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Burning Bodies

The acute, tender personal essays of Megan Nolan have developed a significant online following in recent years. Her readers – myself included – look forward to the publication of her next piece, where we will no doubt find some aperçu that will illuminate things we knew to be true about ourselves but lacked the words to articulate. Nolan, born in Ireland in 1990 and now based in London, specialises in unflinching self-exposure: her articles for the New Statesman, the New York Times and elsewhere are assured exercises in introspection that tend to circle around the body, sex and relationships. The particular feeling or concern to be anatomized tends to be announced in the opening line. A recent essay on what lockdown has meant for those like her, for whom ‘social comfort comes from dating or from having sex with strangers’, begins: ‘In early lockdown, I spent most evenings in the front room of my mother’s house, drunk, staring at a computer, reeling at the prospect of my body being deprived indefinitely of touch’.

One of her most affecting pieces deals with her history of self-mutilation and compulsive biting of her fingers. It is a condition Nolan shares with the unnamed narrator of her debut novel Acts of Desperation. The essay, published in 2019, is typical of her writerly procedure: an event, in this case the engagement of her best friend, prompts her to focus in on an aspect of her life she considers shameful. Her ‘dermatophogia’, as she categorises it, is then traced back through her history – she notes how when single she would let the tearing of flesh become so bad as to grow infected, causing her to be ‘ashamed of what feels like uniquely, viscerally ugly behaviour, the mess of skin and bone and chewing, all so animal’. Violent imagery and polysyndeton are both characteristic of her prose. The essay concludes on a redemptive note – but it is not that Nolan has overcome her condition, only made peace with it: ‘There is no end to me, my body, myself; I am a problem there is no solution to’. It is an elegant ending, and one that evades resolution, lifting the reader from the specific concerns of the piece in a volute of thought.

I return to Nolan’s journalism so as to better understand her novel and its limitations. At the turn of the millennium, the critic James Wood proposed a new genre by which to assess Zadie Smith’s debut novel, White Teeth. He called it ‘hysterical realism’, also including within its rubric ‘big contemporary’ novels like those of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo. These novels were ambitious, the kind of work that ‘knows a thousand things’ but in Wood’s analysis ‘does not know a single human being’. So anxious were they to represent the complexities of the modern world that they neglected the individuals inhabiting it; a restless zaniness and propensity to caricature elided the complexity of human beings, when for Wood the novel’s essential domain is the realm of consciousness. Acts of Desperation, by contrast, might be considered as the polar opposite type of novel: a work that wishes to know nothing at all, but for a single human being.

This need not be a negative appraisal. Though willing to consign her own novel to Wood’s new category, Smith objected to his bringing every other ‘big contemporary’ novel down with her. ‘Whatever the weaknesses of the various writers Wood mentioned,’ she responded, ‘I don’t believe he would wish for a literary landscape missing a book such as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or DeLillo’s White Noise’. Both polarities in truth offer rewards as well as risks. The attempt to contain the whole world inside the pages of a novel is a commendable ambition so long as the writing is good, so long as the reader feels the attempt has value. To understand just one person may likewise be a productive limitation, and in the broad church of contemporary authors bidding to do just that, there are some outstanding examples: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, to name a few. Whether such books are successful, then, depends on something much harder to articulate: the book’s ability to hold us, to last, to mean something.

Acts of Desperation shares the lineaments of the work by this crop of autofiction writers. Nolan has written of the profound influence of Knausgaard in particular – how his writing gave her permission to write of the ‘emotional minutiae’ she feared were ‘trivial, unintellectual and altogether too feminine’, how she read nothing but his work while writing her own book. The narrator-protagonist of Acts of Desperation resembles Nolan; as in her essays, the writing is intense and introspective, with the camera held so tightly that one catches little sight of the world beyond her own frantic mind. The novel is a confessional account of an abusive relationship that the narrator fell into in her early twenties, while living alone in a Dublin bedsit and regularly obliterating herself with drink. When she first meets Ciaran, she thinks him the most beautiful boy she’s ever seen. But as the infatuation develops, Ciaran’s unpleasant traits begin to accumulate. He is bad-tempered, mercurial and increasingly manipulative. And yet, she loves him so fiercely that his impression on her mind is like a continually erupting firework, burning with such intensity that, even when she tries to look away, she can see nothing but the afterimage of that brightness.

It is a promising starting point: an exploration of the way one’s sense of self might be annihilated by a toxic, all-consuming relationship. Her narrator’s manic devotion to Ciaran is movingly depicted, as every other aspect of her life becomes blurred and monochromatic. ‘If it was possible for me to have lived just like that, no other life coming in at the edges, no friends, no family, no work – if I had been successful in my attempt to boil my whole universe down just to us, burning bodies welded together in a cold bed – I could be happy there, still.’ Larger structural and stylistic flaws, however, prevent the novel from doing justice to its primary themes.

Its narrative takes place over two time periods: Dublin, between 2012 and 2014, and Athens in 2019 (where Nolan in fact wrote much of the novel). The Dublin sections proceed chronologically with calendrical headings (‘April 2012’, ‘November 2012’), while chapters from Athens are interposed periodically. Such a technique might allow for a distanced, reflective view of the main narrative. But tonally, despite the intervening years there is no shift from the voice of the Dublin chapters, nor a convincing change in psychological distance from the relationship. This is a novelistic requirement, different in kind to that demanded by the essay. Other novels might also have inspired more imaginative means of achieving the same effect. Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018) for example – which if contracted to a single question asks ‘Should I have a child?’, just as Nolan’s asks ‘Is it possible to live for myself?’ – embeds the narrator’s experience of flipping a coin to answer particular questions, in an adaptation of the I Ching, the Chinese divination device. ‘Is it that making babies is not a woman’s special task?’, ‘Is this book a good idea?’ Such moments provide welcome interruption from the anxious, tightly focused perspective of the rest of Heti’s novel.  

Often, the Athens sections begin with an aphorism: ‘Being in love feels like nothing so much as hope; a distilled, clear hope which would be impossible to manufacture on your own.’ These bear a close resemblance to the kinds of perceptions in Nolan’s journalism (Nolan has mentioned in interviews that the book in fact began as a work of non-fiction about relationships), but here they do not have the same effect. They stick up awkwardly, neither advancing the narrative nor being embodied or illustrated by it. Though some critics have drawn positive comparison with Knausgaard (something encouraged by his prominent commendation displayed on the novel’s back cover), these succinct lines are indicative of the distance between them. In Ben Lerner’s review of the third volume of My Struggle, he wrestles with the fact that ‘Knausgaard isn’t really quotable.’ The narrator’s thoughts are too digressive and circuitous; one would have to quote for pages on end just to illustrate a single idea. Such resistance to quotation is in fact part of Knausgaard’s mastery; his writing evades simplification. And, perhaps, the kind of thinking achieved in an essay would do well to be just as complex. Returning to Nolan’s journalism between readings of her novel, I found my relationship to it somewhat altered. I noticed more keenly the moments where my own experiences were seemingly condensed into the simplest of sentences. But what of those that aren’t ‘really quotable’?

While reflections within chapters tend to be short-lived and undeveloped, most chapters as a whole end so abruptly as to feel incomplete. I include one in its entirety below:

‘I remember the last meal I ever made for him, before everything changed for good, because it looked so pretty that I took a picture – crawfish and crab, arranged in neat pink scoops of lettuce leaves, lime juice and chilli, a spoonful of avocado, a sprinkling of black sesame seeds, and as I took the photograph, my phone lit up with a call from another man.’

There is nothing wrong with the writing itself. But there is not enough behind it. So brave in her personal essays, here Nolan seems to lack the courage to delve more deeply into the emotional texture of the story she is telling. For much of the novel, the narrator glides above memories of the relationship instead of entering into them for any significant duration – we tend to hear of them rather than witness or experience them. This again is symptomatic of the novel’s close relationship to the personal essay, which must be efficient and terse, providing fleeting vignettes extracted from the writer’s life. Of recent novels, perhaps Acts of Desperation’s closest stylistic relation might instead be the works of Jenny Offill. Reviewing Weather (2020), last year, Lauren Oyler mordantly suggested there was no reason why the narrator’s capsule-like paragraphs ‘should be organised as a novel and not a particularly literate Twitter feed.’ The implication was that there was something missing from the novel which might have given it life – the messy parts of experience that exist in the gaps between the short paragraphs and neat thoughts.

There are several longer chapters in the latter stages of Acts of Desperation though that indicate Nolan’s potential as a fiction writer, where the narrative is allowed to develop uninterrupted. The concluding section, after the narrator has fled Dublin for Athens in the wake of Ciaran’s last act of violence, is the strongest of all. A friend comes to visit, and she is again forced into sex against her will. More so than anywhere else in the novel, here one feels the presence of both bodies in a bed, the shifting power dynamics illustrated by what is said and what is not. The power of Nolan’s essays is transmuted into narrative. Afterwards, she finds ‘he was easier to listen to now, less grating. I was able to laugh along without it hurting too much.’ It is a heart-breaking moment. Sometimes it can feel easier just to let things happen. The novel ends in much the same way as Nolan’s essay on her dermatophagia. While so often it is the recognisable features of Nolan’s journalism that hold Acts of Desperation back, here this is not the case. Nolan refuses to offer a definitive answer to the question of how the narrator will live now, leaving a space for a future that is unfixed, but is at least more hopeful than the place from which she has come: ‘What would I think about, now that I wasn’t thinking about love or sex? That would be the next thing, trying to figure out what to fill up all that space with. But that was all right. That would follow.’

What might follow for Nolan? Might she widen her perspective a little, beyond that of a single human being? In a recent interview, she has suggested that her next novel will have ‘more of an expansive story, and more of a world’. One of Acts of Desperation’s epigraphs comes from the The Divided Self by R. D. Laing: ‘A little girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her’. It is an evocative quotation, and yet, in its original context, the image was contrasted with another, more disturbing vision. Laing continues, ‘That is a delusion. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from “reality” than many of the people on whom the label “psychotic” is affixed.’ The horrors the girl internalises are not of her own imagination; they are the product of those in power.

Read on: John Frow, ‘Thinking the Novel’, NLR 49.

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Hungarian Liquor

‘Are you a Soviet woman?’ asks Lyudmila Syomina in an opening scene of Dear Comrades!, the latest film by Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky. The question is more forceful than inquisitive. The person that she is interrogating is no enemy hostage, but rather Lyudmila’s local grocery store clerk, a kind, visibly younger woman who, when we meet her, is standing in the stock room, pulling one coveted item after another – a roll of salami, a bottle of rare Hungarian liquor – out of the fridge and off the shelves for Lyudmila to take with her. Outside, other shoppers coalesce into a small stampede around the cash register, buying whatever they can get their hands on. ‘People started coming at seven in the morning, all of this talk about prices going up’, the amiable clerk explains. ‘Are we going to starve?’ she asks Lyudmila, who reacts to the question with a stunned look on her face. ‘Starve? In the Soviet Union? Do you hear yourself? Keep your mouth shut.’

Communication failure between generations lies at the heart of Dear Comrades!, a film that is as much about the personal challenges of historic political change as it is about what happened in 1962 in the city of Novocherkassk, an industrial town located just over the south-eastern Ukrainian border, when price increases led to one of the most violently repressed strikes in Soviet history. Konchalovsky, amongst Russia’s oldest and most recognised directors, provides a clear-eyed reconstruction of this long-suppressed episode, but in doing so he explores the pull that even the most incontrovertibly evil forces have on ordinary people. Through Lyudmila, played by his wife Julia Vysotskaya, he tracks the crushing disappointment that people face when history tells them to move on, be happy, and never look back.

The end of a dark era and the beginning of another; winter thawing into spring: most would greet this with optimism either muted or unrestrained. Not Lyudmila. As the people around her talk gleefully of communism’s imminent arrival, the latest agricultural advances, and above all, the gentler, kinder leader in the Kremlin, all she can do is scoff. Not because of any scorn she harbours towards the Soviet state. Just the opposite. Early in the film we learn that Lyudmila – likely to be in her early forties when we meet her – is a proud party activist, and a member of her local party committee where she oversees the city’s production sector.

She would have first become involved in the party in her late teens or early twenties under Stalin. During the Second World War, Lyudmila went to the front as a nurse where she met the man who, before dying in battle, fathered her daughter, Svetlana, or Svetka. We learn that, for her wartime sacrifices, Stalin’s government bestowed upon her a handsome consolation package: an apartment large enough for her daughter and elderly father to share, a government job, promises of indefinite raises and promotions, and, of course, the material privileges to match her high-ranking position ­– specifically, access to rare consumer goods like those we see her stuffing into her shopping bag in the grocery store.

To show her gratitude, she hangs portraits of Stalin on her wallpapered apartment doors, laments the fact that Khrushchev ordered his body moved out of Lenin’s mausoleum, that holiest of sites, and defends his record whenever someone, above all her daughter, tries to remind her of all the terrible things that Comrade Stalin did. ‘He executed so many innocent people!’ Svetka insists during one particularly strained exchange with her mother. ‘What do you know about Stalin?’ Lyudmila snaps back.

Then comes May 1962. That month, Khrushchev signed off on an abrupt 25% increase in the price of meat and butter, a reform designed to stimulate government revenues and boost collective farmers’ incomes to offset stagnating economic growth. In Novocherkassk, the increases stung particularly sharply. The city’s workers, nearly a tenth of whom were employed by the Electric Locomotive Plant, built in the 1930s as the Soviet Union’s largest producer of train engines, had just learned that their pay would be slashed, in the middle of a city-wide food shortage that forced citizens to stand in line at all hours of the day. Many became accustomed to saving their potato peels to get them through to their next meal. When workers at the plant learned of the price increases, they organized a strike, something which, at first glance, should register as neither a shock nor a rare occurrence in a country that called itself the world’s first workers’ state. Yet as far as party officials were concerned, labour strikes had no place in a socialist country where class conflict – and classes in general – had ceased to exist.

