whether-modern-technology-threatens-to-destroy-it-202756">Transhumanism</a> and the existence of God. These are but a few of the matters Knausgaard concerns himself with in his new novel. Trees feature, too:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All organisms lived in such pockets of time, whose settings differed from species to species, in which their life cycles ran their course, complete for every individual, filled to the brim with life in time. The trees had no brain either, nor any central nervous system, and this of course defined their existence too, the way systems of sensory perception defined the existence of all things living on earth, meaning that the world looked quite different to a fly than it did to a cow or a tree.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I quote at length from Alevtina’s narrative because it’s important to give you a sense of what you are getting yourself into, if you decide to take the plunge into Knausgaard’s latest. Like My Struggle, it was written at impressive pace to deadline.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Karl-Ove-Knausgaard#:%7E:text=Conversations%20with%20Karl%20Ove%20Knausgaard%20is%20a%20collection%20of%20twenty,writer%20and%20a%20daring%20interviewee.">Knausgaard accepts</a> that The Wolves of Eternity is a very challenging book to read. This is mainly because the plot, in the author’s words, “moves very, very, very slowly”.</p>
<p>Some readers may bristle at (or even be put off by) the prospect of this. But the more time I spent with the novel, the more I came to appreciate that its length and pacing serve a specific, indeed vital, function. </p>
<p>It forces the reader to take stock, to grapple with precisely the sorts of complications Knausgaard is interested in pursing in his work. </p>
<p>This, admittedly, is not for everyone. Still, I think there is something truly remarkable, even admirable, about Knausgaard’s willingness to stick to his guns when it comes to seeing what the novel form is capable of doing and containing. </p>
<p>As to what comes next, I’m not entirely sure. But I’m quietly confident it’ll be suitably epic.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215700/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>The Wolves of Eternity is remarkable – and deliberately challenging. Ranging across time and space, it muses on thinking trees, Putin’s Moscow, a Norwegian heatwave and the undead.Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2179882023-12-14T15:54:09Z2023-12-14T15:54:09Z‘American Fiction’ is a scathing satire that challenges pop-culture stereotypes of Blackness<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563028/original/file-20231201-27-tecr8d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=134%2C0%2C4250%2C2910&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Erika Alexander is Coraline and Jeffrey Wright is Monk in 'American Fiction.'</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Claire Folger/Orion)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In this episode, Vinita sits down with two experts to break down the many layers — and Black stereotypes — in the much anticipated new film, American Fiction.</em></p>
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<p>The lead character of the new movie <em>American Fiction</em> is Monk. He’s a Black man but never feels ‘Black’ enough: he graduated from Harvard, his siblings are doctors, he doesn’t play basketball and he writes literary novels. </p>
<p>Directed and written by former journalist Cord Jefferson, <em>American Fiction</em> won this year’s People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, and it has its much anticipated North American release in theatres this month. It’s been called an “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/sep/10/american-fiction-review-cord-jefferson-jeffrey-wright">incisive literary satire</a>” by the <em>Guardian</em>. </p>
<p>The film, starring Jeffrey Wright, is an adaption of the 2001 novel <em>Erasure</em> by Percival Everett. The book and the film are centred on Monk, a novelist who’s fed up with a white-led publishing industry that profits from Black entertainment and tired tropes. As a Black man who thinks about race but also rages against having to talk about it, Monk gets so frustrated that he decides to poke fun of those who uncritically consume what they are sold as “Black culture.”</p>
<p>He uses a pen name to write an outlandish “Black” book of his own. It’s about “thug life” and is called “My Pafology.” But plot twist: his attempt at satire is lost on his audience and the book ends up becoming wildly successful. Suddenly, Monk is among those profiting off the stereotypes he so despises. The rest of the story explores “<a href="https://variety.com/2023/film/reviews/american-fiction-review-jeffrey-wright-1235718392/">the unfairness of asking individual artists to represent the entire Black experience</a>.”</p>
<p>In this episode of <em>Don’t Call Me Resilient</em>, Prof. Vershawn Ashanti Young of University of Waterloo and Prof. Anthony Stewart of Bucknell University join forces to break down the many layers of Monk’s story and why Black stereotypes remain so persistent in pop culture.</p>
<h2>Read more in The Conversation</h2>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-stories-about-alternate-worlds-can-help-us-imagine-a-better-future-dont-call-me-resilient-ep-7-165933">How stories about alternate worlds can help us imagine a better future: Don't Call Me Resilient EP 7</a>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/cultural-appropriation-and-the-whiteness-of-book-publishing-79095">Cultural appropriation and the whiteness of book publishing</a>
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</em>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/blackkklansman-a-deadly-serious-comedy-101432">'BlacKkKlansman' -- a deadly serious comedy</a>
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</em>
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<em>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/harriet-tubman-film-does-not-deserve-the-twitter-hate-127493">Harriet Tubman film does not deserve the Twitter hate</a>
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</em>
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<em>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/american-fiction-asks-who-gets-to-decide-blackness-219704">'American Fiction' asks who gets to decide Blackness</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<h2>Resources</h2>
<p><a href="https://lsupress.org/9780807172643/"><em>Approximate Gestures: Infinite Spaces in the Fiction of Percival Everett</em></a> by Anthony Stewart</p>
<p><a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/08/awards-insider-first-look-american-fiction">First Look: American Fiction Challenges Hollywood’s “Poverty of Imagination” About Black People </a> (<em>Vanity Fair</em>)</p>
<p>“<a href="https://slate.com/culture/2016/09/how-amos-n-andy-paved-the-way-for-black-stars-on-tv.html">How Amos ’n’ Andy paved the way for Black Stars on TV</a>” (<em>Slate</em>)</p>
<p><a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/native-son-richard-wright?variant=41224345419810"><em>Native Son</em></a> by Richard Wright</p>
<h2>Listen and follow</h2>
<p>You can listen to or follow <em>Don’t Call Me Resilient</em> on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/dont-call-me-resilient/id1549798876">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/37tK4zmjWvq2Sh6jLIpzp7">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_mJBLBznANz6ID9rBCUk7gv_ZRC4Og9-">YouTube</a> or wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts. </p>
<p><a href="mailto:DCMR@theconversation.com">We’d love to hear from you</a>, including any ideas for future episodes. Join The Conversation on <a href="https://twitter.com/ConversationCA">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/dontcallmeresilientpodcast/">Instagram</a> and <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@theconversation">TikTok</a> and use #DontCallMeResilient.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for ‘American Fiction’ (Orion)</span></figcaption>
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In this episode, Vinita sits down with two experts to break down the many layers — and Black stereotypes — in the much anticipated new film, ‘American Fiction.’Vinita Srivastava, Host + Producer, Don't Call Me ResilientDannielle Piper, Associate Producer, Don't Call Me Resilient, The ConversationLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2144562023-11-29T19:17:29Z2023-11-29T19:17:29Z‘How is the Great Australian Novel going?’ Not too bad, thanks<p>“How is The Great Australian Novel going?” asks a character in Thea Astley’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_Dressed_Explorer">The Well Dressed Explorer</a>, a Miles Franklin Literary Award winner in 1962. </p>
<p>When the weighty <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-history-of-the-australian-novel/C6792F09CEC145A73C054BC907384517">Cambridge History of THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEL</a> (as the title reads on its gold cover) landed on my doorstep I wondered if I would find out. Its editor, David Carter, first among equals as scholar-critic of Australian literature, has assembled 39 essays by leaders in the field, himself included, to chart the journey of the Australian version of this shape-shifting form. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel – edited by David Carter (Cambridge University Press)</em></p>
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<p>I have read a lot of Australian novels in my time, and written a few. I decided that if I sat down and read the history from cover to cover with open-minded curiosity, I might see what patterns emerged. </p>
<p>Probably no other reader would do this. The chapters on particular topics within a flexible chronology are designed for standalone use by teachers and students. This is a modular and recursive history, in which the past is revisited through a contemporary lens, with an eye on the future. A master narrative is not desired.</p>
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<p>The book has the hallmarks of Carter’s status as respected collaborator, mentor and assessor, and a literary critic grounded in the cultural and material contexts of book production. Most of the contributors are academics in literary studies. Their approaches reflect the trends of the academy in recent years. </p>
<p>Often they draw on research funded by the Australian Research Council, and the work shows those preferences too. For Australian literary studies, that means a turn to digital humanities, notably the collection and analysis of data to develop infrastructure of national significance, such as the AustLit and Trove databases. </p>
<p>It means a concern with “print culture” and the wider environment in which literary works are produced and received. It includes “the transnational turn” – how international perspectives complicate national frameworks – as well as a countermanding focus on locatedness, particularly in relation to climate change. And it means paying heed to First Nations voices in work that passes the “national interest” test. </p>
<p>This is a history shaped, or reshaped, by the glorious advent of literary fiction by Australian Indigenous authors, heralded by Kim Scott’s <a href="https://fremantlepress.com.au/books/true-country/">True Country</a> (1993) and flourishing now. As Iva Polak writes from Zagreb in her essay on “Indigenous Futurism”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) […] as we know, has changed Australia’s literary landscape. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>I was reading my way through this book on either side of the Voice referendum and I could sense the hope as the chapters moved towards the present, culminating in Eugenia Flynn’s remarkable essay “A (Sovereign) Body of Work: Australian Indigenous Literary Culture and the Literary Fiction Novel”. Flynn writes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>an established canon of Australian Indigenous literary fiction can now be affirmed […] that speaks out to the rest of the majority non-Indigenous literary sector, disrupting Australian literary hegemony. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>As a current development, this poses a challenge to writing its history. The optimistic wave crashed in the world outside the book as I was reading – more like a tsunami – and settler-colonialism reasserted itself with a No. </p>
<p>Time can be a curveball.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/enraged-tragic-and-hopeful-alexis-wrights-new-novel-praiseworthy-explores-aboriginal-sovereignty-in-the-shadow-of-the-anthropocene-202827">Enraged, tragic and hopeful: Alexis Wright's new novel Praiseworthy explores Aboriginal sovereignty in the shadow of the anthropocene</a>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559503/original/file-20231115-19-9kr4la.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559503/original/file-20231115-19-9kr4la.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559503/original/file-20231115-19-9kr4la.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559503/original/file-20231115-19-9kr4la.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559503/original/file-20231115-19-9kr4la.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559503/original/file-20231115-19-9kr4la.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559503/original/file-20231115-19-9kr4la.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559503/original/file-20231115-19-9kr4la.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<h2>An elusive literary beast</h2>
<p>The first third of the book takes us from the colonial period to mid-20th-century fiction. At the halfway mark, there is a good-humoured chapter by Paul Sharrad called “From Bunyip to Boom”, which summarises Australian Fiction from 1955 to 1975. Sharrad concludes that the Great Australian Novel (GAN) had by then “become an unstable narrative […] an elusive literary beast”. </p>
<p>Two-thirds of the way through we reach fiction beyond the Mabo decision of 1992, “when the assumptions non-Aboriginal people […] held about their rights to ownership seemed no longer to be watertight”. With Andrew McGahan’s <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Andrew-McGahan-White-Earth-9781741146127/">The White Earth</a> (2004), the discussion moves to work published in the 21st century. </p>
<p>The present is folded into a bending chronology that looks back in order to project to what is only just coming. In “Uncertain Futures: Climate Fiction in Australian Literature”, Jessica White adopts the term “future anterior”, a verb tense, as a mode for imagining near-future scenarios of catastrophe and post-catastrophe. </p>
<p>In other chapters, unexpected juxtapositions reveal persistence across time. Brigid Rooney’s “Unsettling Archive: Suburbs in Australian Fiction”, for example, places Fiona McGregor’s <a href="http://fionakmcgregor.com/words/indelible-ink">Indelible Ink</a> (2010) alongside Jessica Anderson’s <a href="https://sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/products/123851">The Impersonators</a> (1980) in an overlapping map of Sydney. Paul Giles cites Alexander Harris’s <a href="https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks19/1900401h.html">Settlers and Convicts</a> (1847) as an early case of settler unsettlement, while Lynda Ng takes up the same theme in her concluding chapter on J.M. Coetzee, Behrouz Boochani and “the disquiet generated historically” by both Aboriginal people and non-Anglo migrants “in settler Australian culture”. </p>
<p>A tense sense of “future anterior” runs through this collective history, as writers identify trends in the present that may or may not prefigure an alternative potential ahead. In his introduction, Carter refers to “the imagining into being an antipodean world we will also have to name ‘Australia’.” </p>
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<em>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-classical-espionage-novel-with-shades-of-le-carre-the-idealist-explores-the-tumultuous-path-to-east-timorese-independence-213970">A classical espionage novel with shades of Le Carré, The Idealist explores the tumultuous path to East Timorese independence</a>
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<h2>Canon formation and critique</h2>
<p>Carter discusses canon formation and canon critique in his chapter on Australian literary historiography, noting “the ascendancy of academic critics above the men and women of letters dominant” before the 1950s. That situation pertains today. Few of the contributors are creative practitioners or teachers in the cognate discipline of creative writing. </p>
<p>All of the essays are interesting. Some are anxious. Some have flashes of warmth and appreciation, although “great”, as in Great Australian Novel, is pretty much an impossibility. Aesthetic judgements are largely resisted. </p>
<p>A formula emerges, familiar to anyone who has peer-assessed journal articles or research grant applications: fly a theoretical or methodological kite at the start, preferably with an international tail; explore a few carefully chosen case studies as the basis for an argument; conclude briskly with a future-directed uptick. The aim – in key words of approbation – is to “expand” or “recentre” the field. </p>
<p>Carter has argued that Australian literature is as much the creation of Australian readers as it is of Australian writers. Our literature is the totality of the literature we experience, including imports and outside influences, high and low. </p>
<p>It is a powerful idea that I first encountered in the essay “Publishing, Patronage and Cultural Politics”, which Carter contributed to <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-history-of-australian-literature/9E8EC78E77B68B1EE019884118DDF03E">The Cambridge History of Australian Literature</a> edited by the late Peter Pierce in 2009. It manifests here in an interest in all aspects of book production and literary circulation, including sales and accounts.</p>
<p>This history is many-faceted and holistic. In a chapter on publishing, Roger Osborne quotes Carter describing the Australian novel as a “commodity, industry, professional or aesthetic practice, ethical or pedagogical technology, leisure, entertainment, policy object and national space”. </p>
<p>This catch-all conception boils down to a grand definition: the novel in Australia is “a central cultural technology” that “insists on its storytelling power for a wide range of ethical, political and cultural issues, even where written within the bounds of a popular genre form”. </p>
<p>The description recognises the prestige of the novel, whether as bestseller or rarefied prizewinner, while implicitly accepting that everyone has a novel in them and anyone can write one. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-red-witch-how-communist-writer-intellectual-and-activist-katharine-susannah-prichard-helped-shape-australia-182412">'The Red Witch': how communist writer, intellectual and activist Katharine Susannah Prichard helped shape Australia</a>
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<p>Katherine Bode contributes to a chapter on how the meaning of the Australian novel is changed by the information now available in the <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/">AustLit</a> database and <a href="https://readallaboutit.com.au/">To be continued: The Australian Newspaper Fiction Database</a>. Her research shows we need “to look beyond the book” to media such as the periodical press that generated novels in episodic, ephemeral form to understand the grassroots development of fiction in 19th-century Australia. </p>
<p>We need to look beyond the cities for literary communities too, as Emily Potter and Brigid Magner argue in their chapter on the “regional novel”: they recognise that “the region as it creatively emerges is a co-production of writer and reader”.</p>
<h2>Missing pieces of the puzzle</h2>
<p>Yet something like a canon lingers, to judge by the clusters of respectful mentions. After a handful of 19th-century novels, there are Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead, Patrick White, Randolph Stow, David Malouf and, soaring above them with nearly double the number of references in the index, the long-time-comer Alexis Wright. </p>
<p>There are omissions, including some of the best novels and novelists in my opinion. But that’s what happens. A puzzling virtual omission is Helen Garner, who has produced a string of successful novels in a career that has been a constant argument with fiction. Is she anathema to the academy? Or can no one find anything interesting to say about Australia’s great precursor of the autofiction that has swept the world? </p>
<p>At the other end of the time frame, Henry Lawson looks like another diminished figure, as Paul Eggert recalibrates the “nationalist myth of the 1890s”. There is not much place for short fiction in this history. Short story writers, from <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A27388">Mena Abdullah</a> to <a href="http://www.namleonline.com/">Nam Le</a>, don’t appear.</p>
<p>Among my highlights are Philip Mead on mining trilogies, including <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/8391700">The Fortunes of Richard Mahony</a> (1917-29); Nicole Moore’s radical recovery of postwar realism, including Ralph de Boissière’s <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/705373">Crown Jewel</a> (1956), set in Trinidad; the attention Meg Brayshaw pays to M. Barnard Eldershaw’s <a href="https://blogs.slv.vic.gov.au/our-stories/ask-a-librarian/tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow-a-lost-masterpiece/">Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow</a> (1947); Elizabeth McMahon on Randolph Stow’s <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/8266093">To the Islands</a> (1958); Brigid Rooney’s spotting of the “purple theme” of “the little sarsaparilla vine” that emerges “from the darker undertones” in Patrick White’s <a href="https://patrickwhitecatalogue.com/novels/tree/">The Tree of Man</a> (1955); and Jessica White on <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781760558604/">Dyschronia</a> (2018) by Jennifer Mills. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-case-for-the-fortunes-of-richard-mahony-by-henry-handel-richardson-24474">The case for The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson</a>
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<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561244/original/file-20231123-15-oi5fh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561244/original/file-20231123-15-oi5fh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561244/original/file-20231123-15-oi5fh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561244/original/file-20231123-15-oi5fh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561244/original/file-20231123-15-oi5fh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561244/original/file-20231123-15-oi5fh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1064&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561244/original/file-20231123-15-oi5fh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1064&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561244/original/file-20231123-15-oi5fh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1064&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Henry Handel Richardson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_Handel_Richardson,_author,_ca._1920-1935,_photographers_Elliott_%26_Fry_(6963289973).jpg">State Library of New South Wales, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>Emmett Stinson does a compare-and-contrast of David Malouf and Gerald Murnane, finding that “Malouf’s success is in no small part linked to the way in which educational institutions have assigned his works over the years”. And in “The Novel Road to the Global South”, Sascha Morrell takes a scalpel to celebrated works by Peter Carey and Richard Flanagan to diagnose an Australian condition: “a peculiar, backward-looking nostalgia for Australia’s accustomed ‘underdog’ status”. </p>
<p>Elsewhere the issue of “inherent racism” is noted in passing in Australia’s bestselling invasion narrative for Young Adults, <a href="https://johnmarsden.com.au/">John Marsden’s Tomorrow series</a> (1993-99).</p>
<h2>Multilingual writing?</h2>
<p>Emily Yu Zong writes in “The Making of the Asian Australian Novel” that the recent translation into English of Wong Shee Ping’s <a href="https://sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/products/108833">The Poison of Polygamy</a> – a novel serialised in Melbourne’s Chinese Times from 1909 – “has unveiled the earliest Chinese Australian novel and a neglected multilingual lineage of Australian literature”. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561778/original/file-20231127-21-xpm7i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561778/original/file-20231127-21-xpm7i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=871&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561778/original/file-20231127-21-xpm7i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=871&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561778/original/file-20231127-21-xpm7i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=871&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561778/original/file-20231127-21-xpm7i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1095&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561778/original/file-20231127-21-xpm7i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1095&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561778/original/file-20231127-21-xpm7i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1095&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>The question of translation comes up in discussion of <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/legendary-tales-of-the-australian-aborigines-paperback-softback">Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines</a> (1930) by Ngarrindjeri man David Unaipon, in Jumana Bayeh’s consideration of diasporic writing in “The Arab Australian Novel”, and in relation to Behrouz Boochani’s hybrid work <a href="https://theconversation.com/book-review-behrouz-boochanis-unsparing-look-at-the-brutality-of-manus-island-101520">No Friend but the Mountains</a>, originally written in Farsi. </p>
<p>Otherwise fiction in languages other than English barely breaks the surface. That limitation occludes Iwaki Kei’s remarkable novel <a href="https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2019/winter/farewell-my-orange-iwaki-kei">Farewell, My Orange</a> (2013) about African migrants to country Australia, which has been translated from Japanese by Meredith McKinney. Multilingual writing seems to be one part of the “future anterior” that we are not quite ready for.</p>
<p>Literary history can take many forms. I missed the most basic of those: biography. While writers are identity-checked where possible (“Christos Tsiolkas, a second-generation gay Greek Australian man”), few contributors are interested in explaining a writer’s career path. </p>
