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Militant Visions

Cecilia Mangini, who died on 21 January this year, is widely credited as Italy’s first female documentary filmmaker, though she was also a photographer, critic and activist. Her career, which spanned over six decades, followed a sinuous path. Born in the Southern region of Puglia in 1927, Mangini moved to Florence at the age of six after her father’s leather business collapsed. She studied political science at the University of Florence and upon graduating took up a secretarial role at the Italian Federation of Independent Cinema in Rome, where she began writing film reviews for Cinema Nuovo, Cinema ’60 and L’Eco del Cinema. From there she turned her hand to documentary filmmaking – an arena in which she was critically acclaimed, if never famed.

Living through the fascist era and the Years of Lead, Mangini’s turbulent historical context shaped the political impulses – primarily Marxist and feminist – which unite her eclectic body of work, pulsating through her studies of the Vietnam War, the life of Antonio Gramsci, the rise of the European far-right and the traditional shamanic practices in Apulia. Paradoxically, though not unusually, Mangini’s first forays into filmmaking were via the ‘Cineguf’ group: a fascist student film club attended by a number of leftist avant-garde directors – including Pier Paolo Pasolini and Antonio Ghirelli – in the early stages of their career. Like them, Mangini quickly shrugged off her reactionary affiliations, working with Pasolini and Lino Del Fra (the Roman director whom she would later marry) on several militant cinematic treatments of postbellum Italy. These included Ignoti Alla Città (Unknown to the City, 1958), a blistering commentary on the disenfranchisement of young working-class men, and All’Armi Siam Fascisti!  (To Arms, We Are Fascists!) a 1962 archive compilation reflecting on the privations that led to Italian fascism, WWII and its aftermath.

These collaborations paved the way for Mangini’s work with the Italian Communist Party, under whose auspices she produced Essere Donne (Being Women), a 28-minute documentary commissioned by the Communist-aligned production company Unitelefilm as part of the 1965 election campaign. Essere Donne begins quite unlike any of Mangini’s previous work, with a hallucinatory montage sequence that unfurls at dizzying pace. A lurid pink elephant is flanked by a model clad in ostrich feathers and a Maidenform bra. The camera moves contemplatively over this image while cutting back and forth to clips of exploding atom bombs, which then give way to a series of disjointed close-ups. Magazine photos of lips, hands, feet, hair and eyes appear to fracture the female body into discrete, commodified parts. The unsettlingly hypnotic quality of the sequence is amplified by its accompanying score, the dissonant clanging of machines overlaid with an accelerated rendition of Brecht and Weill’s ‘Alabama Song’, whose lyrics desperately bewail: ‘If we don’t find the next whisky bar, I tell you we must die’. A male narrator, speaking in sparse, formal Italian, asks of the glossy advertisements:

Who can recognise herself in these images? Not the six million women who work in production in Italy. Not the millions of women who stay at home, bound by domestic labour. Not these 14- or 15-year-old girls who work in a pasta factory in Apulia.

With that, the prologue’s tension is undercut by a humdrum scene of Italian factory workers, edited so that a fragmentary shot of a male boss monitoring a female employee is continually replayed, as if to mimic the monotony of the assembly-line. Gramsci’s analysis of Fordism is thus translated into the visual language of the avant-garde, while the vivid colour of the opening is abandoned in favour of a saturated monochrome – draining the affect from the images. The camera pans down the leg of a young factory-worker, whose scarred calf forms a striking contrast with the airbrushed limbs of the previous scene. An elderly woman is shown stitching a bra not unlike that featured in the Maidenform advertisement. She speaks in regional dialect, telling us: ‘I make 100 lire from each of these bras; the store sells them for 1,500 lire each.’

Essere Donne is not Mangini’s best-known documentary, but it is among her most accomplished – its fusion of political propaganda, cinematic experimentation and juxtaposition of rural and urban cultures typifying her trademark style. Its power derives from her ability to weave different aesthetic practices and cinematic threads into a rich fabric that mimics her subject matter: the garment trade. Her thesis – that post-war capitalist expansion has crippled Italian workers – is not stated explicitly, but rather given striking visual form. The disruptive effects of rapid industrialization are highlighted through sensitive visions of the landscape which reflect Italy’s North–South divide. A looming shot of Milan’s Pirelli Tower, the administrative centre of the Pirelli tyre automobile corporation, is contrasted with the undulating Apulian hills. Machine noises are set against the plaintive lyricism of Southern folk song. While a woman works the fields of a Southern olive plantation, a factory tower rises ominously behind her, and the narrator informs us that ‘now industry has sprung up even in the olive groves of the South … every day that breaks over the skyscrapers, as over the houses of peasants and farmhands in the South, begins in the holy name of monopoly capital.’

Mangini had a lifelong interest in the effect of industrialization on Italy’s female population. Drawing on her childhood experience, as well as her conversations with other working-class women in Rome and Florence, she believed that rural women lured to the city by hopes of economic emancipation would find themselves ensnared in the strictures of urban capital. This bleak outlook finds its way into Essere Donne, which unflinchingly confronts the material impediments to women’s independence. Her portrayal of individual female subjects often overflows with humanity and empathy. ‘Still my husband cannot get a steady job’, laments an Italian mother, reflecting on her move from the countryside to Milan. ‘And to support the family, I have to go to the factory. So Rosetta, who is the eldest, must look after the little ones. She has to miss school.’ This testimony is accompanied by a sequence of the mother and daughter climbing the polluted stairwell that leads out from their basement. The mother, setting off for work, closes a fence on her daughter who, in the absence of her parent, clings to its metal wire. These tender moments recur throughout Essere Donne, showcasing Mangini’s ability to fuse polemical opposition to the Italian post-war settlement with a persistently humane and dignified portrayal of her interviewees.

The mainstay of Essere Donne is the contemporary economic situation in Italy, but there are also glancing allusions to world politics. These are mostly explored in its epilogue: a montage comprising press footage of anti-NATO protests and women’s marches, interspliced with moving images of nuclear weapons testing. The opening scene’s references to the atom bomb thereby come full circle, with Mangini implicitly suggesting that – despite the film’s lingering landscape shots, which appear to focus its critique on Italian class dynamics – the plight of female labourers cannot be reduced to a national issue. It is rather bound up with Cold War power relations. With this change in perspective, the situation of Italian women comes to metonymize a broader condition. Their mutilation by machine work stands for our collective precarity before NATO’s nuclear death machines. The expansion of capital into Italy’s semi-feudal pockets mirrors its forcible extension into Southeast Asia, Latin America and Indochina – accompanied by American warplanes.  

Partly because of this closing sequence, Essere Donne was deemed too radical for Italian cinemas, which at the time were still regulated by the government’s ‘Obligatory Programming’ legislation. Its distribution was consequently limited: an issue only partially remedied by the Communist Party’s decision to take matters into its own hands by screening it in regional Communist Clubs. The suppression of Essere Donne was defended not on political but aesthetic grounds, with censors citing its failure to meet the minimum ‘technical, artistic and cultural requisites’ set by the ministerial committee. (The judges at the 1965 international film festival in Leipzig begged to differ, awarding Essere Donne the prestigious Special Jury Prize.)

Mangini’s mobilization of different aesthetic forms – semiotics, montage, stock footage and aural motifs – anticipated developments in British cinema that would not take hold until the 1970s. One can draw an easy comparison between Essere Donne and The Song of the Shirt, Sue Clayton’s and Jonathan Curling’s seminal 1979 documentary about female garment workers in London – which similarly interweaves disparate narratives, temporalities and screen effects. Perhaps the earliest and most influential text on film semiotics to be translated into English was Pasolini’s ‘Discourse on the Shot Sequence, or the Cinema as the Semiology of Reality’, which appeared in a 1969 edition of Cinim, and articulated many of the stylistic precepts which were forged in his collaborations with Mangini. As the British New Wave petered out amid the decline of 60s counterculture, this cinematic language – imported from the European left – became increasingly important for the avant-garde theorists and practitioners clustered around Screen magazine and the British Film Institute. 

