Art Cult And Lit From A Marxist Perspective.pdf

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Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective Tony McKenna

free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com © Tony McKenna 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–1–137–52660–1 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McKenna, Tony, 1979– Art, literature and culture from a Marxist perspective / Tony McKenna. pages cm ISBN 978–1–137–52660–1 (hardback) 1. Socialism and culture. 2. Socialism and the arts. I. Title. HX523.M395 2015 306—dc23

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2015013970

free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com For my mother and father, Gay and Mike

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Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1

Breaking Bad: Capital as Cancer

2

In Time: The First Hollywood Movie of the Occupy Wall Street Era

23

The Walking Dead: The Archetype of the Zombie in the Modern Epoch

33

4

Let Me In: The Figure of the Vampire as Kantian Noumenal

43

5

True Detective and Capitalist Development in Its Twilight Phase

58

6

Tupac Shakur: History’s Poet

70

7

Vincent van Gogh

81

8

The Song of Achilles: How the Future Transforms the Past

91

9

Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna and the Nature of the Historical Novel

98

3

10

9

Balzac’s Women and the Impossibility of Redemption in Cousin Bette

107

11

The Wife: A Study in Patriarchy

120

12

The Vigilante in Film: The Movement from Death Wish, to Batman, to Taxi Driver

128

A Mirror into Our World: The Radical Politics of Game of Thrones

134

14

Harry Potter and the Modern Age

141

15

The Hunger Games Trilogy – Art for the Occupy Era

153

16

The Politics of Deduction: Why Has Sherlock Holmes Proven So Durable?

162

13

vii

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Contents

17

Literary Love as Kantian Sublime: Wuthering Heights and The Sea, The Sea

170

Brief Loves That Live Forever: The Historical Melancholy of Andreï Makine

181

John Williams’ Novel Stoner and the Dialectic of the Infinite and Finite

190

From Tragedy to Farce: The Comedy of Ricky Gervais as Capitalist Critique

197

18 19 20

Bibliography

210

Index

213

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free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Acknowledgements I am grateful to the publishers of the following works for permission to reuse copyrighted material from them as the basis for the chapters indicated: ‘In Time: The First Hollywood Movie of the Occupy Wall Street Era’, Science & Society, 79(1) (Guilford Press, New York) 117–126. ‘Vincent van Gogh’, Critique Journal of Socialist Theory, 2011, 39(2), (Taylor and Francis, Oxford) 295–303. www.tandfonline.com ‘A Mirror into Our World: The Radical Politics of Game of Thrones’, published Monday, 7 April 2014 in Ceasefire Magazine. www.ceasefiremagazine.co.uk ‘Harry Potter and the Modern Age’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 39(3) (Taylor and Francis, Oxford) 355–364. www.tandfonline.com ‘The Politics of Deduction’, Overland Literary Journal, 217/Summer 2014.

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free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Introduction

It is 1961. In a small, spare auditorium a man is sitting behind a glass screen and speaking into a microphone. His voice is sharp and scratchy. He looks nondescript: middle-aged and balding, he is dressed in a tidy but dour suit, and his thick black-framed glasses give the impression of someone in the civil service, or a university lecturer perhaps. While he speaks, a group of people in the gallery hurriedly scribble into their notes. One of these is a lady somewhere in her 50s; with owlish features and penetrating, dark eyes – she squints in concentration as she tries to better make out the person doing the talking. The scene is low key and muted, conducted in the spirit of a certain dry formality, so you might be forgiven for not realising that the man who is speaking from behind the glass is one of the twentieth century’s most notorious mass murderers, while the woman taking the notes will go on to be considered one of its greatest philosophers. Hannah Arendt was attending the trial of Nazi leader Adolph Eichmann in her capacity as a journalist for The New Yorker. Her observations and analysis of the event would yield one of the most provocative but fascinating accounts of the psychological nature of men like Eichmann, unfurling the psychic basis for the horrific war crimes they helped facilitate. In a period of time when the Holocaust was such an immediate and suppurating memory for a vast number, Arendt departed from the commonplace narrative, which – not unnaturally – tended to see men like Eichmann almost exclusively as criminal psychotics or deranged monsters. Arendt endeavoured to offer a deeper explanation. She coined an iconic phrase to describe the genocidal activity of the Nazis – she referred to it in terms of ‘the banality of evil’. By this she did not mean that the Holocaust was banal, for the murderous pitch and scope of its violence was without precedent in the historical record. Nor did she mean that 1

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Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective

we, as human beings, have become so inured to the violent occurrences in our history – that the horror of the Holocaust might appear to us in mundane terms. What she in fact argued was that Nazism had helped cultivate a new type of historical subject; that Eichmann was a breed of bureaucrat who had been so deeply integrated into the mechanisms of the bureaucracy – the routines, the legal minutiae, the nexus of structure and authority – that his fundamental being had been abstracted from those who were the victims. For Eichmann, the victims appeared foremostly in their guise of a statistical quota which had to be achieved; the industrial murder of millions was merely part and parcel of a necessary and ongoing logistical project. Eichmann’s evil, then, lay in this: his essential banality. A functionary, a creation of the bureaucratic machine – his monstrousness resided in the fact that he was so immersed in the processes of regulation and policy that he had ceased to think the human beings – who were on the other side of those processes, who were the victims of them – as thinking, living entities whose lives achieved a parity with his own. It was this deficit in thought, this singular lack of imagination and empathy, which Arendt so expressly captured with that one phrase: ‘the banality of evil’. One of the other awful aspects of the Nazi regime, of course, was the fate of free thought more generally. As a totalitarian regime, only the most propagandistic elements in art and culture were tolerated, dissenters were arrested and killed, and the smoke from the bonfires of burning books cast a pall of darkness across a culture which had once given us Hegel, Goethe and Heine. But the book burnings were about something more than the need to eradicate those political ideals which were immediately and coherently opposed to the Nazi ideology. Yes, the works of ideologues such as Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Georg Lukács were destroyed. But alongside this, works of fiction were obliterated as well – novels by writers such as Franz Kafka, D H Lawrence, Joseph Conrad and many others. There was something more than the simple and brutal pragmatics of repression on offer here: the Nazis wanted to eradicate more than the ability to think; they wanted to eradicate the ability to feel too. Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy offers us a pithy but profound description of the function of art; he argues that the viewer/reader/listener must be ‘infected by the author’s condition of soul.’1 Such a description seems 1 L Tolstoy, What Is Art?, (Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis: 1996) p.140.

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to capture something of the essence of the artistic, which lies in the transmission of profound feeling from the artist to the recipient in and through the mediation of the aesthetic object – the painting, the song, the film and so on. In describing evil’s banality, Arendt drew attention to the bureaucratic mechanics which undergird totalitarian regimes and set the basis by which the subject – the regime functionary or party man or woman – is abstracted from the object of his or her oppression. It seems to me that the aesthetic process operates in precisely the opposite direction; that is to say, in it – the object of the process – the receiver of the transmitted emotion, is ‘compelled’ to experience a metaphysical identity with the subject in and through his or her encounter with the art the subject has produced. The distinctions of separation which exist between the artist and the receiver – distinctions of time and place, age and gender, race and class, occupation and language, even life and death (for the artist might have succumbed many years before) – are for a time collapsed in and through the aesthetic experience. The artist through the mediation of the art object ‘infects’ the receiver with his or her conditions of life even if those conditions have long since perished. The receiver encounters the spiritual substance of the artist embodied in the aesthetic object, frozen in eternity, and that encounter proves joyous or moving, cathartic, terrifying or inspiring. Above all, it excites empathy. And such empathy represents an existential threat to ‘the banality of evil’. It works to weaken and undo it. The Nazis burned literature and paintings not simply because they were cultural grotesques but because, in their belligerent and unconscious fashion, they recognised that the social system which they had cultivated was premised on a process of abstraction and that art fatally undermines that process by its very nature. Nazi culture didn’t just happen to be aesthetically poor – it was required to be in order to ensure its efficacy and its cohesion. On a perverted and subliminal level, the Nazi destruction of art was a recognition of art’s social power. In today’s world, however, art is rarely accorded its power. In the UK in 2012 education secretary Michael Gove implemented a series of reforms, and one of these included the requirement for younger children to learn poetry. This measure in particular was widely derided, and one was aware at the time of the conviction – carried by the press and the TV stations – that poetry is little more than a whimsical indulgence on the part of the out-of-touch, the intellectual fodder of the hoity-toity. But this was also part and parcel of a more general implication: science, business, economics, maths – such things are necessary to impart to our children – but art has little practical value, and its

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Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective

unchecked absorption always carries the danger of leaving the child with his or her head in the clouds, unable to relate to the practical necessities of day-to-day reality. Perhaps this conviction carries a particular weight in England – the birthplace of industrial capitalism and the self-made man, a country whose earthy pragmatic soils allowed the hard, austere principles of classical utilitarianism to take root and acquire definition. It is often difficult to mount a defence of art in the face of such hard-headed pragmatism, but I have begun this book with a description of the Nazi regime for a reason, as it seems to me that a consideration of those social forms which necessitate the overwhelming suppression of art also provide us with a potent reminder of why we need art in the first place and where its true value lies. But in making the argument that art isn’t simply a luxury but a social necessity, one is then confronted by a broader question: What makes a work of art great? We may concede that art is important, even integral, to the life of our species, but why are some works of art more significant than others? The question of what makes superior art has often been related to the way in which it is created. Here a vivid polarisation has emerged. On the one hand, there are those who argue that the success of art depends on its ability to be ‘for its own sake’ – that is, it should remain untrammelled by socio-historical concerns, not to be pervaded by any kind of ethical or political subtext. On the other, there are those who aver that art must reflect and carry palpable social truths, that a political or ethical content must consciously be employed to raise the receiver to a higher level of social awareness. But while this is a debate whose flames are still fanned in contemporary aesthetic and philosophical circles, it is worth remembering that it has a somewhat more seasoned lineage too. By the late-eighteenth century Kant had already discerned the onesidedness of both these views. If the aesthetic object is regarded as exhibiting some ‘purpose’ which is present in the phenomenal world more broadly and conditions the work of art itself, such a ‘purpose’ would denude the work of its freedom and independence. The artwork would become a way to some specific and practical goal which lies outside it. Or to put it in the Kantian refrain, it would be a means to an end rather than an end in itself. One can sense the truth of this in our everyday lives. When we watch an advert on TV, we are rarely moved or inspired for no matter how appealing the images or sounds it projects are, we are always aware that they exist only as a means to an immediate and practical end – the need for sales. But, argued Kant, if the aesthetic

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object is experienced as having no ‘purpose’ whatsoever – that is, if it holds no necessary connection to the logic and determinations of the broader phenomenal reality – then it could only ever be experienced in a purely subjective manner according to the individual in isolation. It would lack universality. It would be impossible to say, for example, that one painting is better than another, any more than one might say a taste for mayonnaise is superior to that for ketchup. Kant was forced into the paradoxical conclusion that the aesthetic object must encompass both purpose and purposelessness. It must have purpose in order for it to retain the aspect of universality which is part and parcel of all great art. It must be purposeless in order to avoid the reduction of the aesthetic object to some immediate and practical aim or agenda. And the way in which Kant achieves a synthesis of ‘purposefulpurposelessness’ provides one of the most abiding and original parts of his philosophical system. It is worth perusing his solution in its bare outlines.2 An object like a chair has a practical purpose in the way in which a painting of that same chair doesn’t. One does not try to sit on the painting. The purpose of the chair is expressed by its physical actuality. It has four legs, and these should be of roughly equal length if the chair is to retain equilibrium and better serve the purpose of being sat upon. But a tiger too has four legs, and its legs also serve its purpose best when – like the chair – they are roughly of the same length and in proportion to one another. The purpose of the tiger, however, is markedly different from that of the chair – as anyone who tried to sit on the tiger could swiftly attest. But although both chair and tiger are, so to say, at cross purposes, there are a set of formal elements which are conducive to the purposes of both – that is, equilibrium, symmetry and balance. The tiger hunts better if it possesses these things, and likewise the chair is more comfortable when sat upon. These elements, then, are purposeful to both but without being restricted to the specific purpose of either – that is, the need to sit or the need to hunt. In this way, Kant has provided us with the notion of a ‘formal objective purposiveness that nevertheless lacks a purpose’.3 In the aesthetic object – the elements of symmetry, structure, 2 Naturally, this cannot be developed with much depth or accuracy in the space of a few paragraphs. For a more detailed consideration of Kant’s aesthetic from a Hegelian-Marxist viewpoint, please see T McKenna, ‘Kantianism and the Judgement of Beauty in Light of the Problem of True Totality and its Basis in the Forms and Structures of Social Existence’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 42(2), (Taylor & Francis, Oxford: 2013) p. 183–195. 3 I Kant, Critique of Judgement (Werner S. Hackett, Indianapolis: 1987) p. 74.

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Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective

balance, continuity and so on – excite our sense of beauty with their ‘purposiveness that nevertheless lacks a purpose’. And is it not possible to sense the truth of the Kantian formulation? Who hasn’t gazed upon some great painting only to be powerfully moved but without being sure quite why? To sense within the painting a profound and higher purpose while remaining unable to articulate in coherent and specific terms what that purpose might be. But though the Kantian solution was a brilliant exercise in dialectical reasoning, in establishing a synthesis of purposeful-purposelessness, that great philosopher only ever attended to the formal side of the question. That is to say, his purposeful-purposelessness treated only visual-logical forms abstracted from particular functions – symmetry, proportion and balance; these elements are considered in isolation as components which the individual, generic ego generates in the process of constituting and making palpable the phenomenal reality. A painting by Titian might exhibit these elements in a masterly fashion, as might a painting by David, but those same elements – symmetry, proportion and balance – tell us little about why Titian has chosen to paint one of the lesser gods in the Greek pantheon frolicking with an underdressed nymph, while David, for his part, has focused on a great French revolutionary slumped dead in his bathtub. To even begin to answer those questions, we would have to interrogate the period in which each artist produced; to come to terms with its pervading religious tenets and its political, legal, cultural forms; and above all the fundamental social conflicts which pervade it. In other words, the formal aspect of aesthetic critique would always necessitate a given historical content. A Marxist account is perfectly attuned to this type of content because Marxism more generally endeavours to elucidate the social contradictions which underpin epochs and which provide the necessity by which one flows into the next – the contradictions which people generate in their lives as productive beings, labouring on the world in order to guarantee their subsistence and transforming themselves and the historical forms of their social organisation in the process. It provides the analysis of the historical forms through which the art object is filtered and takes shape. As a student, I once came across an analysis of the novel Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. The writer, a Marxist historian,4 suggested that the story’s liveliness and its potency lay in the fact that it typified one of the fundamental socio-historical contradictions of the 4

E Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, (Orion House, London: 1996) 61.

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period. The novel was published in 1873 at a time when a rapacious, recently born industrial capitalism was expanding across the globe, laying down train tracks in order to facilitate its economic march. But, noted the author, because the new social order had not yet been consolidated, it was constantly bumping up against the old-world forms it sought to displace. So, for instance, if you were travelling by train across North America in the latter part of the nineteenth century, you might well have had the stressful experience of being attacked by some of the Native American tribes whose lands had been stolen away by the railway barons. The dramatic tension, the haphazard excitement, the sense of fear and obstacle – all the elements which underpin Phileas Fogg’s epic journey – are also the products of the manner in which the contradiction in the broader historical sweep had been distilled and exhibited in the novel’s aesthetic. And in my view, the novel also confirms the Kantian formulation of ‘purposeful-purposelessness’. Jules Verne, we surely imagine, did not start out with the ‘purpose’ of exhibiting the conflict between the old epoch and the new; at no point, can we assume, did he make a conscious effort to best depict in fantasy form the central, historical and sociological contradictions of the period in which he, the artist, was enmeshed. What Verne wanted to do – and what he succeeded in doing rather finely – was to write a rip-roaring adventure yarn where a heroic Englishman of an upper class bent accepts and prosecutes a lucrative bet by circumnavigating the globe in 80 days. But although the ‘purpose’ of the work is not to provide a conscious and rational appreciation of the socio-historical contradictions of the given period, nevertheless history’s form, its underlying movement, its development – its own ‘purpose’ if you will – is crystallised indirectly and unconsciously in and through the interplay of the imaginary characters and the context of the dilemma they face. Broadly speaking then, one must try to identify within the work of art the crystallisation of a broader historic necessity: the reason why the work has arisen at this moment, at this particular juncture, and how its greatness lies in its ability to preserve in a moment of eternity the historical contradiction and mood of the epoch more generally. But at the same time, we should be aware that those elements are manifested only in a fantastical, individualised and profoundly unconscious form which can never be read directly and mechanically from its historical basis. One might even invoke Freud here – as it seems to me that the wonderful, topsy-turvy spectres and emanations of the aesthetic imagination stand in relation to the ebb and flow of historical development in

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Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective

much the way the unconscious mind relates to the conscious one; or to put it a little more concisely, art is the medium in which history dreams. And I suppose that makes the chapters which follow my own attempt to interpret some of history’s dreams: to see in Harry Potter, the work of Vincent van Gogh, the songs of Tupac Shakur, the characters of Breaking Bad or the comedy of Ricky Gervais the unconscious working out of the deeper and more abiding development of what the great German philosopher G W F Hegel would describe as ‘world spirit’. Finally this book is intimately related to my own direct and personal experience of art, literature and culture. I can recall as a very young child moving house, going to a new school and experiencing what often felt like a lonely, alien and hostile environment. The palliative to that external world was always the rich inner one which I could disappear into any time I opened up the covers of a good book. And I can remember that sense of immersion so vividly; I recall staying up into the early hours, cosseted under the covers with a torch and a book, unwilling to disengage from those fantasy realities where I was so much more than a frightened small boy. I remember the sense of losing myself in that infinity of worlds. As we get older, as our critical faculties more and more assert themselves, I think the ability to slip into the silver, snowswept forests of the magical terrain which opens up just to the back of the wardrobe is something which is increasingly difficult to exercise. So, above all, this book is a work of love – a paean to those wonderful artists, writers, singers and poets who have helped me find that ability once more.

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1 Breaking Bad: Capital as Cancer

As the online reference in Wikipedia has it, ‘To Break Bad’ means ‘to go wrong; to go downhill; to go bad; to turn toward immorality or crime’. And it is just such a transition – the movement from middle-aged affable chemistry teacher Walter White to the ruthless, dead-eyed drug lord Heisenberg – which underpins the narrative of the award-winning series Breaking Bad. Walter White is a good man, and it is only the imposition of an indifferent and remorseless fate which inflicts his body with an equally interminable cancer; it is the crushing cosmological injustice visited upon him – the piling medical bills and the suffocating worry for the future of his family – which finally causes Walter to break bad. Or is it? This is the question which has fascinated critics and viewers across the spectrum. How much is Walter the helpless victim of an implacable fate? How much is he the agent of his own eventual monstrousness? When we see Walter at the start of the series, he feels like a fundamentally sympathetic character. There we watch him in the classroom, fervently holding forth on the mysterious laws of chemical composition – the infinite, infinitesimal possibilities of atoms and compounds – and yet, despite the sublimity of his convictions, and despite the genuine enthusiasm which they inspire in him, he is rarely able to rouse his students from their apathy. The most he can hope to merit is an acquiescent grunt of adolescent acknowledgement. There is, then, something fundamentally lonely about this middle-aged man, standing out there at the front of the classroom, lost in the void of his own esoteric interest. And yet, every now and again, we sense something else: a shadow falls across his gaze, a darkness flickers in his eyes, a glimmer of contempt. Only it is more than that, for some of the students Walter is teaching are also the cruel, carefree debutantes who – wealthy and with time on 9

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their hands – mock Walter as he polishes their cars during the second job he works in order to make ends meet. Every now and then, we, the audience, glimpse something in the nondescript chemistry teacher’s eyes which is beyond contempt; his well-worn, weather beaten and gentle countenance transfigured into a violent grimace of loathing, and it is then, from deep inside, we feel Heisenberg – his dark alter ego – begin to stir. As the series progresses, we learn more about Walter’s back story; we learn that he felt cheated and frustrated long before the cancer ever set in. Rather, he was subject to another sickness, the corrosive spread of thwarted ambition and resentment. As a young man, Walter had founded a company with two friends, a company which utilised his scientific prowess and became hugely profitable. Walter, however, was compelled to sell his share at a bargain-basement price early on in the endeavour. So, as he retreated into a life of nondescript anonymity, teaching at a local school, and as the years rolled by, Walter was reduced to a helpless slow burn of resentment and frustration, rendered as a passive bystander and forced to watch as his onetime colleagues and friends surpass all expectations and step into the limelight to become billionaires. There is a sense, then, in which the arrival of his cancer lets the genie out of the bottle. All that thwarted ambition and resentment and smouldering sense of frustrated superiority finally crystallises into something palpable: a ruthless, Nietzschean will to power. Enter from stage left – Heisenberg. And so, critics have been divided; on the one hand, Walter has been regarded as a good person whose corruption was the tragic result of something foisted upon him by terminal illness – the need to provide for his family in the aftermath of his demise. Tom Shales writes for The Washington Post, ‘as absurdly risky as Walt’s solution seems to be, he really doesn’t have all that many options’.1 But others have argued that the exigencies of fate play far less of a role; instead, Heisenberg was in Walter all the time, just waiting to be called into being. As Scott Meslow, writing in The Atlantic, has it – ‘all the elements that have since turned him into a monster were already in place’.2 1 T Shales, ‘There’s a Meth To AMC’s Madness In “Breaking Bad”, Washington Post, 19 January, 2008 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2008/01/18/AR2008011803342.html. 2 S Meslow, ‘The Big Secret of “Breaking Bad”: Walter White Was Always a Bad Guy’, The Atlantic, 31 August 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/ archive/2012/08/the-big-secret-of-breaking-bad-walter-white-was-always-a-badguy/261833/.

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The true nature of Walter White, however, is fundamentally dialectical; it is not either/or – but rather both. Yes, Walter was driven by the external and tragic necessity of fate; the cancer threw into relief the vulnerability of his family, and his love for them drove him to do the unthinkable in order to provide for them after he had died. This aspect of him, this reaction to circumstance, was selfless and genuinely heroic. At the same time, his ability to harness Heisenberg was as well a product of his frustrated ambition, his precious, petulant resentment – the longsimmering rage against a world which has failed to adequately reward someone of Walter’s gifts and abilities. This aspect of his personality generates from its smallness and pettiness, a corresponding monstrousness, a vast black annihilating force which is increasingly insensible to all forms and considerations beyond its object and its ambition. And what makes Walter White a truly great character is that, throughout the series, these conflicting elements of his personality are constantly at war. It is worth bringing Tolstoy to mind, who knew something about character development and whose words are prescient apropos of Walter and Heisenberg: One of the most widespread superstitions is that every man has his own specific definite qualities: that he is kind, cruel, wise, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. But men are not like that at all. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic, or the reverse. ... Men are like rivers: the water is the same in all of them, but every river is narrow and rapid in some places, and broader and slower in others, sometimes clear, sometimes troubled, sometimes cold and sometimes warm. It is the same with men. Every man carries in himself the germs of every human quality, but sometimes it is one quality that manifests itself and sometimes another.3 In Breaking Bad, the same sense of elemental, internal conflict is heightened. Jesse Pinkman, Walter’s partner in crime, is also riven by contradiction. On the one hand, Jesse represents the living heart of the piece. Although he was ostensibly introduced as a means to connect the lowermiddle class Walter with the sprawling underbelly of the subterranean drug scene, nevertheless, Jesse is naive and soulful, a raw wound of vulnerability and conscience set against the darkness of a world whose 3 L Tolstoy. Cited by J Knight, The story of my psychoanalysis, (McGraw-Hill, New York: 1950).

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cruelty he remains unable to fathom. At the same time, we feel that he is teetering on the edge of losing his humanity: of either being sucked into a bleak, drug induced apathy, or worse, developing the same kind of brutality which is so alien to him. His soul is in a perpetual state of contention; a quasi-religious friction which forever falters between damnation and grace. With Walter’s nemesis – brother-in-law and DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agent Hank Schrader – something similar is achieved. Hank’s character is, in many ways, an ennobling one, and as Walter’s megalomania becomes ever more pronounced, our sympathies begin to shift to the law enforcement agent. But at the same time, the feelings which are elicited from the characters are always interrupted and distorted by countervailing tendencies. Yes, Hank is strong, bold and robust; but these very qualities which underpin his heroism and a commitment to a social good greater than himself are also the very things which – while recuperating after being shot – make him such a tormenting and effective bully to his wife Marie. His humanity is a powerful impetus to his drive to battle drug crime, for sure, but at the same time, so is his class prejudice and his racism: a provincial sense of us and them which leads to a more effective dehumanisation of those he needs to interrogate and terrify. In the final season, Hank has taken to manipulating a distraught and emotionally vulnerable Jesse in order to get the goods on Walter; Hank’s partner, Steve Gomez, questions the ethics of this, wondering if the ‘kid’ is in any danger. Hank turns to him, his eyes glazed and lifeless, and mutters, ‘The kid? Oh, you mean the junkie murderer who is dribbling all over my bathroom floor?’4 Hank then reveals he is glibly prepared to sacrifice Jesse’s rights and even Jesse’s life: ‘Pinkman gets killed?’ he shrugs. ‘We get it all on tape.’5 Hank and Walter are depicted as opposing forces, their conflict set into motion from the outset, and its trajectory providing the overall sweep and raison d’être of the plotline. But on another level the two men are very similar. Hank’s need to bring Walter to justice becomes more about a sense of unreconstructed masculine identity – the feeling of damaged pride that Hank’s brother-in-law has been able to deceive him for so long and with such ruthless efficacy. In the same vein, as the series grows older, Heisenberg takes control of the wheel from Walter White – precisely because Walter is no longer 4 Breaking Bad, ‘Rabid Dog’, Episode 12, Season 5, creator – Vince Gilligan, Gran Via Productions: September 2013. 5 Ibid.

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behaving in accordance with the best interests of his family. Rather, he too is acting from the remit of a wounded masculinity, the need to assert himself against a lingering and malignant sleight, to prove himself to be dominant and to stomp out his inadequacy. Towards the end of the series, both characters – Hank and Walter – have allowed the suffering of innocents to become part and parcel of their career arsenals. But it is also the case that both men remain at least partially redeemable. And this is necessary. It is integral to the power of the series because it allows us to remain invested in them. However much the forces of darkness, of atavistic masculinity, of violent protean individualism intrude, they never completely overwhelm the protagonists. Hank – having prosecuted his obsession with Heisenberg to its very limits, breaching the threshold of legality and ethics in the process – finally puts the cuffs on Walter. Moments later, he is confronted by a gang of neo-Nazis, who will release Walter and murder him (Hank). In the few seconds before his death, Walter begs the gang not to execute his brother-in-law, emphasising that Hank is not simply an agent but a man: Hank Schrader, a member of Walter’s own family. He remonstrates with Hank to plead for his (Hank’s) life – to abdicate his duty in favour of his personhood. And yet, Hank does the reverse. Wounded and helpless, he looks up at his assassin and emphasises his identity as a cop: ‘My name is ASAC Schrader, and you can go fuck yourself.’6 In one way, the culmination of this powerful scene is reminiscent of the denouement in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In that play, the protagonist has been brought low and has compromised himself, and it is only by emphasising his name – that is, his subjectivity and inward ethical conviction – at the cost of his life that he is rendered morally whole again: ‘Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life!’7 In the case of Hank, we find a take on the same theme, but with a neat reversal. For it is Hank’s subjectivity that has caused him to be compromised in the first place. His obsession with Walter has become increasingly subjective and personal – a by-product of his own humiliation and aggravated pride – and it is that which has allowed him to become ever more brutal and unjust. When Hank looks his killer in the eye and says, ‘My name is ASAC Schrader’ – he emphasises the moment of universality once more. He emphasises his role as a facilitator of a higher objectivity, one which transcends his personal peccadilloes and 6 Breaking Bad, ‘Ozymandias’, Episode 14, Season 5, creator – Vince Gilligan, Gran Via Productions: September 2013. 7 A Miller. The Crucible, (Methuen Drama, London: 2010) p.130.

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particularities – the objectivity of justice in the guise of law. But just like John Proctor, Hank is redeemed in the very moments before his death, as the prospect of his immanent execution has thrown into relief his better nature. Although it appears that the crimes Walter has committed as Heisenberg place him beyond redemption, as the series comes to a conclusion, Walter too is in some way redeemed. This might seem a bizarre claim for Walter has become so deeply immersed in darkness. He has murdered innocents, and even poisoned a child, in the pursuit and prosecution of his underworld empire. And his final act entails a shootout in which he massacres a gang of his criminal associates. But beyond the fact that he rescues Jesse – the person upon whom Walter has inflicted the most pain – and beyond the fact that the gang comprises the same people who were responsible for Hank’s murder, there is a set of more telling details in the ultimate episode of Breaking Bad that speak to Walter’s redemption. Firstly, one is struck by his appearance. As he purchases the machine gun with which he will carry out his final act, Walter appears dishevelled: his hair has grown back in a lumpy shaggy matt, and he is unshaved and forlorn. On top of it all, he isn’t wearing his hat. What may seem like a small and arbitrary detail is far from unimportant; donning the hat has come to represent the shift to the alter ego – Heisenberg. What is fundamentally tragic about the final scene, and about the violence that Walter is perpetrating, is that it no longer involves the aspect of sadism which the Heisenberg persona more and more inculcated. Rather – having realised that he has lost his family as a result of the terrible ambition which had claimed him – now Walter’s actions are a haggard and last-ditch attempt to try to at least set a few things right. The tragedy is that the attempt is doomed to fail: Walter knows that he is running against the clock, that he won’t live to see the day out. But nevertheless, that final day does in some way represent a triumph for Walter because he lives it as Walter White – and not as Heisenberg. He has reclaimed himself for the short period of time that he has left. And the strongest evidence of this comes from the fact that when ‘Uncle Jack’ – the leader of the neo-Nazi gang whose destruction Walter has engendered – lies wounded on the floor, he offers Walter the possibility of reclaiming the cash fortune the gang stole from him. Walter responds by shooting ‘Uncle Jack’ without hesitation. The action in its brutality, its brevity, shows also that the thing which was most real and fundamental to Heisenberg – the formation of a business empire through the neverending cycle of financial accumulation – has ceased to resonate within

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Walter. In those moments, as he bleeds to death, Walter has met with the best, most humane aspect of himself once again. And despite everything he has done, all the horror he has unleashed, we, the audience, pity him. Herein lies the greatness of the writers’ achievement. Of course, the greatness does not lie in this alone – in the sublimity of the individual characterisation. Rather, the characters and events are conduits for broader tendencies which criss-cross the panorama of the social world. It is, for example, no coincidence that the catalyst for Walter’s swarthy metamorphosis into a drug lord occurs in and through cancer. The image of the dark shadow on the x-ray, the black mass of tissue lodged deep within healthy pliant flesh, the consumptive power of an alien entity working invisibly from behind the scenes – is one which can be applied more broadly to the social landscape of Breaking Bad. When Skyler, Walter’s wife, wins back her old job, her moment of triumph is short-lived. Although the office she returns to remains much as she remembers, behind the pleasant façade of mundane routine, she unearths a secret. The business has, in fact, been shackled with overwhelming debt, and its head has taken to corruption – cooking the books in order to evade hundreds of thousands in taxes. In the same vein, the law business of Saul Goodman is little more than a front; riddled with illegality, it provides a gateway into the criminal underworld. Scrapyards, masseuse parlours, gaming arcades, car washes – a whole assortment of businesses – provide the benevolent appearance which belies the inner reality: the world of money laundering, drugs, criminal enterprise, violence and gangs. In the food chain franchise ‘Pollos Hermanos’, this process reaches its apogee. Here the fast food restaurants are fronts for the vast crystal meth operation of crime kingpin Gustavo Fringe, but as the series goes on, as the camera pans out, we are made to realise just how widespread the invisible network of corruption extends. From the restaurants themselves, to the labs in desert outposts in New Mexico, to the giant multinational corporation which supplies much of the equipment, we realise that the cycle of finance, big business and crime is endemic. The underlying subtext of the Breaking Bad world, then, is capital as cancer, capital which nestles everywhere, touches everything with its tendrils and acts as a blind but all-pervasive force constantly at work behind the scenes, unifying everyone on the social scale from the street dealer who uses children to hawk his wares to the corporate head who is prepared to indulge in a few contract killings in order to keep business secrets from prying state eyes.

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Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective

Cancer as an allegory for capital development has been used to great effect, most recently in The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: And Its Cure by John McMurtry. McMurtry argues that the ‘unregulated growth of a reproductive sequence within social bodies that attacks the life functions of its hosts is no less a disease on the social level of life-organization than it is on the individual level.’8 McMurtry goes on to exhibit the parallels between the two: An undertow process of unmediated money-to-more-money spread increasingly exhibits the classic indicators of carcinogenic invasion and metastasis because of its ‘freedom’ to move with increasing volumes and velocities in and out of any social or environmental lifehost. At the same time, the life-bodies which are the site of this disease pattern do not recognize its competitive metabolism which converts ever more social life resources to feed its decoupled growth.9 In Breaking Bad, however, it is not only the ‘life-bodies’ of the social landscape which are afflicted by the monstrous metaphysical determinations of capital – capital as cancer – but also the protagonist himself in as much as those same determinations come to constitute him in their self-image. When we first encounter Walter White, his situation is the epitome of the American urban petite bourgeois in the context of the twenty-first century. The shadow of the financial crisis is something which is forever looming in the background. It is cast across the desert when the only trailer Jesse and Walter can afford – a spluttery and decrepit vehicle to be used as a makeshift meth lab – malfunctions and strands them there, very nearly extinguishing the two drug entrepreneurs before their business has even begun. It falls across the wrecked pockets of emptiness in the midst of the urban sprawl – the gutted, dilapidated houses where only the addicts huddle and gather. And it is cast across the life of Walter himself – the lower middle class individual who has worked hard throughout – and yet, even while running two jobs, he is still propelled towards financial ruin because his diminishing income remains unable to cover the ever spiralling costs of his existence. In the context of a financial collapse which is characterised by its aspect of negative equity, Walter is worth more to the system dead than alive.

8 J McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: And Its Cure, (Pluto Press, London: 1999) 118. 9 Ibid p.118.

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Walter represents, then, the American dream evaporated by the remorseless reality; but what is truly monstrous about Walter is that he is destroyed by capital only to be reborn in capital’s image. In the guise of Heisenberg, the logic of relentless, remorseless infinity10 which underpins capital’s metamorphosis and drive; it is this logic which is pushed to its grotesque, inhuman consequences. Walter begins by acting in accordance with a given remit; in and through his criminal endeavour, he wishes to gain a sum of money ($700,000), which has a specific use value – that is, Walter has rationally calculated that such an amount will cover his medical costs, alongside the costs of housing his family and the college education of his children – after he is gone. But as the series progresses, we realise he is no longer acting according to the remit of use – that is, the specific need to support his family after his death. Rather, he begins to act according to a different motive – the logic of capital accumulation which is thereby unbound, decoupled from any human need, monstrous, and consumptive in its aspect because it has the potential to expand indefinitely. (Again, the parallels with cancer are clear.) Despite the often brutal tenor of previous forms of exploitation, they were delimited by a certain concrete object – perhaps the satisfaction of the appetite of the lord, who could only take in so much food, or the satisfaction of the need for shelter, which even in the case of the most luxurious palace could have only so many rooms. In contradistinction, Marx noted, capital is the ghostly and neverending movement of accumulation for accumulation’s sake, the relentless generation of profit that the cycle of market competition necessitates but which has ceased to be tied to any specific set of concrete needs. Walter in his Heisenberg persona is, in some sense, the manifestation of capital. His is an appetite which has ceased to correspond to the needs of his family and the people who surround him and who throw him into relief as a specific, concrete individual – a man who is at the same time a father, a brother-in-law, a husband, a friend; that Walter has already become, in one way, a cipher – for an interminable and infinitely broader process – that he has been transfigured; all of this is apparent in the horrified reactions on the part of those who love Walter and who witness his dissolution. At one point, Jesse begs Walter to desist in his activities – by confronting him with his previous agenda – by pointing out that Walter only ever intended to make the sum which corresponded to his family’s future and that he has already succeeded in fulfilling that aim many

10

What the philosopher Hegel referred to as a ‘bad’ or ‘spurious’ infinite.

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times over. But it is too late because, by this point, Walter is already in thrall to a more abiding and elemental force. Later, Skyler brings Walter to the place where the profits of his criminal and murderous enterprise are being stored; she brings him to a cramped storage room in which the money has been stacked knee high in a massive solid block. Skyler looks at Walter and asks the same question uttered by whole populations and directed towards the various banks and financial organisations which facilitated the crisis. She looks at him with the same incredulity and asks, ‘How much is enough?’11 Her question, like our own, has no answer. There is, in fact, no amount which can satisfy that which now animates Walter, which has taken him over, which has possessed him. When Hank finally ascertains that it is his brother-in-law – that it has been Walter all along – who was the elusive Heisenberg, their confrontation takes place in Hank’s garage. The scene is incredibly fraught. In the first instance, they exchange words, niceties, in something of the pally way in which they always did. Walter says goodbye and strolls down the driveway. And then he stops and turns back. Hank then lowers the door to the garage. Both men now know the truth. Walter is completely controlled. Hank is overwhelmed with emotion. He punches Walter. But the most telling part of the scene lies not in this fleeting moment of physical violence. Rather, it is the point at which Hank looks at his brother-in-law – a man toward whom he has always assumed a certain protective fondness. He looks at Walter, and with sincere disbelief, he mutters ‘I don’t even know who you are.’12 The revelation on the part of Hank – towards his brotherin-law – is more than a consequence of the scales falling from the eyes of the DEA agent. Rather, it is the case that Walter has genuinely been transformed by the logic of accumulation, that Walter has assumed the dimensions of its most horrific, insatiable aspect. In the moment Hank is looking at Walter in that garage, he truly is looking at a different person (Heisenberg). In cultural terms, the natural ancestor of the Breaking Bad plotline is Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In the Scottish play, too, the central character has many noble qualities and is eventually lain low by a single character flaw – his ambition – which is something fate pounces upon and exploits, in order that the protagonist be corrupted and eventually destroyed. But 11 Breaking Bad, ‘Gliding Over All’, Episode 8, Season 5, creator – Vince Gilligan, Gran Via Productions: September 2012. 12 Breaking Bad ‘Blood Money’, Episode 9, Season 5, creator – Vince Gilligan, Gran Via Productions: September 2012.

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Breaking Bad is superior to Macbeth because within it freedom and necessity are brought into a more comprehensive and dialectical interrelation. The essence of Macbeth is more in the spirit of an earlier form – the Greek tragedy – in which an oracle (the witches) makes a prediction and thus sets into motion a destiny from which the protagonist has no recourse. The witches predict Macbeth’s destiny to become king, which in turn sparks his ambition and leads him to murder on the way to fulfilling said destiny. Macbeth possesses an element of volition – his subjective ambition presages the witches’ predictions, for instance – but his volition remains a secondary and minor aspect, which becomes nothing other than the means by which the overarching construct of destiny – the witches’ prophecies – are fulfilled. In a literary and powerful essay, the renowned Shakespearean scholar G Wilson Knight draws attention to Macbeth’s fate and the means by which an ‘absolute’13 and ‘alien’14 evil fully determines its trajectory. Before this ‘suffocating, conquering’15 evil, which fixes him with ‘the basilisk eye of a nameless terror’,16 Macbeth is rendered powerless: he ‘is paralysed, mesmerized. ... He is helpless as a man in a nightmare; and this helplessness is integral to the conception – the will-concept is absent. Macbeth may struggle, but he cannot fight: he can no more resist than a rabbit resists a weasel’s teeth fastened in his neck, or a bird the serpent’s transfixing eye.’17 For this reason, Macbeth cannot approach redemption, cannot in some way redeem himself by affirming the moment of his better nature at the end of the play. He is dammed absolutely, and this is because – in his character – the moment of freedom remains subordinate to the moment of necessity and the requirements of fate. What makes Breaking Bad more tragic than Shakespeare’s tragedy is that, at the end of it all, Walter’s character can summon the freedom to choose to emphasise his better self once more – only the price for this is his demise. For this, Walter’s death is more poignant that Macbeth’s, and it is also more serene. In the moments before he expires, Walter gazes into his own reflection and gently touches his hand against the image, giving the impression that the person he sees there is no longer Heisenberg but Walter White once more, whole again.

13 G R Wilson Knight, ‘Macbeth and the metaphysic of evil’, 20th Century Literary Criticism – Editor David Lodge, (Longman, London: 1977) 159. 14 Ibid. 159. 15 Ibid. 159. 16 Ibid. 159. 17 Ibid. 168–169.

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The difference in the conclusions of Macbeth and Breaking Bad is far from fortuitous. Shakespeare was writing from within a historical hinterland – the space between the old feudal order and the capitalist forms which were beginning to merge and gain focus from within it. Macbeth very much represents the decline of the feudal world by new social forms which are given the veneer of antique supernaturalisms by the writer in order to convey their sense of inevitability. But although Shakespeare wasn’t writing as someone firmly located in feudal social relations – and for this reason he was able to so eloquently express the process of their decay in a fantastical form – his subject, Macbeth, was just such a feudal subject. And in capturing the necessity which binds Macbeth to his destiny, Shakespeare was also capturing the necessity which pervades feudal relations, the necessity which binds the serf to the land, the necessity which ties the apprentice to his guild, the necessity which holds prices and generates monopolies within given trades. Everywhere these necessities harden and make brittle the underlying structures of labour – affixing them in stone. But with the rise of free labour and generalised commodity production, social relations begin to lose their ossified character and are developed in terms of a superfluidity: a constant shifting of the social stratum at the most elemental level; a surging, free-flowing current of labour which now serves the capitalist metabolism as its life’s blood. And this shift in the character of labour practise has fundamental consequences for human subjectivity. The seller of labour power as a commodity is undoubtedly compelled to sell that commodity as a result of a fundamental necessity; lacking his or her own means of production, this is the only key to survival. And yet, unlike the majority of feudal forms, the modern wage labourer is not bound to this or that workplace; he or she can choose to withdraw his or her labour from a particular employer and can – circumstance permitting – move between workplaces. He or she is bound to the employer (in most cases) by a form of contract which he or she voluntarily enters into. Yes, such voluntarism is very much conditioned by external economic compulsion and necessity – but it nevertheless involves an element of volition, of will, which the feudal serf or antique slave cannot indulge. And this has implications for the possibility of freedom more broadly. Free labour can withhold its capacity to labour in terms of a strike. The modern proletariat as a class can occupy collectively the means of production and use it to coordinate and direct the economic life of society as a whole in a way in which the peasant, working on an isolated patch of land, never

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could. For this reason, peasant rebellions on a large scale – like those which occurred throughout Europe in the fourteenth century – would always end up dissipating their radical energies because they did not hold within themselves the structural blueprint for the creation of a new form of socio-economic order. They could effect a genuine social revolution only when aligned with another class – such as that of the bourgeoisie or the industrial proletariat. And so, even from within the remit of the most furious turmoil and seething rebellion, the feudal peasant would always remain situated within the social horizons of feudalism – unable to transform the fundamental mechanisms of social exploitation he was subject to. He would remain beholden to the forms of necessity he encountered in the world as fixed and objective facts which were, ultimately, indifferent to his own self-activity. But in a capitalist economy, the worker appears as a complex of freedom and necessity – he or she is subservient to capital’s laws but simultaneously possesses the ability to subvert and transform them fundamentally. He or she can transform necessity in accordance with self-activity. Such a combination of freedom and necessity could have never been embodied in fantasy form in a feudal archetype like Macbeth. The drama of Macbeth reaches its apogee when the forces of fate have imposed themselves fully; the limited degree of freedom the feudal subject possesses is subserviated to the overarching requirements of destiny. Thus, Macbeth’s corruption by fate overwhelms him and finishes him off. But in the case of Walter White – who is an archetype of the capitalist epoch – the fusion of freedom and necessity always contains the possibility that the moment of necessity might be subverted and transformed by the moment of freedom. Even when the overarching power of capital is at its most terrible, its most implacable – when it most resembles the mighty fate of antiquity in all its decimating, debilitating power, Walter can nevertheless turn away from it and reclaim himself in a beautiful and tragic gesture of freedom and finality. He can be redeemed. This is an option which was never available to Macbeth – nor could it have been. Walter is a character who contains in himself the conflict between freedom and necessity which is constitutive of capitalist social relations, and what is also integral to such a conflict is the possibility of transcending it. The moment of freedom can be asserted in and through the revolutionary actuality of the collective class. In the ultimate episode of Breaking Bad – despite the omnipotence of fate/capital (which occurs with all the ferocity and power of global economic crisis), Walter White

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is, at last, able to subvert it. In those final lingering scenes, he becomes what he once was, only shorn of all the ambition and inadequacy he previously contained. At that point he asserts his better nature in a single precious flashpoint of freedom and authentic self-determination. Walter White is redeemed. Ultimately then, one should keep in sight that it was not the authorities who brought their guns to bear; nor was it any criminal conflict which eventually destroyed the spectre of Heisenberg. It was Walter White himself.

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2 In Time: The First Hollywood Movie of the Occupy Wall Street Era

Released in 2011, In Time was written and directed by Andrew Niccol and stars Justine Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried. It was distributed by Twentieth Century Fox and offers a worthy insight into contemporary reality and the changing way in which capitalist exploitation is perceived and experienced by popular consciousness. Set in 2169, In Time presents us with a dystopic future in which wages are paid, quite literally, in chunks of codified time. Goods are paid for in the same way; by sacrificing and exchanging portions of accumulated time – a cup of coffee costs four minutes, for instance. A digital countdown is embedded into the fabric of every human being; a series of blinking luminous numbers on the forearm denotes how much time you have. Some have more than others. While those in the salubrious areas have accumulated millions of years, those in the ghettos live day-to-day, selling what little time they have in order to pay for food, rent and transport, simultaneously trying to make sure that the hours and minutes of their body clock do not drop to zero – for then death occurs instantaneously. The plot begins with 28-year-old factory worker Will Salas. He encounters a wealthy but suicidal man, whose last act is to give Will 106 years of his time before he throws himself off a bridge. Shortly after that, Will’s mother ‘times out’ – that is, she dies – before he has the chance to replenish her clock. With his newly gained surfeit of years, an embittered Will travels to the wealthy district. The contrast between the secure, moneyed lives of the wealthy and the life of poverty he has known is a vivid one. He meets a parasitic oligarch, Philippe Weis. At this point, Will is being doggedly pursued by police enforcer Raymond Leon, who suspects Will of stealing the time he has just recently acquired. Will – alongside his romantic interest (Weis’ daughter) – begins to rob ‘time banks’ in an attempt to redistribute wealth to the impoverished ghettos. 23

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As Karl Marx said of the capitalist mode of production, ‘Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most time’s carcase. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day for day’.1 Quantity becomes paramount. The commodity form contains as its hidden essence a given quantity, the quantity of socially necessary labour time which is required to bring it to market. But, as Marx pointed out, the quantity of labour time crystallised in the value of a given commodity is not apparent; it is not of a tangible physical quality like the hardness of a diamond or the ripeness of a banana; it maintains, therefore, a certain metaphysical invisibility. In Time, through its sci-fi format, converts this hidden essence into a visible appearance. In this dystopia, the labour time congealed within any given commodity loses its invisible and metaphysical aspect; instead, it appears as an outward, palpable content. Labour time (or in its fantasy form it appears in the film as just time) manifests as an independent physical ‘thing’. In Time, therefore, performs the audacious move of transmuting the economic essence of the capitalist mode of production into a visible form. The social basis of the capitalist system – labour time – is transformed by the imagination so that it attains materiality; and so, in the film’s story, time is physically embodied in electronic modules and can be transferred from person to person in the form of extra minutes, hours and days. In the real world, of course, the fundamental relationship between capitalist and proletarian remains cloaked in a reifying veil; it seems to immediacy that the struggle between labour and capital is not about a contested portion of a concrete social substance – that is, embodied labour time. Instead, the battle for surplus value appears in a mystified form: in fact, it does not appear as the battle for a concrete social substance at all but, rather, the subjective demand for a ‘fair’ wage on the part of the worker countered by the demand for a ‘realistic’ one on the part of the capitalist. Concomitantly, it seems as though Bill Gates or Steve Jobs has ‘made’ their millions through individual skill and dynamism. They step forward as sleek entrepreneurs and the thousands of factories around the world in which people toil for very little making Microsoft or Apple equipment recede into the background, the socialised, metaphysical aspect of their labour is not visible to the naked eye in the way in which these magnificent ‘philanthropists’ are.

1 K Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, (Global Vision Publishing House; India, 2008), p. 28.

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And so, by presenting ‘time’ as an embodied concrete ‘thing’, In Time allows the scales to fall from our eyes. The subject of capitalist appropriation appears as a ‘fact’ immediately present in the dystopic world the heroic characters inhabit, and their rebellious acts attain a justification and purpose which extends beyond the nebulous abstraction of ‘fairness’. Likewise the villains also appear in their naked guise as accumulators, thus allowing the link between their parasitical behaviour and the misery of those whose time is appropriated to be rendered visible and palpable. Would it be accurate, therefore, to describe In Time as ‘a Marxist film’? The question is problematic. In Time does exhibit a conflict, in fantasy form, between labour and capital. But it doesn’t do so in a way that is fully Marxist, if by that one refers to the central discovery of Marxism: that labour power is the true source of added value; that it both provides the socially necessary labour time in order to facilitate its appearance in the market as a saleable commodity and – uniquely – generates a surplus value over and above that. The appropriation which takes place in In Time is not one by which a concrete, socially determined appropriation of a portion of the surplus value produced by labour power is effected – though how any science fiction film might convey that kind of detail and accuracy in what is essentially a fantastical format is, of course, a complex issue. Rather, in In Time, the wealth of the fantasy ruling class (and its process of appropriation thereby) is presented rather vaguely – more as an act of theft, trickery and deception; the exploiting class appropriates ‘time’ in a greedy but ultimately haphazard fashion. In Time is a radical film for the fact that it visibly depicts the object of appropriation as a concrete social substance – but even as it reveals the hidden social content which infuses the object of appropriation, it mystifies the true social process by which such appropriation occurs. This mystification is one of the central reasons, perhaps, why the ‘revolutionary’ resistance to such appropriation takes place in and through a series of robberies conducted by Salas and his partner; the collective ‘theft’ of the oppressors is responded to in kind by the individual thievery of the two protagonists. It is also the reason why – although this is a film about class exploitation and appropriation – so little of the film is centred on the points of production, the factories and the workplaces. But whatever its faults, by revealing labour time as concrete, social substance – and thereby as something subject to class appropriation – In Time performs a vital inversion: exhibiting capitalist essence as visible appearance and allowing a profound historical truth to be displayed in

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‘plain-sight’ so to say. As a result, the film has been treated with almost vitriolic contempt by various members of the commentariat. James P Pinkerton, writing for Fox News, correctly categorises the film as ‘the first Hollywood movie of the occupy-wall-street era’,2 but this is one of the few salient comments in an article whose subtext is driven by neoliberal dogma and snide innuendo. Having suggested that the film is very likely anti-Jew and anti-white, Pinkerton delivers his fundamental criticism of the film’s reason d’etre: Of all the goodies that millionaires and billionaires can buy for themselves, longer life is perhaps the most elusive. Yes, the rich can afford to see more doctors, and stay in nicer hospital rooms, but for some major categories of disease, the rich don’t do much better than the poor at gaining cures, because money can’t buy something that doesn’t exist.3 Pinkerton has no basis on which to conclude In Time ‘is a nonsensical sci-fi movie with a lefty political message that gets it exactly wrong about those goods that the rich can monopolize’.4 Life, along with labour time, is something which the rich can and do possess more of due to their access to better health facilities, food and conditions – even if they too are subject to incurable diseases. But Pinkerton’s analysis is interesting in as much as it does connect the dots: he understands that while the film ‘pretends to be about the future, [it] is really about the present’,5 and he has linked this insight to the Occupy movement more generally. Both of these points are fundamental – even if the conclusions he draws from them are fundamentally erroneous. The strength of the film lies in its ability to illustrate, through its sci-fi aesthetic, how the parasitic basis of capital depends on the class appropriation of a concrete content. Although the film describes this appropriation in crude terms – as little more than collective theft, by depicting labour time as social substance, it nevertheless offers a concrete premise at the level of social being which comes to inform the nature of the individual exploiter – over and above the personal peccadilloes and subjectivities ascribed to his or her character by the writer.