<p>Top marks then to Beth Driscoll and Kim Wilkins, whose chapter on fantasy, crime and romance fiction provides empirical information on how such stars as Kerry Greenwood and Peter Temple did what they did, and names those, including agents, editors and publishers, who were part of the process. They shout out to the short story as crucial to the networks that underpin the success of Australian fantasy. Fiction is also a form of sociability.</p>
<p>What are novels for? One answer would be that they are for academics to find interest in and make researchable and teachable. They are a means to an important end: part of how “contemporary Australian culture is valued and assessed”, in the words of Imelda Whelehan and Claire McCarthy in a chapter on screen adaptations. David Carter and his team have done a great job of showing how it’s done.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214456/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicholas Jose has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>A major new history of the Australian novel is shaped by the recent renaissance in Indigenous writing, but there are some notable omissions.Nicholas Jose, Professor of English and Creative Writing, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2121562023-10-20T15:24:23Z2023-10-20T15:24:23ZHow Sherlock Holmes, ancient Egypt and a mysterious ‘curse’ inspired Agatha Christie<p>Agatha Christie published <a href="https://www.agathachristie.com/en/stories/the-adventure-of-the-egyptian-tomb">The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb</a> in September 1923, almost a year after the <a href="https://theconversation.com/more-than-a-story-of-treasures-revisiting-tutankhamuns-tomb-100-years-after-its-discovery-193293">discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb</a> in Egypt’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Valley-of-the-Kings">Valley of the Kings</a>. Her Hercule Poirot short story drew inspiration from the sensationalised folklore of the “mummy’s curse”. <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Edward-Stanhope-Molyneux-Herbert-5th-earl-of-Carnarvon">Lord Carnarvon</a>, sponsor of the excavation, had died on April 5 1923, less than two months after he had entered Tutankhamun’s burial chamber.</p>
<p>Yet, there was another inspiration for Christie’s story: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Hound-of-the-Baskervilles">The Hound of the Baskervilles</a> (1902). Christie draws on Conan Doyle’s novel in the design and unpacking of the alleged curse which, in both stories, actually turns out to be a sophisticated crime</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for the 1959 adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Christie was familiar with Egypt, having stayed for three months in Cairo with her mother in 1910. The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb deliberately references Carnarvon’s death at her story’s outset, channelling “Tutmania” and the alleged curse into her fiction. </p>
<p>Poirot is summoned by Lady Willard, the widow of Sir John Willard, who died shortly after excavating “funereal chambers” near the “Pyramids of Gizeh”. Willard’s death, coupled with the deaths of others on the dig, becomes the talk of the day. As the narrator, Arthur Hastings, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61262/61262-h/61262-h.htm">observes</a>: “The magic power of dead-and-gone Egypt was exalted to a fetish point.” </p>
<p>While Willard died of heart failure, Poirot reveals that a member of the dig team, Dr Ames, had been exploiting Willard’s death to harness the power of superstition and kill for financial gain. In this regard, and in others, the story mirrors The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which a murderer excavates a family curse as a cover for their crime, in an attempt to acquire Baskerville Hall.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/is-hercule-poirot-autistic-here-are-seven-clues-that-he-might-be-210725">Is Hercule Poirot autistic? Here are seven clues that he might be</a>
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<h2>The power of superstition</h2>
<p>The murderers of both stories rely on superstition to shield them. The Baskerville family live with a curse involving a gigantic hound. It allegedly haunts the family after the evil Sir Hugo Baskerville pursued a woman across the moors to her death. The legend is passed through generations of the Baskerville family.</p>
<p>Sir Hugo’s descendent, Stapleton, who is third in line to the Baskerville estate, deploys the power of the curse. He creates his own demon hound by painting a large dog’s fur with blue luminescent paint and releasing it onto the moors. The sight of what looks like the demon hound kills the owner of Baskerville Hall, Sir Charles. He dies, like Willard in Christie’s story, of heart failure.</p>
<p>But it is how the detectives respond to superstition which cements the connections between the Conan Doyle and Christie stories. Both sleuths utilise superstition to expose the villains. </p>
<p>In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2852/2852-h/2852-h.htm">warns the new heir</a>, Sir Henry, of the demon legend to keep him off the moor: “Bear in mind, Sir Henry, one of the phrases in that queer old legend … and avoid the moor in those hours of darkness when the powers of evil are exalted.” </p>
<p>Holmes knows, although we do not, that the moor is dangerous for a Baskerville. Not because anything supernatural is afoot, but because the threat comes from a dangerous living animal and its murderous master. When Holmes tricks Stapleton into revealing his hound, the curse is laid to rest.</p>
<p>Similarly, Poirot confirms that he believes “in the terrific force of superstition”. And on the dig site he has a trustworthy member of the team disguise himself as Anubis, “the jackal-headed, the god of departing souls”, to bring the case to a crisis point and unveil the villain.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-tutankhamuns-curse-continues-to-fascinate-100-years-after-his-discovery-193766">Why Tutankhamun’s curse continues to fascinate, 100 years after his discovery</a>
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<h2>Conan Doyle’s “elementals” and Christie’s archaeology</h2>
<p>In the first publication of his story, <a href="https://archive.org/details/houndofbaskervil00doyluoft/page/n9/mode/2up">Conan Doyle noted</a> that he “owed its inception” to Bertram Fletcher Robinson. The journalist had told him about an evil Devonshire squire, Richard Cabell, who died in 1677. His ghost, surrounded by fiendish hounds, was reputedly seen on the moors. </p>
<p>Around the same time, Robinson was researching the misfortunes that befell those who handled an ancient Egyptian artefact known as the “unlucky mummy” but that was actually a wooden board used to cover a mummy and painted to look like the person when they were alive. He died shortly afterwards. </p>
<p>Christie’s The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb also refers to the “unlucky mummy”, saying it was “dragged out with fresh zest” when Willard died after entering the tomb of “King Men-her-Ra”. Even today, the <a href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA22542">British Museum confirms</a> that the object has a “reputation for bringing misfortune”, though it explains that this has no “basis in fact”. </p>
<p>Conan Doyle reported to the press that an “evil element” might have caused Carnavon’s “fatal illness” and connected his death with Robinson’s. <a href="https://www.visitportsmouth.co.uk/conan-doyle/blog/read/2023/03/conan-doyle-and-king-tut-b86">Conan Doyle observed</a>: “One does not know what elementals existed in those days, nor what their form might be.” </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553299/original/file-20231011-17-zrmxow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="black and white photo of young Agatha Christie" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553299/original/file-20231011-17-zrmxow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553299/original/file-20231011-17-zrmxow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553299/original/file-20231011-17-zrmxow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553299/original/file-20231011-17-zrmxow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553299/original/file-20231011-17-zrmxow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553299/original/file-20231011-17-zrmxow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553299/original/file-20231011-17-zrmxow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Agatha Christie as a young woman in the 1910s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Agatha_Christie_as_a_young_woman.jpg">The Christie Archive Trust</a></span>
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<p>Christie’s story demonstrates her engagement with Conan Doyle’s writing, as well as her interest in Egypt. A decade later she became an amateur archaeologist, supporting the digs of her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, in the Middle East. </p>
<p>Christie’s story also taps into the global interest in Tutankhamun. By the early 1920s, Conan Doyle – though still publishing Sherlock Holmes stories – was coming to the end of his career, while Christie’s was just beginning. </p>
<p>In the final decade of his life, Conan Doyle embraced spiritualism, a religious movement that proclaimed the dead could communicate with the living. This opened him to the idea of ancient curses. He was, in the words of Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles, inclined to “supernatural explanation”.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Wynne 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>It is how the detectives respond to superstition which cements the connections between the Conan Doyle and Christie storiesCatherine Wynne, Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise, Faculty of Arts, Cultures and Education, University of HullLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2140522023-10-06T12:31:25Z2023-10-06T12:31:25Z20 years after the publication of ‘Purple Hibiscus,’ a generation of African writers have followed in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s footsteps<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552193/original/file-20231004-23-3cpw1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=143%2C229%2C2943%2C1890&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in 2004, shortly after the publication of 'Purple Hibiscus.'</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/nigerian-author-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-poses-while-in-news-photo/56522066?adppopup=true">Ulf Andersen/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Twenty years ago, in October 2003, 26-year-old Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the North American publishing scene with her debut novel,“ <a href="https://www.chimamanda.com/purple-hibiscus/">Purple Hibiscus</a>.” </p>
<p>Since then, Adichie’s literary fame has only grown: She’s published two more novels and a collection of short stories, while <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg3umXU_qWc">two of her</a> <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en">TED talks</a> have garnered tens of millions of views. In September 2023, she published her first children’s book – a joyful celebration of mother-daughter love – under the nom de plume <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/742306/mamas-sleeping-scarf-by-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-writing-as-nwa-grace-james-illustrated-by-joelle-avelino/9781774882696">Nwa Grace-James</a>.</p>
<p>But the October 2003 publication of “Purple Hibiscus” didn’t just signal the start of a single author’s brilliant career. It also forged a path for a whole new generation of African novelists who had come to America as immigrants or students and who have been mining that experience in their writing. </p>
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<img alt="Black and white portrait of African man wearing a tweed coat sitting at a table." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552194/original/file-20231004-19-uk36ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552194/original/file-20231004-19-uk36ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552194/original/file-20231004-19-uk36ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552194/original/file-20231004-19-uk36ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552194/original/file-20231004-19-uk36ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1018&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552194/original/file-20231004-19-uk36ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1018&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552194/original/file-20231004-19-uk36ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1018&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel ‘Things Fall Apart’ came perilously close to never seeing a printing press.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/portrait-of-chinua-achebe-nigerian-novelist-poet-and-critic-news-photo/681121124?adppopup=true">Michel Delsol/Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>The struggles to get published by prior generations of African authors are almost legendary. Thirty years apart, Chinua Achebe and Tsitsi Dangarembga have both described how close their manuscripts of “<a href="https://slate.com/culture/2013/03/things-fall-apart-by-chinua-achebe-was-almost-lost-by-london-typists-the-amazing-story-of-the-handwritten-manuscript.html">Things Fall Apart</a>” (1958) and “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/books/tsitsi-dangarembga-this-mournable-body.html">Nervous Conditions</a>” (1988) came to being lost. Achebe’s only copy of the manuscript was a handwritten draft. He sent it to a typing agency in London that nearly dismissed it as a joke. Dangarembga’s manuscript sat unread in the basement of a British publishing house for years. Only when the writer stopped by the offices during a work trip to London did the editors agree to read it.</p>
<p>Through attending American MFA programs, however, Adichie and her contemporaries were able to tap into the networks of agents and found their work snapped up by American publishers.</p>
<p>Writers born in Africa who studied at American universities – Teju Cole, Yaa Gyasi, Uzodinma Iweala, NoViolet Bulawayo and Akwaeke Emezi, to name just a few – have followed in Adichie’s footsteps. </p>
<p>“Purple Hibiscus” has been to these writers what Gabriel García Márquez’s “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/05/one-hundred-years-of-solitude-50-years-later/527118/">One Hundred Years of Solitude</a>” (1967) was to aspiring Latin American writers during the <a href="https://libguides.bc.edu/virtual-book-display/latin-american-literature">Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s</a>, and what Salman Rushdie’s “<a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/rushdie-children.html">Midnight’s Children</a>” (1981) was to the proliferation of Indian writers in English from the 1980s on.</p>
<p>While it would be reassuring to think that the current surge of African novelists represents a wider American interest in all things African, the success of these novels may also have to do with the fact that so many are actually set in the U.S. </p>
<p>The recurrent theme of immigration to the U.S. gives many of these works direct – and instructive – relevance to U.S. readers. As Black outsiders in the U.S., African immigrants have a particularly acute insight into the way race and racism affect daily life in this country. One of the common features of these novels is the way in which they explore the tension of racial solidarity and mutual misunderstanding between African immigrants and Black Americans.</p>
<p>When I first started teaching African literature, I often had difficulty finding books in print. Now my problem is deciding who to leave out of my syllabus. Here is a very brief list of some of the books that I would consider must-reads.</p>
<h2>1. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Americanah” (2013)</h2>
<p>As its title suggests, Adichie’s fourth novel, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/878/americanah-by-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie/">Americanah</a>,” is arguably the definitive novel of contemporary African immigration to America.</p>
<p>It tells the story of Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman overstaying her student visa, and how she negotiates the new Black identity forced on her by the blunt instrument of American race-construction. </p>
<p>In a brilliant metafictional move, Adichie has Ifemelu achieve internet fame by writing a blog dedicated to non-American Blacks: “Dear Non-American Black,” Ifemelu writes, “when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t ‘black’ in your country? You’re in America now.”</p>
<p>Ifemelu’s experience of racism is simultaneously hurtful and baffling to her. On the one hand, her illegal status makes her both psychologically and physically vulnerable. But at times American racism is almost comical; Ifemelu doesn’t understand why an innocent reference to eating watermelon might be misconstrued, for instance, and she is totally bewildered by a shop assistant’s attempt to avoid distinguishing between two shoppers by reference to their skin color. </p>
<h2>2. Yaa Gyasi, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/533857/homegoing-by-yaa-gyasi/">Homegoing</a>” (2016)</h2>
<p>Ghanaian-born Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel takes the form of a series of skillfully interwoven stories set on either side of the Atlantic. </p>
<p>Beginning with two half sisters, Effia and Esi, in the Gold Coast in the middle of the 18th century, the stories trace the two sets of the sisters’ descendants through six subsequent generations in West Africa and the U.S. In the final two stories we meet the young teenager Marjorie, who, as the American-born daughter of Ghanaian parents, struggles to come to terms with her identity as one of Ifemelu’s “Non-American Blacks.” She finds herself ostracized by her Black classmates for “acting white” but is unable to enjoy a normal relationship with a white classmate. One of the only Black teachers at her high school tells her, “You’re here now, and here black is black is black.”</p>
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<img alt="Portrait of young Black woman bathed in sunlight." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552195/original/file-20231004-19-k2bynk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552195/original/file-20231004-19-k2bynk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552195/original/file-20231004-19-k2bynk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552195/original/file-20231004-19-k2bynk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552195/original/file-20231004-19-k2bynk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552195/original/file-20231004-19-k2bynk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552195/original/file-20231004-19-k2bynk.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">
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<span class="caption">Yaa Gyasi in 2017, a year after the publication of her debut novel, ‘Homegoing.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/yaa-gyasi-milano-italy-9th-september-2017-news-photo/1129549208?adppopup=true">Leonardo Cendamo/Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span>
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<h2>3. NoViolet Bulawayo, “<a href="https://novioletbulawayo.com/books/we-need-new-names/">We Need New Names</a>” (2013)</h2>
<p>When “We Need New Names” appeared, Nigerian novelist Helon Habila accused NoViolet Bulawayo of peddling “poverty-porn” by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/20/need-new-names-bulawayo-review">pandering to American stereotypes of Africa</a>. </p>
<p>However, for Bulawayo’s teenage protagonist Darling, it’s American culture that is dangerously dysfunctional – and personally discombobulating. Darling finds American high school ridiculously easy, is horrified by the laxness of American parenting and is generally unimpressed by the urban blight she sees around her in the city she calls Destroyed, Michigan. </p>
<p>Late in the novel, her mentally ill countryman Tshaka Zulu is shot to death by police when off his meds and ranting in his home language. You might think that such a violent, tragic event would be a major plot driver. Sadly, it seems to exemplify just one more random peril – little different from being hit by a car or struck down by cancer – that many Africans coming to America have to endure.</p>
<h2>4. Uzodinma Iweala, “<a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/speak-no-evil-uzodinma-iweala?variant=32118044753954">Speak No Evil</a>” (2018)</h2>
<p>Even wealth and class status offer no protection from such perils. </p>
<p>In Uzodinma Iweala’s “Speak No Evil,” the main character, Niru, is the high-achieving son of high-achieving Nigerian parents in supposedly cosmopolitan Washington, D.C. The first three-quarters of the book appear to be exploring Niru’s dilemma: how to come out as gay to his conservative parents. </p>
<p>It turns out that Niru’s gayness – an invisible characteristic, after all – is not the problem; his Blackness is. When he gets in a row outside a bar with his best friend, Meredith – an equally well-off, well-connected, high-flying white female classmate – someone calls the cops. In the space of a paragraph the inevitable has happened: Shots are fired. “You’re safe,” someone says to Meredith. “He can’t hurt you.” </p>
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<img alt="Young Black man wearing a black turtleneck and eyeglasses posing in front of a sculpture with waterfalls." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552366/original/file-20231005-15-38rtnw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552366/original/file-20231005-15-38rtnw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552366/original/file-20231005-15-38rtnw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552366/original/file-20231005-15-38rtnw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552366/original/file-20231005-15-38rtnw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552366/original/file-20231005-15-38rtnw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552366/original/file-20231005-15-38rtnw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Nigerian author Uzodinma Iweala.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/nigerian-author-uzodinma-iweala-author-of-the-fiction-novel-news-photo/539982735?adppopup=true">Fairfax Media/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>By extraordinary coincidence, Adichie grew up in the very house that Chinua Achebe had lived in on the campus of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. She, and the other writers of her generation, grew up in the house of fiction that Achebe and his generation established. The writers of that older generation were concerned with the material and cultural despoliation of colonialism. In Achebe’s words, their task was to let their African readers know “<a href="https://www3.dbu.edu/mitchell/achebequ.htm">where the rain began to beat</a>” them. </p>
<p>Today’s African writers demand readers’ attention by letting them know that for African and African-descended people in the U.S., although the winds may have shifted, the storm is far from over.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214052/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon Lewis 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>African immigrant writers possess particularly acute insights into the way race and racism affect daily life in the US.Simon Lewis, Professor of English, College of CharlestonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2072902023-09-21T12:44:59Z2023-09-21T12:44:59Z‘Journey to the West’: Why the classic Chinese novel’s mischievous monkey – and his very human quest – has inspired centuries of adaptations<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548883/original/file-20230918-19-ngcwb3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C1%2C1024%2C680&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Monkey: Journey To The West,' a nine-act opera adaptation performed at the Chatelet Theater in France.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/monkey-journey-to-the-west-9-acts-opera-at-the-chatelet-news-photo/171031522?adppopup=true">Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/French Select via Getty Image</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>One summer afternoon in the late 1980s, my mother and I passed by a tea house on our trip out of town. The crowded building was usually a boisterous place filled with chatter, laughter, and the happy, clacking shuffle of mahjong tiles. At the moment we were passing, however, a great hush came over the teahouse: People were held spellbound by the black-and-white glow of a small TV in a corner, playing an episode of the series “Journey to the West.”</p>
<p>The TV series was adapted from <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/J/bo12079590.html">a 16th century Chinese novel</a> with the same title that has <a href="https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295743196/transforming-monkey/">undergone numerous adaptations</a> and has captured the imagination of Chinese people to this day. Like many kids in China, I was fascinated by the magic Monkey King, the beloved superhero in the novel, who went through amazing adventures with other pilgrims in their quest for Buddhist scriptures. While I had to quickly walk by the teahouse in order to catch our bus that day, this moment flashed back to me from time to time, making me wonder what made “Journey to the West” so fascinating for people of all ages and backgrounds.</p>
<p>After graduating from college, I embarked on the next chapter of my academic journey in the United States and reconnected with “Journey to the West” from a different perspective. Now, as <a href="https://www.holycross.edu/academics/programs/world-languages-literatures-and-cultures/faculty/ji-hao">a scholar with expertise in traditional Chinese literature</a>, I am interested in the development of literary and cultural traditions around the story, including <a href="https://brill.com/view/journals/joch/2/1/article-p77_5.xml">how it has been translated</a> and <a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/80237245">reimagined by many artists</a>.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548872/original/file-20230918-27043-s33v7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A dozen children in bright gold costumes and red face paint pose in a dance formation." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548872/original/file-20230918-27043-s33v7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548872/original/file-20230918-27043-s33v7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548872/original/file-20230918-27043-s33v7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548872/original/file-20230918-27043-s33v7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548872/original/file-20230918-27043-s33v7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548872/original/file-20230918-27043-s33v7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548872/original/file-20230918-27043-s33v7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Students of a Beijing opera school dance during a performance about the ‘Monkey King’ in 2006.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/students-of-an-opera-school-dance-during-a-performance-news-photo/72889325?adppopup=true">China Photos/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>While deeply enmeshed in Chinese traditions, the story also resonates with readers from diverse cultures. “Journey to the West” creates shared ground by highlighting the quest for a common humanity, epitomized by its best-loved character, the Monkey King – a symbol of the human mind.</p>
