Author: Simon Hammond

Categories
Uncategorised

No Winners

In Ethiopia, the last few months have seen a dramatic reshuffling of cards. With signs that the federal government are preparing to enter peace talks, the tripartite alliance waging war on the northernmost Ethiopian regional state of Tigray has broken down. The belligerents had been united by overlapping interests – Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sought to consolidate his rule and remove the region’s oppositional ruling party; Eritrea to avenge its defeat in the 1998-2000 Eritrean-Ethiopian war at the hands of a Tigray-dominated army; militias from the neighbouring Amhara state to ‘reclaim’ land from Tigray. Today however, cordial relations between Abiy and Eritrean president Isaias Afwerki, which earned the former a Nobel Peace Prize and set the stage for war, have been replaced by mutual suspicion; Eritrea has tellingly recalled its ambassador, replacing him with a chargé d’affaires. Meanwhile, Abiy’s government is now pursuing a campaign of pacification against its erstwhile Amhara nationalist allies.

The offensive launched on Tigray in November 2020 was initially a success. Abiy declared victory after a matter of weeks, when the regional capital of Mekele was overtaken. Yet setbacks soon followed. The alliance was dislodged from the main cities by a Tigrayan offensive in mid-2021, and by December Tigrayan forces had advanced southwards through Amhara to within 200 km of the federal capital of Addis Ababa (triggering the government to call a state of emergency and engage in mass detainment of Tigrayans civilians). These forces were subsequently pushed back to the Tigrayan border, after drones from Abiy’s foreign benefactors began to inflict heavy costs. But the Tigrayan leadership insisted that the reasons were also political. The fact that both sides halted at the border indicated that some form of agreement, probably through American intermediaries, had been reached. Since then, the warrying parties have largely avoided open confrontation, and in March this year, Abiy’s government declared a ceasefire which was accepted by Tigray.

Eritrea remains insistent on eradicating Tigray’s ruling party, blaming Abiy’s lack of resolve for not having managed to do so; so too, the Amhara nationalists, who believe that Abiy’s forces provided insufficient protection to Amhara areas that fell under Tigrayan control. Yet while it is too soon to ascertain whether Abiy’s government now intends to engage in good-faith negotiations – and with the blockade on Tigray continuing to starve its population and economy – the deterioration of the alliance suggests that the regime has realized the war is unwinnable. That such conditions for peace have developed to the extent they have has little to do with the ‘concern’ of the ‘international community’ of powerful western states, which was never matched by any willingness to damage relations with a compliant regime. Neither has the African Union shown any inclination to embarrass Addis Ababa. The lesson that the conflict holds for similar regions, nationalities and communities is that both defence and liberation remain dependent on one’s own forces.

For Abiy, peace negotiations would be a de facto acceptance of defeat. Though there are no Ethiopian winners of this war, whereas the Tigrayan regional government can at least claim to have successfully defended its state’s self-administration, Abiy’s government has achieved none of its aims. It has not captured the ‘fugitive’ leaders of Tigray’s ruling party in what it labelled a mere ‘law enforcement operation’, and it has not been able to assert federal government rule in the region. It has, however, created a humanitarian catastrophe, with up to half a million Tigrayans said to have died from war and famine, wrecked the economy, compromised the sovereignty and imperilled the integrity of the country. With his ambitions thwarted, Abiy is now essentially a lame-duck akin to Omar al-Bashir in the aftermath of the 2005 peace deal between the Sudanese government and South Sudan (though the future status of Tigray remains an open question, and the Tigrayan leadership will likely look for a settlement short of secession in the medium term).

Abiy’s Prosperity Party, much like al-Bashir’s National Congress Party, will emerge from a war that devastated the country but achieved none of its aims and will now be forced to share power with an organization that represents those it has brutalized. It has serious explaining to do, even to those who parties and populations that supported the war. While no immediate organized threat has presented itself (partly because Abiy’s security forces and courts are busy preventing any credible opposition from emerging in areas it controls), a retreat is evident. Whereas former Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi once boasted that his party’s writ ran in every village, Abiy appears to have little control over even the regional branches of his own party. He is more often portrayed touring new parks in the capital than in exercising power over the republic, and the most notable project launched by his government in the last year is the construction of a new palace for himself, at the shocking cost of a billion US dollars.

Meanwhile, Abiy’s government must deliver on the deceptively named ‘home-grown economic reform agenda’ he has promised its foreign financiers, which includes the privatization of key public assets in sectors recently opened to foreign ownership, devaluation and liberalisation of foreign currency and exchange rate controls, establishment of stock and secondary bond exchange markets open to foreign capital, liberalisation of finance sector policies, deregulation of large-scale mining projects, the removal of trade tariffs and barriers, and expedition of WTO accession. The US-European agenda is to pry the Ethiopian economy open and to have its public assets brought under private ownership. This aligns with the ambition of the elite of the Prosperity Party (which has jokingly been called the Property Party) to profit from such a process. Other powers, such as Turkey and the UAE, now have militarized interests in the country, and Abiy is indebted to them too. In one way or another, they will look to collect on their debt.

The realization that the war in Tigray is unwinnable has unfortunately not prompted the same realization in Oromia, where the federal government is doubling down on militarizing the conflict against the Oromo Liberation Army. The insurgency was no more than a minor nuisance when Abiy came to power in 2018. Yet his government’s attempts to suppress opposition to his rule – in a similar manner to in Tigray – has transformed it into a major problem. In Oromia there have also been several recent cases in which the rebels have been allegedly implicated in mass atrocities. In the past month alone, at least two massacres of mostly non-Oromo civilians – each numbering in the hundreds – have occurred there. The rebels have denied culpability and pointed to the government side. Neither belligerent have a convincing historical record in this regard, however, as both have repeatedly targeted national minorities in the past. The population in Oromia find themselves increasingly caught between a rock and a hard place.

At the same time, the Western Zone of Tigray – also called Welkait – remains under federal military and Amhara administrative control. This zone saw some of the worst crimes of the war, as the Amhara authorities sought to cleanse it of its Tigrayan population, and Amhara authorities have vowed not to relinquish control under any circumstances. Its border with Sudan has also been the site of massive Eritrean military deployment, intended to prevent Tigrayan forces from breaking the blockade. Over the last few months, Amhara militias in the zone have been reined in by federal forces. But should it be returned to Tigrayan administration, this will likely produce a major revolt against Abiy’s government in the Amhara region. Yet any negotiated solution that does not return the western zone to its constitutional pre-war status opens the door for the annexation of other embattled areas. Since all regional states of the Ethiopian federation have border disputes with neighbouring ones, and all are in command of armed forces that occasionally clash or carry out atrocities on each other’s civilian populations, this could trigger the full-scale implosion of the Ethiopian federal state.

Abiy’s regime has driven a wedge between Tigray and the rest of Ethiopia which is unlikely to be removed anytime soon. The scapegoating and ostracization of Tigrayans across Ethiopia even before the war indicates that this constituted an intentional sacrifice at the altar of Abiy’s desire to become the uncontested ruler of a re-centralized empire-state. But Abiy and his lieutenants have also, for short sighted reasons, created bitter animosities between Ethiopia’s other nations and nationalities. How does one reconcile the fact that while Abiy’s Prosperity Party commands every regional state except Tigray, these states find themselves in conflict with each other? The reason is the corruption and clientelism of the Prosperity Party leadership, its lack of a coherent political programme, and its resultant lack of legitimacy. Without any ability to generate widespread support, its only method of retaining power is to rile up new inter-ethnic conflicts.

The role of Eritrea in the conflict will also have long-lasting implications. Removing it from Ethiopian affairs has predictably not been as straightforward as inviting it to join the war on Tigray. Despite Abiy’s newfound desire to rein in its role, it remains in control over areas across its borders, and is training and creating direct alliances with Amhara and Afar militias, bypassing the federal government. The divisions that Abiy has exacerbated is liable to be exploited by external interests. The unprecedented penetration of Al-Shabaab forces from Somalia in July is further evidence of this. Ethiopian sovereignty remains deeply compromised, but it is the internal crisis that generates these opportunities.

Ethiopia therefore comes out of this war in a terribly worsened condition. The polity is now broken, state power having shrunk into something more akin to mayorship over Addis Ababa. Social cohesion and cross-national solidarity have nearly vanished, replaced by extreme polarization. The economy is in tatters, with hyperinflation across the country. Peace in Tigray will only be a first step towards the reconstruction of the country and the rebuilding of cross-national solidarities. It also requires the demilitarization of the conflict in Oromia; the combination of real national self-determination with the protection of the rights of national minorities; the demobilization of irredentist militias; the bringing of the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes to justice; and the reestablishment of Ethiopian sovereignty over its affairs. But above all, it requires the formulation of a coherent social programme that addresses the poverty, inequality and exploitation that is fertile ground for demagogues like Abiy and his corrupt cabal.

Read on: Zenon Merida, ‘Ethiopia’, NLR I/30.

Categories
Uncategorised

The Forgotten Fortuyn

Twenty years ago, the lifeless body of right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn was found lying on the tarmac outside a radio studio in the Netherlands. He had been fatally shot by an animal rights activist while on the campaign trail for the 2002 elections. Nine days after his death, his eponymous party, List Pim Fortuyn (LPF), won 26 seats and the second largest share of the vote – a historic breakthrough known as ‘the Fortuyn Revolt’. Over the following years, the LPF succumbed to internal strife, but new right-wing populist leaders such as Geert Wilders and Thierry Baudet would follow in Fortuyn’s footsteps.

This year, on the anniversary of Fortuyn’s death in May, Dutch newspapers were filled with retrospectives, looking back on how the populist revolt had changed Dutch politics. A mini-series on his rise to prominence aired on public television, while publishers printed special editions of his bestselling books. Commentators from across the ideological spectrum remarked on his enduring legacy. ‘Fortuyn’s message is in many respects more urgent than before’, proclaimed the centre-left daily de Volkskrant. Yet many of them seemed curiously unaware of what that message was.

A common refrain was that the Fortuyn Revolt was a nationalist backlash against globalization, a defence of the little man against the aloof technocratic elites. Already back in 2002, pundits were describing Fortuyn’s rise as a fulfilment of John Gray’s prediction in False Dawn (1998) that the neoliberal utopia of a globally integrated market would soon spark nationalist (and fundamentalist) opposition. In 2017, the British journalist David Goodhart wrote of the revolt of the somewheres, the locally rooted ordinary people, against the anywheres, the cosmopolitan urban middle classes. His cited Brexit and ‘the unexpected populist surge in the Netherlands in the early 2000s’ as his primary examples. For Goodhart, it was not the opposition between left and right, but between ‘closed’ and ‘open’, that defined contemporary politics. This has now become a dominant frame for understanding the rise of right-wing populism, in the Netherlands as elsewhere.

The Dutch sociologist Gabriël van den Brink offered a similar analysis in his 2020 book Rough Awakening From a Neoliberal Dream. He argued that the rise of neoliberalism had initiated a process of liberalization and individualization which in turn triggered a communitarian revolt. This ‘rough awakening’ started with Pim Fortuyn, who rallied against the ‘neoliberal enthusiasm of the technocratic elite’. Van de Brink’s book formed part of a larger popular mythology surrounding Fortuyn, casting him as a zealous defender of the losers of globalization. Exactly twenty years after his death, the official biographer of Fortuyn appeared on Dutch television and proclaimed that his subject had always remained a leftist at heart, who ‘relied heavily on social democratic thought’. 

Yet ‘Professor Pim’, as his supporters affectionately called him, was never mealy-mouthed about what he stood for. When asked whether he was a ‘populist’ in the radio interview just before his assassination, Fortuyn replied that he didn’t like to ‘suck up to people’. At the beginning of his election campaign, he claimed that ‘not only our politics, but also many of our citizens are useless. They look too much at what the government can and must do, and far too little at what they themselves can do’. Far from rallying against the neoliberal elite, Fortuyn believed that Dutch elites were not nearly neoliberal enough. His hard-right politics were born out of the neoliberal tide that swept the country in the 1980s and 1990s; yet, in the Dutch collective memory, his strident opposition to immigration and Islam would eventually become so all-defining that it would eclipse his economic agenda.

During Fortuyn’s campaign, though, that economic agenda was front and centre. In his bestselling election manifesto, The Disasters of Eight Years Purple (2002), Fortuyn asserted that the Dutch welfare system ‘had given birth to a monster’. The unemployed were ‘a dead weight in society’ with ‘a big mouth’ which the state could not be expected to feed. Unemployment was a dispositional and psychological problem, which could only be solved by slashing welfare, abolishing rent subsidies and cutting disability benefits. Fortuyn proposed doing away with open-ended contracts and introducing a more flexible labour market inspired by the American model, turning the Dutch worker into an ‘entrepreneur of the self’ and making the Netherlands more competitive on the world market.

‘Why my plea to remove the wonderfully warm blanket of consensus from our little Dutch bed?’ wrote Fortuyn on the opening page of his earlier pamphlet Without Civil Servants (1991). ‘Globalization of culture and economy require a different management of the economy and society, which is enforced by the free movement of people, money and goods.’ Only on the cultural terrain did Fortuyn make a pronounced shift in the mid-nineties, becoming a prominent critic of Islam, multiculturalism and political correctness, who proposed closing the borders for Muslim immigrants. A renewed nationalism, he wrote, was necessary to defend western values and offer an anchor to Dutch citizens alienated by globalization. Fortuyn’s politics were defined by economic openness and cultural closure.