When the factory strike develops into a city-wide strike, workers spilled out into streets holding portraits of Lenin, signs that read ‘Proletarians of the World Unite!’, and pamphlets with demands for ‘Meat, Butter, and Higher Salaries!’. In the film, Konchalovsky shows city officials, watching from their office windows, respond with confusion and derision. ‘A fucking strike in our socialist country?’ one party official gripes. The protesting workers eventually storm the city’s party headquarters and go on a smashing spree, marvelling with disdain at the rarefied foods which the party officials treated themselves to as the rest of the city goes hungry (‘Look what they’re eating! Hungarian liquor and ham!’). ‘Arrest them all’, Lyudmila recommends, unflinchingly, during a meeting of local party committee members, who are joined by a coterie of bureaucrats flown in from Moscow to monitor the situation. ‘These people are extremely angry at the Soviet government, you never know what they might do’, she warns her peers. ‘Arrest them and take them to court, to the full extent of the law.’ Stalin may have been dead, but his methods lived on.

The officials end up taking her advice. What happens next would come to light nearly half a century later in 1991, when Gorbachev called for an honest, moral reckoning with even the most unsavoury aspects of the country’s past, including what happened that summer day in Novocherkassk. As the protestors enter the city square, we watch as bullets begin to rain down on the workers and their supporters. To this day, it’s unclear whether the call to shoot came from the Soviet Army or the KGB, but we know that 26 people died (87 more were injured and 110 sent to prison for their involvement in the strike). Knowledge of the event remains scarce. When I told my mother, who grew up in the Soviet Union and emigrated to the United States in 1987, that Dear Comrades! was about the Novocherkassk massacre, she had no idea what I was talking about.

One of the most underappreciated and – not incidentally – insidious aspects of Stalinism was the moral simplicity it offered. Dividing the world into good and evil allowed citizens like Lyudmila to navigate the cataclysmic changes brought about by the First Five-Year Plan, the wave upon wave of political purges, an apocalyptic world war. Of the many things that Khrushchev overturned when he denounced Stalin in his 1956 ‘Secret Speech’, perhaps this simple code of right and wrong represented the greatest loss. Practically overnight, ‘enemies’ were rehabilitated as ‘victims’, ‘heroes’ turned into opportunistic collaborators, and ‘foes’ into ordinary neighbours, who, after years labouring in the gulag, returned home to haunt the people next door who had turned them in to save themselves. ‘It was so easy then’, Lyudmila reflects at one point, because it was clear ‘who was an enemy and who was ours’.

For a while, Lyudmila refuses to give in to the topsy-turvy moral universe of Khrushchev’s making. She continues to refer to former gulag prisoners as criminals, invests her hopes for society in the KGB, and advises the government to seek the death penalty for the strike’s organizers. But her world view is challenged when she learns that her teenage daughter, herself an employee at the locomotive plant, is planning to participate in the strike despite, or in spite of her mother’s protests. An enemy? In her own family? The possibility leaves Lyudmila visibly unsettled. When Svetka goes missing after the shooting, Lyudmila immediately embarks on a search for her daughter’s whereabouts, a search that continues for the rest of the film.

Her odyssey takes her to the city’s various agencies and offices, each with a portrait of Khrushchev hanging where a portrait of Stalin once rested, the sloppy mounting job visible. We see her visit a morgue, where she almost trips over the bodies of people who died in the shooting, their corpses strewn on the floor like clutter. We watch her visit the city’s army headquarters, where a gang of young soldiers conduct a rough search of Lyudmila, neglecting to pay her the respect that a war veteran, long-time party member and panicked mother deserves. Finally, we join her as she pays a visit to a cemetery outside the city, where victims’ bodies are rumoured to have been clandestinely buried in plots already occupied by the dead.

Like many features of the film’s plot, this one, too, is rooted in historical fact. Researchers in the early 1990s revealed that party officials – those whom Lyudmila would have called her own – had dumped the bodies of the massacre’s victims in nearby cemeteries. Reeling from the realization that her daughter’s body might have been thrown, anonymously and thoughtlessly, into another’s grave, Lyudmila breaks down, a moment that we are instructed to interpret as her loss of faith. In one of the last scenes of the film, we watch as she sips unceremoniously on a bottle of unlabelled Soviet vodka, a far cry from the Hungarian liquor we saw her purchasing with delight earlier in the film. In this way, she becomes, perhaps for the first time in her life, a true comrade.

Yuri Trifonov, a Soviet writer who made his career during the Khrushchev years, described members of the generation that preceded him as ‘people of the beginning of the war and people of the end of the war’, who despite their best efforts, ‘remain such to the end of their lives’. Lyudmila, by this formulation, is a child of the end of the war. Konchalovsky however, like Trifonov, is a product of the Thaw, and is no stranger to the need to move with the times. Born Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky in 1937, the year that launched Stalin’s Great Terror, into a family as close to royalty as possible in the Soviet Union – his father wrote the Soviet national anthem, and his relatives, the Mikhalkovs, were old Russian aristocrats who traced their lineage to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – his life’s trajectory maps neatly onto Russia’s long twentieth century.

His is a rare career that transcended not only the Soviet-post-Soviet divide, but also that between Russian and American film circuits (his brother, Nikita Mikhalkov, also an actor and director, accomplished a similar feat when he won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for Burnt by the Sun (1994) about Stalin’s Great Terror). The seeming ease with which he’s managed these transitions is a testament not just to the strength of his artistic vision and its broad appeal, but his ability to acclimate, even thrive in political environments which others would find prohibitively hostile. In his more than sixty years of directing, writing, acting and producing, Konchalovsky has had to navigate institutional alliances with everyone from Communist Party bureaucrats to Los Angeles studio executives to Russian oligarchs. One of this latest film’s producers is Alisher Usmanov, a Moscow-based metal and mining tycoon worth an estimated $11.68 billion dollars – an unusual choice of funder for a film about a labour strike. This also helps to explain how and why he has embraced film styles as varied as socialist realism (1964’s The First Teacher), avant-garde (1962’s Andrei Rublev, which he co-wrote and co-directed with Andrei Tarkovsky), and Hollywood action (1989’s Tango & Cash, starring Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell). Lyudmila may have had trouble adapting to changing times, but Konchalovsky has not.

Or has he? A consistent theme that runs through many of the interviews, profiles and discussions of Konchalovsky is his refusal to accede to prevailing moral binaries, or to depict his own life story as a gradual move away from darkness and towards light, from unfreedom to freedom. When asked in 2011 whether during the Soviet part of his career he worried about his ability to express himself in the face of government censors, he responded with an automatic no. ‘Creativity’, he told the visibly confused interviewer, has nothing to do with ‘freedom of self-expression; it’s an illusion, for me’. He then consciously upended the interviewer’s assumptions about what the end of the Soviet Union bestowed upon artists like himself. ‘Russia got a lot of freedom in the nineties, and no masterpieces or great films appeared.’

In an interview conducted in 2018 at an election-night victory party held in Moscow to celebrate Putin’s ascendancy to his sixth term in office, a Russian news correspondent runs into Konchalovsky and asks him to offer his thoughts on the results. ‘Extraordinary joy, a realization of my hopes, and I was almost sure it would happen’, he told the reporter in perfect English. ‘And Putin will lead’, he added, a banner with the words ‘A Strong President; A Strong Russia’ strung visibly behind him. When asked what he thought about the thousands of anti-Putin demonstrators who were out on the streets that same night – many of whom were organized by the now-jailed Alexey Navalny – Konchalovsky did not mince words. ‘It’s not important.’ Like Lyudmila, he would not – perhaps could not – succumb to other people’s assessments of reality. For both of them, it’s too indecent, too unnatural, to bite the hand that feeds.

Read on: Sophie Pinkham, ‘Nihilism for Oligarchs’, NLR 125.

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Deaths versus Death

The difference between singular and plural can be incredible. Take the noun ‘death’. Across almost every continent, the pandemic has submerged us in a daily trickle of ‘deaths’ in the plural, hour after hour, news broadcast after online update. We’re presented with ‘deaths’ on a near-daily basis, in the form of incessant videos: mass graves in Manaus, sombre army convoys carrying the dead out of Bergamo, refrigerated trucks abandoned in the streets of New York. But in its singular form death is shrouded in silence, obscured. Nobody thinks of it, let alone speaks of it. The vociferous dealers of fast-thought are extraordinarily reluctant – almost shy – to speak on the subject, all the while churning out momentous deductions and weighty commentaries.  

So far, nobody has seriously reflected on how (or whether) the pandemic has altered our society’s relationship to death. To begin with, few have even interrogated the silence around the issue. We act as if it were impolite to mention it; an Italian proverb warns against ‘speaking of the noose in the hanged man’s home’, suggesting that any reference to misfortune in front of those on whom it befalls is to be avoided, as if death was an awkward topic, unfit for gentlemen (we’ll return to this in a second). There is, however, a less avowable reason for the reticence we speak of, one that can also be described by an Italian term that has no equivalent elsewhere. Commonly translated as ‘superstition’, the word scaramanzia actually denotes something far more specific; the belief that simply mentioning an event might somehow influence it, by either encouraging its appearance (if the event in question is negative: an accident, a bereavement, a failure) or by forestalling it (in the case of success, a love story, passing an exam). A hunter is therefore never wished good luck, for fear they might return empty handed; they’re wished in bocca al lupo (‘in the mouth of the wolf’), the contrary of what is hoped for them. The idea, then, is that by simply mentioning death one might provoke it. This belief is more common than what we might think, and is widespread beyond Italy, even amongst people who should be immune from superstition (studies abound on the credulous practices of cultured, ‘rational’ people).

More profoundly though, this silence around death can be explained through two longue durée processes. The first relates to discourse around and studies of death. The second concerns the attitudes Western societies have toward death itself.

The decades following the end of the Second World War witnessed a flourishing of research and interventions on the subject of death. Historically the exclusive terrain of literature, philosophy and religion, death was annexed by the human sciences: psychology, anthropology, sociology and history. Roughly speaking the most significant contributions on death in the fields of anthropology and sociology came from the Anglosphere, whilst the French produced primarily historical scholarship. From the mid-70s, though, studies began to thin out, or at least they lost their influence and relevance. To be sure, given its centrality, books (films, documentaries) on the matter were still being produced, but nothing quite left a mark on public discourse like the previous generation’s texts had.

‘The Pornography of Death’ is the title of a short article by Geoffrey Gorer published by Encounter in October 1955. In it, Gorer notes how in the preceding fifty years death had gradually become taboo:

For the greater part of the last two hundred years copulation and (at least in the mid-Victorian decades) birth were the ‘unmentionables’ of the triad of basic human experiences… around which so much private fantasy and semi-clandestine pornography were erected. During most of this period death was no mystery, except in the sense that death is always a mystery. Children were encouraged to think about death, their own deaths and the edifying or cautionary deathbeds of others. It can have been a rare individual who, in the 19th century with its high mortality, had not witnessed at least one actual dying, as well as paying their respect to ‘beautiful corpses’; funerals were the occasion of the greatest display for working class, middle class, and aristocrat. The cemetery was the centre of every old-established village, and they were prominent in most towns. It was fairly late in the 19th century when the execution of criminals ceased to be a public holiday as well as a public warning… In the 20th century, however, there seems to have been an unremarked shift in prudery; whereas copulation has become more and more ‘mentionable’, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon societies, death has become more and more ‘unmentionable’ as a natural process.

This inversion of sexuality and death – the latter replacing the former as object of the unsayable – merits deeper reflection (Gorer developed his thesis in a more detailed study, which appeared in 1965: Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain). Indeed, the popularity of TV series such as CSI could perhaps be attributed to their pornographic element. Their protagonist is, after all, the autopsy table – that theatre of ‘indecencies’ which blurs the line between forensic pathology and soft-porn. It might be that the repression of the scandal around death contributed to the emergence of what Jessica Mitford termed The American Way of Death (1963); the practice of beautifying corpses and the spread of embalmment as a temporary method of conservation of the corpse, contrary to that of the ancient Egyptians, where the appearance of life in the deceased is made to last for thousands of years. The American funerary industry currently has a turnover of around $20 billion, corresponding to 2.4 million funerals a year. Tony Richardson’s film on the Los Angeles funeral business, The Loved One (1965), is worth remembering here; based on a short novel by Evelyn Waugh, the production also employed Mitford as a consultant. Back then, I thought the film was rather good; who knows what effect it would have today.

Our repression of death, then, is not a novel attitude (especially today, as we’re overwhelmed with the constant news of so many undeserved deaths), but rather the result of a trend rooted in the industrial structure of our society. Here French scholarship comes into play, in particular the work of Philippe Ariès, most notably his collected lectures, Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present (1974). Ariès identified various stages in the development of death – from a social death, to a familial death, to a hospitalized death. If somebody was dying at home during the Middle Ages, even casual passers-by would actively participate in bidding them farewell, entering the house to greet them, perhaps sticking around for a groan or two. Death was a communal experience. The family subsequently became death’s main character (here we also see emerge all the rituals of 19th century ‘romantic’ mourning). Then, in a third phase, after being subtracted from society, death was also taken from the family and handed over to hospitals, to which it was ultimately delegated. When one arrives in a new city, one can immediately tell if a hospital is nearby from the number of funeral homes you see in the street. As Ariès summarizes:

The Middle Ages in their entirety – even at their close – lived with a familiarity of death and of the dead. From the 16th to the 18th century erotic images of death attest to the rupturing of the millenarian intimacy between man and death. As La Rochefoucauld notes, men can neither look the sun nor death in the face any longer. From the 19th century, images of death appear increasingly rarely, and disappear altogether in the 20th. The silence that nowadays reigns over death means it has broken out of its chains, transforming itself into a wild and incomprehensible force.