2 J P Pinkerton, ‘In Time — The First Hollywood Movie of the Occupy Wall Street Era.’ Fox News 27 October 2011 http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/10/27/ 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.

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The central figure of Philippe Weis, for instance, has acquired a life span of 10,000 years, but more than this, he is the owner of a monopoly chain of time banks which have sprung up in the ghettos and which lend time, at high interest rates, to those who are struggling to survive and have no other options. Weis is forever immortalised in the frame of a young man: his clothes are immaculately attired, and his mansion is resplendent and pristine. And yet there is something utterly hollow about him – an emptiness which pervades his behaviour, a narrowness of feeling and thought; for his obsession with prolonging his existence through the accumulation of (labour) time means that he has ceased to live. Life’s quantity has overwhelmed its quality. Vincent Kartheiser, who plays Weis, conveys the slick, oleaginous sheen which belies a fundamentally distorted and stunted personality; his performance gives to the oligarch a disturbing, almost Dorian Gray–like aspect; the character perfectly expresses the parasitical entity which has everything but is nothing and which has, in some fundamental sense, experienced a loss of content, a loss of self, for its existence is leechlike, premised entirely on the substance of another. In many ways, the oligarch Philippe Weis acts as a perfect metaphor for the economic crisis and the specific tendency which underpinned it. Weis is a form without content, and so too are the extreme forms of financial capital which created the economic bubble, forms which are increasingly divorced from their content – that is, actual physical commodities such as houses. Instead, these forms – for example, insurance packages and loans on houses – become themselves further abstracted from the content: the physical commodity. Now we enter into an enflamed and surreal cycle of speculation where the investment involves the insurance on the insurance – or several subprime mortgages packaged together as a single entity and then resold. Weis is the extreme embodiment of financial capital pushed to its outermost limits – on the surface, the world he inhabits is smooth and pristine, delineated by all the fripperies and fineries money can buy, but at the same time, this is mere appearance, an artificial bubble which encases his existence and which disguises the fundamental contradictions and tensions which wrack his family life; the point at which the bubble bursts is that point at which his daughter abandons him and a life of wealth in order to take to the streets with the hero, engaging in a series of Robin Hood–like robberies which target her father’s banks in an attempt to redistribute wealth. Philippe Weis’ immortality, secured through the accumulation of others’ time, is the embodiment of capital ‘that, vampire-like, lives only

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by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more it sucks’.6 Weis’ physical life stretches towards forever, but his spiritual life is by the same degree reduced and demeaned. He emerges as a zombie-like character neither living nor dead, an omnipotent nobody whose genetic code has been mutated and rewritten according to the digits and symbols of dollars and cents. Because of the raw truth of its central premise, In Time is able to portray the archetype of the billionaire accumulator with a dark, sinister artistry. But it also describes the way in which capital accumulation is regulated. The other vividly and truthfully drawn character is depicted by Cillian Murphy, who plays a ‘time keeper’ driven to the point of obsession as one of the state enforcers charged with hunting down the heroic rebel of the piece – Will Salas. If Weis’ character has as its prototype the twisted, parasitical core which is simultaneously belied by the gothic mystique and sinister beauty of the external image, à la Dorian Gray, then Raymond Leon – Cillian Murphy’s fearsome ‘time keeper’ – might be regarded as a distant descendent of Javert, the police official in Les Miserables, who for years relentlessly pursues the hero of that novel for filching a loaf of bread. Like Javert, Raymond Leon pursues his targets with a robotic doggedness that comes from an obsessive devotion to the formal aspect of the law, and like Javert, it is revealed at the end of In Time that Leon himself was actually from poverty – from one of the ghettos that the law he serves so effectively represses. Once again, the contradictions abide. Leon has escaped poverty by becoming one of its enforcers. He is effective precisely because he has a sense and awareness of the life of the exploited in a way that the rich, living in the ivory towers of their cordoned off districts, simply can’t attain. And for all of this, Leon holds a genuine contempt for his masters. He regards their money-saturated ethos as a corrupt aberration, but at the same time, he can show no quarter to those underneath him. The contradiction between his social function and his historical origins is mitigated by his absolute and devout faith to the law – which, to the one who practises it, can often attain an independence and objectivity, a transcendental and almost godlike separation from those who have created it. He venerates the order of the law as a pristine objectivity which confronts people as an all-pervasive power, and when Weis offers a bribe to subvert the law, Leon refuses with icy contempt. But such objectification masks the fact that the law is a human product and, moreover, a product of a particular class entity attempting to give 6 K Marx, Capital Vol 1 – Ch 10, sec 1, Marx/Engels Internet Archive. http:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm#S1

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to its mode of exploitation a rational and visible veneer. When the law reveals itself as a particularity, when its class origins are exposed and it becomes clear that its effects sometimes propagate injustice rather than subvert it, it is at this point that its enforcer becomes embroiled in an aporia lodged in the very heart of his being. The criminal no longer appears as simply an inherent aberration but as a bearer of justice in his own right, and this is at odds with the driving ethos which has allowed the enforcer to in some way stand ‘above’ class conflict by serving the ‘higher end’ of justice inscribed by the laws. The awareness of the true character of justice simultaneously undermines the enforcer’s essential being and animating spirit, creating a violent spiritual schism. In Les Miserables, this occurs when Jean Valjean shows Javert mercy and kindness; so traumatic and shattering is this to his worldview that he is unable to assimilate it, and so, he takes his own life. When Leon confronts the criminals/heroes at the end of the film, he does not take the chance to pull the trigger, and instead, he simply ‘times out’. None of this means that In Time is a great film. Its flaws are far too copious and comprehensive. The world it raises is shocking and believable, and it provides a powerful mirror into our own. The contradictions in this world are crystallised in its two most profound characters – Philippe Weis and Raymond Leon, both of whom are depicted with a formidable but meticulous artistry. But when it comes to the resolution and transcendence of the social contradictions which inflict its imaginary cities, In Time becomes at once a far more frail film. The actions of the hero are explicitly political because he is directly responding to the exploitation which has overshadowed his life – yet his methods are remarkably vulgar. He robs time banks and thus redistributes wealth, but one has to wonder, given the sheer level of immiseration inflicted upon them, why none of the ghettos’ denizens ever considered doing this before. And if they had, wouldn’t Timberlake’s character be forced to navigate a far more complex security network and be far less able to gain great amounts of time in any individual haul? The lack of nuance to the political solution the film envisages is very much a result of the aforementioned fact: while the film is revolutionary in as much as it portrays labour time as a concrete social substance – and therefore renders it visible as a subject of class appropriation – it is nevertheless unable to show how such appropriation involves something more than deception, theft and force. Because the nature of the class appropriation of wealth is described so crudely, the ‘revolutionary’ means by which it is resisted inevitably present in equally crude terms – as the isolated and individualised resistance of two individuals who simply try to ‘steal back’ time from those who have filched it in the first

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place. The film then deteriorates into a series of explosive heists and screeching car chases; as a result, it squanders great potential. In fact – in a wonderful example of the filmic unconscious – the resolution of the tale purports to be a triumphant and emancipatory affair because the crime duo have succeeded in transferring enough time to the general population so that they might leave the ghetto en masse and march on their rich exploiters; but in the very moment in which this triumphal procession is enacted, the camera happens to zoom in on a factory and take in the solitary emptiness as the machinery there begins to gather dust. It is as if, in that moment, the film unconsciously references the inadequacy of its own conclusion; it detects within itself a certain futility. In truth, the proposed resolution – the individual act of robbing banks and redistributing wealth – provides an anachronistic and superficial remedy precisely because it does not address the point of production and the factories and workplaces which might transmute such isolated individuality into the possibility of a more comprehensive universality – that is, the universality of class. To put it baldly, the film itself is the movie equivalent of a cut and shut (a lemon): the one half a supercar welded to the other – an old banger. That In Time is not going to enter the echelon of great science fiction is not of prime concern here. What is of more interest is how the film itself acts as a barometer for social change. The idea of using time as a currency has appeared in past films and stories which have shared many of the same elements. The Price of Life,7 for instance, is a film from the late 1980s in which time was also portrayed as a commodity and a currency – the possession of which differentiates the rich from the poor. This film was probably highly influential on In Time, although the makers of In Time do not seem to have credited it. Nevertheless, although this earlier film contains a great deal of embryonic material which would appear in In Time, it is also fundamentally different because it does not connect the accumulated time of the wealthy minority as a social substance subject to class appropriation. This is something which In Time does, no matter how crudely. In In Time Justin Timberlake’s character, Will Salas, is a factory worker, and in a deliciously Marxist flavoured take on alienated labour, Salas works in a factory forging the very manacles which allow for the transfer of time and thereby facilitate the exploitation of workers such as him. But in The Price of Life, the paradigm is very different. People are not born into social classes; rather, in a riff on the American dream, they are born into essential equality, and 7

Price of Life, Director Stephen Tolkin, ‘American PlayHouse’, PBS, 1987.

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the divisions of wealth and poverty which later appear are products of the qualities and aspirations inherent in this or that individual. Why is it that In Time manages to portray in fantasy form ‘time’ as a product of the labour of one social class which has been subject to appropriation by another, whereas in The Price of Life ‘time’ appears as a commodity which is grown out of the labour of the generic individual? The answer is, in fact, just as Fox News’ James P Pinkerton has posed it: In Time is the first Hollywood movie of the Occupy Wall Street era. The contradictions and contractions of the American and global economy manifest in the current financial crisis, mean that the motif which The Price of Life employs – the idea of economic losses and gains emanating from the isolated individuality of this or that economic actor (the same notion that underpins the ideology of the American dream) – is made ever less tenable as the scale and pitch of the crisis reveals the fundamental character of class exploitation on a system wide basis. That is why, and Slavoj Žižek is very good on this point, the Occupy Wall Street movement poses the problem as a universal – that is to say, a crisis of capitalism, per se. Žižek says, as we experience a shift from ‘the plurality of anti-racist, feminist etc. struggles, “capitalism” is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem.’8 It is the moment of universalism which the global character of the current economic crisis has brought out and which allows a Hegelian-type progression to take place: from The Price of Life, where wealth appears as a purely individualised and arbitrary phenomenon, to In Time, where it is depicted in its character of universality, a concrete social essence which is subject to class appropriation. But if the unfolding of the current economic crisis has galvanised the science fiction terrain of In Time, it has also limited it. Žižek talks about the limitations of the Occupy movements. Although, he says, it is an important leap forward to see the problem as a systematic and universal one – that is, as a problem of capitalism itself – he points out that the ideologies of these early protest movements also have a somewhat nebulous character. The protestors are aware that they reject decisively neoliberalist capitalism, but they are far less certain about what should replace it: ‘it is not enough to reject the depoliticised expert rule as the most ruthless form of ideology; one should also begin to think seriously about what to propose instead of the predominant economic organization’.9 8 S zizek, ‘Occupy Wall Street: What is to be done next?’, The Guardian, 24 April 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/24/occupywall-street-what-is-to-be-done-next 9 Ibid.

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And the spirit of this, I think, also carries through to In Time. In that film, the problem and its universal essence as a process of system wide exploitation is imaginatively conveyed. Like the Occupy Wall Street movement more generally, though, the difficulty for In Time arises when it has to pose a solution. At this point, the film collapses back into isolated individuality, which has a distinctively terroristic aroma. And that is why the first half of the film is so good and the remainder is relatively poor. But the relapse – from concrete social essence to abstract individuality – is something which is inscribed in the Occupy movements at this moment in their development. In Time, therefore, filters the modes and forms of historical development through its own logical structure and imaginary dynamic – and though it is not a great film, it remains a vitally important one for just that reason. In it, the contradictions of crisis and burgeoning revolutionary movements are crystallised and embodied in a fantastical and imaginative way. In the more prestigious literary circles, science fiction has often been greeted by the faint whiff of condescension – or failing that, complete silence. Examples from the science fiction pantheon are rarely accorded the accolade of great literature, and this is perhaps because, at first glance, their focus on those distant worlds, most often grafted onto the horizons of a fantasy future, seem to have very little in common with the tenor and depth of our own present. But, noted the Marxist literary theorist Raymond Williams, the ‘future-story’10 allows one to purge the empirical paraphernalia of the present which sits so heavy on the world we encounter and thus portray the abiding and more fundamental social contradictions and conflicts in a more palpable and immediate aesthetic form. Williams notes that ‘nearly all serious science fiction’ offers a plot in which ‘a pattern taken from contemporary society is materialized, as a whole, in another time or place.’11 In particular, this ‘pattern’ tends to involve, ‘fundamentally, a conception of the relation between individuals and society; ordinarily a virtuous individual or small personal group, against a vile society. ... The experience of isolation, of alienation, and of self-exile is an important part of the contemporary structure of feeling’.12 With these words, Raymond Williams could be describing In Time itself.

10 R Williams, ‘Realism and the Contemporary Novel’, 20th Century Literary Criticism – editor David Lodge, (Longman, London: 1978) 585. 11 Ibid. 586. 12 Ibid. 586.

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3 The Walking Dead: The Archetype of the Zombie in the Modern Epoch

Based on a comic book of the same name, The Walking Dead is a TV series which depicts the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, in which a group of survivors try to navigate the remnants of a ravaged world. Led by police officer Rick Grimes, they band together for protection against the threat of the ‘walkers’: the undead creatures perpetually trudging across the broken landscape, looking for survivors to gorge on and ‘turn’ – that is, transform into fellow zombies. The series has drawn both critical and popular acclaim, and is very much the epicentre of a zombie renaissance that has flourished over the last few years. This renaissance has seen everything from the zombie popping up as the central love interest (Warm Bodies) to the more deathly proposition of a team of extremist right-winger zombies with a penchant for the Prussian goose step (Dead Snow). Naturally, the question arises, why now? What is it about the twentyfirst century world which makes it so ripe for a zombie takeover? In answering the question, commentators have tended to reference two central events: the attack on 11 September 2001 and the global economic crisis of 2007/2008. It is not difficult to see how both have helped create the cultural anxieties which prepare the ground for a zombie apocalypse. The footage of the terrorist attacks and their aftermath – the cloud of dust which spread across New York and the images of shell-shocked people who appeared as shambolic, shuffling shadows from within it – very much carried the apocalyptic flavour of many a zombie film. In turn, the economic crisis, and its ruinous effect on housing, public services and civil society, also contains much which the modern zombie film/series draws upon; the survivors of the zombie apocalypse have to navigate a world where the social safety net has been completely 33

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removed; state expenditure on public services and welfare has ceased (because the state itself no longer exists); and the individual is entirely at the mercy of the most atavistic and destructive (market) forces. For good reason, Time Magazine went as far as to declare the zombie ‘the official monster of the recession’.1 Both the attack on 11 September 2001 and the economic crisis are watershed moments in American history in the more immediate sense. The attack on the twin towers occurred on American soil, of course, and the economic crisis became global only after the US economy had first been sent into freefall. In locating these two events as nodal points in the way in which the zombie narrative has been shaped, one might suspect commentators of indulging a certain unconscious bias in favour of US culture and history. But at the same time, it is important to recognise that there is a solid reason for such indulgence because the most profound innovations in the zombie genre have been made on American soil – at least in this century and the last. It wasn’t always that way, of course. Zombie mythology, if one can speak of such a thing, emanated from the miasma of African folklore. In his admirable study – Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism – David McNally traces the genesis and development of the zombie archetype. It originated, he explains, in the lower Congo; however, it would have been virtually unrecognisable to any modern-day zombie enthusiast. In that period, the existence of a spirit or god named the Nzambi was assumed, and such an entity had the ability to reanimate dead family members, returning them to life so that they might join their families once more – either for fair purposes or for foul, to settle old scores or to render assistance. In other words, the dead person, the zombie, would in some way continue to resemble the person they had been when they were alive, but, argues McNally, with the advent of modern slavery on a world scale, the zombie archetype endured a profound transformation. The transformation was centred on the island of Haiti in particular and the voodoo ceremonies which gave expression to the fears and feelings of the half a million slaves working the plantations. In slavery, argues McNally, one’s personhood is usurped; one is converted by the slave owner into a labour force which lacks ‘all aspects of human personality save the bodily capacity for mindless toil’.2 Whereas before, the undead person was still in possession of his subjectivity, albeit in an uncanny 1 L Grossman, ‘Zombies Are the New Vampires’, Time Magazine, Thursday, 9 April 2009. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1890384,00.html 2 D McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism, Brill (Leiden, Boston: 2011) 211.

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dreamlike form, now he or she was rendered soulless, a vessel ‘entirely lacking in memory, self-consciousness, identity and agency.’3 In the Haitian zombie, the drudgery and inhumanity of slavery received its reified reflection. One might wonder why then, the figure of the zombie has remained so popular, even though its social basis – a global and economically viable slave system – has long since perished. McNally argues that it has retained its fascination because capitalist exploitation can have a similar debilitating effect on the labour patterns of the individual in thrall to it. What the capitalist requires of the worker is his or her labour in its abstract guise, its commodification in terms of a number of set hours which are offered up to ‘capital in incremental bits over a lifetime.’4 The richness and unity of the original labour operation – the cobbler making a shoe for instance – is now broken down into a series of discordant procedures carried out by a chain of workers. The repetition of their tasks is regulated by the interminable and relentless motion of the production line, so that the worker himself is now converted into a lifeless appendage of the industrial mechanism. Again, the concrete skill and particularity which is intimately related to the worker’s personhood is evaporated before the ‘bodily capacity for mindless toil’, and again, one can glimpse in the labour process a certain zombifying aspect. But the zombie archetype is about to endure yet another transfiguration. In the 1960s, McNally points out, the zombies themselves were portrayed as far more aggressive; they were depicted as ravenous creatures inexorably driven to sate themselves on human flesh. The cultural trendsetter in this regard was, of course, George A Romero. Romero’s monsters represent a key shift, argues McNally, from the realm of production to the realm of consumption. Romero’s zombies were part and parcel of his own historical period: the economic boom which succeeded the Second World War. By depicting them as monsters with an almost unlimited capacity for human flesh, he was at the same time offering a ‘biting criticism of the hyper-consumptionist ethos of an American capitalism characterised by excess’.5 But the shift from production to consumption, as the raison d’être for zombie hijinks, also represents an aesthetic loss, argues McNally. The quasi-satirical take on capitalist consumerism ‘comes at the cost of invisibilising the hidden world of labour and the disparities of class that make all this consumption’.6 3 4 5 6

Ibid. 211. Ibid. 147. Ibid. 261. Ibid. 260.

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McNally’s analysis then, leads him to believe that the purveyors of the modern zombie archetype have missed a trick. As a result of shifting the terrain from production to consumption – by obliterating the image of the zombie labourer in favour of the zombie consumer – McNally argues that ‘contemporary zombie-isms, at their best, tend to offer a critique of consumerism, not capitalism – one that fails to probe the life destroying, zombifying processes of work in bourgeois society’. However, although McNally’s analysis is a fine one, the conclusions he draws, at least in this regard, are a little suspect. From the purview of process, it is not the case that the shift from production to consumption simply annuls at the aesthetic level the development which has gone before. The point about the zombie labourer is that he or she functions as an emblem of alienated labour in a capitalist/slave mode of production – his or her personhood is annulled in favour of abstract, mindless compulsion. But when, in the latter part of the twentieth century, zombies become more consumptionist in their aspect – prone to gorge on human flesh – it is not the case that the former template is simply dissolved. These new-fangled zombies remain mindless and abstract, only with the caveat that they now are the sinister consumers of flesh too. To put it as Hegel might – the motif of production doesn’t simply vanish in the new aesthetic form – that of consumption – but rather, it is ‘sublated’ – or to say the same, preserved but also transformed. This, of course, might seem like a minor detail to iron out, but McNally’s inaccuracy on the point does have its consequences. Because he argues that the early template – the productionist template – has been abnegated, he then assumes that the aesthetic possibilities of exposing ‘the hidden world of labour and the disparities of class’ are also lost. For this reason, McNally looks back with nostalgia to a period in which ‘the disparities of class’ were still at the forefront of the genre and hence ‘zombies emerged as figures of rebellion’.7 Unfortunately, this rings a double confusion. The modern-day zombie archetype has absorbed the element of ‘production’ into its aesthetic remit – it was never lost. But more than this, the zombie could never have emerged as a ‘figure of rebellion’ in any case because the figure itself embodied in its aesthetic a form of alienated labour – that is, labour divorced from any spiritual content such that it exhibited only in terms of a mindless force. The zombie, then, is able to present the darkest reflection of capitalist labour practice; it is the mirror in which the labourer experiences himself as a transfigured entity: his soul emptied out, his will neutralised, his 7

Ibid. 261.

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personhood replaced by an alien compulsion. In this dark mirror, the horror of the demeaning power of exploitation is rendered as a palpable image: the labourer whose work life has nothing in common with his true being, which calls from him only the physical force of his organism while his mental powers dwindle and stagnate. In the zombie, this process is graduated into a fantasy apotheosis which wreaks havoc in nightmarish proportions – and it is here that the horror lies. But to demand of the zombie archetype that it be ‘a figure of rebellion’ is to mitigate this horror. To permit to the zombie some level of will or agency is to undermine its fetish – that is, the absolutisation in a fantasy format of a mindless labour in thrall to an alien compulsion. One has the feeling that McNally, as a good Marxist, is trying to see in the zombie archetype not only abstract negativity – the negativity of alienated labour – but also the possibility of its overcoming in and through the zombie as a ‘figure of rebellion’. But in trying to artificially impose such a schema, he is in danger of unravelling the zombie archetype itself, of detracting from the most potent element of its horror. Nevertheless, McNally’s discussion does pose a significant issue: If the zombie is bound by the ontological limits of its own aesthetic template – if it cannot transcend its historical genesis in alienated labour by becoming a ‘figure of rebellion’ – what then mediates themes of resistance and rebellion within its fictional world? The answer is, of course, before our eyes. Although the zombie is unable to transcend its condition as a fetish for both alienated labour and unbridled consumerism, the fantasy counterweight to these elements is presented by the groups of people who struggle for survival against the zombies after the apocalypse has occurred. The motif of the zombie apocalypse is useful and also necessary – its suddenness and extent allow for the full-scale separation and demarcation between the humans on the one hand and their zombie antagonists on the other; the shattered pockets of survivors who live on in the aftermath have to create forms of organisation which allow them to navigate and survive the relentless, cohesive zombie onslaught. Or, if one tears away the fantasy veil, these people are trying to develop new forms of life in opposition to the rapacious consumerism and the debilitating patterns of labour which are part and parcel of the anarchy of the world market. McNally’s mistake is that he wishes to locate the aspect of rebellion in the zombie figure – while neglecting the fact that the most fascinating aspect of the zombie genre is not the monsters themselves but the responses of the people who remain ‘unzombified’ as they try to create in the aftermath a competing social order.

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And this is key to any appreciation of The Walking Dead. One of the things which demarks the series from the comic book is that the series tends to level an inordinate amount of focus on the way in which the group, nominally headed by Rick, struggles to implement a viable decision-making process. In a piece for the LA Review of Books – a piece which is highly critical of the series – Calum Marsh hits the nail on the head in his very first paragraph: Rick Grimes, the hero of AMC’s The Walking Dead, cannot resist a good debate. Indeed, he gravitates to them helplessly, dragging fellow survivors into the orbit of his well-honed rhetoric and retort. He seizes every opportunity for deliberation, no matter how grave or trivial the subject: his group’s next course of action, who ought to participate in a supply run, whether a captured foe should be freed or murdered, what sorts of vegetables will be grown in a garden. All find him impassioned, parrying the inevitable riposte, eyes narrowed and index finger jabbing the air for emphasis. Occasionally the series conspires to throw a zombie or two his way. Rick dispatches these threats capably and then gets right on back to arguing.8 The Walking Dead explores this motif – even, on occasion, to the point of tedium. In previous examples of the genre, the group dynamic was of course significant, but it tended to reduce itself to an exclusively moral dichotomy – the central heroic figure struggling to act in the best interests of the group of survivors would be opposed by one of their number who was either more self-serving, incompetent or immoral. The battle for the group’s survival would, in some part, hinge on the battle of wills between these two characters – in Night of the Living Dead, for example, the heroic Ben has to contend with the arrogant, overbearing Harry in a struggle for the hearts and minds of the others. In the slick and stylish 28 Days Later, the same moral dichotomy exists but this time it opens up between separate groups. The noble hero, Jim, has to protect the members of his small group against the sinister militia headed by Major Henry West. But although The Walking Dead preserves the moral conflicts between individuals, these elements are set against the backdrop of a broader and more practical dilemma: How can Rick’s group organise and enforce the 8 C Marsh, ‘The steady decline of “The Walking Dead”’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 5 November 2013. https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/in-need-of-brainsnotes-on-amcs-the-walking-dead

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procedures by which collective decisions can be taken and acted upon? This is the lynchpin around which much of the drama is hinged. In the first couple of seasons, Rick very quickly emerges as the leader of the group and the one who has the last word, so to say. There are solid reasons for this: he is presented as a moral and courageous person, and one who is fierce and decisive and able to protect others against threats. But despite his moral and physical stature, despite his undoubted ability to lead and inspire the others, this is not enough. At the end of the second season, Rick issues the others an ultimatum that has a distinctively dictatorial flavour: his decisions are to be accepted, without qualification, for the sake of expediency, survival and the greater good; and if the others don’t meet this demand, he will abandon them. The group, being aware of Rick’s very positive qualities and reposing great trust in him, eventually acquiesces. But the writers want us to know that the decision to acquiesce is problematic, and they reveal this in several ways. In the first instance, at the start of the third season, we are introduced to the uber-villain, the governor. In a way, the governor provides the distant echo of Rick’s darkest future; the governor had, in his former life, been both an office functionary and a family man, and for these reasons – like Rick – he was motivated to create an environment of order and safety for those in his orbit. But in so doing, in regulating the ‘safe’ space of Woodbury, the governor grew ever more twisted and grotesque – in precise proportion to the level of authority he had assumed. Over and over again, the writers stress that the governor has redeeming, and even noble, features, but these are eaten up by the ever more corrosive deployment of his power. His character is no simple moral constant; rather, the governor’s worst qualities are able to overwhelm his better ones because of his elevated position within the reconstructed social order. His morality, therefore, is also tethered to his social position and practice. In Marsh’s article for the LA Review of Books, he notes, as we have seen, that Rick ‘seizes every opportunity for deliberation, no matter how grave or trivial the subject’, and perhaps this is because the democratic impetus provides an antidote to the more isolating and corrosive pitfalls of leadership and power. In any event, after a few episodes of Rick’s asserting himself as the sole authority within the group, not only have they encountered the governor – a clear harbinger of the dangers of totalitarianism – but Rick has fallen into a temporary madness, isolating himself from the rest, spending days wandering the catacombs of the derelict prison building they have recently occupied. Before the end of the third season, Rick renounces his position of absolute authority; in moral terms, it has been rendered suspect by the horror of the governor’s

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example, but in practical terms too, it has proven to be untenable. Rick, in lapsing into mental illness, has demonstrated in practice that the attempt to repose power in a single individual is inherently problematic, for any disruption to that person would at once paralyse the functioning of the social organism more broadly. Consequently, the group substitutes a multi-member council for the single-leader model. To recapitulate, questions of ethics and morality in The Walking Dead are approached not simply in regard to conflicts between isolated moral entities – the good guy/gal vs the bad one – but more profoundly as grounded in the practical forms and divisions of a newly emergent social order which is represented, in microcosm, by a given group of survivors. The issue of morality, then, is inexorably bound up with the issue of structural organisation, and over and over The Walking Dead returns to this: How can the group organise itself? How can the different day-to-day practical tasks – such as farming or foraging – be allocated? How are the children to be taught? Should they, for example, learn how to protect themselves using knives? How should the group deal with new recruits? I don’t mean to say that previous forays into the zombie format didn’t touch upon these themes, but when they did so, they always remained vague and on the periphery. The Walking Dead, on the other hand, makes of them the central touchstone of its dramatic dynamic. And again, the question should be posed, why now? What is it about the historical realities of the twenty-first century that are conducive to such a shift? The global economic crisis and its aftermath set the conditions for this change of focus. Certainly, zombies have come to represent, in fantasy and dreamlike form, the terrors of a rapacious unbridled capitalism, and it is only natural, therefore, that a global economic crisis of capitalism itself will imbue the zombie presence with an enhanced gravitas. But it is more than just a dramatic deepening. One of the most compelling aftereffects of the crisis has been the various political responses to it. Across the world, the Occupy movement spawned its imitators, and, of course, the revolutions which perfumed across North Africa and the Middle East during the Arab Spring represent most profoundly the depth, tenor and potency of mass resistance. And yet, the problem which was inherent to all these movements was not that they failed to understand the horror of what they opposed – the depredations of unrestrained finance acting through the world market, brutal dictatorships sponsored by various capitalist interests. The more thorny issue is/was this: What kind of alternative can the movements offer? How do they create new forms and structures which can facilitate collective action? How are decisions to be taken? One of the central

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difficulties thrown up by the Occupy movements was precisely the question of leadership. Ideologically speaking, it situated itself as the movement of the 99% against the 1%; the notion of having a central leadership composed of a minority or even a single member was, on a certain level, anathema to its ontological basis. At the same time, the need to direct popular protest into successful political gain would seem to require some type of organised and central decision-making apparatus. At the time of writing, the momentum of the Occupy movements appears to have dissipated, except where it has been transformed into a more coherent political entity – the Podemos party of Spain, for instance, which has emerged out of the Spanish equivalent to the Occupy movement – the indignados. And it is against this specific historical context that the dramatic contours of The Walking Dead come into focus. In its narrative, the question of how to create an alternative mode of social organisation, in opposition to the rapacious, blind and destructive forces which are unleashed by market capitalism is explored in a fantastical form. The Walking Dead reflects, with the bleak surrealism of a nightmare, the most pressing problem bequeathed by historical development to the billions of human beings across the globe: How can one even begin to make a new world? For this reason, The Walking Dead’s content necessitated the form of a TV series because it required the sustained examination of the way in which social organisation is cultivated from the rubble; the two-hour time span of the average film would have simply been inadequate for the task. For all these reasons, The Walking Dead represents the richest, most concrete culmination of the evolution of the zombie archetype for it is in keeping with the historical tempo of humankind as the economic contradictions in the capitalist system reach their apex and burst asunder into the aesthetic realm. Bearing this in mind, it is possible to locate the seam of horror which truly underpins the series – and it is not in the zombies themselves. In the fifth season, there are two especially significant events. In one episode (‘Slabtown’), the teenager Beth, having been separated from the group of Rick and Daryl some time earlier, awakes in a hospital building in the care of a surgeon who has repaired her injuries. At first, the viewer feels she has fallen on her feet, for the small group of people who have occupied the building seem organised and proficient, if a little stern and severe. But the fraught atmosphere quickly graduates into something more ominous. Beth realises that she, and some of the others, are now prisoners, but prisoners of a very specific form of oppression – that is, the leaders of the group have decided that any people they save using the medical resources/expertise at their disposal have automatically accrued

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a debt which must be paid off in terms of a labour contribution once the patient has recovered and is in a fit state to work. But what Beth discovers is that her debt of labour is continually being extended; the food which is provided in order for her to work is then tallied and itemised and converted into additional labour she is now obliged to perform. Now clearly, once again, the scenes of ‘Slabtown’ represent in fantasy form a key aspect of contemporary American reality: a health system which is driven by the profit incentive and what naturally follows from that for a vast number of the population – that is, the claustrophobia of an existence saddled to debt. But the horror of this particular scene is not simply that it provides the dark and fantastical afterimage of a particular facet of capitalist reality but also that the people who have installed the regime of economic oppression are the same people who supply the modes and forms of resistance to the zombies in the first place. Again, twenty-first century politics loom large if one considers, for example, the revolution in Egypt, which began as a demand for popular sovereignty and people’s power; however, once the Muslim Brotherhood was elected, its leader, Morsi, attempted to introduce a series of authoritarian laws which harkened back to the old regime they endeavoured to oppose. In The Walking Dead, the true horror rests in the awful possibility that the forces of the new order will become as monstrous as the zombies they oppose. At the end of the fourth season, we see the group, beleaguered but hopeful, making their way down a broken train line, following signs which advertise ‘Terminus’, a place which promises ‘Sanctuary for all. Community for all. Those who arrive, survive.’ When Rick’s group arrive at the location, at first all seems promising. Only then they are disarmed and thrown into captivity. As they await their fate, huddled like cattle in the back of a massive steel container, the true nature of what their captors have planned becomes clear. The group are to be slaughtered and then cannibalised. The notion of such a horrific endgame is far from accidental. The fact that the denizens of Terminus have taken to eating people sends a clear message: they have, in fact, been transformed into the zombies they oppose – only from within a human guise. The true horror which is carried by the themes which pervade The Walking Dead, when stripped of their fantastical grotesqueries, then, is simply that the revolutionary current and the project of emancipation is always in danger of being repossessed and transfigured by the abiding and relentless logic of the economic exploitation that it seeks to transcend.

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4 Let Me In: The Figure of the Vampire as Kantian Noumenal

Let Me In is a 2010 film about the relationship between a vampire and a young boy, a remake of the 2008 film Let the Right One In, which was itself based on a novel of the same name by John Ajvide Lindqvist. The 2010 film garnered generally positive reviews, but was not as well received as its predecessor, partly because, as one critic says – ‘it has been repackaged as a Hollywood indie directed by Matt Reeves, marketed at an audience who are keen to get a load of the hip new vampire scene, but obviously turn their discerning noses up at the Twilight franchise’.1 Let Me In was therefore very much regarded as a sanitised, Hollywood version of the original, which managed to preserve just enough edge and bleakness to differentiate it from the standard vamp fare of the twilight franchise and its derivatives. But if such criticism can be levelled at the American remake, it must also be noted that the Swedish 2008 film, in many respects, softened the starkness and savagery inherent in the format of the original novel. In the novel, two particularly disturbing motifs are brought to the fore. Firstly, the theme of paedophilia is rendered explicit; in the book, the child vampire Eli lives with paedophile school teacher Hakan, who kills locals in order to procure blood and who makes overt attempts to secure sexual favours from her, whereas in the film, the element of paedophilia is hinted at but remains very much in the background. Secondly, in the book, the sex of the child vampire Eli, who appears to be a girl, is later clarified as male with Eli’s story stretching back over hundreds of years and involving his castration before he is made into a vampire.

1 P Bradshaw, ‘Let Me In’, The Guardian, Thursday 4 November 2010 22.00 GMT . http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/nov/04/let-me-in-film-review

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In the Swedish 2008 film, the fact of Eli’s sex and his castration is alluded to with a distressing close up shot of his mutilated crotch and a scar, but the backstory is not made explicit and remains undefined. And in the 2010 American remake, this shot is removed altogether, and the only indirect reference to his male gender is made when Abby (Eli) turns to Owen (Oscar) and explains that ‘I am not a girl’,2 although when Owen presses her about this, she responds somewhat enigmatically ‘I’m nothing.’3 In its transition to film, first in Swedish (2008), then in English (2010), one can see clearly that the need for revenue has intruded on the creative process; each film represented a more sanitised moment in a movement away from the original novel, towards something less ‘disturbing’ and more palatable for a mainstream audience. This is what has caused purists to bridle – with regard to the 2010 Hollywood remake in particular. One of the most challenging things about writing a vampire novel, film or TV series is the issue of backstory. Programmes such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood, for example, are often interesting and imaginative, but they always face the danger of teetering into the absurd, partly because of the need to give their vampires ‘a real past’ in order that they be humanised, that their motives be rendered legible and we become more engaged with their characters. Or to say something similar, the vampire characters which populate their fictional landscapes are depicted as historical creations. In True Blood, the historical aroma is particularly potent. Based on a set of novels by author Charlaine Harris, The Sookie Stackhouse Novels, the premise is an ingenious one. Vampires have always coexisted with human beings but from behind the scenes and within the shadows. At the turn of the millennium, however, a Japanese company develops the ability to manufacture human blood. Whereas before, the vampires were condemned to a crepuscular existence, feeding off their human counterparts while making sure that their presence remained as opaque as possible, now – as a consequence of ‘true blood’ – they have the chance to be part of the broader social landscape legitimately and openly. In the fantasy world Harris depicts, the individual vampire emerges as a member of an independent ‘ethnic’ group, and – for the first time – he or she has the legal right to open a business, rent a house, become a politician or engage in a civil partnership. But when the vampires do emerge as a collective social entity, this leads to conflicts in the human world between those who perceive the 2 3

Let Me In, director/writer – Matt Reeves, Hammer Films, 2010. Ibid.

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vampires as an existential threat to their own privilege and those of a more radical persuasion, who are fighting for integration and the maintenance of the rights the vampire population have thus far won. True Blood is set in a fictional town in the Deep South state of Louisiana, the region of the country where Harris herself was raised. It is little coincidence that the premise of True Blood should have been cultivated organically in such socio-historical soil. The depiction of the vampires as an emergent social group which is both feared and repressed mediates in a fantasy form the historical context of the apartheid system which followed centuries of rural slavery – and the political tensions which were exacerbated when the repressed black populations culminated their struggles by winning civil rights in the 1960s. Naturally, True Blood represents only the vaguest and fantastical distortions of these elements seen through the lens of a dream; the parallels can’t be read too literally, for the pre-civil rights vampires of True Blood are described as parasitic in nature, preying on others – whereas the black populations of the rural South were anything but, forming the bulk of a productive class whose labour was exploited by a class of landowners and slave holders who were parasitic in the extreme. Nevertheless, in True Blood, the vampires do emerge as a repressed and feared underclass – as a historical entity in its own right. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a vehicle which received its debut as a feature film but became renowned for the later series penned by Joss Whedon, the historical element is less pronounced. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an inventive, imaginative, fun, feminist take on the vampire genre – seen through the tribulations of a teenage girl in high school. She suffers the excruciating, suffocating demands of peer pressure, the desperate (and sometimes predatory) attentions of hormonally charged boys and the struggle to attain a cohesive identity; in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, all the horrific pitfalls of adolescence are given a colourful, pulsating, supernatural form. Unlike True Blood, the vampires do not emerge as a class which stands in a particular position in the social order more broadly; rather, they are allegories for the adolescent experience. Nevertheless, the vampire characters in Buffy are also historical creations. The leading vampire figure, Angel (or Angelus), who happens to be Buffy’s central love interest, is a character with a fully developed history. Originally from eighteenth-century Ireland, and having been made into a vampire, he commits a series of particularly sadistic attacks, at which point a gypsy curse restores his soul so that he might be consumed with pain and remorse thereafter. Another vampire (Spike) is described in his human life as a failed Victorian poet, and

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his thwarted human aspirations bleed into his vampire existence with a gothic intensity. I don’t hope to provide a detailed aesthetic appreciation of either Buffy or True Blood – although I will note that both are highly interesting, occasionally brilliant and sometimes flawed works. What I want to establish, however, is that both series depict the figure of the vampire – either on an individual or on a class basis – as something which is historically given. And while this offers up all sorts of intriguing possibilities for the character dynamics in their respective fantasy worlds, it is perhaps also fair to say that the vampire as a historically created substance is out of kilter with the modern archetype of the vampire that came to predominate in both the nineteenth century and the early-twentieth century. The figure of the vampire has been recorded in most cultures, in some shape or form, but the entity which emerges at the start of the nineteenth century as a cultural staple in Western Europe had an array of unique particularities. In ancient cultures, vampires tended to be creatures who were other than humans – supernatural demons or the like which were visibly and vividly demarcated from the human counterparts whose flesh they fed on and whose blood they drank. So, for example, the vetala – the vampires of the ancient Hindu tradition – are portrayed as ghostly skeletons with wings. In some instances the vampires appeared as deities, as in the case of the Hebrew evocation of Lilith. In the later medieval period, however, the focus tended to fall more heavily on specific human individuals. People who had died and were then said to have returned to life with malevolent and bloodthirsty urges appear more frequently in medieval folklore and even in reportage. The famous case of Jure Grando in seventeenth-century Croatia describes a man who reanimates in order to torture villagers and molest his unfortunate widow. The modern-day vampire presents as an amalgamation of both these tendencies. On the one hand, the figure of the modern-day vampire is a recognisably human one, even with the pale skin and the sharp fangs. But on the other, an element of abstraction is introduced once more. The medieval vampire tended to come from within the village community – that is, this or that dead villager – and remained, in many respects, a known entity, for although the vampire was dead, he or she had been a specific member of the village, with a personal history that the community would have been aware of. But in the modern case – the literary archetype which emerges at the start of the nineteenth century onwards – the vampire, although ostensibly human in its guise, is rendered as an implacable entity. He or she does not emerge from

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within the village as a member of its dead, but rather, he or she penetrates the community from the outside (and usually the community is now town or city based). In probably the earliest example of the literary genre, The Vampyre by John Polidori, the vampire in question – Lord Ruthven – perforates London society. His origins, however, remain mysterious and unadduced. In the most famous example of all, Count Dracula, the ancient vampire emerges from the forests and mountains of Transylvania – once more in order to infiltrate nineteenth-century London, and again a veil of mystery is cast over the details of his former life. The count makes vague references to a noble ‘boyar’4 heritage, while Van Helsing speculates that ‘[h]e must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk’5 – a reference to Vlad III. But these allusions are as vague and intangible as the mist in which the count is shrouded. They hint at his ancientness, but they obscure and make mysterious his origins as much as they reveal them. And so, what the modern-day vampire represents above all is the other – the nonhuman, the darkness on the edge of civilisation, the shadow at the far corner of your vision; its sinister power is manifest in its eeriness, its mystique and its estrangement. It becomes an enigmatic and external force which infiltrates the human realm, and its terror lies in the fact of its opaque darkness for unlike the people it preys upon, it is bereft of any coherent past. Or to put it in Kantian terms, it is rendered as a ‘noumenon’ or ‘transcendental object’.6 And so, the modern-day vampire becomes the transcendental darkness which erupts in the very midst of the historical realities of nineteenth-century Europe – realities which experience the culmination of the enlightenment and the industrial revolution as the cities swell, as the railways mesh the most distant corners of the continent and as the first electric lights bathe everything in the glow of modernity. The vampire’s darkness subsists in such a 4

B Stoker, Dracula, (Vintage, London: 2010) 22. Ibid. 267. 6 I use ‘transcendental object’ to mean the same as ‘noumenal’ in the Kantian sense. There is a debate within Kantian scholarship about whether Kant’s phrase – ‘transcendental object’ was used to refer to noumenal entities. I favour the accounts which argue it was indeed used in this way (though not exclusively) – accounts provided by Kantian scholars such as Friederick Paulsen, August Messer, H W Cassirer, B Fuller, S M McMurrin, Eduard Zuermann and Norman KempSmith, to name a few. Of course, this by no means should be confused with Kant’s use of ‘transcendental deduction’ – to denote the means by which he was able to derive the forms of time and space (transcendental aesthetic) and the categories of the understanding, among others – things which clearly belong to the realm of phenomena as opposed to noumena. 5

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world as an anomaly – to use again the Kantian refrain: it cannot be subject to the forms and categories of modernity, of reason. It repels them by its very nature. But the archetype of the vampire is not the only fictional creation which has Kantian characteristics. In one of his more bravura analyses, philosopher Slavoj Žižek locates another imaginary archetype which also acts as a ‘transcendental object’. The anti-Semitic portrayal of the Jew, Žižek argues, operates along similar lines – because the antiSemitic standpoint refers to ‘the existence of the “Jew”’7 as ‘an underlying-unknowable substratum’8 – as ‘a transcendental object; in this precise sense’.9 In anti-Semitism, particularly that of the Nazi bent, the Jew appears as an ahistorical object at the most fundamental level, as an alien pathogen which penetrates and corrupts what is genuinely human – that is, Aryan historical progress. The movement by which the figure of the Jew is rendered as a transcendental object is discernible in the history of anti-Semitism more broadly; in the Middle Ages the murderous nature of pogroms was often accompanied by an element of ideological coercion – pressure was applied to the Jews who were being persecuted to try to make them renounce their faith in favour of Christianity. In this way, Jews were still, at least on some level, articulated as scrutable and historical entities by their Christian counterparts, for it was thought they might be subject to historical change – albeit through forced conversions. But with the rise of Nazism, this aspect in the modus-operandi of the anti-Semitic procedure was eliminated; now the Jew ceased to represent a corrupted human being but instead became that which is other than human, the nonhuman. The implacable darkness at ‘its’ core was transcendental in the Kantian sense because it could no longer be rationalised, no longer be integrated into the historical process more broadly; ‘its’ essence, then, repelled ‘humanisation’, and for that reason, it could only be destroyed. Historical parallels between the anti-Semitic depiction of the Jew and the vampire are, of course, nothing new and have often been raised by writers. In ‘Circumcising Dracula: The Vampire as Anti-Semitic Trope’, Jeffery Weinstock argues that the notion that the vampire ‘infects’ his victims with a contagion which passes through the blood resonates with the virulent anti-Semitic trope perpetuated during medieval outbreaks 7 S Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, (Duke University Press, North Carolina: 2003) 152. 8 Ibid. 152. 9 Ibid. 152.

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of plague: ‘between 1348 and 1350[,] thousands of Jews were massacred and hundreds of Jewish communities destroyed based on the suspicion that the Jews were responsible for the Black Death ... another manner in which Judaism is linked to the vampire because what the vampire does is to spread its terrible and unholy disease.’10 Joshua Trachtenberg sees the vampire as the Christian bogeyman which unites two of that religion’s traditional antagonists: ‘[t]he two inexorable enemies of Jesus then, in Christian legend, were the devil and the Jew, and it was inevitable that the legend should provide a causal relation between them’.11 But in the modern period, the anti-Semitic characterisation of the Jew and the portrayal of the vampire prove such effective exercises in fear because they convert their subject into a transcendental objectivity – that is, they denude it of its historical nature, or to say the same thing, they denude it of its human nature; for the human nature is synonymous with its historical expression. The subject as vampire is uncanny because it lacks subjectivity; it assumes a human form but is impervious to the historical forces which constitute the human essence – it is, therefore, both living and dead. And if the power and the horror of the vampire archetype (in the modern day) lies in the dark matter of its noumenal and implacable substratum, we are in a position to understand why those portrayals which depict the vampire as a historically given creation – though they might be interesting and effective for all sorts of other reasons – are apt to annul its full spectral horror. When we see the vampire dressed up in costume drama garb and gallivanting around the countryside on horseback, or swilling blood-wine in gilded aristocratic ballrooms, the element of the nonhuman, the fundamental estrangement which both fascinates and repels, is at once reappropriated. By submitting the vampire to the norms and mores of human behaviour; by locating it in the furore of social life its sinister and enigmatic power is dispersed. We can now better appreciate the superiority of the Hollywood film Let Me In over the original Swedish novel. In the novel, the child vampire Eli is increasingly humanised, as more details of his human existence emerge; we are able to understand him, to ‘rationalise’ him as a character to a far greater extent. In the Swedish 2008 film, such details

10 J Weinstock, ‘Circumcising Dracula: The Vampire as Anti-Semitic Trope’, The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 12(1), (2001) 90–102. 11 J Tratchtenberg, The Devil and The Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism, (The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia and Jerusalem: 1983) 20–21.

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are rendered more opaque. And in the 2010 version of Let Me In, the character of the child vampire Abby remains almost entirely mystified; her existence by its nature repels our cognition; she becomes ‘a thing in itself’. The truth of this is manifest in the short, sparse exchange between her and Owen: the young boy yearns to humanise her, to draw her into a boy/girl romantic relationship – ‘to go steady’. But her response is both enigmatic and sad: ‘I’m not a girl. ... I’m nothing.’ Something similar happens with the paedophilia motif. In the novel, Eli’s companion Hakan is clearly perverted and depraved, but by allowing this theme to recede into the background, the 2010 Hollywood film version manages to emphasise something equally horrific though far more understated – that is, a scene where Owen discovers a faded sepia print of an ever youthful Abby next to a young boy. He realises, to his dread, that the young boy is in fact Abby’s middle-aged companion, thereby glimmering an insight into his own tormented future. In Kantian terms, we experience a ‘sublime’ glimpse into the otherwise formless and transcendental nature of what Abby is; for a moment, like Owen, we have a fleeting glimpse of her true monstrousness. Ultimately, the trajectory from book to Swedish film and then to Hollywood film is also the trajectory which transforms the vampire from an essentially historical substance to an impenetrable, ‘transcendental’ thing. Such a movement returns the ‘notion’ of the vampire to itself – for it makes the implicit explicit. That is, it makes explicit the inner fascination we harbour for the ‘other’, for the impenetrable darkness – our need to gaze into the void. With the notion’s return to itself, we move from Kant to Hegel, and what is also very Hegelian is the mode by which this is achieved. The movement by which the transcendental nature of the vampire is affirmed occurs not through a desire on the part of the scriptwriters of the films to ‘improve’ upon the original book, nor any conscious appreciation of what the ‘notion’ of ‘vampire’ entails, but rather because they had to make certain cuts which would guarantee the first film a general release and the second a 15 certification and thus a broader audience. And are these cuts not a clear example of the Hegelian ‘cunning’ or ‘ruse’ of reason – a more fundamental and abiding development crystallised in and through isolated and external contingencies? What is the historical basis for the vampire archetype as a fully rendered transcendental object? Karl Marx often used the figure of the vampire as a metaphor for the historical process of capital accumulation and value expansion; most famously, he wrote ‘[c]apital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’12 The manner in which living labour (or

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labour power) was subserviated to the accumulated dead labour which assumed the form of capital – in particular the industrial capital which was embodied in, among other things, the technological paraphernalia which constituted the first factories – was particularly visible when Marx was writing because of the appalling conditions the early industrial workers in England had to endure. Because of the level of injury and death, because of the short life-expectancy and incredibly long working hours and because of the lives of the children who were also consumed in the relentless and mechanical grind of automated steel; for all of this, the image of a dead, inanimate power that was draining the living of their health and vitality was a particularly apposite one. But Marx’s use of the vampire metaphor must be understood, not only at the more visible level of the brutal and bloody working conditions of the nineteenth-century factory but also at the undisclosed level of the labour operation. Over a period of several centuries, the ontological character of the labour operation had been transfigured; it went from being a unified process premised on the conscious skill and determinations of a given individual to a fragmented and mechanised procedure in which the activity of the individual becomes not the primary condition but an abstract, mindless force which constitutes merely one of many subordinate moments. A cobbler, for example, would once craft the shoe from its basic materials using his skill and technique to furnish it with a finished form; but a labourer working in a shoe factory cannot in any real way consciously determine the type of shoes which the production line turns out; rather, he or she performs a particular and isolated labour operation – perhaps, say, pressing a button at a specific time in order to activate a nail gun. In the interminable, repetitive nature of the operation, the worker loses the semblance of himself; no longer is he a thinking creative being embodying his personality in the finished product of his labour, but rather, he manifests as an abstract and objectified force that the factory line requires in order that its productivity be set into motion. Or to put it as Georg Lukács does, ‘the worker is objectively transformed into a mere object of the process of production by the methods of capitalist production. ... [T]he worker is forced to objectify his labour-power over and against his total personality’.13

12 K Marx, Capital Volume One, ‘Chapter Ten: The Working-Day’, Section 1 (1999), Marx/Engels Library. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867c1/ch10.htm 13 G Lukács, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, History and Class Consciousness, (Merlin Press, London: 1983) 168.