By contrast, Mangini’s domestic influence was somewhat limited. She was not just a woman in a man’s world, but the only woman in it. Twentieth-century Italian cinema was a firmly patriarchal industry, and though Mangini’s career was in a sense launched by Pasolini – whom she said provided a ‘springboard’ for her own productions – she was also eclipsed by his stardom. Pasolini’s cinematic theories acquired canonical status for later generations of filmmakers, while the audience for Mangini’s critical essays remained relatively small. Her documentaries also garnered little commercial success, relying instead on public subsidies and monetary awards. The funding to support such experimental ventures during the 1950s and 60s dried up in the 70s, an era that marked a qualitative decline in Italian cinema and a drop-off in Mangini’s previously prolific output. Already suffering under serious financial strain, she was dealt a further blow when Pasolini was murdered in 1975. Her career – still enmeshed with his – came to a temporary but significant halt, and she began to fade from public memory.

Although Mangini continued to produce powerful, socially conscious films, she did so at a reduced rate and in a comparatively conventional style. She became a sporadic screenwriter, working on more marketable projects such as La Villeggiatura (Black Holiday), a 1973 drama which explores the life of a conflicted history professor who, having been exiled to the provinces for refusing to pledge allegiance to Mussolini, begins to question his political commitments and the value of resistance. Developing on this theme, in 1974 Mangini directed La Briglia sul Collo (The Bridle on the Neck), which documents the attempts of the post-fascist Italian state to integrate perceived ‘misfits’ into mainstream society, focusing on the relationship between a seven-year-old village boy and the local school system. Towards the end of the decade Mangini co-wrote the script for Del Fra’s acclaimed biopic of Gramsci, set during the leader’s prison days, with flashbacks to the founding of the CPI and street-fights with the far-right. Whereas Pasolini’s later works retreated into fantasy and epic, Mangini’s marked something of a return to the neorealist tradition – yet with a strident political commitment that distinguished her from influences like Rossellini and De Sica.

Her final film was released in 2020, after she accidentally came across a series of pictures from her 1965 visit to Vietnam tucked away in two neglected shoeboxes. Mangini and Del Fra had travelled there with the hope of producing a documentary to aid the North Vietnamese cause, yet they were ordered to return home by the revolutionary forces and soon abandoned their project. Upon finding the images again, Mangini interwove them in her classic style to make Due Scatole Dimenticate (Two Forgotten Boxes), a reflective study not only of the Vietnam War, but also of her life in filmmaking, her innovative practice, and how the world had changed during the near century she spent on it.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton on the contours of new working-class cinema.

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Lusophone Stories

The Angolan-born writer José Eduardo Agualusa once said that he wrote his first novel because he wanted to understand his country. ‘You cannot explain the present if you do not understand the past.’ This is not to say his fiction is didactic – anything but. Take his remarkable A General Theory of Oblivion (2015), first published in Portugal in 2012, whose expressive prose is deftly captured by Daniel Hahn’s translation.

The novel is mainly set in the Angolan capital where, on the eve of Independence in 1975, Ludovica, a Portuguese woman marked by a traumatic past, decides to build a brick wall to keep out intruders seeking a bag of raw diamonds that her brother-in-law has left behind in the chaos. Sealing off her eleventh-floor apartment in downtown Luanda, she survives on wild pigeons and vegetables grown on her terrace; slowly burning first the furniture, then the thousands of books in her brother-in-law’s library, on a cooking fire. Over the years, the apartment block fills up with new residents, moving in from Luanda’s shanty towns or fleeing the countryside roiled by civil war. They bring chickens, music, country habits. A magnificent mulemba tree grows in the courtyard, its upper branches reaching Ludo’s terrace. Satellite dishes sprout like mushrooms across the neighbouring roofs.

Ludo, who remains in this state of self-imposed house arrest for 28 years, gives the narrative a static point around which disparate plotlines can unfurl and extend. While she resists any engagement with the civil war that rages on her doorstep, it reaches us – in patchwork form – through snippets of overheard conversation, scenes witnessed on the street outside, radio news bulletins and Ludo’s diary entries. These fractured mediums furnish apparently self-contained stories, each with an oblique relation to Ludo, which encode the complex, often violent history of Angola’s post-liberation period, as rival independence forces fought for supremacy – a struggle prolonged by foreign intervention, with the US and South Africa backing rebel UNITA forces, while the ruling MPLA called in help from Cuba.

Agualusa’s kaleidoscopic fiction captures the diverse actors in this conflict and the subjective changes wrought by successive historical conjunctures. Monte, a former revolutionary, becomes a leading figure of the political police. Jeremias, a Portuguese mercenary, escapes a regime firing squad and joins the nomadic Mucubal tribe. The orphan known as Little Chief, a young political dissident jailed and tortured by Monte, roams the streets disguised as a madman and builds up a business empire.

Their stories, told backwards and forwards, make up a fretwork of Angolan history. The demonstrations, strikes and rallies of 1974, ‘filled with the laughter of the people on the streets, which burst into the air like fireworks’. The farewell parties of the Portuguese settlers, who danced till dawn while young people were dying in the streets. The MPLA prison of the late 70s, where Monte tries to break Little Chief, and where:

American and English mercenaries, taken in combat, lived alongside dissident exiles from the ANC who had fallen into misfortune. Young intellectuals from the far left exchanged ideas with old Portuguese Salazarists. There were guys locked up for diamond trafficking and others for not having stood to attention during the raising of the flag.

After 2002, with the MPLA’s victory in the civil war: ‘The socialist system was dismantled by the very same people who had set it up, and capitalism rose from the ashes, as fierce as ever. Guys who just months ago had been railing against bourgeois democracy . . . were now dressed in designer clothing, driving round the city in cars that gleamed.’ The new wealth is manifested in the landowner’s fences – a millionaire general, with armed goons in jeeps – that block the migration of the Mucubals’ herds. Monte is appalled by the free-market turn – ‘the capitalist system, thriving like mould amid the ruins, had begun to rot everything’ – and angered when two ruling generals instruct him to take out Daniel Benchimol, a local journalist whose reports, tempered by a touch of humour, infuriate the new bourgeoisie.

While Agualusa eschews a reductive and didactic treatment of Angolan national history, he assembles myriad suggestive fragments of what it has entailed. By and large, the novel registers historical conflict through personal experience, the objective facts of the civil war by way of subjective changes in fortune – and the insights that they yield. The narrative register – refusing to reduce the characters to their political roles – is punctuated by harsh judgements, pillorying the MPLA for its suppression of dissent and abandonment of egalitarian principles.

Yet Agualusa’s fiction also resists any reading as national allegory, on the lines of Fredric Jameson’s once-famous hypothesis – that in third-world texts, stories of private individual destiny are always an allegory of the embattled situation of the country’s culture and society. Neither Ludo, Monte, Little Chief nor Jeremias approximate to figurations of Angola’s struggle, in the way that Jameson suggested Lu Xun’s protagonist Ah Q, proud to be ‘number one in self-belittlement’, could stand as an allegory for semi-colonial China. This is not an allegory in any formal sense, with the characters as stand-ins for a set of abstractions – Power, Colonialism, Capital, Angola.

Agualusa’s fiction is ‘allegorical’ only in the loosest meaning of the word, as a synonym for symbolism or representation itself. Taken on their own terms, the characters do not constitute a totalized portrait of Angola; they rather demonstrate its hopeless fragmentation. Yet by interweaving their stories in the fabric of his fiction, the narrator establishes a precarious set of relations that (for most of the novel at least) remains inaccessible to the characters themselves. The relation of fictional forms to cultural and political-economic realities is insistently complicated here. The theme of ‘oblivion’, for example – or esquecimento, whose literal meaning in Portuguese is closer to ‘forgetting’ – is considered from multiple perspectives. Ludo wants to consign her teenage rape to oblivion, but also to shut out the joyful, chaotic, violent eruption of Angola’s independence. This impulse is what atomizes her: she becomes a hermit, as alienation and esquecimento go hand in hand.