The repression of death is thus a process rooted in industrialization and technological progress. Even the rise of cremation can be understood in terms of this social repression, for the buried corpse acts as a permanent reminder of the departed (no matter how deeply they might be buried under the conscience of the living), whereas cremated ashes ratify a disappearance, sanctioning a more definitive type of rupture. It’s been shown that cinerary urns are visited far less than graves; the former signals the decline of the cemetery as a sacred site and the end of ‘romantic’ mourning, with its characteristic monumental graves and solemn funeral processions that marked the life not just of towns, but also of cities.

From this perspective the pandemic has hardly altered our relationship with death. It has merely intensified already present dynamics – above all the increasing solitude in dying. Once more, the peremptory assertion that ‘nothing will ever be the same’ rings hollow. In no way has the pandemic altered modernity’s tenacious attempts to cancel death, to make it vanish from our horizon of life, to bequeath it to an incomprehensible and unimaginable ‘elsewhere’ or ‘otherwhen’:[1] a form of absolute panic, to put it brutally.

It will be objected that one of the past year’s more frequent complaints has been that the pandemic has deprived us of the ability to grieve. Here too we might do well to consult Ariès, who has shown grief to be a category far from immutable, but rather a precise historical construct whose culmination came in the 19th century. In reality, mourning in its various manifestations – beginning with the recurrent ritual of the visit to the cemetery and the spread of funerary monuments – only took shape with the advent of romanticism, when mourning for the dead supplanted the cult of the dead. The previous two centuries have thus seen human society do without that cult of the dead which had characterized it since its origins.

Only in the 1800s did the middle classes begin to express bereavement through the colour of women’s garments, which were black during the funeral and often kept so for subsequent months. As W. M. Spellman recounts in his A Brief History of Death (2014): ‘A period of withdrawal from social life was also expected, again with women taking the lead role. In America many middle-class girls received mourning kits for their dolls, the ritual acted out in the world of play’. In short, before the end of the 1800s, Freud would never have been able to argue that mourning was one of man’s innate psychological processes.

But it would still be inaccurate to say that the pandemic has simply magnified tendencies that have been developing for a century – its effects resemble more a return to a proximate past. For the effects of modernity described by Gorer, Mitford and Airès have lost their prominence in the past decades: deaths in hospital reached a peak, but recently families have preferred to keep their dying loved ones at home.

We know that around 80% of Americans would prefer to die in their homes, but also that 60% die in hospital, 20% in nursing homes and only 20% at home. This percentage, however, is rising, as deaths in hospitals and emergency departments fall, whilst admissions increase. This trend is explained by our growing consciousness of the futility of therapeutic persistence in terminal patients.

The evolution of grief is also less linear than it might appear. The most caricatural, archaic figure associated with it is that of the contracted mourner, the professional weeper. Hiring people to cry demonstrates the theatrical (and therefore deceptive) nature of sorrow. An article in the Sunday edition of the New York Times from 22 March 1908 is rather disorientating. ‘Professional Mourners Strike’, the title announces, and the opening paragraph reads, ‘PARIS, March 14. Those curious, gruesome individuals, made notorious through French romances, known as “croque morts”, or professional weepers, have gone on a strike, as they only get 5 f. for twelve hours’ service, and an additional franc when sent out on an extra call’. What we have here is an ultra-archaic profession combining with a tool of modern class struggle, the strike.

Professional mourners have even entered the world of the internet, participating in the latest technological revolution:

Worried that not enough people will show up to your funeral? Let Rent-A-Mourner help. The ingenious and aptly-named company allows concerned parties to pay for professional grievers to fill a funeral home and make sure that the deceased gets a fitting and extremely well-attended sendoff. For approximately $68 a head, the UK-based business will send ‘professional, polite, well dressed individuals’ to attend your funeral or wake, and will weep, wail and generally appear sad about the passing of whatever person happens to be filling the casket for about two hours. Rent-A-Mourner promises that your paid grievers will be ‘discreet’ and ‘professional’, according to its website.

Unfortunately, at a time of undoubtedly high demand, the service is no longer available – rentamourner.co.uk ceased trading in March 2019.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti

Read on: Marco D’Eramo, ‘The Philosopher’s Epidemic’, NLR 122.

[1] I borrow the term ‘otherwhen’ from H. Beam Piper’s famous 1965 science-fiction novel, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen.

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Black Leaves

The German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck is used to living in pieces. Born in East Berlin in 1967, she came of age in a bifurcated city. But even after German reunification, in 1990, the country she inhabited struck her as clumsily cobbled together. When she meditated on reunification years later, she eschewed talk of repair and opted instead for the counter-intuitive imagery of breakage. ‘What was I doing the night the wall fell?’ she asks in her new book, Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces. ‘I slept. I literally slept through that moment of world history, and while I was asleep, the pot wasn’t just being stirred, it was being knocked over and smashed to bits.’ In many cases, the smashing was physical: the wall itself was torn down, while Erpenbeck’s erstwhile elementary school was reduced to rubble. But a form of life was also destroyed, and much of Not a Novel treats its author’s conviction that even now she remains riven, an occupant of both a place that no longer exists and its strange, shiny successor.

Though an uneasy inhabitant of present-day Germany, Erpenbeck is one of its most acclaimed authors. Thanks in large part to the efforts of Susan Bernofsky, the skilful translator of her five slim novels, she is now well on her way to prominence in the anglophone sphere as well. Not a Novel was released in Germany in 2019 as Kein Roman: Texte 1992 bis 2018 (literally, ‘Not a Novel: Writings from 1992–2018’). The translator Kurt Beals’s rendering of the book’s contents is elegant, but its original title might have been more accurate: it is in pieces, but it is not a memoir so much as a collection of essays. Alongside autobiographical sketches, there are lectures, prize acceptance speeches, literary critical musings, and feuilletons about everything from fairytales to the word ‘suction’. Though certain preoccupations (with ruins, with silence, with global injustice) emerge, what ties the disparate threads together is not their varied subjects but their common inflection. As in her fiction, Erpenbeck writes in an elegiac mode. Her sentences are long and sinuous, and she tends towards the incantatory repetition of phrases. She omits quotation marks and lapses into a present tense that smacks not of immediacy but of awareness that the past is eerily eternal, like a ghost flickering back to the site of its body’s death. Still, there are structural differences between Erpenbeck’s novels and her not-novel. Where the former are intricate contrapuntal constructions, the latter frays into straying strands.

In Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, which is very much a novel (and a good one at that), a woman in a nineteenth-century Galician village confesses to her husband that ‘as a child she had long been convinced the world was as flat as a palatschinke, and she herself—like all the other inhabitants of the border town she lived in—had been sprinkled on the outermost rim of this pancake like a grain of sugar’. When she neared the town’s outskirts, the woman recalls, she feared she would topple off into the abyss. Erpenbeck grew up as a grain of sugar on the edge of the East German pancake. Her family lived first in an apartment on a dead-end street cut off by the wall, later in a high-rise so close to the West that she could see its distinctive double-decker buses from her window. In Not a Novel she writes: ‘There is nothing better for a child than to grow up at the ends of the earth’, then repeats the sentence, then repeats it again. When the wall fell, she tumbled off. Her recollections reveal that she is still struggling to pick up the pieces.

* * *

All of Erpenbeck’s novels are, in some sense, in pieces. Indeed, as she explains in the preface to Not a Novel, she once crafted a college paper by chopping the pages up and reassembling them: ‘whenever I wanted to change some part of the text, I would take scissors and cut it up into individual paragraphs, shuffle them around on the floor until the collage was just right, and then reach for the glue’. Traces of this approach are palpable in her novels, all of which are made up of chunks of text separated by strips of space.

For the most part, each unit of an Erpenbeck novel – they might be best characterized as stanzas – is shorter than a traditional chapter but longer than the Tweet-adjacent blips that appear in contemporary ‘fragment novels’. Her stanzas are not stand-alone pronouncements so much as invocations of a clastic whole. Phrases and objects break away from their native contexts only to recur as refrains, and what seems at first like fragmentation later paves the way for more complex holism, as in operas in which strings of notes resurface as leitmotifs. Erpenbeck spent her college years studying to become an opera director, and she writes in Not a Novel that her training gave her an ‘education in the principle of collage’. In Don Giovanni, a key influence, ‘three different pieces of music, played by two small ensembles on stage and by the orchestra in the pit, begin to tumble into each other’.

Like strains of music that become intelligible only as they twine together, individual snatches of Erpenbeck’s novels are often confusing in isolation. In her first two books, the revelation of a central secret prompts both her characters and her readers to re-interpret everything that came before. The Old Child (1999) treats a mysterious and apparently amnesiac girl who turns out to be an adult in disguise, while The Book of Words (2004) follows a character who discovers that her seemingly loving father is in fact a torturer. In much of Erpenbeck’s fiction, the idea that the end can alter the beginning plays out not just at the level of substance but also at the level of form. In The End of Days, her fourth (and in my view, best) novel, the characters are not named but defined relationally, for instance as ‘the mother’ or ‘the grandmother’, so that they are not fully comprehensible until their children or grandchildren are introduced. The book opens with the burial of a baby, yet her death is presented as an obliteration of her future selves – as meaningful only in the context of the whole of her prospective life:

Three handfuls of dirt, and the little girl running off to school with her satchel on her back now lay there in the ground, her satchel bouncing up and down as she runs even farther; three handfuls of dirt, and the ten-year-old playing the piano with pale fingers lay there; three handfuls, and the adolescent girl whose bright coppery hair men turn to stare at as she passes was interred.

These various iterations of the baby survive in four extended re-imaginings of her biography (each succeeded by short sections that Erpenbeck, ever musical, calls ‘intermezzos’). In the second iteration of the story, the girl moves to Vienna with her family and survives to adolescence, only to kill herself during the Depression; in the third, she decides against suicide but perishes in a labour camp in the Soviet Union as a young adult; in the fourth, she makes it to middle age in East Germany but trips down the stairs and breaks her neck before the fall of the wall; and in the fifth, she dies peacefully in a nursing home after reunification. Locutions, images, and objects carry over from each of these parallel worlds to the next. A clock and the complete works of Goethe are lugged from one place to another, until at last they end up in a pawnshop in the final version of the story. When the adult son of the protagonist glimpses these heirlooms on the shelves, he does not even recognize them, for an object uprooted from its context is no more meaningful than a sentence torn out of a book or a note yanked out of an opera.

Erpenbeck is intent on preserving the connections that so often threaten to fade into invisibility, for which reason her novels are all in the business of demonstrating how the ostensibly disparate pieces in fact hang together. Visitation, her third novel, is about a lake house near Berlin that changes hands over and over, passing from an agrarian homesteader at the turn of the century to a Jewish family in the thirties to a Nazi architect during World War II, and so on and on until its demolition in the present day. Each chapter is devoted to one of the house’s visitors or inhabitants, and in each there is a slogan that is repeated.  (‘I-a-m-g-o-i-n-g-h-o-m-e’, types an East German writer over and over; ‘humour is when you laugh all the same’ is the motto of the architect’s jocular wife, at least until the Red Army closes in.) Only one character remains in the orbit of the property as the others rotate in and out: the subject of every other chapter is the quiet, unassuming gardener, who performs the same tasks in the employ of various owners. For decades, he ‘waters shrubs and flowers twice a day, once early in the morning and again when dusk arrives’. Every time he plants something new, he digs all the way down to the ‘blue clay found everywhere in this region’.

Like the gardener, Erpenbeck digs until she reaches the substratum that underlies the shifting surface. She is after ‘what remains’, as another East German writer, Christa Wolf, titled one of her novellas. In Visitation, what remains is a house and the gardener who tends to it; in The End of Days, what remains is the single character who thwarts death in four different ways. What, if anything, remains in Not a Novel?

* * *

‘Many different eras are collected in this volume’, the book begins. Like Erpenbeck’s harrowingly historical fiction, Not a Novel ranges over decades, gathering Erpenbeck’s reflections on her youth in East Germany, the baroque music and Romantic fairytales she loves, the recent death of her mother, and the ongoing refugee crisis. Its contents are arranged into sections titled ‘Life’, ‘Literature and Music’, and ‘Society’.

‘Life’ is the most memoirist, the least in pieces, and by far the best. Its contents examine lives and deaths with reference to the orphaned objects they leave in their wake. In ‘Open Bookkeeping’, Erpenbeck makes an unsentimental but never unfeeling inventory of the items she finds in her dead mother’s apartment: ‘I inherit hundreds of slides and 3 projectors, inherit 8 ashtrays, 3 cartons of cigarettes, 1 old cassette recorder, 2 mirrors…’ and so on and on.  She discovers ‘10 bottles of shampoo and 10 tubes of conditioner’, which she uses for ‘the next year and a half’. In a later piece, Erpenbeck takes her mother’s pressure cooker to her country house to bury it. She ends up using it to melt dirty snow into water hot enough to thaw the pipes. Her parting observation is bleakly and guttingly funny: ‘my mother’s pressure cooker has become a pot once again: I am cooking – a soup of black leaves’.