In this Fortuyn was far from exceptional. During the same period, political scientists such as Herbert Kitschelt and Hans-Georg Betz observed that a series of right-wing populist parties with broadly similar positions had emerged across Europe: Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, Jörg Haider’s FPÖ, the Swiss People’s Party, the Norwegian Progress Party and the Danish Fremskrittspartiet. Many of them started out as ‘neoliberal-populist’ parties before shifting focus and developing into anti-immigration policies. In The Radical Right in Western Europe (1997), Kitschelt described the combination of free-market and anti-immigration policies as a ‘winning formula’ which had become increasingly capable of mobilizing large electoral constituencies. Right-wing populism, he argued, first emerged as an offshoot of neoliberalism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Fortuyn’s work.

Fortuyn began his storied career as a leftist sociology professor at the University of Groningen. He wrote his PhD on postwar socio-economic policy and developed a close relationship with the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA). But at the end of the 1980s he was swept up in the enthusiasm for neoliberal reform. The government had begun privatizing public assets and liberalizing the economy with the help of a small but growing army of private consultants. Fortuyn wanted to get in on the action. His university seconded him to Rotterdam, where he led a committee that authored a report on the market-led renewal of the troubled port city, which had been hit by mass unemployment.

Fortuyn spent this period at the Rotterdam Hilton, with his bill picked up by city hall. In his autobiography, he recalled consorting with his fellow committee members from the private sector, who taught him how to ‘drink the better wines and appreciate the pleasures of salmon and caviar’. After a self-described ‘eureka moment’ in April 1987, he joined a select group of technocrats overseeing the government’s ongoing privatization drive. In the following years, ‘professor Pim’ quickly became a sought-after public speaker in Dutch business circles. He exchanged his jeans and denim jacket for tailored suits and brightly coloured silken ties.

In the early 1980s, the Dutch neoliberal turn was overseen by the Christian Democrats (CDA). The centre-right government led by Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers replaced the Keynesian full-employment policies of yesteryear with austerity and supply-side economics. Lubbers’s cabinet ministers, many of them drawn from the private sector, presented themselves as corporate managers. They promised to run the country like a company, referring to parliament as its ‘board of directors’. The state would be trimmed down to its core activities, with peripheral functions outsourced and sold-off. Deregulation and flexibilization were pushed through along with enforced wage moderation, while the trade unions watched from the sidelines.

By the time of Fortuyn’s conversion, however, the campaign for market-led reform had suffered a serious setback. Tired of austerity and concerned about eroding support, the Christian Democrats tacked left in 1989 and formed a government with the social democrats. Many on the right feared that the momentum for market reform was dissipating. In a much-discussed campaign speech, the Labour Party leader Wim Kok proclaimed that after ten years of neoliberal reform, ‘the pendulum had swung too far’. He criticized the ‘authoritarian governing style’ of the previous decade and promised a restoration of corporatist, consensus politics, with trade unions brought back to the table.

Lubbers was denounced by the right for his betrayal. ‘If only we had a Margaret Thatcher in Dutch politics’, lamented the economist Eduard Bomhoff. Thatcher had fought and defeated the trade unions, while Lubbers mistook consensus for a policy goal. ‘Thatcher’s lessons had been ignored in the Netherlands,’ the journalist Marc Chavannes explained, ‘because we conveniently imagine that she is a mal-coiffed lady in a country full of strange figures who seem to have walked out of a television series.’ ‘How do we get rid of late-corporatist structures’, he went on to ask, ‘which are expressions of a fattened harmony model that threatens the prosperity and well-being of the Dutch people?’

Fortuyn joined the chorus of disappointed free marketeers. In the first half of the 1990s, he published a series of bestselling pamphlets in which he proposed a frontal assault on Dutch consensus politics. Fortuyn complained that Lubbers had squandered a golden opportunity: although he had defied the public sector unions, he had failed to deal them a fatal blow. ‘Needless to say, things would be far better now if Lubbers had opted for the method of amputation rather than the administration of a temporary medicine.’ Fortuyn’s wanted a Dutch ‘Iron Lady’ to deal with the trade unions, suggested firing half of all Dutch civil servants and proposed banning permanent contracts. This neoliberal critique of the corporatist consensus as an obstacle to market reform would soon become a central component of Fortuyn’s populism.

Fortuyn became the first public figure in the Netherlands to provide neoliberalism with a populist appeal, becoming a prominent exponent of what Thomas Frank called ‘market populism’: the idea that ‘markets expressed the popular will more articulately and more mean­ingfully than did mere elections, that ‘markets conferred democratic legiti­macy’; that ‘markets were a friend of the little guy’. In One Market under God (2000), Frank showed how ‘market populism’ spread like wildfire during the New Economy and internet bubble of the 1990s. These same arguments formed the core of Fortuyn’s The Disasters of Eight Years Purple: a heavy-handed critique of the so-called ‘purple’ coalitions of social democrats (PvdA, ‘red’) and right-wing liberals (VVD, ‘blue’) which had governed the country in the second half of the 1990s, and which constituted the Dutch equivalent of the Third Way.

Fortuyn began the manifesto with a comparison between the market and the state. In a market environment, he pointed out, a company is punished if it delivers bad products. The consumer decides. The New Economy would therefore strengthen the influence of the consumer. Thanks to the blessings of information technology, mass products could henceforth be tailored to personal preferences. Mass customization would entail the ‘democratization and individualization of economic life’, while in the workplace traditional hierarchies would give way to horizontal networks.

While the business world had adapted to this new spirit of the age, the public sector was still stuck in the industrial age, with its anonymous, large-scale production processes. ‘The consumer-citizen is only paid lip service to’, Fortuyn complained. ‘There is no democracy, unless one sees democracy as marking a box red once every four years.’ This system was propped up by a tiny elite who were invested in the tripartite polder model: ‘a kind of musyawarah system in which people talk to each other until they more or less agree’. Whereas in his leftist days, Fortuyn’s worldview was based on an opposition between the productive working class and exploitative capital, by now he had developed a new, neoliberal class theory. On one side stood the entrepreneurs large and small, Fortuyn’s productive class; on the other, a parasitic group of politicians, bureaucrats and welfare recipients. Fortuyn advocated the radical dismantling of bureaucracy in favour of the citizen-consumer, who should no longer be patronized but rather allowed to make his or her own choices.

This economic agenda was interwoven with a nostalgic longing for what Fortuyn called ‘the human scale’: smaller schools, regional hospitals, workplaces close to home. As he saw it, this scaling down would go hand-in-hand with modernization. Local hospitals would be overseen by specialists from a central location through the use of digital technology. Working close to home was possible thanks to newly established neighbourhood internet pavilions. Fortuyn’s utopian horizon was a curious amalgam of fifties nostalgia and Zoom prophecies. But this striving for ‘the human scale’ was also a thinly veiled plea for more inequality. Fortuyn complained in The Disasters of Eight Years Purple that, under the present system, he received the same care as his cleaning lady while paying much more taxes. This was equivalent to ‘the insurance company that replaces your crashed and expensively insured Jaguar with a Fiat Uno and says: here you are’. On one occasion, when Fortuyn was admitted to hospital, he used this reasoning to demand his own private room, only to be laughed at by the hospital director.

For Fortuyn, individual customization meant paying true market prices, bringing an end to the ‘artificial’ equality which the government maintained through social subsidies, the minimum wage and sectoral collective bargaining. He saw collective labour agreements as an archaic mechanism by which the government imposed centralized salary scales and conditions of employment. In their place, individual companies and employees should be left to negotiate the value of work – with flexible contracts supplanting the permanent job. This would lower wages and strengthen the competitiveness of the country as a whole. In this, Fortuyn wrote, he followed a time-honoured logic: ‘if a man will not work, he shall not eat.’

Fortuyn saw all this as an inevitability enforced by globalization, yet he was also aware that the removal of economic certainties could lead to unrest. ‘In addition to a great degree of freedom and a very considerable enlargement of choice,’ he asserted in Against the Islamization of our Culture (1997), globalization ‘also caused anxieties among those who can only very partially reap the benefits of this internationalization of the world.’ His nationalist agenda offered them an important form of compensation. The unrest that unfettered capitalism produced in the socio-economic sphere would be addressed in the cultural sphere. Thomas Frank described a similar process in the United States as ‘The Great Backlash’: politicians mobilized the electorate with ‘controversial cultural themes’ which were intertwined with ‘right-wing economic policies’. For Frank, the resultant culture wars had ‘made possible the international consensus on the free market, with all its privatization, deregulation, and anti-union policies’. Fortuyn’s legacy is to have introduced backlash politics to the Netherlands.

Read on: Marco D’Eramo, ‘They, The People’, NLR 103.

Categories
Uncategorised

Degrees of Separation

In 2015, the American writer Jhumpa Lahiri published an essay in The New Yorker titled ‘Teach Yourself Italian’. Proceeding in a present tense of terse sentences, it detailed Lahiri’s relationship with the Italian language – an ‘infatuation’, which at various stages of her life she had pursued for ostensibly practical reasons: a doctorate on Italian architecture in English Renaissance drama; a holiday; a book tour. Finally compelled to relocate to Rome, Lahiri describes how she soon began writing in Italian, renouncing the language in which she had enjoyed a successful career as a writer ever since her Pulitzer-winning debut Interpreter of Maladies (1999). The essay’s conceit comes in the penultimate paragraph, where Lahiri notes in passing that she is ‘writing this sentence in Italian’. An editorial note confirms the article had indeed been translated. Lahiri’s journey into Italian was thus certified; for her English readers, she was now on the other side of a gauze.

Lahiri subsequently returned to the United States to take up a professorship at Princeton, but her work has remained – both linguistically and intellectually – on foreign shores. She writes her literary work in Italian, sometimes translating herself, while any writing in English takes the form of criticism and translations of Italian and Latin writing. This striking and unusual new course has however remained hard to make clean sense of, or, perhaps, to narrativise. A memoir, In Other Words (2015), written in Italian and published in a bilingual edition, gives a vivid sense of Lahiri’s experience of living in Italy and Italian, as well as what writing in another language has offered her – namely a freedom which is paradoxical, both permissive and restricting. Yet what drove her decision, and what sustains it, is left tantalisingly unarticulated.

Lahiri’s latest book, Translating Myself and Others, follows In Other Words in presenting a kind of composite picture of her writing life since she began working in Italian. It collects recent essays that have dealt with translation both as discipline and a theme. Three essays on novels that Lahiri has translated by Domenico Starnone, first published as companions to them and slightly unbalancing the collection, are nonetheless among the best, demonstrating the well-rehearsed idea that translation is the most intimate form of reading. This is in keeping with all the essays: these are records of intense relationships rather than holistic critical appraisals. Lahiri uncovers resonances with translation throughout Starnone’s novels which, given the terms of her encounter, feel inevitable. Lahiri’s responses to other writers ­– Calvino, Gramsci, Ovid – are similarly focused, a priori, on translation. The essay on Gramsci’s Prison Letters comprises a set of fragmentary observations that circle around doubles, imitations, and responses. Lahiri’s attention to Gramsci’s ‘readings’ of others – including Dante, Dostoevsky, and G. K. Chesterton – develops into a reading, perhaps even a translation, of Gramsci himself.

The essays also contain personal anecdotes and reflections, which are typically forthright, even defiant, in their contentions – ‘I didn’t think that my growing dedication to the Italian language was anything unusual before coming to Italy. I’d never paused to consider what it meant.’ Lahiri is consistently present in her particular critical sensitivities and recurring attention to subjects such as exile, etymologies and ghosts. Yet her presence is nevertheless oblique. In The Clothing of Books (2015), a lecture given in Italian and translated by her husband, Lahiri recalls collaborating with the photographer Marco Delogu on the portrait that would appear on the cover of In Other Words, ‘the first time…I was able to participate in the creation of a book jacket’. In the portrait, Lahiri sits in the reading room of a library in Rome with a large anonymous volume in front of her, her head resting on one hand and her gaze facing, inscrutably, away. The portrait, and her pleasure in directing it, is indicative of a certain distance that Lahiri maintains. Her self-presentation is clear yet ambiguous, an evocation of reticence and indirection as much as an assertion of character. Translating Myself is similarly calculated and precise, and however open it may appear, it is never straightforwardly confessional.

Central to Lahiri’s self-presentation is the notion that translation has always been a part of her life. Lahiri was born in 1967 in London to Bengali parents and moved to Rhode Island, where she grew up. ‘I was raised speaking and living, simultaneously, in English and Bengali, and this meant translating between them, constantly, for myself and for others.’ She went on to study at Columbia and Boston University, pursuing a master’s based around translations of Ashapuna Devi from Bengali, and then the doctorate that prompted her to study Italian. ‘I was a translator before I was a writer’, she has stated. Translation is indeed there in the title of her first short story collection. The story that gives Interpreter of Maladies its title is a kind of fable of translation, turning on the relationship between a tourist visiting Calcutta and her guide, who normally works as a translator at a doctor’s surgery.

Moving between Bengal and the north-eastern United States, the collection is also preoccupied with translation in a wider sense – of people, traditions, and cultures. Lahiri portrays this adroitly from multiple generational standpoints; the social milieu – the middle-class families of university employees – is the more or less unbroken constant. The novel that followed, The Namesake (2003), begins with a quintessential example: a Bengali woman, Ashima, is trying to recreate Calcutta street-food from Rice Krispies and peanuts in her kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Within a couple of pages, we are back at the intersection of wellbeing and language, in a hospital where Ashima struggles with her limited English as she goes into labour: ‘What does it mean, dilated?’

Here and in Lahiri’s next short story collection, Unaccustomed Earth (2008), an attraction to other languages – that is, languages to which the characters have no familial or circumstantial relation – develops into a recurrent motif. The Namesake follows the fortunes of Ashima’s son, Gogol Ganguli (named after his father’s favourite author), as he moves through relationships, jobs, living situations, and, emblematically, names. Experimenting with degrees of distance from his upbringing, he is drawn to Italy, in particular its architecture. The figure who more directly seems to pre-empt Lahiri’s future though is his friend Moushoumi, who moves to Paris: ‘Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge – she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind.’