Yet walled off in her flat, Ludo gains a new relationship to the world from her terrace, open to the sky and the city, ‘and off in the distance, a long necklace of abandoned beaches, fringed by the fine lacework of the waves’. ‘We should practice forgetting’, she tells an aged Jeremiah who has come to apologise to her, thirty years on, about the diamonds. He replies: ‘Forgetting is dying, forgetting is surrender.’ As he struggles to explain about the Mucubals’ problems, Ludo recalls Pessoa’s lines: ‘I feel sorry for the stars / which have shined for so long’ – ‘Is there not, finally… / Some kind of pardon?’ Meanwhile the workers employed in Little Chief’s handicraft business have a more sardonic take on the theme. Their best-selling carving is the Thinker, a popular figure in traditional Angolan statuary, but now with a gag over his mouth, whom they dub, ‘Don’t Think’.

Nor does the narratorial strategy of A General Theory offer an easily read allegory of Angola’s cultural situation. ‘A man with a good story is practically king’, the narrator declares at one point. But if narrative and power are major themes of the novel, neither is straightforward. In this case, the story – that a visiting French writer was suddenly swallowed by quicksand, leaving only his hat behind – was confected by a security officer to cover up a murder gone wrong, and the boy who tells it a dupe, serving to keep the status quo in power.

In this sense, when the narrator offers explicit political judgements, or sweeping statements on Angolan history, these interventions are less clear-cut than they seem, for they are belied by an awareness that unified narratives are often imposed by the powerful upon the powerless. Such self-consciousness – which destabilizes the narrator’s most categorical, objective register – comes through in his tendency to interrupt and second-guess himself after making decisive pronouncements:  

When people look at clouds they do not see their real shape, which is no shape at all, or maybe every shape, because they are constantly changing. They see whatever it is that their heart yearns for.

You don’t like that word – ‘heart’?

Very well, choose another, then: soul, unconscious, fantasy, whatever you think best. None of them will be quite the right word.

A General Theory of Oblivion reflects precisely on the difficulty of finding ‘the right word’ to summarize Angolan realities.

Not allegory, then. But neither is Agualusa’s fiction ‘national’ in any conventional sense. Its imagined community is Lusofonia, the Portuguese-speaking world-system that encompasses Brazil, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, Goa and East Timor as well as Angola, Mozambique and Portugal. Post-colonial landscapes of a pre-modern empire, deeply marked both by the South Atlantic slave trade and by what the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre welcomed as a unique degree of mestiçagem, the contemporary Lusosphere was formed under a European metropole that was itself a peripheral country, already semi-colonized by the UK.

From a family of mixed Brazilian, Portuguese and Angolan descent, Agualusa was born in 1960 in Huambo, then Nova Lisboa, a railway town on the Angolan plateau that would be a vortex of MPLA–UNITA fighting; its verdant landscape and deep blue skies have been constant motifs in his fiction. He left Angola as a teenager in the late 70s, studied in Portugal, worked as a journalist for the Africa service of Portuguese television, and has since operated as a pan-Lusophone intellectual: a columnist for Luanda’s A Capital and Lisbon’s Público, presenter of a radio show on African music and poetry, co-founder of the Rio de Janeiro publishing house Editora Língua Geral, dedicated to bringing Portuguese and African writing to Brazil. Currently based in Mozambique, Agualusa has fourteen novels to his name, six of them translated into English by Hahn, as well as several short story collections and countless journalistic pieces.

Among these fictions, Agualusa’s first novel, A Conjura (1989) recounted the background to a 1911 uprising against Portuguese rule in Angola, its central character a poor black anarchist barber. Nação Crioula (1997) centres on a 19th-century slave ship, the last to transport human cargo from Angola to Brazil, but which also provides the means of escape for two lovers, a footloose, free-thinking Portuguese traveller and Ana Olímpia, a beautiful and wealthy former slave. In O ano em que Zumbi tomou o Rio (2002), exiled Angolan military officers join a black-power rebellion in the Rio favelas.

The Society of Reluctant Dreamers (2017, trans. 2020), the latest to appear in English, is largely narrated by the journalist, Daniel Benchimol – one of many recurring characters in Agualusa’s fiction. It is set in the overlapping worlds of Lusophone intellectuals, artists and journalists, on the one hand, and generals, secret police and big businessmen, on the other. Benchimol’s ex-father-in-law supplies the archetype of the latter: director of an important state firm, member of the party’s central committee, immensely rich even before he switched to the private sector, he can get his ex-son-in-law sacked from any newspaper in Luanda with a phone call. Benchimol’s counterpart is a former UNITA guerrilla, Hossi Apolónio Kaley, captured by Cuban security forces, whose dream diaries from Havana contribute the rest of the narrative.

Dreams here occupy a comparable role to forgetting in A General Theory. As Benchimol discovers, they may be personal, practical, aesthetic – the basis for an extraordinary photographic series by a Mozambican artist, another of Agualusa’s angelic female characters, with whom Benchimol falls in love – or political. Benchimol’s daughter, arrested for protesting against the Old Man – Angola’s president – awakens him to the new democracy movement: ‘You wouldn’t believe the dreams that fit inside this prison.’ The novel ends with an evocation of the protests that helped to drive José Eduardo dos Santos from office in 2017 after nearly four decades in power. Agualusa’s work might better be read as auto-fictional essays on ‘third-world literature’, staging the tension between subjectivity and historicity, cosmopolitan and national perspectives, whose struggle for hegemony is like a civil war within these books themselves.

Read on: Gabriel García Márquez on Cuban internationalism and the MPLA.

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A New Voice

The publication of this first novel by 26-year-old Fatima Daas has generated much media excitement in France, for reasons that have little to do with the quality of the work itself. Daas has attracted attention for breaking taboos. She grew up in the Paris suburb Clichy-sous-Bois, best-known as the site of major rioting in 2005 which provoked Sarkozy’s comment about cleaning the place up with a Kärcher, or high-pressure water hose. The riots had been sparked by the death of two boys who were electrocuted at a Clichy substation when they were hiding from police. Daas is French – she was born in another Paris suburb – but her parents are Algerian and all her family, apart from her two sisters and her parents, live in le pays, as Algeria is commonly referred to. Daas is a practicing Muslim. She does not wear the veil and prefers chunky jewellery and red lipstick. She is openly gay though acknowledges the problems this poses her in her religion.

So it is worth noting two things: the novel itself is impressive and does not sit easily in any box, and the author has been wary about her warm welcome from the literary establishment:

What affected me (after the two boys died) was the aftermath. I had the impression we couldn’t change this image of the banlieue. At college I put all my energy into wanting to change the negative image people had of Clichy-sous-Bois, I often said it was up to us to show we were not people who torched cars. I realized it wasn’t just up to me to do everything to change the way people see the banlieue; just like I don’t have to say, because I am a Muslim, I break with the terrorists. It is not up to us to change the images and perceptions others have of us, it is up to people to change how they see things. I don’t owe anyone anything. Not Clichy, not anyone.

Les Inrockuptibles, 19 August 2020

I called myself a writer very early on and I was supported by my classmates in Clichy. That gave me a lot of strength, to be encouraged like that. Then over time I undid certain things. I do not want to incarnate success, I do not want to be a symbol, ‘the chick from the banlieue who made it’, because that would mean writing is exceptional when you come from Clichy-sous-Bois. I am tired of having to be either those who do nothing, who are violent, or ‘those who make it’.

Elle, 28 August 2020

Evidence that the novel deals with difficult issues, acknowledges contradictions exist, and offers no easy solutions can be sought in the controversy that has followed its publication. In September Daas appeared on France Inter, and in response to the question: Do you believe it is a sin to be a Muslim and gay, she said: ‘Yes, yes I do’. For anyone who has read her novel there is nothing surprising in this statement. The conflict between Islam and homosexuality is one of the subjects explored with care and subtlety. But to hear it spoken on the radio at 7am, ‘while people are brushing their teeth, it can be a surprise’, as Mediapart put it. On Mediapart’s A l’air libre, Daas looked genuinely troubled by the whole furore, and in particular to being catapulted into the role of a public figure making pronouncements about Islam. She insisted that life was full of internal conflicts and certain things could not be resolved but that did not stop her from being a Muslim and gay. This controversy has not settled, nor will it given the atmosphere in France right now. Daas has avoided further media interventions. To her credit she seems more interested in writing and has no intention or desire to be a spokesperson for any cause or debate the media wants to pull her into. She is outspoken on many issues, but on her own terms.