But most of what Erpenbeck mourns has not left such tangible traces. The landscape of the German Democratic Republic has been razed, and in ‘Homesick for Sadness’, probably the richest piece in Not a Novel, she grasps at the few remaining remnants of the country she grew up in and, despite everything, cannot help but miss. She glimpses the ‘small blue tiles that covered the girl’s bathroom’ in the pile of concrete that was once her elementary school and recollects ‘the mechanical pencils that we unscrewed to make blowguns for spitballs’.

These images are conjured with novelistic vividness, and indeed, devotees of Erpenbeck’s fiction will recognize many of the details that crop up in Not a Novel from her other books: she recalls ‘a lacquered wooden clock with golden numbers’ that ticked throughout her ‘entire childhood’, an artifact reminiscent of the clock in The End of Days; she notes that her father was enthralled by a catacomb unearthed beneath a Berlin church, a discovery that delights enthusiasts in both Visitation and her most recent book, Go, Went, Gone; she relates that a Red Army soldier shoved her infant mother through the window of a departing train when her family fled East Prussia, an anecdote also included, in slightly altered form, in Go, Went, Gone.

But Erpenbeck’s oracular register is much better suited to fiction and autobiography, with their necessary forays into material reality, than it is to flights of theoretical fancy, which can so easily bloat into phatic imprecision. Many of the more philosophical meditations in the ‘Literature and Music’ and ‘Society’ sections of Not a Novel lapse into cliché by way of rhetorical questions. In a lecture about The Book of Words, Erpenbeck muses, ‘Can we exchange our history for another? Discard it? Retract it? … Can we unlearn what we have learned, unfeel what we have felt?’ Later, she asks, ‘Is forgetting our only salvation? Or are our stories the only baggage that no one can take from us? Are we our stories?’

Questions so baggy are unanswerable, and Erpenbeck’s half-hearted attempts to answer them are predictably unsatisfying. ‘Time has the power to separate us, not only from others, but also from ourselves’, she ventures. Later, she reflects, ‘When we read – and when we write, too – we have to live with the fact that the world can’t be divided into good and evil, into wins and losses’. This is about as pat a commendation for complexity as I can imagine. But no matter: Erpenbeck defies her own injunction seventy pages later in a decidedly moralistic lecture about the plight of refugees in Europe (a topic treated with more nuance and less sanctimony in Go, Went, Gone, in which a retired professor becomes enraged by Germany’s unjust asylum policies when he befriends a number of displaced African men). That her largely leftist diagnosis of the situation is, by my lights, correct is not enough to reconcile me to maudlin and meaningless talk of how ‘much we can lose without losing ourselves’.

In the end, Not a Novel is worth reading more because it sheds light on Erpenbeck’s ornate novels than because it coheres in its own right. It does not do justice to Erpenbeck at her most majestic. Sometimes it is sharp, and sometimes it is cloying, but the shattered pieces never quite come together.

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘A New Germany?’, NLR 57.

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How Does It Feel

The second best thing that happened to me in 2001 was spending an hour with Destiny’s Child in the basement of the Civic Centre in Peoria, Illinois. The best thing was driving to that arena in a rental car, doing 80 MPH on this flat earth and listening to Daft Punk’s Discovery for the first time. All of that land speed record fury road hogwash came true as I melted in their slipstream. The engine of Discovery moves like techno, but the frame is made of soul and disco samples from the Seventies. The singing is another thing altogether, filtered and transformed into mechanical birdsong, low on meaning and high on sentiment. With the Chrysler PT Cruiser’s built-in CD player working at its limits, I rode eternal with Daft Punk, shiny and chrome.

Later, the battery died because I left on the headlights and had to wait three hours for AAA. Such is the fall from machine grace. Daft Punk made it worth the wait, though, and thinking of them being gone leads me to some basic questions. How good were they? Almost impossibly. Is this breakup a stunt? Hopefully. Were they scammers? In a way, though only in the tradition of popular music’s cannibal contract.

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo formed a vector; their direction only corresponded to positive developments in popular music and their magnitude was considerable. Some of that can be easily seen in their production of other artists, work they were picky about. They’re responsible for the acrid fry of Kanye West’s 2013 album, Yeezus, producing its four most important tracks, including the bug-zapping opener ‘On Sight’. Daft Punk worked on two hits from The Weeknd’s 2016 album, Starboy, while Bangalter produced a chunk of the 2017 Arcade Fire album, Everything Now. Why they decided to break up in 2021 – eight years after releasing an album they never toured – is a mystery as of now. The band has made no statement other than posting a clip from their 2006 film, Electroma, in which one robot self-destructs and the other walks into the sunset.

Go back to the band’s beginning, in 1992, and you’ll find the rapid reinventions of their twenty-nine year career visible in the first five. The teenage Bangalter and Homem-Christo first record as a rock trio named Darlin’ and release two songs on a compilation put out by Stereolab’s label, Duophonic, in 1993. They are unremarkable, tame versions of Stereolab’s German backbeat and guitar ostinatos. In May of 1993, Dave Jennings of Melody Maker calls the single a ‘daft punky thrash’. Discouraged but still very much eighteen, Bangalter attends his first rave on top of the Pompidou Centre in the Beaubourg. (If that doesn’t read, culturally, imagine attending your first rave on the roof of The Whitney.) There, he hears a Chicago house classic – Phortune’s ‘Can You Feel The Bass?’ – and nothing is ever the same. Long into the band’s career, Daft Punk cite Chicago house as their inspiration (and later recite the names of 40-odd house and rap producers on a track called ‘Teachers’).

A few months into 1994, Homem-Christo and Bangalter take a hard turn from Darlin’ and create the first three Daft Punk songs – ‘The New Wave’, ‘Assault’, and ‘Alive’ – for Dave Clarke’s SOMA label. The angry saw-tooth waveforms that show up twenty years later in Yeezus are there in ‘The New Wave’. There’s no melody of any kind but plenty of sweet agitation in the sounds. Produced in Bangalter’s bedroom, it comes across as entirely professional.

Homework, the first Daft Punk album, is released on Virgin in January of 1997, and the duo make two decisions: to tour steadily for the year and never be photographed without their masks. One live recording from that tour is released in 2001 as Alive 1997, and you can easily find a clip of their LA performance of ‘Rollin and Scratchin’. This is Daft Punk 1.0, working with a manually connected system, drum machines controlling the synthesize patterns via leads. At one point, Bangalter turns the knobs on a Doepfer filter and the music becomes harsh and asthmatic before dropping back into a comfortable, woody midrange. This method is part of ‘French touch’, a brief genre which matches these electronic sweeps with big, juicy samples of old disco records. That filtering move, which removes the spatial aspect of the music only to bring it back double, became the ‘drop’ of EDM and still plays a part in the structure of variously affiliated dance songs. The disco sample reached its apex with Daft Punk themselves and had mostly faded by 2005.

An instrumental called ‘Da Funk’, first released in 1995, becomes the duo’s first American single in 1997. Spike Jonze uses it to score a real shaggy dog story. Jonze films an actor wearing an enormous dog mask limping around New York on crutches, blasting the Daft Punk song from a boombox. The squelch on ‘Da Funk’ is slower than the Daft Punk average tempo, and the rhythm is built from two Seventies funk tracks by Barry White and Vaughn Mason. At the time, Bangalter revealed that the pair had been listening to Warren G’s ‘Regulate’, but critics were shy about tying the act to hip-hop. (Somehow, even though hip-hop is built from records played in discos, hip-hop is never allowed to coincide with disco.) Daft Punk ignore this, slowly compiling everybody’s best strategies, like dance consultants.

What they compile is an impeccable mille-feuille. The electric sugar of old soul and disco records forms the first layer, over which they stack deft keyboard melodies and electronically filtered singing. (Find the ‘Daft Punk Medley’, a brief piano rendition by Chilly Gonzalez, and you’ll hear how durable their themes are.) The third stratum is a family-friendly nostalgia, more Star Wars than Blade Runner. There is very little sex in Daft Punk’s world, no violence, and no explicitly stated politics. We are always returning, never arriving.

Michel Gondry directed the video for their next single, ‘Around The World’. There are no samples in this song, and the duo does beautifully without them. The song has only three words – around the world – sung into a vocoder, gently tootling as a bass line circles the keyboard figure. In the video, breakdancing men and swim-suited women move precisely, going upstairs and downstairs in sync with the bassline. There are skeletons and robots, too, but no sign of the band.

After Homework, the band refines their mission by working on a side project, Stardust. ‘Music Sounds Better With You’, the only song under the Stardust name, becomes a worldwide hit in the summer of 1998 and remains the central song of French touch. The track uses a bright burst of Chaka Khan’s 1981 song, ‘Fate’: three keyboard chords and a sharp, high guitar figure. Over this, Benjamin Diamond sings, ‘I feel like the music sounds better with you, love might bring us both together, I feel right’. Those are also the only lyrics, and the song repeats and rolls like a disco holding pattern. The clip introduces a tendency seen in many Daft Punk videos. The three men of Stardust are painted silver, playing keyboards and guitars on a cloud. In Stardust’s case, nobody played any guitar on anything at all, and this is where a benevolent deception enters.

In 2001, having become fully helmeted robots as a result of the Y2K bug (their story) Daft Punk launch deep into popularity with the best album they ever produce, Discovery. (Disco? Very.) In the 2015 documentary, ‘Daft Punk: Unchained’, you hear Les Inrocks founding editor Jean-Daniel Beauvallet describe Discovery as ‘one of the first post-sample albums, which builds music out of other sounds. Sampling means taking parts of a song, looping it over and over until it becomes music. But they changed them so much that samples became unrecognizable’. This reorganization of fragments was old hat for producers like DJ Premier and J. Dilla, who routinely atomized records and assigned those bits to the pads of an Akai MPC and created songs that bore no resemblance to their sources. Apart from the fact that nobody says ‘post-sample’, Beauvallet’s distinction can only be working to distinguish Daft Punk’s work from that of these Black American producers, who got there way before them. In light of this, and the fact that Black Americans supplied most of the samples on Discovery, Daft Punk’s elevation can be a slightly queasy affair, even for those of us who adore them.

Discovery is a patchwork of samples, just as much as Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique or The Avalanches’ Since I Left You or Jay-Z’s The Takeover. The band turns everything up here, including the contradictions. They use other people’s records more than ever – huge chunks of Edwin Birdsong and George Duke records power big songs – while also creating their most expansive melodies. Discovery is also where they solidify their fourth and most powerful layer – joy. Daft Punk are the least cynical pop act of the 21st century. They provide the emotionally moist sweep of rock without rock, the thrill of victory without the burden of a self, and the plush comforts of nostalgia without the indignity of aging. Daft Punk are a psychological car bomb that drives into your garage on a silver disco E-ZPass.

Discovery allows the assembly line to slow down for the first time. ‘Something About Us’ is a quiet storm R&B song, crooned through machines. It may be uncanny to have the robot singing a winelight love song, but not so uncanny it doesn’t work. ‘Nightvision’ is a placid instrumental that could be a NASA rewrite of Billy Joel’s ‘Just The Way You Are’, and its air-conditioned detention cell vibe may have inspired the movie Drive. (Homem-Christo went on to co-write and co-produce Kavinsky’s ‘Nightcall’ for that soundtrack.) But check your files – the duo cut up this very same Billy Joel song on Homework’s ‘High Fidelity’. The plan was always there. Not DJ big – Billy Joel big.

The success of Discovery rattles them, though, and they follow it up with Human After All in 2005, openly describing it as a reaction to Discovery’s painstaking construction. Created in a few weeks and only lightly edited, Human After All sounds like Daft Punk 1.0 with higher production values and more guitars. It’s harsh and claustrophobic, and they quickly move on to Electroma, in 2006. Like everything they produce, the movie looks exquisite but it’s atypically dull, a too-long riff on two robots hoping to become human. The robots (not played by Daft Punk themselves) commit suicide in the film, so it isn’t unfair to suspect that the band saw the end in sight long before this year’s announcement.

The negation of Human After All and Electroma leads to the synthesis of Alive 2007, the peak (and summary) of Daft Punk 2.0. The band toured the world in 2006 and 2007, some of it documented in vaguely legit videos available on YouTube, and on a live album released by the band. A recently uploaded set filmed in Chicago’s Grant Park in August of 2007 shows our boys at the top of a pyramid frame inside a larger triangle, all of it fitted with LED lights, screens, or both. To say this light show worked is to undersell a genuine miracle of cheap tricks and expensive gear. The show is a ninety-minute mastermix of their career, possibly recorded beforehand, possibly created in the moment. It hardly matters. Daft Punk managed to bottle the energy of a club night and unfold it in a setting no different in scope than a Van Halen show. You can hear this on the Alive 2007 album, where the band closes with an ecstatic blend of ‘One More Time’ and the instrumental track of ‘Music Sounds Better With You’, an almost too-pleasing combination of triggers. The music dissolves into a tumble of crackling electronic embers, dying back into brute sound genesis.

The two retreat and re-emerge to do a passable job on the Tron: Legacy soundtrack in 2010, their first experience with a string section and a professional studio. This pushes them towards their 2013 album, Random Access Memories, a radical detente between decades of affect and sound and strategy; and the first and last Daft Punk album made in an actual studio. Rather than ape Chic and Michael Jackson records, they hired the musicians who made them: Nile Rodgers, Paul Jackson, Jr. and John J.R. Robinson, amongst others. Paul Williams and Giorgio Moroder are also on here, being their most Seventies selves. Williams sings a saccharine monstrosity called ‘Touch’ and Moroder talks for nine minutes about his importance as an early synth adopter, a very strange choice for a track three slot.