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Again, one can see the manner in which the living personality is subordinated to the compulsion of an inanimate power; capital restructures the labour operation, subsuming living labour under its own inexorable logic and – just like the modern-day vampire – divesting it of its will. The other salient point to be taken into consideration is the manner in which the logic of capital accumulation is unbounded. Pre-capitalist forms were by and large premised on ‘use’ values; that is to say, the majority of people laboured in order to produce products which satisfied a specific, concrete want related to the immediacies of subsistence. Even the wealthy, however much surplus product they managed to appropriate, were still bound by the concrete parameters of use value; a feudal lord could enjoy only a set number of luxuries because his consumption was limited by the physical fact of his concrete existence. The size of the lord’s belly limited the intensity of his exploitation of the serf as that same lord could consume only so many courses during a banquet. But the ghostly metaphysical process by which value is expanded in and through the appropriation of surplus value by capital investment is rooted not in use value but rather in the prerogatives of exchange and capital accumulation. In a highly influential essay, Marxist scholar and literary critic Franco Moretti argued that Dracula can very much be read as an allegory for capital expansion: ‘like capital, Dracula is impelled towards a continuous growth, an unlimited expansion of his domain: accumulation is inherent in his nature’.14 In a riff on the same theme, Donna Jeanne Haraway suggests that the vampire represents ‘the marauding figure of unnaturally breeding capital, which penetrates every whole being and sucks it dry in the lusty production and vastly unequal accumulation of wealth.’15 Such analysis seems persuasive to me, but it is worth expanding on. As already noted, a key shift in the vampire archetype takes place when the vampire ceases to be comprehended as something immanent to the village – that is, as a deceased villager with his own history rooted in the life of the community – and instead becomes articulated in terms of a mysterious power which penetrates the community from the outside. To express the same thing in historical terms, the change here is very much the movement away from a ‘natural’ economy based primarily on use value to an economy grounded in generalised commodity production 14 F Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, (Verso, London: 1983) 91. 15 D J Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan_Meets_Onco Mouse, (Routledge, New York: 1997) 215.

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and exchange. What is the ontological difference when we speak of use and exchange here? If we take the example of a Van Gogh painting – The Starry Night for instance – its most fundamental use value lies in its ability to move us, its aesthetic beauty. Such beauty is very much bound up with the historical nature of the object – that is, its aesthetic formation. Van Gogh poured not only colours into the canvas but also his very being. Or to say the same, the concrete content of the painting is inexorably bound up with the aesthetic process which has called it into being. But when that painting goes before the market and achieves a specific price tag, that price is something which penetrates it from the outside, so to speak. It attaches itself to the painting, but it is not bound up with its fundamental nature, its physical form and the feelings and sensibilities such a form denotes. If we extend this analysis to the vampire, then we see in the earlier archetype that the horror of the vampire is bound to the immanent development of a deceased individual; the horror, then, is immanent to the process which comes to yield the vampire in question, and in this regard, the earlier vampire archetype accords with the logic of use value. In the latter paradigm, however, the vampire ceases to be bound to a historically constituted individual who is immanent to a given community and instead takes the form of an external and metaphysical force which penetrates the community life from the outside. Thus, the later paradigm accords with the logic of exchange value in as much as exchange is not immanent to the nature of the object. The means by which the market economy overwhelms previous social forms is a long and protracted one taking place over many centuries and on several levels – from the breakdown of the organic unity of the labour process at the point of production (which we have already referenced in brief) to the concomitant extirpation of the peasants from the land and their means of production and their subsequent conversion into wage labourers. But the pressures of capital accumulation become particularly pronounced in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, channelled as they would be through the mechanics of the industrial revolution. This, however, was also the period in which the rapidly developing industrial working class was only just beginning to emerge and was yet to be constituted as an independent social power. A forensic analysis which penetrated the mysteries of capital in its relation to labour – the type of analysis Marx would provide in the later part of the nineteenth century in his masterwork – was at this point not possible for the very reason that the industrial proletariat had not fully come into being.

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To elucidate, Marx’s single greatest discovery was to unearth the secret of added value. Marx would demonstrate that newly created value (the value which would eventually be concretised in profit) has as its sole source the commodity labour power. A typical commodity, according to the Marxist account, attains its exchange value from the socially necessary labour time embodied within it. A diamond, therefore, is worth more than an apple because far more labour operations are performed in bringing it to market: the diamond must be cleaved from the rock, the ore broken down, the pure material then transported before being cut and fashioned and so on. Thus the finished commodity contains within itself the ghostly echo of all the labour operations required to make it saleable. But labour power, Marx noted, is unique. Like any other commodity its value is equal to the socially necessary labour time which is required to facilitate its appearance on the market. So, for instance, the socially necessary labour time required to feed, clothe and shelter this particular worker for a given day might be equal to three hours of labour time – that is, three hours of that worker’s labour time expended working in the factory (average conditions pertaining). But labour power is special because not only is it equal to its own value in this way, but it is able to produce a surplus value over and above this. If the socially necessary labour time embodied in the labour power of a given worker in a day might be equivalent to three hours of work in the factory on the part of that worker, then the same worker can nevertheless continue to work for a period of time over and above this: for four hours, for five, for ten, for twelve even. Labour power, Marx demonstrated, is a unique commodity because while it is still subject to the law of value and is realised as any other commodity in the medium of exchange, it is also capable of generating a surplus value over and above the value necessary for its continued reproduction and sale on the market. Consequently, Marx was able to unearth the nature of exploitation which undergirds capitalist society – the means by which capital is able to appropriate some portion of surplus value. The law of value, in one form or another, goes as far back as Thomas Aquinas, but pre-Marx, it received its most sophisticated expression in the work of the classical political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Neither thinker, however, was able to successfully apply the law of value to labour power in its commodity form, and thereby transcend the horizons of the bourgeois class perspective. Adam Smith, in the words of the great Marxist economist Isaac Illyich Rubin, ‘confuses labour with the products of labour right through his analysis’,16 and in so doing, he 16

I I Rubin, A History of Economic Thought, (Ink Links Ltd, London: 1979) 190.

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obliterates the specific socio-historical character of the exchange which takes place between capitalist and worker. If labour power is regarded abstractly in the same way as the materialised labour which is embodied as a physical commodity, if it is regarded as the product of labour rather than in its aspect as a specific form of labour activity which has been commoditised, then its ability to produce the surplus value which is appropriated by capital is rendered invisible. Thus, the relationship between capitalist and worker is denuded of its socio-historical character and instead appears merely in the abstract guise of two generic commodity owners who bring about an exchange of products of equal value (for this reason, Smith had to argue that the law of value had ceased to operate in the wage-labour exchange because he was unable to use it (the law of value) to explicate profit – or in its abstract form – surplus value). Ricardo’s theory, too, ultimately foundered on the same issue: ‘Ricardo’s inability to grasp the social nature of value as an expression of the production relations between people created enormous difficulties for him’.17 Rather than treat capital as a social relation of appropriation, Ricardo regards it in ‘material-technical terms’,18 as part of the collective wealth which is used in production – that is, the accumulated labour of the past which is manifested in the clothing, raw materials, machinery and so on that provide the materialtechnological basis of production. Like Smith, ultimately, Ricardo ‘turns the confrontation between capital and labour power from a conflict between social classes into a material-technical counter-position’.19 But the reason that Marx was able to apply the law of value to the problem of labour power in its commoditised form so as to unravel its hidden, metaphysical secret – its ability to yield added value – was not simply the result of his more radical sensibilities in comparison to the classical political economists, but was also the product of a more fundamental fact. When Marx was writing, the industrial proletariat had emerged as a coherent social entity with its own political programme – not only in Britain with the Chartist movement but also in France – as was made clear by the revolutionary upsurge in 1848. In his magnum opus, Lukács famously theorised the industrial proletariat as the ‘identical subject-object of the social and historical process’.20

17

Ibid. 255. Ibid. 256. 19 Ibid. 257. 20 G Lukács, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, History and Class Consciousness, (Merlin Press, London: 1983) 149. 18

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What he means by this, in brief, is that the proletarian is a bearer of the fundamental economic unit of capitalism – the commodity form; he or she is, in fact, a living commodity, and so, for the proletariat, the knowledge of the fundamental essence of capitalism is, simultaneously, a knowledge of self. We have, therefore, an identity of subject and object in the Hegelian philosophical tradition. But what this also means is that the theoretical excavation – performed by Marx – of the form of labour power as value adding substance would not have been possible until the industrial proletariat had been brought to fruition as a coherent historical entity at the level of social existence. No matter, then, how gifted the individual theorist, the attempt to theorise capital – and the secret of capital as alienated labour power – specifically as appropriated surplus value – before the development of an industrial working class – must necessarily have led to failure. It must necessarily run aground in the way Smith and Ricardo’s theories did because the form of social existence which would visibly and coherently exhibit the essence of capital accumulation vis-à-vis labour power was not yet fully developed; the enigma of capital, therefore, was not simply something unknown but rather was, by its very nature, something unknowable – at least at this juncture in the historical process. To say that the force of capital was unknowable is at once to emphasise its noumenal character, which brings us back to the question of the vampire archetype. Here we might remember that the first literary depiction of the vampire as a creature both without any backstory (historically unknowable), and which penetrated the community from the outside, was offered up by John Polidori in his work, The Vampyre, which came into print at exactly this time. That is, it came into print during the historical moment when the processes of primitive accumulation had been at work for centuries – penetrating communities from the outside, breaking down the natural economy. But at the same time, capital’s antithesis, the modern proletariat, had not yet been constituted as a concrete social entity. And it is this historical moment when capital appears to humankind in all its alienated and spectral power as something unknowable and implacable; it is this moment which is condensed into a fantasy form – in and through the vampire as transcendental object. Later depictions of the vampire might have departed from this archetype. Even in Dracula, as we have already noted, there occurs a vague reference to some type of historical background. But now we can appreciate the full aesthetic importance of the dialectical progression which is evinced in the movement from the novel Let the Right One In, to the Swedish film

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of the same name, and finally to the American remake Let Me In. It is a movement which transforms the vampire archetype from the historical to the transcendental, but this movement reflects the transformation of the vampire archetype which took place across the centuries in the mythology and literature more broadly and was itself thoroughly permeated by the anxieties and fears of old-world communities whose character was increasingly undermined and transformed by the development of capitalist social relations and who experienced in capital the infiltration of a ghostly, alien, external power. Let Me In is shot in an isolated border town on the outskirts of New Mexico which seems to stop dead before a snow covered expanse and the endless black of night. Abby materialises from such blackness and embodies that which is forever external, without history or origination. When Owen finally asks her the tremulous question – ‘Are you a vampire?’21 – she cannot answer affirmatively, for it is as if her nature is veiled even from herself. The most she can utter, pensive and uncertain, is, ‘I need blood.’22

21 22

Let Me In, director/writer – Matt Reeves, Hammer Films, 2010. Ibid.

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5 True Detective and Capitalist Development in Its Twilight Phase

Long the shore the cloud waves break, The twin suns sink beneath the lake, The shadows lengthen In Carcosa. Strange is the night where black stars rise, And strange moons circle through the skies But stranger still is Lost Carcosa. – Robert W Chambers

Set in the bayous, swamps and small towns of Louisiana, the first series of True Detective involved a self-contained story which played out over eight episodes and three separate time frames. The first period brought us back to 1995, where the corpse of a woman had been found at the edge of a thick grasslands, positioned by a gnarly, solitary tree. The sense of the gothic is heightened by the fact that the victim had been posed on her knees as though praying, her hands had been bound, she’d been blindfolded and a set of stag antlers had been mounted on her head. Several symbols had been daubed on her body. The two detectives investigating the case, Martin Hart and Rustin Cohle, eventually turn up more victims, which point towards the work of a ritualistic mass murderer. Intermittently, the camera jumps to 2012, at which time both policemen are being interviewed by another set of detectives from a special investigative unit. It is revealed that Marty and Rust had a falling out in 2002, and they have not been on speaking terms since. Further 58

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still, the object of the investigation is Rust himself, whom the interrogators believe might be somehow implicated in the murders, crimes that have been ongoing even though Marty and Rust apprehended and shot two suspects some years before. The final section of the story involves Marty and Rust trying to come to terms with one another once more and find the missing link in the puzzle: the mysterious figure who is still out there and is still torturing and killing. The relationship between the two men, which provides the driving force of the story more generally, represents something more than a riff on the cop-buddy theme. It is true that Rust and Marty are mismatched, and this, in places, sparks a certain dark comedy. Whenever Rust delivers one of his more existential homilies – describing self-consciousness as a grotesque mutation of the natural order, as something which should never have bubbled up out of the evolutionary morass, for it provides an unnatural self-awareness which is heaped like a curse across our existence – there is a great deal of comic value derived from first seeing the look of contorted concentration which crosses Marty’s face as he tries to comprehend the thrust of Rust’s bleak verbosity, before he is overwhelmed by the irritation which seeps into him once he has decided that his partner is making no sense whatsoever. But at the same time, these comic asides belie the fact that there is something more fundamental at work here. Rust’s pronounced introversion and profound pessimism represent more than simple idiosyncrasies. When we meet Rust and Marty at the start – we are quietly treated to an appreciation of Marty’s household – his glowing wife, his beautiful daughters – whereas Rust appears in the guise of a lonely interloper. It is revealed that his own familial happiness was irrevocably shattered with the death of his child some years before and with the demise of his marriage, which that tragic event prompted. His mood – one which combines the most awful pain and torment with the dark snippets of mumbled, misremembered philosophies – is also redolent of the fact that his life has been smashed to pieces, and now he is barely able to cling to the fragments. More broadly, the difference in circumstance between the two men also represents a more fundamental distinction. Marty recognises that Rust is a brilliant and effective detective, but at the same time, the other man’s way of thinking and his methods prove inexorably alien to Marty’s own. This difference in temperament is rooted in the social conditions of each man’s existence more broadly. Whereas the semblance of Rust’s world has been irrevocably shattered, Marty’s remains intact. Rust has no family, and he now lacks the emotional capabilities to build one.

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Marty, on the other hand, is anchored to the world in and through his family; in the very first episode, he reflects on the unnaturalness of an older man without kin – ‘past a certain age, a man without a family can be a bad thing’.1 It is clear here that Marty is referring to the typical nuclear family, the one he has endeavoured to cultivate, and this coheres in a broader conservatism in which everything in Marty’s worldview is subsumed in a tight and well-ordered moral vision. He believes in regularity, decency and community; he sees himself as a bastion and protector of these values and traditions; he is a conservator of a strict and sensical social order in which the wolf has to be kept from the door and decent people are to remain unmolested by anarchic elements on the fringes. His black-and-white moralism is supplemented by his methodological technique in terms of investigation: he tends to locate the most visible and immediate elements in the case and tries to string them together in a coherent cause and effect paradigm. But Rust operates on a fundamentally different level. Because his own historical formation has yielded such a shattered development, he is unable to form an image of society as a coherent and well-regulated whole. Rather, everything is fractured and fragmented, and the superficial semblance of order belies the fundaments which are forever in effect just beneath the surface: the swirling chaos of nihilism and disintegration; a perpetual blackness which consumes everything from the inside out, and which mocks with its grotesque darkness the superficial facades and performances we indulge in order to prove to ourselves that we are consciously whole and morally aloof. His method of detection is counterposed to Marty’s: it involves seeing the hidden essence behind the appearance, the secret conspiracy of an invisible network of power and the sinister puppet master who lurks behind the scenes. The juxtaposition between Marty and Rust, then, represents not only a literary description of two conflicting personalities but also the clash of two profoundly antagonistic worldviews. When Rust mumbles out one of his bleak homilies, Marty is often bluntly dismissive, but at the same time, one senses how Marty fights to contain a more profound form of anger. He tries to ridicule Rust’s ramblings and to label them as incoherent non-sequiturs, but in reality, he is deeply perturbed, at times becoming almost violently enraged. He is made furious because Rust’s observations involve more than just their formal aspect – that is, the obscurity and bizarreness of the phrases themselves. The 1 True Detective, ‘The Long Bright Dark’, Episode 1, Season 1, writer/creator – Nic Pizzolatto, Anonymous Content: 2014.

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feelings and sensibilities which underlie them also carry a genuinely radical conviction: there is something profoundly corrupt and inadequate about the status quo. Rust’s views and thoughts threaten the cohesion which Marty has so meticulously woven as part and parcel of the ideological and cultural patchwork which reinforces his own existence. And at this point we can see that the three-tier time frame, although irregular, remains necessary for True Detective. Because the character conflict which takes place between Rust and Marty is redolent of these larger themes, it is important that we do leap forward in time by more than a decade; in so doing, we are able to see how each of the protagonists has ended up, to see in practise how each of their respective worldviews has fared in the context of the realities it has faced. On the face of it, it seems that Rust has had the worst of things. Having left the police force many years earlier, he is emaciated and gaunt, his alcoholism is prolific, and the visions which had been sparked by his forays into hard substance abuse have continued to inflict and dizzy him. But the truth is, despite his haggard appearance, Rust is merely an older version of his past self; there is a continuity to his character and worldview which runs through the various time frames and renders him one and the same man. In Marty’s case, however, things are a little different. Even at the very height of his career, the contradictions in his existence and the cracks in his black-and-white worldview were already beginning to show. He espoused decency and family values but seemed to bitterly resent his father-in-law and the oligarchy of wealthy landed interest that he represented. Marty claimed to put the interests of his family above all else, and yet he repeatedly cheated on his wife. The Marty we meet in the future is a somewhat more subdued individual, and he has been rendered pathetic too as his extra-marital misdemeanours have resulted in an exile from the family home, and in place of his prestigious role as a state detective, he now finds himself the proprietor of a down-market PI agency: ‘Hart Investigative Solutions’. He spends his nights alone, munching on TV dinners and watching old cowboy movies. The vision of a coherent, black-and-white moral landscape, regulated by the forces of law and order, a vision which Marty’s conservatism so futilely tries to bind him to, is eroded not only at the personal level of the individual character – by the way Marty’s life eventually tapers off into its rather atomised and solitary twilight – but also by the pattern and development of the murders themselves as the broader panorama of the story pans out. Here too Rust’s worldview is seen to prevail.

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Initially the detectives are conflicted about the first murder case: the murder of prostitute Dora Kelly Lange. Rust quickly establishes that this is the work of a serial killer, while the other detectives are inclined to believe the killing is an aberration: they think it is the by-product of the risk and danger that prostitutes inevitably expose themselves to. Such a difference then graduates into a broader set of terms. Rust establishes that Lange was attending church in the time immediately before her disappearance and is thus able to start piecing together the forms of a more underlying pattern. Not only have the killings been a regular and repeated occurrence, but also they are to be integrated into the broader institutional corruption of a specific church hierarchy: the nexus of churches, faith schools and foundations established by the millionaire evangelist preacher Billy Lee Tuttle. Tuttle, it transpires, not only has connections to the world of politics – through his cousin Governor Edward Tuttle – but also has sufficient status and economic clout to lobby the police to appoint a special task force investigating ‘anti-Christian crimes’. Rust uses these facts in order to hint at the more fundamental pattern of power and corruption which is at work underneath the surface, and naturally, inevitably, this meets with the hostility of the department who are to some degree infiltrated by such corruption – or whose interests are better served by turning a blind eye to it at the least. The difference between Marty and Rust’s worldviews – first exhibited at the personal level in and through their various exchanges – is now embodied on an institutional level: the activities of the police on a day-to-day basis as they continue to ‘keep the peace’, arresting drug addicts, vagrants, a mother who exhibits Munchausen syndrome – but necessarily remaining blank before the more systematic corruption which lurks just beneath the surface of a seemingly well-ordered reality. And here is where True Detective really comes into its own; the notion of this hidden world underneath the surface is exhibited at the level of the landscape itself. The thick, sweltering forests of the marshlands shelter under their canopy pockets of human life, which have fallen below the radar of the everyday world. As their investigation persists, Rust and Marty are led to a remote ranch, deep within the bayou, where a group of decrepit caravans house a small community of under-aged girls: teenage runaways who are now being exploited as prostitutes. As they become more deeply embroiled in the case, the detectives are led to dilapidated, gutted churches overgrown by the weeds of the ever encroaching wilderness, home now only to the rats and the insects; adorned with the same mysterious pagan symbology which is seen to

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criss-cross the bodies of the murder victims. It is under the carapace of the arching trees, then, that Rust’s view of the world is most exemplified. In the shadows and the decay, an ancient stillness abides; any sense of the ordinary and coherent passage of time is surreally undermined, or in Rust’s words, time becomes ‘a flat circle’.2 The feeling of fragmentation, of otherworldliness, about the forms of life which have developed in the alcoves and crevices of the bayou and the forest lands – abides. This atmosphere of ‘other-ness’ is enhanced by the folklore which comes to overlay the story. Rust discovers the diary of Dora Lange, which contains enigmatic references to a quasi-mythical place – Carcosa – and reveals that it was there she came under the influence of a figure known only as the King in Yellow. Type in any quick Internet search using those terms, and you will see the web is awash with articles which endeavour to decode the mythology which underpins True Detective – and this, perhaps, is a sign of its fecundity. Most commonly you will discover that ‘Carcosa’ is a sinister magical city which appears in an 1895 short story collection by the American horror writer Robert W Chambers. The book was called The King in Yellow and contains the fragmented portions of an imaginary play which condemns to insanity all those who read its words. Throughout True Detective – references to Carcosa and the Yellow King abound. The witnesses who repeatedly refer to the Yellow King and the scarred man – alongside the forays of the detectives themselves deeper into the wilderness – allow for the rich depiction of a sinister alternative reality which lurks in the forests on the outskirts of civilisation. This draws upon the motif of the classical German fairy story – in this case transplanted onto Louisiana soil via the medium of American Gothic through writers such as Chambers and Lovecraft. But there is something more fundamental to it as well; again, it is no coincidence that the loci of corruption seem to centre on Billy Lee Tuttle, who is an evangelist preacher and therefore a propagator of a monotheism which appears to hold together in a coherent and totalised worldview. But once more, this appearance is belied by the underlying essence; when the detectives begin to uncover the truth, when they discover what is really going on behind the façade of Tuttle’s church networks, they unearth the horrific details of child sacrifices, which are linked to the proliferation of a series of cults and ancient pagan practises indicated by the presence of the

2 True Detective, Episode 5, Season 1, “The Secret Fate of all Life”, writer/ creator – Nic Pizzolatto, Anonymous Content: 2014.

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symbols. Again the semblance of the whole manages to mask this, the more fragmented and broken reality. As the investigation delves ever deeper, the detectives close in on the fabled Yellow King, and the final denouement occurs when Rust and Marty discover a hidden isolated patch of land deep within the swamps, which the killer has cultivated and moves within and which has at its centre a large old house that contains a surreal blend of archaic technology, beads, dolls and rotting furniture. As the view expands, the house is bordered by a wild, unkempt garden, where the weeds have grown giant and obscene, crawling across an old shed with a decomposing body inside before finally the terrain graduates into a series of catacombs riddled with grotesque decorations up to the point of a ghastly central chamber whose open roof reveals a firmament of stars. This then, is Carcosa, the shadowy hinterlands between the reality and the myth, where the detectives finally stumble upon the monster which waits at the end of the dream. On the structural level, then, we are able to locate three layers. Initially – the conflict between Marty and Rust at the level of political philosophy – between Marty’s vision of a well-ordered whole, and Rust’s appreciation of the instability and fragmentation which lurks beneath the surface. This ideological conflict is then graduated into an institutional conflict in and through the modus operandi of the police, who again, in their prosecution of crime, remain at the level of surface phenomena and are largely oblivious to the more fundamental currents of corruption which flow underneath. This again is broadened into a larger ontological contradiction: the contradiction embodied in the landscape and reality of Louisiana itself – the forests and the swamps providing the carapace under which occurs a more fundamental fragmentation – the breakdown of the broader, nationally cohesive community into a series of local polities and tribalisms. This latter development is also exemplified by the way in which the national religion – Christianity – devolves into a series of pagan cults. The three layers are graduations on the same theme: the appearance which belies the fundamental essence. The way in which such a contradiction is developed in ever broader terms is integral to the plot – because it is only by exhibiting it thus that the full failure of Marty’s conservatism is lain bare. Marty, as his personal life implodes, as he is left isolated and bereft is nevertheless redeemed because the development of his own life, and the broadening of the plot more generally, now reveals to him what we, the audience, have had systematically lain out for us. The fundamental corruption beneath the surface – the existence of Carcosa – is

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no mere phantasm conjured up from one of Rust’s drug-induced hallucinations. Rather Carcosa is a reality. And in the final two episodes Marty unites with Rust once more in the pursuit of the Yellow King. This is significant because it means that Marty has managed to overcome his instinctive conservatism and see beyond the immediacies and certainties of the reality in which he is embroiled; this is an aspect of his heroism – just as much as the final confrontation with the Yellow King. In many ways, the ending itself is rather muted. The Yellow King – stripped of his enigmatic and mythical resonance – is eventually revealed as a sadistic, deeply damaged land labourer, Errol Childress. Although Rust and Marty eventually succeed in finding and killing Childress, the broader structural corruption goes largely unaddressed. But the redemptive aspect doesn’t consist in their ability to fundamentally transform the reality they encounter but rather in a far smaller but touching concession – that is, Marty’s ability to finally comprehend the truth of the world he inhabits. In so doing, he achieves a moment of genuine reconciliation with his partner in and through the sacrifice they undertake together. One can see, I think, how the form of the piece – its three-tier time frame – is entirely equal to its content; the exhibiting of the contradiction between appearance and essence at the personal level, the institutional level and the broader ontological level. The plotline involves the process by which the two protagonists become increasingly aware of this contradiction – in its multiple-manifestations – and how Marty in particular is able to set aside his conservatism in order to glimpse the hidden world behind the veil and finally come to terms with his partner. I have endeavoured to break the piece down into its logical components and layers, but watching it unfold in real time, so to speak, one is aware of how seamlessly and invisibly these elements are synthesised in an organic whole. Beyond the artistic skill and depth of the writer, however, one must ask the question: What is it about this dark and Gothic Deep South parable which allows it to resonate with a twenty-first century audience? What secrets does it hold within its forests and swamp lands that hint at underlying truths which are immersed in the forms and structures of modern social existence more generally? A clue to the question can be pinpointed in the landscape of True Detective. As this article has already endeavoured to indicate, the swamps and wilderness serve to disguise the process of a more fundamental social fragmentation. But what is also interesting is that the natural imagery – of weeds, brush, trees and swamps – is nearly always married with technological elements: in Childress’ ramshackle house, the disarray contains

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old technology like VCRs, but more broadly, the natural elements of the bayou tend to swirl and engulf a series of human constructions – dilapidated factories and long abandoned fisheries. The depiction of an eroded industry swallowed up by the elements is a recurring theme. And it is a highly significant one with important historical ramifications. It has long since been the fashion for the defenders of industrial capitalism to see in its development a linear progression, an upward movement by which the more advanced capitalist nations imposed their forms on more backward ones and revolutionised their social structures. Earlier ‘natural’ economies were automatically displaced by a system of generalised commodity production and free labour, which in turn transformed loosely knit and isolated communities bound by tribal allegiances or feudal inheritances into a more cohesive and totalised citizenry, fully integrated into a national and global market, enjoying all the technologies and political prerogatives which arise from such a situation. In his famous homily to the revolutionary power of capitalism in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx wrote: The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’. ... [I]t has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation.3 Although Marx’s appreciation of the transformative effect that the spread of capitalism has on less developed economies contains a profound truth, it outlines only a general trend and does not take into account those countervailing tendencies which became pronounced due to specific conditions, particularly those which pertained in the twentieth century and an epoch of empires and blocs of nations jostling for territory within the global market. As part of this fundamental dynamic, a capitalist power would often infiltrate a less economically developed ‘nation’ in order to convert it into an imperial proxy, but in so doing, it wasn’t always the case that the latter automatically received impetus to its social development. In the twentieth century, in particular, fully capitalist nations often exacerbated pre-capitalist divisions within a given country rather than simply extinguishing them and replacing them 3 K Marx and F Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, (Progress Publishers, Moscow: 1969) 44.

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with more advanced social forms. Rwanda is a case in point. Its colonisation by Belgium did bring with it a development in industry, but at the same time, and in order to enforce its political hegemony, Belgium empowered one section of the indigenous population over the other. The tribal divisions which had existed in the territory hitherto – the divisions between Hutu, Tutsi and Twa – had remained remarkably fluid. The membership of your group was determined through hereditary – your male parent – but in the same moment you could grow up as a Hutu – as a farmer – and become a Tutsi – or a cattle owner – in and through marriage. Likewise, an increase or decrease in economic status could see you shunted from the one group to the other. But with its colonisation by the Belgians at the end of the First World War, and with the start of a more direct colonial rule, Tutsi power was cultivated as an imperial proxy, and the fluidic interrelationship between the indigenous groups was converted into a fixed rigidity. Belgium introduced identity cards in order to more clearly delineate ‘ethnicity’, and these helped prevent movement between the different social sections and classes. This, of course, set the basis for a bitter and ongoing conflict between one group and the other, eventually leading to the genocide in 1994 and the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. The traditional narrative tends to describe this event as a result of primitive tribal tensions which had become inflamed and then burst through the boundaries. Such an account skirts over the fact that the conflict was very much a product of the ethnic identities imposed by a specific strain of capitalist imperialism. It was use of colonial power itself which morphed and perverted pre-existing identities and social arrangements, and thus converted what were essentially distinctions in occupation into hard and fast ethnic distinctions which would set the basis for an irreconcilable civil conflict. These ethnic differences, then, are in a very real way to be comprehended as part and parcel of capitalist modernity – not as something antithetical to it. It is this historical reality which sets the basis for True Detective and provides its aesthetic necessity. The natural precursor to True Detective tended to operate according to a single, fundamental paradigm. In the Heat of the Night, for example – the 1967 film with Sidney Poitier which was based on a book of the same name – you had a detective hunting down a murderer in a rural backwater in the heart of the Deep South. The contrast is clear: Poitier plays an experienced detective from the urban North, who finds himself at odds with the backwardness and prejudice he encounters in the agricultural South. The point is rendered all the more explicit when we discover that the murder victim was an

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industrialist who had plans to install a factory in the local area and was opposed in his endeavours by a wealthy plantation owner. It doesn’t seem a stretch to surmise that such a motif represents the historical afterecho of the American Civil War, which pitted the capitalist industry of the North against the plantation economies of the South and the barbarism of the slave system. The other genre which makes copious use of the same theme is the horror/psycho-thriller. In the film Deliverance, for instance, the city dweller is again pitted against the savage backwardness of the agricultural backwaters, and this pathfinding film spawned a whole host of successors from The Chainsaw Massacre to Wrong Turn. But these films, perhaps in keeping with the historically specific realities of the American Civil War, offer a stark juxtaposition between industry and agriculture, between the city and the countryside, between the cosmopolis and the backwater, between the progressive and the reactionary; in the last analysis – between civilisation and ‘the other’. In True Detective, however, these binary oppositions collapse; the ‘other’ which shelters in the swamps and the forests is what it is because it has been reconstructed according to the paradigm of ‘civilisation’. It is the pervasive forces of big business – embodied by Tuttle’s evangelical entrepreneurship – that infiltrate the social forms of the bayou and provoke their grotesque mutations. The Yellow King, otherwise known as Childress, proves to be one of many victims of abuse to emerge from the schools which Tuttle had set up some decades before as part of his business racket. So, while something like Deliverance derives its aesthetic echo from the movement of capitalist development in the ascension – that is, the overwhelming of the slave-holding South by the more progressive forces of free labour and industry – True Detective represents capitalism in its descending phase, a more shadowy epoch of imperial intervention which was very much in effect in the twentieth century and which sets the basis for a far more retrograde effect on the social structures it transfigures. According to the plot-parameters of the former model, the agencies of good and evil are very clearly delineated. The city slickers are perhaps naive and wilfully arrogant as they penetrate the swamps and the forests of a world they don’t truly understand, but ultimately, they are the carriers of a humanity and metropolitan sense of enlightenment which is constantly on the verge of being swallowed by the atavistic darkness as represented by the rural elements. In True Detective, however, the elements of good are very much blended with the elements of evil; their unmediated opposition can’t be sustained, because the forms of ‘civilisation’, including the state police who investigate the murders, are also part and parcel of the underlying

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and systematic corruption which has set the basis for the crimes. Marty and Rust, then, are part of the very forces they eventually come to fight against. True Detective presents a far more pessimistic and nuanced vision of the world, precisely because it draws its aesthetic impetus from a version of capitalism which has entered its twilight phase and lost its once historically progressive power. This is particularly evinced by the backdrop of the American reality in the twenty-first century: the invasions of several countries in the Middle East which have fostered the development of various ethnic conflicts that are now in the process of imploding any semblance of national cohesion – Iraq being a case in point. The reality of True Detective contains within itself this sensibility; the effects of ‘civilisation’ on the ‘other’ are profoundly detrimental, generating corrosive and cancerous aberrations and an underlying fragmentation. True Detective reflects this bleakness not only in terms of its landscape and the factories and former communities which have been abandoned to the wilderness but also in the terms of the hopelessness of Rust and Marty’s mission. They will never be able to undo the interminable processes which are at work at the most fundamental level – and their tragedy and their redemption lies, ultimately, in that the most they can hope to do is stop a single individual.

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6 Tupac Shakur: History’s Poet

Tupac was a mirror of contradictions. In the short time he lived, Tupac was a poet, artist, actor, rapper, model and screen writer. As well, he was a convicted batterer, a ‘thug’ and a self-styled ‘gangsta’ with murky gangland affiliations. On top of all that, he was a revolutionary. In order to understand such vivid paradoxes, we must locate them in the historical contradictions of the period more broadly. Tupac was born in 1971, at the tail end of the civil rights movement. This represented the end of an era of flourishing political activism. In the time before, in the 1950s and ’60s – and through the nexus of churches, black-owned businesses and local grass roots associations – the civil rights movement had brought about a series of boycotts, strikes and mass mobilisations. Passive protest combined with more militant forms of civil disobedience to create a heroic and sustained pressure, one which would eventually collapse the hateful apartheid regime of Jim Crow America. Although nobody could deny that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were significant steps forward, they didn’t alter greatly the trenchant social inequality which was already in place in the US. Black people were no longer legally barred from restaurants and hotels, true enough, but few could afford to eat at the best restaurants or stay at the nicest hotels in any event. As the civil rights movement wound down in the 1970s, those organisations which wanted to address issues of fundamental economic inequality were increasingly isolated; the iconic Black Panther Party, for instance, went from tens of thousands of members in the late 1960s, to a group which had less than 30 by the early ’80s. They had been infiltrated and slandered by government lackeys in a campaign sponsored by the FBI, known as the Counterintelligence Program or COINTELPRO. They had been subjected to decades of police brutality, but they were 70

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also victims of a broader malaise, a retreat from politics due to a global economic slump and the savage neoliberal measures which were enacted in its aftermath and which brutalised whole communities. The great social movements which had pervaded the decades before fell into decline. This was apparent even at the level of individual destiny. Tupac’s mother Afeni, for instance, was a spirited and courageous Black Panther leader in the 1960s, although by the time of Tupac’s teenage years, her triumph had become tragedy as she had been reduced to crack addiction. The generation of black children who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s gleaned an important insight: although their parents might talk about the mighty civil rights struggles with moony-eyed nostalgia, in the harsh light of the present, they remained as impoverished as ever. Many young people took to heart the lesson that politics and social struggle are ultimately futile endeavours. And, if you cannot raise yourself out of poverty in and through community activism and collective struggle, then the only viable alternative remains to empower yourself on a purely individual basis. Such a conclusion would resonate not only in politics but also in culture more broadly. In the hip hop world of the early 1990s, it impressed in a strident, vivid way. Figures such as Puff Daddy explicitly located black empowerment within the narrow limits of individual economic success and the spirit of entrepreneurialism. Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs came from the projects of Harlem, but his gaze was always directed away from the community in which he grew up and outward towards the ivory towers of the Manhattan business district and their sleek promise of social and financial elevation. Puff Daddy’s hero was Donald Trump rather than Angela Davis or Malcolm X, and he went on to found a music label (Bad Boy Entertainment) and achieve wealth both as an artist and businessperson. Combs professed to have retained contact with political radicalism, ‘I’m as pro-worker as they get’,1 but his personal history tells a rather different story, one in which the pursuit of profit tends to trump political themes of rights and social emancipation. One of his first entrepreneurial ventures, for instance, involved the attempt to promote a celebrity basketball game which was subsequently oversold. A crush ensued where 29 people were left injured and nine lost their lives. In 1998 some of the victims of the incident filed a successful lawsuit against Combs. He was ordered to pay compensation when the 1 S Combs, ‘P Diddy in Sweatshop Row’, BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/ hi/world/americas/3222521.stm

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judge ruled that he and his partner ‘were liable for 50 percent of the accident’.2 The same ruthless entrepreneurialism found expression in the music itself. The loss of community and consequent emphasis on self-advancement through the individual acquisition of wealth and property was rendered vivid, not only in the lyrical content of many of the songs but also in the way rappers appeared decked out in gaudy gold chains and diamond rings, posed before streamlined super cars or luxury yachts. The dissolution of collective struggle also served to weaken the bonds of solidarity – so apparent in the 1950s and ’60s – between men and women. Combined with the emphasis on property, this allowed for the emergence of a particularly virulent strain of misogyny within rap music and film: the shady, underworld figure of the ‘pimp’ now became someone to revere, not only because he had manifest sexual control over the women he came into contact with but because he could use those women as ‘commodities’, alongside the cars and gold chains, to serve as symbols of his wealth and status. As a child of the revolutionary tradition Tupac was highly attuned to this shift in the historic panorama. In one of his more poignant and melancholy lines, he summed it up when he reflected how ‘we went from brothers and sisters, to niggaz and bitches.’3 In their astute and comprehensive biography of the slain rap icon, Tayannah Lee McQuillar and Fred L Johnson III, provide a fluid and intriguing description of the political legacy that Tupac had had passed down to him, in the main from his mother. Tupac’s maternal ancestors came from Lumberton, North Carolina, a region noted for its traditions of radical and militant resistance to Confederate power and its eventual successors in the form of the Klu Klux Klan. But this militancy was possessed from the outset by a unique composition which blended the struggles of ‘poor communities of impoverished and harassed Native Americans, blacks, and even poor whites.’4 In other words, the fight back stretched beyond the interests of any one single group and successfully coalesced in a broader universalism which came to ‘symbolise’ in general terms ‘the power of the powerless to resist’.5 Afeni Shakur transmitted some

2 J Berry, ‘Puff Daddy Settles Stampede Case’, MTV News, 25 May 2000. http:// www.mtv.com/news/921352/puff-daddy-settles-stampede-case/ 3 T Shakur, ‘When Thugz Cry’, Until the End of Time, Paramount Recording Studios, 2001. 4 T L McQuillar and F L Johnson III, Tupac Shakur – The Life and Times of an American Icon, (Decapo Press, Cambridge: 2010) 7. 5 Ibid. 7.

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sense of the broader parameters of social struggle when she told of ‘the courage and heroism the Lumbee Indians. ... As children, Tupac and his sister, Sekyiwa, heard the Lumbee tales that had been passed down from generation to generation.’6 The significance of the political and universalist traditions which Tupac inherited from his mother cannot be overstated. Much of Tupac’s great songs were concerned with the need to assert the universal moment once more, to address the loss of community and the social fragmentation which underpinned it. Such fragmentation is, of course, anathema to social struggle and solidarity. Antagonisms between whites and blacks, heterosexuals and gays, state workers and those in the private sector, immigrants and domestics or whoever else inevitably weaken the struggle against oppression in its general form and thus must, in as far as it is possible, be transcended. Tupac already experienced a strong ideological impetus in this direction because his radical politics were informed not only by the great civil rights movements but also by the earlier struggles of those Lumbee Indians and their impoverished comrades, both blacks and whites. But in his mother’s revolutionary example, as a Black Panther in her own right, he was provided with yet another impulse towards a broader sense of universalism because the role of women in the movement – and the concomitant need to cultivate a respect and solidarity between both genders – holds a particularly important place in terms of the universalist dimensions of class struggle. Any split between men and women is simultaneously a split in the whole, and even on purely quantitative and practical grounds (let alone the ethical implications) a repressed group is at its least effective when one half of its membership is alienated from the other.7 Often one of the key ways in which one can gauge the strength of radical movements is in terms of the solidarity they promote between men and women. When, therefore, one registers the rise of a misogynistic content in a great deal of rap music it is symptomatic of the fact that the universalist tenor of collective social struggle had more and more been broken down at the fundamental level of social being.

6

Ibid. 9. One of the ways in which one can gauge the strength and weaknesses of radical movements is in terms of the solidarity they promote between men and women; see for instance Egypt, in which a revolutionary process which was blighted from the outset by a sustained misogyny has, at the time of writing, been forced into abeyance. 7

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It is for this reason that many of Tupac’s greatest works focus on the empowerment of poor women, not simply because he was empathetic and sensitive (though he possessed those qualities in abundance) but because the status of women in the struggle against repression was inexorably linked to the power of the universal more broadly. In providing to the struggle of impoverished women a beautiful and poetic expression, Tupac was – albeit subconsciously and through the medium of his art – seeking to reassert the power of the universal, of the community once more, over and against the fragmentation it had endured. It is the contradictory nature of such a proposition which gives Tupac’s work its tragic character; he was expressing in song a solidarity which was ever more lost to the world he’d grown up in. To put it another way, Tupac’s music exhibited a form whose content had been degraded at the level of social existence. The great political movements had either retreated or been destroyed, so now the moment of the universal could manifest only in the aesthetic plane in and through music. In his great anthem to revolution, Changes, Tupac expresses this paradox very clearly; he sings with hope and gusto about the need for struggle and uprising while simultaneously observing that the social agencies which might provide these things had already been destroyed: ‘It’s time to fight back/That’s what Huey said/Two shots in the dark now Huey’s dead.’8 The nod to Huey is a reference to Huey P Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party who was later murdered – only here Huey appears as a cipher, as a personification of the larger social movement which had itself been annihilated. Today it is all too easy to forget how ground-breaking some of Tupac’s songs were. They were revolutionary in many respects. In the track Dear Mamma, Tupac sings about Afeni. For a young man to come out in the ‘gangsta’-orientated rap world of the early 1990s and dedicate a song to his mother was unheard of and risked widespread ridicule and disparagement. Yet there was something about Tupac’s words and voice which gave to his songs a searing authenticity. Rap music shares something in common with country music, I would say, in as much as the voices of the individual artists are rarely melodic in the traditional sense. And Tupac’s voice was particularly raw; it was rich and deep but also throaty and unrelenting. You had to acclimatise yourself to it. Like the voice of Johnny Cash, its starkness – a whiskey-rich vocalisation often closer to simple speech than song – meant that there was no softening of the syllables by a sweeter smoother lilt; instead, the emotion itself remains 8

T Shakur, ‘Changes’, Greatest Hits, Interscope and Death Row, 1998.

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raw and unmediated. Its feeling was transmitted through the intense integrity, the purity, of the utterance and in his beautiful homily to a son’s love for his mother – this is powerfully manifest. Tupac’s voice here is gentle, little more than a husky whisper. The voice is understated, yet at the same time, the words resonate with such emotion that it is almost unbearable; you have the distinct feeling the singer is going to break down, to burst into tears, as he puts into perspective from the purview of his adult self just how meaningful his mother’s sacrifice was: ‘And I could see you comin’ home after work late. You’re in the kitchen tryin’ to fix us a hot plate. Ya just workin’ with the scraps you was given. And mama made miracles every Thanksgivin’.9 In the song Keep Your Head Up, again the emphasis falls on the empowerment of women and the joy to be found in the celebration of one’s identity as a communal being, as steeped in tradition and shared culture, for in Tupac the individual is to be made whole precisely by his or her identification with the community spirit: ‘Aiyyo, I remember Marvin Gaye used to sing ta me. He had me feelin’ like black was tha thing to be. And suddenly tha ghetto didn’t seem so tough. And though we had it rough, we always had enough’.10 But once more, the song oscillates between an appreciation of the universal moment and the realisation that it has been fatally undermined by the fragmented reality of the present: ‘I’m tryin’ to make a dollar out of fifteen cents. It’s hard to be legit and still pay tha rent. And in the end it seems I’m headin’ for tha pen. I try and find my friends, but they’re blowin’ in the wind. Last night my buddy lost his whole family. It’s gonna take the man in me to conquer this insanity.’11 And yet again, so much of the song is framed from the perspective of the lives of poor women as a group: ‘I give a holler to my sisters on welfare. Tupac cares, and don’t nobody else care.’12 9 10 11 12

T Shakur, ‘Dear Mamma’, Me Against The World, Interscope, 1995. T Shakur, ‘Keep Ya Head Up’, Strictly 4 My Niggaz, Interscope, 1993. Ibid. Ibid.

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Tupac was able to assimilate radical political traditions through his mother – that is, through the education she provided for him and through the battle for survival she was engaged in on their behalf. Tupac was rather fortunate, in one way at least, because when the family relocated from Harlem to Baltimore, he was able to win a place at the prestigious Baltimore School of Arts. There he studied poetry, acting, jazz and ballet. He became passionate about Shakespeare and performed in several plays. He began to hone his rap skills with enthusiasm and despite the fact that the school was overwhelmingly white and middle class, his developing talents met with praise and encouragement as the institution itself was saturated with a precocious, liberal atmosphere which endeavoured to promote curiosity and experimentation. Tupac later remarked how the school was mostly for ‘white kids and rich minorities’, but – with regard to the subjects he studied – he would have ‘been a totally different person had I not been exposed to those things.’13 It is in this period that Tupac’s burgeoning creative powers are subject to synthesis: the fusion of the political sensibilities he inherited in and through his family background with a new array of vibrant aesthetic forms and traditions. The synthesis would come to underpin the best of his later music. Nevertheless, this crystallisation of revolutionary ardour and artistic expression remained an isolated and individual development. The politics Tupac acquired were never to be supplemented by any broader revolutionary movement in society at large. Tupac had absorbed what he could from his mother and from a sporadic and haphazard contact with some others of the leading lights from the Black Panther Party in the day, who still lingered on the fringes, having avoided jail or worse. During his time spent in the Baltimore School of Arts, Tupac even became affiliated with the Young Communist League of the USA. But these influences were never allowed to coalesce with wider political developments because the world Tupac lived in was so very different from the one Afeni had known. The reality on the streets of Baltimore involved blackon-black violence on a far larger scale; depredation, drugs, gangs and gun crime were all more commonplace – as they represented the aftershocks of a shattered world. The political legacies of the past were, in Tupac, fused with the isolation and crushing poverty of the present. The Source magazine would later write of his first solo album – Strictly 4

13 T Shakur, ‘Tupac Shakur on his time at Baltimore School for the Arts’, The Baltimore Sun, 30 November 2007. http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/ education/blog/2007/11/tupac_shakur_on_his_time_at_ba.html

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My N.I.G.G.A.Z… – that it was ‘a combination of ’60s black political thought and ’90s urban reality’.14 We can see how the historical conflict between the universal tenor of community struggle and the narrow horizon of personal acquisition was one which had been grafted onto Tupac’s artistic psyche. His greater works raised the moment of the universal and the community especially in and through the struggle of women. This was inevitable not only because, as we have pointed out, the solidarity between men and women is inexorably bound up with the cohesiveness and wholeness of social movements in the modern context but also because a specific woman – his mother – provided Tupac with a living link between the time of the great civil rights movements and his own reality. But the world he encountered day-to-day on the streets stood in stark contradiction to his internal political conscience. In that place, the ‘pimp’ and the ‘gangsta’ had become the supreme symbols of resistance and empowerment because there were no other visible means. Particularity, individuality and factional identity (Tupac was later to demark himself as West Coast over and against the East) became the order of the day. For this, much of Tupac’s music involved a turn away from the universal, instead giving expression to the immediate aspiration for wealth and the purely individualised sense of power and status which the broader reality projected. In turning away from the universal, Tupac was, in a fundamental way, losing contact with historical ‘spirit’ – as Hegel calls it – the universal element which provided the animating principle for the greatness of his art. Bereft of that, Tupac was all too quick to revert to the depressingly familiar idiom of ‘hos’ and ‘bitches’ and to embrace the riches and prestige of his newly acquired superstar status. In the song Hell 4 A Hustler, Tupac asks the rhetorical question, ‘Why plant seeds in a dirty bitch?’15 It is impossible to interpret the lyric as anything other than sickening misogyny. In some ways, it is doubly degenerate because the misogyny is bolstered by a vulgar anti-workingclass stereotype too. The point Tupac is making here is that this type of poor woman will provide sexual favours in order to get pregnant and force a man into providing for her; she is inherently parasitical. Tupac’s sexism was not confined to song either. He was accused and charged with sexual assault, although this was always something he denied. But 14

‘Record Report’, The Source, April 1993, 69. Tupac and the Outlawz, ‘Hell 4 A Hustler’, Still I Rise, Amaru-Death Row-Interscope, 1999. 15

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there are other disturbing instances. When the feminist and civil rights activist Delores Tucker criticised the misogyny which infected a lot of rap music – and where one would have hoped that Tupac, the child of a female civil rights activist himself, might have responded with some degree of sensitivity – he delivered a series of lewd insults choosing to rhyme in song her surname ‘Tucker’ to the obvious and rather unimaginative expletive. Tupac’s foray into some of the worst elements of culture would have devastating consequences. He was later to ally with the Death Row record label – itself a mishmash of ruthless, lumpen, semi-criminal business elements, steeped in corruption and with links to the notorious LA street gang, ‘The Bloods’. The company, headed by the noxious and inarticulate thug Marion ‘Suge’ Knight, was eager to promote and aggrandise methods of gang warfare, seeking to boost profits and publicity by engaging in a feud with rival company Bad Boy Entertainment. Tupac, who, for all intents and purposes, should have been the one voice in the whole sorry organisation to question the wisdom of glorifying black-onblack violence, instead flung himself into the altercation wholeheartedly, spitting bitter venom at his supposed ‘rivals’ on the East Coast through song and commentary. In interviews, when you see Tupac and ‘Suge’ standing side by side, you can’t help being struck by the animation and vivaciousness of Tupac’s speech, his lithe self-expression, while beside him the hulking figure of ‘Suge’ struggles to sputter a few morose syllables of dumb aggression. Watching them, one could never hope to find a more vivid contrast between the brilliant and the dull. And yet Tupac genuinely looked up to this mean-spirited and self-serving older man as something like an idol. This expresses, perhaps, just how childish and insecure Tupac was. He was still very young, desperately craving the adulation of his peers, and perhaps because he was bereft of a father, figures such as ‘Suge’ seemed to offer an alluring template of masculinity and identity. And so, he strived to gain approval from the archetypes of a base, unreconstructed masculinity; he sought out the company of those who would have brutally derided the values of community and solidarity his mother had so lovingly instilled in him. The feud between the West Coast and the East was inevitably escalated, and ‘Suge’ Marion Knight’s pockets were lined in proportion. Tupac was murdered in 1996 – a victim of a drive-by shooting. The killing remains unsolved, but it was very probably a result of the conflict ‘Suge’ had so ruthlessly engineered. These, then, were the more unsavoury details of Tupac’s existence, and they were also the themes which led to its its end. Nevertheless,

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the criticisms which people like Tucker levy against Tupac and rap music more generally are also misguided. Most critics of hip hop tend to seize upon its degenerate elements and absolutise them: the misogyny, the homophobia, the crass materialism and the naked violence – the ‘bling-bling’ and the ‘bang-bang’. This, they assert, is the essence of the phenomenon itself. Such an outlook is inherently conservative because it is not able to take in the broader contextual panorama; it is not able to show how the cultural form in question exhibits within itself the struggle between opposed historical tendencies. Rap music contains simultaneously the moment of the individual and the universal both striving for expression, and this is something which expresses a broader contradiction intrinsic to capitalism, per se. On the one hand, the mechanisms of repression and class exploitation continually drive the members of the working classes into mutual proximity and a universal solidarity. On the other, the differences in their objective positions at the level of social existence – as individual consumers, as workers in this country rather than that, as state workers rather than private sector workers, as men who enjoy certain privileges over women; these simultaneously generate a moment of disunity, of particularity, which disrupts and undermines the universal moment, the broader cohesion which results from the fact of being a member of a repressed class or group. The phenomenon of rap music grows out of the way this general contradiction is manifest in and through the movement of a specific cultural history pertaining to the great civil rights movements and their eventual recession. Tupac’s greatest work was expressive of the broader historical tendency which had lost purchase in the world, only to reappear as a beautiful and dreamlike afterthought in the aesthetic realm. Because of this, it had a diaphanous and illusory quality, as though the music was speaking through him, for it carries the ghostly echo of a generation which once was. Such is the essence of great music more broadly. Take Nina Simone as an example. The rich, sweet sadness of her voice wasn’t hers alone. It was also a history brought to life. In her voice, one can detect the echo of slaves toiling in the fields as they would sing traditional African folksongs. In the music of Johnny Cash, it is the lives of the farm hands toiling in the cotton fields whose hopes and struggles saturate the lyrics. In Tupac, it is the hopes and dreams of a lost generation of the urban poor. Tupac never lost the sense that the individual activity of the artist would often act as a conduit for a higher universal; in the song Ghetto Gospel, he describes the creative process: ‘Never forget, that God hasn’t finished with me yet. I feel his hand on my brain. When I write rhymes,

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I go blind and let the Lord do his thang.’16 Tupac understood the process of artistic creativity from the purview of the artist – that is largely unconsciously. But the thought he expresses here has a great deal of truth, especially if we replace the reference to God with one to history. That sense of the transcendent is something every artist strives for, the moment in which the paraphernalia of your own self seems to peel away and you feel, somehow, through your activity you have articulated the form and shape of a higher development. Many critics of rap tend to lose sight of this when they focus only on the moment of pure individuality, of difference. Although it is important to critique the sexism, the homophobia and so forth, these elements can’t be reduced to the generic essence of the rap phenomenon. Those who caricature the music as a rather loud and monotone stream of inchoate aggression present it as nothing more than a crude and vulgar aberration for there is not one particle of historicity present in their analysis. Such accounts often, but not always, have a tendency to lend themselves to certain racist tropes. Tonight, however, there will be somewhere in the world, a poor man living in a shanty town on the outskirts of Johannesburg, or an Indonesian factory worker who also happens to be a single mother; they will listen to a song from Tupac, a young man whom they never knew in person and perhaps know very little about. They will listen to his words and experience in them their own struggles and hopes. Although he has long since ceased to exist, Tupac will continue to call out across time and to speak to their lives. Quincy Jones reminds us of just how remarkable Tupac’s achievement was when he throws it into relief by writing, ‘If we had lost Oprah Winfrey at 25, we would have lost a relatively unknown, local market TV anchorwoman. If we had lost Malcolm X at 25, we would have lost a hustler nicknamed Detroit Red.’17

16 T Shakur and E John, ‘Ghetto Gospel’, Loyal 2 the Game, Amaru-Interscope, 2004. 17 Q Jones, Foreword to Tupac Shakur, Vibe Magazine (Three Rivers Press, CA: 1998).