La petite dernière – ‘the little last one’ or ‘the youngest’, though neither are satisfactory for the term is used for the youngest child, specifically a girl, and is one of endearment – appears autobiographical because the protagonist is also called Fatima Daas, grew up in Clichy and when we meet her she is 30. It is important to note here that Fatima Daas is a pseudonym. The author has called it a work of ‘autofiction’, a familiar genre in France, but how much is auto and how much fiction in any given novel depends very much on the writer.

For much of the novel we are with the protagonist aged 30, though we cut back and forth to events in her past, from childhood to recent history. Each chapter runs to no more than a few pages. The novel is written in the first person, with every chapter beginning with the line ‘My name is Fatima Daas’. Often the next lines repeat themselves too, though always with a significant if subtle variation. We return to the same themes and get to know the salient facts of her life that influence her sense of who she is: Islam, her relationship with the religion, the meaning of names and words, the significance of certain events and people. Statements recur, in various forms: I am Algerian. I am French. I am from Clichy. I am the youngest child. I am asthmatic.

The cumulative impact of the familiar refrain of each chapter opening is to create the impression of the protagonist seeking to make sense of herself. It also gives momentum to the prose, not unlike the chorus of a song. This quality of the writing has been described as ‘rapping’ by some critics, but it reads more like verse, though not with a fluent or balanced cadence – it is clipped, and captures the protagonist’s own speech patterns. Her asthma is serious and she recounts episodes from her childhood when she visited doctors and took classes that taught her how to breathe and deal with attacks. In adulthood she continues to have a complicated relationship with speech: the physical act requires effort, brings some discomfort so she must force words out, and sentences have to be short. On the occasions when we do have blocks of paragraph or dialogue it is usually someone else speaking, or the words of her prayers, which feature throughout and provide a total contrast in rhythm and language.

Though the story does not reduce to simple summary, one is never in doubt about what is happening. Daas pares down her descriptions to the bare minimum. A great deal happens, but all is recounted episodically and we jump around in time within a few lines. Daas is the last child of three girls and not the son her parents had hoped for. She grows up a tomboy and finds school easy. The relationship with her parents is full of silent conflict. More dramatic scenes involve friends, and her first girlfriends, and clashes with teachers. There are some passing references to moments that impact her development as a writer, though only elliptically. She also describes her solitary moments praying, quoting at length various Muslim prayers. Nothing is resolved exactly, by the end of the novel, but it does conclude with the promise that Daas is writing a novel and may, finally, manage to communicate with her mother, whose portrait is more tender than that of her father, whom Daas cut out of her life in her twenties.

Religion, and Daas’s evolving relationship with it, is one central conflict. Early on she states:

My mother told me we are born Muslim.
But I think I have converted.
I think I continue to convert to Islam.

I try to be as close as possible to my religion, to get closer, to make it a way of life.

I like finding myself on my prayer mat, feeling my forehead on the ground, seeing myself prostrated, submissive to God, to implore Him, to feel myself tiny before His greatness, before His love, before His omnipresence

La petite dernière is also a love story. ‘Nina Gonzales is the heroine of this story’, we are told midway through. But Nina only appears fleetingly, and we do not know what happens to her. All we can be sure of is the strength of Daas’s feelings for her, and how these have upturned her world. Here one of the few scenes of the two together, towards the end of the novel:

Nina lets me in, apologising.
I say I’ve seen worse.

At Nina’s, there’s a little hallway of two metres that leads to her bedroom. In there the bed is unmade, under the bed there are cigarette butts, on her desk there’s a TV surrounded by books.

There’s a guitar and next to it clothes that she has left lying around.
I feel funny in Nina’s place and at the same time I feel good.

There is something reassuring about this mess, as though I was finding my place, as though it was a bit my own place.

I have the pretention to think I will put order into Nina’s life, when there’s not any order in my own life, when I can’t even be arsed to tidy up my room, to make my bed, that at my age my mum still makes it for me.

With Nina by my side, I feel less weird. Less crazy. Less blocked.

The most impressive quality of La petite dernière is its restraint. So little is said about most things, but single phrases tell us or suggest to us a great deal. This is achieved through the quality of the writing. Every statement counts, and every statement is rich with meaning.

Given the subjects Daas engages with, and the very personal register she uses, I had expected a more conventional tell-all story. The novel is the opposite of this, and I was left instead with an impression of integrity. Daas is clearly wrestling with the difficult balance between fiction and reality, and how much she will allow herself to say. This integrity is inevitably reminiscent of Annie Ernaux’s work. Daas quotes a passage from Ernaux’s novel Passion simple when she asks Nina if she could write about her, to which Nina offers no clear reply:

            All this time I had the impression I was living my passion in a novelistic form, but now I don’t know in what form I am writing, if it is the form of a witness, like the accounts written in women’s’ magazines, or the form of a public witness statement, or even that of a text commentary.

I do not want to explain my passion – that would be like treating it as an error or an anomaly that has to be justified – I just want to set it out.

The French literary establishment has poured praise on the book, uncritically and unanimously celebrating the author as a ‘revelation’ with ‘intrepid prose’, as if to sidestep the main point Daas makes in La petite dernière that she became a writer not because of this literary establishment, certainly not with its help, but despite it. This is made clear in passages such as this, recounting an incident in college:

My name is Fatima Daas.
Before allowing myself to write, I satisfied the expectations of others.
After college I went to hypokhâgne, to prepare for a literary degree.
That’s what the good students do.
They go into medicine, or in prépa, or to Sciences Po.

For several months, I imitate my classmates.

I must:
Work several hours after each day of classes.
Learn dates and definitions by heart.
Take oral exams, read and comment on texts written exclusively by straight white cisgender men.

I arrive at my first class of the day, on a Wednesday. It’s eight thirty.
My Spanish teacher hands us back our homework. He keeps a hold of my copy. He looks at me with his big glasses.

– Mademoiselle Daas, would you please step outside with me a moment?

I get up and push my chair under my desk.
I can feel his impatience.
I don’t have the time to take my jacket.
I follow him, like an idiot.
He’s already outside, the door is closed.
Two, three students watch me as I leave.
I am wearing a T-shirt and I feel the wind on my arms, my hairs stand on end and it tickles me.

– So… Mademoiselle Daas (he says this with a good strong voice, looking at me straight in the eyes), I won’t do anything, you can relax, I just want to know the truth (he lets time pass to create a pathetic suspense). Who did your work?
I don’t really understand, so I say with a smile, my homework?
He says yes, your homework. Who did it in your place?
Sometimes, when people doubt me, I doubt myself, it’s funny, I invent situations to prove them right, but this time I didn’t want to because the work was easy and I didn’t enjoy doing it.
I said nothing.
I hoped he would tell me it was an April Fool’s joke in February, something, but he wasn’t the type of guy to crack jokes. I carried on believing he would eventually catch himself, that he would sense, from my silence, that it was all one big fucking joke.
He carried on with his mad story:
– OK, fine, who helped you?

I was getting tired, but I did reply:
– I love Spanish. I had 8/10 on average last year and I got 16 in the bac.

Then I realized that proving, demonstrating, making myself legitimate, showing what I was worth was not what other students had to do, the students who were all inside, in the warm. Nobody had to argue for ten minutes, in a T-shirt, in the cold, to prove they had deserved 17/20.

A month later I stopped preparatory classes.
I didn’t go into medicine.
I didn’t enter Sciences Po.
I wrote.

Daas did not choose Sciences Po, and it certainly did not choose her. She has since chosen not to play the designated role of ‘the chick from the banlieue who made it’. All of this makes her path harder, as does her unwillingness to iron out the conflict she sees between her religion and her sexuality. This has made for a fine first novel.