The lead single, ‘Get Lucky’, co-written by Pharrell Williams, was a success and deservedly so. Williams plays the good-smelling lech of disco, staying ‘up all night to get lucky’, the closest to a sexual phrase Daft Punk gets. The rest of Random Access Memories is gorgeous audio best experienced without the lyric sheet. Daft Punk 2.0 was everything about Daft Punk that worked, torqued as far as the material allowed. Daft Punk 3.0 was the band facing off with its heroes and hitting an Oedipal block. How do you kill your idols when you’ve hired them? The strong parts of Random Access Memories stand next to the records they sampled but what makes the album work is also what kills it. Daft Punk lyrics were, from the start, little more than chanted encouragement cribbed from the psychic clipboard of the Eighties: good times, celebrations, togetherness, music and music and music. On Random Access Memories, the band conducts a group therapy session with lyrics that flicker between mutual soothing and despair. ‘I am lost, I can’t even remember my name’, ‘Where do I belong?’, ‘We will never be alone again’, ‘We’ve come too far to give up who we are’. They announce their self-destruct sequence throughout the album, choosing to end themselves rather than their elders. Random Access Memories is too nice to be great but it’s way too much fun to be bad.

The confusion around musical labour obtains once again in the video for ‘Get Lucky’, where the robots appear behind Rodgers and Williams, playing bass and drums. But Bangalter doesn’t play bass on the song – Nathan East does. And Homem-Christo didn’t play the drums – that’s Omar Hakim. This long-running misdirection around physical activity and instrumentation is obviously not accidental, another variation on Oedipal anxiety, more than a little childish. We’re just as good as the bands that play their own instruments, right? Look!

Daft Punk 3.0 ultimately feels most like Stardust, a successful one-off that spread rapidly and atomized. The band’s career makes the most sense if you see the 2007 tour as a goodbye, and all of the subsequent productions and creations as contract gigs. It’s a good way to find their philosophy. You don’t need any remixes of Daft Punk done by people outside the band, but you do need every remix and production Daft Punk did under their own name. The inhuman part was how consistent they were, but much of that came from relentlessly applying a sensibility – as human a strategy as there is.

Read on: Simon Hammond, K-Punk At Large, NLR 118.

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Engaged Pessimism

Explaining her reasons for turning to the roman noir when in her fifties, after decades of teaching history at a university in Paris, Dominique Manotti points to François Mitterrand. His presidency, she has said, sounded the death knell for hopes of a radical transformation of French society. Fiction, though, offered her an alternative form of resistance – if only as a stubborn refusal to let things lie. Now aged 78, Manotti has written a dozen novels on subjects ranging from football corruption and factory protests to police violence and oil trading, mostly set in contemporary France. To better appreciate her work, it is useful to understand why it was the noir genre she chose rather than the policier, or detective novel. In a talk she gave at the University of Bari in 2009, she explained this well:

In ‘traditional’ detective fiction, a crime (or more than one crime) takes place and creates a rupture in the order of things. An unacceptable disorder – an unacceptable transgression – takes place at the start of the novel. An investigator (or more than one) carries out an investigation, which results in the discovery of the culprit(s) and the restoration of order. The detective story is by definition an ordered novel. Evil exists, but in the end, order is restored. You have scared yourself, but you can sleep soundly. The crime is an individual act, which is explained through personal motives and relationships.

The detective novel is steeped in psychology, and even psychiatry when you have the character of the serial killer, which is the new archetype of this kind of fiction. The noir novel, however, roots its crimes in the particular social circumstances in which they are committed. It is no longer the individual alone who is the criminal but the world of suffering, misery, violence and corruption in which we live which produces criminal individuals, this world that law and justice cover up without ever addressing. The reestablishment of order, if it takes place at all, is never more than a fragile reestablishment of an appearance of order and peace. Disorder is the true state of this tragic world. We are poles apart from any kind of edifying literature. The noir novel seems to use the same codes as detective fiction, and reuses the same characters such as the detective, but it does so with a very different scope: crime and disorder are not accidents that can be remedied. Disorder is at the very heart of social organization; it is its irreparable truth.

And it is this way of seeing things that strikes me as better adapted to the understanding of my time. It seems to me that we are living in a world that has a heightened awareness of the crisis it faces, a world that sees the imbalance and loss of control, and therefore the danger.

This goes some way to accounting for the general darkness and despair that hangs over Manotti’s novels. One could call it an engaged pessimism. She writes novels to call out what she considers unacceptable in society, but she has few expectations that what she details in her books will go away. Much of the time she is also drawing from fact, and these true stories have all ended badly, as is the case for Marseille 73, her thirteenth and latest novel which was published last year.

Manotti is the pen name of Marie-Noëlle Thibault, born in Paris in 1942. She was a student in 1968 and describes the shock of France’s bloody involvement in the Algerian war for independence as the key event that oriented her towards a life of political activity. At university she joined the French Communist Party and went on to do a doctorate in economic history. For many years she taught history at Vincennes, where she was a union leader and worked on the journal Les Cahiers de mai. She published her first roman noir in 1995.

Manotti has a recurring detective, Inspector Daquin, whom she is clearly fond of and who we in turn warm to as readers. He is a classic noir character: a flawed and brilliant outsider, sensitive but with a violent streak. He is the same age as Manotti but unlike her played no role in 1968 – all we learn is that he was ‘out of the country’ at the time. By giving Daquin no association with a period that for her was crucial, Manotti distanced herself from her protagonist, perhaps to avoid caricature, or loading him with too much partisan baggage. Daquin is also gay and has a tormented past, which comes back in flashes throughout the books, as in the following extract from KOP from 1998. The style is typical Manotti – little bursts of biographical detail about her characters, infrequent but enough to give us a clear sense of each of them, with a curious switching between third and first person that lends immediacy to the scene:

Daquin enters the main hall of the hospital of Lisle-en-Seine. He is at once overcome by anxiety. All through his childhood, the spectacle of his mother, high on drugs and alcohol, a very slow decline, a medically assisted suicide. Since then, a badly managed fear of the world of doctors. And then Lenglet, his old friend, dead from AIDS, in hospital, just two years ago… Sam (the journalist). Surprised to see his face so drawn, in this harsh light. I had forgotten already.

Five of Manotti’s books have appeared in English so far, and more have German, Italian and Spanish versions. In France, it was her 2008 novel Lorraine Connection which first reached a wide audience. It is one of her strongest books, its power perhaps deriving from her own experience as a union leader. The novel is inspired by a real incident: the fire that broke out at the Daewoo factory in Mont St Michel in 2003, which was blamed on trade unionists protesting ahead of the factory’s closure. Manotti did not believe the official account and so decided to investigate – the novel was the result. Among her other notable works are Bien connu des services de police from 2010, which won France’s most prestigious crime-writing prize. Dedicated to her students in the Saint-Denis college where she had taught for many years, the novel was inspired by the wave of police violence in the suburbs in 2005. Another accomplished novel, L’honorable société, co-written with a fellow noir author Hervé Albertazzi – penname DOA – and originally intended to be a television series, was published the following year. It follows a group of environmental activists who witness a murder and become embroiled in a political cover-up.

In Marseille 73, Manotti returns to a time and place she had already visited in a previous novel, Or noir from 2015. The earlier book had dealt with the oil boom and rise of traders in the 1970s, featuring Daquin aged 27, just starting out in his first post with the Marseille police department. In Marseille 73 Daquin is with us again, but this time Manotti concentrates on a specific set of events in 1973. She says she was inspired to write the novel after learning about the wave of assassinations that had taken place that year in France, when some 50 people were killed in six months. The murders were targeted hits on Arabs, with 20 or so killed in Marseille alone. The deaths however were brushed under the carpet – Manotti only found out about them decades later. Typical of her modus operandi, she investigated. The novel appeared two years later.

‘I wrote it to resist forgetting’, she said in an interview published on her website. This is a simple way to summarize all her work. She uses fictional form to expose the real mechanics of power and corruption. ‘Warning’, she wrote at the start of Lorraine Connection, ‘This is a novel. Everything is true and everything is false.’

Marseille 73 is ultimately an indictment of France under Pompidou and Giscard d’Estaing, the presidents who came after 68 and who sought to erase the inglorious events of that period. These include the activities of the OAS, or L’Organisation armée secrète, the clandestine and murderous French paramilitary group that carried out terrorist attacks in Algeria in the last year of the war. De Gaulle had granted amnesty to its leaders in 1968, and by the 1970s they were being reintegrated into the police force and the army. Meanwhile, the racism of the Front National was on the rise.

The novel opens with an order made by the French government in 1972 that set the stage for the subsequent wave of violence the following year:

In the fall of 1972, the French government decided to control the immigrant population much more strictly than it had done until then. The Marcellin-Fontanet circular requires immigrants who wish to come to France or who already reside there to have an employment contract and to have adequate accommodation in order to be able to obtain a residence permit and thus be ‘regularized’. Eighty-six percent of immigrants present on French soil suddenly switch from the category of ‘unofficial workers’ to ‘illegal workers’ and overnight a new category, that of the ‘sans-papiers’ is created – making them candidates for expulsion from France in the summer of 1973.

In Grasse [a town near Marseille] as elsewhere, foreign workers feel threatened. They do not have work contracts or decent housing. On 11 June 1973, they protested in Grasse’s old town, where many had been housed in slums, and over the following days they decided to strike, calling for job contracts and better housing. At night, the city walls were covered with black and white posters reading: ‘Stop uncontrolled immigration’, signed under the new decree.

The Grasse mayor refused to meet with the workers and instead called in the riot police to crack down on protests, which they did with brutal enthusiasm. The local, non-Arab population was also spurred to action and a special anti-immigrant committee was created.

The declared objective is ‘to get rid of the thousand idlers who undermine the good reputation of the city’. The mayor tells the press: ‘these immigrant protests are absolutely scandalous and undermine public order. It is no less scandalous that they are not more severely repressed’. He adds, ‘It’s very tedious, you know, to be invaded by them’.

After this sobering prologue, the main story of Marseille 73 begins with the brutal murder of a bus driver, a real case that followed several targeted killings of immigrant workers in Marseille and dozens more deaths across the country. In the novel, Daquin discovers that the investigations carried out so far have been woefully inadequate. Generally the crimes were dismissed as instances of ‘settling scores between rival gangs’, regardless of whether the victims had criminal records. Then a particularly shocking murder takes place: a 16-year-old Algerian, Malek, is shot three times as he waited on the street for a friend. As Daquin looks into it, he discovers the initial investigations have been botched and that no real attempt is being made to find the killers – prompting him to quietly pursue the leads himself.  

The story is compelling as fiction, but it is shocking when considered as drawn from fact. Daquin’s investigation focuses on the killings, but he goes on to discover the disturbing truth about the police force – rife with racism and former OAS members – who saw Marseille as round two of the Algerian war. Marseille 73 details all of this as well as the rise of the far-right groups that legitimised anti-immigrant sentiment. It is interesting to learn that in the 1970s the media had not yet started to demonize the Front National; instead there was a generalized complacency by reporters to covering the wave of violence towards Arab communities. The police, meanwhile, are portrayed as operating more like a mafia, with decisions made in dark bistros and business considerations looming large over promotions within the force. Daquin can only rely on a few trusted colleagues and the family of the dead teenager, who are portrayed in stark contrast to the police. We also gain insight into how immigrant workers organized strikes over the lack of justice for the killings.

True to her definition of the noir genre resolving nothing by the end of the story, Marseille 73 offers no satisfactory final scene in the drawing room with the perpetrator of the crime exposed and moral order reestablished. Daquin’s investigation does manage to put a police officer in jail – the henchman Picon, Malek’s killer. But on his first night locked up he dies. The official report says it was a heart attack, but everyone involved in the case knows it was an inside job: Picon was killed by his fellow officers, who feared that he would expose their corruption to save himself once he stood trial. When Daquin asks Malek’s family if they want to push for a conviction of Picon’s killers, they dismiss the idea of getting real justice for their son  – Picon’s conviction was the best they could hope for. In France, Malek’s father says, the legal system tells us that as North Africans ‘our lives are worth nothing’.

One does not read Manotti’s novels for subtle psychological portraits or the cool literary style found in the best noir fiction. Her prose is closer to being ‘cinematic’, as it was described by one French reviewer. The action moves along swiftly; we have few inner thoughts of characters but a great deal about their environment and about their interactions with each other. Marseille 73 is a fine example of this, but its subject matter is particularly unsettling and important. Algeria continues to cast a long shadow in France decades after the end of the war, and much still remains unsaid or hidden from view. Manotti employs her training as a historian to unearth the facts, and the techniques of noir to chip away at shameful events that we should not be allowed to forget.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton on the autofiction of Fatima Daas.

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Reading the Room

Since its consolidation at the end of the eighteenth century, the realist novel has been the premier vehicle for the depiction of contemporary life. For over two hundred years, a relatively fixed set of representational techniques – point-of-view, voice, description, dialogue, plot – has managed to adapt to the radical transformations of modernity: the nuclearization of the family, the entry of women into public life, the liberalization of sexual mores, industrialization and deindustrialization, urbanization and suburbanization, secularization, the lifeworlds of dominated classes and colonized nations, war on a planetary scale, and new conceptions of cognition and identity formation, to name just a few. By doubling down on its core strength – the linguistic representation of inner experience – the novel even managed to fend off challenges from rival media, like film and television. But over the last decade or so it has become clear that changes in the texture of the contemporary itself, due primarily to the diffusion of digital networked media, have begun to strain the capacity of the novel – as an institution, as a medium, as a form – to fulfil its traditional remit.