<h2>One journey, many stories</h2>
<p>Scholars usually trace the beginning of this literary tradition to <a href="https://www.shambhala.com/xuanzang.html">a Buddhist monk, Xuanzang</a>, who set out on an epic pilgrimage to India in 627 C.E. He was determined to consult and bring back Sanskrit copies of Buddhist scriptures, rather than rely on previous Chinese translations. He did so after nearly 17 years and devoted the rest of his life to translating the scriptures.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548870/original/file-20230918-19-u5edwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A detail from a Chinese scroll painting of a man with short hair in a green robe and sandals." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548870/original/file-20230918-19-u5edwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548870/original/file-20230918-19-u5edwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1341&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548870/original/file-20230918-19-u5edwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1341&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548870/original/file-20230918-19-u5edwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1341&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548870/original/file-20230918-19-u5edwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1686&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548870/original/file-20230918-19-u5edwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1686&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548870/original/file-20230918-19-u5edwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1686&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The seventh-century monk and translator Xuanzang traveled far and wide in India for Buddhist scriptures.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/xuanzang-was-a-famous-chinese-buddhist-monk-scholar-news-photo/1485117238?adppopup=true">Pictures from History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>The journey has inspired a wide variety of representations in literature, art and religion, making a lasting impact on Chinese culture and society. Legends began to emerge during Xuanzang’s lifetime. Over centuries, they gradually <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/european-and-world-literature-general-interest/hsi-yu-chi-study-antecedents-sixteenth-century-chinese-novel?format=PB&isbn=9780521102810">evolved into a distinct tradition</a> of storytelling, often focused on how Xuanzang overcame obstacles with the help of supernatural companions.</p>
<p>This culminated in a 16th century Chinese novel, “Journey to the West.” By this point, the hero of the story had already shifted from Xuanzang to one of his disciples: the Monkey King of Flower-Fruit Mountain, who serves as Xuanzang’s protector. The Monkey King possesses strong magical powers – transforming himself, cloning himself and even performing somersaults that fly him more than 30,000 miles at once.</p>
<p>Despite this novel’s dominance, the broader tradition around “Journey to the West” encompasses a wide variety of stories in diverse forms. The canonic novel itself grew out of this collective effort, and its authorship is still debated – even as it continues to inspire new adaptations.</p>
<h2>The deeper journey</h2>
<p>Central to all Journey to the West stories is a theme of pilgrimage, which immediately raises a question regarding the nature of the novel: What is the journey really about?</p>
<p>Centuries-long debates <a href="https://doi.org/10.7312/yu--14326-009">about the journey’s deeper message</a> center on the 16th century novel. Traditional commentators in late imperial China adopted a variety of approaches to the novel and underscored its connections with different religious and philosophical doctrines: Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism and syntheses of those teachings.</p>
<p>For example, all these teachings highlight the role of the “xin” – a Chinese word for mind and heart – in self-cultivation. While Confucian readers might see the plot of “Journey to the West” as the quest for a more moral life, Buddhists might decipher it as an inward journey toward enlightenment. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548873/original/file-20230918-17-kwrct8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Four small, brightly painted clay figurines of people and animals in clothing." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548873/original/file-20230918-17-kwrct8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548873/original/file-20230918-17-kwrct8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548873/original/file-20230918-17-kwrct8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548873/original/file-20230918-17-kwrct8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548873/original/file-20230918-17-kwrct8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548873/original/file-20230918-17-kwrct8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548873/original/file-20230918-17-kwrct8.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"></a>
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<span class="caption">Four of the characters from ‘Journey to the West,’ made in the clay figurine technique of Huishan, China, including the Monkey King on the right.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/characters-of-journey-to-the-west-made-in-huishan-clay-news-photo/524791578?adppopup=true">Zhang Peng/LightRocket via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>In the early 20th century, <a href="https://c250.columbia.edu/c250_celebrates/remarkable_columbians/hu_shih.html#:%7E:text=A%20onetime%20cultural%20critic%20who,late%201910s%2C%20he%20joined%20other">Chinese scholar and diplomat Hu Shi</a> criticized traditional allegorical interpretations, which he feared would make the novel seem less approachable for the general public.</p>
<p>His opinion influenced <a href="https://groveatlantic.com/book/monkey/">Arthur Waley’s “Monkey</a>,” an abridged English translation of “Journey to the West” published in 1942, which has contributed to <a href="https://www.proquest.com/docview/2584781824/9CC4031C8094A1CPQ/1">the canonization of the novel abroad</a>. To a considerable extent, “Monkey” turns the pilgrims’ journey into Monkey’s own journey of self-improvement and personal growth.</p>
<p>Recent scholarship has further underlined <a href="https://doi.org/10.1163/9789047415893_015">religious and ritual connotations</a> of the novel from different perspectives, and debates over the issue continue. But few people would deny that one idea plays a crucial role: the Monkey King as a symbol of the mind.</p>
<h2>Mind monkey</h2>
<p>There has been a long tradition in Chinese culture that associates <a href="https://brill.com/display/title/3488?language=en">the image of a simian creature</a> with the human mind. On the one hand, a monkey often symbolizes a restless mind, calling for discipline and cultivation. On the other hand, an active mind also opens up the opportunity to challenge the status quo and even transcend it, progressing to a higher state.</p>
<p>The Monkey King in the novel <a href="https://doi.org/10.7817/jaos.141.4.2021.ar035">demonstrates this dual dimension of the mind</a>. He vividly displays adaptability in exploring uncharted territories and adjusting to changing circumstances – and learning to rely on teamwork and self-discipline, not merely his magic powers.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548876/original/file-20230918-27-jeg8si.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A Japanese ink sketch of a monkey creating small, flying creatures out of his breath." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548876/original/file-20230918-27-jeg8si.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548876/original/file-20230918-27-jeg8si.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548876/original/file-20230918-27-jeg8si.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548876/original/file-20230918-27-jeg8si.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548876/original/file-20230918-27-jeg8si.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548876/original/file-20230918-27-jeg8si.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548876/original/file-20230918-27-jeg8si.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The Monkey King creates an army by plucking out his fur and blowing it into the air – each hair becomes a monkey-warrior. From the Japanese series ‘Yoshitoshi ryakuga.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-magic-monkey-songoku-from-the-chinese-story-journey-to-news-photo/526988270?adppopup=true">John Stevenson/Asian Art & Archaeology, Inc./Corbis Historical/Corbis via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Before being sent on the pilgrimage, the Monkey King’s quest for self-gratification wreaked havoc in heaven and led to his imprisonment by the Buddha. The goddess Guanyin agreed to give him a second chance on the condition that he join the other pilgrims and assist them. His journey is fraught with the tensions between self-discipline and self-reliance, as he learns how to channel his physical and mental powers for good. </p>
<p>The Monkey King’s human qualities, from arrogance to fear, endow him with universal appeal. Readers gradually witness his self-improvement, revealing a common human quest. They may frown upon how the Monkey King is entrapped within his own ego, yet respect his courage in challenging authority and battling adversity. While his mischievous tricks give a good laugh, his loyalty to the monk Xuanzang and his sense of righteousness make a lasting impression.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1943/03/14/archives/monkey-a-chinese-folk-novel-the-arm-and-the-darkness-and-other.html">Reviewing Waley’s “Monkey” in 1943</a>, Chinese-American writer Helena Kuo commented of the pilgrims: “Humanity would have missed a great deal if they have been exemplary characters.” Indeed, each one depicts humanity’s quest for a better self, particularly the main character. Monkeying around on the path of life, this simian companion captivates readers – and makes them consider their own journey.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207290/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ji Hao 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>There is a long tradition in China of associating monkeys with the mind – symbolism that has helped the novel’s most memorable character, the Monkey King, find universal resonance.Ji Hao, Associate Professor of Chinese Studies , College of the Holy CrossLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2121932023-09-21T03:38:42Z2023-09-21T03:38:42ZAnne Enright’s bold new novel The Wren, The Wren is the work of a writer at the height of her power<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548242/original/file-20230914-23-b7q2cq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=20%2C6%2C4510%2C3009&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">bieszczady_wildlife/shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In her essay <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/63022">Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown</a>, published in 1924, Virginia Woolf famously proposed that the novel’s primary function is the expression of character. She presented the maxim: “it is only if the characters are real that the novel has any chance of surviving.” </p>
<p>But in her discussion of what constitutes “real character”, she went on to ask a strikingly contemporary question: “what is reality? And who are the judges of reality?” </p>
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<p><em>Review: The Wren, The Wren – Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)</em></p>
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<p>The question of how different characters judge, navigate and offset one another’s shared reality is at the centre of Anne Enright’s eighth novel, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-wren-the-wren-9781787334618">The Wren, The Wren</a>. This technically experimental work trails a relationship between a young and spirited 20-something Trinity College student named Nell and her soberingly pragmatic mother Carmel. </p>
<p>Both women’s sense of self and perception of reality are irrevocably altered by two key events that ripple through the novel. </p>
<p>The first is Nell’s desperate bid for independence. In the opening pages, she has moved to a “little bubble of sorrow” in the Dublin suburb of Ballybough. This dreaded but necessary ascension to adulthood breaks her mother’s heart and her own. </p>
<p>Carmel’s sudden and reluctant empty-nester freedom prompts her to nostalgically revisit a series of painful memories from early adolescence and her years of single motherhood. </p>
<p>As with Enright’s earlier novels and her nonfiction work <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/making-babies-9781409017288">Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood</a> (2004), The Wren, The Wren interrogates the politics of care and motherhood. It also offers an incisive meditation on the nature of filial relationships. And like her Man Booker Prize winner <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-gathering-9780099501633">The Gathering</a> (2007), it offers little consolation. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548245/original/file-20230914-1089-p9amxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548245/original/file-20230914-1089-p9amxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548245/original/file-20230914-1089-p9amxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548245/original/file-20230914-1089-p9amxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548245/original/file-20230914-1089-p9amxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548245/original/file-20230914-1089-p9amxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548245/original/file-20230914-1089-p9amxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548245/original/file-20230914-1089-p9amxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>The second event that towers over the narrative is inflicted by the tweed-wearing, self-interested, philandering Irish poet Phil McDaragh. A quintessential Art Monster, Phil is Carmel’s father and Nell’s grandfather. Early in the novel, Carmel recounts how “daddo” left her and her mother, who was suffering from breast cancer, lured away by the prospect of literary stardom in America and a young, ripe, wealthy “American Wife”. </p>
<p>It was not only that he left when her mother was recovering from her mastectomy, Carmel recalls, “it was the way he came back and ransacked the place”. In a harrowing scene, the blindly self-righteous Phil harangues his bed-ridden wife and recently abandoned children about the whereabouts of his watch. </p>
<p>Much of the novel’s power is accrued in Enright’s crisp and restrained handling of its heavier moments. The concision of her prose imbues these scenes with a ruthless severity that raises questions about what we should do with the art of monstrous men.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-cancellation-or-conflicted-joy-grappling-with-the-work-of-our-art-monsters-202748">Friday essay: cancellation or conflicted joy – grappling with the work of our 'art monsters'</a>
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<h2>Abandonment</h2>
<p>Phil’s abandonment of the family home alters Carmel’s direction in life. The novel charts the emotional aftershocks of his absence. As with the rest of Enright’s oeuvre, The Wren, The Wren offers an acute exploration of the relational complexities of family dysfunction and the way sinister acts can have ongoing legacies. We see this in Enright’s depiction of Carmel’s anguish as something inherited by Nell. </p>
<p>In the wake of her father’s departure, Carmel’s protective shell hardens. She keeps a safe emotional distance between herself and everyone else, moving through the world like a survivor, relying on an unhealthy amount of mistrust and suspicion. She raises Nell alone. She takes boxing classes. She doesn’t do reassurance. </p>
<p>When Carmel entertains the idea of a new romantic partner, Ronan, she discards him the minute he becomes emotionally demanding. As Nell reflects, her mother is the kind of person who is “strongly of the opinion that, if you don’t think about yourself then you won’t have any problems”. </p>
<p>Nell is the one exception to Carmel’s careful avoidance of emotional vulnerability. Motherhood is a balm for Carmel, a safe emotional portal back to reality. When she gives birth to Nell, she finds comfort in knowing “this baby was hers, and hers alone”. When Carmel holds her daughter, the frozen sea within is axed. She senses that “the baby knew how vast her mother’s loneliness had been”. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548211/original/file-20230914-29-y2ll6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548211/original/file-20230914-29-y2ll6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548211/original/file-20230914-29-y2ll6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548211/original/file-20230914-29-y2ll6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548211/original/file-20230914-29-y2ll6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548211/original/file-20230914-29-y2ll6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1185&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548211/original/file-20230914-29-y2ll6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1185&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548211/original/file-20230914-29-y2ll6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1185&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>In one of the many parallels that emerge throughout the novel, Nell is trying to transcend the same emotional gulf we see modelled by Carmel. She is a character of the contemporary moment: bold, sexually adventurous and digitally savvy. She is not so much “worried about the end of the world”, but she is concerned about small things like the extinction of the Irish nightjar and the “unbearable fate of the bees”. Her voice has a wry and precocious tone reminiscent of Ali Smith’s adolescent narrator George in <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/how-to-be-both-9780141025209">How to be both</a> (2014). </p>
<p>Nell is addicted to the internet in a way that functions as a proxy for a connection to the real world. She is surrounded by college friends disappearing into Instagram. She works for a travel blog, writing about places she hasn’t been to. She also writes drunken poetry on paper because she thinks this makes them real poems. </p>
<p>As Nell struggles with her new distance from Carmel and her lifetime in the shadow of her celebrity-poet grandfather, she buries herself in her relationship with Felim, a muscly Louth-born Dublin resident. She meets him one night in a club, where he is showing off his ability to lift people by the head: the first red flag missed. Their romance starts off on a comically bland note: him thumbing car magazines at the newsagent on the quays; her thinking, “<em>Car Magazines. Really?</em>” </p>
<p>In the beginning, it is the kind of intimate relationship you would expect between the young and inexperienced, where everything is new and mistakes are understandably made. But things deteriorate quickly. Esoteric pillow talk and surprise choking escalate to more elaborate forms of sexual violence that leave Nell wondering how it became “hard to tell the difference between sex and getting hurt in other ways”. </p>
<p>As the relationship disintegrates, Nell finds herself caught between reality and delusion about the men in her world. She thinks she is in love with Felim, despite knowing on at least a subconscious level that he is toxic. At one point, she reflects that “[w]aiting for this man was better than being with him”, as the act of waiting meant that “longing kept eating itself and giving birth to more longing.” </p>
<p>In the same way, watching her late grandfather’s interviews on YouTube and reading his poetry magnifies the strange intensity of her fantasy of love for this unavailable male figure. She tucks herself into bed at night with his poems to “curl up with Phil and sweeten the hurt”.</p>
<p>Enright cleverly shows how the subconscious and conscious mind compete in Nell’s narration. The deeply suppressed voice of reason occasionally surfaces in italicised font. For example, Nell has a moment of striking clarity when she is thinking about Felim: “<em>if I believed all this was working, would it work?</em>” </p>
<p>As parallels emerge between the delusional love Nell projects onto Felim and Phil, Carmel is struggling with a similar conflict between perception and reality. Throughout the novel, she is trying to reconcile the public image of her late father as a sensitive and revered poet with the private reality of the man he was. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/love-violence-and-class-wounds-in-thatcher-era-glasgow-what-booker-winner-douglas-stuart-did-next-179095">Love, violence and 'class wounds' in Thatcher-era Glasgow: what Booker winner Douglas Stuart did next</a>
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<h2>Levels of reality</h2>
<p>One of the great achievements of The Wren, The Wren is its formal inventiveness. Enright successfully renders the three separate but interconnected points of view of Nell, Carmel and Phil. These voices are staggered through the novel in a non-linear fashion. </p>
<p>As James Wood highlighted in <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/how-fiction-works-9781845950934">How Fiction Works</a> (2008), it is a novel’s job to teach us “how to adapt to its conventions” or its own “reality level.” In The Wren, The Wren, the levels are complexly intertwined. The overlapping of each character’s vantage point charts the effect of Phil’s absence on Nell and Carmel’s realities. Enright braids these perspectives in a way that illuminates grief’s ability to reverberate through time. </p>
<p>She also incorporates Phil’s poetry and his letters addressed to Carmel. The latter are signed off with a contrived closeness – “love eternal / Daddo” – that exacerbates the estranging distance between them. Like the trail of pain Phil leaves behind him, the poems and letters surface at uncanny intervals between chapters and imbue each scene with meaning. They also function as intrusive reminders of his narcissism. </p>
<p>Phil’s desperate grasps at being remembered serve as a reminder that his sensitivity was an aesthetic performance reserved for his writing and not his family. The juxtaposition of poetry, letters and prose also shows how delusion sits alongside folly in the narrative. </p>
<p>For example, the poem titled “The Wren, The Wren” makes a mockery of his influence over the daughter he deserted. Phil renders Carmel as “a panic / of feathered air” giving her a wounded-bird-like vulnerability that is misaligned with her presentation in the novel as, in the words of Nell, a “fighter” and a “lioness”. </p>
<p>There is something perverse about the logic behind Phil’s method of trying to connect with Carmel by sending her the very thing he walked out on them all to produce. But this perversity is very true to the “reality” of his character. Or, as Carmel reflects, if Phil had stopped writing poetry, the “veil of reality would be ripped away”. </p>
<p>The formally daring nature of The Wren, The Wren, its nimble prose, and the deft rendering of character and complex levels of reality make it easy to see how Enright has earned her place as one of Ireland’s most revered novelists. She was the country’s first Laureate for Fiction (2015-2018). In 2018, she received the PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature. And in 2022, she was the recipient of the Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award. </p>
<p>The Wren, The Wren is another bold contribution to contemporary literature by a novelist at the height of her power.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/212193/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Georgia Phillips 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>Perception and reality collide when a mother and daughter are compelled to live in the shadow of a monstrous artist.Georgia Phillips, Lecturer, Creative Writing, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2136022023-09-19T12:15:09Z2023-09-19T12:15:09ZThis 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">
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<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 UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2107642023-08-23T12:27:04Z2023-08-23T12:27:04ZWhy have you read ‘The Great Gatsby’ but not Ursula Parrott’s ‘Ex-Wife’?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543788/original/file-20230821-29-jhus0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=68%2C53%2C1079%2C810&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Writer Ursula Parrott, pictured with her son, Marc, in 1935. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.neh.gov/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2023-04/Ursula_w_son_Fig_12_Gordon.jpg?itok=LBc8_0fM">ACME Newspapers</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald published “<a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Great-Gatsby/F-Scott-Fitzgerald/9781982146702">The Great Gatsby</a>.” Four years later, Ursula Parrott published her first novel, “<a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Ex-Wife/Ursula-Parrott/9781946022561">Ex-Wife</a>.” </p>
<p>I probably read “The Great Gatsby” a dozen times between junior high school and my late 20s. But I had never even heard of Ursula Parrott or her 1929 bestseller until I stumbled across a screenplay adaption of one of Parrott’s short stories. </p>
<p>Fitzgerald, in fact, had been hired to write that screenplay. Even though “Infidelity” was never produced because it was <a href="https://collections.new.oscars.org/Details/Collection/627">deemed too risqué by Hollywood’s Production Code Administration</a>, its very existence piqued my curiosity.</p>
<p>Why was the most famous author of the Jazz Age hired to adapt a story by a totally unknown writer? And who on earth was Ursula Parrott?</p>
<p>I acquired a used copy of “Ex-Wife” on eBay and soon realized that Ursula Parrott was not unknown; she was just forgotten. </p>
<p>In April 2023, <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520391543/becoming-the-ex-wife">I published a biography</a> of Parrott. Since then, I’ve continued to try to understand just how and why she and her writing drifted into obscurity – how “The Great Gatsby” is required reading but few have heard of “Ex-Wife” or its author.</p>
