Ruth Padel
Khirbet Khizeh
by S Yizhar (Ibis, $16.95)
Preliminaries
by S Yizhar (Toby Press, £14.99)
Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy, a central text in the modernist canon, was published in 1951. Two years earlier, an equally powerful modernist novella, Khirbet Kizeh, appeared from the Israeli writer Yizhar Smilansky (who took the pen name S Yizhar), writing not in French, like Beckett, but in Hebrew, an ancient tongue reforged as a spoken language less than 100 years earlier. Yizhar was born in 1916 in Ottoman Palestine, the son of an idealistic Russian immigrant who farmed by day and wrote journalism at night. Khirbet Kizeh was a tale not, like Beckett’s, of existential angst, but of ethnic cleansing and a crisis of conscience in an individual soldier. It is only now, two years after Yizhar’s death, that English audiences can finally read it.
Read more »
Stephen Everson
The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
by Alex Ross (4th Estate, £20)
In The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross, the New Yorker’s music critic, provides what he describes as an account of “the 20th century heard through its music.” Quite what that should amount to is not obvious, at least to me, but certainly Ross manifests a great knowledge, and understanding, of 20th-century music. He is a writer, and a listener, of wide-ranging sympathies, and the terrain covered in the book is vast. Given its scope, it is no mean achievement that the book has any shape at all. He quite reasonably eschews any ambition to be comprehensive—”certain careers stand in for entire scenes, certain key pieces stand in for entire careers, and much great music is left on the cutting-room floor”—but one is still often uncertain of his motivation for choosing particular careers or for selecting particular pieces as “key.” The result is that it is not always clear whether the works Ross talks about are chosen on grounds of pure musical interest, their importance in the history of 20th-century music or because of their cultural or political significance.
Copland, Britten, Shostakovich, Strauss, Sibelius and the American minimalists receive a great deal of attention, while Bartók, Ravel (extraordinarily relegated to the category of a folk realist) and Webern get relatively little. It may be that Ross thinks that Sibelius, to whose work he devotes a whole chapter, and Philip Glass are more interesting composers than Bartók and Webern: an argument for that view, even if not convincing, would have been of interest. But no such argument is given, and the reader must infer what he can from the vagaries of Ross’s decisions about which composers and works he is going to discuss at any length.
Read more »
Peter Bazalgette
Have you been watching Moving Wallpaper and its companion piece, Echo Beach? I’m not sure how many Prospect readers tune into ITV on Friday nights. If it’s not your habit, let me tell you about it. Moving Wallpaper is a comedy about a dysfunctional television production team making a corny (and, as it happens, Cornish) soap opera. And half an hour later you get to see the soap itself. Yes, very postmodern, very ironic. But can ITV do ironic? Will its regular viewers wear it? The fortunes of this sitcom/soap reveal rather precisely some of the dilemmas facing the team now running ITV (though, as far as I know, they have no plans to dramatise these on screen as well).
The Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach project is the brainchild of Tony Jordan, one of the most influential television writers in Britain. He had previously come up with some of Eastenders’ best characters and also co-created BBC1’s Life on Mars, the most innovative prime-time drama of the past ten years. Life on Mars was turned down by several broadcasters before Jordan persuaded the BBC to take the risk. Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach had a similar provenance, but there the parallels end. For Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach has suffered a fairly steep decline in ratings over six weeks, from 5m down to 2.7m (Moving Wallpaper) and 2.3m (Echo Beach). More than one in five of all those watching prime time television were there at the beginning; only one in ten remain.
Characteristically, Jordan’s idea is a bold one. The commissioners at ITV, faced by a declining channel share and a declining share price, wanted to plant a flag that said “cool, surprising, original.” And you have to give them credit for that, but it’s not so easy to sell to ITV’s national constituency, one of the last mass audiences left in an increasingly fragmented media world. They get Coronation Street from 8.30pm to 9pm on Friday evenings. No irony, no tricks—just straight, popular drama. Let me give you a flavour from last week : “Marry him and you’ll live a half life… You know she’s never going to be enough for you, Liam… I just want everything to be perfect, and do you know, darling, it will be… Barry, would you just eat your casserole?” Then at 9pm they are swiftly transported into a slick deconstruction of all that. Episode one of Moving Wallpaper had this: “Sue thinks the show [Echo Beach] will bomb. You’ll be the man who killed off ITV’s new baby”; and “People will see it as the cynical stunt it is.” This witty stuff starts by living dangerously but, in view of the recent ratings slump, ends as self-harm.