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7 Vincent van Gogh

Vincent Wilhelm van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853. He was the son of Anna Cornelia Carbentus and Theodorus van Gogh. Three of Vincent’s uncles were art dealers, and one was a successful sculptor. It is often noted that Van Gogh didn’t begin painting until the ten years before his death, and while this is true, it also bears remembering that art had a presence in Vincent’s life long before that. As a child, he received tuition from a successful artist, and as a young man, his first job was as an art salesman in the Goupil & CIE dealership. Although for the most part Vincent wasn’t drawing or painting methodically, art pervaded his existence: his education, his family connections and his work were all imbued with it. Vincent van Gogh’s younger brother and truest friend, Theodore, was an art dealer. It was Theodore van Gogh who was to supply Vincent with the money he needed to pursue his painting in the later years. And it was Theodore who gave the troubled young man the compassion and affirmation which would otherwise elude the efforts Vincent made in his life, until long after he had ended it. Besides art, the other powerful inspiration for Vincent’s spiritual life was religion. His father was a Protestant vicar, and his grandfather was an accomplished theologian. Vincent would study theology and eventually try his hand at lay preaching. It is worth considering that, both as a commercial artist and as a priest, Van Gogh was a failure. Of the hundreds of works that Van Gogh painted, only two were commissioned in his lifetime. His attempt to sell others’ works proved equally pitiful and resulted in his dismissal from the gallery. The religious project emerged stillborn; his endeavours to qualify as a priest were thwarted when he did not meet the standards of the upper echelons of the clergy. Vincent failed in everything that seemed important to those around him. He was rarely able to earn his own living and relied on his father 81

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and then later his brother for subsidy. The few personal friendships he had managed to develop would inevitably implode, leaving him bereft and lonely. The women he fell in love with rejected him in no uncertain terms, and he was never able to start a family. And yet, historian Simon Schama would justifiably opine that Van Gogh ‘did have a child of course, Expressionism, and many, many heirs.’1 Despite his abject failure to accommodate the social expectations of the day, Vincent managed to become one of the most well-known and influential geniuses of the epoch. The schism between the intensity and talent of Van Gogh, and his seeming inability to function in the world, to form successful relationships and to achieve career success was at the same time the latent but unyielding source of his creativity – a living dialectic which faltered between hope and despair. The power, beauty, loneliness and love; the audacity of his work; the blazing sunflowers and that starry night – can be understood from such a context. Little is known about Vincent’s early years. It seems that the young boy was possessed of a reticent and introverted demeanour. His sister later described him as having been ‘intensely serious and uncommunicative’.2 A family servant recalls an ‘odd, aloof child who had queer manners and seemed more like an old man.’ This is more than incidental. Although Vincent’s father undoubtedly loved Vincent deeply, the paternal emotion was expressed through the severe strictures of a devout Protestantism; from an early age, it was expected that the young boy exhibit the mores and moral seriousness of an adult. Playfulness and frivolity were largely discouraged in a household which emphasised discipline, formal order and a Protestant work ethic. The need to accommodate these expectations, to suppress exuberance and to channel his emotion inward, created a brooding melancholy on the part of the small boy. And so it was that Vincent the young child had as well the aspect of ‘an old man’. The endeavour to internalise the formalities of a world which seemed at odds with his inner life made the young Vincent, in the words of his sister Elizabeth, ‘a stranger to himself’.3 His sense of alienation became more palpable when Vincent was sent away to boarding school at the age of eleven. Years later Van Gogh would

1 S Schama, ‘Wheatfield with Crows’, Simon Schama’s Power of Art, 2006. Documentary, from 59:20. 2 V van Gogh, The Art History Archive: http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/ arthistory/expressionism/Vincent-Van-Gogh.html 3 Ibid.

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comment on his early years: ‘my youth was cold, gloomy and sterile’,4 he wrote. And yet, this gave way to a short period of if not happiness exactly, then a certain degree of satisfaction. Through his family connections, Vincent obtained a job working as an art dealer. He was working in and around a medium which he was passionate about. Art always had a presence in his life. In addition, he was, at the age of twenty, earning more than his father – and this pleased him. One suspects that this was not due to any quality of competitiveness on Vincent’s part but to the fact that he was, for once, succeeding in his father’s eyes: pleasing his father and forging a link between them. Vincent now became a young man with a promising career, and it was perhaps the only time in his life that he had the sense that the world was a place he might comfortably inhabit, his outer existence and inner nature attaining a brief moment of unity. It was not to last. Vincent fell in love with the daughter of his landlady, and the subsequent rejection left him feeling isolated and depressed. But more important, his career had started to flounder. Having already had some exposure to art, and perhaps because of his intense, unworldly disposition, Vincent found it easy to inhabit the swirling colours and secret emotions of the picturesque worlds framed in wood. He easily came to terms with the painters, their respective styles, their technical merits and their underlying motifs. But if a customer wanted to buy a painting which Van Gogh considered substandard, Vincent had no qualms about explaining exactly why the work was flawed, much to the chagrin of his superiors. It was said that he even became argumentative with the patrons regarding such aesthetic questions. This was because he had never mastered the subtleties of social etiquette. Vincent’s was not a temperate personality; it was an all or nothing. He was capable of flooding others in a deluge of agitated passion or of retreating into himself entirely and failing to even acknowledge their presence. His manners were awkward and stunted, and he had no idea how to put people at ease. He did not know how to read others. Yet this lack of nuance was not merely an arbitrary psychological trait but was already the expression of something more profound. Although not yet an artist himself, Vincent had connected with art and discovered something deeply humanising in it. He was unable to subvert his instincts and become a good salesman, to place the exchange value 4 Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, Nuenen, c. 18 December 1883. http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/expressionism/Vincent-VanGogh.html

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a painting might possess over and above his own organic sense of its beauty and worth. Just as when he was a child, the forms and modes of the external world seemed to be pushing against his inner sensibilities; the people around him thought him increasingly strange and out of place. He was fired from the gallery and would later comment that the art galleries more generally ‘are in the clutches of fellows who intercept all the money. ... [O]nly one tenth of all the business that is transacted ... is really done out of a belief in art.’5 At this point, we can observe how Vincent’s deepening appreciation of art begins to coalesce with a certain political awareness too. The split between the qualities of beauty and consistency which inhere in any specific painting, and the supersensible value it attains in a market economy, was something which Vincent experienced in practice. As a dealer, he was required to appreciate and discuss art but at the same time, he was compelled to partake in its alienation – the process by which a painting is divested of all its visible and beautiful particularity in and through commodification. Each and every picture was to be valued, not according to the feeling it provokes but by the price it might inspire. For Vincent, this was already too much. Although not yet painting, the twenty-year-old Van Gogh already had the feel, the sense and the fierce heart of an artist – all of which rendered the sales project repellent to him. This artistic conviction placed him in contradiction to the commercial art world, his inner resistance growing and becoming a visible opposition to the requirement and demand for successful sales. And that is why, in retrospect, we can see quite clearly that any art gallery worth its salt might quite naturally dismiss someone with the limitations of Vincent van Gogh. Who could really blame them? Vincent was told to leave. Vincent was demoralised by the dismissal, but at the same time, he had arrived at a more pronounced political perspective; he had developed the deep distaste for bourgeois enterprise which was to stay with him throughout his life. He had experienced the alienation which one experiences when their physical and spiritual resources are subsumed and dissipated in and through the suprapersonal sweep of accumulation. He experienced the sundering of his personality into two vivid and mutually opposing poles: his working life and his personal one. It is an opposition which feels wholly unnatural, and yet it is something so many of us endure. And, like many others, Vincent entertained the rather simple hope that he might do something which would reconcile 5 Vincent van Gogh – The Art History Archive. http://www.arthistoryarchive. com/arthistory/expressionism/Vincent-Van-Gogh.html

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these things, that he might experience in his working life, his essential being; or, to put it more easily, he might do a job which he also enjoyed and found to be genuinely worthwhile. But was there a sphere of labour in which such a unity might be realised? Already, Vincent found himself repelled by the stuffy and stultifying atmosphere of the art gallery. In turning away from that world, he looked towards rural life: the small communities of peasants and fishermen whom he felt managed to attain dignity in their labour, in a way which ‘civilised’ people did not. At the same time, he felt that peasants lacked certain key elements of culture: ‘for what do they know of art and many other things?’6 Van Gogh seemed to believe that the peasant was embedded in a deeper, truer and more human existence vis-à-vis manual labour on the land, but at the same time, he was convinced that the peasant needed to be edified spiritually and culturally. Such a vision – sympathetic but also rather crude in outline – corresponded to the religious fervour which had asserted itself trenchantly in light of the alienation Vincent felt from bourgeois society. His restlessness compelled him to seek a new outlet and new direction in the form of religion and the priesthood. Lay preaching was a way in which he might commune with the rural world and also help uplift it. Vincent’s growing political awareness was saturated with socialist elements. Above all, it involved an identification with the oppressed. But it was an abstract awareness. It was the immediate reflection of his practical experience – the result of his alienation from a particular sociohistoric form and the expression of this; an unformed and incoherent striving; a compulsion to find satisfaction somewhere else, specifically in the semi-idealised vision of the rural poor. Van Gogh felt and intuited many of the problems a capitalist economy posed, but at the same time, he had no political education. He had no contact with any developing political movements, and he was therefore entirely without the means for arriving at concrete political conclusions. His political sense was deeply felt but also nebulous and highly emotive for he hadn’t inherited any political traditions. But he had gained certain religious ones, and in religion, his developing political instincts found confused but profound expression. The early period of Van Gogh’s art mediates much from this chapter of his life. His studies of peasants, weavers and fisherman contain

6 Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh: c. 30 April 1885. http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/15/404.htm?qp=art.theory

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a picturesque delicacy; the dark hued figures seem to blend with the ground as they stoop or squat, the sea or sky not relegated to the distance but brought close such that it seems to occupy a higher level in the foreground. The separation between subject and object, between human being and the environment that he or she inhabits, is to some degree annulled by the pastose graduation of yellows, greys and blacks. In these depictions Van Gogh is certainly expressing the strenuousness of peasant life, but more importantly, he is showing us its unity, its completeness and its dignity. And there is one other separation which is also dissolved: the boundary between artist and subject itself. In the art of Van Gogh, the images of people are not recreated with an eye towards realism. Van Gogh is not striving for the superficial accuracy of the photograph, because such accuracy is profoundly passive; the photograph is a pale, melancholy reflection of the life of the subject, an empty perfection frozen in eternity. Van Gogh sets out to reproduce his subjects not as they are found but as he finds them. In his depictions of peasants, he lathers the colour on thickly; sinews of shadow and shade furl and twist in and through the figures – in fact, the artist does not merely depict the peasants but brings them into being. The intensity of the brush strokes required to bring these figures into being is very much the intensity of the peasant striking at the earth, compelling it to yield its life. One might say that Vincent is not merely painting his subjects but partaking in their essential nature. As a lay priest, Van Gogh exhibited the same tendency. He didn’t merely preach as a day job; that is to say, he didn’t simply go out into the countryside for a few hours, deliver a sermon and return home to some comfortable clerical dwelling. Rather Vincent sought to partake in the lives of those he wished to reach. In the early part of 1879, Van Gogh took a temporary post as a missionary in the village of Petit Wasmes, in a coal mining district in Belgium. He opted to live with the people there; he stayed in a small hut in the back of the baker’s house where he slept on straw. There is something forever guileless and naive in Vincent, and at the same time, there’s something so profoundly genuine. It is difficult not to be moved by the image of the young man, alone in a strange place, curled up on a bed of straw. The baker’s wife recalled hearing him sobbing through the night. And yet, certain people weren’t so sympathetic. His endeavour to share the hardship and poverty of other human beings wasn’t met with a great 7 Vincent Van Gogh Biography, Biography Online. http://www.biographyonline. net/artists/vincent-van-gogh.html

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deal of sympathy by church authorities. His choice to live in squalor was described by them as ‘undermining the dignity of the priesthood.’7 And really, who can blame them? What priest in their right mind would actually want to live in the same conditions as those they preach to? Vincent was subsequently dismissed. Another sphere had closed its doors to him. The defeat of Vincent’s theological ambitions is important. It marks the moment when the symptoms of mental illness start to make an appearance. When Vincent returned home to live with his parents, his father considered having him committed to a lunatic asylum. In addition, it is at this point that Van Gogh realises there are no further career paths to be trodden. So, he decides to take up painting in earnest. It is worth remembering that, despite such difficult experiences, Vincent never loses his sense of identification with the rural poor. After the period of painting which concentrated almost exclusively on rural life and culminated in the work ‘The Potato Eaters’, Van Gogh changed his focus. This change was partly due to the death of his father and his subsequent departure to Antwerp and then, later, Paris. Although he felt the death of his father deeply, Van Gogh was later to write of their relationship, ‘up to the last, Father spoke and behaved towards me, really, in the same way as the Roman Catholic priest.’8 Without dwelling excessively on the Freudian undertones, it might be safe to say that the death of his father was something which had both conscious and subconscious repercussions. On the one hand, the feelings of grief and loss must have been immeasurable, but on the other, they would have been accompanied by an unacknowledged element of liberation. Van Gogh had been liberated in the most simple and terrible of ways from the spare, unyielding strictures of his father, though perhaps Vincent never fully stopped hearing his voice. Van Gogh moved away, away from the village and the ghost of his father. In so doing, he was able to leave behind the rigid Protestantism of his youth and unleash a new spate of creative energy. There is a certain optimism in his work during this period, an experimentalism. In Paris, Vincent gets his first taste of Japanese woodcuttings and is impressed by their delicacy of colour and interplay of light. The cosmopolitanism of the city is itself a living collage of colour, and Vincent voraciously works its influences into his paintings. He met other artists, including Gauguin and Bernard. He debates various artistic theories in the company of 8 Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, Antwerp, c. 15 December 1885. http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/16/440.htm?qp=attitude.Mother

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artists who all held in common the sense that their bold and revolutionary art might profoundly change their world. It can be surmised that Vincent’s later vision of an art commune has its genesis here. And the period as a whole is perhaps capped off with the striking ‘portrait of Julien “Pere” Tanguy’. This is a painting of Julien Tanguy, who was the owner of a paint store where Van Gogh and other artists would congregate. At the time, the store was the only place where young artists had access to the works of Cezanne. ‘Portrait of Julien “Pere” Tanguy’ is a picture which is difficult to describe effectively because of the sheer wealth of colour. In the background of this picture hang various Japanese woodcuttings, which Vincent was so fond of depicting. The delicate Japanese figures seem almost to lean out from the flat two dimensional landscapes they inhabit. The mountains and jungles and kimonos all form an intense complex of colour which is at the same time well ordered: the paintings are arrayed next to one another neatly and symmetrically. In the foreground sits ‘Pere’ with his hands rested on his lap. His face is warm and redolent, tickled by the delicate brush strokes of red, orange and brown. They create a richness of burnished colour, a copper hue which is offset only by ‘Pere’s’ dark translucent eyes. The warmth of that face indicates a corresponding warmth of feeling from the artist; you can’t help but feel that Vincent must have held a great deal of affection for this kind and generous older man. It is often said that Van Gogh had difficulty expressing himself to other people, but when one sees a painting like this, it seems clear that Vincent could express himself to others perhaps more sublimely than anyone who had hitherto lived. On the other hand, this painting really shouldn’t work at all. It is a painting with several other pictures contained within it. The colours are vibrant and too diverse. The brushwork isn’t at all consistent and varies depending on the shapes or the faces (for ‘Pere’s’ face, there are the short strokes which so recognisably demark Van Gogh’s work, but the porcelain faces of the Japanese women remain smooth and untrammelled). This painting is in fact the most incredible mishmash of competing forces and contradictions. And yet, when you gaze upon it, all those things blend together, meshing in a single sustained burst of colour which manages to illuminate entirely the nature of the man sitting in the chair. It is nothing short of incredible. In 1888 Vincent moved south to Arles, where he was inspired by the quality and consistency of the natural light. The most famous in the series of sunflower paintings comes from this period. Van Gogh paints

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big, empty, blue skies; golden, rolling fields; and trees whose leaves turn upwards in flits of copper flame. Again, nothing here is particularly realistic, and yet these pictures seem to capture the essence of a heat-soaked Mediterranean summer. And again, they clearly convey the mood of the artist which seems primed, almost buoyant. The lightness of his mood is more than a result of the luminescence of the location. It is also a product of the fact that Van Gogh now cherishes the hope of creating an artistic commune. The notion of an artistic commune is important because it grows out of Van Gogh’s experiences of labour as fractured and distorted by class relations and oppression. In the art gallery, he experienced the indignity of art subserviated to the commodity cycle, and he was expelled from the priesthood because his sympathies lay so unequivocally with the oppressed. Van Gogh had experienced the pre-existing social structures and organisations of the working world as relentlessly alienating objectivities. The desire to create a commune is, as well, indicative of the need to transcend a capitalist imperative, to create an enclave in society whereby people might mutually support one another, bound only by their shared loved of art. Such a free association would no longer be subject to the prerogatives of capital. The notion of the commune was the genuine but naive attempt by the artist to grapple with the fundamental political problem of our age. And it was to be Vincent’s final utopia. At first, he received a massive boost to his vision. His brother Theodore had succeeded in persuading the artist Gauguin to go and live with Vincent. Vincent sets to work in a frenzy of anticipation painting an array of pictures which would decorate the ‘yellow house’ and were intended to make Gauguin feel more at home. But Vincent’s enthusiasm and admiration for the other artist were not reciprocated. Gauguin felt, and probably was, pressured by Theodore into living with Vincent. Gauguin was insolvent and had come to financially depend on Theodore van Gogh with the latter eventually paying off the former’s debts. In addition, living with someone of Vincent’s morbid intensity could not have been easy. The relationship deteriorated very quickly, and after nine weeks, Gauguin left, never to see Vincent again. The split with Gauguin precipitated Vincent’s descent into madness because it was more than just the ending of a friendship. It represented the dying of his artistic dream. The commune was Vincent’s last-ditch attempt to partake in society. The modes and forms of the external world had stood in contradiction to Vincent’s inner life throughout a series of successive stages: from his childhood, to the art gallery and then the priesthood. The commune was his final attempt to reach out

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to the world and to cleave away a small space in which he, and other artists, might freely pursue their creative agendas. When Gauguin left, Vincent must have felt that there was simply no other place to go. All possibilities had been exhausted in the course of his life. He turns away from external reality, and everything seems to collapse, falling inwards. Feelings of loneliness and hopelessness that he had struggled with throughout now spread unabated, perfuming across his mind. He is admitted to a mental asylum. And yet, despite his mental deterioration, his creative power seems to sharpen and intensify. His abandonment of the external world compels him to focus on the thoughts of beauty and despair which dwell so terribly in his own head. There is nowhere else to look now. The very final period of his painting is marked by a vehement intensity. To paraphrase Marx, all that was once solid now melts into air. Vincent paints furiously. Landscapes are transfigured violently by his inner emotion: clouds billow and churn, trees spiral upwards touching the skies and the stars become great swirling balls of fire which burn like comets suspended in the night. Two weeks before his suicide, Van Gogh paints what is undoubtedly one of his greatest masterpieces: ‘Wheat Field with Crows’. In a certain way, it is a simple picture. A dark blue night. Some golden fields of corn. And a path which tapers across those fields only to break off prematurely. After all, there is nowhere else to go. And across the horizon, Vincent paints crows, vicious dashes of black against the blue. The crows represent the dark thoughts which flicker and inflict the artist’s mind. It is the picture where we are with Vincent as he finally wanders out into the field, the shotgun held snug against his side. And yet, the colours of the painting – the delirious yellow of the corn and the deep blue of the night – abide. It isn’t merely a vision of hopelessness; it is also the appreciation of the beauty and the immortality of art itself. It is the vision of an artist who is standing on the edge of forever. He puts the gun to his chest and pulls the trigger. Vincent doesn’t die straight away – he staggers back to his residence, where he is able to smoke his pipe, which was something he always enjoyed. He smokes his pipe and then passes away. His brother Theodore is by his side.

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8 The Song of Achilles: How the Future Transforms the Past

Perhaps one of the most unconscionable whitewashes in the history of drama was performed by the makers of the 2004 film Troy. The film itself – ostensibly a retelling of the epic poem The Iliad – squandered the magnificence of its incredible props and Hollywood enhanced scenery by eviscerating the original storyline, gutting it of its most powerfully dramatic caveat. The climax of the tale occurs when the figure of Achilles, decked out in his glinting bronzen armour, strides across the dusty planes towards Troy’s city walls, leaving the open, gushing bodies of Trojan soldiers strewn like bloody flowers in his wake. The visceral nature of the violence and the absolute implacability of the slaughterer provokes a dread contrast; Achilles is possessed of a rage so acute and so all consuming that it seems to pass into its opposite, becoming deathly, interminable calm. One has the distinct impression that the figure undertaking the massacre is not altogether there. What is the cause of such unadulterated homicidal ire? It rests squarely with the killing of Achilles’ lover – the effete, idealistic Patroclus – by Hector, the greatest of the Trojan warriors. And this is key; the indiscriminate slaughter by Achilles of the Trojan soldiers left, right and centre can only be rightfully comprehended as a crime of passion. It is the action of a man made insane by the searing loss of his beloved. The writers of Troy, however, denude the tale of its modus operandi. Although the film chronicles the slaying of Patroclus, the character becomes a far more minor figure. Most important of all, he is relegated from his status as Achilles’ lover. Achilles’ actual love interest in the film is a slave girl he has won in battle. In de-gayifying the piece, the filmmakers render the dizzying, intoxicating tempo of love, insanity and inevitability according to an altogether more banal rhythm – as we

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watch Hollywood heartthrob Brad Pitt going through the motions but barely raising the pulse. To all of this, Madeline Miller’s book The Song of Achilles provides a welcome tonic. Not only does it reinstate the romantic connection between Achilles and Patroclus; it also makes this the central concern of the novel. Rather than begin where The Iliad does, Miller ventures further back in time, crafting the backstory to the fateful relationship, showing how the young men met as children and eventually fell in love before she goes on to chronicle the events leading up to the Trojan war and their tragic culmination. Above all, this is a work of love. The story is told from the first-person perspective of Patroclus – first as a young child who finds himself exiled from his own kingdom to the court of King Peleus. Despite Patroclus’ loneliness and isolation, young crown prince Achilles – the perfect son, the most revered athlete and all round golden boy of the realm – chooses to befriend him. The author handles with a delicate beauty the awkwardness of the two children on the cusp of pubescence, dealing with a friendship which is already riven with tentative, indecipherable and wonderful implications. Miller describes with loving detail the way in which the boys shyly, awkwardly and even on occasion violently work through these. The violence, of course, is somewhat comically, somewhat pathetically, instigated by Patroclus as a means of claiming the attention of the beautiful, graceful object of his affections – and it is always repelled in the gentlest manner by Achilles who, for his part, understands with grave tenderness the threat his terrible strength could pose to his smaller, ganglier friend: I stepped forward. “Fight me”. He made a sound almost like a laugh. “No, of course not” ... “I dare you” ... He knelt and laid his weapons in the dirt. His eyes met mine. “I will not. Do not ask me again.”1 Although Achilles is superior to Patroclus in both physique and social standing, Miller peppers their friendship with interludes of this type, where Patroclus seeks provocatively to goad his friend into some expression of feeling. Thus, a dual power relation is established; Achilles, the boy blessed with everything, is nevertheless wrong-footed by his intense, broody friend Patroclus – who on more than one occasion – causes 1

M Miller, The Song of Achilles, (Bloomsbury, London: 2012) 43.

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Achilles to wince or blush or give in. As a result, their relationship entails a certain passivity on Achilles’ part, with Patroclus often being the one to drive things forward. And the element of passivity brought forth in Achilles’ character is not simply a construct of the author’s imagination, for it is already discernible in the original Homeric epic. In The Iliad, Achilles betrays a certain tendency towards languor; after a disagreement with Agamemnon, he is content to while away the days in a magnificent billowing tent out on the vast white sands far from the conflict. Ultimately, it is the loss of Patroclus rather than any commitment to the Achaian imperial cause which fully galvanises Achilles’ battle instincts. What is brilliant in Miller’s novel is that she brings the same element – which is expressed in the original through Achilles’ outward actions – his surly retreat from the front and his subsequent inactivity; she refracts this from an outer appearance to an inward essence. Miller allows the passivity which was already there in his character in the original drama to take on a more fully embodied form. The third-person narrative of the ancient Greek epic would never have allowed for the intense inward exploration of the psyche that the modern novel facilitates. Through his relationship to Patroclus, Miller is able to more fully bring out the contradiction in Achilles between his almost invincible battle persona and his passivity and credulousness. In other words, Miller says what The Iliad cannot; she makes Achilles more truly himself in a way the mechanisms of Greek tragedy could not allow. Something similar is true when we consider character development in The Song of Achilles – specifically the historical form which such development takes. When we consider the ancient Greeks and their epoch more broadly, we are aware that – in terms of literature, but also in terms of politics and culture more broadly, the consciousness of the Greeks necessarily assumed an ahistorical outlook. To the modern consciousness, and from the purview of the most progressive social agencies and ideologies, history can appear in the guise of a social-evolutionary development in which the lower stages are, in essence, driven towards the higher ones – albeit in the form of a broken, uneven movement which slips back, stagnates or suddenly jumps forwards in time rather than resembling the mechanical progression of an escalator whose path tapers smoothly and uninterruptedly upwards. Scientific, cultural and political advancements also find their darkest reactionary echoes and setbacks in the form of a Hiroshima, say, or the Gulag. But, for the ancient Greeks, notes Marxist historian Neil Davidson, history didn’t appear in the form of a progression of various stages. Rather, the Greeks and Romans tended to view history as a naturalistic cycle, an almost Nietzschean recurrence,

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in which – to borrow the famous phrase – everything must change in order for everything to stay the same. Davidson writes: The assumption that society would remain essentially immobile beneath any changes of regime was retained in both Greek and Roman discussions ... there were, however, a limited number of possible regimes or constitutions. In classical accounts these either followed each other in cyclical succession or were simply available as alternatives, but in neither case were there more than six – or rather three, each of which had two aspects reflecting whether they were operated justly or unjustly: monarchy and tyranny, aristocracy and oligarchy, democracy and anarchy.2 Davidson is referencing classical antiquity, but the oral poetry which came to underpin The Iliad was cultivated long before this, in the shadowy juncture between periods – in the historical Dark Age – which lingered in the aftermath of the collapse of Mycenaean civilisation. If history appeared to the citizens of antiquity as an immutable set of static social forms, then in the period of time when the oral poets were weaving the delicately crafted nostalgia for a lost civilisation the same would have been true. There are no historical records to confirm the supposition, because those who were living in the Dark Age – which formed the hinterland between the Mycenaean world that was and the antique world which would come to be – had forgone the ability to write. And yet, that oral poetry, and its reconfiguration in Homer, nevertheless contains the stamp of the ahistorical in the way in which its various heroic characters are depicted. In Erich Auerbach’s seminal essay ‘Odysseus’ scar’, he confirms this when he argues that ‘Achilles and Odysseus are splendidly described, ... but they have no development. ... So little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing or having developed that most of them – Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles – appear to be of an age fixed from the very first.’3 It is from this point of view that one is able to comprehend the radical necessity behind Miller’s decision to begin her story with the life of her central characters as children; this imbues Patroclus and Achilles with historical impetus and development; she is able to show how Achilles’ love for Patroclus first takes the form of an awkward friendship between young boys before developing into a more 2 N Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, (Haymarket Books, Chicago: 2012) 9. 3 E Auerbach, ‘Odysseus’ scar’, 20th Century Literary Criticism – editor David Lodge, (Longman, London: 1977) 327.

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tentative teenage romance which would eventually blossom into the allencompassing love whose tragic annihilation compels Achilles’ finale of murderous retribution. All of this, one feels, is somehow immanent in Homer’s original, but the very forms and structures of social existence of the great poet’s time forbade him from rendering it explicit because history and, concomitantly, the historical characterisation of a fictional character was something which, of necessity, remained invisible to his eyes. Thus, when it comes to The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller’s work should be understood in the most radical way possible. It is not simply that she interprets the best aspects of The Iliad through her novel; rather, she allows the Greek epic to fully become itself. Such a claim might seem fantastical, but it is also far from original. Let us review what T S Eliot said more generally about the relationship between the past and the present with regard to aesthetic tradition: No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not merely one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new.4 What Eliot is suggesting here is that the present determines the past as fully as the past determines the present: ‘what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.’ What is remarkable about Miller’s novel is that it exhibits precisely the line of reasoning Eliot lays out. The character of Achilles becomes through its mediations in the aesthetic forms of the present; The Iliad itself is transformed retroactively, so to speak. The author’s profound acquaintance with Greek mythology expresses a lifelong engagement. In Miller’s brief set of acknowledgements at the back of the book, we find a wry apology to her brother for ‘putting up with my stories of Achilles’5 during childhood. The novel is clearly a product of a long-term and subtle gestation which culminates 4 T S Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, (Methuen, London: 1920) 44. 5 M Miller, The Song of Achilles, (Bloomsbury, London: 2012) 356.

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in a delicate aesthetic awareness and sensitivity to the characters in the original. Miller combines this with a dextrous and lithe facility of imagination which gives to the original characters a rich and compelling inner consciousness, which is drawn out and developed in and through the historical structure which The Song of Achilles provides. Herein lies the premise of the novel’s literary power. But even in those places where Miller breaks profoundly with the characterisations set out in The Iliad, her own creations nevertheless retain the aura of truth. Here we might consider her depiction of Thetis. In The Iliad, Thetis – Achilles’ mother – is a minor and more benevolent figure, who, in the aftermath of Patroclus’ death, inspires feelings of grief and loss among his comrades: ‘Thetis stirred among them the desire of wailing.’6 In The Song of Achilles, however, Thetis is radically transformed. Now she seems to crackle with dark fire, stepping from the page, humming with a vivid and visceral malevolence. The tenderness exhibited by her counterpart towards her son in the original is dissipated; what remains is an absolute imperiousness, a cool brand of fury driven to elicit the unqualified obedience of Achilles, and everybody else. From the perspective of the novel’s structure, the reformation of Thetis’ character makes perfect sense; it allows the dark, destructive goddess to enter into a dramatic conflict with the more bashful and diffident Patroclus in what is essentially a battle for the heart and soul of Achilles. I turned. Thetis stood at the edge of the clearing, her bone-white skin and black hair bright as slashes of lightening. ... ‘I warned you,’ she said. The black of her eyes seemed to seep into me, fill my throat to choking. I could not have cried out if I’d dared to.7 But despite Thetis’ radical reconfiguration, she still manages to attain an authenticity because the dark goddess’ presence reminds us that the mortal characters act out their lives against a backdrop of more inexorable and fundamental forces: the caprices of the gods, the interminability of the fates. The stories of The Iliad were originally transmitted orally, in a period of retreat from civilisation, a Dark Age when the dreadful spectral implications of the supernatural were an inevitable feature of the human existence. And so, while Miller transfigures Thetis, she does so according to a paradigm which nevertheless draws on the darkness

6 7

Homer, The Iliad, (Wordsworth, Great Britain: 1995) 314. M Miller, The Song of Achilles, (Bloomsbury, London: 2012) 81.

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of the ancient world itself. In the words of author Donna Tartt – also no stranger to novels steeped in Hellenic classicism – ‘[Miller’s] characterisation of the goddess Thetis ... carries the true savagery and chill of Antiquity.’8 In creating a more ‘three-dimensional’ Achilles – in imbuing him with a sensitivity, playfulness and childlike sense of wonder in and through his explorations of the world and his burgeoning relationship with Patroclus – Miller invites an inevitable contrast with his actions in war, his terrible, graceful ability to kill. Perhaps the conflict between these two elements of his existence should jar, but it doesn’t. That might be because of the beautiful simplicity of Miller’s prose; with a couple of deft strokes, she is able to attain the vibrancy and colour of living events. Or perhaps it doesn’t jar, because the contradiction between the professional and private individual is so familiar to us, as citizens of modernity. According to sociologist Erving Goffman, the advanced division of labour and the increasingly complex subset of professions and specialisations which we step into allows us to partake in ‘roles’ which are somehow alien to our ‘authentic’ selves. In a riff on the same theme, Hannah Arendt pointed out how, for the contemporary human being, acts of even the most extreme horror can be abstracted from the conditions of his or her private existence by the bureaucratic mediations in which he or she is involved – a process which suggested, in Arendt’s telling phrase, ‘the banality of evil.’ So, in this respect too, it is modernity which once more informs Miller’s Achilles retroactively, which allows him to survive our scrutiny, permitting him to become something beautiful and wondrous despite the elemental nature of such contradictions. Miller has approached the creation of Achilles not as person but as process, a living development which draws its sustenance from the forms and features of modernity. In so doing, she has actualised the spirit and the tenor of the past.

8 D Tartt, ‘The Times Books of the Year 2012’, The Times, http://www. bloomsbury.com/uk/the-song-of-achilles-9781408821985/.

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9 Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna and the Nature of the Historical Novel

Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna is a novel concerned with the life of Harrison Shepherd, an introverted observer who prefers to slip into the background and record events rather than be a part of them. Kingsolver unfolds his life in its entirety from birth to death, from a childhood spent mainly in Mexico trailing his flamboyant but volatile mother as she embarks on a series of torrid relationships with solvent older men, to his teenage years and early twenties spent as a cook and typist in the household of Diego and Frida Rivera, before his eventual emigration to the United States, where he achieves prominence as a successful writer in his own right. At this point, his life is unravelled by the sinister and claustrophobic event of McCarthyism and the purges of suspected communists. Although the book outlines the life of fictional writer Harrison Shepherd, such a life provides the lens through which a profound historical transition might be observed. Shepherd comes of age in the 1930s in Mexico at a time of political and artistic ferment. It is no coincidence that Shepherd’s stay with the Riveras also takes place in the period of time that exiled revolutionary Leon Trotsky spent in the household of the revolutionary artists before his murder at the hands of a Stalinist assassin. This period becomes the focal point around which the more panoramic horror of humanity’s slip into a second global war is arrayed. The figure of Trotsky is described with warm sympathy, though as is often the case, the author also portrays him as an incorrigible idealist and political utopian. But it is not all important in the fictional context to give an adequate account of the political complexities of such a thinker; what is important, however, is that Kingsolver’s ‘Lev’ becomes a beacon of hope during a time at which the world is growing irrevocably darker. Her Trotsky shines with a humanity and light, even as he faces 98

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the terrible crimes visited upon him, his loved ones, his colleagues and his generation by a rapacious and murderous bureaucratic machine. If Kingsolver’s Trotsky is luminous, then her Frida Kahlo is inflamed. From the start, Frida is captivating, chewing up the scenery, pulling the reader into her life with the inexorable gravity of a sun: ‘Senora Frida is a confusion in terms: sometimes like a stern little man, then suddenly a woman or a child, but in every form demanding that you remain in love with her ... her cat smile, those hands, the paintbrushes. Any one of them can be like a slap across the chest.’1 Kingsolver cultivates a touching but problematic relationship between Kahlo and the narrator. Shepherd is gay, but he is, like everyone else, drawn to Frida, and the feelings he has for her often attain the intimate intensity of romantic love. Kingsolver presents Frida as vibrant and spontaneous, sometimes to the point of being callous (she sleeps with the young man the narrator is in love with), but in the next moment as melancholy-wise, and in the next, imbued with childlike wonder and vulnerability: ‘you looked up then with a child’s dread, clutching your shawl as if it might protect you from bullets or ghosts’.2 The ceaseless, shifting kaleidoscope of Frida’s personality is paralleled by the ever changing colours of the Rivera household: the dinners and dances, the revolutionary discussions, the love affairs, intrigues, suppressed resentments and pyrotechnic rows. Such a profuse creativity is made all the more precious because of its precariousness, and the writer is never far from reminding us of the darker, historical forces which lurk beyond the encampment, drawing ever closer. The precarious living arrangements are eventually upended when Rivera learns of an affair between his wife and Trotsky, and the period is ultimately brought to a close by Trotsky’s assassination. Following this, Shepherd departs for a new life in the United States. The final part of the book, in which the fictional author Shepherd attains great literary success, is paradoxically the greyest and most drab – not in terms of literary technique, as the author maintains her fiercely poetic prose style, but instead in terms of an understated but pervasive melancholy; in the company of Frida, Trotsky, Diego and the rest, you feel that Shepherd was compelled to live life, his existence infused with their colour. However, once these figures retreat into the past, all that remains for Shepherd to do is to write about events rather than to actively participate in them.

1 2

B Kingsolver, The Lacuna, (Faber and Faber, London: 2009) 220. Ibid. 240–241.

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In the preface to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he comments on the retrograde character of thought: ‘When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old ... The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.’3 The final part of Kingsolver’s book partakes of this Hegelian insight, for in the last section Shepherd is left to ponder a ‘shape of life ... grown old’; that is, he constantly draws on his memories of Lev, Frida and Diego and the period of time spent living with them, which in turn works to personify an epoch, ‘a shape of life’ which has passed from being. The writer’s increasing isolation and persecution help to accentuate the grey, oppressive character of post-war existence. It is not a failing on Kingsolver’s part that her writing here evokes a certain forlorn weariness in the reader; it is, rather, a condition of the success of her novel, that the world which has arisen in the aftermath of war is a more traumatic, haunted and fragmented place. The epoch which once was has passed from the stage forever, and nothing can be the same again. And so, the strength of this work lies in its tragic element, it depicts loss, not simply the loss of friends and family but the loss of a historical period; the narrator is a particle of that time, and so, he carries its loss within himself. In his book The Historical Novel, we find a section where Lukács considers the aesthetic power of several of Shakespeare’s historical creations, specifically the characters from antiquity. What is key to the profundity and aesthetic power of Shakespeare’s depictions, argues the great Hungarian philosopher, is the manner in which, even though they portray figures from a far earlier epoch, they appear neither distant nor obscure. Rather, their essential characteristics attain a parity with the socio-historical ‘types’ that were visible and recognisable in the period that Shakespeare himself was writing: ‘thus when Shakespeare portrays Brutus, say, he can see the stoic features of aristocratic republicanism in living evidence about him in his own time (think, for example, of the friend of Montaigne’s youth Étienne de La Boétie.)’4 Shakespeare uses the similitude between ‘types’ to bring to light a more general likeness between epochs – and so, he is able to bring ‘to life those tragic events of antiquity which were based on historical moral experiences inwardly similar to those of his own time; so that the generalised form of the drama reveals the features which the two ages hold objectively in common.’5 3 G W F Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, (Oxford University Press, London: 1962) 13. 4 G Lukács, The Historical Novel, (Merlin Press Limited, London: 1965) 155. 5 Ibid. 156.

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One can argue that Kingsolver’s The Lacuna achieves something similar. True, the distance between the two ages – the time in which the book was written and the period which the book focuses on – is far slighter. In his depiction of Brutus, Shakespeare was separated from his historical content (the decline and demise of the late Roman Republic) by nearly a millennium and a half, whereas Kingsolver, writing in the early twenty-first century is separated from the historical content of her novel by little more than half a century. And yet, the literary procedure in both cases is virtually identical. Kingsolver, in the true Lukácsian sense, locates in her central character a ‘type’, a type which (in this case) acts as a nodal point that melds the common elements in two separate periods of time. But what is most intriguing in The Lacuna is that the ‘type’ she draws upon, the ‘type’ which provides the contemporary template for Shepherd’s past experience, is none other than Kingsolver herself. The Lacuna was written in the aftermath of the attack on New York on 11 September 2001, which – like the Second World War – is an event that marks a transition point between epochs. But Kingsolver experienced the implications of this historical transition in a heightened fashion when, in the months following the attacks on the twin towers, she penned a series of opinion pieces calling for reflection and debate regarding foreign policy. Her heartfelt missives denounced Bush’s brand of cowboy militancy and argued for a more measured approach. For this, she received a ‘monstrously angry response’6 which entailed threats, hate mail, and the misquotation and demonisation of her by certain sections of the press. For Kingsolver, the change in historical climate became a thorny truism which couldn’t but permeate her being. Facing a hysterical onslaught carried by the media, in which she was denounced as a ‘traitor’,7 Kingsolver must have been aware – at the level of the most intimate and fundamental immediacy – of the way in which patriotism can provide a natural and effective means by which dissent can be smothered and snuffed out. She writes, ‘[p]atriotism threatens free speech with death. In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and

6 B Kingsolver (cited) in conversation with Kira Cochrane, ‘Barbara Kingsolver: from witch hunt to winner’, The Guardian, Thursday, 10 June 2010. http://www. theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/10/barbara-kingsolver-orange-prize 7 S Adams, ‘Orange Prize won by anti-Bush writer Barbara Kingsolver’, The Telegraph, 9 June 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/7814072/ Orange-Prize-won-by-anti-Bush-writer-Barbara-Kingsolver.html

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shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder. Who are we calling terrorists?’8 The Second World War and the events of McCarthyism, then, become the natural parallels of the events and the historical period the author was immersed in – precisely because in its own period, McCarthyism became an effective means of repressing dissent by fomenting a rabid, almost deranged strain of patriotism. For that reason, Harrison Shepherd is a ‘type’ whose literary essence is ‘based on historical moral experiences inwardly similar to those of ... [the author’s] ... own time’, significantly in this case, the historical experience encountered directly by Kingsolver herself. Of course, this is not to say that Shepherd represents a fantasy simulacrum of the author; if the novel had been written in this way – that is to say, if Kingsolver had simply rendered creatively the details of her own personality and implanted them onto a different historical backdrop – then her depiction of Shepherd would feel jarring and artificial. Again, Lukács proves instructive here. When Lukács talks about a literary ‘type’ he has in mind the depiction of a fictional individual which embodies within themselves the broader historical currents while at the same time maintaining the peccadillos and particularities which are unique to that individual and thus differentiate him or her from the other characters who populate that same work of fiction. It is, in fact, the very nature of this individual’s uniqueness, his or her particularity – through which is filtered the broader historical sweep. In this way, Lukács’ theorisation of ‘type’ should be clearly delineated from the more generic concept of ‘archetype’ because Lukács’ conception involves an organic synthesis of the universal and the particular in and through the depiction of the historically concrete individual. Apropos of Walter Scott’s literary depiction of historical heroes, Lukács writes, ‘[t] hey are never mere representatives of historical movements, ideas etc. Scott’s great art consists precisely in individualising his historical heroes in such a way that certain, purely individual traits of character, quite peculiar to them, are brought into a very complex, very live relationship with the age in which they live.’9 And in as much as The Lacuna does attain certain parities with Shakespeare’s Roman plays, its direct ancestor would surely be the historical novel, which was typified in the work of Walter Scott. Lukács understood Scott as being so crucially significant because in his works the early ‘social’

8 9

Ibid. G Lukács, The Historical Novel, (Merlin Press Limited, London: 1965) 47.

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novel would be graduated into the ‘historical novel’, a shift in form which was denoted by a concomitant shift in the historical panorama which had culminated in the mighty French revolution. The protracted nature of the revolution was responsible for pulling the masses into the historical vortex in a way which was previously inconceivable. Lukács argues this was especially explicit in the transformed character of military engagements because in ‘its defensive struggle against the coalition of absolute monarchies, the French Republic was compelled to create mass armies.’10 Whereas before, smaller and more mobile armies pressed into service the atomised elements usually found on the very fringes of classes – mercenary groupings who would act quite independently of the populations from which they emerged – now the mobilisation of a mass army required a profound engagement with the hearts and minds of those same populations: ‘[the] qualitative difference between mercenary and mass armies is precisely a question of their relations with the mass of the population. If ... a mass army is to be created, then the content and purpose of the war must be made clear to the masses by means of propaganda.’11 The change in historical content also necessitates a change in aesthetic form. The historical novel, as Lukács calls it, bears the imprint of the change in as much as its leading protagonists cease to be what Hegel called ‘world historic individuals’ and are instead (generally speaking) selected from across the broader spectrum of the lower or middling classes. Whereas Shakespeare could and would make ‘world historic’ figures such as Julius Caesar or Henry V the central protagonists of his works, the period which is inaugurated by the French Revolution12 marks an epoch in which the masses more and more appear on the historical stage as protagonists. The work of Scott, then, unconsciously assimilates this fact as one of its ‘fundamental requirements’,13 and thus, the typical hero emerges as ‘always a more or less mediocre,14 average English

10

Ibid. 23. Ibid. 23. 12 And, of course, the English Revolution of 1640–1688 contains many of the same traits, in as much as the New Model Army had a far more radically democratic and plebeian character, and the same period experienced an explosion in the use of printed propaganda designed for a mass audience – following the abolition of the Star Chamber in 1641. 13 Ibid. 36. 14 Not to say that all heroes selected from a broader spectrum of society must necessarily be depicted as ‘mediocre’ – in Scott, the ‘mediocre’ nature of the hero also helps to better throw into relief the vivid nature of more fundamental social contradictions, according to Lukács. 11

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Gentleman.’15 That is not to say that world historic figures cannot be presented in the historical novel as Lukács has outlined it, but when they do appear, they must necessarily appear in the guise of secondary characters. Because the being of the age is so fundamentally grounded in the life of the masses, the historical novel must encompass ‘a broad and many-sided picture’16 in which ‘the everyday life of the people, the joys and sorrows, crises and confusions of average human beings are portrayed.’17 When the world historic individual does appear in such a context, he or she appears already fully formed and as someone who draws upon the ‘character of popular life’18 in order to ‘generalize and concentrate in a historical deed’,19 but he or she does not appear as the central protagonist whose personality is developed as part and parcel of a process which reaches fruition in accordance with the broader arc of the plot as a whole. This once again returns us to The Lacuna. In that novel we can see how the social character of the modern epoch has determined its form, at least in accordance with some of the central traits which Lukács has laid out. Kingsolver’s depiction of Frida does, in my view, capture the volatile charisma of the great artist. Her depiction of Trotsky is equally sublime, depicting not only his piercing intellect and ruthless logic but also a halting childlike sense of wonder which is revealed in the small details – such as the childish glee the old man exhibits when seeking to climb to the top of an Aztec pyramid or the tentative and hesitant attempts he makes to come to terms with the Spanish language. But while these characters are so sensitively observed, and while it seems to me almost certain that Kingsolver has successfully distilled something of their realworld tragedies within them – despite their power and their magnetism – they necessarily appear as secondary characters who take up a relatively small portion of the overall novel. They appear on the scene as already fully formed. And their tragedies and their glories are thrown into relief by the fact that they are observed fleetingly by Shepherd, who is being pulled into the historical slipstream as the colour and liveliness of the one epoch perishes before a darker and more sinister reality. And this more than anything is what makes The Lacuna a great work: not only does it faithfully recreate a historical period, but it also

15 16 17 18 19

Ibid. 33. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 39.

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provides the account of its decline and its eventual loss. The true power lies with its tragic element; it is seen to raise a whole world in imagination, a form of life which once was and is now no more, outlining in poetic free flow the tragic inevitability of its demise. The decline of a historical period, however, presents us with something of a paradox. If the central strength of The Lacuna consists in its ability to exhibit the inevitable and tragic collapse of a given period, then one would be forced to conclude that the power of the historical novel is a purely negative one; that is, it is only concerned with the melancholy collapse of a drowned world. Indeed, Schopenhauer had argued in his theory of drama something akin to this – namely, that its (drama’s) strength lies most fundamentally with the power of the negative: ‘the purpose of the supreme poetic achievement is the representation of the terrible side of life, that the nameless pain, the anguish of humanity, the triumph of evil, the mocking rule of chance and the irremediable fall of the just and the innocent are here paraded before us.’20 The paradox, then, consists in the fact that although the moment of the negative is integral to tragedy, the negative moment also fails to exhaust it. Schopenhauer’s formulation feels inherently problematic, for when one finishes The Lacuna, even though the power of the novel resides in its tragic element, the reader doesn’t take away from it the type of existential despair which Schopenhauer’s argument would seem to imply. Rather, one feels a great sense of hope also. Now, on a very immediate level, this is the result of a final plot twist: Shepherd is persecuted by the McCarthyites to the point of hopelessness. Only when it is reported in the media that he has taken his own life – a mysterious communiqué from Frida herself suggests that he might have feigned his death and returned to Mexico – thus offering a positive resolution and leaving space for hope once more. But this little twist in the tail can hardly be said to fundamentally transform the whole tenor of the novel, which does in fact derive its power from the melancholy remembrance of a vanished age. In order to fully overcome the paradox, the Schopenhauer formulation – the positing of drama’s essence as an abstract negativity – such negation must itself be negated, and Lukács, as a good Hegelian, is in the perfect position to do this. Lukács comprehends the moment of the negative, not abstractly so in the manner of Schopenhauer but concretely, in accordance with the nature of the historical subject which is being depicted. It is in the very moment of collapse, the movement by 20 A Schopenhauer (cited) G Lukács, The Historical Novel, (Merlin Press Limited, London: 1965) 122.