By the last story in Unaccustomed Earth, events have moved to Rome. The city is presented as a place where two estranged childhood friends from intertwined families are able to forget their origins – at once a non-place, a world away for the characters, and a real place, rendered with the equanimous detail with which Lahiri portrayed Rhode Island or Massachusetts via Calcutta. The Lowland (2013) reads as a transitional work. It follows the lives of two brothers who are drawn between the familiar pulls of tradition and reinvention, as well as, on this occasion, political and ideological forces, including the Naxalite movement of the 1960s. The novel’s pared back style, like these departures, feels more searching than resolved, palpably on the hunt for a new groove. The book’s Italian epigraph, by Giorgio Bassani, points to where Lahiri would eventually find it.

Lahiri published her first Italian novel, Dove mi trovo, in 2018, later translating it herself as Whereabouts (2021). Its spareness has something in common with The Lowland, but two features distinguish its style: in place of the specificity of geographic and cultural coordinates, there is an absence of proper nouns; and Lahiri’s usual close, but discreetly removed, third-person narration is exchanged for first person, previously only employed in a handful of short stories. All of Lahiri’s Italian writing published to date has been in the first person; one of the freedoms Italian grants her seems to be to write as an ‘I’, fictional and her own.

Whereabouts is narrated by an unnamed woman living alone in an unnamed city. It moves episodically through encounters with friends, family and strangers. Each chapter has a prepositional title – ‘In the Piazza’, ‘On the Balcony’ – which combined with the chapters’ briefness gives them the feel of verbal exercises (especially considering the struggles with Italian prepositions recorded in In Other Words). Other facets of its style indicate Whereabouts’s unusual lineage. Chains of near-synonyms suggest an author entranced by her vocabulary book – ‘Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, severed, turned around. I spring from these terms.’ And the odd phrase that jars – ‘a sizable clump of glue’ – suggests a source text in which it probably did not. But what is unusual about these falterings is that they act as markers of authenticity. Lahiri recalls in Translating Myself her insistence on having ‘translated by author’ alongside a story when it was published in The New Yorker, against the reservations of the editors. In her essay on Ovid, she notes: ‘The moment a translation “feels” or “sounds” like a translation, the reader jumps back and accuses it, rejects it.’ In Whereabouts, these moments – the clump of glue – act like the editorial note, stamping it as the genuine article, but also throwing the whole style into relief.

The scholar Rebecca Walkowitz has identified a strand of contemporary literature that aims to resemble translation, which she calls ‘born translated’, in reference to ‘born digital’ images, and which she relates to the dynamics of globalised literary publishing. Her examples include J. M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy, which pretends to unfold in Spanish, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, which pose as unoriginal copies, Junot Diaz’s New Jersey-via-Santo Domingo idiolectic narration, and Haruki Murakami’s Japanese processed through his work as a translator of English. Whereabouts fits into this company in its themes and voice, as well as being ‘born translated’ in a more literal sense. As Walkowitz writes of Coetzee, in Whereabouts, Lahiri ‘creates a text in which…English readers are blocked from imagining a direct, simultaneous encounter with a language that is their own.’

Perhaps this is not such a departure from Lahiri’s English fiction. Her earlier books, preoccupied in their quieter ways with translation, also withhold a ‘direct, simultaneous encounter with language’. Reviewers experienced this as a kind of disjunct between text and effect: a Guardian review of The Namesake celebrated the book’s ‘guileless vocabulary and an appealing lack of stylisation’, which ‘somehow conjures a bleak, arm’s-length mood’. It went on to express a kind of mystification, which has become a trope of Lahiri’s reception: ‘Peer closely at any single sentence, and nothing about it stands out. But step back and look at the whole and you’re knocked out.’ The response may have something to do with the showier, rambunctious novels of the time which dealt with similar concerns – Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), for example, out of which a character named Gogol Ganguli might easily have stepped. In contrast, Lahiri’s narrator is strikingly reserved; as Lahiri would observe and admire in Starnone much later, she never shows her full hand.

These traits have now found fuller realisation in her Italian work. Whereabouts is written ina straightforward syntax extended by paratactic clauses, adjoined with commas, which develop or revise the preceding statement, often sounding like nothing other than translations: ‘She’s in her forties like me but she’s always rushing through life, she’s always harried’. Phrases and adjectives that smack of the thesaurus – ‘is he the hale and hearty son of the pallid young girl?’ – have a similar effect. In a 2018 afterword written for a new edition of The Namesake, Lahiri admits that ‘the prose, from my current perspective, is a bit unruly, refusing to “lie flat”’. Her Italian prose can be seen to achieve this flatness, and yet it is a flatness that estranges rather than producing transparency.

The translator and critic Lawrence Venuti coined the phrase ‘the translator’s invisibility’ for the way in which the translator is routinely ignored or forgotten. Lahiri joins the chorus of voices rejecting this invisibility: highlighting the chastisement translators can expect when they make themselves known, she recounts how one critic resented her introductions to the Starnone novels and advised that next time she ‘let Starnone do all the talking’. At the same time, there is also plainly something that appeals to Lahiri about this status. In the original New Yorker essay, she writes, ‘All my writing comes from a place where I feel invisible, inaccessible.’

We could speculate that this place corresponds to the between-worlds, suspended-in-translation state of Lahiri’s childhood, yet it seems to offer something more actively nourishing than just a symbolic return. With its intimate considerations of translation, articulated with metaphor upon metaphor, Translating Myself appears to be addressing the question of what a translated voice, with its particular invisibility, affords Lahiri. The answer remains elusive. A second, connected question constantly in contention is ‘why Italian?’ This is in fact the title of the book’s first essay, in which Lahiri describes being repeatedly asked: ‘Why Italian instead of an Indian language, a closer language, more like you?’ Sometimes Lahiri appears directly to answer the question, but in fact offers a closed loop – ‘I began writing in Italian to obviate the need to have an Italian translator … something was driving me, in Italian, to speak for myself’.

There are fragments of a more specific answer to be found elsewhere, as in Lahiri’s introduction to her edition of The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories (2019). Though she begins by explaining how she was propelled toward Italian by ‘an inexplicable urge to distance myself, to immerse myself’, the condensed history of the language and its literature that follows suggests more explicable points of affinity. She describes the imposition of Italian – ‘an invention in and of itself’ – on a population that spoke diverse dialects during unification; the way in which Italian Fascism was ‘declined linguistically’ – how the regime defined the language by creating all-Italian neologisms to replace words imported from foreign languages. It was also under Fascism, Lahiri suggests, that confinare – to confine – came into use as a transitive verb, indicating a punitive act. Within this context of imposition and confinement, she is drawn to the work of writers who worked within and in tension with the language’s strictures. She also celebrates Italian’s history of translation, through figures like Cesare Pavese who were translators as much as writers. If her relationship with Italian begun as an inexplicable infatuation, it has developed and been emboldened by its particular histories.

Lahiri is notably sensitive in her fiction to architectural spaces – a house, an apartment, or a room is often the dominant impression a story or chapter by her leaves. She also describes language in spatial terms – ‘Every language is a walled entity’ – as an environment to be negotiated, obeyed, pressed against, through which a situated kind of expression becomes possible. She shares with Beckett, whose influence on Whereabouts, not to say the whole of her move into Italian, is conspicuous, this spatial conception of language – the one Stanley Cavell perceived when he wrote that while begrudging language Beckett understood ‘there is nowhere else to go’. Analogising Italian to a succession of doors, she writes: ‘An unconditional opening, without complications or obstacles, doesn’t stimulate me. Such a landscape, without closed spaces, without secrets, without the presences of the unknown, would have no significance or enchantment for me.’

Is it simply a matter of making things difficult, then: creating obstacles, setting exercises, tangling with etymologies and prepositions? After ten chapters evincing an interest in translation in these terms, the afterword to Translating Myself suggests a more personal set of stakes, of a kind that Lahiri has rarely clarified before. In a manner that not incidentally recalls her earliest English fiction, Lahiri narrates her mother’s declining health and eventual death during the years in which the preceding essays were written. Four days before her passing, Lahiri brings two potted plants to her mother’s bedside. Her mother remarks that she would like to dwell inside them, and these words, Lahiri states, in closing, ‘enable me to translate her unalterable absence into everything that is green and rooted under the sun’. As an endeavour, translation is an acknowledgement of what can’t be changed or even reached, examples of which might include ourselves, our parents, the places we came from, the lives we build, absences, and ghosts. An attempt to carry across something like this into any language can never quite succeed, but achieves its own kind of understanding, its own expressive failure. At her mother’s bedside, back among the relation of language and illness, the delicate presence of interpretation across Lahiri’s writing looks less like arm’s-length detachment and more like a kind of ministration.

Read on: Pascale Casanova, ‘Literature as a World’, NLR 31.

Categories
Uncategorised

Pacific Fictions

France conducted its first nuclear test on 13 February 1960, in doing so becoming the world’s fourth nuclear power. The initial detonation was already four times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. They named the project Gerboise Bleue, after the small rodents who hop around the desert where the tests took place near the Reggane Oasis in Algeria – Gerboise Blanche and Gerboise Rouge would soon complete the tricolore. The French army maintained that they were carried out as safely as possible, though it used human participants in lieu of lab rats: soldiers were made to lie in the sand and then walk towards the explosion’s epicentre less than an hour after detonation (a poll found that 35% developed cancer and 20% became infertile). Anticipating that Algeria may soon gain independence – in the event, tests continued there in secret thanks to the Évian Accords – in 1963 France expanded its nuclear testing to French Polynesia, where de Gaulle established the Centre d’expérimentation du Pacifique. By 1996, when operations came to an end, it had conducted a total of 45 atmospheric and 134 underground detonations, many at a small atoll named Moruroa – a Tahitian word meaning ‘big lies’.

The maverick Catalan director Albert Serra has chosen a portmanteau title with similar connotations for his latest film. According to a recent interview, Pacifiction is intended to simply mean ‘a fiction of the Pacific’, something ‘exotic, artificial and unbelievable’, which might be one way to describe the colonial project in French Polynesia. The islands remain an ‘overseas country’ – France can assume direct control at any time – which is governed by a tripartite of rulers: the French President, a French Polynesian President and a High Commissioner who functions as an emissary of the French state. In Pacifiction, the High Commissioner is a man named De Roller (Benoît Magimel). He dresses in a double-breasted linen suit and blue-tinted shades; he often pouts and flaps his hands in a Trump-like way. Serra has described the character as ‘affable’, a ‘populist’ and a ‘psychopath’.

The big lies at work in Serra’s film also concern nuclear testing. Marines have begun appearing on the island of Tahiti, as have suspicious foreigners with diplomatic passports. We meet two Americans who are likely CIA, and a Portuguese spy with British underlings. De Roller can’t make head or tail of their presence. Rumours abound that nuclear testing is set to resume, but he hasn’t heard anything official. He spends the film telling people not to worry, all the while becoming increasingly worried himself. Every character in Pacifiction appears to be against nuclear testing except for a French Admiral (Marc Susini), also recently arrived on the island, who may well be insane. He tends to look straight through his interlocutors as if drunk or deranged; asked how sailors don’t go mad being at sea for so long, he replies ‘I often wonder that myself’. Speaking to Matahi (Matahi Pambrun), a local representative covered in tattoos both traditional and contemporary, the Admiral justifies nuclear testing as follows: ‘When they see what we’re willing to do to our own people – yes, our own – will they still be able to doubt how our enemies are treated?’ (‘My friend,’ Matahi replies, ‘do you have enemies?’)

The invocation of those to be sacrificed as ‘our own’ has historical precedent. French Polynesians have opposed nuclear testing in their homeland for decades – most forcefully in 1995, when Chirac ended Mitterand’s moratorium on the practice. Tens of thousands took to the street in protest, manning a blockade in the capital Papeete that lasted several days. Journalists from around the world descended on Tahiti to cover the event, as did Greenpeace’s anti-nuclear ship, the Rainbow Warrior II. (French agents had blown up the first Rainbow Warrior in 1985, killing one crew member in the process. Growing up in New Zealand, where it was sunk, I would often visit its memorial at Matauri Bay.) Despite the rallying together of these anti-nuclear powers, France was undeterred. In interviews after testing had resumed, the centre’s director Admiral Jean Lichère explained plainly that they had been given orders and followed them, that there would be no significant impact on the environment, and that the test had occurred so far below water that it didn’t even make a sound. When asked why it wasn’t carried out on French soil, he replied: ‘But this is France!’

It is about midway through Pacifiction that Matahi attempts to strongarm De Roller, telling the High Commissioner that ‘we’re not going back to ’95’. In this sequence, as on other occasions in the film, it is not easy to discern who holds power over whom and in whose interests they are acting. Matahi may be operating as a puppet of the Americans, who may be coordinating the local protests to curb France’s military power. De Roller meanwhile represents the French, but he is more immediately concerned with his own well-being – which, ironically, depends upon the approval of the locals. Rather than an instrument of colonial power, Matahi insists that De Roller should be acting as a shield: ‘We’re asking you to act how we want. Prophylactically.’

Colonialism has often been conceived as a kind of rape and here the symbolism is plain: the nuclear bomb as phallic, masculine, violent, while French Polynesians have historically regarded their islands as feminine, nourishing, womb-like. Tahiti’s colonial history is one of being cast as a fertile fantasyland, beginning with its ‘discovery’ in 1768, when French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville named it after the birthplace of Aphrodite (the story of the mutiny on the HMS Bounty didn’t help matters, nor did Marlon Brando’s starring role in 1962’s Mutiny on the Bounty). When Captain Cook arrived in Tahiti a year later, he brought with him several artists who inaugurated the exoticized depiction of the island’s women, which persisted through the work of Gauguin to contemporary advertisements for tourists. Serra takes up this figure only to subvert it. Male and female servers saunter scantily around the film’s nightclub – called Paradise Night – but any lustre is gone. One scene shows a topless woman dancing as she DJs a never-ending house track. The aural dullness mirrors the bathetic lack of visual spectacle: nudity ad tedium.