Ben Miller as the neurotic, venal and essentially insane boss of the production team is buttock-clenchingly good. This is the comedy of embarrassment (see Ricky Gervais). Miller has made the difficult transition from comedian (Armstrong and Miller) to straight actor well. And the casting of two actors from Channel 4’s Teachers makes it clear what they’re aiming for. But can you do Channel 4’s smooth nihilism on ITV at 9pm? Even Channel 4 doesn’t attempt this until 10pm. And what Moving Wallpaper has lacked as the weeks have gone by, clever confection that it is, is any characters you care for. All sitcoms need this, like any other drama. Remember the receptionist in The Office and her love affair?
Some of the jokes are good. In a later episode, the producer is told that Johnny Briggs, who plays a sort of trailer trash hobo in Echo Beach, wants a limp for his character. The response is: “He can’t have one. If we give him one, they’ll all want a limp.” Briggs is an actor best known for his long-running part in Coronation Street, where he was allowed to keep his natural Cockney accent. Here he attempts an appalling west country burr—my tip is that he’s a certainty for a Bafta this year in the “least convincing accent in a supporting role” category. But that is by no means the least convincing thing about Echo Beach, I’m afraid.
Is the programme what it purports to be—a soap opera—or a comedy? Am I meant to laugh at the characters or empathise with them? Martine McCutcheon (ex-Eastenders) is trapped in a washed-up and somewhat sinister marriage, while all the time she loves another man—Jason Donovan (ex-Neighbours—pictured, right, in Echo Beach). Do we care? The rules of the soap opera demand that I do. But once you’ve seen Ben Miller in Moving Wallpaper presented with two dresses for Martine, one pink and one blue, it’s rather difficult: “Which one does she like?” “The blue one.” “Put her in the pink!” And 20 minutes later, you duly see Martine in pink—this is clever, subversive but ultimately destructive. Perhaps the biggest mistake is to have separated these two shows rather than going for one hour of clearly signalled comedy, Echo Beach merely becoming a number of interwoven clips within it. That, of course, was the format of Seinfield, one of television’s greatest ever hits.
ITV is a company in transition—between the analogue and the digital age, between the days of a captive audience and the multichannel age of viewer promiscuity, and between a Britain with a large, self-identifying working class and a rainbow nation of a thousand tribes. It has to take risks to attract younger viewers. This one didn’t come off, but it should keep at it. My prediction is that ITV will be valued more highly in three years than it is now. It will still be in possession of a mass audience when such an asset will be a valuable rarity. And like all audiences, it will repay being surprised from time to time. But it has to be a pleasant surprise.
?
?
Tom Chatfield
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
On 24th May 1683, Britain’s first museum, the Ashmolean, opened its doors in Oxford. Divided into three parts, it contained rooms for undergraduate lectures, a laboratory and a miscellaneous collection of specimens and cultural artefacts. Such “collections” had always been considered the preserve of an elite possessing the leisure, taste and education profitably to contemplate them—displaying one to the general public was a radically progressive notion, even though this “public” meant respectable commoners able to afford the admission. Primarily, the museum was intended for research and scholarly taxonomy; the word “museum” itself was a direct import of the Latin for a library or study.
This “scholars and the respectable” attitude would persist throughout the next century—the British Museum, opened to the public in 1759, required advance applications from prospective visitors in writing so that its mission of serving “studious and curious persons” would not be compromised. Then, in 1793, the first truly public museum was born in Europe with the opening of the Louvre, which made available for free and to all the centuries of treasures hoarded by the French monarchy. Revolution and Enlightenment had created a new kind of public space: one that people came to in order to be civilised by culture, rather than confronted by it as an instrument of others’ power or as a mystery meaningful only to the elite. The Louvre embodied a shift in notions of citizenship that would spread through western culture—a reassessment, already occurring incrementally in Britain, of whom the state and a national culture could be said to be for. For the next two centuries, mass enfranchisement, nationalism and museums would be inextricably linked.
Read more »
Simon Blackburn
In the play Travesties, Tom Stoppard’s character James Joyce asks: “What now of the Trojan war if it had been passed over by the artist’s touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots.” Contrast what it is for us, mediated by Homer: an epic of gods and heroes, struggle, lust and glory. The point generalises. Thackeray remarked how a bald, stupid, heartless little man with a paunch became the majestic Louis XIV if put in the right shoes, robes and wig—and that then, having set up the fantasy, we had to worship the result. The mirage suits us better than the truth.