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which social contradictions are heightened such that the epoch is sent into a process of irreversible decline; it is then when the latent heroic qualities of the central protagonist are made manifest. For this reason, Lukács contends contra Schopenhauer that the ‘tragic outcome must not be conceived in an abstract pessimistic sense’.21 To conclude, it is worth quoting the Hegelian Marxist more fully: Every really great drama expresses amid horror at the necessary downfall of the best representatives of human society, amid the apparently inescapable mutual destruction of men, an affirmation of life. It is a glorification of human greatness. Man in his struggle with the objectively stronger forces of the social external world, in the extreme exertion of all his powers in this unequal battle, reveals important qualities which would otherwise have remained hidden. ... The realization of this possibility produces the enthusing and uplifting qualities of drama.22

21 22

Ibid p.121 Ibid p.122

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10 Balzac’s Women and the Impossibility of Redemption in Cousin Bette

Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac is a novel about a socially superior family and their poorer cousin who feels patronised and maligned by them. The eponymous cousin Bette consequently expends a malevolent, lago-like energy to bring about the ruin of her more colourful and wealthy relations. Bette works in tandem with a bitter and discontented young woman – Valérie Marneffe – in order to seduce and ruin the patriarch of the family, the aristocratic Baron Hector Hulot. As Bette and Valérie bleed the Baron dry, he loses both his fortune and name, and his family is decimated in the process. He is reduced to corruption in order to support Valérie’s avarice in her role as his mistress. Bette and Valérie, however, are able to triumph only because the Baron is presented as having a naive and flawed but essentially noble and generous nature. He is a lover of beauty. His aristocratic disposition disposes him to fine wine and women. But above all, he is unable to fathom the scheming and acquisitive natures of those whom fate has set into motion in order to work against him. And in this respect, the conflict between Bette and brood is more generally a representation of the broader historical conflict which took place between the old world and the new. It is about the way in which the epoch of exchange value and capital expansion increasingly intrudes, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, on the ‘patriarchal, idyllic relations’1 which correspond to older feudal forms. It is about the ascension

1 K Marx and F Engels, Manifesto of the Community Party, (Progress Publishers, USSR: 1978) 44.

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of the bourgeoisie and the manner in which that class tears ‘away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation’.2 Balzac’s skill lies in the way in which he is able to raise a whole world through words, to dissolve the boundary between the history of an epoch and the history of a family, to allow the one to flow into the other, to reveal world historic change as being inexorably but indirectly bound up with individual destiny and to demonstrate this with seamless and invisible artistry. But Cousin Bette is also a problematic novel. It is, in places, poisoned by the author’s contempt for society at large and bloated by senile, aristocratic predilection. In the first scene, we have the meeting between two of the most important characters: the Baroness Adeline Fischer and the nouveau riche entrepreneur Monsieur Crevel. Monsieur Crevel is a craven stuffed shirt; he typifies the modern bourgeoisie in that he worships money and understands accumulation to be an end in itself. Crevel’s character is counterposed to the aristocrat of old, the Baron Hulot – a figure that spends little time in the contemplation of wealth, seeing it as nothing other than a means to an end, a way by which he might expedite a life of adventure and pleasure. When we first meet Crevel, he is propositioning the wife of the Baron, for, like an astute businessperson, he has sniffed out economic desperation and is hoping to profit from it by compelling her to prostitute herself. Crevel thinks in francs and devalues any existence which is not devoted to the feverish pursuit of wealth. The vast sum of money he has already managed to accrue is entirely precious because it is not merely an external fact but is as well the physical embodiment and ultimate measure of his being. It remains the memento of his successful past and forms a bridge to a glorious future for – although Crevel is a fundamentally unlikable, manipulative and pompous human being – his money buys him associates, friends and even lovers; in its light, he is transformed. One is reminded of the words of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, who says of gold with bitter irony, ‘Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, / Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.’3 But Crevel also possesses that certain practical astuteness which comes from being an effective accumulator. And he is able to sense, 2

Ibid. 45. W Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Timon of Athens, Act IV, Scene 3, lines 1692– 1693.Open Source Shakespeare http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/ plays/play_view.php?WorkID=timonathens&Act=4&Scene=3&Scope=scene 3

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albeit dimly and intuitively, that other people quite naturally despise him. Because he senses this, his character retains a sharp streak of bitterness; he records slights made against him and takes a cruel, luxurious pleasure in fomenting revenge. He aims to make a trophy of the Baron’s wife in order to exact revenge for a previous occasion on which the Baron ‘stole’ (the conception of private property is extended to people) a young mistress from him. But more generally, his struggle against the Baron flows from the fact that both men are organically incompatible as they belong to separate and conflicting historical epochs. Balzac presents the Baron Hulot as severely flawed but ultimately sympathetic. He is a tragic character with many virtues: he fought courageously for the empire, and his great deeds earned him a commendation from Napoleon himself. He is essentially a kind and generous man, a person of taste and a lover of refinement, culture and joy. However, his destiny is interwoven with a fading era: a melancholy and rapidly perishing twilight which the new generation of crude, cash-coveting bookkeepers like Crevel threaten to blot out entirely. Baron Hulot is the last of a dying breed, and as he is moved closer to the abyss, his weaknesses become more pronounced. He becomes a serial adulterer and squanders large amounts of money in the pursuit of various young women. He brings his own family to the point of ruin, and yet he continues cheating and running up debts. Balzac uses what amounts to sex addiction as a device, I think, to convey the sense of powerlessness of the Baron and, in more general terms, the futility which arises from swimming against the historical tide. History, like death, is immutable, and despite the Baron’s brave, warrior-like qualities, he cannot but ultimately dwindle and succumb before the inexorable pull of destiny. His time, and that of those like him, has come. So Balzac provides us with a beautiful and tragic vision of the aristocrat, but it is also a teary and sentimentalised vision, one which serves to blur and disguise the often hideous nature of his deeds. The Baron’s conquests are young women who are in some cases little more than children, people who have sought to evade poverty by selling themselves. But the motif which runs through the tale is that it is not they who are victims but instead the Baron himself. The Baron is a victim of his own colourfulness, of a gregarious and irrepressible nature, and in a dazzling reversal, it transpires that the women whom he purchases are in fact his victimisers, his tormenters. They are nineteenth-century minxes endowed with a cruel appreciation of their own beauty and the power it allows them to wield over the gallant but fanciful Baron. They tease and mock, and Josepha, one of many, has the audacity to address

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the Baron as ‘old boy’. Balzac describes the outrageousness of it all when he writes: The use of the expression old boy, addressed to such a high official as the Baron, admirably illustrates the audacity with which these creatures pull down the greatest to their own level. The Baron was left paralysed. Josepha, all in white and yellow, was adorned for this festivity so beautifully that even in this magnificently luxurious setting she could still shine, like the rarest jewel of all.4 You can almost taste the bile which the author has for these ‘creatures’. And there is more to come as there are so many ‘evil kinds of women in Paris’.5 The various women whose services the Baron has managed to procure – ‘like Josepha, Madame Schontz, Malaga, Jenny Caldine and the rest’6 – are bad enough, but their brazenness and their open greed at least act as a warning to a man, ‘a warning as brightly shining as prostitution’s red lamp or the blazing lights of the gambling dens.’7 More dangerous still are the ‘Machiavellis in petticoats’8 – that is, those women who disguise sultry, conniving natures beneath a ‘sweetly prim respectability’.9 Balzac warns the reader that such women are to be found ‘at every level of society’.10 Indeed, there is only one type of female character who manages to evade such inherent vulgarity, and she is the aristocratic woman as depicted in and through the elegant and austere figure of the Baroness. Balzac says of her: Adeline Fischer, one of the most beautiful of this divine race, possessed of the noble features, the curving lines, the veined flesh, of women born to be queens ... an empress’s stature, a stately bearing, an imposing profile, the modesty of a country upbringing – these made men come to a halt as she passed, enchanted, like amateurs of art before a Raphael.’11 The Baroness represents the transcendence of womanhood through the attitude she displays to her husband. Instead of trying to tempt, corrupt 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

H de Balzac, Cousin Bette, (Penguin Classics, London: 1965) 85. Ibid. 156. Ibid. 156. Ibid. 156. Ibid. 156. Ibid. 156. Ibid. 157. Ibid. 32.

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and erode the Baron, Adeline Fischer actively worships him. She dotes upon his many abilities, and although she feels a considerable pain for his numerous betrayals, she maintains the reserve and dignity of a truly aristocratic wife. She does not bother him with petty recrimination but instead humbly reminds herself of how lucky she is to have found him in the first place. Indeed, this saintliness, this servitude, is extended to the point at which she comforts him after the Baron has been insulted by one of his mistresses and cannot contain himself: ‘Oh forgive me, but I must tell you about these outrages’.12 Balzac frames her response thus: ‘But my dear’, his poor wife answered heroically, ‘creatures like that don’t know what love is, the pure devoted love that is what you deserve. How could you, a man of such intelligence, dream of attempting to be a millionaire’s rival?’13 What is interesting about Balzac’s various female creations is that they have such contemporary relevance. In the romance languages today, the most common informal word to signify prostitute is also the word for ‘bitch’. I refer here to the word ‘puta’.14 There is no real consensus on when these two designations (‘bitch’ and ‘prostitute’) became merged in the one word ‘puta’, because there is a lack of general agreement regarding the complexity of the etymological originations which stand behind them. But the most likely explanation seems to be the identity was achieved in and through the consolidation of ‘puella’15 – which is the Latin word for ‘girl’ – with ‘pūtidus’16 – which is the Latin word that means ‘stinking’ or ‘fetid’. Thus, a woman who is compelled by poverty to sell her body is transformed by the dark alchemy of language into a predatory and self-aware ‘creature’ who wishes to draw guileless men into filth and corruption. The women who inhabit the fictional landscape of Cousin Bette are, in the majority, ‘bitches’. But Balzac also offers us the flipside of the same stereotype in the character of the Baroness. The Baroness represents the virginal and the pure; she possesses none of the wanton sexuality of the Baron’s consorts, and consequently, she is not tainted. She is beautiful, yes, but distinctly asexual. The Baroness is 12

Ibid. 85. Ibid. 86. 14 For Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan, read ‘puta’; for French, read ‘pute’/’putain’; for Italian, read ‘puttana’; etc. 15 C T Lewis, An Elementary Latin Dictionary (American Book Company, New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago: 1890). 16 Ibid. 13

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for Balzac the highest incarnation of womanhood because in a certain way she is not a woman at all; she is – only in relation to her husband, only as a means to facilitate his existence. When, through economic desperation, the Baroness is reduced to offering herself to Monsieur Crevel, Balzac describes her situation: Poor Adeline, who was incapable of inventing a beauty-patch, of setting a rosebud in the cleft of her bodice, of contriving tricks of dress calculated to fan men’s smouldering desires into flame. ... The courtesan, on the other hand, is the confection of Carmeme’s with its condiments and spices, and its studied refinements. The Baroness could not, did not know how to, serve up her white bosom in a magnificent dish of lace after the fashion of Madame Marneffe.17 Adeline is offended by the notion of having to prostitute herself; the prospect reduces her to tears. Because of this, she is unable to do it effectively; she does not know how to tempt and entice. But the other genre of woman as epitomised by Madame Marneffe revels in her degradation; she seeks it out because she is at heart base, unscrupulous and unrefined. To couch what she is in modern-day language, she wants it, and she is begging for it because she is both a ‘bitch’ and a ‘whore’, and men have to remain guarded around her. Behind both stereotypes lies a distinction of class. Adeline cannot reconcile herself with becoming a prostitute, because she has dignity and breeding, whereas for the women from the lower classes it is infinitely easier and even cynically pleasurable to offer themselves up because they lack the humanity, the feeling, and the sensibilities which the aristocratic background cultivates. In our own times, just as in Balzac’s, we are everywhere taught to hate and despise those who are most vulnerable, those who are most oppressed. Single mothers are forever running up benefit tabs of millions; illegal immigrants milk the generosity of a benevolent state with their devious wiles. In reality, such social groups are the poorest, work the hardest, suffer the severest depravations and so on. But it is the ideological reflex of any ruling group to actively despise those it extorts. How can you appropriate their labour and their land, how can you force them into factories and workhouses, and even buy their bodies, if they are not base, dirty and somehow less than human? It’s much easier to exploit people if one holds to the underlying belief that the people

17

Ibid. 298.

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who are being exploited deserve what’s coming to them, that they have somehow brought it upon themselves. The basis of Balzac’s stereotypical depiction of women in Cousin Bette, then – especially those from the lower classes – arises in the last analysis from historically specific modes of class and patriarchal oppression. But for the purposes of our investigation, we must decide to what extent these politico-ideological elements intrude on the aesthetic integrity and power of Balzac’s most famous novel. In light of this, it is worth recalling the admiration evinced by both Marx and Engels for the work of the great French novelist more generally. Marx had, according to his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, toyed with the idea of making a comprehensive study of Balzac’s Human Comedy,18 and both he and Engels regarded Balzac as a world historic writer. Engels would coin the term ‘realism’ in reference to the type of fiction Balzac produced. In his letter to Margaret Harkness, he gives us a brief but tantalising summary of what he means by this concept: ‘[r]ealism, to my mind, implies, besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances’.19 There are a couple of things of note here – things which would figure as the elementary material in later Marxist reconstructions of aesthetic principles with regard to literature. First, one should emphasise that by ‘typical characters’ Engels does not mean a character that somehow condenses within himself or herself a recognisable set of attributes which are shared by a majority in a given period – an aesthetic version of the arithmetic mean, if you like. Rather, Engels is alluding to the connection the literary character – as a ‘typical’ character – has with the broader historical sweep; that is to say, a ‘typical’ character will be marked by the traits of a deeper historical tendency, but these elements will be filtered through the particularities and peccadillos of that same character – which are themselves the products of an unfolding personal history that is fissured by all sorts of contingency. Crevel is a ‘typical’ character in as much as Balzac demonstrates with formidable irony just how his personality has been submitted to and warped by the corrosive prerogatives of capital accumulation, but he acts as more than just a cipher for these tendencies, for as Sarah C Maza notes in an incisive study, he is possessed by all sorts of bizarre affectations which 18 See S S Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature, (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 1978) 94. 19 F Engels ‘Letter to Margaret Harkness, Beginning of April 1888 (draft)’, Marx and Engels – on Literature and Art, (International General, New York: 1974) 115.

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are very much his own and quite often out of sync with some of Balzac’s more redeemable bourgeois characters. Maza writes about Guillaume (the cloth merchant in Balzac’s novel At the Sign of the Cat and Racket) and Birotteau (the shopkeeper from Balzac’s novel César Birotteau): ‘[t]hey are faithful husbands and good family men, economically active but culturally limited.’20 Crevel, on the other hand, contains little of the simplicity and moral austerity of the Protestant work ethic: he ‘emulates the style of the aristocratic rake and invokes the libertine tradition of the previous century in a torrent of clichés’.21 Although his attempts to seduce various women are underpinned by the brutal and callous force of economic superiority (of cold, hard cash), the way he enacts them inspires a sense of the pathetically humorous because his portly, middleaged figure and ‘commonplace face’22 are thrown into comic relief by the fact that he initiates any sexual advances while kitted out in military regalia before dramatically striking a pose in imitation of Napoleon Bonaparte. So, while Crevel is historically ‘typical’, he is at the same time, uniquely and absurdly, always himself. Trying to derive the semblance of a systematic literary theory from the work of the founders of scientific socialism is no easy task because although the thoughts which Marx and Engels had on the subject were brilliant, they were fragmented, and it is not always easy to irrefutably establish the cohesion and continuity of their conclusions. Although it has since become one of the staple concepts of Marxist aesthetics, the word ‘realism’ was never actually used by Marx in this connotation, and only Engels makes it explicit. Nevertheless, Engels’ notion of ‘realism’ was underpinned by this idea of the historically ‘typical’ character, and this is a formulation of which we can be sure Marx approved – specifically in regard to the work of Balzac. At the end of the Eighteenth Brumaire, by way of lampooning the opera manager and publisher Louis-Désiré Véron,23 Marx described him as ‘Véron-Crevel’24 because of Véron’s ability to act as the ‘preacher of morals’25 on the behalf of 20 S Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA: 2005) 185. 21 Ibid. 186. 22 H de Balzac, Cousin Bette, (Penguin Classics, London: 1965) 14. 23 Someone known for his skill in adapting the opera house to the ever more prevalent bourgeois sensibilities of the period and make a quick buck in the process. 24 K Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in One Volume, (Lawrence and Wishart Ltd, London: 1973) 178. 25 Ibid. 178.

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the upper-stratum of the French bourgeoisie. In S S Prawer’s magisterial study of Marx and Marx’s relation to literature, Prawer argues that this reference is ‘the first time we see Marx looking to Balzac for the succinct presentation, in a recognizably individual character, of typical modes of thinking and feeling in nineteenth-century France.’26 But what Prawer outlines here is nothing other than Engels’ concept of a historically ‘typical’ character, a concept which has fundamentally Hegelian trappings. Prawer emphasises the unity of the ‘recognizably individual character’ with the ‘typical modes of thinking and feeling in nineteenth-century France’ – or to say the same in the Hegelian idiom, the literary figure of Crevel becomes an ‘individual’ or ‘concrete universal’, which unites both the universal and particular in its remit. And the Hegelian-Marxist logic at work in this formulation is vital to bear in mind when one approaches the famous contrast which Engels makes between ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism’. In Engels’ correspondence, he criticises the novelist Minna Kautsky for creating a character who conforms to only the universal moment, abstractly so, failing to unite it with the contingencies and particularities by which a historically concrete ‘typical’ character is to be depicted. Engels writes, ‘here I come to Arnold. In truth, he is too faultless, and, if at last he perishes by falling from a mountain, one can reconcile this with poetic justice only by saying that he was too good for this world.’27 Kautsky’s ‘Arnold’ is ‘idealized’28 because he has become merely the means of representation of the progressive historical currents of the epoch, the mouthpiece in fact for the author’s own enlightened views: ‘[e]vidently you felt the need in this book to declare publicly for your party, to bear witness before the whole world and show your convictions.’29 The novelist Emile Zola suffers from something of a similar deficit, according to both Engels and Lukács. In depicting what Engels calls a ‘typical’ character (what Lukács would come to describe as a ‘type’) Balzac often had to exaggerate certain traits in that character and the plot more generally in order that the overarching power of the broader historical movement and conflict would be more fully felt at the level of purely individual destiny. Lukács refers to the character Vautrin, who appears in Balzac’s novel Father Goriot. Zola had criticised the depiction 26 S S Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature, (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 1978) 181. 27 F Engels, ‘Letter for Minna Kautsky, November 26, 1885’, Marx and Engels – On Literature and Art, (International General, New York: 1974) 114. 28 Ibid. 114. 29 Ibid. 114.

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of this character for being unrealistic, but, argues Lukács, ‘Zola failed to realise that Balzac could not possibly dispense with Vautrin’s largerthan-life figure if he wanted the otherwise merely personal and individual catastrophe of Lucien de Rubempre’s ambitions to become the tragedy of the whole ruling class of the restoration period’.30 The criticism Lukács levels at Zola here is significant because it demonstrates the integral importance of the Hegelian logic to a Marxist literary analysis – specifically through the synthesis of universality and particularity which the ‘typical character’ or ‘type’ achieves. Minna Kautsky is unable to realise such a synthesis because the more general socio-historical development overwhelms the moment of the particular such that the shape and form of the individual character becomes merely the husk and outline of that broader movement. Zola also achieves the forcible dismemberment of the universal from the particular; in his case, he is so keen to render the real-world particularities of a given character in all their naturalistic accuracy that its necessary but organic connection to a broader historical tendency is absolved. Both writers fail to rise to the aesthetic heights of ‘realism’ because they are not able to establish immanently and unconsciously the organic identity of the universal and particular at the level of the character ‘type’. And this brings us back to Balzac once more. It is certainly true that Cousin Bette provides us with several literary ‘types’ in the ‘realist’ sense, and clearly Marx, Engels and Lukács were highly attuned to this fact. But what they fail to observe is that several characters in that same novel fall significantly short of the ‘realist’ demand, especially those who happen to be women. I am thinking here of both Valérie Marneffe and the Baroness Adeline Fischer. Whereas Crevel appears as a comic grotesque whose personality is organically permeated by the broader historical logic of the burgeoning capitalist class, and one feels within him – in his rare sense of peculiarity and pompousness – the demands of this higher development, the same cannot be said of Valérie Marneffe. Here the author – although he formally references her class background – fails to show how she is pervaded by the set of historical conditions and contradictions particular to it, and in any case, such conditions were something Balzac might never have established, because he has drawn Valérie Marneffe in line with a specific, ahistorical premise from the outset. That is to say, a woman of her type is to be found ‘at every level of society’. In other words, the possibility of creating an organic identity 30

G Lukács, Studies in European Realism, (The Merlin Press, London: 1972) 88.

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of the universal and the particular, of the historical and the individual, at the level of character is obviated in advance by the imposition of an ahistorical and misogynistic template of femininity; ‘type’ is replaced by ‘stereotype’. But in my view, this failing in Balzac is hardly accidental. Engels provides us with a lucid summary of the novelist’s greatness and the essential historical conflict which shines through the various characters and their developments. Engels writes: Balzac whom I consider a far greater master of realism than all the Zolas ... in La Comédie humaine gives us a most wonderfully realistic history of French ‘Society,’ describing, chronicle-fashion, almost year by year from 1816 to 1848, the progressive inroads of the rising bourgeoisie upon the society of nobles, that reconstituted itself after 1815. ... He describes how the last remnants of this, to him, model society gradually succumbed before the intrusion of the vulgar moneyed upstart, or were corrupted by him.31 Engels’ description is delicate but precise, swift to arrive at the essence of the historical conflict which pervades Balzac’s works, and which is vivid and palpably present in Cousin Bette. But what Engels fails to appreciate is that, in Hegelian terms, we are also dealing with a moment of abstract negativity. The ‘rising bourgeoisie’ signalises the forms of the future, but it is a profoundly negative phenomenon. It will work to undo the ‘model’ society – or that of the nobles – by virtue of ‘the intrusion of the vulgar moneyed upstart’. Now that abstract negativity might itself be negated in a standard Hegelian movement effected at the aesthetic level; a positive, redemptive, revolutionary moment could still be drawn out in and through the fictional depiction of those nobles who – though their struggle is ultimately doomed – nevertheless exhibit courage and integrity in the moments in which the historical abyss opens up before them in all its bleak blackness. In an intriguing piece, the literary critic Edmund Wilson notes a similar logic at work in one of Ernest Hemmingway’s short stories. Wilson writes, that in ‘Hemmingway’s story The Undefeated, the old bullfighter who figures as the hero is actually humiliated and killed but his courage has itself been a victory’.32

31 F Engels ‘Letter to Margaret Harkness, Beginning of April 1888 (draft)’, Marx and Engels – on Literature and Art, (International General, New York: 1974) 116. 32 E Wilson, ‘Marxism and Literature’, 20th Century Literary Criticism – editor David Lodge, (Longman, London: 1977) 248.

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Lukács would extend the same point, allowing it to underpin the raison d’être of the historical novel more broadly when he wrote, ‘[m]an in his struggle with the objectively stronger forces of the social external world, in the extreme exertion of all his powers in this unequal battle, reveals important qualities which would otherwise have remained hidden.’33 But although Lukács’ insight contains all of that great thinker’s customary profundity, he has failed to link it to the dramatic structure which underpins Balzac’s work, particularly Cousin Bette. After all, it is simply not the case that the nobles exhibit heroic and ‘hidden qualities’ which are teased out in and through the tragic tenor of their doomed struggle; rather, the very opposite is true – that is, in such a historical climate the nobles reveal the worst and basest aspects of themselves. The Baron Hulot is a courageous noble who has many heroic qualities that are derived from the life-essence of his class more broadly, but when he senses that his fate is in terminal decline, the worst aspects of his character come to the fore. He cheats on his wife with increasing profligacy, and he squanders more money not less. Mired in decadence and hopelessness, Balzac’s baron fully avails himself of the old biblical insight: ‘let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’34 Because the aristocracy as a class is doomed in historical terms, its representatives as literary characters in Balzac’s works, though they might be depicted as ‘types’ in the realist sense, are incapable of carrying the humane and redemptive power required by a central character whose fate is thrown into tragic relief. The aristocratic ‘type’ cannot revive nobility and humanity for he himself is doomed – not simply in individual terms but in terms of the broader class horizons through which the individual personality comes into focus. Despite the fact of Balzac’s historical ‘realism’ – which Engels and Lukács both successfully locate in his depiction of ‘types’ – the overall sweep of his work has a distinctly pessimistic, almost Nietzschean flavour in which the Dionysian revelry and colour of the noble forms of life are snuffed out by the more Apollonian caveats of cold, harsh economic calculation. What pervades in the aftermath is a melancholy despair. For Balzac to have overcome this at the aesthetic level, and the spiritual level more broadly, he would have to have been more attuned to the struggle of those whom both the noble and the capitalist society had subjected and devastated in turn – the peasant and plebeian elements in whose fragmentation can already be discerned the ghostly outline of a new world. This, of course, was an 33 34

G Lukács, The Historical Novel, (Merlin Press Limited, London: 1965) 122. Isaiah 22:13.

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image of the future Balzac remained oblivious to, blinded as he was by the teary nostalgia which he had formed for the worthy decadents of the old aristocracy which he so much admired and who were, by then, in the process of shuffling from the historical scene. Within decades, much had changed. Both Dickens and Eliot provide us with ‘types’ drawn from the lower classes, both beautifully and sympathetically, and in many cases, these figures are the heroes. But the peasants and proto-proletarians receive their most sincere, powerful and redemptive depictions in Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. At first glance, Tolstoy’s work seems at odds with this analysis because so many of his heroes are aristocrats. But Tolstoy is able to depict the figure of the aristocrat as a tragic hero in a way that Balzac never could because in Balzac, the nobles – even in the process of their decline – are still the representatives of a social class which carries within itself the most worthwhile and human tendencies. In the words of Lenin, however, Tolstoy offered up an ‘indictment of the ruling classes ... made with tremendous power and sincerity’.35 The tragic power inherent to a heroine such as Anna Karenina, for instance – although she is drawn from the aristocracy – lies in the fact that the essential being of her character conflicts with the narrow and harsh confines of the aristocratic existence she has been born into. Her individualised struggle which, on the surface, took place in the immediate context of the upper class environment was nevertheless – in an indirect and heavily mediated fashion – bound to the broader historical shift whereby the brittle feudal forms which had remained for centuries were now under pressure of collapse by the interminable, rolling movement of the recently awakened peasant masses – that ‘great human ocean, agitated to its very depths’.36 For this reason, says Lukács, although ‘Tolstoy’s heroes come from the upper sections of society ... the life and destiny of the whole people are reflected in the events of their lives.’37 Here, then, is the profound difference between Balzac and a writer like Tolstoy. Even though both writers successfully depict ‘types’ in the Marxist sense, Balzac’s writings are, despite their power, limited by their connection to a past which remains unmediated by those progressive social agencies which inhere in the present. The work of the great writers who follow him, on the other hand, use those same social agencies to mediate the outline of the future.

35 36 37

V Lenin, On Literature and Art, (Progress Publishers, USSR: 1982) 62. Ibid 63. G Lukács, The Historical Novel, (Merlin Press Limited, London: 1965) 284.

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11 The Wife: A Study in Patriarchy

The concept of patriarchy is a notoriously difficult one. Loosely speaking, of course, it means a social system in which males have more power – but the manner in which that power is transmitted can be multifarious in its aspect. It can, for instance, be expressed through direct and quantifiable differences in the situation of the genders; at the time of writing there exists in the UK, on average, a 15% discrepancy between the wages1 paid to a man or a woman within the same job sectors. But beyond that there remains the more intangible phenomena: the forms of cultural behaviour which men and women exhibit – the routines enacted out in the backdrop of our day-to-day lives, which perpetuate a myriad of nebulous feelings and beliefs that come to underpin and fortify more traditional gender roles. Because these feelings and beliefs do not always attain the definition and clarity of coherent ideologies, they do not necessarily appear as a cogent intellectual topography easily available to critical analysis. Rather, they involve what are often semi-invisible forms of behaviour: a parent who unconsciously but routinely serves the little boy dinner before the little girl; the same girl, older now, overlooked when she has her hand up in class even though she has been waiting longer; and later still, when she lands her first job as an IT technician and she is the only woman there – her boss’ voice is a little different when he addresses her, its tone modified ever so slightly, softer and more cajoling in its aspect, as though he were talking to a child.

1 Staff and Agencies, ‘Gender pay gap stands at 15%’, The Guardian, Thursday, 7 November 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/nov/07/genderpay-gap-official-figures-disparity

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Meg Wolitzer’s novel The Wife is a story which is very much attuned to these small, intuitive, semiconscious behaviours which carry the faint aroma of patriarchy, and The Wife is a fluid study in the cumulative effects they have on an individual who experiences a lifetime of them. The central character of the piece – Joan Castleman – is above all things a wife, and yet her husband Joe is first and foremost a writer, and only then a spouse. The story opens up when the couple, now in their sixties, are onboard an aeroplane headed towards Helsinki, where Joe is due to receive a prestigious literary award. As he shrills with pleasure, basking in the attentions of the air hostess who offers him various titbits – but seems insensible to the presence of his wife, Joan reflects on the decision she has made – to leave her husband once and for all. Perhaps the decision has been sparked by the flirtations of the air hostess and her husband’s eager reciprocity, for this causes Joan to reminisce on the female attention Joe has enjoyed, often through extramarital affairs. And yet, the instinctual conviction that women exist to facilitate his needs and dreams is one which was formulated and grown long before. The writer describes Joe’s childhood following the death of his father: It was just them, the women and the boy. ... Lorna had been betrayed by her husband’s early death, which had arrived with no preamble or warning. Aunt Lois had been betrayed by her own absence of sensation, by the fact that she’d never felt a thing for any man except, from afar, Clark Gable, with his broad shoulders and his easy-grip-duringsex jug ears. Aunt Viv had been betrayed by legions of men. ... The women who surrounded Joe were furious at men, they insisted, yet they also insisted that he was exempt from that fury. Him they loved.2 Wolitzer’s swift, deft description of Joe’s childhood and the contradictions which inhere in the attitudes of the women guardians to masculine power has the genuine ring of authenticity. On the one hand, these women are resentful of patriarchal privilege because they have been its victims and have now developed a fortitude and a brusque intolerance towards the men who deploy it. But at the same time they become both its progenitors and enforcers in and through their untrammelled indulgence of the young boy. This contradiction between empowerment and subservience has a real-world resonance. Here, for instance, is the

2

M Wolitzer, The Wife, (Vintage, London: 2012) 14.

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writer Isabel Allende reflecting in her beautifully authored memoirs on machismo and the figure of the typical Chilean woman: Chilean women are abettors of machismo; they bring up their daughters to serve and their sons to be served. While on the one hand they fight for their rights and work tirelessly, on the other, they wait on their husband and male children, assisted by their daughters, who from an early age are well instructed regarding their obligations. Modern girls are rebelling, of course, but the minute they fall in love they repeat the learned pattern, confusing love with service.3 That may be an overgeneralisation because it is difficult to imagine its author – a Chilean woman and a brilliant writer and activist – ever conforming to such a paradigm. But the gist of what’s being relayed seems to be simply this: the reproduction of patriarchal values requires a degree of internalisation on the part of those who are the victims of them. The women who flock and fuss around Joe, who attend to his every need as a matter of routine social practise, inevitably inculcate the awareness on his part that ‘in some unstated way he ruled the roost and always would.’4 For this, the character of Joe has to it an everyday monstrousness; having been raised in the manner of a little crown prince accustomed to the satisfaction of his every whim by the fleet of feminine figures forever cruising his orbit, he develops an almost unlimited capacity – a gaping black hole of need which nestles in the very heart of his being and which has the propensity to suck dry the vitality and energy of the women he depends on. But the destructive nature of this peculiarly masculine strain of solipsism is complemented by a certain level of sensitivity and attunement to the desires and aspirations of the women he comes into contact with – precisely because Joe was raised in an almost entirely feminine context. Thus, his sense of entitlement is supplemented with a coy ability for manipulation; he is able to flatter, cajole, manipulate and deceive with a softness and vulnerability which often belie the callous nature of his activities. His is not the embittered, violent misogyny of the batterer; his is very much a liberal personality which has inhaled the fragrant gains won by the feminist liberation movements in the 1960s, and yet his behaviour is monstrous nevertheless, perhaps because it is thusly so insidious and qualified. 3 4

I Allende, My Invented Country – A Memoir, (Flamingo, London: 2003) 53. M Wolitzer, The Wife, (Vintage, London: 2012) 14.

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To take a case in point, Joe first encounters Joan as a student in the literature class he teaches. She is hesitant, uncertain and timid regarding her own gifts as a writer, though we, as readers, are given to understand that she possesses them in no small measure. Joe, as her teacher, purports to encourage her gifts; he lavishes attention and praise on her, and yet his compliments seem more about encouraging intimacy between them – a segue to seduction – rather than a genuine appreciation of her abilities. His observations are impeccably timed but never without a faint hint of patronisation: ‘So. Your Story.’ He looked at it serenely… ‘I’ve read this twice,’ he said, ‘and frankly, both times I’ve found it to be wonderful.’ … ‘Thank you,’ I said quietly, not meeting his eyes. ‘You barely know what I’m talking about now, am I right?’ he asked me. ‘You have no conception of how good you are. I love that about you, Miss Aimes; it’s a very touching quality. Please don’t change.’5 In time, Joe achieves his seduction. Joe leaves his wife and child to be with Joan, but his abandonment of his family gives the young, liberal college professor little pause for thought because he understands it to be the inevitable but unhappy by-product of his wife’s deficiency and lack: ‘a woman grown shrill, whose most significant crime was that, since the baby was born, she no longer wanted to have sex. She refused him, he said, turning away from him again and again.’6 The sentence which follows this is simple and stark. The author simply reminds us of Joe’s liberal convictions and how ‘thrilled’ he was ‘when Welch stuck it to McCarthy, stirred by Brown v Board of Ed., especially as he had a couple of close Negro friends’.7 In the forensic light of the author’s unsparing prose, Joe’s liberal convictions are revealed as sentimental indulgences which paper over the almost predatory nature of his own sense of entitlement. Having once encouraged Joan to write, now that they are a couple, Joe becomes oblivious to the possibility of her burgeoning career, and naturally, inevitably, the couple’s focus becomes concentrated on the novel that Joe is writing. Joan shifts, gradually, inexorably, from a writer in her own right to the wife, the figure who exists in order to provide support and emotional sustenance to her husband in all his creative endeavours. 5 6 7

Ibid. 57. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 67.

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And so begins a life whereby the raising of their children is interspersed by the various writing functions which Joan must attend in her role as dutiful spouse. As Joe’s career starts to skyrocket, these engagements become ever more frequent. Joe pays lip service to his wife at these functions in the same semi patronising way, depicting her as the steadfast and dependable grist to his fiery creativity: ‘She keeps me in line this girl. ... She keeps my world at bay. She is my discipline, my cato’-nine-tails, my better half’.8 At the same time, he displays his gratitude by using the occasions as a means to meet and then sleep with fans. But beyond such specifics, Wolitzer is able to vividly describe the testosterone-soaked atmosphere of these literary events and the stifling sense of claustrophobia experienced by the women and wives who attend them. Again, she provides a meticulous study of oppression, the multifarious ways in which someone can be demeaned with little more than a gesture or tone of voice. Wolitzer describes a scene where a group of male writers ruminate on a perceived propensity of female writers towards mental illness: ‘Have you ever noticed,’ said Lovejoy slowly, as though introducing a theory he’d been quietly cultivating for some time, ‘that a surprisingly high number of them are mad as hatters?’ … ‘I’ve come across a few of that kind in my day,’ said Samuelson. ‘Boy, they give you a run for your money.’ The men all nodded and laughed easily, Joe included, though when he saw me looking at him he sobered quickly. ‘You’re not one of them, are you?’ Lovejoy said to me mildly. He leaned forward, reached out and then very, very lightly stroked the soft skin of my forearm with his fingers. I jerked back quickly. ‘Don’t,’ I said. Lovejoy removed his hand. ‘Sorry,’ he said, and then shrugged at Joe. ‘It was just irresistible.’ ‘Like women themselves,’ said Lyle Samuelson. ‘Like women themselves,’ repeated Lovejoy.9 The question arises: Why does Joan stick with Joe as long as she does? The standard answers inevitably pertain: she is a housewife, while he is 8 9

Ibid. 120. Ibid. 104–105.

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the breadwinner; they are bound together by their children, especially in the period when the children are growing up. But other reasons also pertain. Joe’s personality – horrific in its aspect of need and an almost amoral capacity geared towards its satisfaction – in some way resembles a monstrous overgrown child. Beneath the nihilism of his need, there also persists, as unformed and inarticulate, the bemused innocence of a child. Joe’s attitude towards Joan is not underpinned by solely cynical manipulations; he reposes in her a childlike trust which – despite her awareness of his capacity for callousness – nevertheless moves her and makes him vulnerable to her even after everything else. Wolitzer does not dwell on this aspect of the relationship, but when she references it, it feels remarkably moving, and it underlines the fact that sometimes exploitation is most effective when bound up with intimacy and even fondness: We sat at a large, round table at The Cracked Crab that night ... and there was the incessant, almost soothing sound of crab cartilage being crushed or pulled, when suddenly, with a mouth full of food, Joe reared back in his chair and said, ‘Shit.’ Then his chair slammed forward to the floor and his face smashed down onto the butcher paper, and all of us leaped forward. ... The next thing I knew, paramedics had pushed through the wooded back room of The Cracked Crab and had Joe on a stretcher with an oxygen mask over his face. Someone put an arm around me; I heard a mesh of voices, and I reached out toward Joe, but he was already being wheeled away. … I clung to Joe that year, extremely frightened. I forgot his flaws; they flew away as quickly as the taste of that meal. I have never eaten crab again.10 By the time Joan confronts Joe – in Helsinki at the moment of his greatest literary achievement – many years have passed, and Joe’s betrayals, along with the years of his relying on Joan as an emotional crutch – mean that Joan is determined to strike out on her own, to finally give consideration to her own thwarted career ambitions. At this point, Wolitzer hits us with a reversal that slams into our minds like artillery into the trenches. Not only had Joe been dependent on his wife’s self-sacrifice, emotional support and domestic labour, but in fact she had been writing the novels 10

Ibid. 178–180.

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which propelled his career into the stratosphere; along with everything else, it was her intellectual activity which Joe had usurped. Although it is ingenious and clever, shocking the reader out of his or her complacency, I think it is fair to say that the final twist is the weakest part of the novel. The notion that Joe has so callously appropriated Joan’s labour by taking the credit and the fame for the success of her novels provides a powerful revelation, but it is one which fails to keep with the harshness and the tragedy of the typical form of labour appropriation that takes place in the capitalist epoch. One of its fundamental aspects is that the person who is producing through his or her exertions has the tenor of that labour undermined not simply by the appropriation of its results but also by the warping of the production process in line with the imperatives of capitalist accumulation. In pre-capitalist feudal forms, the direct producer – though regularly the victim of the forced, external appropriation of his labour product – was nevertheless to a lesser or greater degree the overseer of the productive process, bound up as it was with his immediate conditions of life, his control of his own means of production (the plot of land, the tools of the guild master etc.) and the traditions and skills he had inherited in a given field. But the relentless, rationalised and mechanised processes of capitalist production break down the unity of the labour operation effected by the individual producer, such that the producer is rematerialised as a single component part in the chain of a broader objectivity whose impetus and direction originates from a source outside him. He becomes, in the modern refrain, a cog in the machine, an abstract energy which provides the material force by which a particular moment in the ongoing process of production is actualised. He pulls a lever, flicks a switch or scans a barcoded item. As Georg Lukács phrases it so succinctly, ‘the worker is objectively transformed into a mere object of the process of production by the methods of capitalist production. ... [T]he worker is forced to objectify his labour-power over and against his total personality’.11 All of this might seem to have little bearing on the relationship between Joan and Joe and the way in which the latter ‘appropriates’ the creative product of the former. Their spousal relationship clearly doesn’t constitute any form of the capital wage–labour relation. But although this is true, the loss that the wage labourer experiences under capitalism assumes its fully tragic and debilitating dimensions because it is at the 11 G Lukács, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, History and Class Consciousness, (Merlin Press, London: 1983) 168.

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same time the loss of self in which the worker is ‘forced to objectify his labour-power over and against his total personality’ – and this, in turn, has important ramifications for an understanding of the damage and danger of patriarchal power as it is elucidated in The Wife. Until the revelation that Joan is the one who has really been doing the writing, Joe’s ‘exploitation’ of Joan seems to have certain key elements in common with the model which Lukács describes. Joe, as the writer, is the overseer of a complete and unified process of labour; that is to say, the product – the final novel – is fully determined by his will and creative agency. In contrast to this, Joan types up his work and brings him food – or to say the same, her personality is converted into an abstract force of labour which is set into motion by a power outside herself: Joe and his writing needs. The truly outrageous thing here, the thing which would most excite feelings of injustice, would be that Joe realises his chance to produce freely precisely at the expense of Joan. Through the patriarchal paradigm, Joan’s labour activity is converted into an abstract force, and her own creative personality and ambitions are dissolved in this force, for it is rendered as one of a series of subordinate moments by which Joe achieves self-realisation through his free and unified creative act. This is the tragic essence of the novel. But the idea that Joan was the writer all along does not fit well with this motif as it suggests that Joan was the true originator of the creative product and that Joe has managed to merely steal away the final results – that is, the prestige and the fame. Yes, that makes for an extremely clever twist, but it militates against the true power of the exploitation that Joan has been subject to throughout the novel, and thus the twist alleviates the novel’s tragic results. In lieu of the twist, we realise that Joan has realised her creative potential after all – she has manifested it in its objective guise as a series of novels – even if Joe has managed to take the credit for them. Such an inversion returns Joan to herself, and Joe is the one who remains bereft. Although this type of ending is infinitely more pleasing, it more or less whitewashes the most devastating effects of the patriarchal exploitation Joan has been in thrall to.

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12 The Vigilante in Film: The Movement from Death Wish, to Batman, to Taxi Driver

Cinema evinces an almost schizophrenic attitude toward the figure of the vigilante. In the first place, there are those films which offer an uncritical celebration, a homily to the vigilante as a type of modern-day folk hero. Death Wish is probably the most well known of these, though others have followed suit by trading in on the same formula. Here the writer/director is at pains to show how the vigilante figure is in essence, and against all expectation, a fundamentally gentle and passive persona possessing a profound ordinariness. Charles Bronson’s character – Paul Kersey – is a mild-mannered professional who is a credulous believer in the status quo; he assumes that if he pays his taxes and behaves with civic dignity and responsibility, things will inevitably turn out for the best. The message conveyed is an obvious one: Kersey is just like you and me. When his wife and daughter endure a senseless attack perpetrated by a vicious street gang, he becomes a vigilante and proceeds to exact a ruthless and methodical vengeance. The revenge – for the viewer – contains a twofold aspect. Because of the fact Kersey is an everyman, his sudden explosion of heroic violence, pushing back against the forces of evil, is one the viewer is invited to partake in from the viewpoint of his or her own fantasy self. But although Kersey’s violence is ostensibly directed at those people who committed the crime against his family – or at least the social types which resemble them – the vigilante motif allows for the fantastical satisfaction of a more general sort. In a modern world where human behaviour is increasingly regimented, quantified and rationalised by a complex of legal and bureaucratic forms, the individual is, on one level, subject to a profound loss of subjectivity; 128

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his or her thoughts and feelings are made ever more redundant. If one receives a parking ticket, for instance, or is late with a banking payment and incurs a charge, subjective appeals and wilful arguments cannot contravene them, because they are manifested through a series of objective bureaucratic mechanisms impervious to any personal intervention (you receive the fine, then the warning letter, then the summons). To contest them means employing a lawyer – someone who speaks in a voice foreign to your own, uses a technical language which you are unable to fathom (unless you have legal training) and moves in a field of laws and statutes which, more likely than not, remain alien to you. The bureaucratic forms of capitalist modernity, therefore, imply a process of ‘depersonalisation’ – achieved by a layer of professional specialists (accountants, lawyers, government employees etc.), which tends to divest the individual of his or her ‘authentic’ voice and instead speaks for them, articulating their position in an esoteric, bureaucratic idiom which is often indecipherable. The sociologist Max Weber outlined the process in the following terms: The more fully realized the more bureaucracy ‘depersonalizes’ itself, i.e., the more completely it succeeds in achieving the exclusion of love, hatred, and every purely personal, especially irrational and incalculable, feeling from the execution of official tasks. In the place of the old-type ruler who is moved by sympathy, favor, grace, and gratitude, modern culture requires for its sustaining external apparatus the emotionally detached, and hence rigorously ‘professional’ expert.1 In my view, the notion of the vigilante resonates with the individual, who is a product of modernity and who experiences in their self-activity a sense of powerlessness before a series of external objectivities, a surfeit of bureaucratic trivia which nevertheless comes to pervade their very existence. The figure of the vigilante in the Death Wish mould exemplifies the anonymous individual who has been depersonalised by an ineffective (and invariably liberal) bureaucracy, and they are now – through the most violent and explosive means – asserting their personhood once more. But this type of freedom, even in its fictional variant, is profoundly conservative. Kersey is a dupe, a beautiful soul; he’s a bleeding heart who believes all the fashionable fairy stories about ‘rehabilitation’, ‘leniency’ and ‘tolerance’. The murder of his wife and the rape of his daughter 1 M Weber, Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society, (Harvard University Press, Massachusetts: 1954) 351.

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constitute reality’s revenge on the character for his sheer naivety – a bloody and violent wake-up call which raises him to a more sustainable political perspective. He comes to realise just how dangerous the streets are, that street crime must be responded to by the most savage measures. There no longer remains in his political psyche any room for a touchyfeely, liberal intellectualism and political correctness. But the second strain of vigilante films departs from this formula in as much as it begins to problematise the leading character. However, there is a great deal of sociological complexity in articulating such contradictions within the vigilante figure; and so the first attempts to imbue the figure with contradiction and nuance often take a fantasy form; that is, the contradiction in the hero’s essential being is projected onto a fairytale world. This formulation achieves its apotheosis in the comic book Batman and its incarnations in the Tim Burton films. Here, the paradigm of the hero is altered. He is no longer an everyman. Bruce Wayne is the child of a billionaire financier, and the motive for his actions is underpinned by the fact that he is not like other people but different in the extreme. The murder of his parents, his witnessing of it, creates an almost dissociative state in the young boy; he begins to reconstruct his shattered personality anew according to the image of a sinister bat-like figure. As a result, he cultivates two personalities: the person he would have been, the frivolous billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne who holds Champagne infused, high-society soirees; but, in an ironic reversal, the Bruce Wayne persona is, in fact, the mask, the cosmetic and fragile identity, which is intermittently perforated by the underlying rage of the darker and more authentic self – the Batman. In Death Wish, and its ilk, the vigilante presents as someone who is a moral force, an untrammelled goodness despite the violence of his or her (Jodie Foster in The Beautiful One, for example) actions. His or her actions flow from the fact that they are representative of the community at large; the vigilante acts in the name of a broader abstraction – a community of individuals who have been unvoiced and disempowered. But with the move to the fantasy vigilante as embodied by the Batman, the vigilante ceases to represent a pure, untrammelled goodness and is rendered ambiguous and contradictory. It is true that ‘abstractly’ the Dark Knight strives for justice. But – unlike Paul Kersey – the Batman is not an ordinary citizen, and thus, his morality and the actions which flow from it are far from universal. In his manifestation, the Dark Knight retains a fundamental identity with the criminals he chooses to combat. This is made clear: like him, they tend to have a double identity, the result of some retro-trauma: Jack Napier’s alter ego is the Joker and Cat

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Woman’s is Selena Scott, while Harvey Dent is figuratively and literally described as ‘Two Face’. In Hegel’s Science of Logic, he presents us with the transition from Being to Essence. On the one hand, the realm of Being is unitary, immediate, abstractly universal: ‘Being is the immediate’.2 On the other, the realm of Essence ‘sets itself against itself’:3 it is the sphere of mediation, of duality, of antagonism. The movement from the pure universality of the unproblematic, reactionary vigilante to that of the figure of the Batman, in which the duality of the vigilante is expressed in terms of mutually antagonistic alter egos sees an unmediated and abstract ‘goodness’ replaced by a far more ambiguous and contradictory morality. In my view, such a movement develops precisely in accordance with the Hegelian shift from Being to Essence. And yet the vigilante figure as fantasy superhero is still abstract. The forces of good and evil which are at war within him or her are still moral abstractions which replace a sense of authentic social contradiction with a fantastical duel persona set against a background of lavish Gothic theatre. And that brings us to the final subgenre of vigilante films. Here the contradictions which express the moral ambiguity of the vigilante character must now be expressed, not in a fantasy form as a double personality but in and through the depiction of an authentic social reality. To put it in Hegelian terms once more, we move towards the realisation of a concrete universal. The abstract morality of the vigilante figure in the form of a Paul Kersey was later, by way of the fantasy superhero, sundered and split in duality. But this duality was realised in the context of a dark fairy tale realm. What remains is for the contradictions and duality in the vigilante figure to be grafted onto a concrete socio-historical context. The film which most effectively realises this is Taxi Driver. Taxi Driver provides a prolonged and painful chronicle of mental unravelling and disintegration. The lead character is in many ways sympathetic. But his better qualities are increasingly undermined by the concrete conditions of the socio-historical context. Travis Bickle is a traumatised Vietnam War vet who, returned to society, finds it increasingly difficult to function, and his isolation is compounded by an indifferent state which fails to provide the forms and agencies of psychological support his condition requires. Bickle is simply left to his own devices and as such, his sense of anomie and dislocation intensifies, and his 2 G W F Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, (George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London: 1969) 389. 3 Ibid. 390.

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ability to gauge social norms and act in accordance with them is ever diminished. So, when he takes Betsy on a date, he takes her to see a pornographic movie, not because he is looking to embarrass or humiliate her but because he simply doesn’t register the behaviour as inappropriate. It is a disturbing juxtaposition: his soft, shy, fumbling attempt at romantic overture – at once annihilated by a supreme moment of vulgarity – a moment that Bickle is simply unable to register but that vividly hints at the profound level of the alienation he endures. His spiral into violence directly succeeds this event; it is a consequence of his failure to function socially and the fact that there are no groups or organisations in place to better mediate and integrate him into wider society. It is important to note how this is the very opposite of the Death Wish formula. In Death Wish, the vigilante is a product of a state which is far too paternal, interventionist and involved. It is a state which is always prepared to molly-coddle the criminals, to give them lenient prison sentences in institutions which are relatively luxurious, to reason away the moral reprehension of their crimes through its teams of do-gooding psychologists who constantly reference the criminal’s ‘damaged’ childhood. An overbearing nanny state, through its various interferences and mitigations, manages to whitewash and whittle away all notion of criminal responsibility. The vigilante in Death Wish, therefore, becomes the true bearer of justice. But in Taxi Driver the situation is quite different. It is not the interventionist presence of the state which becomes the context for the behaviour of the vigilante; it is, rather, its lack. The state is a ghostly non-presence in Bickle’s life; his anomie is cultivated and accentuated precisely because he is a fragmented individual set adrift from the social order. Paul Kersey, on the one hand, realises his true individuality partly in response to a social world characterised by an overbearing state; Bickle, on the other hand, loses his individuality in a world which is characterised by its absence. Hidden within both characterisations are two profoundly different ideological worldviews. For its part, Death Wish expresses a neoliberalism whereby state intervention is regarded as a bad thing, as stifling individuality and incentive, and it is the figure of the vigilante who, in a metaphorical sense, reasserts these. However, a film such as Taxi Driver suggests that vigilantism is not a result of empowerment but rather its lack, an expression of a society in which the absence of comprehensive social services and welfare does not act as an incentive to individuality but engenders its loss and dissolution.