<h2>Greeted by mixed reviews</h2>
<p>Both “Ex-Wife” and “The Great Gatsby” are modern novels of love and loss, money and (mostly bad) manners. They’re set in New York and saturated with the energy, language and spirit of the time. <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1929/08/11/91915237.html?pageNumber=30">Both garnered mixed reviews</a>, deemed by many critics as entertaining and of the moment <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/04/to-early-reviewers-the-great-gatsby-was-not-so-great/390252/">but not great literature</a>.</p>
<p>At first, “Ex-Wife” was far more successful than “Gatsby,” blasting through a dozen printings and selling over 100,000 copies. It was translated into multiple languages and reprinted in paperback editions through the late 1940s. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, “The Great Gatsby” went through <a href="https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781571133717/american-icon/">a mere two printings totaling less than 24,000 copies</a>, not all of which sold. By the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, the novel had essentially been forgotten.</p>
<p>“Ex-Wife” centers on a 24-year-old woman named Patricia whose husband is divorcing her. Supporting herself with a job in department store advertising, she learns to navigate life in Manhattan as a divorcée. </p>
<p>Whereas “The Great Gatsby” is largely a suburban novel with trips into the city, “Ex-Wife” is fully immersed in Manhattan, especially Greenwich Village, where Parrott herself lived after she married her first husband. The novel’s characters drink Clover Clubs, Alexanders, brandy flips and Manhattans while frequenting the Brevoort, the Waldorf, Delano’s and Dante’s. </p>
<p>“Ex-Wife” revels in the rhythms of the city: One chapter even includes musical bars from George Gershwin’s hit “<a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200156779">Rhapsody in Blue</a>” sprinkled between paragraphs. </p>
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<img alt="Musical notes appear on a page underneath dialogue." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544084/original/file-20230822-15-g3yjz0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544084/original/file-20230822-15-g3yjz0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=297&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544084/original/file-20230822-15-g3yjz0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=297&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544084/original/file-20230822-15-g3yjz0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=297&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544084/original/file-20230822-15-g3yjz0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544084/original/file-20230822-15-g3yjz0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544084/original/file-20230822-15-g3yjz0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Chapter 12 of ‘Ex-Wife’ features bars from ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Marsha Gordon</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>But “Ex-Wife” is not all martinis and music. Parrott uses it to address, in unsparing directness, the challenges that women faced and the limited paths available to them. This alone sets it apart from the male protagonists of “The Great Gatsby” and the novel’s scant attention to the experiences of its female characters.</p>
<p>Parrott’s witty and biting novel was, in fact, concerned first and foremost with a generation of young women who had abandoned Victorian sensibilities: They got educations and jobs, drank, had premarital and extramarital sex, and cast aside pretensions of being the fairer, gentler sex. </p>
<p>But in shedding these mores, they also sacrificed protections. Patricia reflects on how men of their generation used women’s self-sufficiency and independence as an excuse to leave them to fend for themselves: “Freedom for women turned out to be God’s greatest gift to men.” </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543765/original/file-20230821-29-lmgeo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Book cover featuring drawing of a young, forlorn woman." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543765/original/file-20230821-29-lmgeo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543765/original/file-20230821-29-lmgeo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543765/original/file-20230821-29-lmgeo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543765/original/file-20230821-29-lmgeo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543765/original/file-20230821-29-lmgeo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543765/original/file-20230821-29-lmgeo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543765/original/file-20230821-29-lmgeo5.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>
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<span class="caption">‘Ex-Wife’ sold four times as many copies as ‘The Great Gatsby’ in the 1920s and 1930s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff689e048-ef86-4a0b-bcff-e59400fd1186_413x576.jpeg">Screen Splits</a></span>
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<p>“Ex-Wife” depicts a culture in which women often suffer at the hands of men. At one point, Patricia is brutally raped. In another scene, her husband throws her through a glass window during a fight, a moment as harrowing for its rendering of domestic violence as it is for Pat’s nonchalant reaction to it. In one of the book’s most moving episodes, Pat is compelled to procure a risky abortion at her soon-to-be ex-husband’s insistence but at her financial, physical and psychological cost. </p>
<p>“One survives almost everything,” Patricia unhappily realizes.</p>
<p>She survives, however, thanks only to a streetwise female friend and mentor, her own ability to earn a living, practiced if not heartfelt flippancy, the numbing effects of alcohol and an acceptance that everything in her life is both transient and precarious.</p>
<h2>Art imitates life</h2>
<p>Ursula Parrott <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520391543/becoming-the-ex-wife">had a keen understanding</a> of gender inequality and male privilege: Her own publisher made passes at her, her banker once proposed sexual favors in lieu of interest payments, and she experienced a rape not unlike the one she depicted in “Ex-Wife.”</p>
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<img alt="Black and white photograph of woman sitting on balcony smiling and using a typewriter." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543763/original/file-20230821-19-vgphn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543763/original/file-20230821-19-vgphn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=777&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543763/original/file-20230821-19-vgphn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=777&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543763/original/file-20230821-19-vgphn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=777&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543763/original/file-20230821-19-vgphn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543763/original/file-20230821-19-vgphn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543763/original/file-20230821-19-vgphn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Ursula Parrott in California in 1931, two years after the publication of ‘Ex-Wife.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photos</span></span>
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<p>Before she became a novelist, Parrott, who earned a degree in English from Radcliffe, had desperately wanted a career in journalism. However, she was barred from employment at all New York newspapers because her ex-husband, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/21/obituaries/lindesay-parrott-ex-times-reporter.html">reporter Lindesay Parrott</a>, marked his professional territory by warning the city’s editors – all male, of course – not to hire her. </p>
<p>There is a similar form of male chauvinism at work in the way that Parrott’s writing was often treated by critics during her lifetime. Many described her books and short stories as romantic or melodramatic, fit only for consumption by women.</p>
<p>“Melodramatic,” <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520391543/becoming-the-ex-wife">Parrott once smartly observed in a letter</a>, is “just a word men use to describe any agony that might otherwise make them feel uncomfortable.”</p>
<h2>Gatsby’s boosters</h2>
<p>I am convinced that “Ex-Wife” deserves a place <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/01/11/why-do-we-keep-reading-the-great-gatsby/">alongside Fitzgerald’s novel</a> in classrooms and in the hands of a new generation of readers based on the merits of its style and contents. </p>
<p>But more importantly, I’m convinced that the reason Fitzgerald’s novel is so ingrained in American life and letters has little to do with its originality, craft or quality and everything to do with <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/so-we-read-on-how-the-great-gatsby-came-to-be-and-why-it-endures-maureen-corrigan/110705">the way books were marketed and promoted</a> over the arc of the 20th century. </p>
<p>“The Great Gatsby” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/achenblog/wp/2015/03/20/why-the-great-gatsby-is-the-great-american-novel/">owes its resuscitation from obscurity</a> in the 1940s to the efforts of prominent male critics and scholars – and even to the American military.</p>
<p>Fitzgerald had important friends and admirers, among them the esteemed literary critic Edmund Wilson, who was instrumental in the republication of “Gatsby” in 1941. <a href="https://paw.princeton.edu/article/enduring-power-gatsby">Thanks to Wilson’s efforts</a>, Fitzgerald’s novel could be taken up by other well-regarded and influential scholars like Lionel Trilling, <a href="http://thenation.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/1949.pdf">who wrote admiringly</a> about Fitzgerald in The Nation in 1945, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/29/obituaries/malcolm-cowley-writer-is-dead-at-90.html">Malcolm Cowley</a>, who edited collections of Fitzgerald’s short stories and celebrated his literary gifts.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Seated man in suit holding a cigarette and looking out a window." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543773/original/file-20230821-10983-meide4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543773/original/file-20230821-10983-meide4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543773/original/file-20230821-10983-meide4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543773/original/file-20230821-10983-meide4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543773/original/file-20230821-10983-meide4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543773/original/file-20230821-10983-meide4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543773/original/file-20230821-10983-meide4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Critics like Lionel Trilling rescued ‘The Great Gatsby’ from obscurity.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-american-literary-critic-lionel-trilling-is-shown-here-news-photo/515252642?adppopup=true">Bettmann/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After Trilling, a parade of writers took up Gatsby’s cause, praising it for precisely the same traits that might also have been found in “Ex-Wife,” had anyone bothered to look: its use of contemporary language, its critique of hedonistic behavior, its rich attention to period detail and its depressing portrayal of aimless, unmoored characters trying and failing to find meaning in modern America.</p>
<p>Consider just one instance of differential legacy-tending: during World War II, the American military <a href="https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/62358/how-wwii-saved-great-gatsby-obscurity">provided over 150,000 free copies</a> of “The Great Gatsby” to American soldiers – ensuring a readership that well exceeded the number of people who had, to date, actually bought the book.</p>
<p>But when the <a href="https://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/07/25/victory-book-campaign-and-nypl">Victory Book Campaign</a> started its drive to collect novels for overseas servicemen, it explicitly warned potential donors to desist from handing over any “women’s love stories,” specifically naming Ursula Parrott among the authors whose books they would not be putting in soldiers’ hands.</p>
<h2>Making the case for ‘Ex-Wife’</h2>
<p>There are, of course, many other factors at play here. <a href="https://www.theawl.com/2014/01/all-the-drunk-dudes-the-parodic-manliness-of-the-alcoholic-writer/">There’s the tendency to romanticize</a> the tragic lives of male authors who drink heavily, spend recklessly and make bad decisions – departments in which Fitzgerald and Parrott seem pretty equally matched. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543768/original/file-20230821-19874-9e3281.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Newspaper clipping suggesting authors to avoid when sending troops books." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543768/original/file-20230821-19874-9e3281.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543768/original/file-20230821-19874-9e3281.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=726&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543768/original/file-20230821-19874-9e3281.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=726&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543768/original/file-20230821-19874-9e3281.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=726&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543768/original/file-20230821-19874-9e3281.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543768/original/file-20230821-19874-9e3281.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543768/original/file-20230821-19874-9e3281.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Book donors were discouraged from sending ‘women’s love stories’ to troops during World War II.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Moberly, Missouri Monitor</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There’s also what can only be described as a collective <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2013/05/07/why-the-great-gatsby-is-the-great-american-novel/2130161/">refusal to categorize</a> “The Great Gatsby” as a romance novel, a category that has historically been used <a href="https://theconversation.com/if-the-romance-writers-of-america-can-implode-over-racism-no-group-is-safe-130034">to diminish women’s writing</a>.</p>
<p>“The Great Gatsby”‘s ascension from obscurity to ubiquity is only one example of how Parrott’s book was passed over. “Ex-Wife” and William Faulkner’s “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/48428/the-sound-and-the-fury-by-william-faulkner/">The Sound and the Fury</a>” were marketed alongside each other by publishers Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. Faulkner biographer Carl Rollyson observes that Faulkner’s book <a href="https://www.nysun.com/article/even-as-william-faulker-struggled-ursula-parrott-thrived">sold “less than a tenth” as many copies as Parrott’s</a>. But Faulkner amassed critical praise in the right places, and Parrott, Rollyson concludes, “did not manage herself or her work the way writers like Faulkner did.” </p>
<p>But this is not merely a question of self-management. It is true that Parrott did not publish during the last, difficult decade of her life. After a series of public scandals, missed deadlines, ongoing battles with alcohol and financial missteps, she tried to write herself back into literary society, to no avail. </p>
<p>The real difference, in my view, is that Parrott had nobody to tend to her legacy – no Trilling or Wilson or Cowley in her corner to bring her writings back into circulation or make a case for her genius or her novel’s importance.</p>
<p>However, there is no reason to believe that the erasure of “Ex-Wife” from cultural memory is a fait accompli, or that “The Great Gatsby” will always be the go-to Jazz Age novel. Writer Glenway Wescott, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/116002/moral-scott-fitzgerald">in his February 1941 tribute to Fitzgerald</a>, wrote of “The Great Gatsby”: “A masterpiece often seems a period-piece for a while; then comes down out of the attic, to function anew and to last.”</p>
<p>Consider this article a “better late than never” effort to make the case that “Ex-Wife” deserves to come out of the attic of America’s lost literary past to be read, discussed and taught as one of the important American novels of the 1920s. </p>
<p>After McNally Editions republished “<a href="https://www.mcnallyeditions.com/books/p/ex-wife">Ex-Wife</a>” in May 2023, reviewers remarked on the “freshness of its prose” and the “remarkable erotic freedom” it depicted, as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/30/books/she-wrote-frankly-about-divorce-and-suffered-the-consequences.html">The New York Times</a> review put it; <a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-dark-side-of-the-jazz-age-fletcher">The Baffler described Parrott’s writing</a> as “deftly crafted, wryly observed, and thoroughly unsettling.”</p>
<p>“The Great Gatsby” is a fantastic period piece. But “Ex-Wife” manages to be both that and to remain timely. Women’s lives and bodies continue to be subject to all manner of scrutiny, critique and legislation, which means that many of the things that Parrott wrote about in “Ex-Wife” – the double standard, women in the workplace, work-life balance, rape and even abortion – remain astonishingly relevant today.</p>
<p>In “Ex-Wife” – and in many of her 19 other books and over 100 stories – Parrott wrote from what amounts to Daisy Buchanan’s point of view rather than Nick Carraway’s, to use “The Great Gatsby” again as a reference point. </p>
<p>Imagine what a different story “Gatsby” would have been had the reader seen the world through Daisy’s eyes? </p>
<p>Or don’t imagine. Rather, give “Ex-Wife” a read.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/210764/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marsha Gordon has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Program and the National Humanities Center.</span></em></p>‘Ex-Wife’ originally outsold ‘The Great Gatsby,’ but critics sniffed at the novel, deeming it a melodramatic period piece − even though it tackled timeless issues like gender, money and power.Marsha Gordon, Professor of Film Studies, North Carolina State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2077092023-06-16T17:42:27Z2023-06-16T17:42:27ZCormac McCarthy’s fearless approach to writing<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532288/original/file-20230615-27-es4rpl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C17%2C1930%2C1298&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">McCarthy attends the 2009 premiere of the film adaptation of his novel 'The Road.'</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/ObitCormacMcCarthy/e76e31de4fce44e5becba9a64b06a2f7/photo?Query=Cormac%20McCarthy&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=19&currentItemNo=0">Evan Agostini/AP Photo</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Cormac McCarthy, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/books/cormac-mccarthy-dead.html">who died on June 13, 2023</a>, at the age of 89, is often characterized rather narrowly <a href="https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/texas/articles/cormac-mccarthy-reinventing-the-southern-gothic/">as a Southern writer</a>, or perhaps <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/the-read-down/want-read-southern-gothic-heres-start/">a Southern Gothic writer</a>.</p>
<p>McCarthy did lean heavily on <a href="https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/local/2023/06/15/remembering-cormac-mccarthys-legacy-and-early-life-in-east-tennessee/70320788007/">his Tennessee upbringing</a> in his first four novels, and he set many others in the deserts of the Southwest U.S. However, as a writer, he saw himself as a part of an expansive literary community, one that stretched back to the classical and Elizabethan periods, and one that drew on a variety of genres, cultures and influences.</p>
<p>His unique and varying writing style has been compared with that of many of the greatest authors of American letters, with scholars highlighting connections to the writings of <a href="https://readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com/1616140/8480163-episode-9-melville-and-mccarthy-with-steven-frye">Herman Melville</a>, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cormac-mccarthy-in-context/ernest-hemingway/D3D8FDEB9548A1D4786480EAA3B39714">Ernest Hemingway</a>, <a href="https://www.openculture.com/2023/06/the-three-punctuation-rules-of-cormac-mccarthy-rip.html">James Joyce</a>, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Hypermasculinities_in_the_Contemporary_N.html?id=WmnBoAEACAAJ">Toni Morrison</a>, <a href="https://lithub.com/harold-bloom-on-cormac-mccarthy-true-heir-to-melville-and-faulkner/">Thomas Pynchon</a>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2023/06/cormac-mccarthys-irrational-apocalypse/">Fyodor Dostoevsky</a>, <a href="https://themarginaliareview.com/how-flannery-oconnor-and-cormac-mccarthy-helped-to-invent-the-south/">Flannery O’Connor</a> and <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-orchard.html?scp=7&sq=The%2520Orchard&st=cse">William Faulkner</a>. </p>
<p>As such an unwieldy list of compatriots suggests, McCarthy is an author who experimented with language and literary technique. Each of his books typically departs radically in tone, structure and prose from the previous one.</p>
<p>I’m currently working on a book that’s tentatively titled “How Cormac Works: McCarthy, Language, and Style.” In it, I trace McCarthy’s career-long commitment to playing with style, particularly his approach to narration and his techniques for conveying a mood.</p>
<h2>Two radically different reading experiences</h2>
<p>Depending on the book – and even passages within certain books – McCarthy’s writing can be characterized as minimalistic, meandering, esoteric, humorous, terrifying, pretentious, sentimental or folksy. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Title page of book reading 'Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West,' followed by author's name." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The title page for the first edition of McCarthy’s 1985 novel ‘Blood Meridian.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Blood_Meridian_%281985_1st_ed_half_title_page%29.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some novels depend heavily on dense passages of narrative exposition and philosophizing, while others lean heavily on everyday dialogue. Some books celebrate regional voices and vernacular, and others adopt a neutral, removed and clinical tone.</p>
<p>It is possible to see McCarthy’s literary range and stylistic experimentation in two of his most famous novels, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110472/blood-meridian-by-cormac-mccarthy/">Blood Meridian</a>,” which came out in 1985, and “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110490/the-road-by-cormac-mccarthy/">The Road</a>,” which was published over two decades later, in 2006, and was turned <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0898367/">into a movie</a> in 2009.</p>
<p>In “Blood Meridian,” set in the desert of the Southwest U.S. and Mexico, McCarthy’s prose is dense, with details piling up one after another. </p>
<p>Take the famous scene in which a mercenary gang of American scalp hunters encounters a band of Comanche warriors:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador. … ”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The entire sentence is much too long to quote here. But you get the picture: There is very little punctuation and there are few places to even take a breath. </p>
<p>The narration in other moments of the novel catalogs the desert landscape of the U.S. West in similarly painstaking and tedious – if also beautiful – detail. The prose feels drawn out, slow and repetitive, like the subject of the novel: the United States’ western expansion in the 19th century, a campaign of escalating destruction that McCarthy characterizes in the novel as “some heliotropic plague.”</p>
<p>“The Road,” a later novel similarly committed to the idea of incessant movement, could not be more different in its style, pacing and rhythm. The prose in that novel, which won <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/cormac-mccarthy">the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction</a>, is concise and is marked by a linguistic restraint that’s entirely absent in “Blood Meridian.” </p>
<p>Rather than dense and overwhelming passages, this novel is constructed of short and distinct paragraphs that are separated by white space and often unrelated to what comes directly before or after:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was colder. Nothing moved in that night world. A rich smell of woodsmoke hung over the road. He pushed the cart on through the snow. … </p>
<p>In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice but he thought differently. … </p>
<p>On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was? </p>
<p>Dark of invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. … </p>
<p>People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Each paragraph in this passage is different in tone, subject matter, place, and time from what comes before and appears after. </p>
<h2>A lasting legacy</h2>
<p>It might be tempting to see such difference as an evolution, as McCarthy honing and taming his narrative voice from his earlier work. But his final long novel, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110481/the-passenger-by-cormac-mccarthy/">The Passenger</a>,” which was published in 2022, returns again to the rambling prose reminiscent of McCarthy’s big novels in the middle of his career, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110485/suttree-by-cormac-mccarthy/">Suttree</a>” and “Blood Meridian.”</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Black and white photo of man with mustache folding his arms." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A portrait of McCarthy used for the first edition of his 1973 novel ‘Child of God.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Cormac_McCarthy_%28Child_of_God_author_portrait_-_high-res%29.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some readers find McCarthy’s stylistic flourishes and experimentation excessive – or, even worse, pretentious. But they always struck me as reflecting his love of words and the endless possibilities of language. </p>