The late Jean Baudrillard pursued the same theme, with his theatrical declamation that “Le gulf war n’existe pas.” On the face of it, this is a crashing falsehood—which we must therefore read, charitably, as pointing to some other claim. That is the French style, and it is a close cousin to any use of metaphor. Those who called Mrs Thatcher the iron lady did not mean that she clanked when she walked.
Baudrillard was not concerned with the artist’s touch but with what happens when television and other media purport to take us to the field of action. The 1990 Gulf war was modelled by planners using simulations; it was won, if we call a massacre a victory, largely by pilots looking at computer screens; and it was relayed to the public by television. Most consumers of these images get no reality check; the image is all we have to go on. And the image does not come to us innocently. What happened in 1990 may, indeed, have been something more than a war: an episode in America’s cultural narcissism, a hallucinatory projection of its fears and fantasies, a Faustian pact between developed capitalism and virtual reality, a promotional video, or a simulacrum indistinguishable from Disneyland. So Baudrillard’s hyperbole had a serious point. He often provoked outrage by it, but when, for instance, he tactlessly suggested that the iconic place of Nazi atrocities as a symbol of evil makes it “logical” to ask whether they even existed, his point was not to ally himself with the David Irvings of this world, but to suggest that for many political and cultural purposes, the answer is irrelevant. As with God, it is our investment that matters, not whether it is invested in a fiction.
Read more »
Francis Fukuyama
Modern identity politics springs from a hole in the political theory underlying liberal democracy. That hole is liberalism’s silence about the place and significance of groups. The line of modern political theory that begins with Machiavelli and continues through Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and the American founding fathers understands the issue of political freedom as one that pits the state against individuals rather than groups. Hobbes and Locke, for example, argue that human beings possess natural rights as individuals in the state of nature—rights that can only be secured through a social contract that prevents one individual’s pursuit of self-interest from harming others.
Modern liberalism arose in good measure in reaction to the wars of religion that raged in Europe following the Reformation. Liberalism established the principle of religious toleration—the idea that religious goals could not be pursued in the public sphere in a way that restricted the religious freedom of other sects or churches. (As we will see below, the actual separation of church and state was never fully achieved in many modern European democracies.) But while modern liberalism clearly established the principle that state power should not be used to impose religious belief on individuals, it left unanswered the question of whether individual freedom could conflict with the rights of people to uphold a particular religious tradition. Freedom, understood not as the freedom of individuals but of cultural or religious or ethnic groups to protect their group identities, was not seen as a central issue by the American founders, perhaps because the new settlers were relatively homogeneous. In the words of John Jay (in the second “Federalist Paper”): “A people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles.”
In the west, identity politics began in earnest with the Reformation. Martin Luther argued that salvation could be achieved only through an inner state of faith, and attacked the Catholic emphasis on works—that is, exterior conformity to a set of social rules. The Reformation thus identified true religiosity as an individual’s subjective state, dissociating inner identity from outer practice.
Read more »
Eric Kaufmann
The modern western world is inseparable from the idea of secularisation. From Socrates’s refusal to acknowledge the Greek gods to Copernicus’s heretical idea that the earth revolved around the sun to the French revolution’s overthrow of religious authority, the path of modernity seemed to lead away from the claims of religion. In our own time, the decline in church attendance in Europe is seen as evidence that secular modernity has entered the lives of ordinary people. Some optimistic secularists even see signs that the US, noted as a religious exception among western nations, is finally showing evidence of declining church attendance. But amid the apparent dusk of faith in Europe, one can already spot the religious owl of Minerva taking flight. This religious revival may be as profound as that which changed the course of the Roman empire in the 4th century.
In his remarkable book The Rise of Christianity, the American sociologist of religion Rodney Stark explains how an obscure sect with just 40 converts in the year 30AD became the official religion of the Roman empire by 300. The standard answer to this question is that the emperor Constantine had a vision which led to his conversion and an embrace of Christianity. Stark demonstrates the flaws in this “great man” portrait of history. Christianity, he says, expanded at the dramatic rate of 40 per cent a decade for over two centuries, and this upsurge was only partly the result of its appeal to the wider population of Hellenistic pagans. Christian demography was just as important. Unlike the pagans, Christians cared for their sick during plagues rather than abandoning them, which sharply lowered mortality. In contrast to the “macho” ethos of pagans, Christians emphasised male fidelity and marriage, which attracted a higher percentage of female converts, who in turn raised more Christian children. Moreover, adds Stark, Christians had a higher fertility rate than pagans, yielding even greater demographic advantage.