Read on: Natasha Pinnington’s engagement with the experimental life-writing of Annie Ernaux.

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International Letters

A strong dose of idealism is needed to keep any magazine going. For Lettre Internationale, it’s no less than to counteract the ‘provincialism of the great cultures’ and induce them to ‘see themselves through the eyes of others’. How? By scouring the world for the best texts in any language and offering them in exquisite translation.  

That was the ambition of Antonín Liehm, a Czech editor who spent his life between France and the US after the crushing of the Prague Spring. On December 4, he passed away in that city, at the age of 96. Three-quarters of a century before, he had started his first magazine, Kulturní politika, along with E. F. Burian, one of the country’s most innovative theater directors. As the rubble from World War II was still being cleared, the 21 year-old Liehm churned out the culture-meets-politics platform at the mad pace of a weekly. The magazine was pro-communist, but not an appendage of the Party, and ran for three years before Liehm rubbed the government the wrong way by publishing a poem deemed an anti-state conspiracy.

In 1960, he took over the Litérarní noviny and transformed what had been a Stalinist mouthpiece of the Writers’ Association into the most popular intellectual journal of the country. The LN wove a critical politics out of reportage on culture, philosophy, film, theatre and literature – Sartre, Aragon, the New Wave. For a readership of over 130,000, it supplied uncompromising and provocative articles that shimmied past the censors via sympathetic connections. Within a few hours of its appearance every Thursday, the magazine was sold out.

In 1960s Czechoslovakia, Liehm later reflected, its place was akin to that of the Encyclopédie in eighteenth-century France: a venue for the taboo in pamphlet form. And it carried similarly profound political repercussions. Promoting the reform of communism, Liehm’s concoction was a crucial catalyst for the Prague Spring, and several of its writers were leaders in the uprising. A year after the Soviet tanks rolled in, the magazine’s editor, on the list of people to be ‘shot down’, found refuge in Paris.

In exile, Liehm cobbled together his finances by teaching film and literature at universities in France and the US while searching for another publishing venture.  Gunter Grass and Heinrich Böll showed interest in assembling an East-West magazine, but for Liehm, this was too parochial. Only something truly international would suffice, something that would take down not only the wall separating Eastern and Western Europe, but the pedestal on which the latter stood as well. For Grass, this was not German enough, and the two parted ways.

It was at sixty that Liehm founded the outlet for this vision: Lettre Internationale. Funding he scrambled together from the French Ministry of Culture and Polish and Hungarian émigrés, who were willing to support an intellectual journal of the type they knew from home.  It wasn’t a fortune, but it was enough to birth the magazine in a one-room office shared with another dissident leftist, Paul Noirot. What money there was all went to pay the translators, whose work had to be of the highest quality: the texts were to read as fluently in French as they did in the original. Without funds to commission writers, the magazine was assembled as a collage, anchored by central text, juxtaposed against others, and refracted through images and poetry interspersed throughout. 

But it was to be much more.  The foundational idea was an international network of publications, but one quite unlike the standard sort that offers simply the same fare in different languages. Moving past the intellectual divisions in Europe and beyond – not merely East-West, but also North-South – meant not standardization but localization: half of the texts in each issue were to overlap, while the rest could be determined on the ground. Perhaps only Le Monde Diplomatique’s global federation of partner editions provides a contemporary comparison. 

In the late 1980s, Leihm’s vision spread quickly, with the rapid appearance of sister magazines in Italian (Lettera Internazionale, 1985), Spanish (Letra Internacional, 1986), and German (Lettre International, 1987). When the East opened in the 1990s, the pan-European ebullience, buoyed by foundation funding, spawned even more – Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian versions, while smaller western countries, Denmark and the Netherlands, caught up.

But noble intentions alone don’t pay the presses and the idealistic aim struggled against the technology available at the time: the texts circulated, slowly, by post. Within a decade, the French version collapsed, and no edition ever appeared outside Europe, which remained the central geographic focus. Now merely six languages remain: the Russian edition has found refuge online, and the rest struggle to hang on.

Only in Germany has the project continued in full form, without qualification, under founder-editor Frank Berberich. With a circulation of over 20,000, the Berlin-based Lettre International is the widest-read literary magazine in the country. This is no small feat for a chunky periodical of 150 pages printed on broad A3 paper. As such, it’s very much a stay-at-home quarterly: even rolled up, it won’t fit into a handbag. In public, it can be seen mostly in the window of cafes or wine shops, like a Zagat sticker signaling taste.

But the uncooperative format is perhaps a needed concession to the magazine’s interdisciplinarity. In the tradition of Breton’s Minotaure, it showcases artworks between the articles, and the uncompromised size gives them their rightful due. Covers are typically head-turners (for example, a watercolor of an S&M orgy), while the pictorial contributions inside, from the likes of Ai Weiwei, Annie Lebowitz, or Georg Baselitz, offer a moment for breath between the texts.

Three-quarters of these are translations that range across essays, reportage, interviews, poetry, fiction, commentaries and analysis. European languages predominate, but authors outside the West are not in short supply. The point is discovery – German readers have Lettre to thank for the introduction of Slavoj Zizek and Liao Yiwu to their shelves – and disruption. The magazine darts between political perspectives and hovers around the contentious.  It was in an interview with Lettre that then Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin first expounded his views on Muslim immigrants’ ‘unwillingness to integrate’, sparking a media frenzy and his eventual departure from public life. Recent issues have covered deglobalization and epidemics, the ganglands of Kosovo, the transformation of writing, apocalypse past and present, mutations of racism in America, the fraught Americanization of Europe, as well as the philosophy of touch – all from original texts in more than a half-dozen languages – and in its massive, obstinate format.

How should we conceptualize these internationalist endeavours? In The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova mapped the global literary order onto an uneven political-economic terrain. If universalist vernaculars once facilitated literary communication across vast swathes of territory, the Herderian revolution of nineteenth-century nationalism swept them aside as authors embraced writing in one’s native tongue as both right and necessity. The outcome was a more localized literary space, bounded by nationalized languages. Yet if languages were increasingly homogenized within state borders, literary worlds remained vastly unequal beyond them, country power a determining feature of their global rank. The effect is a hierarchy, much as in the field of international relations.

Within it, what passes now as world literature is determined in the hubs of power – London, Paris, New York. These dominant centres host the publishing, reviewing, translating and prize-giving mechanisms that function as gatekeepers of taste and arbiters of the new. The result is not a Republic of Letters, but an Empire of the same. Outsiders, whether from social margins or peripheral countries, gain admittance only if they conform to the establishment’s criteria of taste. The parochialism is perhaps strongest within the current global hegemon: in the US, works in translation account for only 3 percent of all books sold. 

Liehm’s vision for Lettre – like his politics since the 1940s – subverted this order from the inside. He took a project, born on the periphery of Europe, and transposed it to Paris where he attempted to raze the inequalities on which the continent’s literary capital rose, for translation was supposed to go both ways. There are as likely to be Arabic texts that readers of Swedish should access as vice versa, he would comment. The success of the magazine’s offspring in Germany would not have surprised Casanova. The country’s linguistic power lags far behind its economic might; as such, interest in translation from its hinterlands is an understandable response.

Or maybe it is that Germany remains the last bastion within Europe of the once wide-spread feuilleton culture, still materialized as an extended section in weekend newspapers. These, as a rule, carry long-form essays on politics and arts that assume a far more literate public than even the London Review might expect of its readers. Perhaps only this, and the feuilleton’s ritual venue – the Sunday breakfast that stretches on until sunset, round a table covered in jam and breadcrumbs – can explain how a magazine as thick and uncompromising as Lettre can survive in an age of blogs. 