<p>In a blurb that was originally written for McCarthy’s first novel, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110489/the-orchard-keeper-by-cormac-mccarthy/">The Orchard Keeper</a>,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/17/obituaries/ralph-ellison-author-of-invisible-man-is-dead-at-80.html">Ralph Ellison</a> <a href="https://www.fedpo.com/images/TheOrchardKeeper/04TheOrchardKeeper.jpg">wrote</a>, “McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly – envied.” </p>
<p>As I learned of McCarthy’s death, I couldn’t help but think of this quote that marked the beginning of his career, and to think how right Ellison was to champion McCarthy’s craft – the careful use of language that sustained his work for six decades across 12 novels.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207709/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bill Hardwig 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>The Pulitzer Prize-winning author was always willing to experiment with his prose, pacing and narration, crafting an oeuvre that varied wildly in style and structure.Bill Hardwig, Associate Professor of English, University of TennesseeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2045782023-05-19T09:27:08Z2023-05-19T09:27:08ZInternational Booker Prize 2023: our experts review the six shortlisted books<p>From a <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/media-centre/press-releases/the-international-booker-prize-2023-longlist-is-announced">longlist of 12</a>, <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/six-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-international-booker-prize-2023-shortlist">six novels have been shortlisted</a> for the 2023 International Booker Prize. Our academics review the finalists ahead of the announcement of the winner on May 23. </p>
<h2><a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-gospel-according-to-the-new-world">The Gospel According to the New World</a> by Maryse Condé, translated by Richard Philcox</h2>
<p>The Gospel According to the New World starts with the birth of a boy in an “overseas department”, “surrounded by water on all sides”. Pascal, a child of mixed heritage, is born and subsequently abandoned on Easter Sunday. Rumours immediately start spreading that he might be the son of God. </p>
<p>What follows is Pascal’s journey to himself. He travels the earth looking for his biological father and grapples with questions about his own purpose – a journey that closely mirrors that of Jesus in the New Testament.</p>
<p>The novel, translated from French to English by Condé’s husband Richard Philcox, is full of wit, humour and allusion. </p>
<p>It engages with questions of belief, philosophy and politics, and brings together a range of captivating characters from across the New World as Pascal grapples with his reputation as a new Messiah. I was unsure of what to expect, but I found Condé’s novel charming and full of heart.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Leighan Renaud</em></p>
<h2><a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/whale">Whale</a> by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated by Chi-Young Kim</h2>
<p>Set largely in the remote village of Pyeongdae, the dreamlike story of Whale is punctuated by satirical references to historical events that mark the seismic social shifts that transformed South Korea into a modern state in the 20th century. </p>
<p>Rather than focus explicitly on these episodes – the Korean War, US occupation and military dictatorships, for instance – Whale tells its grand national narrative on a smaller human scale.</p>
<p>The rags to riches journey of protagonist Geumbok is reminiscent of a Dickensian epic. Her ambition and gradual acquisition of material luxury are indicative of Korea’s shift towards capitalism. Her daughter meanwhile, the mute Chunhui, has a deep spiritual connection with the natural environment and this is used to fondly recall the traditions of the past. </p>
<p>Whale provides an unflinching look at two contrasting portraits of national identity in the era of Korean modernisation – equally valid, yet highly oppositional. </p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Gemma Ballard</em></p>
<h2><a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/boulder">Boulder</a> by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches</h2>
<p>Boulder is a gripping, discomfiting novel of potent language and uncompromising moral certitude. With a poetic intensity that oscillates between the fiercely carnal and a stark abstraction, Eva Baltasar immerses the reader in the consciousness of her protagonist, “Boulder”. She’s nicknamed, by her girlfriend, after “those large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element”.</p>
<p>This is a rich and surprising novel about desire, freedom and domesticity, which follows the merchant ship cook Boulder as she struggles to navigate the new terrain of a settled life with a partner intent on having a child.</p>
<p>In densely metaphorical prose, Baltasar handles romance with an unsentimental boldness. This is a love “that grows like brambles, strangles the furniture, and girds the walls”. Boulder picks apart the piety of motherhood and delivers a heroine whose wildness leaves her always giddily yearning for escape. </p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Kaye Mitchell</em></p>
<h2><a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/standing-heavy">Standing Heavy</a> by GauZ’, translated by Frank Wynne</h2>
<p>GauZ’ has penned a razor-like examination of consumerism from the standpoint of a security guard in the Champs-Elysées branch of a famous chain of perfume retailers.</p>
<p>Standing Heavy offers a refreshing and often caustic take on the cultural and economic consequences of an encounter between western consumerism and capitalism and the acute African sense of observation and derision. Using the story and observations of an undocumented Ivorian migrant in Paris, it digs into the rich, complex and often fraught relationship between France and its former African colonies.</p>
<p>With the sharpness of an Ivorian <a href="https://elpais.com/planeta-futuro/africa-no-es-un-pais/2022-08-30/coupe-decale-la-musica-que-nacio-para-aliviar-la-tension-de-la-guerra-civil-en-costa-de-marfil.html">coupé-décalé</a> song, GauZ’ offers evocative glimpses into the life of African migrants in France, from the first generation who could set up their own businesses to the later wave, most of whom have been denied legal immigrant status. </p>
<p>This second generation has to make ends meet through low paid, tedious and racially profiled jobs – such as security guards in shops or emptied factories like the <a href="https://www.grandsmoulinsdeparis.com/">Grand Moulins de Paris</a> in the novel.</p>
<p>Standing Heavy delivers a powerful invitation to reflect upon the multiple meanings of “postcolonial France” and the Franco-African relationship, 60 years after the “end of Empire”.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Berny Sèbe</em></p>
<h2>Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel</h2>
<p>Gospodinov’s <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/time-shelter/georgi-gospodinov/angela-rodel/9781474623070">Time Shelter</a> has the power to take our mind to times and places, uncertain that we will find our way back.</p>
<p>It is a philosophical exploration about memory and nostalgia, about forgetting and trying to hold on to our pasts while making sense of our present and future. Above all, it is about time – in its fragments and in its perpetuity. The narrative is so unembellished and laced with scathing humour that it has a jarring effect, further facilitated by uneven segments and breaks – much like our thoughts, some fleeting, some resilient.</p>
<p>The novel has just two characters, the unnamed narrator and their time travelling friend Gustine. This sparsity reflects the aridity of a demented mind. Together, they create rooms for Alzheimer’s patients. Rooms in which a chunk of their familiar time and memory is preserved to provide them with shelter in a rapidly erasing memory world.</p>
<p>Eventually, nostalgia grips Europe and nations hold referendums to return to the comfort of the past. Gospodinov’s deft brewing of European history, utopian ideals and the reality of neurological disorders will continue the conversation on human fragility beyond the pages of the book. </p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Sukla Chatterjee</em></p>
<h2>Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey</h2>
<p>Part way through <a href="https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/still-born">Still Born</a> there’s a scene in which a character has a panic attack in a medical scanner: “I think I’m going to explode in here.”</p>
<p>This same sensation animates Rosalind Harvey’s delicate but enthrallingly tense translation of Guadalupe Nettel’s fourth novel: an exploration of maternity, loss and refusal. </p>
<p>Alina and Laura are old friends whose relationship is based on eschewing procreation as the be all and end all. It’s a perspective that gets increasingly complicated through pregnancy, birth, loss, a growing intimacy with the troubled son of a neighbour, unexpected resilience, the “birthing” process of writing a thesis and gradual drifting apart with a mother.</p>
<p>The novel asks challenging questions about care for terminally ill children and substitute motherhood. Laura and Alina’s bond is a constant core. At one point the prospect of the death of a child is described as “so unacceptable that we have chosen not to name it”.</p>
<p>Still Born explores those aspects of motherhood that have often gone untold in uncompromising writing that feels throughout as though it’s being narrated in confidence to a close friend.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Colin Herd</em></p>
<p><em>The winner of the <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com">International Booker Prize 2023</a> will be announced May 23 2023.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204578/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Reflecting on themes as diverse as motherhood, war, religion and memory, our experts were impressed by the 2023 shortlist.Leighan M Renaud, Lecturer in Caribbean Literatures and Cultures, Department of English, University of BristolBerny Sèbe, Associate Professor in colonial and post-colonial studies, University of BirminghamColin Herd, Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of GlasgowGemma Ballard, Lecturer in East Asian Studies, School of East Asian Studies, University of SheffieldKaye Mitchell, Senior Lecturer, English and American Studies, & Director of the Centre for New Writing, University of ManchesterSukla Chatterjee, Lecturer in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, University of AberdeenLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2053782023-05-17T12:40:39Z2023-05-17T12:40:39ZBarbara Kingsolver’s ‘Demon Copperhead’ and the enduring devastation of the opioid crisis<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526588/original/file-20230516-35975-5ps8gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=453%2C590%2C3095%2C2057&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Barbara Kingsolver's protagonist, Demon, is much more than his drug habit.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/child-lying-on-the-waterfall-royalty-free-image/537292087">SergioZacchi/iStock via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="http://barbarakingsolver.net">Barbara Kingsolver’s</a> literary honors range from the National Book Prize of South Africa to the PEN/Faulkner Award. </p>
<p>On May 8, 2023, she added a <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/barbara-kingsolver">Pulitzer Prize</a> to her accolades. </p>
<p>Her winning novel, “<a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/demon-copperhead-barbara-kingsolver?variant=40073146204194">Demon Copperhead</a>,” is more than just a reimagining of Charles Dickens’ “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/766/766-h/766-h.htm">David Copperfield</a>.” Casting an opioid-addicted Appalachian orphan as her protagonist, Kingsolver sheds new light on one of America’s greatest health crises. </p>
<p>Understandably, the COVID-19 pandemic eclipsed media coverage of and national concern over the opioid epidemic; nevertheless, opioids remain a massive public health problem, and I think the author’s attention to it is both welcome and necessary. </p>
<p>In taking up the topic, she joins artists with ties to Appalachia, such as bluegrass guitar phenom <a href="https://www.billystrings.com/">Billy Strings</a>, the late singer-songwriter <a href="https://www.johnprine.com/">John Prine</a> and photographer <a href="https://www.stacykranitz.com/">Stacy Kranitz</a>, all of whom have used their art to highlight the ravaging effects of these drugs on their region.</p>
<h2>How artists can reclaim a place</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.middlebury.edu/college/people/william-nash">As an American Studies professor</a> who teaches courses on both country music and images of rural America, I see this groundbreaking work through the lens of <a href="https://researchguides.dartmouth.edu/human_geography/cultural">cultural geography</a>, which explores the relationship between culture and place.</p>
<p>A region can inspire unique forms of art, music, literature and architecture, and the work of geographer <a href="https://www.aag.org/memorial/edward-w-soja/">Edward Soja</a> helped show how this work can push back against stereotypes. </p>
<p>In 1996, Soja published “<a href="https://geography.ruhosting.nl/geography/index.php?title=Thirdspace">Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places</a>.” </p>
<p>In it, he argued that stereotypes of a region’s people and landscape could lead to damaging politics and policies. For example, outsiders’ views of “the inner city” as hotbeds for poverty, crime and broken families led to the implementation of racist <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/moynihan-report-1965/">public housing policies in the 1960s</a>.</p>
<p>Soja’s book was a call to arms for artists and the marginalized: In what he called “thirdspace” – a place that exists at the intersection of the real and the imagined – they can reclaim and reframe visions of their region, showcasing <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-black-poets-and-writers-gave-a-voice-to-affrilachia-155706">different identities and experiences</a>. </p>
<p>Appalachia is a region that, for generations, has been subjected to <a href="https://qz.com/1167671/the-100-year-capitalist-experiment-that-keeps-appalachia-poor-sick-and-stuck-on-coal">economic oppression</a>, <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/03/298892382/stereotypes-of-appalachia-obscure-a-diverse-picture">classist stereotyping</a> and environmental and medical recklessness. <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney-general-brian-benczkowski-gives-remarks-west-virginia-and-appalachian">The pumping of opioids into rural communities</a> represents just another chapter in this story of exploitation. </p>
<p>Yet artists and writers like Kingsolver are able to show that the people in the region are more than just backward, powerless victims – that they are complicated people with the same goals, longings and fears as the rest of us. </p>
<h2>More than an addict</h2>
<p>Kingsolver, who was raised in rural Kentucky and who currently resides in Virginia, had a keen vision for Copperhead. She weaves the history of the economic fallout from the tobacco industry and coal mining into her protagonist’s backstory.</p>
<p>Her central concern, though, was always the opioid crisis. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/14/books/barbara-kingsolver-demon-copperhead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare">As she told The New York Times in October 2022</a>, “I wanted to say, ‘Look, it’s still here, and this got done to us and we didn’t deserve it.’”</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526611/original/file-20230516-34052-cr44y0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Book cover of 'Demon Copperhead.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526611/original/file-20230516-34052-cr44y0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526611/original/file-20230516-34052-cr44y0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526611/original/file-20230516-34052-cr44y0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526611/original/file-20230516-34052-cr44y0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526611/original/file-20230516-34052-cr44y0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526611/original/file-20230516-34052-cr44y0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526611/original/file-20230516-34052-cr44y0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Demon Copperhead’ won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0570/7209/1326/products/33274BCF-6D06-40F3-B603-2C8F57086E36.jpg?v=1669761668">Black Bird Bookstore and Cafe</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>That’s the story of Demon’s life. An orphan who experiences poverty, an abusive foster home and social isolation, he finds freedom and glory on the football field, only to experience a devastating knee injury. </p>
<p>Pressured by his coach and the townspeople to play through his pain, he blindly takes the OxyContin that the local Dr. Feelgood prescribes, only to find himself crippled physically, psychologically and emotionally by his addiction.</p>
<p>And yet, through all of that, Demon is much more than his habit. Kingsolver foregrounds his humanity, his humor and his potential for goodness in a way that makes him more than “just an addict.” </p>
<p>In doing so, Kingsolver uses her connection to the region, her empathy for its residents and her awareness of stereotypes about Appalachians and addicts to avoid what could have easily been a reductive portrayal. Instead, she crafts a realistic and still-not-despairing vision from the inside.</p>
<p>This approach – an example of Soja’s thirdspace – is, in my view, the most powerful tool that artists have at their disposal to counteract the impulse to move on from grappling with this ongoing epidemic.</p>
<h2>Filling the void</h2>
<p>What Kingsolver does in prose, Billy Strings and John Prine do in song. </p>
<p>Strings, whose breakout hit, “<a href="https://outsider.com/entertainment/music/country-music/billy-strings-dust-in-a-baggie-lyrics-story-behind-song/">Dust in a Baggie</a>,” is a portrait of methamphetamine addiction, takes on opioids in “<a href="https://americansongwriter.com/billy-strings-enough-to-leave-video-jason-isbell-tour-announcement/">Enough to Leave</a>,” a track from his album “Home.” </p>
<p>Written to commemorate two friends who overdosed on fentanyl-laced heroin within the same week, <a href="https://lyrics.lol/artist/1431433-billy-strings/lyrics/4694970-enough-to-leave">the song</a> is a <a href="https://jambands.com/news/2020/02/20/billy-strings-shares-in-studio-video-of-enough-to-leave/">haunting evocation of grief</a> for those left behind when addiction takes its toll:</p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> Enough to kill ya, enough to put you down
Seems like every way you turned was like a hard wind comin' down
Enough to leave me, enough to leave me here
And though the room is empty now I can almost feel you near
</code></pre>
<p>The same is true for Prine’s “Summer’s End,” a track from his last album, 2018’s “The Tree of Forgiveness.”</p>
<p>The video for that song, directed by West Virginia filmmakers Kerrin Sheldon and Elaine McMillan Sheldon, <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/how-john-prines-summers-end-video-addresses-the-opioid-crisis-776514/">portrays an aging grandfather and his young granddaughter</a> going about the mundanities of daily life in the wake of their daughter and mother’s death. A single frame depicts a news headline about the opioid crisis, illuminating the source of their suffering without overshadowing the regularity of their routines.</p>
<p>The video brings to mind a line from Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Unnamable">The Unnamable</a>”: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nXbEFTv9zr0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The music video for ‘Summer’s End.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Upending a theory of ‘genetic decline’</h2>
<p>Words, music and pictures – all have become powerful tools in this thirdspace reading of opioid-afflicted Appalachia. </p>
<p>Like the Sheldons, Kentucky-born photographer Stacy Kranitz offers gritty, complex and beautiful photographic portraits of Appalachia.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.readingthepictures.org/2014/02/stacy-kranitz-the-rape-of-appalachia/">She has written</a> about how she wants her work to provide a corrective to the negative portraits of Appalachia penned by Kentuckian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Comes_to_the_Cumberlands">Harry Caudill</a> and New York Times reporter <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Bigart">Homer Bigart</a> in the 1960s. </p>
<p>Caudill, who emphasized the economic exploitation of Appalachia, also came to embrace William Shockley’s <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/william-shockley">theory of dysgenics</a>, arguing that “genetic decline” among the people of Appalachia played a contributing role in the perpetuation of their suffering.</p>
<p>Their work brought Appalachia to the <a href="http://acsc.lib.udel.edu/exhibits/show/legislation/appalachian">Johnson administration’s awareness</a>. But it also amplified the national perception of the region and its people as backward, helpless and ripe for exploitation. </p>
<p>Kranitz’s engagement with Appalachia – particularly her refusal to let Caudill’s stereotypical views of its inhabitants as backward and regressive stand – offers a thirdspace revision of the region and its residents. Her series “<a href="https://www.stacykranitz.com/as-it-was-given-to-me">As It Was Given to Me</a>” juxtaposes a burning cross at a Klan rally with an image of a lovely, innocent girl holding a lit sparkler. Unafraid to illustrate the ugliness of the region, Kranitz is equally insistent on finding its beauty. </p>
<p>Like these artists and musicians, Kingsolver set out in “Demon Copperhead” to wrestle with the region’s complex history and its current social ills. </p>
<p>In that, she succeeded. </p>
<p>Hopefully the Pulitzer committee’s recognition of the novel will lead others to not only educate themselves about Appalachia, but also participate in the work needed to undo the damage that these drugs have done – and continue to do. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/CQtOSdzMXDr","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205378/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>William Nash 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>The Pulitzer Prize-winning author is just one of many artists from Appalachia who are probing the crisis in their work, while taking pains to ensure that it doesn’t define the region and its people.William Nash, Professor of American Studies and English and American Literatures, MiddleburyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2009092023-05-01T20:15:47Z2023-05-01T20:15:47ZHow encrypted Victorian newspaper personal ads shaped fiction like Sherlock and Enola Holmes<p>How familiar are you with <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/victorian-era-timeline">the Victorian-era</a> newspaper feature known as the <a href="https://news.library.mcgill.ca/a-whole-romance-contained-in-four-little-lines-introducing-the-agony-column/">Agony Column</a>? You are likely familiar with its methods and central plot lines, even if you don’t know what it is!</p>
<p>Anonymous personal advertisements made up the Agony Column in the mid- to late- 19th century. Authors of these advertisements sometimes coded them using different kinds of <a href="https://news.library.mcgill.ca/couched-in-unintelligibility-agonies-of-the-times/">numbered ciphers and pseudonyms</a>.</p>
<p>Although the Agony Column no longer exists as it did in the 19th century, our research has documented how private messages on this public forum have had an enduring impact on fiction, entertainment and popular culture. </p>
<h2>Power of encryption</h2>
<p>Encryption gave authors writing personal messages the ability to share private messages in a public forum. Personal dramas unfolding there day after day meant the Agony Column was widely popular in 19th-century English newspapers. </p>
<p>In 1881, a book was published about these private messages, in which editor <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/54658/pg54658-images.html">Alice Clay wrote</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Most of the advertisements … show a curious phase of life, interesting to an observer of human existence and human eccentricities. They are veiled in an air of mystery … but at the same time give a clue unmistakable to those for whom they were intended.”</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Text of the Hound of the Baskervilles is seen next to a magnifying glass." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522804/original/file-20230425-3276-3h2xgm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522804/original/file-20230425-3276-3h2xgm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522804/original/file-20230425-3276-3h2xgm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522804/original/file-20230425-3276-3h2xgm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522804/original/file-20230425-3276-3h2xgm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522804/original/file-20230425-3276-3h2xgm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522804/original/file-20230425-3276-3h2xgm.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">Nearly all original and modern reworkings of Sherlock Holmes contain a plethora of newspaper codes to crack, harkening to the Agony Column.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Longing, tragedy and the everyday</h2>
<p>Advertisements written by individuals from across the British Empire were dubbed “the agonies” by 1853 because they were full of longing, tragedy and profound misfortune shadowing the Victorian domestic everyday. They occupied prime real estate in the second column on the front page of <em>The Times</em>. </p>
<p>Messages featured voices of desperate parents, forlorn lovers and savvy detectives. Many were published anonymously or under pseudonyms, <a href="https://libraryponders.github.io/faq.html">making it impossible for most readers to know who wrote them</a>. </p>
<p>As interest grew, the private was increasingly made public. Readers not only followed the episodic narratives, but also <a href="https://news.library.mcgill.ca/i-fear-our-cypher-is-detected-when-agony-ads-go-awry/">worked to crack the most puzzling codes and ciphers</a>. </p>
<p>Detectives and amateur enthusiasts alike followed the drama of the agonies. As Stephen Winkworth wrote in <a href="https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/14135176"><em>Room Two More Guns: the Intriguing History of the Personal Column of the Times</em></a>, the Agony Column became “more a meeting-place than a market-place and a forum where national quirks and characteristics can be expressed, where lovers can make their rendezvous and lost causes can be proclaimed.” </p>
<h2>Fascination shaped novels</h2>
<p>During the Victorian era, fascination with the Agony Column shaped both newspapers and novels. </p>