Dennis Lim has written for Film Comment that Serra’s films ‘bring the mythic past to life through a rejection of spectacle, by distilling events to the sparest of anecdotes and imbuing figures with the mundane weight of existence’. Serra’s Don Quixote stumbles about in the fog (Honour of the Knights, 2006); his Louis XIV simply rots away in bed (The Death of Louis XIV, 2016). Even when he relies on spectacle, as in the orgies of his previous film, Liberté (2019) – 132 minutes of flesh, piss and wank – a certain dullness sets in. In the case of Pacificition, however, bringing that mythic past to life becomes a more complex endeavour for the fact that the history of Tahiti is riven in two: before and after foreign invasion. But Serra seems less concerned with what Tahiti once was, focusing instead on what it has become, forgoing the island’s local mythology in favour of the perverted Western spectacle imposed upon it. The very first shot of Pacifiction makes this clear: a beautiful pink sky and purple mountain range in the background (in local myth, the terrestrial body of the Tahitian gods), and then in the foreground, shipping containers. It’s one of many images that Serra allows to speak for itself, yet which lays bare the pacific fictions of the colonial imagination. Much of the film is shot through with a similar beauty, yet the use of bilateral blur makes the colours fray at the edges of the frame, undermining the authenticity of such sublime visions. Occasionally, Serra also employs a circular, lens-like effect – the result is a little like watching through the periscope of a nuclear submarine.

Are these images warped by the idealizations of the island fantasy, or merely nuclear fallout? It remains illegal to visit Morurua, which continues to be guarded by the French military and remains absent from some maps. What big lies wait in slumber? While the French government maintains that the tests had no impact, local stories tell otherwise – secret bans on fishing and harvesting, swift deaths from the consumption of fish and coconuts. As the anthropologist Miriam Kahn recounts, in spite of efforts to suppress the health statistics, it was revealed that within a decade of the tests starting, typically radiation-induced diseases such as leukaemia, thyroid cancers and brain tumours began to appear at alarming rates. Early in the film, De Roller recounts that ‘the most terrible thing’ he ever heard was the view that even if nuclear testing was causing illnesses, cancers, birth defects, and other malformations, ‘the nuclear program also afforded us the money to treat them’.

Just as Pacifiction begins with a potent image of empire – the land and the ships that sullied it – it also ends with one. The Admiral leads a group of young soldiers out to sea one morning, instructing them to leave all earthly possessions behind. Perhaps sensing their disquiet, he launches into an impassioned speech – one invoking sacrifice, heroism and the greater good. ‘One day, perhaps, others will recognize your deeds. And that day, the world will have changed!’ It’s an irony beautifully compounded by Serra’s camerawork. In the frame, from left to right, we see one soldier in blue, the next in white, and then lastly, projected from the ship’s hull, a red light splattered on the ocean. After lingering for a moment, Serra pivots rightward, leaving only red – an intimation of the horrors that lie beneath the sea.

Read on: Ian Birchall, ‘Capital of Pariahs’, NLR 98.

Categories
Uncategorised

Adieu Boris, Adieu

In 1985, all Britain’s living ex-prime ministers were invited to 10 Downing Street to mark the 250th anniversary of the building. Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson, Heath, Callaghan and then incumbent Thatcher were all there. To break the ice, Callaghan supposedly asked the others what they thought they had in common. ‘A lack of principle’ Macmillan immediately replied. The rot at the top has deepened measurably since then. Thatcher helped her son to millions in kickbacks for smoothing Saudi arms sales. Major’s government was embroiled in unending cash-for-questions and kiss-and-tell scandals, the PM himself conducting torrid affairs in Number Ten, while his Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Jonathan Aitken, was eventually jailed for perjury in denying Riyadh had settled his Ritz Hotel bills in Paris.

Blair and Brown, both accused of lying about legal exemptions for Formula One racing after a million-pound donation from Bernie Ecclestone, turned to tarring each other over the cash-for-peerages scandal, which saw Scotland Yard knocking on numerous ministerial front doors; not to mention the still unexplained death of whistleblower David Kelly and misleading Parliament over the invasion of Iraq. Cameron was deeply embroiled in the celebrity phone-hacking scandal involving the Murdoch press and his close chum Rebekah Brooks. Theresa May, always coy about her tax returns, was revealed to be linked via her husband to Panama Papers tax-avoidance schemes.

And Johnson? Office parties during lockdown, or sparing the rod to spoil your Pincher, fade in comparison. Claiming not to know about the notorious Mr Pincher (his Deputy Chief Whip) fondling young men’s posteriors at his club was a stupid decision, but a sacking offence? The hallowed domain of the Carlton has surely witnessed worse. The frothing indignation of the British liberal pundits – ‘toxic’, ‘poison’, tarnishing ‘good people’ according to the Economist’s Bagehot column – makes one wonder what these people know of their own history.

Comparisons between Johnson and Trump were always far-fetched. Trump is a disruptive novelty who has succeeded in creating something like a political movement on the right of US politics: numerically quite small, perhaps, but capable of exploiting the radicalizing dynamic that the predominance of gerrymandered one-party constituencies has built into America’s two-party system. Johnson – a social liberal by inclination, who presided over the most diverse cabinet in British history (a litany of opportunists and useful idiots, many of whom are now vying for the top job) – is very different. More of a louche old-school politician with a popular touch, the closest US equivalent would be an upper-class Chris Christie. Johnson has no extra-parliamentary movement. He rode the Brexit wave; he didn’t create it.

It’s miscategorizing Johnson to see him as some right-wing populist excrescence on the fair face of liberal democracy. While the Daily Mail has risen in Johnson’s defence – ‘What the hell have they done?’ – ‘Day Tories Lost Their Marbles’ – ‘Red Wall Backlash Against Tory Traitors’, the Daily Telegraph has been attacking him from the right for turning the Conservative into a ‘semi-socialist party’ with big-state hand-outs and tax rises. Whatever else his ouster is, it’s definitely not a revolt from below. If Johnson had seized the initiative at the start of last week and called a snap election, the voters would likely have returned him with a much-diminished majority. It is rumoured that the Queen baulked at agreeing to dissolve Parliament and call a fresh election. Then BJ baulked at going head-to-head with his monarch. This is England, after all. Amid soaring inflation and rising interest rates there is plenty of discontent in the country, as the widespread support for the striking railway workers and their plain-speaking leader Mick Lynch has shown. But Starmer is desperate to avoid any association with it, banning Labour MPs from joining RMT picket lines, adopting all the Tory policies he can. Johnson, of course, has presided over a hawkish foreign policy and sadism towards refugees, but this is continuity politics in Britain.

What we are witnessing is an internal Tory Party revolt, set in motion by some of Johnson’s long-term personal enemies: ex-Foreign Office mandarin Simon McDonald, the energetic Cummings. The real puzzle is why Tory MPs have lost their heads in this fashion and defenestrated one of their very few leaders capable of galvanizing popular support. True, Conservatives have always been ruthless in dumping Prime Ministers viewed as an electoral liability (in polar contrast, Labour is only ruthless in removing any leader who poses a threat to the values of the extreme centre: before Corbyn there was George Lansbury, considered too radical and replaced by Attlee). But the Tories were not doing so badly in the polls and have done worse since Johnson’s overthrow. Their deep divisions over tax-cutting Thatcherism or ‘One-Englandist’ pork will still prevent them from presenting a coherent programme to the electorate.

Why then are the Tories behaving so irrationally? It appears to be a galloping case of the post-imperial entropy diagnosed by Tom Nairn many decades ago, through which ‘the English conservative Establishment has begun to destroy itself.’ Enoch Powell was an early sign of this – as Nairn put it: ‘symptomatic of the growing paralysis and deterioration of the consensus itself.’ Posing as the answer to British malaise, Thatcher succeeded in rebooting returns on capital and crushed the organized working class for two generations as a political force. But the radicalism she injected into Conservative politics – combined with the decimation of the Tories’ provincial base of local gentry, bank managers and businessmen through the waves of trans-Atlantic acquisitions and privatizations she unleashed – has left the Tory Party permanently damaged. Cameron’s attempts to remodel it on New Labour opened up a vacuum to its right, instantly filled by UKIP and the tyros of the European Research Group.

Thatcherite globalization, along with the abdication of international sovereignty formalized by Blair and Brown, has produced a series of disconnects between governing-class factions, business interests, cosmopolitan intellectuals and provincialized voters, which manifested themselves in the Brexit bid and now in this febrile desertion of the leader, without having a better candidate in place. A Night of the Short Knives has begun, as Tory contenders stab each other in the front. An election looms, probably within the next year. The Tories will be punished for this electorally, which is well deserved; but otherwise Johnson’s departure offers nothing much for the left to celebrate, since Starmer stands for virtually the same policies, not least being as gung-ho for war on Russia, China or anywhere else. A Lib-Lab coalition with SNP support, hoping to glue the UK more firmly together with a new Scotland deal and rapprochement with the EU over the Customs Union, but thereby losing more support in the North, would take the entropy one stage further.

Read on: Tom Nairn, ‘Enoch Powell: The New Right’, NLR I/61.

Categories
Uncategorised

Hard Feelings

‘Our main product’ insists the website of the Medieval Torture Museum, the largest of its kind in the United States, ‘is emotion’. With sites in Chicago, St Augustine (Florida) and a third branch opening this summer on Hollywood Boulevard, the private collection of sadistic historic instruments and replicas aims to surpass its Czech inspiration by abolishing glass cases for garottes, thumb screws and Spanish boots, immersing the visitor in an interactive experience of Old-World suffering, allowing her to inhabit roles of both victim and executioner. In Europe, dusty displays of artefacts might suffice, but in America, it’s important to feel something.

When the LA branch opens its doors, Ottessa Moshfegh will, traffic depending, find herself only twenty or so minutes away. With her husband, the writer Luke Goebel, she lives in Pasadena, in a house reassembled from the ruins of an earthquake. Designed and built by the artist Herman Koller over a fifteen-year period from 1928, Casa de Pájaros is old for California. The stones of the house were salvaged from the San Juan Capistrano Mission, the bell that hangs there from the Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, both late-eighteenth century Spanish colonial structures levelled by the tremor that hit Long Beach in 1933, killing 120 people. The couple moved in just before lockdown, and Moshfegh has described how the age of the materials along with the retreat from modern life enforced by pandemic isolation brought the deep time of the European Middle Ages to mind. When news broke last year that Moshfegh, pigeon-holed as the laureate of millennial ‘sad girls’, had turned to historical fiction it was greeted with some apprehension. Such reports turn out, however, to have been a misunderstanding – Lapvona, despite its putative late-fourteenth-century setting and list of Balkan-ish place and character names, does not stray from the themes of her work to date. Reacting, perhaps, to the curse of pseudo-relevance which made her satire of contemporary feminine abjection and narcissism, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), into a lockdown parable, Moshfegh, like the Medieval Torture Museum, has simply diversified her portfolio of locations. The novel is the latest result of a decade-long obsession with, in the words of one Lapvonian, ‘hard feelings’.

Born in Boston, the middle child of an Iranian father and Croatian mother, both of whom were professional classical musicians, Moshfegh, 41, was initially set to follow in the family trade. In her adolescence, an oversubscribed music summer school and an empty spot on a creative writing course altered her path without affecting her artistic methodology. If Moshfegh stands out from many of her contemporaries in the nebulous marketing category of ‘women’s literary fiction’ it is not for her perversity, or unashamed interest in lapses of bodily etiquette, but because of her commitment to the craft of narrative. Every sentence appears the product of rehearsal, every plot paced as if by metronome. In a now-infamous Guardian interview, she described having written her breakout success Eileen (2016) following the prompts laid out in Alan Watt’s guide The 90-day Novel. Moshfegh’s comments, along with her declared ambitions for fame and fortune, were taken to reflect a hustling fraudulence, a lack of respect for the muses and the divinity of literary inspiration. In fact, Moshfegh’s approach – which has produced a series of delicately hinged psychological thrillers and mysteries – relies on treating inspiration as work; in interviews she describes a hermetic tendency that, when combined with a stoic daily writing practice, yields novels that accelerate almost imperceptibly, pushing their protagonists across the state lines of ordinary misery and into the lawless borderlands of pathological chaos. In the introduction to Week One of his course Watt writes, ‘if we allow our subconscious some time to play, our characters tend to surprise us.’

The risk of such an approach is that the result becomes formulaic. While the plots and settings of most of her fiction cluster around a set of easily identifiable themes (wipe-clean institutional buildings, temporary and unproductive employment, embittered social isolation – for her characters the challenge is not to change the world, but to flee it), Moshfegh has developed a line in idiosyncratic narrative voice that elevates her stories beyond the conventions of their genres. In Death In Her Hands (2020) the protagonist and narrator Vesta, discovering her own capabilities for the first time in the aftermath of a controlling and miserable marriage, anxiously probes the interior of her ‘mindspace’, the kind of jarring word choice that sets Moshfegh’s anti-heroes just west of centre within the frames they inhabit (on the New Yorker fiction podcast in 2018, she described a similar move by Sheila Heti who writes, in her story ‘My Life Is a Joke’, that someone conceived ‘using fertility’. ‘Why did she do that?’, Moshfegh puzzles admiringly).