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The Short Life of Fake News

Never believe anything until it has been officially denied

Claud Cockburn

Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare

Louis XI the Prudent, King of France (1461–1483)

Figures of speech and their trajectories make an intriguing study. For example, partly due to Covid-19, one of this year’s most popular locutions was, ‘We are entering uncharted territory’ – a portentous way of saying that we have zero understanding of it. These expressions disappear, often overnight, sometimes more gradually. Why? Their fortunes follow an erratic path, hard to decipher. For example, the term fake news has barely been used in 2020, when just three years ago it was rampaging across the media, with legislation drafted on it in various parliaments. It is not as if the world has grown more truthful over the past few years, yet now it seems to have been almost deleted from our vocabularies.

Which suggests the opposite question: how come it was only in 2017 that a stunned humanity discovered that lies are told in politics and war? It is over two millennia since the figure of the ‘doomed spy’ was first etched in The Art of War, attributed to Sun Tzu and transcribed in the 4th century BC. In Chapter 13 (‘The Use of Spies’), Sun Tzu identifies five types of secret agent: local (employing the inhabitants), ‘inward’ (recruiting the enemy’s officials), ‘converted’ (turning the enemy’s spies into double agents), ‘doomed spies’ – agents ‘to whom we deliberately give information we have fabricated out of thin air’ and who are sacrificed to the enemy – and ‘surviving spies’, who bring back news from the enemy’s camp. A thousand years later Tu Yu, who died in 812 AD, commented on the category of the doomed spy: ‘We allow genuinely false information to escape and we make sure our agents come to hear of it. When these agents travel into enemy territory and get captured, they won’t be able to avoid revealing this fabricated information. The enemy will believe it – because they will have obtained it through extortion – and will proceed accordingly. But we will operate quite differently and the enemy will therefore execute our spies.’ It was the discursive equivalent of the chess move that sacrifices a piece to lure the adversary into a trap.

No wonder the maxim, ‘truth is the first casualty of war’ has been speculatively traced as far back as Aeschylus. The oldest sources for that particular formulation can be traced only to the First World War, although Samuel Johnson said something similar – ‘Among the calamities of war may justly be numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages’ – in ‘The Idler’ column of the Universal Chronicle in November 1758. In general, though, this type of ‘fake news’ – the deceptions of war, or war as the art of lying – goes back to the dawn of time. Not for nothing did the Romans used to say, ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’, thinking of the wooden horse the Achaeans gave to Troy – the trick that constituted the final act in the war which founded Western culture.

A second type of fake news is more ‘social’ in character, closer to civil war than war between states, and can be catalogued under the rubric, ‘slander’. Anonymous calumnies and denunciations did not need social media to cause misfortune. From the tamburo, or letterbox, in the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence in which the unsigned accusation of sodomy against Leonardo da Vinci and others was deposited in 1476, through to the innumerable anonymous accusations of sorcery in Germany and Scotland in the 1600s, which led to just as many immolations: the viral tom-tom insinuating that Obama was not an American citizen and studied in an Islamic madrasa has precedents which, if not illustrious, were ancient and more lethal.

But it was in 17th-century Europe that treatises began to multiply on the art of lying, or of saying nothing; understandably, as saying what one thought risked the stake or decapitation. And it was at this time that the canonical definition was stabilized. ‘We simulate that which is not and dissimulate that which is’, wrote Torquato Accetto in On Honest Dissimulation, published posthumously in 1641, a year after his death. Francis Bacon used the same terms in his essay Of Simulation and Dissimulation (1625): ‘Dissimulation’ is ‘when a man lets fall Signs and Arguments, that he is not, that he is’. And ‘Simulation’ is ‘when a Man industriously, and expressly, feigns and pretends to be, that he is not.’

Skipping three centuries forward to 1921, the great French historian Marc Bloch turned to examine the falsehoods employed during the First World War in his Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre. The era saw a vast expansion in the dissemination of mass propaganda and the wartime use of radio. So today we are not in the least surprised by a text like this:

Never have we lied as much as in our time. Nor lied in as brazen, systematic or constant a manner. We may perhaps be told that this is not the case, that the lie is as old as the world, or, at least, as old as man, mendax ab initio; that the political lie was born with the city itself, as history superabundantly teaches… All that is true, undoubtedly. Or almost. It is certain that man defines himself through speech, that this entails the possibility of lying, and that… the lie, even more than the laugh, is peculiar to man. It is equally certain that the political lie belongs to all time, that the rules and techniques of what once was called ‘demagogy’, and today ‘propaganda’, have been systematized and codified for thousands of years… It is incontestable that man has always lied. Lied to himself. And to others. Lied for his own pleasure – the pleasure of exercising that astonishing faculty of ‘saying that which is not’ and creating with his own words a world of which he is the sole author. Lying, too, as self-defence: the lie is a weapon. The preferred weapon of the low and the weak who, in deceiving the enemy, affirms himself and takes his revenge. But… we remain convinced that, in this domain, the present epoch… has made powerful innovations.

All entirely recognizable. The only problem being that ‘the present epoch’ in which we lie as never before lay 77 years ago: the original text of Alexandre Koyré’s Réflexions sur le mensonge appeared in 1943 in the first number of Renaissance, a quarterly journal published in New York – proof that the sensation of being enveloped by a world of lies and falsehoods, of swimming in an illusory reality, belongs to every age.

There is thus no doubt that the sudden discovery of fake news must have been instrumental. But what was it for? And why at that precise moment? Why do hardened liars become indignant when others lie? There is only one explanation. If, for Weber, the state holds the monopoly on legitimate use of physical force, in the world of modern communications – in which TV counts for more than armoured divisions – the state, or more precisely the establishment, is that which holds the monopoly on legitimate lying. It alone has the right to lie and to impose its lies as truth. We could therefore hypothesize that the almost hysterical indignation against fake news was caused by the dominant groups’ fears of having lost the monopoly on legitimate lying.

Social media endangered such a monopoly. Recall that Facebook was born in 2004, QZone (China) in 2005, VKontakte (Russia) and Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010. It took some years of dissemination fully to unleash their power in reconfiguring the market for truth and lies. And it was in 2016, with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, that the establishment felt the earth crumble beneath its feet, when it saw the triumph of lies that weren’t its own. The campaign against fake news was therefore immediately reconstituted as a campaign to regain control of social media, to introduce a kind of censorship or self-censorship. By definition, censorship consists in giving oneself the right to decide what is true and what is false, what can be said and what it is forbidden to say, what citizens can know and what must be kept from them. Based on the behaviour of social-media platforms during the US elections this November, it seems that the objective of regaining control of the flow of news has been at least in part achieved. The category fake news can go into hibernation, ready to be brought back out in case of need, when a better liar than those in power comes to assail the power of the liars.

Translated by Eleanor Chiari

Read on: Marco D’Eramo’s history of print journalism, from the rising bourgeoisie to the new oligarchy.

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Funeral Rites

At first you might miss Stalin in the sea of white flowers and crimson satin; then you spot his waxy dead man’s face, the black moustache that Mandelstam famously, fatally compared to a cockroach. The cadaver turns the heads of a torrent of mourners. Some are in tears, some look anxious or horrified, some wear an expression of awkward indifference, some might be suppressing a smile. There is never any question about what they’re looking at, even when the body is out of sight.  

Faces and crowds are the substance of the Ukrainian-Belarusian director Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral, a 2019 documentary created from 1953 footage for a documentary called The Great Farewell. Squelched by the first spasms of de-Stalinization, the original film was a collaborative effort by six eminent directors, including Grigorii Aleksandrov, an early collaborator of Eisenstein’s who became famous for 1930s musical comedies, and Elizaveta Svilova, who helped create the Soviet montage documentary with her husband, Dziga Vertov. Loznitsa has already made several laconic, lyrical documentaries from archival Soviet footage: 2006’s Blockade (the siege of Leningrad); 2015’s The Event (the August 1991 putsch attempt); 2018’s The Trial (a 1930 show trial). His oeuvre, which also includes four dramas and several non-archival documentaries, centres on the Soviet experience, the Second World War, and post-Soviet identities. The archival documentaries are his strongest work, remarkably delicate and subtle despite their proximity to historical episodes of extreme violence and suffering. For State Funeral, he was working with high-quality material whose poeticism, angularity, and fine attention to mundane detail were the work of gifted eyes, product of decades of Soviet artistic experiment.