<p>Elements of sensational stories like the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/jun/06/archive-road-hill-murder-1865">Constance Kent Road Hill House murder</a> from front-page news began to appear in novels like <em>Lady Audley’s Secret</em>.</p>
<p>Original and modern reworkings of Sherlock Holmes contain a plethora of newspaper codes to crack. In the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7846844/">2020 Netflix film adaptation</a> of <em>Enola Holmes</em>, based on Nancy Springer’s novels, Sherlock Holmes’ case-cracking younger sister, Enola, communicates with her missing mother <a href="https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2020/10/05/the-cryptograms-appearing-in-the-movie-enola-holmes/">via ciphers</a>.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_npsmALqREk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Netflix video about codes in ‘Enola Holmes.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Far beyond Sherlock and spinoffs, many popular films have had their plots advanced by the personal columns in the newspaper: movies like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162346/"><em>Ghost World</em></a> (2001), <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264761/"><em>Kissing Jessica Stein</em></a> (2001) and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089017/"><em>Desperately Seeking Susan</em></a> (1985).</p>
<h2>Comparing novels and ‘the agonies’</h2>
<p>We explore this cultural fascination in the <a href="https://www.mcgill.ca/library/channels/event/exhibit-news-and-novel-sensations-344248">exhibition <em>News and Novel Sensations</em></a> online <a href="https://libraryponders.github.io/about.html">through the McGill Library</a>.</p>
<p>This includes access to two data sets: Our research team scraped 650,000 sentences from the Agony Column of <em>The Times</em> between 1860 and 1879, and over 25 million words from a corpus of 220 Victorian novels from 1800 to 1920.</p>
<p>Both datasets are available for anyone to explore and download on <a href="https://libraryponders.github.io/resources.html">the project webpage</a>. This will be a valuable resource for those studying the Victorian era and print history.</p>
<p>We will use both computational analysis of those data sets, and close reading, to continue to explore ways newspapers and the Agony Column featured in and shaped Victorian novels and Victorian readers’ experiences.</p>
<h2>Victorian detective’s perspective</h2>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513797/original/file-20230306-24-uiuvs8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="man in a tuxedo with Victorian muttonchops" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513797/original/file-20230306-24-uiuvs8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513797/original/file-20230306-24-uiuvs8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513797/original/file-20230306-24-uiuvs8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513797/original/file-20230306-24-uiuvs8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513797/original/file-20230306-24-uiuvs8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513797/original/file-20230306-24-uiuvs8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513797/original/file-20230306-24-uiuvs8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">1874 image from ‘Figaro’s London Sketchbook of Celebrities,’ showing Ignatius Pollaky.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Lindsay Scrapbook/Ohio State University, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While the agonies and coded advertisements have captured some time in the spotlight thanks to the popularity of film productions of Sherlock and <em>Enola Holmes</em>, understanding just how popular or influential they were on Victorian society is difficult today. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.mcgill.ca/library/channels/event/exhibit-news-and-novel-sensations-344248">Visitors to the website</a> can explore some of the encrypted stories of <em>The Times</em> in a few unexpected ways, and gain a firsthand glimpse of another era’s print media. </p>
<p>Ignatius Pollaky, <a href="https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/910665874">the so-called real-life Sherlock Holmes</a>, was known for advertising his own business in the Agony Column and for inserting mysterious notes and messages in the newspaper relating to his cases. </p>
<p>We created a game as part of the exhibit called <a href="https://www.mcgill.ca/library/channels/event/exhibit-news-and-novel-sensations-344248">Pollaky’s Agonizing Adventure</a>. The game allows visitors to track coded clues in the agony columns by following fictionalized detective case notes.</p>
<p>Visitors can experience how the agonies were embedded in the emerging world of detective practice, and experience how the agonies made communicating private messages and plans possible in the public medium of the newspaper.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="The front page of a newspaper is seen with a rectangle of text highlighted." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513990/original/file-20230307-16-7l5uox.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513990/original/file-20230307-16-7l5uox.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513990/original/file-20230307-16-7l5uox.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513990/original/file-20230307-16-7l5uox.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513990/original/file-20230307-16-7l5uox.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513990/original/file-20230307-16-7l5uox.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513990/original/file-20230307-16-7l5uox.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The front page of ‘The Times’ as the player sees it in an online exhibit game, Pollaky’s Agonizing Adventure, designed to teach tracking coded clues in the Agony Columns.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Jacquelyn Sundberg and Nathalie Cooke)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Changing vocabulary</h2>
<p>Do you write like a Victorian? How far has our vocabulary shifted since that time? Our research team created the <a href="https://libraryponders.github.io/vibecheck/index.html">Victorian Vibecheck</a> to allow visitors to create period-appropriate text. </p>
<p>Vibecheck quantifies how rarely, if ever, words in a given text appear in our corpus of more than 450 Victorian novels. The program then gives you a score based on whether it over- or under-uses words. </p>
<p>Visitors can enter their own text or choose from a list of examples to see if they can approximate a Victorian vibe.</p>
<p>How closely do Victorian novels resemble the agonies, or does our own language resemble the Victorians’? We invite visitors to explore for themselves.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/200909/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jacquelyn Sundberg received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nathalie Cooke receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.</span></em></p>Personal ads of ‘the Agony Column’ were full of longing, tragedy and profound misfortune. Intrigue they generated has had an enduring effect on literature and film.Jacquelyn Sundberg, Outreach Librarian, McGill Library, McGill UniversityNathalie Cooke, Professor, Department of English, McGill UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1990932023-04-04T20:20:40Z2023-04-04T20:20:40ZGuide to the classics: steeped in the arboreal sublime, Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders carries a startling urgency<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519146/original/file-20230403-23-t8wel.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C11%2C3970%2C2976&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887), the trees sing. </p>
<p>Sometimes the sound is like a Gregorian chant, a threnody from the rustling leaves, the creaking boughs, the undulations of limbs heavy with leaves, swaying in the wind that rushes through the woods of Dorset’s Little Hintock. </p>
<p>At other times, it is a low moan, a cry of pain, voiced as if in sympathy with the tragic plight of the characters who wander through these woods, searching for something lost or never quite possessed – for a Hardyian character is always driven by a restive compulsion to move. </p>
<p>Even in stillness, Hardy limns the minute transformations of the body – of human limbs cicatriced with tree wounds, or the trunk of one of the forest’s oldest inhabitants – pulsing with life, desire, will. </p>
<p>These sylvan protagonists – English oaks, crab-apples, silver birches, willows, blackthorns, hazel trees, ash-trees, and elms – come into life with a sigh, an audible exhalation sounding from deep inside the trunk. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/where-the-old-things-are-australias-most-ancient-trees-65893">Where the old things are: Australia's most ancient trees</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The vocabulary of trees</h2>
<p>The Woodlanders tells the story of a small community who live and work in the forest. They are woodcutters and spar-makers, fruit-pickers and timber dealers, busily industrious under the tree canopy that makes a second sky. </p>
<p>Human labour keeps time with the seasons in Little Hintock, the fictive hamlet that Hardy maps onto the topography of Dorset in the south of England: felling timber in the autumn and winter; pressing apples for cider in the spring and summer. Hardy’s tragic hero, Giles Winterborne, is continually evoked by the traces of labour that cling to his skin, hair and clothes: apple pips and pomace, the vestiges of pulpy matter on his hands.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511841/original/file-20230222-24-6epnqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511841/original/file-20230222-24-6epnqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511841/original/file-20230222-24-6epnqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511841/original/file-20230222-24-6epnqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511841/original/file-20230222-24-6epnqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511841/original/file-20230222-24-6epnqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511841/original/file-20230222-24-6epnqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511841/original/file-20230222-24-6epnqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&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>The bodies of the novel’s characters are expressive, not so much of their individual personality as their contact with the forest. Their flesh is imprinted with a history of woodwork unique to each. The skin is an index of mishaps with elms, boles, rubbings of bark and brushings of twig. These afflictions become the means through which the body is known, to the self and to others. Mnemonic aches and resisting joints are evocative of the past. </p>
<p>One of Hardy’s great themes, and an element of his aesthetic accomplishment that astonishes us still, is his unsettling of the individual, understood as sovereign, private and unified. Hardy understands the self as constituted by and continuous with both human and non-human others. </p>
<p>In The Woodlanders, the pliancy and impressible feeling of consciousness cannot be uncoupled from the botanic. We can see this – and hear it too – in the vocabulary of trees, which structures characters’ speech patterns and ways of thinking and being. Desires and passions are formed by the sculpting hand of the natural environment. </p>
<p>At times, the words characters speak to one another are felled like wood: in many of the novel’s climactic scenes, speech is painfully constrained, an inadequacy that is camouflaged by physical activity. </p>
<p>Winterborne suffers most acutely from this linguistic affliction. He finds his words cleaved “into two pieces”. They respond not to his conscious intentions, but instead, for instance, to the arc of his arm in the act of woodcutting. In this way, language is an effect of the body’s primacy: like an echo, it continually reasserts the fact of embodiment. </p>
<p>In an epoch of environmental catastrophe, The Woodlanders carries a new and startling urgency. The cumulative effect of the pervasiveness of trees is to imply something about our notions of selfhood, something that philosopher <a href="https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/dalia-nassar.html">Dalia Nassar</a> and plant scientist <a href="https://profiles.waikato.ac.nz/margaret.barbour">Margaret Barbour</a> have described as the lesson trees can teach us about embodiment and boundedness, of “our rootedness, relationality, dialogue, and responsiveness”. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519144/original/file-20230403-24-baol2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519144/original/file-20230403-24-baol2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519144/original/file-20230403-24-baol2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519144/original/file-20230403-24-baol2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519144/original/file-20230403-24-baol2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519144/original/file-20230403-24-baol2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519144/original/file-20230403-24-baol2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An English oak.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-trees-communicate-via-a-wood-wide-web-65368">How trees communicate via a Wood Wide Web</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Attuned to the forest</h2>
<p>The trees’ expirations are recorded by the two characters most lovingly attuned to the forest: Marty South and Giles Winterborne. In one remarkable scene, the pair – not quite lovers, yet united in a complicity that springs from their possession of a unique affinity with the vegetal world – plant fir saplings early one winter’s morning. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513032/original/file-20230301-20-3sa97u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513032/original/file-20230301-20-3sa97u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513032/original/file-20230301-20-3sa97u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=871&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513032/original/file-20230301-20-3sa97u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=871&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513032/original/file-20230301-20-3sa97u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=871&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513032/original/file-20230301-20-3sa97u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1094&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513032/original/file-20230301-20-3sa97u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1094&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513032/original/file-20230301-20-3sa97u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1094&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Thomas Hardy (1840-1928).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hardy’s affection for Winterborne is emphasised in the attention he pays to the young man’s movements. A skilled woodsman, Giles has a mystical ability. His fingers are “endowed with a gentle conjurer’s touch in spreading the roots of each little tree, resulting in a sort of caress, under which the delicate fibres all laid themselves out in their proper directions for growth”. </p>
<p>But it is the young woman Marty, barely more than a girl, with her hands roughened by the skin of trees, who can hear them “soughing”. Hardy lets us hear it, too, with that lovely word. Placing the plant in the cavity of soil Giles has made, Marty listens as “the soft musical breathing instantly set in, which was not to cease night or day till the grown tree should be felled”. </p>
<p>Marty’s percipience indicates her prophetic role in the story. She sees and hears the signs of imminent tragedy long before the other inhabitants of the village. </p>
<p>There is more to this relationship between humans and trees, something of ontological significance that Hardy realises about our embeddedness in the environment. Hardy does not think about people without reference to the natural world. Put another way, and somewhat awkwardly, there is no character without tree. There is no human voice, nor human love or pain, that is not articulated without this defining correspondence with fecund and fleshly matter. </p>
<p>The human drama that reaches such a fine pitch of poignancy in The Woodlanders arises from the moist soil and the branches burdened with gratuitous leaves “rubbing each other into wounds”. The diffuse vocabulary of nature, tender and violent, is absorbed into the representation of human emotion. When Grace realises that she is in love with Giles more deeply and irretrievably than she had first understood, her “heart [rises] from its sadness like a released bough”. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511859/original/file-20230223-26-ctnrb2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511859/original/file-20230223-26-ctnrb2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511859/original/file-20230223-26-ctnrb2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=670&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511859/original/file-20230223-26-ctnrb2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=670&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511859/original/file-20230223-26-ctnrb2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=670&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511859/original/file-20230223-26-ctnrb2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=842&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511859/original/file-20230223-26-ctnrb2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=842&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511859/original/file-20230223-26-ctnrb2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=842&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rufus Sewell as Giles Winterbourne and Emily Woof as Grace Melbury in the 1997 film adaptation of The Woodlanders.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">IMDB</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Hardy’s radical cosmology, to be in love is to yearn for metamorphosis: a poetic and fantastical transposition of metaphysical desire into the earthy and sap-stained realm of the trees. </p>
<p>While Hardy’s prose vibrates with nature’s energies, a competing and, at times, antagonistic temporal order regulates social life. Obsessions with patriachal lineage and class define the elaborate marriage plot, which concerns five characters: Grace Melbury and Winterborne, natives of Hintock, who have been affianced since late childhood; Edred Fitzpiers, an urbane and brilliant doctor, who becomes Grace’s feckless husband; and Fitzpiers’ lover, Felice Charmond, a widowed woman, indulgent in her love, yet capricious in her affections. </p>
<p>The last is Marty South, who watches the romantic entanglements from afar, intervening when necessary, usually by recourse to a tool from the forest itself. </p>
<h2>Arcadian lovers</h2>
<p>The skein of secrets, lies and betrayals that binds the characters is too complex to detail here, so I will concentrate on the couple who absorb Hardy’s and the reader’s interest: Grace and Giles, the Arcadian lovers, whose quietly magnificent passion for each other is inextricable from the brilliancy and pain of the forest. It is in his depiction of their acts of tenderness, culminating in a spirit of mutual worship that marks their love for one another, that Hardy most fully realises an arboreal sublime. </p>
<p>Hardy’s fiction is notorious for its tragic spirit, distilled so that it is almost unbearable. Suffering seams even the rare moments of bliss in his stories. </p>
<p>In The Woodlanders, this tragic spirit is depicted in the extraordinary encounter between Giles and Grace, staged as a slowly unfolding lovemaking, but of a very different kind. As the narrative draws ineluctably toward the despair that has been everywhere foretold, Grace and her lover descend into a Dantean underworld of dense plantations, a world so thick with foliage that it feels unmoored, belonging only to these two. </p>
<p>Eroticism takes place not by actual lovemaking, but through small gestures, touches of fingertips, the sharing of food, bare words spoken. As Grace realises Winterborne is dying, her transformation into woodland myth is complete. Dragging his feverish body on a barque of ferns and sticks, she brings him to a place of warmth. Sheltered from the incessant rain, she kisses and bathes his too-warm flesh, tending to him with all the solicitousness that she has until now feared to give. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513051/original/file-20230301-20-t3z5fg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=24%2C24%2C5439%2C3587&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513051/original/file-20230301-20-t3z5fg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=24%2C24%2C5439%2C3587&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513051/original/file-20230301-20-t3z5fg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513051/original/file-20230301-20-t3z5fg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513051/original/file-20230301-20-t3z5fg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513051/original/file-20230301-20-t3z5fg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513051/original/file-20230301-20-t3z5fg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513051/original/file-20230301-20-t3z5fg.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"></a>
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<span class="caption">The path to Thomas Hardy’s cottage in Dorset, England.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>In these ritualised acts of love for a dying man, we see Hardy’s ideal of love. It is spiritual rather than carnal, but not a simple opposition. It is, rather, a dialectic between the ideal and the fleshy. The lovers “trouble each other’s souls”, but it is a yearning grounded in the material. </p>
<p>We see this when Winterborne dies, just hours after Grace’s desperate attempts to revive him, to keep him with her. Walking through the forest toward her father’s house, and toward her rueful husband, the world is changed. The trees mourn for Winterborne, weeping sap that is a phosphorescence, a milky substance that catches the weak light tenacious enough to penetrate the canopy. Giles has become “her wood-God, smeared with lichen”, the very milieu in which she moves. </p>
<p>The Woodlanders is as devastating as it is extraordinary in its beauty. One doesn’t so much read Hardy, in the sense of following the black marks upon the page, as experience the world he creates.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199093/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sophie Alexandra Frazer 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>In Thomas Hardy’s novel The Woodlanders, the trees sing. Hardy’s exploration of the relationship between humans and trees resonates in an epoch of environmental catastrophe.Sophie Alexandra Frazer, Lecturer, the School of Liberal Arts, The University of Wollongong, University of WollongongLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2028272023-04-03T20:08:19Z2023-04-03T20:08:19ZEnraged, tragic and hopeful: Alexis Wright’s new novel Praiseworthy explores Aboriginal sovereignty in the shadow of the anthropocene<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518075/original/file-20230329-28-219670.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C0%2C5454%2C3660&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Grass Yellow Butterfly, Australian Butterfly Sanctuary, Kuranda, Queensland.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Clode/Unsplash</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://giramondopublishing.com/books/alexis-wright-praiseworthy/">Praiseworthy</a> is Alexis Wright’s most formidable act of imaginative synthesis yet. It is simultaneously a hero’s journey for an age of global warming, a devastating story of young love caught between two laws, and an extended elegy and ode to Aboriginal law and sovereignty. </p>
<p>It is Wright’s most enraged, tragic and hopeful novel to date, with a magnificently upbeat denouement.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Praiseworthy – Alexis Wright (Giramondo)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>In 2019, writing of her storytelling heritage, Wright <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/the-ancient-library-and-a-self-governing-literature/">observed</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Even the idea of story is a cultural understanding that story involves all times and realities, the ancient and the new, the story within story within story – all interconnected, all unresolved.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Praiseworthy, Wright has conjured just such a multi-storied, open-ended, protean narrative, one that conveys forward movement through linear time (in the form of a quest), an uncanny sense of slipping through multiple timelines, and the ever-presence of eternity. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518061/original/file-20230328-24-pf2a0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518061/original/file-20230328-24-pf2a0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518061/original/file-20230328-24-pf2a0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=851&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518061/original/file-20230328-24-pf2a0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=851&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518061/original/file-20230328-24-pf2a0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=851&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518061/original/file-20230328-24-pf2a0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1070&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518061/original/file-20230328-24-pf2a0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1070&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518061/original/file-20230328-24-pf2a0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1070&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Wright first broke with conventional linear time in <a href="https://giramondopublishing.com/books/alexis-wright-carpentaria/">Carpentaria</a> (2006) to convey this unity of all times and stories in Aboriginal cosmology. In <a href="https://giramondopublishing.com/books/alexis-wright-the-swan-book/">The Swan Book</a> (2013), set 100 years into the future, the fractured narrative spirals through time and space like the grass seeds of Wright’s ancestral savannah. Praiseworthy seems to be both set in an infinite daily present and unmoored from time completely. Reading it is a heady, almost vertiginous experience.</p>