The Melvillian novella McGlue (2014), her debut, recounts an elongated dark night of the soul of a nineteenth-century Massachusetts sailor who may have killed his best friend and lover during an alcoholic blackout in Zanzibar. Ostensibly historical fiction, McGlue shows her revelling not in the details of 1800s Salem maritime life but rather in the disorganising vessel of a fraying mind; when the ship’s captain asks McGlue for his thoughts a litany of exotic luxuries ensues – goods to be smuggled in the gash in his head – that runs over a page and a half: ‘What I have been thinking, captain, is what is exempt from import tax in one country is what I’d like to stick through the crack in my skull to fill it: hay, oranges, lemons, pineapples, cocoa nuts, grapes, green fruit and vegetables of every variety and linseed oil cake.’ Repeatedly in her fiction, everyday objects become tests for the limits of the body, which must be stuffed, ruptured and purged as a proof of existence.

Thanks to the commercial success of My Year of Rest and Relaxation – whose narrator, a young, rich, beautiful Manhattanite, decides to take a pharmacologically-fuelled sabbatical from life on the eve of 9/11 – Moshfegh is often touted as a writer of young womanhood. In fact, over the course of her writing she has regularly adopted the subject position of the elderly and middle aged: the narrator of Eileen is in her mid-70s, Vesta a similar age, the most memorable protagonists of her short fiction (‘Disgust’, ‘No Place for Good People’, ‘The Beach Boy’) range from their late forties to sixties. Old age, more evidently than youth, allows her characters to physically unclench – the younger ones rely heavily on laxatives – and to release themselves of the weighty expectations of success, beauty, even happiness. These characters, the women especially, have quit the rat race of social recognition, weaponize their invisibility and delight in muddling the rationality of the contemporary mundane. When Vesta visits the public library, hunting a missing body, she Asks Jeeves how to solve a murder; the search engine directs her to instructions on how to write a murder mystery and for the rest of the book dying and writing are synchronous acts, best performed by those who’ve seen it all.

The two regions of America in which Moshfegh has lived also comprise the locations of her fiction: the northeast shoulder of the USA (Eileen, McGlue, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death In Her Hands) and its southwest hip (the bulk of the short story collection Homesick for Another World). Lapvona, her sixth book and fifth novel, belongs to the latter, offering a Hollywood view of feudal Europe. Closer to Duloc than Montaillou, the medieval world of the novel is a costume not a thesis for Moshfegh, distanced enough from the obfuscatory familiarity of the contemporary to allow her to focus on what she really cares about: pain. It is also the first of her novels written in the third person. No longer propelled by the missteps of her trademark unreliable narrator, in the absence of a protagonist’s voice one imagines instead an omniscient creator. The effect is to redirect attention to the author, who one now sees as crouched with a magnifying glass over the sandbox world she has constructed, alternately illuminating and scorching the dramatis personae. The novel switches episodically between characters – a technique unknown in her earlier fiction in which plot equals protagonist, and a development surely not unrelated to her recent work as a screenwriter – the narrative unfurling in linear time across five consecutive seasons.

Lapvona charts the unlikely rise of Marek, a shepherd boy afflicted with scoliosis (from which Moshfegh herself has suffered since childhood), ‘from lowly lamb herder’s son to the lord of Lapvona’. After manslaughtering the Lord’s preening heir (who, in a characteristically Moshfeghian detail is brought down by vanity: his sleek crimson and blue leather boots causing him to slip on craggy rocks after Marek has lured him high to hunt for gulls), Marek is adopted by the fey and febrile Villiam, who substitutes him for his dead son in the soiled games of the court. While coprophagia reigns in the castle, in the village below the peasants turn to cannibalism in the wake of a drought exacerbated by the maintenance of Villiam’s ornamental lakes. Life is hardly worth hanging on to in the village of Lapvona, characters lie down beside dried out riverbeds and hope for death or slip away from a residue of poisoned claret dried on their lips, ‘so fragile was she, so willing to leave this stupid life behind.’ Those who survive seem to know that they shouldn’t have, that the good are always the second to go, hot on the heels of the innocent.

Marek’s ascension to nobility leads him back to the mother who abandoned him after failing to abort him, and the novel concludes with an act which could be motivated by revenge but feels more like the inevitable fulfilment of the book’s ceaselessly cruel logic. Elderly characters are, once more, an exception to the rule of brute stupidity that governs Moshfegh’s fiction; Ina, a wild woman, wet nurse and witch, survives plagues, raids and floods to act as a spiritual conscience for the village, advocating a love for Christ in nature not the Church. ‘You can’t believe the difference in my sleep, now that I know what time is to me, and not what it meant to the church’, Grigor, another aged survivor (and EP Thompson avant la lettre) tells her, before she opens his heart to the real God, to be found ‘in the harmonious song of spring’.  

The scaffolding of Lapvona is characteristically robust: resolutions are achieved, arcs conclude with the ironic flourishes that are the trademarks of Moshfegh’s character development, but the ultimate effect is overburdensome, the pillars and poles of the neatly paced plot begin to bow under the weight of all the misery they must support. The final effect is akin to that of having feasted on a fridge full of rotten food, where even the ice water reeks of canned fish. For the digestor of this fiction as well as its creator the same maxim holds: just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. Thematically, Lapvona hardly exceeds the carnivals of bad taste in Moshfegh’s other works – why, then, does it feel so oversaturated with suffering? Here Moshfegh’s shift to the third person explains more than her deployment of a studio feudalism. Lapvona is the first of Moshfegh’s works to take a location as its subject, not a character. Where, in her other fiction, Moshfegh offers up similar grotesqueries, the experiences are channelled through a single perspective, forming the basis of a psychological profile. Even when, plausibly, that single character is a synecdoche for the baseness of humans en masse, the fact remains that our worst moments are ours alone, our perversions symptomatic but ultimately unique. In the populous world of Lapvona there is no limit to the numbers upon which anguish can be visited, and, without the confines of a first person perspective, no obsessional introspection to justify the foulness. At her best, Moshfegh is able to make an unhinged flight from reality seem the only logical move, but in Lapvona the narrative, determined by place not character, has nowhere to go.

Read on: Christopher Middleton, ‘The Sexual Division of Labour in Feudal England’, NLR I/113-134.

Categories
Uncategorised

Fight or Flight

It was supposed to be boring – the end of history, that is. In Francis Fukuyama’s famous characterization, human society had reached its final resting place chiefly through the exhaustion of alternatives. Far from triumphal, The End of History and the Last Man (1992) ended on a melancholy note:

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands…In the post-historical period, there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.

Fukuyama has maintained his position, arguing that the persistence of division and conflict – most recently in Ukraine – has done nothing to disprove this essential claim. But what if the end of history isn’t like that at all? What if the last man is not a gloomy docent dusting off the artifacts of humanity’s great epochs – what if, instead, he’s a maniac on the run, dashing wildly through time and space, babbling breathlessly as he tries to deliver some interminable monologue?

This is one way to describe the world of the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai. A cult figure in the anglosphere since around the turn of the millennium, Krasznahorkai is best known for major novels including Satantango (1985), The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), War & War (1999) and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2016). His ironic, philosophical body of work bears the unmistakeable influence of Kafka; it is dominated by a sense of universal ruin, and the belief that epic possibility has vanished from our world, if indeed it had ever been here in the first place. Perhaps surprisingly, this is an outlook that remained largely continuous across the historic caesura of 1989-1990. Krasznahorkai’s first novels, written after he completed his studies in law and literature, were set among the moral decay of the Hungarian Communist regime’s final years. But the replacement of this system with another inspired in him neither triumph nor relief, as he would later say in interview: ‘the world in Hungary was absolutely abnormal and unbearable, and after 1989 it was normal and unbearable.’ Party elites there proved particularly capable of maintaining their power and influence; economic hardship was wrought by rapid privatization and austerity; a combination of integrationist neoliberalism and reactionary nationalism took hold. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Krasznahorkai travelled widely – he has lived in Berlin, the US, Spain and Japan – and the locations of his fiction roamed accordingly. But his work has continued to be inflected by Central Europe’s past and present.

In recent years, Krasznahorkai has become increasingly drawn to a particular kind of narrative: the single-perspective story involving a hunt or chase. His characters are regularly harried and pursued, or perhaps they flee pre-emptively – their flight accompanied by rambling, vertiginous monologues rendered in Krasznahorkai’s trademark long, labyrinthine sentences. These flights are ultimately hopeless, and yet the nature of their failure is emblematic of how Krasznahorkai understands our ‘post-historical’ times. The novella Chasing Homer – his most recent book, which has been translated by John Bakti and published by New Directions – represents the purest articulation and refinement of this narrative strategy, which we might call the sentence-as-pursuit. Here an anonymous, disoriented, paranoid being dashes madly across Europe, determined to outrun or evade his pursuers for as long as they can. Nearly every chapter is a single sentence, a breathless – and sometimes interrupted – monologue by its narrator-on-the-run. Each is accompanied by a painting by the German painter Max Neumann and a QR code that, when scanned, plays compositions by Hungarian jazz drummer Szilveszter Miklós. Taken together, it is an unstable and exhilarating work.

Initially, Chasing Homer appears as a kind of escape narrative in the abstract. We learn nothing of the narrator, save that they are on the run; they confess to having no memories and no past, to being trapped in the perpetual here and now: ‘…such a focused state of being remains uninterrupted, nonstop, ongoing, it’s not even worth speaking of instants, especially not of two instants, moreover two successive instants, how ridiculous…’ Yet here and now is not clear either. ‘I’ve no idea what country this is, as far as I’m concerned it could be any country’. The pursuers, meanwhile, are unnamed and unseen: one begins to doubt they exist. The narrator’s decisions seem odd and arbitrary, too – their ‘survival strategies’ are nothing but ‘constant makeshifts’, since a move in any direction is just as likely to attract their pursuers. Their fear, throughout, is palpable, not only in the skidding, screeching monologue and the vivid depictions of anticipated violence, but in the lurching percussion of the musical accompaniment.

About halfway through, however, the setting suddenly resolves into a specific place: the Adriatic coast. The narrator runs from Pola to Fiume, considers Dubrovnik, then continues via boat to Mljet, allegedly the island where Odysseus was trapped by Calypso until Hermes arrived with the gods’ order to free him. Here a sense of fated possibility awakens:

I must plunge, from the edge of a moment right into its midst, and onward, from one wave to the next, just like some Moby-Dick, or a dying butterfly between two flower petals, I must keep fleeing, even if on top of everything, as I have already mentioned, there’s no such thing as two moments.

Mistakenly believing Mljet to be uninhabited, the narrator experiences a ‘tranquillity’ that they chalk up to either exhaustion or mental derangement. They suddenly have the sense that they are being driven by an unknown power, and so they continue past the sign that says ODYSSEUS’S CAVE, feeling lighter, freer, almost as if they’re flying – until they smash through the fence and tumble off a cliff, falling deep into a chasm. Down below, and here the novella shifts to italics, a group of scuba divers emerges from an underwater passage. One of them notices something on the beach, and investigates: ‘…approaching it cautiously, for that thing might have been anything, and after reaching it, and giving it a kick or two, he waves to the others, calling: “It’s all right, just a dead rat, nothing to worry about.”’ A final chapter, entitled ‘No’, contains only the words: ‘No, I was never giving up’, accompanied by a minute-and-a-half long drum track.

It is certainly one of Krasznahorkai’s stranger chase sequences. As in Kafka, the sudden change of perspective is not just darkly funny, but also world-turning. One man’s transcendence is another man’s gobbledygook: one person’s hero is another’s trash. If this is an Odyssey, it is a distinctly postmodern one. Our protagonist faces an obstacle-strewn Mediterranean journey, but this is an Odysseus without an Ithaca – his journey is all from and no to, all chase and no telos. The closest thing to a destination is the cave of Calypso, a mythic place of isolation and purgatory, yet any final resolution is foreclosed by the perspective of people to whom the quest means nothing.

Novalis described philosophy as a homesickness, an urge to find a resting place. The Krasznahorkian chase might be said to be a frantic enactment of this desire. It seeks the home – which can be found in anything – as a site of refuge from the threat that’s present in everything. The chase is thus an existential condition, or at least a response to one: ‘my fate is to be on the roads’, says the narrator, who is ‘forced to sojourn in precisely the very world from – and because of – which I’m fleeing’. Krasznahorkai’s narrators are, or believe they are, hunted and pursued across a world that’s continually falling apart. They are always in a hurry, always afraid. And, as they run, they talk – they blabber and they hector, they lose their train of thought, they imagine the attention of the audience waning and demand you hear them out.

But what exactly are these characters fleeing? When they run, they do so in fear – and defiance – of what Krasznahorkai often calls ‘war’. This should not be mistaken for literal fighting. Krasznahorkian ‘war’ is rather a kind of brutality that sniffs out anything different or weak, unrationalised and unassimilated. It is personified by characters such as the scheming Mrs. Eszter in The Melancholy of Resistance or the militaristic Mastemann of War & War. In the fictional lecture series at the heart of The World Goes On (2013), Krasznahorkai has an imprisoned thinker discuss why ‘war’ is so hard to escape: 

This most maleficent demon is not the same as the angel of death, for it is not the spirit of peace but the demon of war, of delight that everything in existence can be ruined…nothing and no one is exempt from its sway.

Krasznahorkai’s work is gripped by this insatiable logic of ruination, as well as the lure and danger of ‘security’ – security of the body and security of knowledge. The lecturer accuses his wardens of being ‘most concerned with the predictability of the world, in other words, your own security’ – faced with the ‘collapse of the imagination’, he suggests, the ‘only possibility was to retreat’. Throughout this work, it is violence carried out in the name of security that proves most destructive. Like the paranoid beast in Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’, the more you build up your defences, the more you lose your sense of what’s inside and what’s outside. Krasznahorkai’s short prose work Animalinside (2010) is seemingly narrated by a black dog who, taunting the reader, boasts that attempts to defend oneself are all in vain because ‘one day I shall come’ – yet, as the title suggests, the animal may already be here, within us.