The victorious Soviets had seized large quantities of Agfacolor film stock from Germany in 1945. About half of the footage in State Funeral is in this strange, erratic colour, rose-red banners cutting across monotone building façades, oil rigs, and snowy expanses. Sometimes the same footage flickers between colour and black-and-white, as if the past is coming in and out of focus. Crowds in Moscow, Donbass, Latvia, Tajikistan, and Chukotka gather around their local Stalin statues, listening as an echoing voice on a loudspeaker details Stalin’s final illness. People stand on street corners, plucking newspapers from stands or looking over shoulders at Stalin’s printed portrait; we watch as a woman replaces a poster promising a lecture on ‘THE REACTIONARY NATURE OF SEMANTIC PHILOSOPHY’ with Stalin’s image.

Lines wrap around Moscow’s Hall of Columns, where Stalin’s body lies in state; immense crowds justify the breadth of Moscow’s central streets. Men in leather trench coats arrive bearing immense wreaths, the leaves an Agfacolor kelly green; it seems that all the flowers in the Soviet Union have been cut for this occasion. Ordinary and not-so-ordinary people trudge up broad stairs, waiting to say goodbye or simply to see the corpse with their own eyes. Women in furs, women in aprons, women in cheap padded jackets. Delegations from the Soviet Socialist Republics and from other socialist countries and parties move in clusters, stand in rows. (Loznitsa omits The Great Farewell’s footage from other countries, including China and North Korea.) Dolores Ibárruri, one of the only female dignitaries present, looks grim, almost aghast. The camera lingers on the hapless Vasily Stalin as he takes long, shuddering breaths; Marshal Rokossovsky’s cheeks shine with discreet tears. Artists sketch the corpse from life. At the end Stalin is carried away in a coffin with a ballooning front window, as if in a submersible.

In The Great Farewell, a traditional voiceover orients the audience, while a classical soundtrack instructs the viewer on how to feel. State Funeral, by contrast, provides no helpful captions, voiceovers, or talking heads. Places and people are not identified. Instead, we watch a kind of historical ballet. The first impression is of unexpected discovery, or of being thrown into another time. But where does found footage end and where does Loznitsa’s intervention begin? The crowd scenes at Stalin monuments suggest that the whole Soviet Union was wired with speakers, that faceless voices of authority could ring through the street at any moment, even in the tundra. But in 1953 film sound still had to be added in a studio. These tinny, echoing, omnipresent voices are Loznitsa’s additions. The same is true of the shuffling of feet, the rustling of winter coats, the intermittent sobs. Chopin’s funeral march in B-flat minor, which John Williams has burdened forever with the memory of Darth Vader, adds a whiff of irony. A huge Stalin portrait swings in the air, suspended by a crane, before the creak and clank give way to silence and darkness. The Sith Lord is dead at last.

There is an eerie sense of voicelessness to State Funeral; no vox populi interviews here. (‘Will you miss Stalin?’) A viewer familiar with the literature of the Soviet era will be reminded, however, of the numerous descriptions of Stalin’s death and its aftermath from Soviet and post-Soviet novels and memoirs (notably those of Evgenii Evtushenko, who later wrote a 1990 film called Stalin’s Funeral). Viewers not born in the USSR may recall Aleksei German’s gruesome, hallucinatory Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998) or Armando Iannucci’s slapstick satire The Death of Stalin (2017). These external intertexts substitute for the testimony of these oddly quiet crowds. Footage of crowds moving helplessly sideways evokes the now-familiar story, suppressed in Soviet times, of the funeral stampede that killed dozens or even hundreds of people.   

State Funeral’s refusal of commentary reduces the quarrelsome Politburo members to a kind of anonymity, too. The dumpling-faced Khrushchev introduces Malenkov, Beria and Molotov before they deliver their ineloquent speeches on Red Square – but this scene comes only at the very end of the film. Until then, the viewer must rely on her own powers of recognition. If this were a film made primarily for post-Soviet audiences, we could assume that Loznitsa is trusting, as post-Soviet intellectuals still do, in the universal recognition of certain faces, verses, songs. But Loznitsa is now based in Germany, makes his films with Dutch partners and shows them at film festivals around the world. Is he suggesting that characters like Beria and Molotov are of little ultimate significance, that Soviet history can be reduced, in the end, to the one dead face that everyone on earth can still recognize? If so, why did he resist the urge to put Stalin’s name in the title? Silence, absence, redaction: more than Beria or Molotov, these are the stars of this film.

Read on: Sophie Pinkham’s deft analysis of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU, the controversy-courting product of Russian oligarch largesse.

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Negative Capability

Anglophone readers are belatedly becoming acquainted with the writing of Annie Ernaux, who turned eighty this year. A Man’s Place is the fifth work of hers to be published in English in the last two years, with a sixth scheduled for the spring. The uniform cream covers of this growing set of volumes – drawn from the two dozen she has produced over the last half century – recall the chalky landscape of the Pays de Caux where Ernaux was raised, and which has been home territory of her oeuvre. At some distance aesthetically from the seascapes of Monet and Courbet, or socially from the Rouen of Flaubert and Maupassant, in disposition her work though shares something with Flaubert’s anticipation that former classmates would blush, scandalized, at his precise rendering of ‘la couleur normande’. Ernaux’s forensic approach has likewise elicited shock and disapproval. Today a grande dame of French letters, her current English reception – cordial, at times ardent – has tended to emphasize kinship with a range of semi-fictionalized autobiographies by women that are currently in vogue, carrying appeals to the work’s universal applicability. A Girl’s Story, published earlier this year, was praised by one critic for instance as ‘a story that belongs to any number of self-consciously clever girls with appetite and no nous’.

Such critical interest is to be welcomed, but the effect has been rather to denude Ernaux’s work of its specificity. Typically occluded has been the wider shape of her oeuvre, as well as its political ethos. The macro-narrative uniting the individual texts is her own progress from rural, poverty-stricken origins; the distinctive, torqued shape of each the result of a writing life taking the measure of the social conditions in which she found herself – what she calls ‘taking possession of the legacy with which I had to part’ – and negotiating the distance travelled since. This personal history is inseparable from the shifting coordinates of post-war France, its class structure, its political, social and cultural developments, and from a critique of the country’s social divisions. Her work has been categorized as ‘auto-socio-biography’; at once deeply personal, transfixed by the detail of her life, the workings of memory and trauma, but also sociological. These are texts that are deeply embedded both in the wider history of France – Algeria, ’68, Poujade, Mitterrand et al – but also the local pigments and textures of a specific region, period, class and culture.

Two principal influences laid the ground for this project. Ernaux has described the ontological shock she experienced upon encountering the work of Pierre Bourdieu – the pain of recognition she felt at his analysis of social domination – and how, in the wake of ’68, this provided a ‘secret injunction’ to explore the wrenching nature of upward social mobility. His influence is discernible in some local habits of Ernaux’s prose. Her cataloguing of social and cultural phenomena, with its satirical after-taste, appears at times straight out of the pages of Distinction (1979). What Bourdieu elucidated for the social world, Simone de Beauvoir had done a decade earlier for the condition of women. Her autobiographical writing, which began with Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), provided a formal antecedent. Ernaux’s affectless style – described by her as ‘écriture plate’ – owes a clear debt to Beauvoir; I Remain in Darkness (2019) is a recognizable progeny of Beauvoir’s own account of her mother’s last days, A Very Easy Death (1964), published when Ernaux was twenty-four. This kind of acerbic tonal mixture is also a feature of Ernaux’s style, channelled into her own now caustic, now genuine, never less than self-aware use of adjectives like ‘easy’.