The reason most often given for this is that, bound to the format and economics of the book, an increasingly Jurassic technology, the novel’s production cycle cannot keep pace with the accelerated timescale of the internet, which contracts what counts as the contemporary into shorter and shorter units of duration by flooding the collective consciousness with data. To write a novel, find it representation, sell it, edit it, design its cover, copyedit it, check the proofs, print it, promote it, publish it, and distribute it requires a year at an absolute minimum, and almost always much longer than that. And in a year’s worth of contemporary time whole epochs can pass and be forgotten. This is in part why we have seen the prestige of genre fiction – specifically historical fiction and science fiction – rise at the expense of literary realism, and why so many so-called literary authors have turned to these genre forms. The historical novel, broadly defined as any novel set in a time before social media, sidesteps the question of the contemporary altogether, turning over to the reader the task of drawing any parallels with the present, whenever that happens to be. Whereas the science fiction novel, set in a speculative future, gambles that reality will meet it sooner or later, but ideally at a moment coincident with the pub date chosen by sales and marketing. The number of recent science fiction novels which have been praised as ‘prescient’ should give the game away: if each represents a possible world, and hundreds if not thousands of them are produced per annum, the laws of probability suggest that a handful of these will guess correctly how some aspect of the contemporary will look one day.

For the literary novelist who nevertheless wishes to depict what Trollope called The Way We Live Now, and who therefore cannot ignore the extent to which ‘being’ and ‘being online’ have come to overlap, two other, less-often-discussed technical challenges immediately present themselves. The first is what I’ll call, following Fredric Jameson, the ‘collective representation problem’: how can any of the narrative perspectives available to realist fiction function as metonyms for the perspectives of the hundreds of millions of users on a single social media platform? The second, related problem is what I’ll call the ‘formal mirroring problem’: how should this narrative perspective translate the user experience of one medium into a different medium? As more and more ‘Internet Novels’ are written, it is worth exploring how a recent entry in this quickly consolidating genre, Fake Accounts, the debut novel of the critic Lauren Oyler, published earlier this month, handles these two challenges.

In both cases, the novel’s strategy is the same: acknowledgement and disavowal, followed by a lateral move onto a parallel track. Consider the following exchange, set in an early epoch of the Trump eon. The unnamed narrator, who has returned to New York from attending the Women’s March in Washington D.C., has run into a friend, who has also just come from an anti-Trump protest. Everyone was talking about impeachment, the friend reports. ‘Who was everyone?’ the narrator wants to know. Her friend answers: ‘The people who spoke’ at the rally, though it is unclear whether these were organizers with microphones, or whisperers in the crowd. Either way, the narrator, a media professional and avid Twitter user, knows that simply speaking on some particular occasion cannot define a coherent public in an age when billions of people have access to – but no control over – the means of communication. In fact, nothing can. ‘The group’, she observes, ‘regardless of its size, could always be dismissed as not representing everyone else, a group that was always unfathomably larger’. There are social types in the twenty-first century – the narrator is one of them – just as there were in Balzac’s time, but because of the size of the online public sphere, none of these can be translated into representative figures, deserving of consideration on this basis alone. (Needless to say, this would also hold, mutatis mutandis, for novels like Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides or Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, which employ first person plural narration.) That collective representation is impossible may have been just as true when Balzac generated his ‘physiognomies’, but the limited, socially homogenous nature of his reading public allowed him and them to remain ignorant of this fact in a way that is simply not available to a contemporary writer, who is reminded of it every time she goes online, where there are different degrees of everybody, just as in set theory there are different degrees of infinity. The ‘universally acknowledged’ truth with which Austen opens Pride and Prejudice (and indeed, the realist novel proper) is meant to be ironic, but the irony comes at the expense of a culture that could still be said to genuinely believe in such things.

Oyler’s narrator is ‘a white woman living in Brooklyn’ (later an American living in Berlin) though of course she does ‘not identify as such’. She lays claim to our attention not on the basis of her demographic representativeness, impossible in any event, but on the basis of her particular expertise. Like Felix, the narrator’s love interest, whom she meets while he is leading a pub crawl through Berlin Mitte, she functions as a tour guide to the Land of the Very Online, a place likewise populated by unreliable narrators and their fake accounts. (Felix, the narrator discovers, after persuading him to move to New York with her, has been moonlighting as a prominent online conspiracy theorist, furnishing her with an excuse to break up with him. In the course of the novel, he will indulge in a hoax even more audacious than that.)

‘There seemed to be two options for engaging with the world’, the narrator writes, ‘desperate close reading and planned obsolescence’ and she opts, at first, for the former, describing with ethnographic precision the distinctive nomenclatures and mentalities fostered by the algorithms of Twitter, Instagram, Tinder, and OKCupid and the non-virtual cultures and subcultures that have been drawn into their orbit. Oyler’s narrator is perhaps the most self-aware character in recent American fiction, which has produced such characters en masse; she is even more self-aware, I’d argue, than Adam Gordon, the narrator from Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, which Oyler astutely gives to one of the book’s minor characters. But by self-aware I do not only mean the way that Fake Accounts draws attention to its status as fiction, from the macro-level of the title and the section titles (‘Beginning’, ‘Backstory’, ‘Middle (Something Happens)’, ‘Middle (Nothing Happens)’, ‘Climax’, ‘End’) down to the micro-level of punctuation (‘A drunk coworker had once let me know that I’d established myself as a somewhat retrograde cynic, a toxic presence in the office but ultimately safe from firing because, among other skills, I was one of only two people on staff who knew how semicolons worked; my leaving was a wash’). Whether she is talking about her own motives, anticipating other characters’ reactions to her speech, looks, gestures, and behaviour (online and off), or deconstructing the cant and lazy thinking fostered by the structure of these platforms, the narrator is able – and more importantly, willing – to make the rules of each and every game explicit. To the extent that she can plausibly function as an ‘everywoman’, it is not because the story she tells is representative, but because in it she acts as both player and referee.

It is one thing, as a novelist, to have your characters anticipate the reactions of other characters: you have many drafts to give your protagonist the perfect lines. It is another thing entirely to play this game with the reader, whose reactions are ultimately beyond your control. And yet it is by taking this risk that Oyler gives her solution to the ‘formal mirroring problem’. Again, the problem is first acknowledged. The narrator is listening to a podcast interview with a writer whose new novel is cut up into short, aphoristic paragraphs on the grounds that ‘this structure…mimics the nature of modern life, which is “fragmented”’. In an Internet Novel, there is a strong temptation to reproduce the look of the site in the format of the book as a means of reproducing a character’s experience of consuming digital media. Unfortunately, however skilled an author may be at producing the ‘reality effect’ in her novel, books are still physical objects – fixed, finite collections of signs – whereas digital media is a discontinuous swarm of signs (and sounds and images) in perpetual, recombinant flux. Whenever authors have yielded to the temptation to make fragmentation the solution to the ‘formal mirroring problem’, the result is disappointing, and Oyler’s narrator does not hesitate to register her disappointment with it. ‘Why would I want to make my book like Twitter?’ she asks. ‘If I wanted a book that resembled Twitter, I wouldn’t write a book; I would just spend even more time on Twitter’. To mirror the appearance of social media in fragmentary prose forfeits the realist novel’s capacity for sustained description in exchange for a gimmicky caricature of digital media, and only serves to confirm the latter medium’s ascendency over the former. In ‘Middle (Nothing Happens)’, the narrator parodies this fragmented style and it is, as she herself foresees, the weakest section of the book.

Here it is worth recalling that the realist novel is itself an attempted solution to a ‘formal mirroring problem’, namely, how to translate the medium of oral storytelling, which requires the simultaneous co-presence of storyteller and audience, to written storytelling, in which the author is separated both physically and temporally from the reader. Up through the eighteenth century, authors were anxious enough about whether readers would accept this translation that they often felt it necessary to account for the existence of their texts before settling down to tell their stories. The frame narrative, the found manuscript, and most famously, the epistolary novel are nothing more than a series of narrative bootstrapping operations carried out for an audience that had yet to be trained to find the realist novel’s autonomous narrative ‘voice’ plausible. Another device, borrowed from theatre – a genre that, like oral storytelling, requires the physical co-presence of actor and audience – was direct address, such as Fielding, for example, employs in Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews. It is the extensive use of this device – in contravention, incidentally, of the ‘best practices’ of Creative Writing 101– that Oyler’s self-aware narrator turns to such good account in her Internet Novel.

‘As a writer you have to think of the reader’, the narrator says in the book’s concluding section, winking at the reader – but perhaps also at Flaubert and Henry James, who, writing during the golden age of the novel, when the form was at the uncontested height of cultural dominance, would have strenuously disagreed. Fake Accounts contains much implicit anticipation of the reader’s response, as well as traditional forms of direct address, but Oyler formalizes the procedure by maintaining a regular dialogue with a group of absent characters she calls ‘my ex-boyfriends’ whose commentary – sometimes collective, sometimes individuated – on the book’s events the narrator imagines coming from ‘the audience’, thereby reproducing in print the oral storytelling scenario. (The word ‘audience’ is derived from the Latin audire, ‘to hear’; the chorus of course derives from Attic theatre.) The ‘ex-boyfriends’ are generally well-disposed toward the narrator, even if, being exes, they also know her well enough to take her stories with a grain of salt, and to take a certain pleasure from watching her romantic pratfalls. They thus function as surrogates for the book’s readership: they express scepticism, concern, impatience, sympathy, respectful disagreement, befuddlement, vindication, and solidarity. In this reader’s experience at least, they performed their role with uncanny accuracy.

If this strategy represents an improvement over the ‘fragmentation solution’, it is not only because Oyler is particularly skilled at it, it is because she has identified an existing novelistic technique that translates the dialogical (or if you prefer, polyphonic) situation that exists on a site like Twitter, rather than merely imitating its look or feel. Twitter disciplines posters into the kind of self-awareness shown by Oyler’s narrator, by accustoming them to a state of all-encompassing auto-surveillance and by giving them real-time metrics for the success or failure of each of their statements. Clever tweets, saying what is on people’s minds, quote tweeting with praise for the right account, dunking on another account that has sparked outrage, trolling, creating a meme or prompt or formula, posting pictures of cute children and pets, etc., can be positively reinforced with likes and rewarded with amplified influence – but for those who become ‘main characters’, perhaps because they have failed to ‘read the room’, a pseudo-space with ever-shifting dimensions and occupants: Vae Victis! Despite being a largely textual medium, Twitter reproduces the conditions of oral storytelling more closely than the novel does: temporal co-presence replaces spatial co-presence, which is mediated by the site and screen, but this is enough to create the kind of n-dimensional feedback loop between addressers and addressees that the technique of direct address in the eighteenth-century novel was invented to mimic on a much smaller scale.

It may seem surprising that a twenty-first-century writer should turn to eighteenth-century techniques in a novel about that most contemporary of technologies and the world it has produced. Perhaps it shouldn’t be. After all, as Susan Stewart observes in Crimes of Writing, her study of the literary economy of eighteenth-century Britain, the period was characterized by the evisceration of the existing social safety net, the commodification of the word, new technologies for its dissemination, an explosion in the supply of and demand for it, the alienation of language-producers from language-consumers, the hackification of freelancers, cutthroat competition between them, and the crumbling of traditional reception contexts and authenticating mechanisms, which led, in turn, to a wave of conspiracisms, nostalgias, forgeries, impostures, grifts, hoaxes, and yes, fake accounts.

The technologies may have changed dramatically, but thanks in part to them Oyler’s narrator and Felix have had to adapt themselves to similar and similarly perilous socio-economic and psychic terrain. Extreme self-awareness of the sort the narrator displays may be necessary for survival on such terrain, but it is not conducive to the formation of a stable self – the crowning achievement of the protagonist in the standard realist novel. Rather, it represents its vanishing point. In the end, what attracts the narrator to Felix is that they are both incorrigible fabricators of themselves, and he is the only person who has ever managed to trick her (and not just once) into taking fiction for reality. Ironically, in doing so, he gives her a glimpse at what having a stable self requires: a commitment to allowing at least one of the rules of the game to remain implicit. The shape-shifting novel ends on a decidedly ambiguous note, but one way of reading the narrator’s character arc is to see in it a move from the ‘close reading’ that comes from engaging with the world via digital media, to the ‘planned obsolescence’ of disengagement from it, a necessary condition for performing such antiquated activities as falling in love, or writing a novel called Fake Accounts.

Oyler’s novel marks two technical advances in the representation of being online, but it is beyond the purview of a single book to decide the contest between the medium of the novel and its most recent rival, which is not ultimately a question of form. Fake Accounts was published a mere three weeks ago, but since then a new genre has congealed, in part, around it: the Internet Novel. The name suggests an attempt to assimilate the former term into the latter, with the Internet as just another object the novel may or may not elect to describe. But bringing the two terms together in the first place puts them on an equal footing, and betrays an unspoken anxiety about the latter’s eclipse by the former – an uneasy recognition that the Internet is not merely an object, nor is being online simply an activity, but that taken together they are a metonym for a series of social relations so extensive and intensive that they have contaminated all the other objects of potential representation too. Thus, even at a purely formal level, the two problems remain in tension with each other. As we have seen, the self-awareness used to solve the ‘collective representation problem’ and the ‘formal mirroring problem’ of representing digital media in a novel winds up swallowing its own tail. Oyler’s narrator, always one step ahead, seems to acknowledge this. Fake Accounts may be her novel, but in it Twitter gets the last word.

Read on: Claudio Magris’s reflections on the novel’s historical course.

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Crooked Lebanon

In the lore of the Eastern Mediterranean, there is a saying (sometimes attributed to Jesus) that goes like this: ‘Things are treated with salt to prevent them from decaying. But if the salt is spoiled, there is no other remedy.’ In Lebanon, this adage has been proven both right and wrong. The current economic crisis was caused by endemic corruption; yet endemic corruption seems to be its only cure. Go figure!