<p>The novel also contains Wright’s most explicit portrayal of the theft of an entire continent of Aboriginal country by white invaders more than two centuries ago, the ensuing clash of Aboriginal and white Australian laws, and the ongoing traumatic fallout. Land theft and its repercussions are invoked on the opening page, where the novel’s central character, Cause Man Steel – “a culture dreamer obsessing about the era” – is introduced alongside the rest of his storm-country people:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They knew just as much as he did about surviving on a daily basis, and about how to make sacrifices of themselves in all the cataclysmic times generated by the mangy dogs who had stolen their traditional land.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But as ever with Wright, before we meet Cause we meet Wright’s ancestral Waanyi country, in its cover image inspired by yellow butterflies and its epigraph in the Waanyi language: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Kulubibi. Baba yalu kurrkamala, jaja,<br>
(butterflies are flying everywhere) </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Butterflies and their ritual dancing of country are key motifs, associated with the “moth-er”, the story of Aboriginal sovereignty and rebirth.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-30-years-after-mabo-what-do-australias-battler-stories-and-their-evasions-say-about-who-we-are-187110">Friday essay: 30 years after Mabo, what do Australia's battler stories – and their evasions – say about who we are?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Vision and ambition</h2>
<p>Praiseworthy is Wright’s fourth novel and her first since 2013, when her groundbreaking climate-change dystopia The Swan Book was published. In the ensuing ten years, the world has changed dramatically – increasingly catastrophic weather events, displacement of peoples and animals, rising inequality, a planetary virus – and yet somehow The Swan Book prefigured them all. Such is the force of Wright’s literary vision and ambition. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518909/original/file-20230403-2142-ug3ovz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518909/original/file-20230403-2142-ug3ovz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518909/original/file-20230403-2142-ug3ovz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518909/original/file-20230403-2142-ug3ovz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518909/original/file-20230403-2142-ug3ovz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518909/original/file-20230403-2142-ug3ovz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518909/original/file-20230403-2142-ug3ovz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518909/original/file-20230403-2142-ug3ovz.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>
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<p>In the interim, she wrote <a href="https://giramondopublishing.com/books/tracker/">Tracker</a>, her Stella Prize-winning collective biography of visionary Aboriginal leader and economist Bruce “Tracker” Tilmouth. Accepting the award in 2018, Wright spoke of the great courage and ambition required to write in these increasingly complex times of multiple crises – and the necessity of doing so. </p>
<p>In Praiseworthy, she has surpassed herself. To The Swan Book’s interweaving of myriad calamities – material, imaginative and spiritual – Praiseworthy adds extensive ruminations on economics and Aboriginal sovereignty. Tracker’s belief in the primacy of Indigenous economic independence infuses the future-saving dreams of Cause Man Steel, who knows that “Aboriginal survival since time immemorial had always been about economics” and that Aboriginal people are “the world’s best economists”. </p>
<p>Cause’s thinking is so huge he’s called “Widespread” and “Planet” by the locals of Praiseworthy, a hot dry town on the Gulf of Carpentaria. His big dream is to make a future for his family and people, independent from the white government. He plans to do this by building a multinational enterprise designed for and profiting from the global climate emergency. </p>
<p>He lives with his wife Dance Steel on their contested Native Title land – the town’s graveyard – with their two elusive sons: Tommyhawk, aged eight, and 17-year-old Aboriginal Sovereignty (Ab.Sov for short), so named because these are “the only words [Cause] loved to say”. Each family member has found a way to hide from the daily horrors of their lives. </p>
<p>Cause escapes into his planet-saving venture. He practises “wife avoidance” and “accomplished absenteeism”. He hides in “the gap” of inequality between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia, because he knows that ensuring the future of the ancestral story is “principally about keeping the main plan hidden amongst a plethora of nothing plans”.</p>
<p>Dance dreams of China and vanishes into imaginary flights with butterflies, moths and other soft-winged insects. The Swan Book was preoccupied with swans; here the winged animals are smaller and more ephemeral. Delicate creatures of the night sky mass and dance their ancient rituals of country before falling to earth; they lead children mesmerised by the strains of Madame Butterfly into the ocean.</p>
<p>The two sons learn “to hide in plain sight by sinking inside themselves”. Glued to his free government digital devices, star student Tommyhawk only communicates through the World Wide Web, which twists his brain into a nightmare of government policy, media whitewashing, and longing to escape to a white heaven called Canberra. </p>
<p>Skinny Aboriginal Sovereignty, who “has the ancestors dancing in him” like he’s the law personified, falls in love with a 15-year-old girl and disappears. Their consummated love is illicit in white Australian law and he pays the price.</p>
<h2>An ochre haze</h2>
<p>Cause’s plan to bestow his people with “the gift of infinity” is defiled when “infinity itself” (Aboriginal Sovereignty) is destroyed. This desecration unleashes an ancestral storm of hate, grief, broken stories, butterfly wings and spirits, which form a huge ochre haze that hovers permanently over Praiseworthy. This sacrilege and its climatic counterpart – the “Anthropocene haze” – set the story in motion.</p>
<p>The haze mysteriously infiltrates the local mayor, turning his black self white and making him obsessed with whiteness. Now called Ice Pick and bolstered by a posse of admiring ice queens, he becomes the town’s “go-to spin doctor” of whiteness, a master of poisonous English words and parroted thinking about assimilation.</p>
<p>While the people of Praiseworthy struggle beneath the oppressive haze in sweltering government housing, with wrecked roads and unreliable fresh food and water, Ice Pick diverts the municipal funds into self-aggrandisement, self-care and forward plans – and hate campaigns against Cause.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518066/original/file-20230328-14-3koz90.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C0%2C1766%2C1167&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518066/original/file-20230328-14-3koz90.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C0%2C1766%2C1167&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518066/original/file-20230328-14-3koz90.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518066/original/file-20230328-14-3koz90.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518066/original/file-20230328-14-3koz90.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518066/original/file-20230328-14-3koz90.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518066/original/file-20230328-14-3koz90.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518066/original/file-20230328-14-3koz90.jpeg?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"></a>
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<span class="caption">Alexis Wright.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Vincent Long</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Evoking Odysseus and the knights of the Holy Grail, Cause is on a quest to find the glistening platinum feral donkey he once saw in a dream. This illusory donkey is destined to be the figurehead of the global transport business that will restore his family fortune: “their vast traditional lands”.</p>
<p>His craft is a clapped out Ford Falcon; his wine-dark sea is the scorching hinterlands of Australia; his enemy is the land-stealing “omnicidal” white culture and government. And like the Greek heroes who set sail for Troy, he abandons his wife and children, leaving them to the Fates. Cause is the absent husband and father consumed by a dream. He has seen a way through the haze: a door similar “to the one his ancestors had built over eons through their economies”. This door, this idea, seems to him as beautiful as poetry. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/big-picture-thinking-in-the-bell-of-the-world-gregory-day-listens-to-the-music-of-common-things-197616">Big-picture thinking: in The Bell of the World, Gregory Day listens to the music of common things</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Visionary thinking</h2>
<p>This conflation of legendary tales, economics, poetry, ancestral land, humour and visionary thinking about global warming is indicative of Wright’s synthesising mode. The metaphoric and imaginative leaps she makes, and the fictional truths they enable her to convey, are breathtaking. Praiseworthy is a novel that creates a literary timespace even more capacious than that of The Swan Book.</p>
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<p>In the ailing north, far from Canberra, white people barely figure. But their asphyxiating words and thoughts hang over the town like the haze. Available 24/7 on digital devices, they distort Tommyhawk’s imagination and invade Ice Pick’s mind. When they do make fleeting appearances, white characters are subjected to Wright’s exacting irony and withering critique. They fly in to share their so-called expertise “on what it meant to be a violent Aboriginal man” or do “white supremacy work experience in an Aboriginal community”.</p>
<p>Chief among them is superhero cop Maximum Security Service, who is sent to Praiseworthy to make the “Aboriginal Sovereignty business” go away before the next election. He is “the ultra-modern cop analyst of one of the world’s greatest slave-master nations”. He specialises in policing blood lines: “his total world was a sphere of passionate investigation into racial purity”.</p>
<p>As this suggests, Praiseworthy is an excoriating satire of white Australia’s ongoing violent invasions of Aboriginal lives – particularly those of Aboriginal men, who are portrayed as forever guilty of crimes they have not committed – and the state’s ongoing presumption that it possesses superior knowledge about what’s best for Aboriginal people. </p>
<p>The novel’s rage is volcanic. As Wright demonstrates in its tsunami of destruction and need, a major white obsession is the purported failure of Aboriginal families to properly care for their children. Praiseworthy’s parents</p>
<blockquote>
<p>knew you had to run faster than hell with fear written across your face when you were Aboriginal parents, just to prove you loved your children more than white people saying you did not love your children enough, like they loved their children.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response (the “Intervention”) – which was the federal government’s invasive reply to the Little Children are Sacred report on child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory – is here understood as a revamped version of the mission system. Aboriginal children are still stolen – physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. Lost children and crushed love lie at Praiseworthy’s heart.</p>
<p>As does the abyss that gapes between ancient Aboriginal law and modern white Australian law. The two systems stem from vastly different cosmologies: one is grounded in eternal laws of living and governing country, the other in land as inert property that can be owned and traded for money (or stolen if not previously accounted for in its system). One is life affirming; the other is life denying. </p>
<p>This disconnect – and the inestimable value of Aboriginal law for the planet’s future – is painted in broad brush strokes. We are not to remain blind to this. For example, the media is shown as fanning public sentiment</p>
<blockquote>
<p>to demand the wiping out of the entire cultural world of Aboriginal people from the face of the planet, where all that would be left of millennia of ancient wisdom – so urgently relevant today in the Earth ruined by the colonial exploiters and thieves of Aboriginal lands – would be the law of white Australia. There would be no room for Aboriginal law in one law for all Australians … </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Sanctity and sacredness</h2>
<p>At 736 pages, Praiseworthy is Wright’s longest novel to date, twice the length of The Swan Book. By the end, I was overwhelmed, spinning from its sheer scale and the many broken plot lines and inconclusions; I felt my mind – grown accustomed to anticipating particular narrative arcs – disappointed again and again.</p>
<p>The magnitude of this narrative disruption felt extreme and deliberate. It forced me to consider how white Australia’s ongoing stories about caring for and “protecting” this continent’s First People have continued to disappoint, decade after decade. Offering empty rhetoric and hopeless policies rooted in white experience, misunderstanding, morality and law, they fail to address the originary crime: the wholesale theft of a continent. </p>
<p>For the first time in my experience of reading Wright in any form and at any length, I felt my attention waver during one of Cause’s long journeys. As a former editor, I might have been tempted to suggest cuts around this section. But I have learnt to trust Wright’s vision. Sometimes the excess and repetition are the point. </p>
<p>How else to evoke the desecration of country and its ancient storylines by ongoing acts of white violence? How else to convey our misplaced sense of superiority and authority over the original inhabitants of this continent and their vast stores of knowledge and rich cultures sustained over 60,000 years? </p>
<p>“Sixty thousand” is one of the novel’s many refrains: lest we forget we are denying justice, equity and respect to the longest surviving First Nations on the planet. Praiseworthy suggests that language and stories need to be redefined for these climate-emergency times – and that what is needed is the “spirit language” of Aboriginal sovereignty, of country: “The story was always about sanctity, the sacredness of country.” </p>
<p>The novel is Wright’s most explicit fictional testament to the time immemorial sovereignty of Aboriginal country, the power of its immutable law and governance, and the almighty eternal presence of its ancestors and spirits, and it attests to the grave danger of disregarding them. There is no ambiguity in this: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What couldn’t a great ancestor of country do? So, it was exactly like what the old law people had always said would happen if you look after country, country will look after you. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Or in this: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>[Aboriginal Sovereignty] had become tied into the chosen shame of a continent stolen from his people by a pack of racists, who had turned the argument against the people whose land they had stolen, and whose intergenerational lives have never recovered from so great a loss.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Passages like these, as well as the novel’s comprehensiveness, cyclical repetitions and insistence, give it an air of urgency. These are perilous days – and Praiseworthy contains an urgent cry for the recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty over this continent and for Aboriginal economic independence, first and foremost. It’s like a lightning bolt thrown into a supercharged moment, with the wording for the referendum on the Voice to Parliament due to be put to federal parliament. </p>
<p>The novel’s creation has coincided with a global pandemic, lockdowns, continued police violence against Aboriginal men, murders, deaths in custody amid Black Lives Matter marches, and an outpouring of rage against male violence and paedophilia. It illuminates this terrain.</p>
<p>Praiseworthy is a paradox: an epic dirge for the ongoing loss of Aboriginal law and sovereignty – and an ode to the abiding fact that this continent always was and always will be self-governing Aboriginal country. It is creating a new story for these unprecedented times, one capacious enough to contain the feral donkeys that have thrown the old stories into turmoil: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Widespread’s feral donkeys became complicated plot lines of everything that had ever gone wrong in Praiseworthy from the beginning of colonial oppression, and the symbol of great fallenness, like an ugly fallen angel …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Reading this novel reminded me of Samuel Beckett’s assessment of James Joyce: “His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.” Praiseworthy is the thing itself.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202827/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>Alexis Wright’s latest novel is an elegy and an ode to Aboriginal law and sovereignty: innovative, visionary, and volcanic in its rage.Jane Gleeson-White, Adjunct Lecturer, UNSW Canberra, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1994162023-03-26T23:54:46Z2023-03-26T23:54:46ZPip Williams shows how World War I transformed women’s lives, in a new novel that captures the ‘poetic materiality’ of books<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517520/original/file-20230326-26-90i7il.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C0%2C2190%2C1465&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Pip Williams</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andre Goosen</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Pip Williams <a href="https://affirmpress.com.au/publishing/the-dictionary-of-lost-words/">describes</a> her new novel, <a href="https://affirmpress.com.au/publishing/the-bookbinder-of-jericho/">The Bookbinder of Jericho</a>, as both follow-up and companion to her 2020 debut, <a href="https://affirmpress.com.au/publishing/the-dictionary-of-lost-words-new-format/">The Dictionary of Lost Words</a>. </p>
<p>There is an overlap of place and profession, and some shared characters, between the novels. The Dictionary of Lost Words began in the late 19th century and covered several decades. The Bookbinder of Jericho illuminates a key period of history experienced by the characters in the previous book: it spans 1914 and the start of the World War I, finishing in the new world that had begun emerging by 1920. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: The Bookbinder of Jericho – Pip Williams (Affirm Press)</em></p>
<hr>
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<p>Both novels are located in Oxford; both are set within the publishing industry – on the creation and editorship side for Dictionary of Lost Words, and on the production side for The Bookbinder of Jericho. Both are told through the experiences of young women who participate in the book world: the former as daughter of one of the editors of the <a href="https://www.oed.com/">Oxford English Dictionary</a>, the latter as a bookbinder for Oxford University Press, which printed the dictionary. </p>
<p>Both novels, therefore, inhabit a world of language, meaning-making and storytelling. And both women are keen social critics, captivated by the nature and the effects of written language. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/book-review-the-dictionary-of-lost-words-by-pip-williams-132503">Book review: The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Bindery girls</h2>
<p>Peggy, the eponymous “bookbinder”, lives with her identical twin sister Maude in Jericho, a fringe suburb built on the banks of the canal on the edge of Oxford, prone to flooding and disease. As an industrial area, it was also the location for Oxford University Press, and hence a convenient home for its staff. </p>
<p>Peggy and Maude live on the canal, in a houseboat their mother named “Calliope” after the muse of poetry: appropriate enough, since the boat is crammed with books, manuscripts and sections, all of them products of the literary impulse. </p>
<p>The orphaned daughters of an Oxford scholar (their otherwise unidentified father) and a <a href="https://bookbindersmuseum.org/bookbinding-and-the-working-woman/">former bindery girl</a>, they work side by side in the Clarendon Press, doing “women’s work”: folding the printed sheets into sections, gathering sections into text blocks, and stitching the blocks before they are bound and sent into the world. </p>
<p>Peggy feels bound herself – to her sister Maude, for whom she has adopted the role of carer. Williams describes Maude, who communicates through echolalia, the repetition of heard fragments, as autistic. As Peggy insists, Maude “wasn’t simple, despite what people thought”. Rather, she possesses the ability to focus entirely on what fascinates her. She can fold pages and napkins and birds with a skill approaching art – and though occasionally she forgets what she’s folding, and transforms a folio into a fan, Peggy is always ready to fix the problem. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517492/original/file-20230326-26-olpgkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517492/original/file-20230326-26-olpgkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517492/original/file-20230326-26-olpgkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517492/original/file-20230326-26-olpgkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517492/original/file-20230326-26-olpgkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517492/original/file-20230326-26-olpgkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517492/original/file-20230326-26-olpgkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517492/original/file-20230326-26-olpgkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Orphaned sisters Peggy and Maude work as bindery girls, like their mother before them. (The women pictured are working at Kingsport Press in the US. Photo by Pauline Minga.)</span>
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<p>Peggy is also bound by the limitations of her class and gender. Though she’s possessed of a fine intellect, her education was very limited, and she can’t imagine even being approved to enter the nearby women’s college, let alone become a student. She is definitively Town; they are Gown. And as a mere bindery girl, she is considered good enough only to fold printed sheets into what will become a book. </p>
<p>This she finds immensely frustrating, as we see on the first page of the preface. “Scraps”, she says. “That’s all I got. Fragments that made no sense without the words before or the words after.” And that is indeed all she gets because, as the forewoman scolds, “Your job is to bind the books, not read them”. </p>
<p>But as a bindery girl, Peggy is skilled at reading “upside down and sideways”, a skill that is both truth and metaphor, since it signals her ability to see from a different point of view. Which she does: her perspective is different from her peers in the Press, from her managers, and from the refugees and wounded soldiers she will support. </p>
<h2>Women and World War I</h2>
<p>A rich cast of characters inhabit the novel. One is Lotte, a Belgian refugee from Louvain, where she was university librarian; she has seen what no one should see. Another is Gwen, an Oxford student who wears her privilege lightly and, with Peggy, works as a volunteer to support the wounded. </p>
<p>Among those is Peggy’s love interest Bastiaan, introduced as “the Invisible Man”, who gradually returns, broken and scarred, to himself. And actor and activist suffragette Tilda, who first appeared in the Dictionary of Lost Words, emerges now as the twins’ “aunt”, probably their mother’s lover. Here she serves as a nurse on the front. </p>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Through the eyes and accounts of each character, a different perspective is offered on the seemingly endless narrative of that war; a perspective that is upside down and sideways, perhaps; a perspective Williams brings to the role of women in this war. </p>
<p>Her women don’t remain in the traditional roles of nurse or grieving mother, but are full participants. They have faced the guns, they are on the frontlines trying to keep soldiers alive. On the home front, they are running the factories, rehabilitating the wounded and the traumatised. </p>
<p>But her account can’t avoid what we know so well about that catastrophic war: all its pointlessness, all the loss. Toward the end, when Spanish flu had added to the misery, and deaths were multiplying at home as well as on the war front, and Peggy’s aspirations to enter university seem to have been quashed, she reflects on the limits of language in the face of such experiences:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Loss</em>. The Concise Dictionary simply defined it as: <em>Detriment, disadvantage. See lose</em>, the entry said. I turned back a few pages. <em>Lose: Be deprived of, cease by negligence, misadventure, separation, death.</em> It didn’t quite explain the feeling I had. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>That “feeling” runs like a thread from the very first line of the novel to (almost) its end, because her sharp intelligence combined with her illegitimate birth and her poverty add up to a life of thwarted expectations. </p>
<p>Still, she says, “I want more”, but then adds, “Who doesn’t?” And sometimes we do get a little more. Peggy’s empathy and reflexivity, her capacity to observe closely and to make sense of literature and argument, highlights the “more” that is rapidly approaching for her and other women. The right to vote. Changing social mores and hierarchies. A gradual decolonising of the world and of individuals’ minds. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/it-makes-one-feel-and-realise-what-a-dreadful-thing-war-is-a-nurses-story-51581">'It makes one feel and realise what a dreadful thing war is' – a nurse's story</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The poetic materiality of books</h2>
<p>This is a hopeful story. But for me, despite the excellent crafting of this narrative of social history, what makes it stand out is its unwavering attention to books, and the making of books. Williams beautifully describes the practices and traditions and rituals associated with what was a trade, then a craft, and is now an increasingly arcane art. </p>
<p>Her focus is on the women’s side of the business, but it recognises the work of writers, readers, editors, compositors, foundry men, mechanics, press specialists: all the army of experts required in the process of moving from idea to material object. </p>
<p>The materiality of books and of the tools used in their construction is also beautifully depicted. She notes the density of rag paper; the swirl of a typeface; the heft and texture of a bone folder; the feel and aroma of leather binding; the luscious sheen of gold lettering. She notes the sensuality of the work. The gathering of books and sections is done as a kind of dance; and as her posh friend Gwen says, “You smell like a new book, it’s positively intoxicating.”</p>