The fear of ‘war’ in Krasznahorkai’s novels is total because it is everywhere – in a world where power knows no boundaries, there is no shelter. War & War depicts four travellers seeking sanctuary who witness a series of pivotal moments in the history of globalization. In one case, they await news of Columbus’s return. If Gibraltar falls as the world’s known horizon, one traveller says, then ‘with Gibraltar the world, and with the world the notion of anything with limits, and with the end of limits the end of everything known, everything, but everything would come to a stop’. He laments the Age of Exploration ushering in the ‘intoxication of sobriety’, a condition no less fallible than what came before, but uniquely unable to recognise limits or mistakes. (Against such epistemological ruthlessness, Krasznahorkai offers a few moments of mercy, tenderly sheltering animals or weaklings; the lecturer ends his speech by refusing to reduce a reclusive bird to its evolutionary defence mechanisms.) As Krasznahorkai lamented in an interview, describing the market’s degradation of cultural value, ‘the victory is total…there’s space only for the barbarian, the brutal, and it possesses such an immense power, where everything is priced to the dollar and cent, no historical power has ever compared in the history of the globe. And there is a globe now, which there wasn’t before, in this sense of the word’.

Ever since Susan Sontag dubbed him the ‘Hungarian master of the apocalypse’, Krasznahorkai has often been read in eschatological terms. But his fictions do not offer the resolution or moral clarity of judgement day. Instead, they depict a ruling order that presents itself as the ‘end of history’ yet refuses to concede its contingencies and limitations. Krasznahorkai does not attribute this condition to the loss of left alternatives as much as the unstoppable spread of commercialism, cynicism about human nature and self-fulfilling nihilism. As his lecturer argues: ‘We are in the midst of a cynical self-reckoning as the not-too-illustrious children of a not-too-illustrious epoch that will consider itself truly fulfilled only when every individual writhing in it – after languishing in one of the deepest shadows of human history – will finally attain the sad and temporarily self-evident goal: oblivion’.

The Krasznahorkaian narrator is propelled by fear – ‘it is enough’, the narrator of Chasing Homer says, ‘that I’m afraid’. Yet fear, in his world, brings no shame. Of the two archetypal responses to fear, fight and flight, Krasznahorkai champions the latter. Better, it seems, to be a holy fool than a policeman, a fugitive than a border guard. The act of fleeing here takes on a curious kind of heroism. It might be futile, but there is something in having tried. A monologue, however strange, implies the hope of someone listening. And those who choose to run reveal, in their disobedience, just how many places and ideas are rendered off-limits. What Krasznahorkai’s maladjusted, fearful, logorrheic heroes offer is an alternative to contemporary disillusionment: not solipsistic defensiveness or brutal realpolitik, but the hope that somewhere out there, across an unbreachable border, lies something better. When Kafka said that there was infinite hope, just not for us, he meant it. The same goes for Krasznahorkai. Against the failure of imagination that characterises our age, he offers imaginary failures. You can’t have hope, but you can’t give up on it either.

Read on: Ryan Ruby, ‘Privatised Grand Narratives’, NLR 131.

Categories
Uncategorised

Memory and Desire

Pedro Almodóvar’s most recent film has been widely characterised as an intervention – humane or political or both – an attempt on the part of Spain’s pre-eminent filmmaker to reckon with the legacy of Franco and the Civil War. The reasoning is clear enough. Parallel Mothers partly concerns the efforts of Janis (Penélope Cruz), a photographer based in modern-day Madrid, to exhume the likely burial site of her great-grandfather, a Republican who was arrested one night in July 1936. It’s certainly true that Almodóvar has never been this close to the fact of fascist violence, and rarely so far, at least in recent decades, from his dependable formula of reminiscing artists (Bad Education, Broken Embraces, Pain and Glory) and anguished or misfiring parent-child relationships (Flower of My Secret, All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Volver, The Skin I Live In, Julieta). But Parallel Mothers, as well as exhibiting traces of these elements, is also continuous with Almodóvar’s temperamental pliancy, reflecting as it does orthodox and to some degree official Spanish attitudes.

There’s a striking belatedness to the intervention. What Parallel Mothers offers is not a portrait of the military uprising mounted by Franco in 1936 or the Civil War, the ensuing dictatorship that lasted until his death in 1975, the subsequent decades in which knowledge of his crimes were suppressed, or even the historical-memory movement associated with interventions such as Javier Cercas’s novel Soldiers of Salamis (2001). Instead, it portrays that movement’s orchestrated second wave, as represented by PSOE’s 2007 ‘Law of Historical Memory’, which Cercas himself described as ‘embarrassingly evocative’ of the totalitarian recognition that ‘the best way to control the present is to control the past’. It was around this time that Almodóvar suggested that ‘we don’t forget that period’. Two years after the law was passed he announced that ‘a moment arrives when it’s impossible to renounce memory’, and it is telling that his contributions to this effort, as a producer (of the 2018 documentary The Silence of Others) and now writer-director have come at this advanced, officially sanctioned stage of the process and take the form not of uncovering the secrets of the past, but depicting tributes to the long-dead as a prominent feature of contemporary Spanish life.

For a long time, Almodóvar appeared unequivocal in his belief that history was less a nightmare than a nuisance. Born in La Mancha, in 1949, he moved to Madrid in his late teens, and started shooting in 8mm while working for the state-owned Telefónica. His breakthrough films, Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980) and Labyrinth of Passion (1982), emerged from la movida, the populist avant-garde cultural movement that developed in the years after the dictatorship, and celebrated the freedoms of which they were a product. Almodóvar’s early work, inspired by farce and noir, comic books and melodrama, might seem to be reclaiming fascist kitsch – nuns, moustached machismo – as liberationist camp, if it weren’t for an apparent fear of social or political comment. Omitting to mention the post-Franco pacto de olvido (Pact of Forgetting) and the related laws of amnistía, twin pillars of the culture of silence that characterised the transición to democracy (1975-1982) and beyond, Almodóvar presented his work’s indifference to the recent past as either tough realism, or the key to progress. In a 1983 interview with the Spanish film magazine Dirigido Por, he argued that ‘these are ghosts which half the country doesn’t share’. In 1988, he said, ‘I don’t want to let even the memory of Francoism exist in my films’, and again, ten years later, talking to the Argentine newspaper La Nación, he insisted that he preferred to act ‘as if in Spain we had always been modern and frivolous… as if Franco had never existed’.

The scholar Joan Ramon Resina has argued that the transición exploited the category of aesthetic to advance its ‘disremembering’ agenda, inducing the Spanish people to introject ‘political rule as a harmonious, imaginative, even critical projection’ of their own ‘creative acquiescence’. Almodóvar appeared all too eager to play along. As the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín once wrote, ‘his civil war had been with his father’ – a repressive Catholic – and the name of Almodóvar’s production company, El Deseo (Desire), reflects the character of his horizons. (Compare, say, Spike Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule, the terms of Sherman’s offer to pro-Union black families along the South Carolina and Georgia coast.) When Almodóvar’s films did allude to the Franco era – as, for example, in a 1974 flashback in High Heels (1991) depicting a Catalan doctor going into exile – it was not to explore the legacy of trauma or the residual Francoism of Spanish society, but to provide a source of contrast, a way to signal how far that society had come, modernity and frivolity abounding. If Almodóvar couldn’t quite expunge Franco’s thirty-five-year rule, he could at least promote the view that his influence died along with him.

This was the impression given even by rare moments of direct engagement. Live Flesh (1997) opens during one of Franco’s states of emergency (moved from 1969 to 1970) when Víctor is born to a prostitute mother on a city bus. It ends, more than a quarter of a century later, with Víctor’s partner giving birth in the back of a car against a markedly different backdrop. Paul Julian Smith, in Desire Unlimited, his study of Almodóvar, describes this as a ‘breath-taking’ volte face and a brave confrontation with the country’s history, but it seems instead a way of denying the past, or at least minimising its relevance. In the first scenes, the streets of Madrid are empty, and Víctor’s mother gives birth only because she is too uneducated to realise that her waters had broken. In the mid-1990s, his partner is better informed, but traffic, commercial activity and general urban good cheer slow their course. ‘You’re much luckier than I was’, Víctor says, addressing the nearly born baby. The people of Spain, he concludes, ‘stopped being scared a long time ago’. 

In reality, there remained plenty of cause for apprehension. Live Flesh was produced shortly after Partido Popular led by José María Aznar – a party founded by senior figures of the dictatorship – came to power after thirteen years of socialist rule. Víctor is married to a wealthy Italian and works as a volunteer at her nursery, but for many unemployment (then at twenty percent, high even by Spanish standards) was a problem. ETA, the Basque separatist group, were engaged in an ongoing campaign of violence, including attempts to assassinate Aznar and the King. But Almodóvar’s head-in-the-sand-ism didn’t only apply to the unfolding present, removed as it may have felt from the darkest days of Franco’s rule, but also the transición. In Bad Education (2004), a man blackmails a former priest who abused him at boarding school. ‘This is 1977’, he explains. ‘This society puts my freedom above your hypocrisy’. And so it proves – his scheme pays off. 

Yet for all Almodóvar’s apparent belief in the fresh start, 1975 as something like a Year Zero, he has also displayed a pronounced emphasis on the burden of inheritance. The key to continuing is to unblock the past. Of the seven films that he has made this century, five, including Talk to Her (2002) and The Skin I Live In (2011), hinge on a flashback structure, while another, Volver (2006), has recourse to a long expository speech, a device also used in Broken Embraces (2009), where a character whose past experiences are not encompassed by the flashbacks gives a blow-by-blow account of her role in the action, then adds – almost by way of justifying the contrivance – ‘I think the catharsis did me good’. While there’s a temptation to suggest that Almodóvar was seeking to allegorise repression, the events exerting power over the present have gone unmentioned on account not of a social contract to forget, or a legal injunction to forgive, but for internal narrative reasons – the clandestine or criminal nature of the activities, or their potential explosiveness. A more likely reading is that such structuring devices, hardly rare in drama, are indispensable to the form that this director has increasingly favoured, melodrama.

There is a fairly obvious example of a director who swerved from stories of the private or individual to the national or collective, a particular favourite of Almodóvar himself: Douglas Sirk. Born in Hamburg to Danish parents, Sirk worked in theatre and film in Germany before emigrating in 1937 to the United States. He established himself with a run of so-called women’s pictures starting with All I Desire (1953), and including All that Heaven Allows (1955) and Written on the Wind (1956), but then he made Battle Hymn (1957), in which a fighter pilot arranges the evacuation of Korean orphans, and adaptations of Faulkner’s Pylon, about the legacy of the First World War during the Depression (The Tarnished Angels, 1957), and Erich Maria Remarque’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), in which a German soldier turns against the Nazis. But Sirk’s films were always geared to public questions, and another filmmaker, though less immediately comparable, offers a closer and more damning – albeit inverse – precedent for Almodóvar’s progress and its relationship with Franco’s legacy.

Like Almodóvar, Alain Resnais, who was born one hundred years ago this month, had a strict Roman Catholic upbringing, was energised by American culture, especially comic books, experimented with 8mm, lived under fascist rule, and belonged to a movement associated with freedom and dissent – the group identified by the critic Richard Roud, writing in Sight and Sound, as the rive gauche branch of the nouvelle vague. The dozen films that Resnais made that coincided with Almodóvar’s career, between 1980 and 2014, among them L’Amour à mort and Smoking / No Smoking, exhibit a similar interest in theatricality and meta-theatrical tropes (a curtain rising on the action, etc), in old friends reuniting and old passions reviving, as well as a tendency to draw on a repertory company (skewing a little more male in Resnais’s case). The creator of Mélo – literally music but with inevitable connotations of melodrama – also shared a taste for Sirk, for surrealism (Cocteau as well as Dali and Buñuel), for Hitchcock and for Dennis Potter, whose influence can be detected in his lip-synced musical On Connait La Chanson (1998) and Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, in which a comatose woman is sexually abused, the notorious subject matter of Brimstone and Treacle (1982).

A chasm however exists between the way they have dealt with history. From the 1950s until the 1970s, Resnais made a series of documentaries and modernist experiments that considered the recent past as a collective phenomenon. The Statues Also Die (1953), his short documentary about African art, was commissioned by Présence Africaine, the Auschwitz record Night and Fog (1956) by the Committee for the History of the Second World War and Réseau du souvenir, which was devoted to the deportations. While his best-known film, Last Year in Marienbad (1961), produced during this period, might be seen as a study of a more conceptualized past along the lines of Almodóvar’s stories, albeit in a different idiom, the follow-up, Muriel, or The Time of the Return (1963), deals directly with the Occupation and Algeria, while titles like Guernica (1950), All the Memory in the World (1956) – a portrait of the Bibliothèque Nationale – and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), his fiction debut, indicate a frontal approach.

During what could be considered the historical-memory phase of Resnais’s work, he collaborated on two occasions with the Madrid-born novelist, memoirist and politician – and NLR contributor – Jorge Semprún, a refugee from the Spanish Civil War who fought in the French resistance and was interned at Buchenwald. La Guerre Est Finie (1965) told the story of a Spanish Communist planning a strike, based partly on Semprún’s experience. Their second collaboration, Stavisky… (1974), concerned the Jewish financier whose embezzling scheme prompted the 1934 riots in Paris, and begins with Trotsky arriving on the Riviera. (In the intervening period, Semprún had written a novel that touched on Trotsky’s exile, The Second Death of Ramon Mercader, winner of the 1969 Prix Femina, as well as the scripts for Costa-Gavras’s political thrillers Z and The Confession.) 