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Taxi Driver is the superior film because it contains in a fantasy form an authentic social truth; that is, vigilantism is symptomatic of profound powerlessness as opposed to authentic self-determination. It is the result of fragmentation, of alienation, and anomie. When we take the time to examine its real-world manifestations this becomes ominously apparent, as in the recent case of George Zimmerman who shot dead teenager Trayvon Martin. In a true example of life imitating art, Zimmerman’s history achieves certain parities with the Bickle character from Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle, in a letter to his parents, fantasises about working in a role of authority for the government. In Zimmerman’s case, he fantasised about being a marine and then a police officer, only to have his application rejected.4 His behaviour before the shooting – joining a citizens’ security watch, spending nights prowling the streets heavily armed, making dozens of calls to the actual police force, calls which were often focused on trivialities such as children behaving raucously around a swimming pool or garage doors left open5 – such behaviour patterns very much resemble the attempt of someone’s trying to touch, in a fantasy form, an existence which remains unrealisable in reality. Signs of an increasing inability to sustain social relationships are also evinced by the history of domestic violence which fissures across Zimmerman’s rap sheet. One receives the potent impression of a miserable human being who exudes frustration, failure and powerlessness, and it is all too easy to imagine Zimmerman posing himself in the classically sinister scene from Taxi Driver, gradually unfurling his fingers to form a gun and murmuring ‘are you talking to me?’, all the while staring into the distorted mirror of his own shattered dreams.

4 P H Moore, ‘George Zimmerman’s Application to Join His Hometown Police Force Was Rejected’, All Things Crime, 10 June 2013. http://www.allthingscrimeblog.com/2013/06/10/george-zimmermans-application-to-join-his-hometownpolice-force-was-rejected/ 5 This Week Staff, ‘George Zimmerman: What we know about Trayvon Martin’s killer’, This Week, 28 March 2012. http://theweek.com/article/index/226131/ george-zimmerman-what-we-know-about-trayvon-martins-killer

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13 A Mirror into Our World: The Radical Politics of Game of Thrones

In the very first episode of Game of Thrones, we meet the steadfast Starks, a noble house who rules over Winterfell – the capital of the North. The castle keep is grey and flinty but protective; the peasants and merchants who bustle about within its walls regard the rule of their aristocratic patrons as firm but fair, and the little prince and princesses of the Stark clan are able to ramble in the grounds mingling with the common folk without fear or concern. But there is a chill in the air. ‘Winter is coming’ – the ominous whisper, carried in the taverns and the trees – is something which hints at more than just a drop in the temperature. The writers quietly graduate the sense of unease; the viewer is made to understand that the people here are living at the end of an epoch, and the shadows of a new reality are beginning to draw close. Such a prelude is typical of the fantasy genre more generally. A transition, a shift in focus from a stable, insular enclave to a broader and darker panorama. Consider, for example, the Hobbit’s shire in The Lord of the Rings: the series of quaint cottages nestled in the earth punctuated only by the hazy green grass and the pastel blues of the sky. J R R Tolkien encourages an atmosphere of lazy, languorous contentment among the little folk who live there, only to violently undermine it; his two hirsute protagonists are wrenched from the womb-like idyll of their existence by the malignant encroachment of sinister external forces. The earliest section of The Lord of the Rings reads very much as a parable to a loss of innocence, with explicit religious undertones redolent of the fall. In Game of Thrones, something similar occurs, and it too is seen primarily through the eyes of children. In particular, the Stark siblings – Arya and her brother Bran – look on, as the king of their continent Westeros – arrives at their home. He brings with him the intriguing of his scheming, incestuous wife and her brother which eventually results 134

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in the crippling and attempted murder of Bran. On climbing a tower, Bran peers through a balcony window and surprises the king’s wife and her brother during sex; he is promptly pushed from the edge and nearly killed. The state of grace, the untrammelled condition of innocence is thus doubly fractured, not only in terms of the child’s broken body but also at the level of the psyche in as much as he has seen something he was never meant to see. This is symptomatic of a much broader historical shift. As the Starks are drawn away from the security of their home, and outward into the heartland of the Seven Kingdoms and a fermenting political conflict, the notion that a familiar and certain world is about to enter its end of days is outlined in the sharpest apocalyptic terms. At the very edge of the Seven Kingdoms is the Wall, a colossal fortification which separates the known world from the beyond – from where something is beginning to stir. The ancient myths of what lives in the wastelands past the Wall – tales of the dreaded White Walkers – begin to gain currency in the hinterlands once more. The careful cultivation of such ominous and sinister foreboding has, perhaps, a particularly vivid resonance for the modern viewer. For although Game of Thrones is ostensibly about a fantasy feudal realm governed by ancient blood lineages and autocratic decadence, the sense of foreboding – the awareness that a tangible and stable reality is ever more in danger of melting away – is something which the viewership can more and more identify with, living as we do under the shadow of a vast global economic crisis. It is a crisis against which any fortification is prone to fissure. And it is a crisis which has a certain intangible aspect too. Partly because of the vast network of its complexity, partly because its consequences will continue to crystallise in the indeterminate forms of the future, it therefore appears to us in spectral terms, as something possessed of an artificial existence capable of impinging on our own, as an alien and external power with an independent momentum, imbued with its own ghostly life. And this is true of what lives beyond the Wall of the Seven Kingdoms. The threat is simultaneously palpable and unreal, both existential and imaginary. What is remarkable about Game of Thrones is how it manages to sustain this sense of claustrophobia; what lies beyond the Wall remains, for the majority of the first two series, an immanent possibility which rarely translates into a visible, supernatural manifestation. This differentiates Game of Thrones from much fantasy fare more broadly: the emphasis on the internal social struggles between castes and clans far outweighs an outward and external concern for magic and magical creatures. In the first two series, there is remarkably little of either of the latter. The focus of Game of Thrones falls disproportionately on the

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political manoeuvres of aristocratic factions and the subtle and corroding influence of power. Once again this provides us with a mirror into our own world. The incestuous marriage of the personal and the political at the very highest echelons was always something which characterised medieval power relations, and it is something whose dramatic possibilities Game of Thrones exploits by laying bare the intrigues, seductions and machinations which the decadent and slippery elites generate. What is particularly fascinating is how close the politicking of our own reality sometimes seems to this – the fusion of the personal and political which occurs at the very heart of empire building. Despite the complex democratic mechanisms of modernity, there is woven into the fabric of power a series of names which appear over and over: an elite set of patrician families whose claim to sovereignty seems almost as much about predestination as polling. Consider the Kennedys, or the Clintons or the Bushes. And such parallels are not lost on the fan base for Game of Thrones. In an extremely unfortunate (and surely accidental) incident, the (fabricated) head of ex-president George W Bush appeared in one of the episodes1 of Game of Thrones – mired on a spike. But what was interesting, in the furore that ensued, was how many of the commentators were prepared to articulate contemporary American political power in terms of the ruthless medieval elites that Game of Thrones so vividly references. One commentator using the moniker Woof 73 – said of ex-president George W Bush, ‘That f**ker’s a Lannister, through and through. And not one of the cool evil ones, either. He’s one of the few that will be left after the story is over, too cowardly to fight, too lucky to be hunted down’.2 But there are other ways in which Game of Thrones draws its themes from the modern political landscape too. Critics have targeted the way Game of Thrones enforces certain stereotypes that have a modern and pernicious flavour. Marxist-feminist Laurie Penny draws attention to the misogynistic and racist undertones of some of the sub-stories which are woven through the fantasy fabric of Westeros. She writes: As well as being mightily entertaining, Game of Thrones is racist rapeculture Disneyland with Dragons. ... Take, for example, one single

1 T McCarthy, ‘Head of state: Game of Thrones sorry about decapitating George W Bush’, The Guardian, Thursday, 14 June 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/ tv-and-radio/us-news-blog/2012/jun/14/game-of-thrones-george-w-bush-head 2 Ibid. – comments section.

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sub-plot: a very young princess, a blonde and beautiful thirteenyear-old virgin whose remarkable fairness of complexion is a motif of the series, is sold off as a child-bride. ... The unfortunate girl’s new husband is a dark-skinned, savage warlord from the Mystical East who, being a savage, is unable to conceive of any sex that isn’t exclusively rape-based, and as such violently assaults the little princess every night. But it’s all ok because a prostitute slave teaches the thirteen-year-old princess super sexy sex skills, and she proceeds to blow the warlord’s mind so thoroughly that they fall in love.3 The depiction of almost every vaguely Middle Eastern-looking character as a nomadic savage intent on rape, murder and the destruction of civilisation is unpleasant and highly problematic, not only from the point of view of a political ethic, however, but also in terms of any kind of aesthetic efficacy. It is telling that the scenes which embody crude racial stereotypes (albeit in a mystical, mythical shell) are those which are the most banal and uninteresting of all – despite the copious amounts of violence and sex injected into them as a means to galvanise them. The ‘dark-skinned savage warlord’ Penny refers to is Khal Drogo, the leader of a band of marauding nomads who wander interminably through the dunes, hacking and slashing to pieces the denizens of any desert outpost which is unlucky enough to fall across their path. Such a racist portrayal is not unrelated to the failure of these scenes to impart any real dramatic resonance. In the words of philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, ‘although literature is one thing and morality quite a different one, at the heart of the aesthetic imperative we discern the moral imperative’.4 Sartre would go on to argue that the aesthetic relationship which opens up between the person who writes a novel and the person who reads it is by its very nature structured according to the prerogatives and essence of human freedom. In the very act of creating the book, the writer automatically assumes the freedom of the person who makes the conscious decision to read, and in the same vein, the person who reads is compelled to recognise the writer’s freedom in choosing to present an imaginary universe which has been called into being by his or her own volition: ‘since the one who writes recognizes ... the freedom of his readers, and 3 L Penny, ‘Laurie Penny on Game of Thrones and the Good Ruler complex’, New Statesman, 4 June 2012. 4 J P Sartre, ‘Why Write?’, 20th Century Literary Criticism – editor David Lodge, (Longman, London: 1977) 383.

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since the one who reads ... recognizes the freedom of the writer, the work of art, from whatever side you approach it, is an act of confidence in the freedom of men.’5 Because the creative aesthetic act is in its essence ontologically structured according to demands of human freedom, anything that interferes with this is liable to reduce its aesthetic power. If one were forced to write a novel for the purposes of propaganda, the relationship of freedom between the writer and the reader would be fundamentally undermined; the reader would no longer be able to feel the writer within the words, for those words would cease to be the ciphers of the writer’s freedom and self-consciousness. Likewise, if the writer were addressing his work to a captive audience – an audience which was forced to submit itself to the lowest forms of propaganda – the writer would cease to feel his reader as a free and autonomous consciousness. His or her words would fall into an abiding blackness, they would perish in the void. Therefore, Sartre argues, ‘the freedom of writing implies the freedom of the citizen. ... The art of prose is bound up with the only regime in which prose has meaning, democracy.’6 But Sartre argues that the aspect of freedom must do more than underpin the conditions for the writing. It must, in fact, pervade the content itself. Because the creative act is an exercise in freedom by its very nature, the fictional worlds it presents must also be stamped by the necessity of this freedom; that is to say, ‘the unique point of view from which the author can present the world ... is that of a world to be impregnated always with more freedom.’7 Now this statement has to be taken very carefully. I don’t think Sartre is saying that the author has to consciously contrive some absurd, happy-go-lucky world in which everybody is depicted as taking part in a triumphal exercise of mass freedom and celebration. On the contrary, the literary endeavour might depict a fictional environment of bleak totalitarianism, a Big Brother-type terrain in which every joy and pleasure is suppressed. But such a depiction could be profound and powerful nevertheless because it awakens in the reader the desire for freedom, thus bringing the reader into contact with his or her true human essence: ‘I feel myself a pure freedom’.8 Again, the work of fiction might be ‘apolitical’ in the broadest sense – it might just tell the story of a lonely child and her imaginary friend – but this too 5 6 7 8

Ibid. 383. Ibid. 384. Ibid. 383. Ibid. 383.

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can excite in the reader a sense of the struggle to overcome loneliness, to discover oneself in the semblance of another, to escape the confines of a purely solitary existence. All of these things allow me, the reader, to ‘feel myself a pure freedom’ as I share in that child’s struggle to transcend the limitations of her reality. For this reason, Sartre observes, most incisively, that ‘nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism. For, the moment I feel that my freedom is indissolubly linked with that of all other men, it cannot be demanded of me that I use it to approve the enslavement of a part of these men.’9 This, of course, returns us to Game of Thrones. The depiction of Drogo and the Dothraki in the early stages of the series/novels lacks aesthetic power because it is drawn in line with a racist archetype. Because the Dothraki are rendered such crude, cardboard caricatures, the danger they present never fully seems real. They are ‘savages’ by their inherent (racial) essence – their characters are without nuance or ambiguity, and their collective is not riven by any kind of discernible social contradiction; they are simply driven to conquer and kill by their generic natures. Thus, the brutality and injustice they create – though vividly and bloodily demarked – never truly moves us, because it contains within itself the unreality of the characters that inflict it. Even in their capacity as oppressors, therefore, the Dothraki can’t provide a genuine sense of existential threat to the freedom of the people they brutalise, and thus, they don’t successfully awaken a feeling for self-determination on the part of the viewer/reader, one that keeps with the Sartrean analysis. In the second and third series, however, the role of the Dothraki is increasingly transformed as is that of Daenerys Targaryen. She is no longer a passive consort but becomes a powerful leader in her own right. The Dothraki become an army which is intent on the liberation of slaves as well as conquest. But it is not just that they go from being a negative force to a more positive one. Rather, the Khalesi and her rebel army are transfigured from vulgar stereotypes to a far more interesting and nuanced prospect. Perhaps the two most heroic figures in the series are Tyrion Lannister and Arya Stark. Again, this evinces the superiority of Game of Thrones over something like The Lord of the Rings; in the latter, there is a very crude dichotomy between good and evil – the beautiful blonde elves are essentially noble and worthy, whereas the grotesque, misshapen orcs are evil incarnate. The magical species acts as a template for a specific 9

Ibid. 383.

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ethical type. But, by and large, Game of Thrones eschews such magical archetypes in favour of characters that are shaped by the living contradictions of their social existence. Arya, for instance, is a bold, adventurous child with the heart of a warrior, but she is frustrated by the fact that she happens to be a girl living in an extremely patriarchal world. Her very best qualities are suppressed by the same social group she belongs to, and in the struggle to overcome this, her character begins to attain heroic dimensions. In keeping with Sartre’s analysis, we share in her struggle for in it the viewer/reader feels his or her freedom ‘to be indissolubly linked with that of all other men.’10 Similarly, Tyrion develops a piercing intellect and a shrewd sense of humour as mechanisms of survival precisely because he has been ostracised by his noble family for the fact of being a dwarf. Both Arya and Tyrion are ostensibly aristocrats, but the vital aspect of their condition is one of disempowerment, of un-freedom, and the consequent desire to transcend it. As Lukács said of Tolstoy’s aristocratic heroes, even though they are drawn from the upper classes – ‘the life and destiny of the whole people are reflected in the events of their lives’.11 And what else is ‘the life and destiny of the whole people’ than the ongoing struggle for more concrete forms of emancipation and self-determination? Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire will be remembered for the radical ways in which George R R Martin authored a fantasy world where social contradictions and not magical qualities become the central driving force of character development. This naturally meshes with a plotline where the most memorable characters seek to transform their situation, challenging the hierarchal forms of the reality they are subject to. And perhaps this too can act as a mirror to the real world.

10 Sartre’s phrasing is heavy-handed in its exclusive emphasis on ‘men’ but the more general point pertains. 11 G Lukács, The Historical Novel, (Merlin Press, London: 1965) 284.

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14 Harry Potter and the Modern Age

There are only a few pockets of the world which have not experienced Harry Potter in one guise or another, either as book, film, computer game or article of clothing. As of June 2008, the series had sold over 400 million books and been translated into 67 different languages. The stories seem to appeal to people of all ages and circumstances across the globe, and subsequently, they have garnered a great deal of commentary, criticism and praise. Yet despite the ubiquity of the phenomenon, many on the left seem curiously incurious about Harry Potter. There is a dearth of articles with a left-wing voice that try to examine what it is about the Harry Potter stories which render them so compulsive and important for so many people. Why should they resonate with so many millions of human beings living in the twenty-first century? This chapter endeavours to address that question by showing how Harry Potter manages to embody some of the most important historical characteristics of the modern epoch from within the context of what is ostensibly a beautifully dark and richly woven childhood fantasy. For those who are unaware of the Harry Potter storyline, it runs as follows. Harry is an orphaned boy forced to live with his cruel and pettyminded aunt and uncle for the first 11 years of his life until eventually he escapes the humdrum world of the grimly ordinary and realises his true destiny as a wizard in the making. His personal tale is set alongside a larger narrative wherein the wizarding world he enters into is increasingly torn apart, as the presence of Lord Voldemort, the villain of the piece, more and more exerts its malign power. The whole series spans seven books, which are home to over a million words and which took the author more than 15 years to write. It is worth mentioning this at the outset as it seems to me that a project of 141

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such a scale would inevitably yield some errors, some inconsistencies in plotline and some places where the language does less than sparkle. But such things are incidental and little concern the essence and breadth of the work. There are, however, several other flaws which one might construe as significantly more damning. The first of these is Harry Potter himself. As the protagonist of the novels, Harry is a character utterly bereft of character. Harry’s role in the book is more or less predetermined; as a baby, he survives an attack by the Dark Lord which cements his status as ‘the chosen one’, and this is later reinforced when it is revealed in a prophecy that Harry alone is capable of vanquishing Lord Voldemort. So, Harry’s relation to the external world is determined not by virtue of those personal qualities which inhere within him but instead by a series of external objectivities already set in place before he has even learnt to walk. The author is hampered by such dogma and inevitably goes on to produce a rather vacant central character whose every gift is innate. It is clear that Harry must leave the ordinary, narrow and grey world of the Dursleys because he is intrinsically special and destined for greater things in the form of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. And when he arrives at the school, he is distinguished from the other students as he immediately attains the most prestigious position on the school’s ‘Quidditch’ team, although, prior to this, his character has demonstrated no proclivity for sport whatsoever. Harry’s intellectual activity is framed along similar lines. The author is at pains to contrast him with a fellow student, the swottish Hermione Granger, who works all hours in order to achieve the best grades. In contradistinction, Harry is remarkably laid back, needing only to put in a minimum amount of study as it is his natural talent which really sees him through. Harry is, we are told by the fawning intimates who surround him, blessed with infinite bravery, talent, compassion and determination, but what Rowling’s boy wizard actually exudes is a supreme sense of entitlement. The vapidity of his character is not incidental; the notion of a young male darling who arrives at the best school in the land in order to realise a pre-anointed role of success and prestige is part and parcel of upper-middle class expectation more generally. However, such class expectation can never be true to itself; it cannot present as a process of privilege whereby the children of a wealthy minority have access to the best conditions and receive the best academic tuition over and against the vast majority of other children. Instead, a reifying cloak is cast across reality so that it seems as though those who

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rise to the top do so not as a result of their historical circumstance but because they are innately more intelligent or more creative, whereupon the vast majority are consigned to the world of the grey. J K Rowling is, albeit unconsciously, harnessing just such a rationale in creating the character of Harry Potter. The notion of the ‘innate’ is the province of every ruling class seeking to explain its power in society in terms of the sublimity of its own content while at the same time dissolving the exploitative nature of its relationship to the social classes beneath it. Notions of the innate pervade the fictional landscape of Harry Potter in a variety of ways; the majority of people are ‘muggles’ by nature; this means that they are non-wizarding folk as they innately lack the talent for magic. Only a small number of intrinsically gifted children are fated to join the wizarding glitterati. Journalist Laurie Penny notes something similar in an insightful and interesting piece where she writes: JK Rowling is in the world-building business, constructing an extremely financially successful arena of the fantastic with deep roots in a nostalgised and mostly imaginary Great British Past of lofty private boarding schools and crumpets for tea. However, her body of work ignores the essentially murderous and imperialistic connotations of the particular era that it evokes and valorises. The entire premise of the franchise fetishises primogeniture, heredity and aristocracy: the Wizarding world is a glittering ubermensch, and those lucky enough to be born into it are destined for a life more resplendent and exciting than anything the rest of us Muggles (nonmagical humans) can hope for.1 Laurie Penny is rightly disturbed by any authorial propensity to construct an imaginary society along the lines of hereditary worth, aristocratic chic and glamorisation. But although the world of the muggles and the world of the wizards are differentiated by exactly such principles, Laurie Penny errs in assuming that this interrelation forms the foundation for the novels. On the contrary, the muggle world is relatively unimportant in the Harry Potter universe; it merely functions as a segue by which the reader is able to make the transition to the world of magic. The muggle world is a pale and melancholy afterthought; it is not explored

1 L Penny, Harry Potter and the Fascist Ubermensch, Penny Red (2009).http:// pennyred.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/harry-potter-and-fascist-ubermensch.html

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by Rowling in any meaningful way and exists only as an adjunct to the real world, which is paradoxically, the world of sorcery and unreality. The muggle world is neither the object nor the point of Harry Potter, and so, the author need not invest it with contradiction or complexity; its innate inferiority is apparent but also, from the perspective of the novel, beside the point. Harry is vapid and grating in as much as he corresponds to a limited stereotype of middle class, male privilege. The muggle world is a place which is emptied of all content besides the grotesque Dursleys, befuddled prime ministers and an odd interloper who glimpses a rare rupturing between the magical and non-magical spheres. But as the Harry Potter books are little about either the muggle world or even Harry himself, the focus of the books is directed primarily towards the contradictions which inhere in the world of magic. It is this world which is unfolded as a totality throughout the seven books. And it is this world alone which must be considered when one tries to understand how the essence of the novels relates to our own reality. On such an account, the author scores a resounding success and manages to achieve something which few fantasy authors have achieved and which is profound in the fullest sense of the word. In the first book, Harry Potter enters the wizarding world at the age of eleven. This book (The Philosopher’s Stone2), when taken in isolation, is a typical child’s fantasy story book. It evokes a world of magical flamboyance, fantastical creatures, exotic spells, supernatural adventuring and the like. Harry attends Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, which is clearly an idealised simulacrum of the traditional English boarding school, and as previously mentioned, some of the class connotations implicit in the character of Harry are realised in and through such a context. However, the role of the boarding school in children’s literature is more than a particular refraction of upper class sensibility. The boarding school is an excellent formulaic device as it allows children to indulge in a fantasy world which is ostensibly free of parents. The students of Hogwarts relate to one another more actively and independently because they are away from home and the gimlet gaze of their parents, although at the same time Hogwarts does have its own set of rules and regulations that are enforced by its guardian professors. Thus, the child reader experiences this loose confederacy of children as relatively independent but also understands that the independence of their counterparts in the 2

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – US title.

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story is not a result of any abandonment or loss. There remains the security of the parental presence albeit in a form which operates rather more invisibly. This first Harry Potter offering also appeals to younger children in particular because underneath the colour and sparkle of the world Rowling raises lies a rather simple and well-ordered moral universe: we are made to understand that what is bad exists as an innate and malevolent presence flitting through the shadows of the Forbidden Forest, hovering on the outskirts, lurking in the darkness. In opposition to this stands the sprightly and white-bearded figure of Dumbledore alongside his staff of twinkle-eyed eccentrics. There is little moral ambiguity here; the evil which stands outside civilisation presses against the warm and glowing windows of the Hogwarts’ hinterland, the point of the tale being that such evil must be fought against and successfully repelled in its endeavour to gain access. Such a simple and brittle opposition between good and evil is the necessary mainstay of a young child’s fiction as it deals with the moral in its immediacy; notions of good and evil are implicit and immediate in the same way in which food tastes either pleasant or horrible. Good and evil are here the moral equivalents of sense sensations; they are immediately realisable in consciousness and require no wider contextual panorama or retrospective from which their nature is to be derived. Young children necessarily experience the world in this way, in its immediacy and superficiality: light is lively and pleasurable, whereas dark is menacing; ugly gremlins are bad though beautiful angels are good; and so on. And most successful young children’s books are successful precisely and paradoxically because they express the superficial and the immediate, in just such a way as to resonate with young children. So too in another hugely successful franchise beloved by children, The Lord of the Rings, do we clearly see how the immediate becomes the overarching principle of the work. As an arch conservative who spent most of his life cosseted by the echelons of upper class English academia, it was highly likely that Tolkien would develop an extremely superficial reading of society as a whole, but when writing a children’s story such political myopia can present as a marvellous advantage. His sterile suspicion of the working class, somewhat amusing in itself, is transmuted through the landscape of his fiction, whereby there arises a vast army of blackened, slavish creatures who labour in the bowels of the earth, subsumed under the will of a shady demagogue (Sauron). This dictator is able to order such a spiritless and mindless collective in a nefarious campaign of conquest and destruction. At the same time, the forces of

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good are rallied by the figure of Gandalf, a rather imperious, aristocratic creation robed in white, who demands that the fumbling but benevolent hobbits and other pleasantly furry creatures generally subject themselves to his will; in fact, this ‘benefactor’ cannot go more than a few minutes without deriding one of the creatures whose interests he claims to represent as either a ‘fool’ or ‘idiot’. Yet such condescending paternalism and, more generally, the reduction of relations between specific groups in the fantasy world (or society) to good or evil and stupid or clever, is what makes something like The Lord of the Rings a successful children’s novel. Tolkien, through the geographical vastness of the world he conjures up, also hopes to create a texture and mythology which corresponds to some of the ancient epics he was so fond of. But on this account, he fails miserably. One is confronted by a world in which the sheer quantity of expansive detail disguises the paucity of character depth and development. The Marxist critical theorist Carl Freedman writes of Middle-earth: [I]t is very much a world of its own – but it is also, in crucial ways, a thin and impoverished world: it is miles wide but only inches deep. Frequently celebrated for all it contains – the various species, the colourful names, the invented languages, the intricate geography, and so forth – it is even more noteworthy for what it lacks. Through three thick volumes, there is, for example, hardly a single important instance of sexual desire ... or religious or political belief (an apparently ironic absence in view of Tolkien’s own devout Catholicism and sentimental conservatism), or psychological complexity (the essential interchangeability of the characters is notorious): which is to say that Middle-earth leaves out most of what makes us real human beings living in a real historical society.3 When Tolkien tries to facilitate a more adult form of literature, he produces a massively contrived and ultimately confused wasteland. What we are left with is a series of interminable battles and two little hobbits wandering through the mud ad infinitum. As soon as Tolkien tries to raise his work to the level of myth, even to the level of early mythology, he fails absolutely because he is unable to reproduce any of its subtlety or contradiction. To the adult who revisits The Lord of the Rings, it is more likely to be the memory of their childhood experience 3 C Freedman, ‘A Note on Marxism and Fantasy’, Historical Materialism, 10(4), (Brill, Leiden: 2002) 261–271.

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of the book which lights the pages and the phrases rather than the often laborious and ossified sequence of battle following battle. And so the first novel of Harry Potter involves, in the same way as The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the sundering of a fictional society into an immediately given opposition of good versus evil. But the difference between the two novels is, while The Lord of the Rings remains on the level of immediacy throughout,4 already in the first book of Harry Potter there is planted a seed of discontent. The opposition between good and evil is rendered bland and obvious, but at the same time, there is an early hint of ambiguity in the character of Snape, who represents a darker, more conflicted element within the school itself. This is one of the moments in which a pure, abstract morality begins to fracture, yielding particularity and difference within the context of an otherwise formless moral landscape. And it is here too one can first discern the power of the series as a historical totality. The genius of J K Rowling lies in the fact that the totality (the wizarding world) unfolds both temporally and logically. Temporally, in as much as Harry Potter is 11 when he first enters Hogwarts and each successive novel marks a further year in his development, mirroring the graduation of child to young adult more generally. But there is also a corresponding logical development. In the first book, almost everything is experienced in its immediacy. The Dark Lord or Voldemort is a malevolent and atomised presence, a pure evil, whereas Dumbledore presents untrammelled goodness. The geography is in the main limited to the contrast between the grounds of Hogwarts, which embody security and nobility, and the Forbidden Forest, which lies on the edges and promises only evil and death.

4 Inevitably fantasy buffs will baulk at my analysis of The Lord of The Rings; they will argue that the character of Gollum introduces into the Tolkien landscape an element of ambiguity, of (mediated) contradiction, but this is really not the case. Although it is true that Gollum is an ambiguous character, such ambiguity is arbitrary – it is merely asserted, and meaningless to wit. This is clear in the end of the series: Gollum steals the ring and then trips over the hobbit’s foot, before plummeting to his fiery death, thereby destroying the ring and securing the triumph of good (securing the universal!). It is a poor ending precisely because what secures the good is not an act of self-determination, but merely a coin toss that might have gone either way. However the accidental nature of the ending is by no means accidental; the arbitrary is here entirely necessary, for it flows from a plot in which true social contradictions are absolved, and only the limp opposition of good and evil remains.

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But in the subsequent novels, the geographical and social landscape is inexorably expanded. Hogwarts ceases to be a simple archipelago of impenetrable goodness and begins to develop a character concordant with the structures and institutions of the wizarding world that Rowling gradually and delicately unfurls. We find that the Ministry of Magic (the governing apparatus of the wizarding world) has a mendacious and politically motivated interest in the workings of the school, and it attempts to exert its influence in all sorts of ways throughout the series, culminating in an open battle for control. Some elements of the school are sympathetic to this, while others attempt to resist. But the point is that the school ceases to be a haven for the good; it is no longer a Garden of Eden, a pure and immediate state of grace, but is seen to have fallen, becoming sundered in contradiction and particularity in and through its relation with the world. And Rowling develops not only a government but also a judiciary, a prison system, a police force and a rich civil society, allowing all these elements to interrelate as particulars from within the context of an organic whole. So while good and evil are introduced as purely moral abstractions at the start of the work, it is through the development of a living totality that such things are deepened for they become embodied in institutions and social relationships. Voldemort is pure evil in the beginning, but gradually this evil is sublated in a political tendency bound up with a wizarding aristocracy and their racialist notions of ‘pure blood’. This class of wizards seeks dominion over the more progressive and radical elements which are allied against it. As the novels unfold, notions of evil and good in Harry Potter are concretised, moving beyond the realm of immediate moral abstractions. In a rather neat riff on this theme Rowling allows her uber-villain, Voldemort, to graduate from a disembodied presence to a physical body; his deeds traverse the path from the abstract to the concrete in a similar fashion in that they no longer flow from his innate evilness but occur as a specific set of actions endowed by an ideological framework, forged in and through the conflict between opposed social agencies realised as a living whole. Why is any of this important? The immediate in thought, that which grasps objects as innate and isolated particulars, nullifies the richness and verve of the manifold relations underpinning them. It reduces history to a caricature fairy tale in which a parade of excitable nobles, audacious generals and dissipated kings shape the historical chronicle according to the caprice and quality of their individual will. It will be recognised that history has furnished us with many a ‘dissipated’ king,

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but the truth of ‘kingship’ consists in something rather more, as the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky was once compelled to observe: Naive minds think that the office of kingship lodges in the king himself, in his ermine cloak and his crown, in his flesh and bones. As a matter of fact, the office of kingship is an interrelation between people. The king is king only because the interests and prejudices of millions of people are refracted through his person. When the flood of development sweeps away these interrelations, then the king appears to be only a washed-out man with a flabby lower lip. He who was once called Alfonso XIII could discourse upon this from fresh impressions.5 This is a concise and ironic statement about the need to pass beyond the unmediated in thought. For anyone who is unable to move past the threshold of immediacy, history can only ever appear in ‘fairytale’ form, and that is why the categories of their political thought permit such a person a certain kinship with the fantasy lives of young children. But while this might be an advantage for a writer of fairy stories, it presents as a darker and abiding disadvantage in a multiplicity of other spheres. The Trotsky citation above comes from his shrewd and masterly pamphlet, ‘What is National Socialism?’ The issue of fascism is the most grievous issue of the modern epoch, and in this regard, immediacy proves to be an unreliable and errant guide. To common sense and immediacy, fascism presents as an innate evil, and precisely because of its innateness, there is not perceived in it the activity of the historical whole. It is seen as a bleak and sinister aberration which unfortunately and tragically happened to come to pass. This is all well and good, for who in their right mind could deny that fascism is bleak and sinister and evil and awful; yet by knowing it only through such moral immediacies, experiencing it only as an object in itself and as aberration, immediacy manages to extirpate it from the historical process entirely. That is to say, it comes to regard fascism as something archaic and lifeless which has no connection to the present. Immediate thought cannot conceive of fascism’s gaining purchase in the here and now, in the midst of modern-day ‘civilised’ society, because it is unable to penetrate the historical interrelations which subsist behind things as they appear: therefore, there can be no underlying reason why fascism would take shape 5 L Trotsky, ‘What is National Socialism?’ (1933) Marxist Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm

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and rise to the fore. Some of the paragons of common sense attempt to go beyond this; it is typical to hear them explain how Hitler came to power because there was an economic crisis which resulted in hyperinflation wherein people lost their savings and then, in desperation, opted for an extreme solution to their problems by voting in a criminal psychotic. But such an explanation is limited historically as it collapses in on itself, dissolving in immediacy once more. The category of ‘people’ is introduced as a lifeless abstraction; a national populous becomes subsumed by an undifferentiated whole in which all the individuals respond to a specific depredation (an economic crisis) in a cynical, reflexive and absolutely identical manner. But Trotsky, in the first comprehensive and dialectical account of fascism, moved beyond the immediate. He recognised that fascism was a historically conditioned phenomenon developing out of the increasingly explicit collision between the two great but fundamentally opposed classes enmeshed in the totality. As capitalist exploitation exacerbates this central contradiction, the working class is ever more constituted as an explicit, active social power; locked into the mechanisms of production across the board and producing value from within itself, it is increasingly able to transform history in accordance with the arc of its own dynamic. For the first time, it is possible that the majority might take the reins of state whereupon the vista of a new and profoundly wonderful social formation opens up. In the same moment, large capital, terrified by the upsweep from below, cravenly fearful for its profits and convinced that its authority over the lower classes is no longer assured via parliamentary means, seeks some way by which to deal the workers revolution a swift and mortal blow. From within the seething discontent of the petite bourgeoisie is forged the fascist weapon by which this might be achieved. And so fascism is not something that belongs to the past as a distant barbarity that the human species has collectively managed to shed. It lives in our midst. It lives in the venom of the insulted patriot, in the bitter resentment towards immigrants and ethnic minorities and in the delirious, masochistic desire for a ruthless, external power to sweep away the inconveniencies and trivialities from everyday life: ‘at least Mussolini made the trains run on time!’ But such ideological wisps are mere fragments; in and through the historical process are they crystallised and brought to their terrible fruition as the battle between classes reaches its mortal crescendo. The children’s or fantasy book might seem far away from such questions. But as with all great art, the best literature of any type will inevitably

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mediate the perilous and pressing problems of its epoch, albeit in a hallucinatory and surreal fashion. In the case of Harry Potter, it is quite clear that Voldemort is a paradigm of the fascist leader: his unconscionable résumé consists of an eerie devotion to a philosophy based on the archaic notions of race and bloodline and his determination to exterminate those who fall outside its parameters. However, there are plenty of other novels and films which draw upon these things in a similar way in order to fashion the bête noire of their character corpus. What makes Harry Potter unique is the fact that the most imperative struggle of our age, the fight against fascism, is shown to be a demand which issues out of a visible set of historical relations, that the horror of fascism lies in its transmutation from a set of disembodied and fragmented principles which are with us all the time to a concrete social essence which must be fought against decisively. The horror of fascism is in its becoming; it is the movement by which the Dark Lord attains a corporeal form in both the way of his person and deed. Of course, this is no reason to see Harry Potter as a political exercise. That would be mechanical and didactic in the extreme. And it is highly likely that the author had no intention of writing an account of fascism even in the realms of fantasy. She probably simply wanted to write about magic and monsters, good and evil and the fabulous adventures of one young boy wizard. Indeed, when J K Rowling tries to bring her rather naive political sensibilities to bear on the plotline, when she consciously tries to give to her imaginary world a clear and coherent grounding in politics and class exploitation, she produces only the most limited and reactionary stereotypes. The wizarding world, she asserts, is premised on the slave labour of a class of elves. Furthermore the possibility of some type of liberation movement for the slaves exists as a futile and naive one because the elves are satisfied in their condition of slavery and indeed actively yearn for it. Here the shaping of the plotline according to the conscious political assertions of the author once more yields the most banal immediacy: the elfin slaves are not slaves because of a social interrelation; they are slaves simply because it is in their nature to be slaves. But again, the relation between elf and wizard remains on the periphery and is not essential to the genuine interplay between the central tendencies in the story. And so, it should be considered that through the activity of the artist flows not only the artist’s own set of particular political and aesthetic sensibilities but also the current of a greater, more universal tendency. It is rarely the case with the great artist that they set out to make a political or historical point, but nevertheless they become the locus at which

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history does manage to make a point or two of its own. There is no clear conception of a revolutionary proletariat in Harry Potter. Nor can there be, for the objective historical tendencies and oppositions in a work of art must always appear in an unconscious and mystified form. Once things and processes are rendered fully conscious and ‘real world’ so to say, the work of art ceases to be, and then we enter into the domain of political science. So, the problem of great art is the problem of historical truth, though in a specifically dialectical realisation, where it embodies the content of the world but in a beautiful and mystified way. To reduce the matter to a question of political propaganda almost – to insist that the work of art advances the progressive agenda in a clear and conscious way – is to once more revert to the immediate. Those who dismiss Harry Potter because of the lamentable characterisation of the elves, for example, unwittingly totter into this trap. At the same time, the belief that art is always diminished and tarnished by its contact with the ‘real’ world, that the imagination derives its beauty and uniqueness precisely because it is in no way related to the processes of reality (art for art’s sake), is an explanation which also languishes in the immediate. Those who sarcastically deride any attempt to find a deeper historical meaning in the work, asserting that ‘it’s just a story for God’s sake!’ fall into such a category. The true work of art is the one which is able to mediate both these moments, to discern in its free, unrestricted and unconscious creativity the shadows and spirit of the historical plane across which its activity is cast.

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15 The Hunger Games Trilogy – Art for the Occupy Era

The Hunger Games trilogy is the story of Katniss, a 16-year-old who lives in a post-apocalyptic North America, a region now named Panem, and one which is subdivided into 13 districts and a capital city (the Capitol). The districts are by and large poor (with the exception of District 1 and District 2 that are considerably wealtier than the others). District 12, which houses Katniss and her family, is a depressed mining community whose denizens supplement their meagre wages by hunting and fishing the surrounding woods. The Capitol, in contrast, represents a rich metropolitan excess where cultural decadence is fused with pronounced economic and technological power. The Capitol is parasitic on the districts, using its technological superiority to extract tribute. As well, every year a form of cultural tribute is enacted – a ritual sacrifice in which each of the impoverished districts sends two of its children to battle to the death in a coliseum-style contest which takes place at the heart of the imperium. After lots have been drawn, and her younger sister has been picked out, Katniss volunteers to fight in her sibling’s place. And so, the 74th Hunger Games commence. The Hunger Games are very much a bread-and-circuses spectacle. Indeed, ‘Panem’ is a curtailment of the Roman phrase ‘panem et circenses’, and the games’ contestants ride around the track during the opening ceremony in horse driven chariots very much in the vein of gladiators. But the sense of the Romanesque and archaic is combined with the monstrous technological presence which looms over the lives of those outside the Capitol like a nightmare. Not only are the citizens of the districts brutalised by the blazing fire power of vast unmanned aircraft (a clear nod to modern-day drones), but the Hunger Games themselves are played out on a computer-generated landscape, skilfully manipulated by the creators of the event so that they can ratchet up the brutality, 153

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honing it to a razor-sharp edge by introducing obstacle after obstacle with lethal, calculated intent. Simultaneously, the spectacle is projected by satellite into the districts where the people huddle and gather before vast screens that render the bloodshed in vivid Technicolor. But the element of the modern is enshrined, not only in the formal aspect of the games – its technological basis – but also in the way in which the contestants relate to the orchestrators of the life and death scrabble for survival. The competitors, in order to survive, must go through a series of preliminary trials with an eye to win favour from various sponsors and the approval of the citizenry more broadly. This, in turn, means the more favoured contestants will be provided with certain perks such as food, water and medical aid. The modern aspect of the competition, therefore, lies in the way in which it is able to manufacture a level of consent on the part of its participants. We see this very clearly: in the first film/book, the other contestant from her district (Peeta) reveals romantic feelings for Katniss, and although she believes these feelings to be a ploy, the two are nevertheless encouraged to simulate a relationship in order to appeal to the sponsors and be more ‘audience friendly’. In the second film, the couple appear on the equivalent of chat shows, flirting and canoodling for the cameras, and there is an aspect of obscenity in this, for the performance of love is enacted against a background of death. Katniss and Peeta simper and preen and caress one another for the benefit of the same element which is actively promoting their exploitation and destruction. Such obscenity has a specifically modern resonance; within it, one quite clearly discerns the echo of contemporary reality TV – the Pop-Idol/X Factor motif. Here not only are the contestants required to compete on the basis of their individual talent, but they are also encouraged to convert an inward spiritual content into the form of a disposable currency with which to buy the judges’ favour. The contestants require some kind of backstory (illness, romance, break up of relationship etc.) so as to make themselves more attractive or sympathetic; they are reduced to the role of both pimp and prostitute, converting their spiritual lives into a palpable external form with which to better advertise the commodity they seek to hawk – that is, themselves. This is exploitation of a particularly insidious and virulent type – one needs only to watch something like Big Brother to see how deeply the contestants are enmeshed in it, how desperately they enact the shrill and absurd pantomime behaviour which peppers the programme, which is cultivated by the various artificial devices the producers inject in order to heighten and inflame conflict and keep their puppets dancing.

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In a certain way, then, the tribulations which Katniss and Peeta endure are not simply about the struggle for survival but rather the struggle for authenticity – to reclaim an inner spiritual substance from its outward ‘commodified’ form. This is why, in the first film/book, although the relationship of Katniss and Peeta begins as a calculated subterfuge designed to gain advantage in the arena as the games progress, the superficial performance – the parody of love – becomes transfigured into its authentic content. As the 74th Games approach their terminal conclusion, Katniss and Peeta come to love one another in reality, thereby reclaiming the authentic substance which the show seeks to appropriate. Thus, when Katniss and Peeta – as the two remaining contestants – prepare to take poison berries in a suicide pact rather than fight on, the act represents far more than the sentimental culmination of a gushing teenage romance; it also provides an authentic revolutionary gesture which undermines the very structure and forms of the order they have been situated in. The gesture itself calls into question the ontological foundation of the Hunger Games because it threatens to reappropriate the alienated content on which they are premised. The creators of the event must thwart this at any cost. In real terms, it would be like seeing the contestants of Big Brother suddenly band together and, in a single act, simply pack their bags and leave. One can only imagine the panic, desperation and disbelief on the faces of the young, hip and mediasavvy professionals behind the scenes, as the cameras in the house zoom in on emptiness and silence and the prospects of their glittering careers begin to fade to black. The issue of authenticity pervades more than just the games; it also pervades the broader panorama of the fictional realm Suzanne Collins has created. The topography of Panem mediates the clash between the authentic and the inauthentic; the Capitol is a flickering world of illusion in which members of the elite primp, preen and prance; garbed in fairy tale masks and sequined tiaras, gilded with an edge of hysteria, they attend luxury balls, striking wide-eyed and languorous poses before the blinding flash of a thousand cameras. In contrast, the people of the districts huddle in rags, scrimp the possibility of survival from the harsh crags of the land while cowering before an ominous and perpetual military presence. The contrast between a wealthy and decadent elite and an impoverished exploited mass is, of course, far from new, and yet Suzanne Collins’ descriptions of Panem are saturated with contemporary insight; in quantitative terms, the opposition between the Capitol and the districts is very much the antagonism of the 1% against the 99% as articulated by the Occupy movements. But qualitatively, too, the

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nature of the current economic crisis is thrown into relief by the territorial dynamic of Panem. The representatives of the Capitol, for instance, have an air of unreality, not simply because they are people who frequently appear donned in pantomime masks. More often than not, you experience the disquieting sensation that the masks – rather than disguise a given content, namely the face underneath – in fact cover nothing whatsoever, that the mask itself is the essence of the entity thus conveyed. To put it more generally, the superficiality, the luxury decor, the priceless jewels – all of which adorn the Capitol where the wealthy citizens interact – do not form an appearance that belies a more fundamental reality. Rather, such externality provides, simultaneously, the absolute essence. To return to our own reality once more, if we consider, in economic terms, the root source of the contemporary crisis, does it not lie in precisely the substitution of form for a given content? The crisis was precipitated by the selling and reselling of entities which were divorced from a palpable content; so, for instance, sellers weren’t simply profiting from the sale of actual physical houses but rather from the ‘subprime’ sale of several mortgages packaged together. The bubble, therefore, was generated because form asserted a fundamental primacy over a given content in and through an ever inflamed cycle of speculation. But when it comes to the depiction of the districts, Collins takes the very opposite approach. She is at pains to show that here content pervades every aspect of the people’s lives. They tend to work with their hands, producing tangible and socially necessarily objects of consumption – by labouring in the mines or on the land. When Katniss comes to the Capitol for the first time, she is both baffled and repelled by a form of life which is so alien to her own: What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by? What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to roll in and die for their entertainment?1 The contrast which Collins draws between the more profound and authentic reality of the districts with the inauthentic ‘virtual’ aspect of the

1

S Collins, The Hunger Games Vol 1, (Scholastic Press, New York: 2008) 65.

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Capitol represents, in fantastical form, the real-world opposition which fissured across the global economic collapse, the ascendency of speculative forms of financial capital at the expense of industrial capital and the development of productive industries. In this aspect, The Hunger Games trilogy is a remarkably prescient work of fiction – the first novel of which was written in a period before 2006 – because it adumbrates in a fantasy guise the development and intensification of the very tendencies and conflict which would come to underpin the crisis of 2007/2008. Of course, one has to look closely in order to discern the historical patterns which have managed to bleed through its aesthetic prism – to be channelled into the colours and contours of its fictional landscape. But the problem is, when it comes to popular fiction/cinema more generally, there is an elite element in literary and film circles which is not inclined to look all that hard and which has been swift to dismiss the trilogy out of hand. So, for example, rather than scrutinise fundamentally the nuanced political subtext, David Denby – in a piece for The New Yorker – endeavours to reduce the work to a teenage populism which offers up self-indulgence and a romanticised sense of martyrdom: ‘But maybe the reason for its success is simple: it makes teens feel both victimised and important.’2 More significantly still, critics have suggested that The Hunger Games represents little more than a re-glossing of the 1999 Japanese novel (also made into a film) Battle Royale. The contention has flared a debate which has inflamed cyberspace and the media mainstream more broadly. Alvin Lin, writing for Hyphen, notes that ‘[b]oth movies feature a corrupt totalitarian government that places children on an isolated island to fight brutally to the death using weapons packs, until one last winner emerges’.3 At the same time, Suzanne Collins went on the record in 2011 to state that ‘I had never heard of that book or that author until my book was turned in’,4 but critics like Lin question the veracity of this statement, arguing

2 D Denby, ‘Kids at Risk’, The New Yorker, 2 April 2012. http://www.newyorker. com/magazine/2012/04/02/kids-at-risk?currentPage=all 3 A Lin, ‘Why the “The Hunger Games”’s Snub of “Battle Royal” Matters’, Hyphen, 22 March 2012. http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/archive/2012/03/whyhunger-gamess-snub-battle-royale-matters#sthash.EX8GPTyh.rfZICByN.dpuf 4 S Collins (cited), ‘Suzanne Collins’s War Stories for Kids’, The New York Times Magazine, 8 April 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/magazine/mag10collins-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2& 5 A Lin, ‘Why the “The Hunger Games”’s Snub of “Battle Royale” Matters’, Hyphen, 22 March 2012. http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/archive/2012/03/ why-hunger-gamess-snub-battle-royale-matters#sthash.EX8GPTyh.rfZICByN. dpuf

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‘[t]his isn’t the first time Hollywood has made minor modifications on an Asian story and marketed it as a novel piece of art.’5 Lin’s concerns regarding the Hollywood propensity to pilfer foreign markets for its plotlines are undoubtedly legitimate, and yet when it comes to The Hunger Games, he is quite off the mark. Although certain superficial identities do abide, the animating spirit in each work is markedly different. Battle Royale has a far lesser degree of political depth and inflection. Both the Hunger Games and the Battle Royale are events which are triggered as a response on the part of governments to national crisis, it is true. But whereas in The Hunger Games, the crisis takes the form of a clearly delineated rebellion on the part of the impoverished and exploited masses of the districts, in Battle Royale, any such class dimensions are excluded. Rather, its event is provoked by a collective oedipal-style angst, a massive increase in youth unemployment has cultivated a morbid, murderous fear on the part of the older generations, a fear the Battle Royale event helps to alleviate. In The Hunger Games trilogy, the spectacle is intimately connected to the political content of the larger panorama: we, the viewers, are provided a depiction of the life in the districts and an evolving appreciation of how the misery there is a result of the exploitation visited upon them by a parasitic city elite. The Hunger Games competition, then, provides an aspect, a part, a microcosm, which derives its character from the context of a broader social whole and the set of exploitative relations which pervade it. In Battle Royale, however, something else is true. The setting of the Battle Royale spectacle provides the central focus of the work, and although reasons are given for the sociological basis of the competition – the collapse of economy, feral youth and so on – these things are referenced only fleetingly, not to be explored or elaborated on in any detail outside the remit of the event itself. There is next to no time devoted to examining the fissure which has developed between the youth and the elders. The process by which the conflict was engendered and how it manifests in and through society at large is almost entirely neglected. For this reason, the Battle Royale event is denuded of any real political content; it is unable to draw sustenance from a larger political reality. As a result, the possibility of a trenchant social critique is more and more annulled in favour of a far more immediate and apolitical paradigm, one where the drama rests largely on the technical aspect of the competition in isolation – that is, the means by which those characters who happen to be more sympathetic are able to outfox the more heinous ones.