What Lebanon has been experiencing since October 2019 is nothing short of a catastrophe. The country’s economic slump was first met with a great dose of aspiration, when large crowds converged on the main downtown square demanding accountability and reform. Yet, lacking a unified vision, after a few weeks this movement faded into pessimism and desperation. The crisis was then accelerated by the extortionary, vigilante embargo imposed by the US Treasury and State Department. The value of the Lebanese currency fell precipitously, the pandemic raged and unemployment rose. All of this was topped by the massive explosion in the port of Beirut on 4 August 2020 that left around 200 dead, 8,000 wounded and tens of thousands homeless (not to mention the attendant psychological and environmental damage).

The calamity that Lebanon now faces has its roots in decades of high-level mismanagement. The Taif peace agreement of 1989, which put an end to the Lebanese Civil War in 1990, promised a restructuring of the Lebanese political system and economy. However, the work centred around a delusional plan to revive Lebanon’s pre-Civil War role as a financial and service hub for the Middle East. The architect of this vision, the late Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, knew full well that realities on the ground would impede its realization: the geopolitical conditions that had permitted Lebanon to play such a role in the 60s and early 70s were not present in the 90s. Yet he moved forward unfazed, bribing the country to dance to his tune. Cash payments and other grand favours were doled out to key politicians, financiers, security officials, religious clerics and the media. Hariri surrounded himself with an army of ‘advisors’ from varying ideological persuasions and religious backgrounds so as to diffuse any serious resistance.

For some time, it seemed that Hariri’s dream was likely to prevail. The economy stabilized, the currency regained its footing and employment soared. The relentless drive to clean and renovate downtown Beirut brought back exuberant memories, tears of joy, and widespread elation that the ‘Paris of the Orient’ had returned. People flocked to places they hadn’t seen since 1975, reminiscing about old cafés and famous juice bars, or wandering in ancient alleyways once congested with merchants and shoppers. After sixteen years of Civil War, they were eager (to pretend) to put everything behind them and look to a promising future. Unfortunately, they were only looking at a choreographed past cleansed of its many miseries, and were determined not to confront the true cost of the Hariri project.

Like many Lebanese who left for the Gulf in the 1960s in search of wealth and opportunities, Hariri made his fortune as a front for several members of the Saudi Royal family, especially Prince Fahd before he became King. Fahd wanted a confidant to syphon millions of dollars from the Saudi treasury into his own pocket. Hariri obliged and launched a business empire that made billions for the duo. His international ambitions meanwhile spurred him to cultivate promising politicians in the West; the most successful case was Jacques Chirac, then the new and energetic Mayor of Paris. When Chirac became President in 1995, Hariri had a staunch Western ally who could open any door for him across the globe. Anchored by these two giants – Fahd and Chirac – Hariri was able to secure enough investments in the Lebanese economy to fund new projects: renovating the international airport, opening highways and shopping malls, constructing sports stadiums and so on.

Yet in 2000 Bashar al-Assad inherited the throne in Damascus. Assad had a personal dislike for Hariri and was determined to torpedo the savvy businessman’s political and financial ambitions, aided by some Lebanese proxies. Simultaneously, the unleashing of the US war machine following the 9/11 attacks transformed the region into a powder keg. Hariri’s assassination in 2005 dealt a major blow to the Lebanese economy, as the sole guarantor of Hariri’s modernizing vision was Hariri himself. Shortly after his demise, the focus of the domestic political class shifted to dividing the cake of corruption. Hariri’s son Saad, who became PM in 2009, was too incompetent to run the political circus, and proved an unmitigated failure at the financial level. Whereas Rafic had the will to mobilize his wealth and connections to achieve his national vision (however unpalatable it may have been), Saad had neither a coherent vision nor an overseas cachet, and squandered much of his inherited fortune through mismanagement. His entire political philosophy revolved around 1) harnessing the legacy of his father in order to assure that he was the only viable Sunni leader in Lebanon, and 2) replenishing his depleted coffers from the Lebanese treasury. The country therefore moved from dancing to Hariri’s tune, to watching his son dance to the tune of an increasingly bloated and self-serving establishment.  

Under Hariri junior, the mushrooming national debt turned into a runaway train – dragging the country and everyone in it towards assured disaster. External investment stopped flowing in at the rate needed to service the country’s vast corruption networks. The Central Bank resorted to a Ponzi scheme: borrowing more in order to meet its most pressing obligations, while continuing to feed the beast by channelling money into the pockets of politicians and financiers – fearful that the end of the patronage system would spell political ruin. High interest rates lured most Lebanese into keeping their deposits in the country, even though they knew it would all come crashing down someday. National debt surpassed $85 billion in September 2019. By that time local banks had invested a large portion of their clients’ deposits (especially those in US Dollars) in the Central Bank’s treasury bills, and could no longer get them back.

The dynamics of Lebanese corruption are perfectly illustrated by the electricity system, which is controlled by the Minister of Energy and plagued by regular outages and rationing. (Most people are forced to purchase electricity for a few hours a day from ‘protected’ private contractors who own and operate generators in different neighbourhoods across the country.) Between 2000 and 2018, the Lebanese government spent around $2 billion per year to run the two large power plants and maintain basic services. On top of outright embezzlement, the system of corruption involves supplying deficient fuel to electric plants at inflated prices, fraudulent contracts and overbilling for maintenance, employment of political supporters in the Energy Ministry, renting floating power plants from Turkey and securing luxurious commissions. It is estimated that an investment of $2 billion would have resolved the power shortages and slashed the yearly cost of electricity by 50 per cent. Several international governments, including Germany and Qatar, have supplied the Lebanese state with viable plans to resolve the issue – yet their recommendations have been rejected wholesale.

Thanks to such wilful acts of sabotage, in October 2019 the Central Bank finally ran short of foreign currency reserves, and could not pay back private banks or international investors. The mounting financial crisis was now fully exposed. Unable to honour their clients’ withdrawal requests, banks decided to halt cash payments altogether except for very small amounts (especially if the accounts were in US Dollars). In the meantime, a number of wealthy Lebanese managed to smuggle large chunks of their deposits into accounts in Europe (the figure is estimated at around $4 billion since Autumn 2019). One of those implicated in this offshore smuggling was the Governor of the Lebanese Central Bank, Riad Salamé, who is currently under investigation by the Attorney General of Switzerland for allegedly laundering a sum in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

When people took to the streets on 17 October 2019, their immediate complaint was the ‘WhatsApp tax’ that the government wanted to impose in order to levy more revenues amid the squeeze on poorer citizens. They also called for the ousting of the corrupt political class, especially Gebran Bassil, son-in-law and heir apparent of president Michel Aoun. Aoun’s outright refusal to rein in Bassil worsened the situation. The movement snowballed, and protests escalated. Within two weeks Prime Minister Hariri had resigned, causing a political crisis. The demonstrators proposed a remedy: a technocratic government. But in Lebanon, clean and efficient technocrats are an endangered species; it is hard to find qualified people who are actually capable of steering the country in the right direction, and not simply waiting for their piece of the pie. The government that was formed proved disastrously incapable on every level. Covid-19 and the explosion of an enormous quantity of ammonium nitrate at the port of Beirut (the original cargo measured 2,750 tons) completed the perfect storm: political deadlock, financial crisis, pandemic, and humanitarian-environmental disaster. Many were now no longer willing to tolerate Lebanon’s endemic corruption – or so they proclaimed.  

Yet if the Lebanese are victims of corruption, they are also its enablers. The characteristics known as Shatara and Harba’a are part of our DNA. Shatara refers to cleverness and craftiness; Harba’a comes from the Arabic word for chameleon: someone able to change colours as the situation demands. These are trademark features of the elite hustlers who have sent Lebanon’s economy into a tailspin. Ironically, they are also the only lifelines for many ordinary citizens, who have to rely on informal processes and low-level corruption to get by as the country teeters on the edge of abyss. Many of those who turned out to protest against political and financial malfeasance are themselves invested in the institution of corruption, albeit on a smaller scale.

Shatara and Harba’a are manifest at every level. Employees, especially in the public sector, typically supplement their income with kickbacks. For example, a bribe is required to get a driving permit renewed. This is often done through a ‘facilitator’ who takes the application and goes through the agency’s offices to get the necessary approvals and signatures. The applicant pays the facilitator, who takes a cut and gives the rest to the employees. (If one insists on doing the process oneself, the application will invariably be deemed incomplete or delayed until a facilitator is found.) Similarly, building inspectors – who are often police officers – demand outright bribes before they issue clearances. Knowing that each contractor breaks the rules to augment their profits, the inspector’s kickback is expected to match the scale of the violation. We call such payoffs a ‘sweet treat’ (hilwayni). The legal system, too, is plagued by hilwayni – often used to initiate an investigation, release an inmate, etc. – with bribes adjusted according to the office of the recipient. Lesser forms of corruption include the custom – in banks, supermarkets and other shops – not to return small change for transactions, with the employee pocketing them instead. Given close family bonds, these payments usually trickle down to a wide network of beneficiaries.

Corruption is also manifest in the sectarian system. Hezbollah, for instance, shields most of the vulnerable members of the Shi‘i community from the impacts of the multi-level crisis. For several years it has been running a parallel financial system that bypasses traditional banks and financial institutions. Thanks to the millions of dollars it brings into the country – invariably in cash – Hezbollah injects desperately needed hard currency that keeps the situation from deteriorating further. The party also has a large network of schools and clinics, as well as organizations that provide higher education scholarships.

The second Shi‘i power, the Amal Party led by Nabih Berri (Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament), has since the 1990s pursued a strategy of employing large numbers of Shi‘i supporters in all types of governmental agencies: a practice which has been critical for maintaining a bare minimum living standard for many families. The main Druze party, led by Walid Jumblatt, has likewise organized a huge machine of volunteers to distribute food and heating fuel to families in need. His constituencies have their own networks of schools and hospitals, and pretty much every Druze supporter who needs a scholarship to attend university can get one through the organizations controlled by Jumblatt and wealthy Druze entrepreneurs. The Maronite Church, with its immense treasures and connections, does the same for its community. In fact, the Sunnis are the sole demographic without an effective leader to advocate for their needs. This is due to various factors: the weakness of Saad Hariri, the vindictive measures taken by the Saudi Crown Prince to punish the Sunnis of Lebanon, the economic repercussions of disastrous US interference in the Middle East and so on. Poor Sunnis, especially in and around Tripoli, often resort to violent clashes with security services – a pattern that rarely plays out with other sectarian groupings.

Life in Lebanon has been such that since the 1990s, around half a million Lebanese have moved abroad to seek financial opportunities, sending large sums of money back to their parents and relatives. Remittances, which almost reached $6 billion per year in the 2000s, have dwindled a little, but they are still estimated at several million per day. Swathes of people are now leaving the country, provided they have a foreign passport or valid visa. Among them are some recent returnees, including second or third generation descendants of Lebanese immigrants who came back to Lebanon in the last few years to escape hardships in their country of residence. Many Venezuelans of Lebanese origin returned to their homeland seeking relief from the ruthless American embargo – but their wager did not pay off. Added to that, the UN-funded program for Syrian refugees in Lebanon brings in badly needed hard currency; the World Bank has approved a loan of $246 million, boosting the Lebanese government’s ability to continue funding public sector salaries and some education services; and countless NGOs continue to distribute aid. Knowing how to exploit these philanthropic schemes is an important aspect of Shatara and Harba’a, by which many stave off destitution.

Lebanon’s unfolding crisis will not be remedied by temporary fixes, which only treat its symptoms rather than its causes. The Lebanese (a few exceptions notwithstanding) are used to dancing on the razor’s edge, and are willing to hurt their feet if it means they can preserve their cherished sectarian system. But one thing is certain: these temporary solutions will not hold if foreign powers decide (as they have done many times before) to drag the country into a new regional conflict – such as war with Iran. Should that happen, a reckoning with the culture of ‘graft’ may be in order. Yet in the absence of outside intervention (which may or may not make things better), the current situation will probably persist for many years to come – or, as the Lebanese would say, until God relieves it.

Suleiman Mourad’s The Mosaic of Islam is out now from Verso.

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A Gorgeous Parade

Film history is full of holes. Forget about the idea that ‘everything’ is available on the internet; everything isn’t available in the archives. The Deutsche Kinemathek estimates that eighty to ninety percent of silent films have been lost. Fire, censorship, neglect, the recycling of silver from the emulsion of nitrate stock: the reasons vary but the result is the same. Although the problem lessens dramatically beginning in the 1930s – a decade that saw the foundation of the world’s first film archives – it does not disappear. The farther away one gets from capital-intensive production, mainstream acclaim, or state-approved cultural patrimony, the more likely it is that a film will disappear or fall into material precarity, existing only as a bad VHS copy passed from hand to hand, and then as a worse digital file, uploaded and downloaded.

The reality of oblivion fuels fantasies of rediscovery. Rarely are these dreams as wholly fulfilled as in the case of About Some Meaningless Events (De quelques événements sans signification, 1974), directed, written, and edited by Mostafa Derkaoui. This debut feature, now streaming on MUBI, was shot in working-class areas of Casablanca by a group of young artists and intellectuals eager to ask what filmmaking could be in Morocco, a country where a national cinema had not yet truly been born. Their speculative, energetic answer was not to the liking of King Hassan II, a despot who was intent to clamp down on dissent and manage the national image following attempted coups d’état in 1971 and 1972. After a single screening in Paris in 1975, the regime suppressed the film and prohibited its export, consigning it to a clandestine existence. The ban was lifted in the 1990s, but when the Madrid lab holding the negative went bankrupt in 1999, the materials were seized as assets. They eventually wound up at the Filmoteca de Catalunya, where the film’s director and his brother, cinematographer Abdelkrim Derkaoui, supervised a stunning restoration. Now, nearly five decades after its first fleeting appearance, the film has finally entered widespread circulation, taking its rightful place as one of the great works of 1970s political modernism. Better late than never.