It was after Stavisky… that Resnais began to shift from what he called ‘virtuous projects, with grand, noble ideas’ towards divertissements. (Last Year in Marienbad, for all its apparent thematic overlap with Hiroshima Mon Amour and Muriel, had been a harbinger of his taste for play). He may have felt he had done his duty, or perhaps he intuited that an epoch was over, or a stage of a project complete. Historical memory was becoming a subject of study, especially in France. ‘Mémoire’ was the subject of work by Pierra Nora (Les Lieux de Mémoire, 1984-1992) and Jacques Le Goff (Histoire et mémoire, 1988), special issues of L’Écrit du temps, Representations, Psychanalystes and Communications, and one might add any number of related breakthroughs, from Deleuze’s philosophy of ‘the phantasm’ to his Bergsonian reflections, on Resnais among others, in his second book on cinema. 

The intention was not to impose an unfamiliar moral or intellectual agenda but to build on progress already made. Historians could look to an existing discursive tradition, particularly the work of the psychologist Maurice Halbwachs, who had theorised ‘collective mémoire’ and ‘les cadres sociaux de la mémoire’ in the 1920s. And the Pétain era had been immediately followed by an épuration légale – which curdled into an épuration sauvage – as well as a wider desire to take stock. The Commission for the History of the Occupation and Liberation of France was founded in October 1944, the Committee for the History of the Second World War the following year. In 1987, Henry Rousso, a member of l’Institut d’histoire du temps présent, published his monumental study, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, at one point presenting a chart – a ‘temperature curve’ – with only rare spots of ‘calm’ to emphasise the fervency of debate over what he considered a French civil war (‘guerre franco-française’). In Rousso’s account, De Gaulle, eager to promote his ‘certain idea of France’, helped foment the resistance narrative, which Rousso mocks as résistancialisme, but his eclipse at the end of 1960s, coinciding with the cultural energy injected by les événements, gave way to a ‘counter-myth,’ as embodied in Marcel Ophuls’s documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), Robert O. Paxton’s book Vichy France (1972), the novelist Patrick Modiano’s Occupation trilogy (1968-72) and Bernard-Henri Lévy’s The French Ideology (1981), in which wartime France was painted as a nation of avid collaborationists and anti-Semites. (Stavisky…, with a Jewish central character, and set in the decade before the Occupation, was to some degree a product of this turn.) But while there was no consensus, few would have argued for the virtues of silence or forgetting.

Clearly a cultural movement or academic discipline based around remembering the past could have no equivalent in the Spain of that time. The Civil War had been followed not just by decades of Francoist rule but a succession plan – specifically a ‘transition,’ not a rupture or break – in which many of the same surnames dominated. Occasionally with the same forenames, too: Manuel Fraga, the politician who can be heard announcing the state of emergency in Live Flesh, was serving as the president of the Galician regional government when the film came out. (So much for Almodóvar’s chalk-and-cheese book-end structure.) Instead of immediate épuration, there had been decades of continuity, then olvido and amnistía. As Peter Burke once argued, history isn’t determined by the victors but forgotten by them. The counterpart in Spanish historiography to Rousso’s The Vichy Syndrome was Paloma Aguilar’s tale of expedient forgetting, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy.

Since then, there has been a revolution in thinking. Yet even in a context where historical memory has become a cultural norm or obligation, Parallel Mothers reasserts Almodóvar’s suspicion of, or distaste for, anything but a personal past. As in Live Flesh, history is confined to the margins. Janis’s investigation takes the form of an encounter with an archaeologist from the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, a couple of updates by telephone, and then, in the final scenes, a visit to a common grave. The rest of the film is dedicated to its engaging melodrama plot, in which Janis inadvertently takes home the baby of a teenage mother, Ana, who is sharing her room on the maternity ward, and then opts not to reveal the mix-up. Historical-memory processes are reduced to an essentially conceptual role, or as ballast for a story about an act of avoidance (also involving DNA swab tests). 

But while Almodóvar builds an analogy – a parallel – between kinds of behaviour or far-flung epochs, he appears uninterested in what might bridge them, not even the potential impact of familial or societal trauma on the character in whose emotional fate we are asked to invest. When Resnais called the Trotsky sections of Stavisky… ‘a subplot, parallel plot’, he was pointing to connections of a more than symbolic kind. Trotsky and Stavisky were not both merely ‘outsiders’, but Russian Jews, treated as ‘métèques’ in 1930s France, with the same policeman (Gagneux, renamed Gardet in the film) working their cases. Almodóvar’s approach instead recalls the critic Serge Daney’s observation, in the newly translated The Cinema Home and the World, that certain so-called political films command moral and ideological assent through appeal to a ‘metaphysical’ theme – e.g., the ‘abstract courage to resist in general’ – which rather than yielding insight about a concrete struggle, encourages ‘a kind of amnesia’.

But while Parallel Mothers realises this generic danger, being concerned with the kind of burdensome past familiar from Almodóvar’s overtly ahistorical work, it also succumbs to the pitfalls of the Spanish predicament as such. The story he has chosen to tell, in which a single victim of falange violence provides the backdrop, reflects a tendency identified by Cercas and others as a kind of resistancialismo. Nor does Almodóvar resist ‘the sentimentalization of memory’ decried by the novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina, any more than he explored the possibility of ideological coercion – as opposed to the exercise of free will or liberationist energy – in his insistence on forgetting all about Franco. Today he argues that engaging with the falange – it’s unclear where this leaves his earlier contrasting stance – is a necessary condition of finishing with it ‘once and for all’, a position also voiced by Janis in the film, a utopian aim even if it weren’t contingent on achieving an impossible task (‘knowing’ 114,000 murders, three and a half decades of social immiseration, two decades of collusive silence). Resnais, by contrast, elected not to use the customary closing title ‘fin’ in Night and Fog.

But then the story of Spanish collective memory since the end of fascism exists in stark contrast to how things unfolded in France, including the matter of reflecting on its own procedures. Rousso, squaring up to the Vichy syndrome, was eager to acknowledge the precariousness of his own position, as a French observer on a French battle, and aspired to something like the meta-historian’s equivalent of counter-transference, his self-consciousness enabling him to evade at least the more extreme existing forms of flawed thinking. But Parallel Mothers and its accompanying rhetoric show that Almodóvar, in so many ways the most distinctive and independent-spirited Spanish director since Buñuel, has been subservient to prevailing attitudes, moving in one more or less prescribed direction and then another, limiting his work to the status of epiphenomena all the while invoking a position of defiance.

Read on: Ronald Fraser, ‘Reconsidering the Spanish Civil War’, NLR I/129

Categories
Uncategorised

Crowd Pleaser

TOPSHOT - Swedish film director Ruben Ostlund celebrates during a photocall after he won the Palme d'Or for the film "Triangle of Sadness" during the closing ceremony of the 75th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 28, 2022. (Photo by LOIC VENANCE / AFP)

Ruben Östlund was awarded the Cannes Film Festival’s top honour this year, winning the Palme d’Or for Triangle of Sadness. He joins a rarefied group of directors – one that includes fellow Swede Alf Sjöberg, Francis Ford Coppolla, Emir Kusturica, Shohei Imamura, the Dardenne brothers and Ken Loach – to have won the award more than once; he now has as many as all female directors combined. Following Michael Haneke and Billie August, he is the third director to receive the award for back-to-back films, having also won in 2017 for his fifth film The Square. The two projects are not so differently shaped: while The Square looks at the art world and the wealthy idiots who inhabit it; Triangle of Sadness begins with the fashion world before moving on to wealthy idiots more generally.

It makes a funny kind of sense that these two films have been so well received at Cannes. The festival is one of hyper-opulence, with its red-carpet, black-tie premieres held in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, a two-thousand-seat palace wedged neatly between superyachts and luxury hotels. By awarding Östlund the Palme, the jury can position themselves as in on the joke: we know you’re mocking us, but we’re laughing, too. Wouldn’t he rather they boo? Östlund does not appear overly concerned with social change; his films are less satire than farce. He treads the careful line of the court jester – wanting to make the king wince while he giggles, just not enough to risk his own head. ‘I believe that rich people are nice,’ Östlund explained in one interview about Triangle of Sadness. ‘There’s an ongoing myth that successful and rich people are horrible, but it’s reductive. I wanted the sweet old English couple to be the most sympathetic characters in the film. They are nice and respectful to everyone – they just happen to have made their money on landmines and hand grenades.’ The film has rather too much sympathy for its wealthy subjects. Its underlying premise seems to be that whether rich or poor, we’re all the same – all driven by the same interest in self-preservation – which perhaps explains why Östlund never draws blood.

Told in three parts, Triangle of Sadness begins with a largely superfluous send-up of the fashion industry. Taking its cues from Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno (2009), it doesn’t stray much further. An obnoxious television personality invades a casting call and has the male models smile or frown depending on what brand they represent. Expensive clothes require sorrow; cheap ones, joy. Among the models is Carl (Harris Dickenson), who, aged 25 in real life, may be aging out of the industry. The frown lines above his brow become the title of the film, after one casting director asks if they can do something about his ‘triangle of sadness’. Carl is dating Yaya (Charlbi Dean), an Instagram influencer who makes far more money than he does – modelling being the rare industry where women earn more than men. This is cause for conflict in their relationship, with Carl advocating a quasi-feminist equality to escape from paying the bill. Östlund’s intervention here is meant to be on the terrain of gender politics – wouldn’t it be crazy if men relied on their looks? – but this opening section has little payoff. Mostly, it begs the question of what constitutes a prostitute, with Carl and Yaya selling their bodies in different ways.

Following an excruciating argument about whether money-talk is ‘sexy’, we next encounter the pair on a luxury cruise, made possible by Yaya’s follower-count. On board are billionaires of differing detestability. The least offensive seems to be modelled on Markus Persson, also known as Notch, the Swedish game developer who sold Minecraft for $2.5B in 2014. He has plenty of money but lacks social skills, at one point offering to buy Yaya a Rolex for the meagre kindness of appearing in a photograph. Other billionaires include the aforementioned English couple, who thankfully meet a fitting end, and a charismatic Russian who, having made his fortune from a manure monopoly in Eastern Europe, calls himself the ‘king of shit’. Then there are the underlings, a crew with its own hierarchy: the non-white janitors, technicians, and cooks; the front-facing white women who pour champagne; an obsequious crew captain who tells her team to ‘think of the money’ when things get tough; and the ship’s captain (Woody Harrelson), who enjoys reading Marx and getting drunk.

The second act culminates with the Captain’s Dinner, where spoiled guests are served spoiled food during a spell of bad weather. They naturally end up quite sick. The sequence was the most uproarious I encountered at Cannes, prompting several minutes of laughter, as well as sending a few queasy press members running for the exit. But though a night of vomiting and diarrhoea, complete with exploding toilets and fecal floods, might seem appropriate punishment for arms dealers and other malefactors, Östlund does not intend for the sequence to be merely a moral comeuppance: ‘the audience should feel that they have suffered enough and want them to be saved’, he explains. More sympathy for the devil? Pirates then invade the floating microcosm and send it belly up. A select few from the ship survive and make it to a nearby island – Carl and Yaya, the crew captain, the tech nerd, the Russian oligarch, a janitor named Abigail, and a few others. Here, society is dramatically reordered. When it becomes clear that Abigail is the only one with any practical skills – a joke at the decoupling of wealth from genuine value – she eagerly takes on the role of a despot, offering each islander an extra portion of octopus if they agree to bend the knee. The Russian recites some wisdom from his school days in response: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’

Marx is rarely more than a punchline in Triangle of Sadness. This is in spite of Östlund being raised in a left-wing family and seeming to know the texts quite well. A retired schoolteacher in Sweden, Östlund’s mother remains an active member of her nation’s Communist party and sometimes strays into party-independent activism as well – such as when she asked her son to film an anti-NATO video in 2016. Östlund agreed, describing her commitment to this cause as ‘admirable and important’. He has not always felt so at ease with his mother’s politics: ‘Mum had books by both Marx and Lenin, and when friends came around, I’d turn the Lenin books around so that the spines were hidden. I understood that they were controversial in the eyes of others.’ That fear of offending the wrong people seems to have persisted. If his mother’s views had an uneven impact on Ruben, they made even less impact on his brother, who became a member of Sweden’s conservative-right. Östlund speaks of his time at the dinner table as one of being between two political extremes: ‘I am used to strong discussions about these two Western-Eastern ideologies’. A scene in Triangle of Sadness reverses this staging, pitting a Russian capitalist against an American communist: the king of shit against the ship’s captain. Drunk and locked in the captain’s quarters, the two take turns reading choice quotes from their phones – Thatcher versus Edward Abbey, Reagan versus Mao. It’s not a bad way of portraying most political debates today, but the effect is to position Östlund as the enlightened centrist, smarter than either side.

The Square provoked criticism from some left-wing critics, which Östlund felt was unfounded. ‘They want a sentimental portrait of poor people’, he claimed. ‘That’s bullshit! Poor people are living in tragedy. And their awful circumstances can create bad behaviours. I worry sometimes that some left-wing people misunderstand Marx.’ Östlund considers his approach a sociological one, which depicts individuals operating within a collective whose structures shape their behaviour. ‘If I look at what I learned from home, the one really useful thing was the analysis of Marx and his theories. That society comes from our position in an economical hierarchy. And that how we behave is determined by where we are according to the concept of production.’ For Östlund, ‘how we behave’ seems specifically linked to his preferred form for examining ‘society’, the comedy of manners, where in his most recent films, conflict arises from the incongruity of a class structure that forces upper and lower to mingle in the middle. His wealthy are well-mannered, his poor are often not, and this is meant as some ironic subversion of the cruelty inherent in the system.