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Battle Royale, of course, does offer a highly effective – and quite literally visceral – allegory of the pitfalls of peer pressure and the ritualised ruthlessness and savagery which can come to underpin adolescent interaction. But setting the grim, visceral violence aside, surely a similar effect could have been achieved by the depiction of any normal competitive sporting event – a football or baseball game – albeit one played out against the fraught backdrop of a set of burgeoning, volatile teenage relationships. Because the Battle Royale competition is not articulated in the context of a larger totality underwritten by a palpable social antagonism, there is nothing necessary in the form of exploitation that its participants endure (or seek to overcome) – nothing to trace them back to a larger political conflict and to give their actions a more fundamental meaning beyond winning the event. Battle Royale, then, provides a grim and brutal meditation on the nature of violence, but the violence itself inevitably teeters into the arbitrary and nihilistic. The comparison between the two works is fruitful because it invites speculation as to why the one (The Hunger Games) is compelled to evoke a more complex and totalised political reality while the other remains unable to elevate itself much beyond mere spectacle. The answer is illuminated by Suzanne Collins herself, when she locates the precise moment which provided the creative spark for The Hunger Games. She recalls: I was channel surfing between reality TV programming and actual war coverage when Katniss’s story came to me. ... On one channel there’s a group of young people competing [in reality programming] ... and on the next, there’s a group of young people fighting an actual war. And I was tired, and the lines began to blur in this very unsettling way, and I thought of this story.6 Though anecdotal, the recollection is also of the highest significance in that it indicates that the creative inception of The Hunger Games was the product of a very specific historical time frame. Collins does not specify the war in question, but there is a strong likelihood that the footage she glimpsed was culled from the invasion and bombardment of Iraq or Afghanistan. In the same moment, this is supplemented by the spectacle 6 S Collins, ‘Suzanne Collins Discusses The Hunger Games’, W H Smith Blog, 12 November 2014. http://blog.whsmith.co.uk/suzanne-collins-discusses-hungergames/

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of reality television, which mediates forms of domestic exploitation more generally (desire to escape poverty and exploitation by achieving fame); consequently, ‘the lines began to blur’ in the author’s awareness; she starts to discern some fundamental and necessary correlative between the two spheres. From its very genesis, therefore, The Hunger Games project necessitated a totalised form, requiring the drawing together of both spheres, seeking to locate cultural and domestic forms of exploitation within the logic of a broader imperialism in and through the reality TV motif. This fundamental shift in scope – from something like Battle Royale, which is unable to escape the cage of its own immediacy – is the necessary product of the escalation of the imperialist conflict and global forms of exploitation which bled through the fabric of early twenty-first century reality. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek is effective in describing how a similar shift took place on the political terrain with regard to the Occupy movements. Žižek’s point here is clear: in a previous period, a radical politics of resistance in the popular consensus tended to be posited in terms of a myriad of particular struggles – a ‘plurality of antiracist, feminist etc struggles’.7 However, as a result of an intensification of wars across the world and a global economic collapse, the aspect of universality which underpinned capitalism and its crises was rendered ever more visible. Thus, Žižek was able to argue that the Occupy movements were increasingly prone to understand political issues in terms of a totalised, global economic system: ‘“capitalism” is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem.’8 One does not have to believe that The Hunger Games trilogy is a pristine work of art; indeed, you might well remain alive to the many possible criticisms of it. The representation of the black characters in the plot is dubious to say the least; they tend to occur as sacrificial foils to throw into relief the heroic destiny of the white protagonists. And the vacillating, palpitating love triangle which is lodged at the heart of the work feels very much like the trite, almost de rigueur stamp of teen fan fiction in the Twilight mould. But although it is easy to raise an ironic and selfaware eye-brow when one encounters these all too visible flaws, there is always the danger of confusing form with content once more; that is to say, we run the risk of remaining oblivious to the way in which some 7 S Zizek, ‘Occupy Wall Street: what is to be done next?’, The Guardian, Tuesday, 24 April 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/ apr/24/occupy-wall-street-what-is-to-be-done-next 8 Ibid.

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of the most fundamental truths have managed to infiltrate the work through its aesthetic, providing a more cohesive and totalising image, in fantasy form, of the realities which both confound and empower us. Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht argued that ‘art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it’.9 Perhaps the trilogy’s most notable asset lies in the fact that it provides us with both the mirror and the hammer.

9 Attributed to Bertolt Brecht by Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard, Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, (Routledge. United Kingdom:2006) p.80.

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16 The Politics of Deduction: Why Has Sherlock Holmes Proven So Durable?

Throughout the last century, one central London address was inundated with some strange requests indeed. The house of 221 Baker Street received letters from people across the globe who were seeking to procure the services of its famous fictional detective, to persuade Sherlock Holmes to apply his deductive prowess to some of the most pressing conundrums of the day – from the Watergate scandal of the Nixon era to the mysterious and unsolved murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in the mid-1980s. But the feeling that Holmes was more than just a fictional character – that he in some way existed in reality, albeit wreathed by mystery and shadow and the London fog – was something which had been audaciously cultivated right from the beginning. In the original tales, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle offered up the character of John Watson as an extant individual, a doctor (and writer) who happened to live and work with the master detective and whose chronicles referred to real events. The short stories were serialised in The Strand magazine, and to the audience of the day, it seemed as though they were events which unfolded in ‘real time’ so to speak, put to paper in a personalised diary form by an actual person who had quite clearly been swept up in their flux. It was an ingenious device. One supposes it might have offered the same sense of reality which – a century later – the device of the documentary film afforded to directors of horror movies like The Blair Witch Project, permitting the viewer a heightened level of authenticity through the directness and alleged spontaneity of the medium. Indeed, such was the identification with the Holmes character that Conan Doyle found himself a figure of hate when, eventually, he extinguished his superlative sleuth in the foaming waters of the Reichenbach Falls; public 162

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animosity reached a fever pitch which culminated in a physical attack on the author himself. Later, as a concession to cultural whim – and a certain lightness of the pocket – Conan Doyle reanimated his famous detective, but this was to be only the first of many resurrections. What is remarkable about Holmes is the way in which the creation really does seem to possess an independent existence, stepping out from the pages of the original stories and into the slipstream of historical time. We find Holmes reappearing in successive epochs, refined and rearticulated, in order to apply his awesome mental powers to the crises and conundrums of the day. In one incarnation, we are treated to a Holmes who bands up with Sigmund Freud in order to thwart crime; in another, we discover Holmes fighting to foil the Nazi menace; and so on. Indeed the current, incredibly popular BBC series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman has adapted the plotlines of some of the original Conan Doyle tales in order to transplant them onto the panorama of twenty-first-century London. Holmes’ ability to transcend historical epochs is complemented by a concomitant skill to defy the limitations of genre; the Holmes of Guy Ritchie’s Hollywood spectaculars is almost of the superhero mould: a ripped, muscular incarnation who battles multiple bad guys with his honed physical skills, while the Hammer film adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles at the tail end of the 1950s swiftly descends into the flavour of Gothic horror. The Fox series House, about a grumpy but brilliant doctor, is clearly a play on the Holmes archetype. The clues are apparent: ‘House’ is a pun – many houses are also ‘homes’ – and the medic’s central confident is one Dr James Wilson, who, of course, shares his initials and profession with John Watson. House is interesting in as much as the Holmes character is now wholly divorced from the pursuit of crime. In addition, we have seen comedy versions in which Watson provides the true genius – his partner merely a convenient front (Without a Clue), cartoon versions where Holmes is depicted respectively as mouse and dog (The Great Mouse Detective and Sherlock Hound), depictions which see Holmes paired up with other fantasy figures (Batman: The Brave and the Bold), films which portray a teenage Sherlock Holmes (Young Sherlock Holmes) and novels which depict Holmes during his twilight years (The Bee Keeper’s Apprentice). Why has Sherlock Holmes proved so durable? The conventional reply references his remarkable ‘deductive’ abilities. To put aside the question of whether Holmes’ reasoning is an example of the deductive method (it is not), what is really being revealed – in and through Holmesian ‘deduction’ – is that the great detective’s mind is at the same time a

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clinical instrument which uses unadulterated and ruthless reasoning to cut through the paraphernalia of the everyday, revealing the truth behind the epiphenomena of events. In a certain way, Holmes’ RollsRoyce brain is very much a product of the Enlightenment; it represents the endeavour to deploy pure reason untrammelled by emotion and prejudice. And yet, as philosopher John Gray points out, the twentieth century in many ways represented a crisis point for reason: the idea of historical progress being driven by forms of collective rationality would, to a large extent, perish – choked as it had been on the industrial smog of the death camps and the gulags. In our everyday lives too, reflects Gray, belief in rational systems has become ever more untenable and subject to attack, ‘from the security software we install on our home computers to the mathematical formulae used by hedge funds to trade vast sums of money’.1 Consequently, Gray argues, it is impossible to explain the durability of the Holmes character from any simple identification with the infallibility of reason. Gray solves the dilemma by suggesting that Holmesian ‘reason’ – because of its sheer, almost omnipotent scope and intensity – is actually more akin to a supernatural power, a form of enchantment, ‘a clairvoyant eye for detail ... [which] demonstrates the enduring power of magic.’2 In this context, Gray naturally references Holmes’ creator, who also felt the limitations of pure reason and ‘found consolation in spiritualism’. Gray is correct, though the crisis of reason has a broader shelf life than his off-the-cuff remarks suggest: from the eighteenth century onward, in fact, when Jacobi was to detect the first particles of ‘nihilism’ in Spinozan rationalism and when Kant was to critique pure reason through his devastating exposé of its antinomies. But Gray is wrong in as much as the crisis of reason would far from invalidate the archetype which sought to personify it – if anything, such crisis would provide a much needed impetus to the endeavour. Gray, in his analysis, has missed the essence of literature’s most Freudian inflection – the element of wish fulfilment. It is precisely when rationality is found wanting that the imagination conjures up from the substratum of its own dark matter a figure whose crooked pipe and deer stalker cap comes to embody an idealised and perfected human reason operating and ‘deducing’ in a fictionalised vacuum, a realm unhindered by historical and social realities. Holmes is required by fantasy precisely when pure reason was long since seen to falter in reality. 1 J Gray, ‘A Point of View: The enduring appeal of Sherlock Holmes’, BBC News Magazine, 17 August 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19268563 2 Ibid.

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But, along with a crisis of reason, the Holmes character might also be perceived as a response to a parallel crisis of science – or at least our collective experience of it as a social force. In the epoch of feudal medievalism, it was certainly true that the general population enjoyed far less education, and what little there was tended to be in the hands of the priests and soured by religious dogma. Scientific innovation, on the other hand, in many ways had a broader and more direct remit in its application to everyday life. Labour saving techniques and devices introduced in Western Europe during the feudal period – such as three-field crop rotation, use of more effective fertiliser, deep ploughing, application of water power to threshing and milling, enhancements in tools and so on all assumed and required some degree of specialist knowledge on the part of the individual peasant, land labourer or journeyman because they were the ones to implement them, to apply them to existing conditions and to adapt the current technologies in accordance with such innovation. This type of knowledge, however, is at odds with the experience of the contemporary worker. Consider a cashier at Tesco – and I say this as someone who has spent a considerable period of time working as one – such a person is in possession of a quite remarkable form of technology: a light sensor which is capable of translating an image or pattern into electronic information, which then registers instantaneously as a given set of numbers flashed up on a digital gauge. And yet, despite the wonder of such technology, despite the fact that it embodies the knowledge and development of the history of science more broadly, the cashier who deploys it experiences it only in terms of the ongoing event which involves the sliding of one item of food after another across the flat surface of an impervious black square – a mind-numbing repetition which is sustained hour by hour, month by month, year by year. As Karl Marx so eloquently noted, the mechanisation of labour implies the separation of the worker from the scientific-technological knowledge embodied in the machinery he or she sets into motion: The machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso. ... The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction to act purposefully, as automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself.3 3 K Marx, Grudrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, (Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, London: 1973) 693.

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Conan Doyle was writing in the aftermath of the first industrial revolution, and he repeatedly describes Holmes’ mind in terms of a finely honed machine – allowing his eponymous hero to reflect that ‘[m]y mind is like a racing engine’.4 Meanwhile elsewhere, Dr Watson is compelled to observe of his cerebral companion, ‘[h]e was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen’.5 The sense that Holmes’ brain is akin to a machine is supplemented by the way Conan Doyle outlines its workings; he explains how it has a given, quantitative capacity to store particular facts and must, therefore, discard others. In this respect, he writes, it is much like an attic ‘stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use.’6 This is interesting for several reasons – not least of which is that it seems remarkably prescient, hinting at the modus operandi of the modern computer. It is notable too that the contemporary and hugely successful BBC reboot, Sherlock, accentuates the same theme. In Sherlock, Benedict Cumberbatch provides us with a Holmes whose magnetic eyes flicker with the luminous glow of a computer terminal, and when Holmes is embroiled in the processes of ‘deduction’, we are treated to the image of his mind’s inner landscape whereby various images and icons are flashed up in whirlwind succession while the master detective is able to pinpoint and affix pertinent information much in the same way as one might do using a digital touch screen. In other words, although the standard analysis of Holmes is liable to (correctly) infer his inadequacy – his alienation from others more broadly as a result of his inability to address the demands of social etiquette – the Holmesian character, at its core, also represents a profound overcoming of alienation. The science that manifests as a social power in and through industry and a complex, fragmented division of labour confronts the worker as an implacable, mysterious and often alien presence. In Holmes, this power is reappropriated so that it becomes a living function of the generic individual (which is why his mind is likened to a machine). The full and awesome consequences of that redeployment are made manifest through the way in which Holmes is able to master the complexity and chaos which face him by the pristine instrument of his own unalienated intellect. 4 A C Doyle, The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge (Project Guttenberg: 2008). http:// www.gutenberg.org/files/2343/2343-h/2343-h.htm 5 A C Doyle, A Scandal In Bohemia, East of the Web Short Stories: http://www. eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/ScanBohe.shtml 6 A C Doyle, The Five Orange Pips, East of the Web Short Stories: http://www. eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/FiveOran.shtml

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Consequently, though Holmes is often thought of as a rather inhuman character, there is one way at least where he can be regarded as a more fully embodied human being. In a time where the productive process manifests as a force set against ourselves, Holmesian reason represents, in a fantasy guise, the reappropriation of that force by a more rounded intellect; the scientific character of production loses its alien form and is exhibited as a property of a given individual in and through his labour activity. It is perhaps no coincidence that when, in the finely attuned BBC remake, Watson delivers his eulogy at the grave of his (supposedly) deceased friend, he describes him as ‘the most human ... human being that I’ve ever known’. This is once again in the spirit of the Conan Doyle original – ‘The Final Problem’ – where Watson describes Holmes as ‘the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known’. Paradoxically, though, it is the overcoming of such alienation which serves to set Sherlock Holmes apart. His brilliance – the symbiosis of science as a social power with the individual it is set against – renders Holmes as an ideal type, a human being given over to the ideality of reason and science at the expense of the viscerality of feeling. But the paradox will always be that Conan Doyle’s creation is, for the very same reason, an alienated and lonely figure, exiled from the ebb and swell of the spiritual and emotional life of the species more broadly. In overcoming a specific form of human alienation, Holmes becomes in the same moment a fundamentally isolated creature – to paraphrase Nietzsche, human, yes, but all too human. It is a contradiction which nestles at the heart of Holmes’ being, and it is one which elevates him from a literary character who is beguiling because he is so uniquely brilliant (a riff on another Nietzschean theme – the Übermensch), to a more poignant figure imbued with an aspect of tragedy. Holmes’ relationship with Watson is integral to this: Watson provides the link with broader humanity and the possibility of an emotional connection with other human beings therein, and yet – at the same time – the more Holmes finds redemption through his friendship with Watson, the less he is fully and truly himself; for again, it is his rational ideality shorn of emotion which allows him to transcend the broader social alienation that the majority of us remain in thrall to. For Holmes, therefore, the experience of love itself must necessarily be a form of self-immolation. And this irreconcilable contradiction produces an exquisite tension in the psyche of the reader/viewer because, in one respect, we are desperate for the friendship between Holmes and Watson to be – shall we say consummated? – by Holmes finally giving Watson some kind

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of concrete display of genuine affection or even love. It is in the short story ‘The Adventure of the Three Garridebs’ that Conan Doyle comes closest to providing such affirmation. In this tale, Watson suffers a bullet wound, and Holmes shows an emotive sense of concern, but this incredibly rare instance of emotion is hinted at rather than stated. Watson describes his companion, how ‘[t]he clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain.’7 As we have already seen, such obliqueness is necessary because in the moment that Holmes comes close to a naked display of emotion, we, the readers, can’t help but feel instinctively uncomfortable – disorientated and discombobulated – for any such display involves the ontological unravelling of the Holmes’ archetype. The BBC series plays on the same contradiction: just when Holmes is at his most manifestly soulful, this soulfulness is snatched away, revealed to be a subterfuge for a more underlying logical ploy or scheme which Holmes has kept under his hat. At the end of the second series of Sherlock, for instance, there is this engaging scene with an emotional Holmes standing on the edge of a building prepared to plunge to his doom for the sake of his friendships with Watson and Mrs Hudson, and yet the very next episode reveals that the whole event was a subterfuge staged by Holmes in order to thwart Moriarty. The emotion he so movingly displayed was nothing more than the mimicry of an actor’s trick. In fact, he callously abandons Watson for the next three years, allowing his friend to believe him dead. In a riff on the same theme, the third series of Sherlock sees Holmes becoming part of a romantic couple. Not only is this plot development disorientating for the viewer, but even Watson seems positively unnerved by it when he is confronted by the vision of the loved-up detective canoodling with his girlfriend and whispering sweet nothings in her ear. Again, the scene seems to violate the essence of the character. In the next sequence, however, we once more discover that the whole thing was a coldly calculated charade designed to manipulate his so-called partner into allowing him access to a building relevant to an ongoing investigation. The deft skill of the writers lies in this ability to allow Holmes to occupy a type of limbo wherein he teeters on the edge of emotional redemption but can never quite grasp it, because to grasp 7 A C Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Three Garridebs’, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, 1924. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/doyle/arthur_conan/d75ca/ chapter6.html

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it fully and truly would be at the same time to annihilate his unique and lonely brand of humaneness. I would add, incidentally, that the truth of this is evinced by precisely those depictions of Sherlock Holmes which do not heed this – the central contradiction which is endemic to the character. The Seven-Percent Solution, for instance, was the pastiche novel written in the 1970s, and later made into a film, that featured Holmes paired up with Sigmund Freud in order to prevent the outbreak of a great European-wide war. Not only does the novel seek to depict Freud, but it also offers up a starkly Freudian premise – Holmesian pure reason is found to be a pathological reaction to a traumatic childhood event. Under hypnosis, our fictional Freud incites Holmes to reveal how his mother was murdered by his father and how his childhood-self bore witness to it. In the film version, this trauma is all the more emphasised. But although it is an ingenious plot device in itself – this Freudian take on the Holmes character – it nevertheless fails, as anyone who has seen the film will attest to. The image of Holmes, on the couch, quietly weeping with profound emotion is moving perhaps, but the viewer is aware of a deep sense of dislocation – the character on the couch looks like Holmes and even talks like him, and yet it doesn’t feel like him at all. All this gives to the scene a feeling of disequilibrium, which is similar to our response to the full-blown romantic Holmes depicted – albeit fleetingly – in the BBC TV series Sherlock. The point is that we, the readers/viewers, can and must always feel the possibility that Holmes actually has a genuine emotional warmth and even love for those close to him, but that possibility must linger on the edge of forever, never to be actualised, for in the moment that it is, the Holmes character dies a death more permanent and more enduring than ever the one his creator inflicted on him at the Reichenbach Falls. Holmes, therefore, is a contradiction which must never be solved; and it is this contradiction, ultimately, which is the root source of his everlasting appeal.

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17 Literary Love as Kantian Sublime: Wuthering Heights and The Sea, The Sea

Iris Murdoch’s most memorable novel is a work of intense poetics and creative imagination. It tells of theatre director Charles Arrowby, who retires to a lonely cottage beside the sea. The beautiful but desolate setting and the isolation he incurs are punctuated by a series of appearances of people from his past; women he’d romanced in the bohemian milieu of London’s Theatreland flit back into his life like ghosts when eventually he encounters his long-lost childhood sweetheart Hartley living in a village a short distance away. The memory of their adolescent love affair has haunted Arrowby over the years – Hartley’s reappearance reigniting an obsession which has smouldered in the background of his life and never died out. When its main elements have been outlined in such a fashion, the plot seems to teeter on the absurd. That the women from his past should arrive on his doorstep in ordered succession in this isolated terrain by the sea conjures up something of the melodramatic flavour of Greek mythos: a protagonist who is tormented by a series of malevolent lovelorn women, each one somewhere between harpy and siren. Our credulity is further strained by the rich coincidence of Hartley’s living in a local village nearby. But the spirit of the novel provides the exegesis for this; that is to say, the novel is very much concerned with examining the reality (or unreality) of the past. Murdoch seeks to interrogate the ubiquitous notion of an allconsuming first love. How much of this kind of love is truly authentic? How much of it pertains to the actual experience itself, and how much of it is a by-product of the inevitable idealisation which transpires when one views past events through the rose-tinted mists of nostalgia? Murdoch, then, is seeking to consider love through the prism of the past. It is a love which develops a certain ghostly resonance, such that the women who represent it for Arrowby also appear in a phantasmagorical 170

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form. Despite his astuteness and refined aesthetic sensibilities, Arrowby is in many ways an unreliable narrator. The women whom he describes often attain the nebulous quality of spectres; it is difficult to discern just how much of them belongs to their flesh and blood characteristics and how much of them involves the hallucinations conjured up from Arrowby’s own unresolved past. And so, the overall improbability of the plot is rendered insignificant because the women who return to him are a series of fictions in their own right; a shifting, ever changing set of chimeras – each one a cipher for a different manner of love Arrowby has lost or disdained. The sense of unreality, the awareness that these women are in some way figments or ghosts of experience past, is augmented by the presence of the sea, which infiltrates the novel as a character in its own right. It too is possessed of a chimera-like restlessness. Sometimes it presents in terms of a gentle, colourful poetry: ‘The sea which lies before me as I write glows rather than sparkles. ... [T]he tide turning, it leans quietly against the land, almost unflecked by ripples or foam. Near the horizon it is a luxurious purple, spotted with regular lines of emerald green.’1 But as Arrowby more and more sinks into isolation in the cottage, and as the figments of the past rise up from the depths to transfix him anew, the sea becomes ever more ominous – a swirling, churning infinity of darkness which awaits on the outer reaches, lashing against the fragile cottage outpost. From its depths appears an unnameable, atavistic sea creature, and again, the writer is asking the question: How much of this can be said to take place in reality, and how much of it is taking place in the churning tumult of the protagonist’s increasingly fevered mind? I saw an immense creature break the surface and arch itself upward. ... I could also see the head with a remarkable clarity, a kind of crested snake’s head, green-eyed, the mouth opening to show teeth and a pink interior. The head and neck glistened with a blue sheen. Then in a moment the whole thing collapsed, the coils fell, the undulating back still broke the water, and then there was nothing but a great foaming swirling pool where the creature had vanished.2 The sense of the hallucinogenic, however, is supplemented by something a little more concrete. When Arrowby spots Hartley – his long-lost love – under the glare of a car’s headlight in the pitch darkness, she enters the 1 2

I Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea, (Triad/Panther Books, London: 1984) 1. Ibid. 19.

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novel for the first time as ethereal and unsubstantiated, but the author proceeds to flesh her out by providing her with a home, a husband and an adopted son. The latter, a wayward boy – now young man – turns up in the village and is befriended by Arrowby in his desperate bid to get closer to Hartley. Here a certain authorial ambiguity is conveyed in as much as now Murdoch seems to suggest that Arrowby’s ‘love’ for Hartley is an illusion, the symptom of an idealised past. Given Arrowby’s calculating attempt to manipulate the young man, it is difficult not to feel that his ‘love’ has more in common with dangerous obsession. Indeed, there is a scene which occurs later in the book, in which Arrowby locks Hartley in his cottage, more or less taking her hostage. At this point, it seems that Arrowby is quite clearly delusional because he has become increasingly manipulative and sinister in his attempt to reclaim Hartley. We are told that Hartley has lived a rather uneventful life. She seems unremarkable; indeed, there is something muted and subdued about her. Her marriage seems conventional and dour – neither happy nor unhappy. And when she is exposed to Arrowby’s ever intrusive interest, it is as a sharp brightness which sends her scurrying back to the shadows of convention and domesticity. Hartley and her husband are presented in the first place as an introverted and quiet couple who simply want to keep to themselves, and the author cultivates an ominous feeling of foreboding, the sense that Arrowby’s graduating obsession is going to somehow destroy all their lives as he plots and schemes and asserts control all in the name of his ‘love’. But at the same time, the author never relinquishes the idea that there was something of integrity, of great meaning, established in that first connection between Arrowby and Hartley in their youth; that it is not all simply a sinister projection on the part of Arrowby. The theme of an unformed, elemental love which verges on the terrible and the sublime is perhaps the central conceit of the story, and again, it is echoed in the presence of the sea. Here is Arrowby as he reflects on the young Hartley and the depth of their connection: I can see her smiling at me now. She was beautiful but with a secret beauty. ... Her lips were pale and always cold; and when, with my eyes closing, I touched them so childishly with mine, a cold force pierced me like a spear ... and that was passion and love of a purity which can never come again. ... There is a deep foundation of my being which knows not of time and change, and is still and ever with Hartley.3 3

Ibid. 80.

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The negative consequences of Arrowby’s obsession are tempered by the author with paragraphs which express the powerful and elemental relationship which did exist between Hartley and Arrowby as adolescents. Murdoch affirms the authenticity of their connection. While Hartley is overwhelmed by Arrowby’s reappearance in her life and cowed by the sheer ferocity of his pursuit, she acknowledges the transcendental power of their initial encounter and concedes that her life has been indelibly marked by it – even though she experiences this in a way which contrasts with the feverish, consumptive yearning that Arrowby displays. Whereas Arrowby has been galvanised by it, Hartley feels a certain level of disorientation, like a sleeper awoken from a dream: ‘I thought it could never be, that it was a sort of impossibility of the world, that we two could ever be together again. I never thought I ever would – see you again and touch you – it’s like a dream’.4 This, therefore, is a profoundly philosophical novel: it exhibits the idea of love as an infinite substance which is possessed of absolute authenticity but retains something monstrous and unfathomable in its aspect therein. It is love as a transcendental force which Murdoch seeks to explore, and here the parities with the Kantian notion of the ‘sublime’ are apparent. Kant describes the natural phenomena which provoke a sense of the sublime as those which cause one to experience ‘the inadequacy of the greatest effort of our imagination to estimate the magnitude of an object.’5 When one tries to contemplate certain external objects, those objects prove too vast for any ‘aesthetical estimation’6 to fully comprehend. So, for example, when one looks at a mountain from up close, the vast swell of rock might extend beyond the immediate field of vision, leaving you feeling almost dizzy. This ‘sublime’ effect, which one encounters in the phenomenal reality, approximates the more fundamental contradiction at the level of Kantian ontology; that is, the finite forms and concepts of the understanding which we bring to bear are incapable of comprehending the noumenal or the infinite – as it is in itself. It, therefore, is rationally unknowable, and the most one can do is encounter it through certain forms of intuition.7 When Murdoch depicts Arrowby’s love for Hartley in this way, she is expressing it in terms of the type of Kantian infinity which cannot be pierced by reason. When

4

Ibid. 215. I Kant, Critique of Judgement, (Werner S. Hackett, Indianapolis: 1987) 94. 6 Ibid. 94. 7 I mean intuition in the general sense rather than in the specifically Kantian one. 5

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Arrowby tries to explain to his cousin James the nature of Arrowby’s elemental connection to Hartley, his cousin’s response is rationally grounded and therefore reasonable but simultaneously inadequate: ‘I cannot attach much meaning to your idea of such a long-lasting love for someone you lost sight of so long ago. Perhaps it’s something you have invented now.’ To try to comprehend Arrowby’s love in terms of the Kantian form of time (‘long ago’) is a futile endeavour because love’s infinite nature repels any such cognition. Murdoch coalesces the sense of the sublime through her stark poetry into the impenetrable depths of the sea, which serves as a cipher for the elemental power of Arrowby’s love. And it is worth noting that Kant includes in his third Critique as an example of the sublime: ‘the gloomy raging sea’.8 The Sea, The Sea’s closest literary ancestor is Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. In that book also, an elemental and destructive love – love in its aspect as the sublime – becomes the dark core around which the constellation of other elements in the story swirls. The eternal, primordial link between Heathcliff and Catherine, and Heathcliff’s relentless pursuit of her, has much in common with Arrowby’s obsession with Hartley. In Wuthering Heights, too, the novelist seeks to present different visions of love, different forms of it. In that novel, the dark, destructive nature of the Heathcliff–Catherine relationship is contrasted with the gentle, temperate and tender affection between Catherine and Edgar Linton. In The Sea, The Sea, Lizzie – one of the women with whom Arrowby has had a past relationship and who has now reappeared – is very much a love interest in the Edgar Linton mould. Although she is passionately and – in her way – obsessively devoted to Arrowby, she is also soft, bashful and fundamentally kind, and her pursuit of him is selfless to the point where it verges on masochism. Lizzie prostrates herself, offering a gentle but unconditional devotion – rendering her vulnerable and utterly open to rejection and mistreatment. And indeed, Arrowby toys with her; having felt some affection for her in a period when he is down and lonely, he discards her with cruel indifference once he finds Hartley again. In a sense, Lizzie’s mode of love – considerate, gentle and attuned to the needs of the other – is utterly alien to Arrowby; his indifference and even his cruelty towards Lizzie are the products of the irreconcilable contradiction in the fundamental substance of their respective spiritual dispositions. Again, this evokes certain themes in Wuthering Heights. While Cathy could be fond of – and even loving towards – Edgar Linton, her attitude towards him 8

Ibid. 95.

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was always pervaded with contempt, for she sensed in his softness something fundamentally alien from herself – ‘whatever our souls are made of ... Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.’9 In the same way, Arrowby tolerates and is even fond of Lizzie, but his elemental bond with Hartley obliterates all else. Catherine is compelled to declare – ‘I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.’10 In a similar vein, Arrowby relates: ‘To say that we were “in love”, that vague weakened phrase, cannot express it. We loved each other, we lived in each other, by each other. We were each other.’11 This evocation of love is Platonic but not in the conventional sense: not in the simple sense of a higher spiritual form which is opposed to a physical-sexual-material version. Plato drew upon an ancient Greek myth in order to inform his definition of love. In that myth – which the Athenian philosopher sets out in The Symposium – human beings were originally eight-limbed, two-faced creatures, each possessing both the female and male set of genitals. Because they were more fully rounded, more complete, they were also substantially more powerful and energetic, such that they even tried ‘to scale the heights of heaven and set upon the gods.’12 Zeus punished their folly by splitting their bodies, separating them, cleaving the one entity into two. But, notes Plato, ‘when the work of bisection was complete, it left each half with a desperate yearning for the other, and they ran together and flung their arms around each other’s necks, and asked for nothing better than to be rolled into one.’13 Despite the violence which sets the events into motion, this is an innocent, delightful myth in which the rolling ‘into one’ is clearly a playful reference to sexual desire, but at the same time, what is happening here has a broader resonance. It is about alienation, the sundering of an initial unity and the drive to overcome separation – not only through the twining of bodies during sex; rather, it speaks to a more profound ontological incompleteness, one which nestles in the heart of our very being: a gap, a void – the unbearable loneliness which comes from being entombed within a single-self.

9 E Brontë, ‘Great Novels of the Brontë Sisters’, Wuthering Heights, (Paragon, London: 2000) 443. 10 Ibid. 444. 11 I Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea, (Triad/Panther Books, London: 1984) 78. 12 Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ‘Symposium’, (Princeton University Press, New Jersey: 1973) 543. 13 Ibid. 543.

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In both Wuthering Heights and The Sea, The Sea, the sexual attraction between the central protagonists remains unconsummated. While Catherine does have sex with Linton (resulting in the birth of Cathy Linton), there is no suggestion that she does the same with Heathcliff. Although Arrowby and Hartley engage in sexual behaviour at various points, they never, to use the current vernacular, go all the way. Neither relationship is consummated – not because either book is prudish in tone – quite the opposite in fact. Wuthering Heights was considered explicit and controversial at the time, and Murdoch does not shy away in the slightest from exploring sexual detail. Sex is marginalised in the relationship of the main characters in both novels because the aching loneliness which resonates at the heart of being – that ontological lack which drives both Arrowby and Heathcliff – represents a cleavage or wound in their very soul, a Platonic gash which has opened up in and through an act of profound spiritual violence, the rending apart of two individuals who had hitherto entered into a state of almost total psychic symbiosis. The time that Heathcliff and Catherine spend together on the moors, for instance, in order to escape the tyrannical attentions of Catherine’s older brother Hindley represents a period of grace in which the social reality of each was entirely filtered through the prism of the other. In that moment, the Heathcliff–Catherine relationship possesses not only the burgeoning romantic connotations of young adolescents but simultaneously that of brother and sister and of clandestine friends and co-conspirators besides. It possesses a multiplicity of social forms amalgamated into a single state of unconditional unity – ‘I am Heathcliff’. Heathcliff is eventually driven out, of course, and Hartley pulls away – and in both cases the act sunders that initial state of grace, rendering the protagonists as discrete individuals once more, as forlorn, bereft and dismembered. Heathcliff’s yearning for Catherine and Arrowby’s yearning for Hartley are – on the spiritual level – equivalent to someone who has lost a leg in an accident and yet experiences the perpetual and relentless tingling of a phantom limb. One might note that the motifs of both novels attain a profoundly religious flavour therein. Because Arrowby’s loss of Hartley and Catherine’s loss of Heathcliff represent the sundering of an unconditional unity, both stories can be read as localised and individualised versions of the fall, of the expulsion of humankind (as Adam and Eve) from the Garden of Eden (the initial, uncorrupted state of grace and wholeness). Again, the religious prescriptive elucidates the ontological gap which the expulsion and separation opens up – that is, the overwhelming desire to attain

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unity with God once more.14 Hegel saw in this religious movement the ‘cleavage of the subject, of the ego, from the infinite, absolute essence’,15 and this provided the impetus which drives ‘spirit back into itself’16 in the form of a higher reconciliation. And so, we can see in both novels the way in which the depiction of love as a Kantian infinite is eventually developed into a dialectical movement of the classically Hegelian/ Christian type; the infinite moment/unity is sundered when the intervention of fate separates Heathcliff–Catherine/Arrowby–Hartley. From that moment on, the desire to attain a more concrete resolution, to become ontologically whole again, becomes the central focus of both novels. And its achievement becomes the criterion according to which one novel fails and the other succeeds. The Sea, The Sea, despite its brilliance, remains a fissured, dualistic work. It is unable to adequately resolve the contradictions it posits; its protagonists are never returned to the unity which they have lost – partly because of the ambiguity and indecision which the author displays at various points in the novel. As we have seen, in the first third of the book, Murdoch allows the impression to linger that Arrowby’s love for Hartley is a dangerous delusion, an imposition of his own idealised past on a living present – on a woman who has a family of her own and has long since moved on. Murdoch conveys this through the sinister nature of Arrowby’s ruthless and cynical plotting but also through the sense that – although Hartley and her husband are not a demonstrative and romantic couple – there exists between them some genuine feeling which Arrowby has simply blinded himself to. The dogma of his devotion will simply not allow him to recognise it. As his cousin James asks, ‘[d]o you really know what her marriage is like? ... A long marriage is very unifying, even if it’s not ideal, and those structures must be respected. You may not think much of her husband, but he may suit her’.17 But then, in the later portion of the novel, Murdoch seems to reverse a more positive presenstation of Hartley’s marriage in favour of one which corresponds to Arrowby’s own interests. It becomes clear that Hartley’s marriage is shambolic; that her husband is jealous, possessive and abusive; and that many of Arrowby’s fears for her are well grounded.

14 This, incidentally, speaks to the love of – and desire for – death which undergirds many religions. 15 G W F Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion – Vol 1, (Clarendon Press, Oxford: 2007) 105. 16 Ibid. 105. 17 Ibid. 178.

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And Hartley is responsive to Arrowby and acknowledges the love they once shared. In a sense, two stories open up, and yet they seem to mutually exclude each other. On the one hand, Arrowby’s love, although destructive and obsessive, is nevertheless genuine and, in philosophical terms, infinite; on the other, it is nothing more than a limited derangement projected onto a virtual stranger. The author herself seems to be unable to decisively commit to either possibility; the result is a somewhat obscure ending which delivers little edification and feels unsatisfying. Hartley returns to her husband, and they emigrate to Australia, giving Arrowby the slip. Ultimately, Hartley’s character emerges as beleaguered, down-trodden and confused, and her motives remain inscrutable. It is difficult to say why she returns to her husband or why she seems, at different times, either apathetic towards her adopted son or terrifyingly unsettled by his presence. Perhaps it is because these plot threads are never adequately tied together that the author, in the aftermath of Hartley’s departure, allows Arrowby to reconsider. At this point, Arrowby decides that his feelings towards Hartley were less than absolute after all and have been superseded by his fondness for her adopted son Titus, who found his death in the cold waters of the sea pages earlier. Through his manipulation of Titus – as a means to secure his mother – Arrowby realises that he ended up developing a genuine affection for the young man after all: ‘The horrors of remorse abound in unfulfilled conditionals. ... Why had I not seen at once that this, the possession of Titus, my anxious fumbling responsible fatherhood of him, was somehow the point, the pure gift which the gods had really sent me, along with so much irrelevant packaging?’18 Again, the parallels with Wuthering Heights are stark. In that novel, Heathcliff foments his plans for revenge on Catherine’s older brother Hindley by first befriending Hindley’s son Hareton and turning Hareton against his (Hareton’s) father. As with Arrowby, Heathcliff’s cynical ploy has unintended consequences – more and more does he recognise in the face of Hareton Earnshaw the expression and features of his beloved Cathy staring back at him. Consequently, the young man becomes more than a simple tool, and Heathcliff finds it impossible to maintain his ruthless indifference. He begins to care for Hareton. But what Brontë has succeeded in doing here, I think, is giving us a taste of the redemptive power of Heathcliff’s love for Cathy because it is that which ultimately trumps his desire for revenge and allows him to develop a certain gruff 18

Ibid. 458.

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tenderness towards Hareton. In this way, the novel has come full circle: Heathcliff, towards the end of his life – in and through Hareton – is brought closer to Cathy again, closer to that initial state of grace, and despite his terrible cruelty, he is in some way redeemed. The end of the novel concludes with a haunting but gentle realisation: a young servant boy is adamant that he has encountered Heathcliff and Cathy roaming the moors, and thus the cycle is brought to a close as we understand that in death they are returned to one another again, that the precious unity they experienced as brutalised children is now theirs for eternity. But the conclusion of The Sea, The Sea markedly lacks the perfection and the organic completeness of Wuthering Heights. Arrowby’s love for Hartley is, ultimately, irredeemable. She moves away with her husband. Arrowby is left alone. Arrowby realises his love for Titus, yes, but this realisation occurs as little more than an afterthought; it has not been a central focus of the novel. Arrowby’s affection for Titus cannot be linked with his transcendental love for Hartley in the way in which Heathcliff’s love for Catherine comes to overwhelm his attitude towards Hareton. Heathcliff feels for Hareton because the boy is the living mediation of the infinite love which Heathcliff had thought to be lost; his encounter with Hareton drives the dialectical movement towards the higher resolution that his separation from Cathy, and then her death, necessitates. But the same driving, tragic necessity is notably absent in the culmination of the plot in The Sea, The Sea. Rather, Hartley simply ups and leaves, calling into question the nature of her past love for Arrowby. Arrowby, for his part, suddenly realises he wished to love Titus as a son after all. Arrowby’s love for Hartley and his love for Titus have, therefore, no necessary connection. Consequently, the author is unable to achieve a genuine resolution to the transcendental nature of the love which existed between Arrowby and Hartley and the tragedy which it provokes. Arrowby’s final realisation of his connection with Hartley’s adoptive son is almost incidental to the plot and thereby lacks any genuine redemptive power. None of this detracts from the brilliance of Murdoch’s novel. But, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, The Sea, The Sea calls into being powerful and elemental forces which proliferate and, ultimately, cannot be resolved within the given structures of the novel. The incomparable greatness of Wuthering Heights is that Brontë is able to set out a vision of love which is possessed of a transcendental, quasi-religious power by sundering it in the second act and then bringing out its redemptive power in the third – by allowing the characters to attain grace once more. All this is achieved by the dexterity of plot, which allows the work to crystallise in

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a finished whole, a mediated totality by which the driving spirit of the novel – the love of Heathcliff and Cathy – is returned to itself. This is love as a radical proposition – and also a Christian one – for the moment of disunity, of alienation, of loss, is precisely that which allows for its concrete realisation. The Sea, The Sea, though, is unable to fulfil its radical promise and, ultimately, remains sundered in the moment of disunity and loss, delivering to the reader a beautiful melancholy therein.

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18 Brief Loves That Live Forever: The Historical Melancholy of Andreï Makine

It is fair to say that the life of novelist Andreï Makine has been marked by the type of disruptions and peregrinations which would, of themselves, translate into a full and viable work of literature. Having come of age in the austerity and gloom of the USSR in its twilight years, he departed an empire in its death throes before stepping into the vortex of colour and cosmopolitanism which was 1980s Paris. A more vivid literary shift one could not hope to locate. In the French capital, and assuming the existence of a text-book bohemian, Makine spent his days eking out a wage teaching his native Russian, living from hand-to-mouth to the extent he once found himself sleeping rough in the crepuscular shadows of a Parisian graveyard. At the same time, he snatched every available moment in order to scribble down his literary endeavours, building up a suitcase of unpublished manuscripts and poetry infused with the nebulous, dreamlike aura which would come to characterise his corpus. This, then, is a biography in brief, or what we know of it at least, because Makine is somewhat reticent when providing all the facts. Just as with his prose, when it comes to such definitive details, Makine remains beautifully elusive, preferring to leave some things to the imagination. And yet, although his biographical details remain sketchy, one can say that his work is indelibly and obviously marked by them – in a way in which few writers have been. Dickens’ work was, of course; his awful foray into the blacking factory as a youngster would irrevocably determine the way in which the innocence and vulnerability of poor children fissured through his writing. And in the tradition which Makine comes from, many of the great Russian writers directly crafted into their works their own personal experiences of political persecution or exile; see Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, for instance, or anything penned by Solzhenitsyn. 181

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Makine’s prose, however, is more ethereal and less political in the explicit sense than that of his literary ancestors. Both the classical Russian and French tradition had yielded what Lukács described as great works of ‘realism’. Many of the characters were figures drawn from across the social spectrum who, in an individualised and often indirect way, exhibited the characteristics of a broader historical logic and development which was at work within the social world in which they were situated. A consequence of their being drawn this way was that novelists such as Balzac or Tolstoy would tend to write from the third-person perspective – from the purview of the omniscient narrator – which would, in turn, allow them to easily and seamlessly travel across the various class layers and cross sections, which formed in a single social whole or totality as they unfurled the plot. The depiction of the totality was, therefore, an integral condition of ‘realism’ more broadly, or as Lukács would write of Tolstoy, his ‘realism paints a comprehensive picture of life in all its complexity and movement ... with which the all-embracing world-view of great writers gathers in the totality’.1 Makine, on the other hand, takes a very different approach. He most often writes from the first-person perspective, settling his focus on a single protagonist. It is through this one lead character that a broader set of events is filtered. But those events rarely develop cohesively and coherently across a linear time frame. Rather, Makine tends to dwell inwardly in the memories of his protagonist, casting back across time, alighting on a single event – a first chaste kiss perhaps or the fleeting recollection of a woman glimpsed through the snow. Instead of presenting us with the type of extensive and external social totality which the classical realists so frequently employed, Makine offers a private vision of rich inner consciousness which mediates the broader events of the plot. As a native-born Russian, Makine writes with the nostalgia of the émigré, but he combines it with a specifically French inflection – a personal poetry of memory which is reminiscent of a modernist like Proust rather than a classicist like Balzac. There is, then, a certain inevitability about the fact that so many of Makine’s novels are structured in the first person, and the sweeping historical events which his characters are exposed to are always rendered through the soft-light of an intimately personal encounter: a conversation between lovers on a train set against a backdrop of the vast visage of Brezhnev frowning out from a propaganda portrait or a group of children 1 G Lukács, Studies in European Realism, (The Merlin Press, London: 1972) 254–255.

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whose childhood games take place inside the skeletal architecture of a grandstand once used for the proselytising of party leaders. In Brief Loves That Live Forever, this combination of the most intensely intimate personal events conducted against the darker panorama of a totalitarian state is rendered poetic and resonant, and at times, it assumes a tragic tenor. The novel recounts a set of moments experienced by a Russian orphan – from early childhood to adulthood, the recollections involve love in its different guises – a series of snatched memories which, though fleeting, have nevertheless indelibly shaped the narrator. In the second chapter, the protagonist as a young child finds himself trapped in the scaffolding of that abandoned podium from which once the apparatchiks delivered their speeches and where now only children play. His friends have run off, abandoning him to his panic and claustrophobia; only in the midst of his discomfort, he glimpses an anonymous young woman, at a distance, walking through the snow and she smiles at him. The young child is rooted to the spot, overcome by powerful but indefinite feeling, and he gives himself over to this entirely, at which point he finds his way out from the bars. In truth, the metaphor is somewhat heavy-handed. Entombed and repressed by the political machine, one is able to transcend one’s condition through spiritual aspiration and the discovery of love. And yet the organic, austere beauty with which the writer renders the apparition of this woman in the snow, and the young boy’s response to her, is intensely moving: For she was also the abundance of snow around us, and this whole moment in which there was already a foretaste of the hesitant breath of spring. She was all of this and each detail of her figure’s mere outline echoed this far-reaching radiance. The snow crunched under my foot, the woman opened her eyes and I saw tears glistening upon her lashes. But her expression remained serene, almost glowing.2 There is a genuine tension throughout this novel and in Makine’s work more generally between the personal and the political, between political possibility and individual salvation, and it is a conflict rooted in the particularity of the conditions of Russia’s historical development more broadly. The October revolution of 1917 purported to usher in a new epoch of freedom for a brutalised population. But after several years of civil war

2

A Makine, Brief Loves That live Forever, (MacLehose Press, London: 2014) 40.

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and foreign invasion, it was to be succeeded by the Stalinist monolith; terror, show trials, gulags and the ever vigilant eyes of a sinister police apparatus ensured that the ordinary Soviet citizen became adept at seizing their joys, pleasures and desires in clandestine snatches from within the shadows. The contrast between an ‘authentic’ private moment which is cultivated from behind the scenes – and a public life given over to the enforced enactment of atonal political ritual – forms one of the lynchpins of Makine’s literary repertoire: a flickering human luminescence which sustains in secret – irrepressible but vulnerable, inevitable and at the same time entirely unexpected. Consider this encounter which occurs between the protagonist and a girl in the midst of a paramilitary training exercise which is part of the makeup of the children’s general education: The enemy turned round. It was a girl. I hesitated, then helped her up. We paused for a moment, uncertain whether to resume our roles or instead. ... The noise of the battle was now coming from a long way off, almost blotted out by the calm of the great trees asleep under the snow. The warlike passion that had animated us a moment earlier was dissipated in the fading air of a wintery dusk, in the silence marked by the two of us panting breathlessly. ... [T]he same notion had occurred to us both, the real possibility of calling a halt to this cruel and childish game, this training in brute force, and recognising that quite a different mode of existence, quite a different world, lay close at hand.3 Again, the same simple brush-stroke poetics, again the sublimation of the human furore before a more universal and abiding natural beauty and again the childlike awakening to the intimate sense of another are fused in a life-changing flash of awareness. Prose like this is effortless, silvery and spare, but the ease of style belies a definitive content, and this too is something which has its distinctively Russian inflection. Like Solzhenitsyn, Makine has the ability to lay bare the cruelty and the grotesquery of the Soviet political machine with sharp ironical clarity, but like Solzhenitsyn too – as a writer formed by the twentieth-century Bolshevik revolution and its totalitarian aftermath – Makine displays an attitude to political struggle which hovers between cynicism and despair. This has a double consequence for his work. It is the reason 3

Ibid. 78.

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as to why his writing tends to dwell on the inward world and nebulous memories of the individual, for the possibility of a broader political solution to socio-political ills has been abnegated in advance. Thus, resistance takes an implicitly personal form, the precious moments in which one loves provide the revolutionary risk and redemption which, for a short time, is able to raise one above the brutal mechanics of the interminable historical process; and it is this which provides the aesthetic core of Makine’s writing – its ethereal, tragic and profoundly individual tenor. But for the same reason, when it comes to the depiction of genuine political struggle in his work, Makine is rarely able to rise above the level of the vulgar stereotype. The dissidents who populate his fiction are nearly always of a piece: they are either wizened veterans who have been worn away by the debilitating pressures of the Gulag and now reside in ragged-clothed disarray, teetering on the edge of hopelessness; or they are the young egotistical bohemians who sustain brief but intense flirtations with a radical politics driven by the most vacuous political clichés and are in thrall to the most self-serving and vulgar ideologues. In a scene towards the close of Brief Loves That Live Forever, the narrator recounts his fascination with Kira, a girl he knew as a child, and whom, after many years apart, he would encounter again as a young adult. Now the gap between their divergent histories has created a spiritual schism between them. The narrator has fought in the war in Afghanistan, while Kira is a journalist who has fallen in with a radical sect. Their reunion takes place as the couple stroll through an immense orchard of innumerable white petal trees, and again, one encounters the same luscious, freeflowing language as the outer world is gently melded with the inner: Foaming blossom along the boughs, the whipped cream of petals, a white wave, spilling the length of an avenue of apples trees where we walk. ... This white avalanche in which we are drowning is extraordinarily beautiful. ... [I]n admiring it one gradually forgets who one is, even forgetting that at some time one will have to abandon this hazy reverie and return to one’s previous life.4 At the same time, the writer is at pains to emphasise the gap, the distance, the sense of alienation which opens up between the pair. Even while the protagonist admires his love interest, he is aware that she ‘is passionately in love with another, a man involved, like her, in this business of 4

Ibid. 139–142.

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dissidence and clandestine publication, which is all so alien to me.’5 The depiction of the young woman, set against the intoxicating fragrance of such evanescent beauty nevertheless harbours a kernel of sourness, for the narrator understands that Kira has chosen to re-establish contact only for the reason that she wishes to use his war experience/trauma as the raw fodder for her creative propagandising and as a means to dazzle and impress her new paramour thereby. The contrast the writer draws is a familiar one: the ingénue radical motivated by the most vulgar and doctrinaire consolations set against the protagonist – someone who has genuine experience of the world through his flesh and blood suffering and who is thus able to see past the web of propaganda and ideology in which his counterpart is enmeshed. And so, when he is interrogated by his ardent schoolfriend about what kind of resistance he and his comrades were able to offer up against their Soviet masters while embedded in Afghanistan, he understands the question to be inherently naive, for in a true life-and-death situation which throws man’s authentic nature into relief, he swiftly reveals himself to be an apolitical creature: ‘my friend was hoping I would talk to her about the opposition. ... I had disappointed here too: a soldier becomes a fairly basic creature, who simply wants to survive, and for this he finds it convenient not to think too much. “So, no way of resisting?” “Yes, there is. Drink. And drugs.”’6 The message is hammered home – it is, in the main, young privileged radicals who are able to indulge the luxury of revolutionary ideals (and cynical careerists who profit from them). In a scene in which the protagonist is still young enough and unwise enough to buy into such schemas, he is quietened by his companion Vika’s transcendental wisdom, which is imbued with the nature all around them and is liberated from such dogma therein: ‘A doctrine? What for? We’re happy here, admit it. We are happy because the air smells of snow and spring. Because the sun’s been warming the planks, because ... Yes, because we are together.’7 The issue here is again twofold. Makine is stolidly obsessed with the same revolutionary caricature; and yet anyone who has participated in the fringe movement of radical left politics could quite happily attest to the fact that one is sometimes confronted by such caricatures in a living form. (I remember with some fondness the moment when I attended a political discussion only to be derided by one impossibly earnest 5 6 7

Ibid. 143. Ibid. 141. Ibid. 83–84.