<p>In the author’s note at the end of the book, Williams writes of the books that appear in the novel:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They were not sought or chosen with any great care. Rather, they presented themselves in the course of my work.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And, therefore, “The books play themselves”: they are real-life characters, who work alongside the fictional characters, to craft this story.</p>
<p>If I had to say what I think the novel is about, I could say the first world war, or the struggle for women’s rights, or sisterhood. But for me this novel is mostly a paean to the poetic materiality of books. It makes visible the long, slow, skilful labour involved in building a book; it traces the life that book might lead through decades or more of use: of instructing and distracting, entertaining and creating empathy. </p>
<p>Books might be the canvas on which their readers draft their own dreams, their own thoughts, and their own decisions. But, viewed through the eyes of a bookbinder, they become material beings, with their own life cycles, their own physicality – and their own relationships with us, their readers.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199416/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jen Webb receives funding from Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Pip Williams’ follow-up to her internationally bestselling debut novel explores World War I, women’s rights and sisterhood – but what makes it special is its unwavering attention to the making of books.Jen Webb, Dean, Graduate Research, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2002492023-03-01T09:43:26Z2023-03-01T09:43:26ZFrom Chinua Achebe to Toyin Falola – 5 essential books Nigeria’s new president should read<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511370/original/file-20230221-22-lymjhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/nigerian-flag-with-pile-of-books-isolated-on-white-royalty-free-image/843290280?phrase=nigeria%20books&adppopup=true">Golden Brown/Getty Images </a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Not many African political leaders are known to have publicly declared their love of reading. US president Barack Obama popularised the idea of a recommended <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2022/12/23/barack-obama-2022-favorites-books-movies-songs/10948842002/">reading list</a> and he still shares his annual choice. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/olayinka-oyegbile-1297384">a communications scholar</a> and a book reviewer, I made a short list of essential reads for Nigeria’s new president. My selection of books is based on what a new president needs to know when he takes the reins of <a href="https://businessday.ng/news/article/nigeria-more-divided-today-than-four-years-ago-report/">a deeply divided and disillusioned country</a>.</p>
<p>Nigeria has many problems. Disunity deepened under the Muhammadu Buhari government, and <a href="https://nairametrics.com/2022/07/29/controlling-nigerias-rising-population-could-reduce-long-term-inflation-report/">galloping inflation</a> has led to a <a href="https://www.premiumtimesng.com/business/577603-nigerians-groan-as-fuel-scarcity-bites-harder.html">shortage of essential goods</a> and services. <a href="https://theconversation.com/nigeria-insecurity-2022-was-a-bad-year-and-points-to-need-for-major-reforms-194554">Insecurity</a> remains a challenge too. </p>
<h2>The Trouble with Nigeria, by Chinua Achebe</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Chinua-Achebe">Chinua Achebe</a>, Nigeria’s preeminent novelist, took a break from fiction <a href="https://africanbookaddict.com/2015/05/25/the-trouble-with-nigeria-by-chinua-achebe/#:%7E:text=Even%20though%20this%20book%20was,administrations%20in%20several%20African%20nations.">in 1983</a> to write <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Nigeria-Chinua-Achebe/dp/9781561475">The Trouble with Nigeria</a>. I recommend it first because of its slim size. Many of our leaders have a well-known disdain for anything intellectual or rigorous. </p>
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<span class="caption">The Trouble With Nigeria.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>The incoming president should find time to sit down and pore over the 68 pages of this book and see what Achebe has said about our country. The writer says: “The trouble with Nigeria is leadership.” Simple. The president should then ask himself how he can make a difference. Perhaps after reading this small but powerful book, the incoming president might see where he fits into the “trouble” with Nigeria and how to fix it.</p>
<h2>From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000, by Lee Kuan Yew</h2>
<p>I know this is a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Third-World-First-Singapore-1965-2000/dp/0060197765">big book</a>. But it earns my recommendation because it is written from experience. Achebe was never a leader of a country. Lee Kuan Yew was. As prime minister of Singapore, he led a nation that was poor, scorned and derided. But through stern determination, he led it out of the dungeon. Nigeria needs a leader like Lee, without his <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/23/lee-kuan-yews-legacy-of-authoritarian-pragmatism-will-serve-singapore-well">dictatorial tendencies</a>. Nigeria has long been a subject of scorn, even among its own citizens who have decided to vote with their feet in search of better fortunes in other countries. </p>
<p>How did Lee transform his small, decrepit country into an internet economy? There is no need to reinvent the wheel for Nigeria; this has been done in Singapore. All the president needs to do is adapt it to local needs. </p>
<h2>Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson</h2>
<p>I recommend <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/dp/0307719227">this book</a> because it is simple and straightforward without economic or political jargon that might bore or scare the incoming president. Daron Acemoglu is <a href="https://economics.mit.edu/people/faculty/daron-acemoglu">an economist at MIT</a> while James A. Robinson is <a href="https://harris.uchicago.edu/directory/james-robinson">an economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago</a>. </p>
<p>The authors did a great job of synthesising the reasons why nations fail – it’s an easy read. Many have argued that Nigeria is failing or has failed because of its culture, geography, climate or ethnic composition. These authors have punctured all that. </p>
<p>The new president will get a clear picture of how to move out of the bind Nigeria is in, 62 years after <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Nigeria/Independent-Nigeria">independence</a> and <a href="https://www.refworld.org/docid/5278c70012.html">24 years after a return to democracy</a>. To the authors, nations find themselves where they are because of the choices made by their leaders in setting up economic and political institutions. They conclude it’s possible to break out of the poverty cycle. This is what Nigeria needs now to restore citizens’ faith in the system. It is political and economic institutions that underlie economic success. </p>
<h2>Understanding Modern Nigeria: Ethnicity, Democracy, and Development, by Toyin Falola</h2>
<p>Abiodun Alao, a professor of African Studies at King’s College London, writing a blurb for <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Modern-Nigeria-Ethnicity-Development/dp/1108837972">this book</a>, said: “Falola has brought together, under one cover, answers to all the questions anyone may want to ask about Nigeria.” </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511368/original/file-20230221-14-xabhxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511368/original/file-20230221-14-xabhxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511368/original/file-20230221-14-xabhxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511368/original/file-20230221-14-xabhxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511368/original/file-20230221-14-xabhxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511368/original/file-20230221-14-xabhxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511368/original/file-20230221-14-xabhxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511368/original/file-20230221-14-xabhxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Understanding Modern Nigeria.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/falolaoo">Toyin Falola</a> is a Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and a distinguished teaching professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the US. </p>
<p>This is truly a magisterial book about Nigeria. In its 672 pages it covers everything about the country from colonialism to post-colonial and modern times, religious identities, fault lines, youth, popular culture and politics.</p>
<p>It is arguably one of the most detailed books about contemporary issues in the country. The new president can learn a lot from it. </p>
<h2>New York, My Village: A Novel, by Uwem Akpan</h2>
<p>Unlike the four other books, this is fiction. Why a novel? It earns its place because fiction has a way of telling some home truths that non-fiction may gloss over. In <a href="https://www.amazon.com/New-York-My-Village-Novel/dp/0393881423">this book</a> about <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nigerian-civil-war">the Nigerian civil war (1967-70)</a>, Akpan has been able to give a voice to the minority. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511369/original/file-20230221-18-19pgjy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511369/original/file-20230221-18-19pgjy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511369/original/file-20230221-18-19pgjy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511369/original/file-20230221-18-19pgjy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511369/original/file-20230221-18-19pgjy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511369/original/file-20230221-18-19pgjy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511369/original/file-20230221-18-19pgjy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511369/original/file-20230221-18-19pgjy.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">New York, My Village.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nigeria has been dogged by the issue of a majority accused of lording it over minority ethnic groups. Akpan’s short stories and autobiographical pieces have appeared in various magazines locally and abroad. He currently teaches at the University of Florida. </p>
<p>In this novel, Akpan gives minorities a voice. The majority have to listen instead of ramming their ideas down the throats of others. The incoming president would gain a lot from reading this book and understanding that we must always have the patience to listen to the minority.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/200249/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Olayinka Oyegbile 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>What a new president needs to know as he takes the reins of a deeply divided and disillusioned country.Olayinka Oyegbile, Journalist and Communications scholar, Trinity University, LagosLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1984842023-02-23T13:33:02Z2023-02-23T13:33:02ZNovelist, academic and tattoo artist Samuel Steward’s plight shows that ‘cancel culture’ was alive and well in the 1930s<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511802/original/file-20230222-20-4w67dr.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=12%2C10%2C1201%2C890&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Outside of teaching and writing, Samuel Steward took up tattooing.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2010/07/26/books/0726SECRET2/0726SECRET2-jumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp">The Estate of Samuel M. Steward</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In January 2023, Hamline University <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/08/us/hamline-university-islam-prophet-muhammad.html">opted not to renew the contract</a> of an art professor who showed a 14th-century depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in class. Hamline labeled the incident “Islamophobic” and released a statement, co-signed by the university’s president, saying that respect for “Muslim students … should have superseded academic freedom.” </p>
<p>After <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/01/hamline-university-adjunct-professor-freedom/672713/">widespread backlash</a>, the university walked back that statement. However, the lecturer was still not rehired.</p>
<p>Concerns about academic freedom are nothing new. Rather than being a product of recent “<a href="https://theconversation.com/can-we-cancel-cancel-culture-164666">cancel culture</a>,” tension has long existed over the ability of professors to freely teach and write about controversial topics without fear of retribution.</p>
<p>More than 80 years ago, an English professor named <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/books/26secret.html">Samuel Steward</a> was dismissed from his teaching position after publishing what his college’s president deemed a “racy” novel.</p>
<p><a href="https://works.bepress.com/alessandro-meregaglia/">As an archivist and scholar</a> studying publishing in the American West, I’ve located published and unpublished archival sources detailing the controversy surrounding Steward after he published his first novel, which ultimately cost him his job.</p>
<h2>A book met with backlash</h2>
<p>A native of the Midwest, Steward earned his Ph.D. in English in 1934 from Ohio State University. The following year, Washington State College – now Washington State University – hired Steward to teach classes on a one-year contract.</p>
<p>An aspiring writer, Steward drafted his first novel while still a graduate student. He worked to find a publisher and contacted a small firm in rural Idaho. After an editorial review, Caxton Printers agreed to publish Steward’s novel, “Angels on the Bough,” which told the story of a small group of characters and their intertwined lives in a college town.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Black and white portrait of man wearing small glasses." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511495/original/file-20230221-28-b44wu2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511495/original/file-20230221-28-b44wu2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511495/original/file-20230221-28-b44wu2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511495/original/file-20230221-28-b44wu2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511495/original/file-20230221-28-b44wu2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1201&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511495/original/file-20230221-28-b44wu2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1201&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511495/original/file-20230221-28-b44wu2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1201&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Caxton Printers founder James H. Gipson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lehigh University Special Collections</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Founded in 1907, <a href="https://www.caxtonpress.com/">Caxton Printers</a> has earned national attention for its fierce defense of freedom of expression and unique publishing philosophy. Caxton’s founder, James H. Gipson, understood the transformative power of books and sought to give a voice to deserving writers when other firms rejected them. Profit was not a motivator. As Gipson <a href="https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv02075">explained</a> to Steward, “We are interested not in making money out of any author for whom we may publish, but in helping him.”</p>
<p>Caxton published “Angels on the Bough” in May 1936. </p>
<p>The book immediately received reviews, almost entirely positive, in dozens of newspapers across the country. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1936/05/31/archives/trouble-in-academe-angels-on-the-bough-sm-steward-317-pp-caldwell.html">The New York Times</a> wrote favorably about the novel, describing Steward as possessing “a very distinct gift above the usual.”</p>
<p>And <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gertrude-stein">Gertrude Stein</a>, the American writer and expatriate who lived most of her life in France, lauded “Angels on the Bough” in a letter she penned to Steward.</p>
<p>“I like it I like it a lot, you have really created a piece of something,” <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Dear_Sammy/A1dbAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22quite%20definitely%22">Stein wrote</a>. “It quite definitely did something to me.”</p>
<h2>Steward loses his job</h2>
<p>Despite the favorable reception, the book started causing trouble for Steward before it was even published. Review copies reached campus in early May 1936. Steward soon began hearing rumors that college administrators found his book distasteful for its sympathetic portrayal of a prostitute, one of the main characters.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A yellow book cover." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511801/original/file-20230222-26-roekc4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511801/original/file-20230222-26-roekc4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=873&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511801/original/file-20230222-26-roekc4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=873&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511801/original/file-20230222-26-roekc4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=873&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511801/original/file-20230222-26-roekc4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1097&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511801/original/file-20230222-26-roekc4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1097&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511801/original/file-20230222-26-roekc4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1097&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The publication of ‘Angels on the Bough’ prompted Washington State College to not renew Steward’s contract.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alessandro Meregaglia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yet, as Steward <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Gay_Sunshine_Interviews/T8wYAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22little%20women%22">noted in an interview</a> during the 1970s, the book was “very tame – reading like ‘Little Women’ by today’s standards.”</p>
<p>Steward sent an urgent telegram to Gipson asking him to stop selling the book on campus: “A young poor man with only one job asks that you withdraw his novel … because his departmental head and dean hint at his discharge.”</p>
<p>Caxton had advertised the book as “not appeal[ing] to the less liberal mind.” This “alarmed several people,” <a href="https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv02075">according to Steward</a>. The head of the English department told Steward his book contained “unsavory material” and that Steward’s position “would undoubtedly prove very embarrassing” to the college.</p>
<p>Despite this, Steward still planned to return to teach classes the following autumn. Earlier that spring, he had been verbally assured that he would receive another one-year contract. Three weeks later, however – and just hours before he left campus for the summer – Washington State’s president, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20100308091433/http:/president.wsu.edu/office/university-governance/past-presidents/holland.html">Ernest O. Holland</a>, summoned Steward to a meeting.</p>
<p>Holland informed Steward his contract would not be renewed. He accused Steward of writing a “racy” novel and of being sympathetic with a <a href="https://content.libraries.wsu.edu/digital/collection/clipping/id/110709/rec/3">student strike</a> a month earlier.</p>
<p>Angered, Steward immediately dashed off a telegram to Gipson: “Discharged by God Holland for writing a racy novel … I have no regrets whatsoever despite the fact his methods were those of Hitler but think I will take up stenography.”</p>
<p>Steward and Gipson both set to work to widely publicize Steward’s dismissal. Steward appealed to the <a href="https://www.aaup.org/">Association of American University Professors</a> for assistance. Founded in 1915, the association’s primary purpose is “to advance academic freedom.” The organization still regularly investigates violations of academic freedom, <a href="https://www.aaup.org/news/aaup-launches-inquiry-hamline-university#.Y_U3HHbMKUk">including what happened at Hamline University</a>.</p>
<p>After months of investigation, the AAUP published <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40219810">its report</a>. It determined that Steward had been unjustly let go and concluded that “President Holland’s handling of the Steward case has been most ill-judged, and indicates … improper restriction of literary freedom.”</p>
<h2>From teaching to tattooing</h2>
<p>After leaving Washington State, Steward promptly found a position at Loyola, a Catholic university in Chicago. Before hiring him, Loyola’s dean read Steward’s book and apparently had no objections. An AAUP member <a href="https://searcharchives.library.gwu.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/374014">noted the irony</a>: “Apparently our Catholic brethren are much more tolerant than a state institution in Washington.”</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Shirtless tattooed man smoking a cigarette." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511498/original/file-20230221-3821-5leisr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511498/original/file-20230221-3821-5leisr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511498/original/file-20230221-3821-5leisr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511498/original/file-20230221-3821-5leisr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511498/original/file-20230221-3821-5leisr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1207&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511498/original/file-20230221-3821-5leisr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1207&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511498/original/file-20230221-3821-5leisr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1207&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Samuel Steward worked as a tattoo artist under the alias Phil Sparrow.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d6/Samuel_Morris_Steward_1957.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Outside of teaching, Steward, who was gay, published gay erotica under the pseudonym Phil Andros and took up tattooing. By 1956, Steward permanently left academia to ply his trade as a tattoo artist full time on Chicago’s South State Street under another alias, Philip Sparrow.</p>
<p>In the 1960s, he moved to California and opened up a tattoo parlor in Oakland, where he became the <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Secret_Historian/cl9kgQmqj54C?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22official%22%20%22hells%20angels%22">“official” tattoo artist</a> for the Hells Angels motorcycle club.</p>
<p>After retiring from tattooing, Steward lived a quiet life in Berkeley. He still wrote frequently, producing a handful of <a href="https://worldcat.org/search?q=au%3D%22Steward%2C+Samuel+M.%22&itemSubType=book-printbook&orderBy=publicationDateDesc&itemSubTypeModified=book-printbook&datePublished=1950-1993">fiction and nonfiction books</a>. Steward <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/20/obituaries/samuel-steward-84-a-writer-about-stein.html">died in California in 1993</a> at the age of 84.</p>
<p>Despite his prolific and varied career, Steward’s legacy as a “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Gay_American_Autobiography/6Frgs5iRL4YC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22remarkable%20figure%22">remarkable figure in gay literary history</a>” was not widely known until the publication of Justin Spring’s meticulously researched 2010 book, “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Secret_Historian/cl9kgQmqj54C?hl=en&gbpv=0">Secret Historian</a>.”</p>
<p>Interest in Steward continues. Performance artist John Kelly recently staged a show, “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/01/theater/john-kelly-underneath-the-skin.html">Underneath the Skin</a>,” in December 2022 that examined Steward’s life.</p>
<p>It is impossible, of course, to know the trajectory of Samuel Steward’s career if he had been reappointed to Washington State for another year. But a prescient comment Steward made just before his dismissal suggests that he sensed he couldn’t stay in academia forever: “I am afraid I will have to get out of the teaching profession in order to be able to write the way I want to.”</p>
<p>Academic freedom is <a href="https://www.aaup.org/our-work/protecting-academic-freedom/academic-freedom-and-first-amendment-2007">related to free speech</a>. A <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/For_the_Common_Good/y6ozEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">long-standing tradition</a> afforded to college faculty, it shields professors from retribution – from both internal and external sources – for teaching controversial topics within their area of expertise. <a href="https://www.aaup.org/report/1940-statement-principles-academic-freedom-and-tenure">According to the AAUP</a>, academic freedom is based on the premise that higher education promotes “the common good (which) depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.” </p>
<p>This protection covers both classroom lectures and publications.</p>
<p>With debates about academic freedom lately making headlines – from <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/society/hrw-harvard-israel-kennedy-school/">outside interests influencing appointments</a>, to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/01/hamline-university-adjunct-professor-freedom/672713/">administrators kowtowing to vocal students</a>, to <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2023/01/11/desantis-seeks-overhaul-small-liberal-arts-college">politicians changing oversight of public universities</a> – Steward’s plight some 87 years ago is a reminder that this freedom requires constant defense.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198484/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alessandro Meregaglia 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>The ability of professors to freely teach and write about controversial topics without fear of retribution is nothing new.Alessandro Meregaglia, Associate Professor and Archivist, Boise State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1996192023-02-15T12:21:41Z2023-02-15T12:21:41ZSalman 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 BristolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.