Triangle of Sadness’s shipwreck might well undo all this, but instead what it presents is the persistence of ruthless social hierarchy – we may question whether here Östlund himself misunderstands Marx. In its progression from superyacht to survivor-island, the film suggests that we’re all foremost driven by greed and that capitalism, therefore, is merely an outgrowth, and natural conclusion to this uniquely human impulse. This is the West’s founding myth: that rationally self-interested individuals have been engaging in acts of truck, barter and exchange since the dawn of history, and that this process is inherently capitalistic. Despite appearances, therefore, Östlund films are ultimately less concerned with institutions or structures than the apparent verities of human nature. Barbarism is figured as a kind of blastema; manners, as dressing for the wound.

The Square and Triangle of Sadness both stage their best sequences during ritzy dinner parties. In the former, an artist enters the room acting as a gorilla, terrorizing the wealthy diners to the extent that they eventually pin him to the ground and beat him. Another descent into savagery. Is the artist here meant to represent Östlund? It’s hard to imagine his films provoking such animosity. They go too far to flatter their subjects; exploitation is figured as merely something awkward for all those involved. It may be incorrect to call the director a court jester – Lear’s fool, after all, spoke truth to power, acted as the king’s conscious, was the smartest in the room. Östlund, I fear, is more like a clown for hire, harmlessly squirting water in people’s faces, crafting intricate but hollow animals from balloons, smiling widely as he toots his horn. He’s just happy to be at the party.

Read on: Göran Therborn ‘Twilight of Swedish Social Democracy’, NLR 113.

Categories
Uncategorised

Subterranea

‘Has anyone seen Rosemary Tonks?’ began an unusual announcement in London’s Evening Standard in November 1998. The request was on behalf of the publisher Bloodaxe Books, who were keen to reissue her poetry but explained that ‘we haven’t managed to speak to anyone who’s seen her since the seventies’. At the close of the decade Tonks had seemingly vanished, absconding from Hampstead and her career as a celebrated writer. No further poetry appeared, no new novels were added to the run of six that she’d published between 1963 and 1972, and it was widely believed she’d put a ban on anyone ever republishing them. The collected poems, Bedouin of the London Evening, finally appeared after her death in 2014. An introduction by the publisher Neil Astley revealed that Tonks had in fact been living in Bournemouth. ‘In illness you want to be alone’, she’d once said about her stint in Paris recovering from polio. In 1979, following a series of personal crises – the sudden death of her mother, the collapse of her marriage, burglaries, a lawsuit, an operation to correct detached retinas that left her partially blind for several years – she had retreated to the coast.

Perhaps Tonks had been threatening to do as much in her 1965 poem, ‘Ice Cream Boom Towns’: ‘Hurry: we must go south to escape / The bubonic yellow-drink of our old manuscripts’. An irresolvable restlessness, the sense of being out of joint with yourself and the world, goes back further than her difficulties of the seventies. ‘I was a guest at my own youth’, she writes in ‘Running Away’; ‘My private modern life has gone to waste’ in ‘Bedouin of the London Evening’. The feeling of finding yourself in the wrong life is also present in The Bloater (1968), which has been reissued this month. The most remarkable of Tonks’ novels, it had long been legendarily unavailable. It opens on Min, collapsed with world-weariness – ‘a form of tiredness which is like drunkenness… there are varied layers of brand-new tiredness inside the massive, overall exhaustion, so that you go on falling through one after another’. Later, Min tells Claudi that she’s ‘so miserable and frustrated’ she’d like to ‘lie down in some lousy stinking old Beckett play and just rot there’. Plagued by FOMO after gossiping with Jenny about their respective love lives, she phones up Billy to ask, ‘Am I being left out of things?’ But when Min does find herself properly in the world, she’s shattered by the recognition that her life isn’t her own.

Even prior to disowning her back catalogue, Tonks claimed not to think all that much of her novels. ‘It just proves the English like their porridge’, was her response to an editor’s congratulations on the success of her fifth novel, The Way Out of Berkeley Square (1970). But although the remark’s flamboyant contempt and self-flagellating high-mindedness are classic Tonks, neither The Bloater, nor the rest of her novels, are that. The blurb on the new edition calls it a ‘sparkling’ comedy. ‘Exuberantly jaundiced’ or ‘blithely savage’ might be more accurate – and I’d argue that if the novel merits reappraisal, it’s precisely because of this awkward implacability. The novel appeared disguised as a gently racy social comedy, but Tonks – just like Min, her bristling, incorrigible bullshitter of a protagonist – cannot help but send up the conventions and proprieties of the form into which she’s plotted. It’s one way, short of disappearing, of tolerating not being how or where you ought to be.

The Bloater was originally published in 1968, though it’s not that sixties, but another one, a decade of relentless brown – brown ale, brown walls, brown corridors, brown light, brown days. Min works at the ‘electronic sound workshop’, a fictionalised BBC Radiophonic Workshop, with whom Tonks collaborated on a sound poetry broadcast, Sono-Montage, in 1966. There’s not much youth-quaking modernity here either. The staff are sexually frustrated bureaucrats bunkered ‘like a tinned shepherd’s pie’ down some endless corridor, where ‘the light is so bright you don’t even look ugly. You simply look like yourself’. The one spot of glamour is lovesick Jenny – surely a version of Tonks’ collaborator, Delia Derbyshire – with her bangles and glittered blue-black hair. But Tonks won’t have that either; Jenny’s face is only half made-up ‘until the evenings when she puts on the other half’.

The set-up is a marriage plot turned on its head. Min is married to George, and the novel follows her as she shuttles antically between two alternative suitors. There’s the eponymous Bloater, an exuberantly embodied, man-mountain of an opera singer, as gamey and oily as his cured herring namesake. Min finds him repulsive and cannot get enough of him. Then there’s Billy, who is ‘exact, contemporary, very masculine and controlled’; the way he talks to Min is like ‘a piece of fine dentistry… he stops up all aches and pains’. George meanwhile is hardly there at all. The ‘keeper of unprinted books at the British Museum’, we briefly glimpse the back of his pyjama jacket as he turns over in bed, emanating mute discontent. So vague a figure is George that one night Min switches off the lights in their home and locks up, leaving him eating dinner in the dark. Their house too seems strangely insubstantial, almost as if it doesn’t have any walls, and it’s unclear who lives there. A painting is cantilevered through a first-floor window. A slice of terrine is stored in the glove compartment of a car. Everything is ‘somehow running against the grain’, so that Min continually has to reapproximate the scenes of ordinary life.

But this isn’t really a book that cares about the breaking of marital vows. It is less concerned with bringing lovers together than with Min’s farcical efforts to escape from other people. The Bloater and Billy are two sides of the same coin, representing what Min is trying to avoid: having a body, having to contend with the bodies of others, being seen, being known. In the jacket note for her first poetry collection, Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms (1963), Tonks laid out her poetic ambitions: ‘I want to show human passions at work,’ she writes, ‘and give eternal forces their contemporary dimension in this landscape’. Here, however, she shows Min wriggling this way and that to avoid feeling at any cost. The risk of closeness is ‘all the suffering which is yet to come’.

Desire in the novel is constantly being cast out by disgust. The Bloater is an altogether disgusted book – excessively, theatrically so ­– and especially with the body: smarting gums, ‘pestilential’ armpits, bed sores, ‘cruel’ fingers, claggy over-powdered noses. Min has ‘the new welfare state disease’, gout, while the Bloater has catarrh. Their entanglement finally ends when she blurts out, ‘I don’t like your smell’. If Min’s not placing the world and the people in it at arm’s length by finding them repulsive, she’s trying to numb herself with what she calls ‘phony pleasures’, or else warding off intimacy with a clenched and calculating defendedness. Conversations are conducted like a game of Battleships. The point is to ‘win’, or, at least, not to surrender, lest your interlocutor colonises your mind or annihilates you. ‘She’s gone too far, and is forcing me to live her life’, Min says of a light chat in the pub with Jenny.

Tonks isn’t much interested in redeeming or absolving her protagonist, though it’s hinted that she shares a background a bit like her own. She does, however, get her happy ending with Billy. Finally, she coincides with herself: ‘I’m not the spectator I’m accustomed to being; I’m not in front of him, nor am I getting left behind.’ But it’s winkingly dashed off, as if to say, come on now, don’t be ridiculous. All kinds of things happen in The Bloater, but the real story is subterranean.

*

Tonks wouldn’t thank you for referring to her as an ‘English novelist’, profiles from the period comment, as if they’re indulging a daft pretension. But she rightfully claimed kinship with a nineteenth-century tradition of French writing, especially Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Her fiction writing, however, with its fascination for the secret chaos that exists between people, is more like her French contemporary, Nathalie Sarraute. Either way, you can understand why she was keen to disaffiliate herself from British literary culture. A 1970 Guardian profile includes the observation that ‘I have never met anyone who was so hurt by critics’. But, reading the reviews, I don’t think it was simply a case of Tonks being sensitive. Rather, perhaps her Francophilia was a response to the prevailing attitudes amongst critics of the time, who were tediously stuck on a nationalist, narrow and incurious idea of ‘the English novel’.

In any case, there’s more to the difficulty of placing Tonks’ writing, and the unhomeliness of The Bloater. In a 1963 interview she comments that ‘I could communicate if only the English weren’t quite so English’. And she wasn’t, exactly, but neither did she belong anywhere else. She was raised and lived mostly in Britain, but her life was profoundly altered by her family’s links to the colonies. Her father died in Nigeria before she was born, in Kent in 1928. She was brought up in boarding schools before joining her mother, who’d remarried, in Lagos, where her stepfather later died. Tonks married at 20 and went with her husband to India and Pakistan for his work, before returning, via a year in Paris, to London in 1953. She’d contracted paratyphoid fever in Calcutta and polio in Karachi, which left her with a withered right hand. Though not a colonial writer per se, she’s not quite an English writer, either. Tonks’ cosmopolitanism is a troubled thing – it’s that of someone who has left parts of herself behind elsewhere and carries elsewhere indelibly with her. In The Bloater, a shift in the light can render London more like Paris or St Petersburg. It’s a less pronounced version of an effect of her poetry, where a familiar London flickers in and out, becoming Egypt or the Baltic Sea. The equator might well run through Chelsea; Covent Garden is full of souks. But she’s not invoking other places as metaphors for some exotic, faraway imaginary. For Tonks, elsewhere is right here, bathed in the same brown light.

*

‘You can cure your reading with your life’, Tonks says, gnomically, during the same 1963 interview. It’s an offhand comment about the anxiety of influence, but the remark has a broader resonance with the way that, for her, living and writing sat uneasily with one another. Early on, her literary work seemed to provide a means to get to the real heart of things. ‘I know that to get through to you, my epoch,’ she writes in ‘Epoch of the Hotel Corridor’, ‘I must take a diamond and scratch / On your junkie’s green glass skin, my message’. But, over time, she came to see the literary world as the thing that had drawn her away from the proper stuff of life. ‘I think it diabolical,’ she comments, ‘this getting of a poet out of his or her back room and the making of them into public figures who have to give opinions every 20 seconds’. Later, this was to harden into violent disavowal.

Throughout the seventies, following the death of her mother, she’d drawn sustenance from various spiritual practices: Sufism, tarot, Taoist meditation, yoga. However, after a period of ill health followed by a series of bizarre supernatural experiences, she came to reject these as diabolical, and instead took up fundamentalist Christianity. She staged a double exorcism in her garden in Bournemouth, burning five suitcases’ worth of ancient Asian, African and Middle Eastern artefacts bequeathed by an aunt, along with the manuscript of a vast unpublished novel about the search for God, as two kinds of false idols. Perhaps, in some way, she was also attempting to vanquish those foreign, restless, unhomed bits of herself. In October 1981, she was baptised in Jerusalem. Born again, she became Rosemary Lightband, discarding the name that feels like an aptronym – at once fearsome and ridiculous, seeming to denote something of its owner’s skinless hauteur – for her married name, though she was already divorced.

I’d like to be able to tell it as a story of refusal, or of mystical transformation, against the typical accounts of people who, like Tonks, just get up and walk away from their lives – those narratives that prescribe the kind of existence it’s acceptable to have, hitting familiar marks: self-destructiveness and self-sabotage, reclusiveness, squandered potential, tragic decline. But it wasn’t. The diaries of her later years record a slow and torturous form of self-immolation. She devoted her attention to the bird song and ticking of clocks that she understood as messages from God. Mostly, she sounds terrified: of the incursions of Satan, the malign influence of other people, even more so of herself and her own mind. She was sometimes to be found commuting up to London to hand out copies of the Bible, the only book she now read, at Speaker’s Corner. In her house just behind the sea front, she worked at painfully winnowing herself away to make a vessel for God’s love.

Clearly, she was intent on making a complete break with her former self. But one can see in Rosemary Lightband a mutation of Tonks’s facilities as a writer into something else. Those same habits of mind – the form-seeking, the heightened awareness, the relentless self-interrogation – metastasized. In a letter to her great-niece from 1987, she writes that her former life was exactly ‘the preparation needed’ for studying the bible, ‘because your mind is alerted to unravelling mysteries hidden in words’. There’s an unassuming passage towards the end of The Bloater in which Min is rueing her domestic failures, but also seems to be reflecting on the source of her difficulties. ‘I know that one of my weaknesses is the fact that I can’t see dust’, she says. ‘I’ve been taught to see the fish lying in a stream, which means that I can penetrate through the glass clothes of a river and see its insides.’ This gift of obscene seeing was Tonks’ too. A writer like her, so vigilant about signs and symbols, so deep within her regime of self-punishment, must have read significance into her misfortune, especially the loss of her sight. Perhaps she decided that if you can’t cure your reading with your life, or your life with your reading, or your life with a different one, you must stop yourself from looking underneath the water.

Read on: Angus Wilson, ‘Condition of the Novel (Britain)’, NLR I/29