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individual as a ‘counter-revolutionary’.) The stereotype is undoubtedly a resonant one. But at the same time the problem is that the stereotype is the only aspect of radical political movements which Makine seems inclined to depict (in his novel Human Love, for example, even the highly complex historical figure of Che Guevara endures the same reduction). More generally, in presenting the impossibility of political struggle – through his depiction of dissidents who are at best hopelessly naive and at worst megalomaniacs on the make – the possibilities for Makine’s other characters are significantly narrowed. The protagonists, for instance, increasingly tend to resemble the same person: the realist who has won through to the notion of the futility of political struggle through his suffering and has turned to love as the only possible source of life’s meaning and redemption. Increasingly, such an archetype assumes a certain saintly aura. He stands above the fallacies of doctrine and the foolhardy attempts of those who endeavour to commit to some kind of rationalised project of political emancipation. He understands – with the wistfully wise detachment of the holy man abstracted from the messy and ungodly paraphernalia of the world – that any vision for broader social emancipation must necessarily remain pie in the sky and all that is left is to snatch the individual snippets of love and friendship which the mayfly-like lifespan of a single existence offers up. Brief Loves That Live Forever opens with a description of an irreconcilable militant who has spent his life being shunted from prison to prison; crushed by hard labour, knock-kneed and hobbled – his hatred towards the senseless stupidity of the regime which has brutalised him remains undiminished. In the final chapter, though, the same character reappears only to proclaim the ultimate futility of his political struggle: ‘He knows that in this duel with History there can be no victor. Regimes change. What remains unchanged is men’s desire to possess, to crush their fellow men, to lapse into the numb indifference of well-fed animals’.8 One can’t help but feel there is something hollow and unsavoury in this attempt to articulate what is rather a complacent and vulgar template of human nature and present it as the sagacious, profound wisdom which provides the terminus of political struggle, per se. In a similar vein, Makine’s transformation of the fleeting encounter into the ontological absolute that alone can offer succour and redemption (the brief love that lives forever) is sometimes in danger of deteriorating to the level of a hippy-esque solipsism which tends to evince the kind 8

Ibid. 174.

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of bohemian mentality Makine is elsewhere keen to skewer. Makine’s archetypical narrator is someone who is appalled by the spectre of totalitarianism but also repelled by those who consciously band together in order to fight it. In this regard, his perspective is very much that of the bohemian who, disturbed by the political forces both above and below, allows himself the luxury of turning away from both, occupying a realm of transcendental purity given over to the mellow and melancholy contemplation of nature and love’s loss. In the final paragraphs of Brief Loves That Live Forever, the same dissident who appeared in the first scene, his figure ravaged by entropy and hardship, reflects ruefully on his past and the gulags: ‘They used to call me “Poet”, my comrades at the camp. If only it were true! I should know how to speak of the joy and light I find everywhere nowadays!’9 The narrator then draws the novel to a close with the thought which sustains throughout: ‘I am convinced now that these words expressed, better than anything, what Ress’s life allowed us to perceive. Far beyond all doctrines’.10 Brief Loves That Live Forever is emblematic both of Makine’s genius and its limits. There are moments which cause you to physically ache. The scene in which the narrator comes across an acquaintance who was crippled by an unexploded shell stumbled upon during a childhood game many years before provides a haunting, luminous lament on lost possibilities and the ghosts of friendships past. This type of scene evinces the true pathos of Makine’s writing: the delicate brush-stroke sketch of a character who has been crippled by the weight of a nightmarish political legacy which will neither relinquish nor relent. And yet, this person endures a moment of grace in and through his or her capacity to love. In a certain respect, Makine’s writings on love represent the twilight of the Russian greats. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy wrote in a social epoch in which the archaic feudal system was in the process of collapse; where the movement of a vast emancipatory uplift was beginning to stir in the populations of the recently liberated serfs in the countryside and in the first mobilisations of factory workers in the newly industrialised cities. The theme of love, in the classical Russian repertoire, tends to assume a religious aspect and tone partially because the revelation that ‘thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’ echoed the universalist dimension which was part and parcel of the historical trajectory of their epoch more broadly. That is to say, the political and universal impulse was translated

9 10

Ibid. 175. Ibid., p .175.

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unconsciously into the aesthetic form which the authors found to hand: more often than not, a religious one. But Makine is writing in a very different epoch. Not only is it one in which the expectations of mass revolution have been frustrated by totalitarianism, but it is also one that has been marked by the collapse of the USSR. This latter event, which many hoped would usher in a vibrant, newborn liberal democracy, instead birthed a corrupt political apparatus very much under the sway of the vulture oligarchs who had robbed billions from the wreckage of the old state machine. If the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists wrote from the purview of the dawn of political possibility, Makine writes from the perspective of its demise, and love – which appeared in its outward and universal semblance at a time when political horizons were still open – now assumes a more melancholy and introverted character, falling into a lonely individuality which has been set adrift from the possibility of political praxis. Lost in time and space, it is grounded only by memory. If one were to ask the question whether Andreï Makine will join the pantheon of the greats in the Russian tradition, the answer would almost certainly have to be affirmative – but with the recognition that Makine’s greatness is the product of a historical impasse from which progress seems impossible. It is this moment, this dark and solitary night, which Makine crystallises through his poetry of remembrance and melancholy love. Lukács once wrote a few lines on the late Romantic tradition. Its proponents were appalled by the ugliness of capitalist life as opposed to the ugliness of Stalinist totalitarianism which Makine describes, but like Makine, these mature romantics could find nothing in the movement and life of historical development – no social agency or power which might oppose it. And so, writes Lukács, in what is a quite remarkably prescient passage: The past is no longer the objective pre-history of men’s social development, but the innocent and forever lost beauty of childhood, to which a squandered life is passionately but fruitlessly drawn in desperate, unrealizable yearning. ... Distance is simply negation of the present, difference of life in the abstract, something forever lost, which is impregnated with memory and desire to give it poetic substance. Its poetic sources are thus purely subjective.’11

11

G Lukács, The Historical Novel, (Merlin Press, London: 1965), p.232

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19 John Williams’ Novel Stoner and the Dialectic of the Infinite and Finite

‘Less is more’1, wrote the Victorian poet Robert Browning. He might well have been describing John Williams’ novel Stoner as it provides the very epitome of such pithy wisdom. Stoner offers an overview of a whole life, unfurling the existence of one William Stoner from his birth in the late nineteenth century to his death in the mid-twentieth. But although its scope is significant – taking in two-world wars alongside the myriad of lives Stoner encounters in the course of his own – the novel lacks all trace of the historical epic. In less than 300 spare pages, few events of import transpire, and from the outset, the author is at pains to emphasise the aura of ordinariness which shrouds his protagonist, to point out how Stoner’s life in its entirety makes little impression on the fabric of the larger world: Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity.2 Stoner was born to humble origins, to parents who manage to scrape up enough of a pittance from the harsh, unyielding land they work year in and year out so as to send their son to university. Having assisted them in the austere fields from an early age, the child is simultaneously an ‘old soul’, possessed of a stoical nature and a sense of responsibility which has been worked into him by the seasons. Naturally, when he comes to attend the university, his choice of specialisation is motivated by utilitarian concerns; he opts to study agricultural science in order to 1

R Browning, ‘Andrea del Sarto’, Men and Women, line 70, 1855. 190

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assist his family and their work back home. At this point we reach the first of the few revelatory moments which punctuate the novel: in one of his core classes Stoner encounters Shakespeare’s seventh sonnet and an instructor with a perverse, ironic manner who compels Stoner to engage with it: He looked at Stoner for a moment more, and his eyes went blank as they fixed unseeingly beyond the class. Without looking at his book he spoke the poem again: and his voice deepened and softened, as if the words and sounds and rhythms had for a moment become himself.3 The description is spare, almost severe. And yet does it not capture, with profound sincerity, the nature of the artistic transaction? You do not possess aesthetic beauty – rather, it possesses you; it infuses you; it becomes you. Stoner is fascinated and beguiled, and at the same time, his reaction to the revelation is typically understated. He mutters a monosyllabic response and wanders out to the campus grounds, where the other students are milling. The only indication of an inner disequilibrium is imparted by the single sentence: ‘he looked at them curiously, as if he had not seen them before, and felt very distant from them and very close to them.’4 At the same time, this deep, muted current of feeling has a profound effect in that Stoner now shifts his academic focus to literature and the humanities before eventually going on to become a professor of them. The understated but seismic shift, which is effected over the course of an afternoon in a classroom whose dusty air is riven by sunlight is more than a simple shift of interests; rather, it represents an elemental change in being, for Stoner is now ‘someone other than who he had been.’5 As a consequence, he realises he is unable to return to the life he has known on the farm with his parents, because it is an existence which has ceased to belong to himself. The scene where Stoner reveals to his parents that he intends to stay on at university is, again, almost terminally understated and yet shot through with the most profound pathos: Stoner tried to explain to his father what he intended to do. ... He listened to his words fall as if from the mouth of another, and watched 2 3 4 5

J Williams, Stoner, (Vintage, London: 2012) 1. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 26.

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his father’s face, which received those words, as a stone receives the repeated blows of a fist. ... ‘I don’t know’, his father said. His voice was tired and husky. ‘I didn’t figure it would turn out like this. ... Your ma and me has always done the best we could for you. ... If you think you ought to stay there and study your books, then that’s what you ought to do. Your ma and me can manage.’6 But although Stoner’s fundamental sense of self has been, so to say, rewritten by his encounter with great literature, the academic world in which he now moves is one which remains inexorably alien to him. He becomes a permanent fixture in the university campus, yes, but at the same time, there remains the perpetual and nagging awareness which subsists in the far reaches of his consciousness: an indelible knowledge ‘of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain ... the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical.’7 While this is a work which rests on the redemptive power of literature and dwells in the university milieu, it also provides a powerful meditation on class and the way in which one’s historical past never fully relinquishes its grip. The main conflict of the novel, for instance, is exacerbated by the contrast in the organic dispositions of the two antagonists, a contrast which abides in class connotations. On the one hand, we have Stoner, who approaches his academic work with the interminable, unyielding action of a farmer steadily hacking away at the land, compelling it to yield its nutrients. On the other, we are treated to the more urbane figure of Hollis Lomax, a cynical, self-aware creature with a deformed body and ‘the face of a matinee idol’,8 someone who – though ‘ironically polite and impersonal’ – is nevertheless able to deliver lecture upon lecture of fluidic elegance and grace while greasing the mechanisms of bureaucracy so as to facilitate his own, easy uplift through the echelons of the university hierarchy. In a distinctly politically incorrect flavour of metaphor, the ‘grotesque’ distortions of Lomax’s body are belied by the smooth untrammelled beauty of his face; likewise, his spiteful petulance, preening ambition and determination to nurture a grudge are obfuscated by his poise and social grace and the brilliance of his train of thought. The battle 6 7 8

Ibid. 22–23. Ibid. 226. Ibid. 94.

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commences when Stoner has to fail Lomax’s supercilious protégée and then resists Lomax’s attempts to promote the same student through the school system via nefarious means (the protégée, too, has his conniving nature exhibited by way of deformity – those with physical abnormalities do not fare well in Williams’ novel). The initial conflict between Stoner and Lomax develops into a decades-long war of attrition in which Lomax does everything he can to undermine, hurt and damage the other, and what little resistance Stoner mounts is more or less nullified in advance, for Lomax is a child of the academy and the ruling class, equipped from the outset to inflict multiple defeats on a ruddy outsider who never really bothers to take aim. Stoner’s unwillingness to engage, however, has little in common with the turn-the-other-cheek passivity which stems from aloof religious sentiment. There are moments in the novel where Stoner becomes bitterly angry with his adversary, and yet his anger is always outweighed by a more profound sense of bafflement because this gentle, ordinary man proves sincerely incapable of comprehending the sheer level of malice Lomax evinces. In the event, the conflict proves to be something of a damp squib: there is no dramatic denouement, no explosive climax – and, therefore, no possibility of a genuine or comprehensive resolution. Like Stoner’s life itself, the event eventually peters away in the stillness, leaving little or no trace. In another novel, the lack of sharpness and definition with which events are imbued might yield a sense of gentle nihilism, the feeling that even though the characters are beautifully drawn, the dialogue is meticulously observed, and the writing is sparse but poetic, nevertheless its ultimate meaning could be summed up with a simple shrug of the shoulders, its ultimate impact, by and large, perishable. And yet, somehow, the novel is anything but. The writer and polemicist Christopher Hitchens once noted – with the existential sobriety conducive to the atheistic worldview – how ‘we are born into a losing struggle, and nobody can hope to come out a winner, and much of the intervening time is crushingly tedious in any case’.9 The whole novel avails itself of the same understanding, by emphasising the death of its protagonist in the opening few paragraphs but also by demonstrating quite conclusively that Stoner’s life has little impact in the greater scheme. Stoner is imbued with this awareness – the sense of finitude which pervades each and every existence. In the following 9 C Hitchens, ‘Living Proof’, Vanity Fair, March 2003. http://www.vanityfair. com/culture/features/2003/03/hitchens-200303#

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example, he reflects mordantly on the lives of his own parents, in the aftermath of their passing: Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies and slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.10 This eloquent but stark description might well provoke a shudder of recognition in the reader – for aren’t we all subject to those moments when, in the midst of our day-to-day routine, we become suddenly and vividly aware of our own finitude, of ourselves as pockets of matter subject to the interminable laws of entropy and decay? In his early and more romantic period, G W F Hegel argued that the sense of limitation, which entombs the single self, can be transcended only in and through love. In love, the great German philosopher observed, the restrictions of pure individuality are collapsed; by losing yourself in another, you lose the sense of a separate self which is subject to the vicissitudes of finitude. The young Hegel reflects on this in a paragraph which is notable for a certain awkward beauty: What in the first instance is most the individual’s own is united into the whole in the lovers’ touch and contact; consciousness of a separate self disappears, and all distinction between the lovers is annulled. The mortal element, the body, has lost the character of separability.11 In love, therefore, one feels the moment of the transcendent, of the infinite, even if it is accompanied by the awareness that, ultimately, we are destined to be reduced to dust. Or to use Hitchens’ phrase, we are born into a ‘losing struggle’, yes, but one which is worthwhile and redeemable nevertheless. When, from within the ebb and flow of our lives, we are suddenly confronted with the awareness of love, it is as though something of the infinite has pierced the veil of the everyday, as light fissuring through cloud. For a brief definition of great art, one could do worse than to say it involves the condensation of this feeling into a 10

J Williams, Stoner, (Vintage, London: 2012) 110. G W F Hegel, ‘Early Theological Writings’, Fragments of Love. http://d13. documenta.de/research/assets/Uploads/Hegel-Fragment-on-Love.pdf 11

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palpable object: the infinite exhibited in and through the finite parameters of a picture frame, the pages of a book or the notes on a sheet of music. Stoner employs the very same motif. The author is at pains to emphasise the ‘ordinary’ nature of his subject, and at the same time, the novel seeks to show how – through the ordinary, the mundane, the phenomenal, the finite – the presence of the infinite is, nevertheless, palpable. And in the novel, the moment of the infinite is likewise represented in a duel aspect as both love and art. It is his devotion to learning, to literature, that redeems Stoner’s life, but this is not something distinct from love. In the final pages of the book, when Stoner’s existence has almost run its course, the identity between the two – between love and literature – is made explicit in one of the most moving passages written on the subject. Due to Lomax’s manipulations, Stoner was, many years before, forced to abandon the one true romantic relationship of his life, and now, as his physical condition enters into its terminal freefall, he receives a copy of a book which has been written by his long-lost love. As he reaches the very limits of his existence, the infinite once more shines through; love and art attain a single moment of grace: It was as good as he had thought it would be. The prose was graceful, and its passion was masked by a coolness and clarity of intelligence. It was herself he saw in what he read, he realised; and he marvelled at how truly he could see her even now. Suddenly it was as if she were in the next room, and he had only moments before left her; his hands tingled as if they had touched her. And the sense of his loss, that he had for so long dammed within him, flooded outward, beyond the control of his will; he did not wish to save himself. Then he smiled fondly, as if at a memory; it occurred to him he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love. But he was not beyond it, he knew, and never would be.12 The power of the novel then, lies in its articulation – with bare, beautiful artistry – of the most fundamental contradiction that nestles at the heart of being: the aporia between the transitory and the infinite, the mundane and the ethereal – the vertiginous sense of the individual stood on the edge of forever. In terms of style, Williams’ closest literary relatives are probably writers such as Hemmingway or Cormac McCarthy. Like them, Williams generates sparse, beautiful, poetic prose which often concerns 12

J Williams, Stoner, (Vintage, London: 2012) 259.

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itself with the minutiae of a seemingly ordinary task like the saddling of a horse or the reading of a book. Such prose form is part and parcel of an appreciation of the integrity of manual labour, particularly labour forms which directly mediate our social existence with the natural world, such as farming or hunting. But in terms of theme, Williams most closely resembles Anne Tyler and John Updike, who consistently attempt, in the words of the latter, to ‘give the mundane its beautiful due’,13 who, through their depictions, permit us a fleeting glimpse of eternity from within the purview of the everyday.

13 J Updike, ‘Foreword’, The Early Stories – 1953–75, Kindle Edition, (Random House, New York: 2012).

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20 From Tragedy to Farce: The Comedy of Ricky Gervais as Capitalist Critique

In 2013 the first series of Ricky Gervais’ Derek was aired, provoking both disorientation and controversy on the part of the commentariat. Tanya Gould writing for The Guardian newspaper argued that the comic’s writings had of late come to feel ‘more like lazy cruelty than satire’,1 while other critics pilloried the lead character Derek – a carer working in a home for the elderly – as little more than a crude caricature of mental disability. But despite the brouhaha, looking back now it seems as though those criticisms missed the mark in that when you watch the series, you realise above all just how much the writer wants you to sympathise with his main character. Derek wears his humanity on his sleeve. He is a middle-aged man who has obvious mental health difficulties (though, perhaps because of the controversy, Gervais denies this is true of the character). He works in a retirement home and yet is often more vulnerable than the elderly people who live there. In classic Gervais style, the series is presented as a true-to-life documentary replete with a slightly wobbly camera and lingering after-shots – with the characters themselves aware of the cameras and film crew in their midst. Gervais plays the lead character he has written, and he has been criticised for overburdening his dramatic turn with an excess of gurning, lurching and other physical idiosyncrasies. But on this score, I disagree. Derek wanders around the home and there is a perpetual flinch in his aspect, a slight shying away, which seems to hint at vulnerability – the 1 T Gould, ‘Ricky Gervais, there is no justification for this lazy cruelty’, The Guardian, Tuesday, 10 April 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2012/apr/10/ricky-gervais-no-justification-lazy-cruelty

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timorous aspect of a child who always expects to be struck. At the same time, and accentuating that childlike demeanour, Derek seems more aware of the camera than the other characters, regarding it with a fascinated sense of wonder; his eyes blinking and his mouth agape, his gaze is compelled to return to it over and over. In fact, one of the rare displays of bad temper on his part occurs when an older resident blocks his view of it – again, he reacts in a childlike way, this time with a sudden flash of impatient petulance. It is, to my mind, an inspired performance. But is – as some have claimed – the central character little more than a cliché? Again, one must demur. Derek takes his place as the latest in a long line of literary and filmic characters who embody a cultural staple – that of the ‘saintly fool’: think Forrest Gump, for instance, or Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. The problem is that such a staple can easily overwhelm, becoming an almost Platonic archetype of goodness, a near holy reminder of just how blemished and tainted the realities of our own existence are. All too often the depiction of the ‘saintly fool’ translates into a vacuous moral lament. Gervais seems attuned to the danger, however, and he is able to deftly avoid it. How so? Firstly, Gervais’ care home is populated by well-drawn characters, so any emphasis on Derek is not one-sided; his individual story is one of many, and we are also treated to glimpses into the lives of the other care workers. The caretaker Dougie, for instance, provides something of a foil to Derek’s baffled innocence. Dougie is world-weary and commonsensical; his cynicism is the necessary ballast to the more idealistic themes in the show. And yet, he too is deeply entrenched in the strange, sad, funny and surreal niche that the residents and the care workers have managed to carve out for themselves. Their existence is both precious and precarious; the presence of death is a natural and inevitable companion to their lives, as one might expect in an elderly care home, but their small enclave is endangered in other ways too; neglected and marginalised, the home is threatened with closure due to a lack of resources and a surplus of apathy. And it is when drawing characters that have been marginalised and exist on the fringes of society that Gervais really comes into his own. In the second episode, Vicky – a teenage girl who has been caught shop lifting – is forced to do community service in the home. At first, surly, uncommunicative and resentful, Gervais draws her character to resemble in every way the stereotype of the ‘chav’2. When asked about what she 2 For Non-British readers the word ‘chav’ is close to something like ‘white trash’

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likes to read, she replies, ‘Twitter’. She presents as entirely superficial; her cultural frame of reference seems to consist entirely of Victoria Beckham. But Gervais gently undermines the stereotype by working the character into the small community of the care home. She becomes involved with the residents and intrigued by them, despite herself. Gradually, she becomes less guarded. When one of residents pays her a compliment, Vicky responds in a matter-of-fact way: ‘Well you can’t be very clever then ’cause I’m thick.’3 The exchange has arisen because the resident is admiring the way the teenage girl has done her nails. The resident looks at her nails and says quietly, ‘Don’t think a thick person could do art.’4 The camera lingers on the young girl’s face as she gazes back at the lady incredulous, lost for words, before glancing tentatively at her nails and allowing herself the ghost of a smile. The thought that there is something worthwhile about herself and that others might appreciate this – is both strange and wonderful, and her face is lit with tentative pleasure. The scene is understated but intensely moving, and one is aware of the beautiful simplicity of the writer’s deft touch. At the same time, Gervais uses his cruel, serrated comic edge to act as a counterweight to this. Following on the heels of the sensitive and finely crafted scene with Vicky, a very different conversation occurs. Derek is lamenting the fact that it is his 50th birthday, and some of the other residents try to assure him that he is still young. One elderly gentleman opines optimistically – ‘Well, 50’s young. I mean, 50’s the new 40. ... 70’s the new 60.’5 Another resident, somewhat baffled, queries, ‘What’s 80?’ Caretaker Dougie, who is milling about in the background, interjects laconically, ‘80 is still 80. You’re fucked.’6 The comment is incongruous and utterly inappropriate given the context – and yet it doesn’t feel that way. Not only is the dead-pan comic timing mortally funny, but it also emphasises a more general truth: the workers who are dealing with the residents are not beings driven by some high-minded abstract moral agenda; they are living flesh and blood people and their goodness is awkward, sometimes stoical and sometimes profoundly inadequate, exhibited as it must be in and through a set of problematic and imperfect conditions. The quality of their heroism is at the same time marvellously everyday.

3 Derek, Episode 2, Season 1, writer/director – Ricky Gervais, Derek Productions Limited, Chanel 4, 2012. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid.

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And the sequencing of scenes such as this one, the way in which the comical is elided into the tragic and vice versa, provides one of the signature movements in great British comedy more generally. Consider the figure of Victor Meldrew from David Renwick’s great series One Foot in the Grave. His grumpy, cantankerous shell belies a softer and profoundly humane interior; as he carps and rants against the absurdity and callousness of modern life to great comic effect, there is as well a wistful sadness which lingers in his wake (in the backstory, it is revealed that early on Victor and Margaret suffer the loss of a child). Or consider the ebullient, ever cheeky Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter from the BBC masterpiece Only Fools and Horses: always with a new joke on the tongue and a new girl on his arm. Now look again. The same character who provides the fulcrum for such delicious comedic moments as when he takes a tumble in that yuppie wine bar has the whiff of the tragic about him. Del Boy is in many ways a sad figure. Having devoted the best part of his life to looking after younger brother Rodney, we see him standing lonely and forlorn in the disco after Rodney’s wedding, the guests long since departed and the pub about to close. ‘What is left for me now?’ is the question which seems to linger as the disco lights begin to dwindle and the haunting riffs to Simply Red’s ‘Holding Back The Years’ start to play. More broadly, Only Fools and Horses is pervaded by the spirit of its age, the 1980s: Thatcherism, the rise of the yuppie and the struggle of working class communities to scrimp and scrape in face of the neoliberal onslaught. It is this spirit which forms the backdrop to the lives of the characters, the wheelers and the dealers, the hopefuls and the chancers. The comical aspects which arise from the dodgy schemes that the Trotters dream up again provide a flipside to a more fundamentally tragic element: they are doing everything they can as a family to hold together and keep their heads above water in perilous and crushing circumstances. It is difficult to imagine Only Fools and Horses outside this context, outside the hard but bawdy and colourful life of the South London markets, pubs and wine bars in the ’80s, just as it would be impossible to imagine Del Boy himself without his red braces, gaudy gold chains and yuppie Filofax. In the same way, Derek also resonates with the spirit of its time; the global economic crisis and the way in which its aftermath has affected British life – specifically through the fantasy depiction of a residential care home. The brutal fact of the cuts – the austerity measures which the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government elected in 2010 used to bring about a hack-and-slash economic policy against pensions, education and healthcare – such elements are condensed so that they appear as an indistinct shadow that

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is cast across the background of Derek’s almost parochial context; the sleepy environs of a rundown home for the elderly. At the same time, the exhausted care workers, the sudden appearance of council ‘inspectors’ and the constant maintenance problems mean the threat of closure is never far away. The lives of the residents in Derek, then, are enacted against the backdrop of a more ruthless and predatory capitalist development which has devoted itself to creating a leaner welfare state, shredding to pieces the social safety net, slashing wages and continuing to actualise the single biggest transfer of wealth from the lowest echelons to the highest in the historical record. This is capitalism mark II: a sleek, refined, steely sharp model that in the pursuit of capital expansion, more and more eliminates from its remit any extraneous, ‘unproductive’ baggage. In such a climate, the elderly are most at risk because they are figures who have ceased to sell their labour power – that is, they have ceased to be the ‘productive’ creators of new value in the precise Marxist sense. In one way, they are even more vulnerable than the children in society, for the children have the capacity to evolve into future wage labourers, and they are from this purview more valuable. In other words, by focusing on a group of elderly people living in a retirement home, Derek is drawing attention to those who fall outside the remit of the cycle of capital expansion and are therefore outsiders by the very fact of their social being. Even the helpers in the care home – such as Derek himself – are people, for the most part, who would struggle to secure conventional employment; together, their care home community comes to form an ‘excluded other’, a group which is located outside the organised social field of capital reproduction. But it is precisely because of their alienation from the social system more broadly that the relationships of the workers and residents in the care home attain a genuinely human authenticity. The context of their failure to meet the imperatives of capitalist society imbues the relationships of solidarity and friendship that spring up between the workers of the home and the residents with such tragic authenticity because in them we feel at the most fundamental level the simplicity and unadulterated kindness which is anathema to the qualities of aspiration, ambition and ruthless individualism which underpin the capitalist work ethic. For this reason, one can say that Derek provides a trenchant critique of capitalism7 from the purview of a revolutionary humanism. 7 I am specifically referencing the first series here. The later series are significantly weaker in my view.

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Not in any kind of didactic sense: none of its characters are revolutionaries; they do not seek to overthrow the system from within the sleepy confines of the elderly care home. But nevertheless, the struggle for their small precarious community flies in the face of the dominant logic of the capitalist social order. In the form of a fantasy aesthetic, then, the first series of Derek is pervaded by a deeply revolutionary spirit. Gervais’ comedy more broadly works as a revolutionary critique of the capitalist system even if the politics of its creator are decidedly more liberal in flavour. The Office (the UK version, co-written with Stephen Merchant) achieves something similar to Derek but in an inverted form. Whereas Derek’s power lies in the fact that the characters it portrays live out their lives in a pocket of social space which is very much excluded from the ebb and flow of mainstream capitalist development, The Office is set in one of twenty-first century capitalism’s standard productive units – that is, the office wing of a fictional paper company named Wernham Hogg based in Slough. The characters in Derek are in some sense partially shielded from the more pervasive modes and forms of capitalist ideological practise; the characters in The Office, however, are exposed to those same ideological forms with a glaring intensity in and through the office hierarchy. The penetration of capitalist ideological practice into the human personality is revealed, with great comical acumen, in the depiction of David Brent, the general manager of the Slough office and the central protagonist of the series. Brent is by no means devoid of sympathetic and even humane qualities, but these have been overridden by the facile and glib idiom of the motivational seminar. Brent relates to others almost exclusively through the ‘proactive’, ‘hit the ground running’, ‘performance orientated’ managerial speech of the modern office environment, and by raising this to the level of satire, Gervais conveys with admirable artistic integrity the power of a capitalist system which is able to reform and restructure the human personality in its own image. But, in true Hegelian fashion, such negativity is itself negated. Gervais’ description of Brent does not simply remain on the level of a satirical lampoon of one who has so thoroughly made his own the values of corporate capitalism; rather, Brent is permitted the tint of tragedy for under the morass of managerial pseudo-speech and glib corporate aphorism, a naive and essentially well-meaning nature is buried. The tragic element to Brent lies in that despite the fact he has swallowed blindly and wholesale the philosophy of business, he nevertheless is quite literally made redundant by the capitalism which he so ardently worships. It is because he too has been unable to fully integrate himself

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into the underlying logic of capital accumulation that he loses his job, but in so doing, he finds himself again – a true negation of negation, which Gervais easily and touchingly exhibits in the final scene. As manager, Brent has been in a position of authority in relation to his employees, and he has taken advantage of the fact rather vulgarly. Brent has dreams about being a successful comedian, for example, and thus he submits his unfortunate lackeys to his interminable comic routines. Naturally, his awful performances elicit the requisite pained and artificial tittering from a captive audience, the group of workers who detect in Brent all the falseness and alienation of the corporate logic that they are subjected to on a day-to-day basis. But when Brent loses his job, he recovers his authentic personhood. In the final episode of the Christmas specials, Brent returns to the office for a reunion, and when he joins the others there and does a comic impression, for the first time, they all really and truly laugh. The aspect of redemption, however, is brought out most fully in the tentative and awkward relationship between unassuming sales representative Tim and receptionist Dawn. Their hesitant and fragile flirtation finally blossoms at the end of the series, very much against the odds. Dawn, for one, is already engaged to another man. But more profoundly, Tim and Dawn’s encounter takes place in the constrained and atomised environment of the office – an environment which compels them to perform roles which are abstracted and alienated from their true selves. Tim’s real interest lies in psychology, only the financial insecurity which is part and parcel of modern existence means that he feels unable to make the decisive break, leave his job and follow his calling. Likewise, Dawn’s true interests lie in illustrating children’s books, but this was something she had to give up in order to pursue a more economically viable career in the office of Wernham Hogg. And so, for both Tim and Dawn, the office implies from the start an existence which negates their true selves. But the development and romantic culmination of their relationship with one another is what returns them to authenticity once more – again a negation of the negative in the true Hegelian style. What The Office is depicting here, sometimes with humour, sometimes with pathos, is the way in which the economic imperatives of capitalism abstract the worker from his or her authentic self – how they encounter in their working existence a life which feels brittle and alien, as well as indifferent to their true sensibilities and being. But The Office is also showing us the way in which these things can be reclaimed by the solidarity which forms in and through our relationships to others in the same situation. Tim and Dawn’s workplace

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romance demonstrates that the relentless and alienating objectivities of capital reproduction can be transcended and overcome through a more abiding universality; in the aesthetic of Gervais’ creation, this universality takes the form of burgeoning love. In the politico-historical arena, the same universality takes the form of class organisation and class struggle and the revolutionary endeavour to reclaim the alienated labour power which appears in the guise of capital and submits the worker to an uncanny existence over and against his own – an endeavour whose possibility lies with the appropriation on the part of the working classes of the means of production and the dissolution of private property in the productive field. The Office echoes the movement by which labour power appropriates its own alientated essence (capital) at the level of social being. But it does so through the prism of fantasy, and for this reason the revolutionary class development is transfigured into a personal and palpable form in and through the depiction of a set of characters who, ostensibly, have nothing to do with revolution, Marxism or even politics in the broader sense. Once more, one can see that art is great when the necessity which pervades historical epochs is transmitted unconsciously into the realm of a series of personalised characters and the collision of their seemingly capricious and haphazard destinies. In the final of Gervais’ most successful aesthetic endeavours, Extras (also co-written with Stephen Merchant), one can again discern some of the more fundamental contradictions which obtain at the level of socio-historical existence and which emerge in a dreamlike and unconscious fashion in and through the aesthetic. Specifically, Extras reveals some of the universal implications which arise from the consequence of a society that bears the imprint of its fundamental economic unit – that is, the commodity form. If we revisit for a moment the first chapter of Marx’s Capital, we will remember that in the very first section, he describes the fundamental structure of the commodity form according to its two component elements: use value and exchange value. ‘The utility of a thing makes it a use value’,8 and this is bound up with the physical properties of the commodity in question. It is, for instance, the fashioned wood of the legs and seat of a chair which makes of it an object to fulfil the use of being sat on. Exchange value, however, is a metaphysical substance which attaches itself to the object from the outside, so to say, and then only in specific socio-historical conditions. It reflects the ‘human labour 8 K Marx, Capital Vol 1 – Ch1, sec 1, Marx/Engels Internet Archive. http://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S1

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in the abstract [which] has been embodied or materialised in it’,9 and it is not realised immanently but only by its mediation by the market in and through sale. When we first encounter Andy Millman, the central character of Extras, his life activity is being streamed into the two fields of use and exchange. On the one hand, he sells his labour power as a commodity on the market, and thus it realises exchange value.10 Specifically, he works as an extra – that is as a person who is paid to appear in the background of films. Millman does not enjoy his job, and Gervais and Merchant are at pains to depict his working environment as a place where the main actors, the celebrities, are surreal, bizarre, and sometimes even tyrannical. But above all, they are fundamentally out of touch with the extras, who occupy a lower economic bracket and who are often treated dismissively by the directors, producers and lead actors. But even though Millman’s work existence is demoralising, it is made bearable by his friendship with the credulous but very kind Maggie Jacobs, who is also an extra and someone he can laugh with over the more pretentious, preening and self-important people they encounter on set. Alongside this friendship, and in his own free time, Andy Millman has worked to create a script for a show called ‘When the Whistle Blows’. At the start of Extras, Millman’s script has yet to sell – or to say the same, at this point the script exists only as a use value. So the fundamental ontological contrast, which is built into the very premise of Extras, is one between use and exchange. To put it another way, in his work as an extra, Millman is subject to the prerogatives of exchange and capital. His work life is dull and often demeaning, and he does not recognise his true nature and interests within it. His work as an extra is merely a means to an end; that is to say, by exchanging his labour power for a wage, he is able to feed, clothe and shelter himself. But it is quite different with the script he has produced in his own time. This is an end in itself. He has written it because he loves drama and comedy, and he has poured his creative interests into the characters and the words. Naturally, Millman would love to get his script made into a TV series by a big fancy production company, but the quality and tenor of the script itself is not premised on this ambition. It has not been tailored for the specific purpose of making it saleable – that is, realising exchange value. It has been formed as a use value which corresponds to the inner 9

Ibid. Naturally, use and exchange are not mutually exclusive – Millman’s labour power also appears in the form of a use value to the employer who purchases it. 10

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nature of the person who created it. Such a stipulation is a condition of the production of great art more generally; that is, it must conform to the artist’s nature and cannot assume the alienated character of a labour activity which is shaped primarily in accordance with the demand to realise a market value. Or as Marx put it so wonderfully of Milton, he ‘produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature.’11 Eventually Millman’s script is accepted by the BBC and adapted into a TV series. And it is now that the conflict between use and exchange is most vividly exhibited. As Millman is pulled deeper into the production process, the primary use value of Millman’s script – its aesthetic integrity – is increasingly degraded by the logic of exchange. The consulting team at the BBC put Millman under perpetual pressure, and the quality of the script is thereby eroded for it is more and more rendered commercially viable and ‘audience friendly’. Whereas Millman had intended his piece to reflect authentic characters in a true-to-life workplace situation, the final product is riddled with catchphrases and clichés, designed only to raise an instantaneous and easy laugh from a studio audience via a series of cheap gags. There is a finely crafted comical scene which exhibits the problem at the heart of this process. Millman encounters another actor who approaches him by the buffet table in a break between scenes. This actor (the British actor Shuan Williamson, playing himself) explains that he is now out of work because he refused to compromise when the writers of the show he was once in, Eastenders, wanted him to dumb down his character ‘Barry’. Nevertheless, Williamson explains in a gentle, hushed voice, he has no regrets because he has at least retained his artistic integrity. Inspired by this, Millman walks back on set and proceeds to confront the producers of the show, berating them for the commercially driven changes they have enforced, endeavouring to assert his own authority as the author of the piece once again. In the same moment, we hear a sudden clattering sound; both the producers and Millman himself turn to see Williamson by the buffet table, surrounded by the small snack items which he has attempted to steal away in his jacket, and which have now come spilling out onto the floor in a flurry. All his quiet nobility is at once dissipated and Millman is confronted by the downand-out Williamson as the dark reflection of his own worst possible 11 K Marx, ‘Capitalist Production as the Production of Surplus Value’, Economic Works of Karl Marx 1861–1864. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ 1864/economic/ch02b.htm

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future – someone whose refusal to operate according to the commercial logic of exchange has left him wretched and desperate. Millman then makes a cringing climb-down, and offers to meet any of his producer’s demands. Now, the scene is great because it does exactly what it should: it makes you snort laughter through your nose. But at the same time, it exhibits a more general truth – the power of the imperatives of exchange at the level of the modern-day writer’s or artist’s social existence and the way in which more abstract and high-minded moral principles easily evaporate in the face of those realities. The scene with Williamson marks a turning point in the series because it is then when Millman abandons his fight for the integrity of his script and takes solace in the comforts which are provided by the commercial success of the sitcom – the wealth and fame it cultivates. But in abandoning the script’s use value to the prerogatives of exchange, Millman has in effect lost the semblance of himself – for the script was a product of his own essential nature; the void that opens in the aftermath is one he seeks to mask with the palliative of his celebrity status. This too has profound consequences for his existence in that his celebrity is something illusory, forever threatening to vanish, and the compulsion to assure it is driven by the need to make sure that he is always moving in the highest social circles, that he is forever in the papers, that he is seen at all the right restaurants and clubs. The poignancy comes when Millman begins to neglect his best friend, the kind hearted Maggie, precisely because she is still ‘just’ an extra and because he is committed to gaining the favour of those who now appear to him as fundamentally more significant. What is so powerful in the writing here is the way in which Gervais is able to show how the conflict between use and exchange is fought out across the terrain of the human soul, how Millman’s own personality has been warped in accordance with the demands of exchange value itself, as he is transfigured into the type of person that once he would have despised, the type of person who treated him so callously when he worked as an extra himself. At this point, however, Millman’s career begins to flounder, for the public have become swiftly inured against the glib superficiality of his character’s catchphrase, and as he feels his celebrity begin to dwindle, he experiences the desperation of an addict to revive his fame once more because it is all he is left with now. As a result, Millman appears on an edition of celebrity Big Brother. Gervais and Merchant’s choice of programme here is inspired because the show represents nothing other than a celebrity graveyard, where those who were once famous come to die a humiliating and prolonged celebrity death. More than

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anything, the Big Brother house represents an ontological space in which exchange value has vanquished use value once and for all; for the celebrities who enter into it are no longer acting according to the particularity and specificity of their talent as a use value. It is not the case that a singer enters the Big Brother household in order to sing. Rather, the celebrities appear merely as a means to prolong their public image; the need for fame has become an end in itself, which has overridden the specific qualities which brought them that fame in the first place. Having shed the semblance of themselves so completely, there exists for them nothing more than fame’s hollow husk. But it is in this situation, when the logic of exchange is experienced over and against the human personality with its full debilitating force, that the nature of the process which Millman has been subject to and which has resulted in the alienation of himself from himself becomes visible. In that instant, the underlying, invisible logic of a society which is premised on the commodity form as its most fundamental economic unit is clear and apparent to the human being who is subject to it. In a moving scene, Millman starts to put into words the nature of his sudden awareness: Ahhh, what are we doing? Selling ourselves, selling everything. Happiest day of my life: Oh, quick, I’d better do the invites and bake a cake, and get a press tent. Must have a press tent, it’s a wedding. You know, I must see pictures of myself with other people I’m in a program with. ... No! The Victorian Freak Show never went away. Now it’s called Big Brother. Or The X-Factor, where in the preliminary rounds, we wheel out the bewildered to be sniggered at by multimillionaires. And fuck you for watching this at home. Shame on you. And shame on me. I’m the worst of all, ’cause I’m one of these people that goes, ‘Oh, I’m an entertainer. It’s in my blood.’ Yeah, it’s in my blood ’cause a real job’s too hard. I would’ve loved to have been a doctor. Too hard, didn’t want to put the work in. Love to be a war hero; I’m too scared. So I go, ‘It’s what I do.’ And I have someone bollocked if my cappuccino’s cold, or if they look at me the wrong way. Do you know what a friend of mine once said? They said I’ll never be happy, ’cause I’ll never be famous enough. And they were right.12

12 Extras, ‘Christmas Special’, writers – Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, BBC 1 (UK), 2007.

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In the moment this understanding slams into him, he realises what he has lost. Once again, Gervais’ brilliance lies in the fact that he is able to treat the moment of the negative in terms of its own negation when Millman’s consciousness of what he has become allows him to reclaim his authentic self in a single redemptive gesture, as – in a heartbroken whisper – he reaches out to the only true friend he has: And if you’re watching this, I’m so sorry. You’re my best friend. You’re my only friend. And you never did anything wrong. It was everything else. And I’ll never do that again. I’ll never treat you like that again. And it’s eating at me. You asked me a stupid question once, and I just, I could have answered it, and I didn’t, ’cause I was. ... I’ll answer it now: I’d be the penguin. ’Cause I could eat the flying fish. I know what you’re thinking: why doesn’t the fish fly away? Well, they can’t really fly; they sort of glide and flap. They should be called Glidey Flappy Fish. I’m so sorry.13

13

Ibid.

free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Bibliography I Allende, My Invented Country – A Memoir (Flamingo, London: 2003). H Balzac, Cousin Bette (Penguin Classics, London: 1965). E Bronte, ‘Wuthering Heights’ Great Novels of the Bronte Sisters (Paragon, London: 2000). S Collins, The Hunger Games (Scholastic Press, New York: 2008). N Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Haymarket Books, Chicago: 2012). A C Doyle, The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge (Project Guttenberg: 2008). http:// www.gutenberg.org/files/2343/2343-h/2343-h.htm A C Doyle, A Scandal In Bohemia, East of the Web Short Stories. http://www. eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/ScanBohe.shtml A C Doyle, The Five Orange Pips, East of the Web Short Stories. http://www. eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/FiveOran.shtml A C Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Three Garridebs’, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, 1924. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/doyle/arthur_conan/d75ca/ chapter6.html T S Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (Methuen, London: 1920). C Freedman, ‘A Note on Marxism and Fantasy’, Historical Materialism 10(4) (Brill, Leiden: 2002). D J Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse (Routledge, New York: 1997). G W F Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Oxford University Press, London: 1962). G W F Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic (George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London: 1969). G W F Hegel, ‘Early Theological Writings’ Fragments of Love. http://d13.documenta.de/research/assets/Uploads/Hegel-Fragment-on-Love.pdf G W F Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion – Vol 1 (Clarendon Press, Oxford: 2007). E Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital (Orion House, London: 1996). Homer, The Iliad (Wordsworth, Great Britain: 1995). I Kant, Critique of Judgement (Werner S. Hackett, Indianapolis: 1987). B Kingsolver, The Lacuna (Faber and Faber, London: 2009). J Knight, The Story of My Psychoanalysis (McGraw-Hill, New York: 1950). V Lenin, On Literature and Art (Progress Publishers, USSR: 1982). G Lukács, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, History and Class Consciousness (Merlin Press, London: 1983). G Lukács, The Historical Novel (Merlin Press Limited, London: 1965). G Lukács, Studies in European Realism (The Merlin Press, London: 1972). A Makine, Brief Loves That Live Forever (MacLehose Press, London: 2014). K Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Global Vision Publishing House; India, 2008). K Marx, Capital Vol 1, Marx/Engels Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm#S1

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K Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in One Volume (Lawrence and Wishart Ltd, London: 1973). K Marx, Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, England: 1973). K Marx, ‘Capitalist Production as the Production of Surplus Value’ Economic Works of Karl Marx 1861–1864. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/ economic/ch02b.htm K Marx and F Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Progress Publishers, Moscow: 1969). K Marx and F Engels, On Literature and Art (International General, New York: 1974). S Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie (Harvard University Press, USA: 2005). T McKenna, ‘Kantianism and the Judgement of Beauty in Light of the Problem of True Totality and its Basis in the Forms and Structures of Social Existence’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 42(2), (Taylor & Francis, Oxford: 2013) 183–195. J McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: And Its Cure (Pluto Press, London: 1999). D McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism, (Brill, Leiden, Boston: 2011). T L McQullar and F L Johnson III, Tupac Shakur – The Life and Times of an American Icon (Decapo Press, Cambridge: 2010). M Miller, The Song of Achilles (Bloomsbury, London: 2012). F Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (Verso, London: 1983). I Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (Triad/Panther Books, London: 1984). Plato, ‘Symposium’, The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton University Press, New Jersey: 1973). S S Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 1978). I I Rubin, A History of Economic Thought (Ink Links Ltd, London: 1979). B Stoker, Dracula (Vintage, London: 2010). J Tratchtenberg, The Devil and The Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia and Jerusalem: 1983) L Trotsky, ‘What is National Socialism?’ (1933) Marxist Internet Archive. http:// www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm L Tolstoy, What is Art? (Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis: 1996). Vibe Magazine, Tupac Shakur (Three Rivers Press, California: 1998). M Weber, Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society (Harvard University Press, Massachusetts: 1954). J Weinstock, ‘Circumcising Dracula: The Vampire as Anti-Semitic Trope’, The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 12(1), (2001) 90–102. J Williams, Stoner (Vintage, London: 2012). M Wolitzer, The Wife (Vintage, London: 2012). S Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Duke University Press, North Carolina: 2003). D Lodge (editor), 20th Century Literary Criticism (Longman, London: 1977).

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free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Index Allende, Isabel, 122 Aquinas, Thomas, 54 Arendt, Hannah, 1–3, 97 Attacks of September 11th 2001, 33–4, 101 Auerbach, Erich, 94

Eichmann, Adolph, 1–2 Eliot, George, 119 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 95 Engels, Friedrich, 113–8 English Revolution (1640–88), 103 Expressionism, 82

Balzac, Honoré de, 107–19, 182 Bernard, Émile Henri, 87 Big Brother (TV programme), 154, 155, 207–8 Black Panther Party, 70, 73, 74, 76 Bradshaw, Peter, 43 Brecht, Bertolt, 161 Brontë, Emily, 174, 178–9 Browning, Robert, 190 Bush, George Walker, 101, 136

Financial crisis, see Economic crisis Freedman, Carl, 146 French Revolution, 103 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 164, 169

Capital, 15–17, 21, 24, 27–8, 35, 50–6, 67, 89, 107, 126, 150, 157, 201, 203–4 Cash, Johnny, 74, 79 Cezanne, Paul, 88 Chambers, Robert William, 58, 63 Chartist movement, 55 Civil Rights movement, 45, 70–1, 73, 77, 79 Collins, Suzanne, 155–7, 159 Combs, Sean ‘Puffy’, 71 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 162–3, 166–8 Country music, 74 Cumberbatch, Benedict, 166 Davidson, Neil, 93, 94 Denby, David, 157 Dialectics, 6, 11, 19, 56, 82, 150, 151, 177, 179 Dickens, Charles, 119, 181 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 119, 181, 188, 198 Economic Crisis 2007/2008, 16, 18, 21, 27, 31, 33–4, 40, 135, 156–7, 160, 200

Gauguin, Eugène Henri Paul, 87, 89, 90 Gervais, Ricky, 8, 197–9, 202–5, 207, 209 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 2 Goffman, Erving, 97 Gothic, American, 63 Gould, Tanya, 197 Gove, Michael, 3 Gray, John, 164 Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’, 187 Haraway, Donna Jean, 52 Harris, Charlaine, 44–5 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 2, 8, 17, 31, 36, 50, 56, 77, 100, 103, 105, 115–7, 131, 177, 194, 202, 203 Heine, Christian Johann Heinrich, 2 Hemmingway, Ernest, 117, 195 Hip hop music, 71, 79 Hitchens, Christopher, 193, 194 Hobsbawm, Eric, 6 Homer, 94, 95 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 164 Johnson III, Fred Lee, 72 Jones, Quincy, 80 Kant, Immanuel, 4–7, 47–8, 50, 164, 173–4, 177 Kantian Sublime, 172–4 213

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Index

Knight, George Richard Wilson, 19 Knight, Marion ‘Suge’, 78 Kingsolver, Barbara, 98–102, 104 labour, 20, 24–5, 28, 30–1, 34–7, 42, 45, 50–5, 85, 89, 97, 112, 125–7, 145, 151, 165–7, 196, 206 free, 20, 66, 68 waged, 20, 23–4, 126, 201 labour power, 51, 54–6, 126–7, 201, 204 labour time, 24–7, 29, 54 Lafargue, Paul, 113 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 119 Lin, Alvin, 157–8 Lindqvist, John Ajvide, 43 Lovecraft, Howard Phillips, 63 Lukács, Georg, 2, 51, 55, 100–6, 113, 115–6, 118–9, 126–7, 140, 182, 189 Luxemberg, Rosa, 2 Makine, Andreï, 181–9 Marsh, Calum, 38–9 Martin, George Raymond Richard, 140 Martin, Trayvon, 133 Marx, Karl, 2, 6, 17, 24–5, 30, 50–5, 66, 90, 113–6, 165, 204, 206 Maza, Sarah C, 113–114 McCarthy, Cormac, 195 McCarthyism, 98, 102, 105 McKenna, Tony, 5 McMurtry, John, 16 McNally, David, 34–7 McQuillar, Tayannah Lee, 72 Merchant, Stephen, 202, 204, 205, 207 Meslow, Scott, 10 Miller, Arthur, 13 Miller, Madeline, 92–7 Milton, John, 206 modernism, 182 Moretti, Franco, 52 Murdoch, Iris, 170, 172–4, 176–7, 179 Muslim Brotherhood, 42 Newton, Huey Percy, 74 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 10, 93, 118, 167 Occupy Wall Street Movement, 26, 31–2, 40–1, 155, 160 Penny, Laurie, 136–7, 142

Pinkerton, James P, 26, 31 Plato, 175–6 Polidori, John, 47, 56 Pop Idol (TV programme), 154 Prawer, Siegbert Salomon, 115 Proust, Marcel, 182 Rap music, 74, 76, 79 Realism, 113–16, 118 Reeves, Matt, 43 Renwick, David, 200 Ricardo, David, 54–6 Romero, George Andrew, 35 Rowling, Joanne K, 142–3, 145, 147–8, 151 Rubin, Isaac Illich, 54, 55 Sartre, Jean Paul, 137–40 Schama, Simon, 82 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 105–6 Scott, Walter, 102–3 Shales, Tom, 10 Shakespeare, William, 18–20, 76, 100–3, 108, 191 Shakur, Afeni, 71, 72, 74 Shakur, Tupac, 8, 70–80 Simone, Nina, 79 Smith, Adam, 54–6 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich, 181, 184 Spinoza, Baruch, 164 Stoker, Bram, 47 Sublime, see Kantian sublime Tanguy, Julien ‘Pere’ François, 88 Tartt, Donna, 97 thatcherism, 200 Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel, 134, 145–7 Tolstoy, Leo, 2, 11, 119, 140, 182, 188 Trachtenberg, Joshua, 49 Trotsky, Leon, 149–50 Tucker, Delores, 78–9 Tyler, Anne, 196 type (literary), 102, 115, 116–7, 118, 119 Updike, John, 196 utilitarianism, 4 Value, 25, 50, 52, 54–5, 84, 150, 201 exchange, 18, 52–3, 83, 107, 204–8 labour theory/law of, 54–5

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free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Index Value – Continued surplus, 24, 26, 52, 54, 55–6 use, 17, 52–3, 204–8 Van Gogh, Vincent Wilhelm, 8, 53, 81–90 Verne, Jules, 6–7 Véron, Louis-Désiré, 114 Vlad III, 47 Weber, Max, 129 Weinstock, Jeffery, 48

215

Wheedon, Joss, 45 Williams, John, 190 Williams, Raymond, 32 Wilson, Edmund, 117 Wolitzer, Meg, 121, 124–5 X Factor (TV programme), 154, 208 Zimmerman, George, 133 Žižek, Slavoj, 31, 48, 160 Zola, Emile, 115–7

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