Some of the sources which Stark draws upon are open to question. What is not contestable is that many latter-day religious groups have thrived thanks to high fertility. The Mormons, for example, like Stark’s early Christians, have maintained a 40 per cent per decade population growth rate for 100 years. They remain 70 per cent of Utah’s population in the teeth of substantial non-Mormon immigration, and have even expanded into neighbouring states. In the 1980s, the Mormon fertility rate was around three times that of American Jews. Today the Mormons, once a fringe sect, outnumber Jews among Americans under the age of 45.
Read more »
James Wood
Here are two recent statements about literary realism, statements so typical of their age that a realist novelist would have been proud to have imagined them into life. The first is by Rick Moody, reviewing JM Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello in Bookforum: “It’s quaint to say so, but the realistic novel still needs a kick in the ass. The genre, with its epiphanies, its rising action, its predictable movement, its conventional humanisms, can still entertain and move us on occasion, but for me it’s politically and philosophically dubious and often dull.” The second is by Patrick Giles, contributing to a long, raucous discussion about fiction, realism, and fictional credibility on a literary blog called The Elegant Variation: “And the notion that this [the realistic novel] is the supreme genre of the lit tradition is so laughable that I ain’t even gonna indulge myself.”
A style unites the two statements, a down-home relaxation of diction (”kick in the ass,” “ain’t even gonna”), which itself informs us about the writers’ attitudes towards realism’s own style: it is thought to be stuffy, correct, unprogressive, and the only way even to discuss it—”so laughable”—is to mock it with its stylistic opposite, the vernacular. Realism, it seems, is so conventional it is almost embarrassing (”quaint”) to be caught discussing it at all. A curious anxiety, when one considers that the era Giles dismisses stretches from, at least, Balzac to Forster, from 1830 to 1910. It is a little like dismissing as beneath comedy the idea that English poetry reached any kind of pinnacle from Shakespeare to Milton, or that music did the same from Beethoven to Mahler.
The major struggle in American fiction today is over the question of realism. Anywhere fiction is discussed with partisan heat, a faultline emerges, with “realists” and traditionalists on one side and postmodernists and experimentalists on the other. No comparable struggle exists in British fiction because experimental fiction has never been substantial enough to mount a decent campaign against the dominant discourse. But the 1960s avant-garde in America was full of talent and vigour. In addition to writers like John Barth and Gilbert Sorrentino, who never really reached popular audiences, many of the avant-gardists of that period became mainstream, notably Thomas Pynchon and the delightful story-writer Donald Barthelme and William Gass, and the unclassifiable Kurt Vonnegut. The heirs of this era of experiment might include Don DeLillo, Rick Moody, David Foster Wallace, Paul Auster, Lydia Davis and Ben Marcus, all very different from each other and of different ages, but all committed in one way or another to going beyond realism. A testament to the success of avant-gardism in America was offered, in 1986, by Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, which took just what it needed from postmodern narrative games in order to make a fundamentally metaphysical argument about the different ways of living, and narrating, a life. In a younger generation, Jonathan Franzen’s writings about whether he is a highbrow artist or a popular entertainer, and his tortured negotiations with the legacies of DeLillo and William Gaddis, are difficult to imagine without the challenge of American experimentalism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Read more »
Julian Evans
Book: The seven basic plots
Author: Christopher Booker
Price: (Continuum, £25)
It may seem odd to propose F Scott Fitzgerald as the most modern of storytellers, but consider how his portrait of Anson Hunter, the protagonist of The Rich Boy, opens with the narrator’s reflections on his own technique: “Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created – nothing.” The Rich Boy was written in 1925, as Fitzgerald waited for The Great Gatsby to be published. With the explosion of modernism, the 1920s were a watershed for storytelling. Behind this decade were Austen, Dickens and James; in front, Joyce and Borges. Yet far from showing Fitzgerald marooned on the 19th-century shore (where critics almost invariably place him), the 30 pages of The Rich Boy demonstrate a remarkable bridging of that watershed. The story consists of a linear narrative managed by a modern consciousness. It may owe more to Chekhov than Beckett, but post-Beckett it is possible to see a notion of reality that has already abandoned authority, becoming oblique, partial, esoteric. “The only way I can describe young Anson Hunter,” the narrator concludes his introduction, “is to approach him as a foreigner and cling stubbornly to my point of view. If I accept his for a moment I am lost.”
Read more »
Post a comment »