MUBI labels About Some Meaningless Events a documentary. Certainly, the film takes inspiration from the ethos of cinéma vérité, capturing life in a crowded neighbourhood bar and out in the street with a lightweight, sync-sound 16mm camera. Never do the filmmakers occupy a private interior; they remain at all times in public, subject to the vibrant reality that surrounds them. Like Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, who in Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un été, 1961) roam Paris, holding out a microphone to passers-by, asking if they are happy, Derkaoui’s crew seeks the vox populi. They conduct a series of interviews, posing questions that bear directly on the activity at hand: their topic is the cinema, and Moroccan cinema in particular.

According to Sandra Gayle Carter’s book What Moroccan Cinema?, at the time About Some Meaningless Events was made, the country had produced less than a dozen feature films. (Her volume’s ironic title telegraphs the enduringly fragile state of filmmaking in the nation.) Meanwhile, new waves were surging around the world and filmmakers from Buenos Aires to Havana to Oberhausen were composing manifestoes, setting out the way forward. It is against this double backdrop that Derkaoui, freshly home after completing a degree at the renowned Łódź Film School, hit the streets. Instead of proselytizing for a predetermined position, he canvases for opinion. What stories should a Moroccan national cinema tell? Should it aspire to the tremendous commercial popularity of the Egyptian cinema, or of karate films like The Big Boss (1971), starring Bruce Lee? Or should it follow the revolutionary example of Latin America and commit itself to formal radicalism and the project of cultural decolonization? Do Moroccans want to be entertained or to see the country’s social problems represented onscreen? The discussions are wide-ranging, broaching matters of genre, aesthetics, and audience. No consensus emerges, but one thing is certain: About Some Meaningless Events conforms to none of the examples mooted throughout its 78 minutes.

Crucially, the interviews are conducted not by Derkaoui himself, but by Abbas Fassi-Fihri, a journalist cast in the role of a director who is making a movie. Derkaoui orchestrates a mise-en-abyme: the inquiry on the future of Moroccan cinema is a film within a film, a documentary nestled within a fiction. The two layers are frequently indistinguishable, sharing a proclivity for handheld close-ups and a title – judging by the clapboard that appears onscreen, at least. When the production crew hangs out at the crowded bar, looking hip and flirting with women, it feels like a hundred stories are circulating through the smoky air, just out of reach. Every now and then a hint of one comes through in a line of dialogue without congealing into anything that lasts, as if the artifice of storytelling were trying and failing to break through the flow of life again and again. Why does one man wave around a crab and another, later, plop a fish in someone’s glass? What kind of appointment is the woman wearing the bright yellow faux fur coat in the midst of arranging? The bustle of the bar refuses to resolve into the tidiness of cause-and-effect narration, yet all of its unscripted vitality is the product of a staged conceit.

One plotline gradually does take root, rising above the collective din to tell the story of an individual. Early on, a young man appears alone on the street, smoking as he watches a bearded man get into a car and drive away. He hops on a scooter, possibly one that doesn’t belong to him, and departs, only to reappear in proximity to the filmmakers – suggesting that this character, whose name turns out to be Abdellatif, is more than just another member of the crowd. Later in the bar, he is there again, his gaze fastened on the same man from before, who now holds court at a table that reeks of corruption. When Abdellatif confronts the man and a brawl erupts, the direct sound usually present throughout the film disappears, leaving Włodzimierz Nahorny’s propulsive free jazz to fill the track, bursting with improvisational vim. Abdellatif fatally knifes the kingpin and the horns squeal. If the premeditated plotting did not make it evident already, the stabbing leaves no ambiguity as to the film’s fictional dimension. Little else can cleave documentation and fabulation like the difference between the obscenity of real death and the thrill of its dramatic contrivance.

The event transforms the nature of the film crew’s questioning. They turn away from the public and towards each other, gathering in the open air to debate how or if the stabbing should be incorporated into their film-in-progress. It transpires that the man was Abdellatif’s boss at the port. What motivated the violence? How does it relate to the broader context, to the exploitation of workers? What are the respective merits of fictionalizing the episode versus foregoing scripts and actors to shoot ‘sur le vif’? In a meandering and conflictual way, the conversation maps a series of issues leftist filmmakers were confronting internationally at the time: class privilege, the politics of form, and the ethics of packaging struggle and trauma for consumption. In what may well be a shot at Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), one man complains, ‘Even the student protests have been recuperated by Hollywood!’.

The murder is a high-stakes eruption of contingency that demands narrativization, whether through the personal history of its perpetrator, the grind of social forces in which he is caught, or some combination of the two. It is the stuff conventional films are made of, an event pregnant with the promise of meaning. As About Some Meaningless Events winds to a close, the crew takes the bait, doubling down on their vérité methods in an effort to make sense of what happened. They interview Abdellatif’s colleague and ask a friend about his family background. Finally, they visit him in police custody. Abdellatif tells them some of what they want to know: the difficulty of finding good employment, the bribes his boss demanded, what life is like in a neighbourhood he is sure the interviewer knows nothing about. Ultimately, though, he becomes frustrated and turns the tables on the filmmakers, challenging their desire for knowledge and the importance they assign to the cinema: ‘And you think you’re changing something with your camera?’ Returning the gaze of the apparatus, he puts an end to the encounter – and to the film we are watching. A distrust of the ideological betrayals of fiction and a hope that a commitment to reality might mitigate them are palpable throughout About Some Meaningless Events. At the same time, Derkaoui never lets documentary off the hook either, making full use of the powers of the false to query any claims it might make to social transformation or political righteousness.

Writing in Cahiers du cinéma in 1969, Jean-Louis Comolli remarked that a certain kind of fiction film was beginning to look a lot like documentary. It wasn’t a matter of simply poaching a visual style associated with authenticity, as happens often today; these were works that left behind the script and the studio, gave up on big budgets and 35mm, and embraced an understanding of cinema and reality as reciprocally produced in the act of filming. It was here, and not in the idea of making contact with a pre-existing reality, Comolli argued, that the radicalism of ‘direct cinema’ resided. Whether occurring in films deemed fiction or those called documentary, these changed working methods released filmmaking from the stranglehold of the commercial system and its conventions, revealing their repressive character and opening new, counter-hegemonic possibilities of expression.

Comolli’s unorthodox revision of direct cinema as a concept untethered from the distinction between documentary and fiction, defined instead as a mode of production and a way of making meaning, sheds light on the reflexive gambit of About Some Meaningless Events. Against the repressive weight of Morocco’s Years of Lead, the film dwells in a wealth of microevents occurring in an everyday world lacking any centre of coherence, a world the film produces as much as reproduces. Certain of little, it traffics in an abundance that refuses the fixity of categories, troubling not just the line between documentary and fiction but, perhaps more importantly, the distinction between significance and insignificance. Rather than focus on a single (anti-)hero or an exemplary incident poised to neatly tie everything together, Derkaoui offers something else: a relentless self-questioning that takes place in and through a sea of faces captured in close-up after close-up, pushing in and out of a frame that rarely relinquishes its tight hold. The result of this insistent proximity to the hum of life is nothing like claustrophobia; it is a gorgeous parade of ungovernable particularity, a portrait of national heterogeneity and dissensus. Could it be an anti-authoritarian aesthetics? No wonder the king was so against it.

Read on: Emma Fajgenbaum on the ghostly realism of Pedro Costa.

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Swimming In It

It’s more surprising that we so often fail to notice it. (Capitalism, I mean.) Eula Biss’s new book, Having and Being Had, chronicles the feelings she traced in herself once she and her husband bought a house, her uncomfort with a comfort that she knew in time would become neither comfortable nor uncomfortable – would simply become ordinary. She is enraged at having to own a gravy boat for Thanksgiving dinner, and at the impossibility of investing her pension in any equitable way; she’s bemused when she buys a $200 necklace and feels satisfied with the day, as if an act of consumption is work done; she is embarrassed when a Mexican woman with four children asks to rent the front room of her Chicago bungalow, because it lies empty three months after Biss’s family moved in. Our awareness of the untenableness of the system we’re living in rises and it falls; it goes undercover; we accommodate ourselves to it. But what, Biss’s book asks, if we didn’t get used to it?

The rules Biss set herself for the writing of Having and Being Had are one way she has of not getting used to it: she promises herself she’ll talk about money, exact amounts (in interviews accompanying the book’s release, she told interviewers she’d been paid $650,000 for this book and one to follow) and that she’ll start every section in the present tense, in a moment drawn from her life. The only books she’s allowed to read are ones a friend has recommended, so that she has to think about the ways her social capital and cultural capital intersect. (This rule has an odd consequence in the book, causing Biss to rely on canonical reading turned hazy since college, or to faux-innocently ask a parent in the bleachers, ‘What is capitalism?’ and hope they start talking about Galbraith.)  Perhaps there must always be rules if you are to stay with the trouble – and Biss has form with trouble: her first book, Notes from No Man’s Land, was an exploration of race; her second, deeply prescient book, On Immunity, is about the fear, particularly the type that creeps over you when you have a child to protect.

The effect of the rules is to fill the book on the one hand with figures – a necklace is $200, a gallon of paint she can’t afford is $110 and the bungalow costs $500,000 – and on the other with conversations where she can never quite grasp this thing called capitalism. (As people say about love, you know it when you see it.) Here is a list of people she asks to help her define it: her friend Bill, an economist in a bar, a mother also waiting at a skating lesson, Scooby-Doo, her friend Dan, Thomas Piketty, Max Weber, Silvia Federici, her old student Eric, a father on the playground, David Graeber, her own father, Lewis Hyde, Beyoncé, Gerard Winstanley, a friend from work called Will. She is talking about it all the time, and in the talking, she realises she doesn’t know what it is. It takes a while for this pose to become refreshing rather than faux-naif – I kept imagining a Deliveroo rider or a worker in a Teesside vaccine factory or a care worker answering her question, with the hard-won knowledge that it was a system that made more money out of their work than they do – but it eventually has the alienating effect she’s going for, particularly when she begins to think about work. 

One of the reasons she finds the acquisition of a mortgaged property so unsettling is that she used to live her life very differently: her aim was to earn enough money, at waitressing or at the Parks department or temping at a publisher or posing for life-drawing classes, to buy time to write, and when she’d accumulated enough money, she’d quit the job and write. She now has a steady job in the university and on the days when she’s not teaching, the work of writing – practicing piano, writing, eating lunch, gardening, writing again – feels to her like the life of an 18th-century aristocrat. Later in the book, a glass of wine in, she tells a friend that she’s afraid to admit that she doesn’t want to work: ‘I would still have plenty of work, I say, even without my job. I would have the work of writing, the work of research, housework and yard work, and the work of caring for a child. Work, in fact, is interfering with my work, and I want to work less so that I can have more time to work.’ You could call capitalism the set of ideas that values some of these forms of work over others, but more than that, you could call it the thing that decouples work and dignity. ‘I don’t see much evidence’, Biss adds later to her husband, ‘that what anyone gets for their work has anything to do with what they deserve.’

It is at this point in her investigation that Biss starts circling back to her own life. If she values most the work that is not her job – the practice of art, the cultivation of care – she must change her life. Can she? What would that look like? A friend commiserates when Biss admits she doesn’t know how to end her book: yes, she agrees, to end this book, you would have to burn down your house. She would also have to give back her Guggenheim money, because fortunes have never yet come from anything good. She turns back to her garden, when a friend who’s temperamentally a collector asks her what she collects, and she realises that her plant wishlist – cornelian cherry, red lake currant, scarlet prince peach – isn’t what it seems. ‘My garden isn’t a collection. It’s a place where I practice care, and where I take time. Time being, in the end, all I ever wanted.’ (This last sentence riffs on the line of Browning Emily Dickinson riffed on in reply to a neighbour’s observation that time must move slowly for the Amherst poet. ‘Time, why, Time was all I wanted!’ she said.) How should she value her time, particularly to those who want to buy it from her? Earlier she quoted Adam Smith on water. ‘Nothing is more useful,’ he said, ‘but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it.’ Diamonds, by contrast, aren’t useful, but can be exchanged for many things. ‘The things that meet our most urgent needs’, Biss writes, ‘are often worthless.’

It says something about capitalism that Biss comes closest when she speaks not just in metaphors, but in paradoxes. Just as we swim in it all day every day but rarely notice it. But when we do see it, it’s dizzying – and you can’t go back. I have felt this once, and not in any of the cooler places Biss sees it in operation, like the playground Pokémon card market, or the video for ‘Work’ by Rihanna. I was at the ballet, watching Giselle for the nth time. In the first half, a prince dresses as a pauper and falls in love with the village beauty, Giselle. She dies of madness when the king and queen turn up with the prince’s fiancée, and her rosy future crumbles. Giselle’s death is hard to believe, willed as it is by fairy-tale logic; I’d found that whether I could swallow it or not depended on who was dancing. But this time the melodramatic death spoke up: like the worker for the boss, the village girl was quite simply expendable to the royal court, and it is exactly her death that reveals this relation of power for what it is. (In Akram Khan’s modern version of the ballet, Giselle works in a factory, of course.) It’s not a broken heart – or not just a broken heart – but a broken system. Having and Being Had takes a feeling like this, the trouble of it, the exhilaration of it, and anatomises it. It is the sort of feeling that can be the beginning of something, if you let it.

Read on: Susan Watkins dissects Kate Manne’s feminism of the privileged.