The autobiographical trajectory which Ernaux’s work records, however, occurred at a different social stratum to the glittering inevitability of success and familiar grands-écoles narrative of Beauvoir, or indeed the rapid ascension detailed in Bourdieu’s Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (2004). Hers was a less assured and more ordinary one. A Girl’s Story details her early departure from Rouen’s École Normale, Happening her later pursuit of a literature degree. Taking the vocational ‘Capes’ exam, Ernaux eventually qualified as a schoolteacher, and since publishing her first literary work, Les Armoires Vides, in 1974, has maintained a certain distance from the centres of cultural and intellectual life. Long-time resident of the ‘new town’ of Cergy, surveyed in her Journal du Dehors (1993), she taught at the Centre for Long Distance Learning until her retirement.

It was her fourth work, A Man’s Place – the original title is the less specific La Place – which established her reputation in France, after it won the 1984 Prix Renaudot. A stark reflection on her father’s life, this also marked an aesthetic turning point: it was the first of her writing to shed the cover of semi-fictionalization. What followed was a growing taste for writing as an unflinching exercise in self-revelation; books that treat either one episode in her life or a single topic over a more extended period. Of the recently published tranche: Happening (2019/2000) tells of a kitchen table abortion in her early twenties; I Remain in Darkness (2019/1997) her mother’s time on a geriatric ward; A Girl’s Story (2020/2016) of painful formative experiences, both sexual and social, the year she left home. Others, as yet untranslated, address her marriage, an affair, the time her father almost killed her mother, the death of a sister before her birth and its legacy. The Years (2018/2008), widely considered her magnum opus, is an outlier in this regard. A grander work of ‘impersonal autobiography’ published in 2008, it pairs her life story more explicitly with the communal movement of a generation, in an attempt to capture what she describes as ‘the lived dimension of History’.

The lineaments of A Man’s Place are dictated by moral constraints, outlined at its outset. Attempts to make the work ‘moving’ or ‘gripping’, ‘lyrical reminiscences’, ‘triumphant displays of irony’, would all be inappropriate, she notes, for relating ‘the story of a life governed by necessity’. Instead, Ernaux endeavours to simply ‘collate my father’s words, tastes and mannerisms, the main events of his life, all the external evidence of his existence, an existence which I too shared’. Collation then over narration; sociology or ethnography before narrative. The approach is often one of assemblage; methodologically Ernaux is drawn to examining particular details from her memory or objets trouvés that conjure them, including the contents of her father’s pockets after his death. The undertaking is framed as a process of recovering suppressed memories: ‘I surrendered to the will of the world in which I live, where memories of a lowly existence are seen as a sign of bad taste.’ Throughout she grapples with how to write without betrayal; elsewhere she has written of wanting to avoid ‘complicity with the cultivated reader’. There is also an oscillation of tone, as she attempts to do justice to the multivalency of her family’s experience. ‘This was the way we lived and so of course we were happy although we realized the humiliating limitations of our class.’

Work is naturally a dominant feature of her account – Ernaux’s father’s childhood as a farm labourer, his work in factories and on building sites after the war, and then at the café-épicerie in Yvetot where his daughter was raised. We witness how being a child of the shop floor trained her in social discrimination, how she learnt to discern the contrasts between its clientele, those more or less ‘proletarian’, those who could afford to go elsewhere, those who would ask for credit. The presiding emotional tenor stems from this social stratification. Her father’s life is portrayed as ruled by the fear of being ashamed, humiliated, caught out of place. Such psychic contortion is often expressed by contorted syntax: ‘we were ashamed at not knowing what we would have known instinctively, had we not been what we were, in other words, inferior.’ This instance records the experience of a ‘we’, but the book charts the cleavage that emerges as she becomes educated. Her father’s self-consciousness about his Norman patois is inflamed by her learning to speak a different French at school; she recalls his habit of splitting up the syllables of vocabulary pertaining to her school, as if saying the words fluently would presume a familiarity from which he was structurally excluded. ‘I realize now’, she writes, ‘that anything to do with language was a source of resentment and distress’.

The book takes care to render the vocabulary and dialect of the Norman working-class life of her upbringing, though this carries a disclaimer against appreciation of the ‘picturesque charm’ of popular speech. Proust, she notes, was able to treat it purely aesthetically because it was the language of his maid; for her father patois was ‘something old and ugly, a sign of inferiority’. It is a challenge to render colloquialisms in another language; some of the finest moments of the translation involve leaving particular words or phrases intact rather than replacing them with an awkward anglicism or near equivalent. In broad terms, English readers are well served by this edition. Ernaux’s pithy but plain style is captured effectively, though the text does occasionally shade into literalism, foregoing more imaginative variants. This particular text is a republication of an existing translation; the freshly translated works such as A Girl’s Story are a little more supple. Some emendations have been made but these are not always to the good; a key articulation of Ernaux’s endeavour has been altered from ‘taking possession of the legacy with which I had to part’ to the technically more accurate, but undeniably clunky ‘unearthing the legacy which I had to leave at the door’.

The force of the book’s portrait of her father’s life as it was circumscribed by poverty and domination remains undiminished by the intervening decades. It has also been influential: we might in fact think of Ernaux as the inaugurator of a subgenre, ­one that details the writer’s poverty-stricken upbringing in Northern France, the wrench and alienation of embourgeoisement, anguished familial relations and lingering marks of deprived social circumstances. The vagaries of translation have meant the recent books of two notable descendants working in this vein have appeared in English during this same period: Returning to Reims (2018/2009) by Didier Eribon and three books by Édouard Louis, beginning with The End of Eddy (2018/2014). Both have cited Ernaux as a significant forebear, Eribon being deeply moved by her early pronouncement that she intended to avenge the world of the dominated. Collectively, their work might be said to present a diagnosis of the socio-geographic alienation brought to international attention by the revolt of the Gilet Jaunes – analysed by Christophe Guilluy as the exclusion of la France périphérique – and of the decline of the left in France and its ramifications.  

These three writers share intellectual and political allegiances: Louis’s first publication was an edited collection on Bourdieu to which both Ernaux and Eribon contributed. Some differences are indices of historical change. Louis for instance, much the youngest of the three, recounts how his family envied the workers, whose lives the books of Eribon and Ernaux relate, writing instead of the stigmatization of living off welfare. For Eribon and Louis, homosexuality takes the place of gender as another axis of discrimination. The central distinction between them though lies in their work’s wider orientation. Eribon, a sociologist and biographer of Foucault, describes his book as a work of theory that happens to be grounded in his own experience. Louis, by contrast, presents his work as expressly political. His latest work Who Killed My Father (2019/2018), is framed as an indictment of the ‘social violence’ inflicted on his father by the successive regimes of Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron. ‘I want to inscribe their names in history’, he writes, ‘as revenge’. Ernaux, by contrast, has more of a sense that her writing has the capacity to work or impress itself on us in more oblique ways – as literature, in other words. It stands simultaneously as a modern inheritor of Beauvoir, and as a counterpart to the formally experimental autobiography of Nathalie Sarraute or Christine Brooke-Rose.

While no less powerful, there is a prevailing indeterminacy to her project. Each book endeavours to put a corner of her life to rest or cajole it into a shape of some kind, but further questions, doubts and uncertainty always crowd back in. Even The Years, a text invested in ‘common time’ and therefore less troubled by the workings of personal memory, ends in a conditional tense that intimates the project remains unfinished. In this indeterminate space sits the arrangement of her mise-en-page as collocations of fragments, her record of dislocation from the past and the struggle to reinhabit it, her sense when she does of being ‘abducted’ by a former self which ‘overtakes her, stops the flow of breath, and for a moment makes me feel I no longer exist outside myself.’ If she is distinguished by the preservation of a sort of negative capability, then it is not that she is less sure of the history, personal or social she relates. The implication is instead that her abiding problematic – how to represent a life integrated with the social conditions that shaped it – will remain, perhaps forever, unsolved. The strange final sentence of A Girl’s Story enacts this in miniature. A transcribed note of intent from her diary, it stills the narrative’s motion into an imperative, carrying with it the latent suggestion that this is an ideal her writing has still yet to achieve: ‘Explore the gulf between the stupefying reality of things that happen, at the moment they happen, and, years later, the strange unreality in which the things that happened are enveloped.’

Read on: Perry Anderson on Macron’s leap-frog to the Élysée; Jane Jenson on varieties of French feminism.