Roy Miller's Blog, page 239
March 22, 2017
Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: Judith Matloff on Why Mountains Attract War
No one would describe mountains as easy places. But the dangers documented in Judith Matloff’s new book, “No Friends but the Mountains,” go beyond the expected rough terrain. Matloff, a veteran war correspondent, was curious why so many of the world’s conflicts take place in mountainous regions. To get a better understanding, she traveled to Albania, Mexico and Afghanistan, among other places. In the first installment of a new interview series, Matloff tells us about the inspiration for the book, what she learned while writing it and more.
When did you first get the idea to write this book?
JUDITH MATLOFF Over three decades as a foreign correspondent, whether I was writing about rebellion or drug cartels or massacres, I invariably found myself in mountains. These assignments required hiking boots and tablets for altitude sickness. Yet I only made the connection between terrain and conflict during the most prosaic moment, at home in flatland Manhattan. I was playing a round of the board game Risk with my 11-year-old son and husband, and that afternoon, as we battled over Afghanistan — who hasn’t over the centuries? — our son, Anton, asked me where people were currently fighting. I marked about two dozen places off the top of my head, and threw in a few more spots that had seen strife over the past century. On a globe that showed elevations, Anton traced the surface with his finger and made notes on a pad, so absorbed that he failed to notice his father rampaging through the Himalayas to take China. “Kosovo, Chechnya, Kashmir, Chiapas,” Anton recited, among others, checking the altitude key for each. “Most occur in mountains. Why?”
I decided to find out.
What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?
MATLOFF: That people from mountains spanning the Atlas to the Andes feel an intense affinity with each other. They have even formed a global organization, the World Mountain People Association. No such network exists for desert dwellers or islanders. The WMPA gathers highlanders from 70 countries, who meet on a different slope each year to discuss a shared “mountain identity” and grievances over flatland chauvinism. The group convinced me that topography plays a role in shaping lifestyle and outlook. A sherpa and a shepherd from the Pyrenees will both describe a deep spiritual connection to the land and similar personality traits: insularity, self-reliance, a gift for improvisation, a suspicion of outsiders.
In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?
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Judith MatloffCredit
Glenn Jussen
MATLOFF: I initially envisaged a prescriptive policy book that would examine why mountains were prone to persistent violence. I delved deep into literature and history to understand these islands in the sky. The book took on a more anecdotal complexion when I began field research. I couldn’t resist describing the drama of the landscape and the lives of people. The isolated mountains entrapped both inhabitants and invaders. Colombian fighters stuck on a ridge squeezed water from moss as supplies ran out. A bold geriatric inspired Nepal’s Rai indigenous people to fight construction of a dam. American soldiers collapsed from oxygen starvation in Afghanistan. Blood feuds prevented Albanian teens from leaving their houses to attend school. I wanted to evoke the crack of avalanches, the vertigo, the smell of wood smoke and fear.
Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work
MATLOFF: My father. He inspired me to write both light and dark. Dad deployed as a teen to fight Hitler, and he spent his adult years obsessing over war. As a child I watched films about concentration camps and General George Patton, which no doubt influenced my choice of topics later on. But my father also was a jokester who drew hilarious cartoons and urged me not to take myself too seriously. My work embodies these contradictory aspects. This book — like my first, about the Angolan civil war — examines why people fight, a topic that my late father would have loved to debate, no doubt. Yet I also seize upon absurd moments, as that’s as much a part of the human condition as misery.
Persuade someone to read it in less than 50 words.
MATLOFF: Danger, like water, cascades down from mountains. They house 10 percent of the world’s population but account for a disproportionate number of its conflicts. Highlands provide sanctuary to ISIS, cocaine barons, Al Qaeda and countless insurgents. You better pay attention because those hills threaten world peace.
This interview, conducted by email, has been condensed and edited.
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10 Transgressive Fairy Tales for Grown-Ups
They may be ancient forms of storytelling, but fairy tales are still big business. Case in point: the new Disney live-action version of Beauty and the Beast—which was not the least bit artistically necessary, by the way, considering that the original is Disney’s best film of all time—just opened to the catchy tune of $170 million in ticket sales, setting a new record for March opening weekend sales. (So I suppose “artistically necessary” isn’t exactly what’s driving decisions here.) At any rate, the revival of Beauty and the Beast, and all the attendant hand-wringing over Emma Watson’s feminism, has gotten me thinking about actually transgressive, interesting, and yes, maybe even feminist retellings of fairy tales. There have been hundreds of these over the years, but here are a few of the most interesting—in this writer’s opinion, of course—from reinterpretations to new myths, from classic to current. Sure, go see Beauty and the Beast, but for my money, I think Angela Carter will show you a better, bloodier time.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Woolf’s love letter to Vita Sackville-West is also a fairy tale—what else to call a novel in which Orlando wakes at the stroke of midnight, after a long magical sleep, having been transformed from man to woman? Allusions to Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella abound in this novel, but even more convincing is the playfulness of Woolf’s prose, the plainly put plot points (“It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.”). No doubt it is one of the greatest novels to make use of the four formal elements of the fairy tale as explained by Kate Bernheimer: flatness, abstraction, intuitive logic, and normalized magic.
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Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird
Oyeyemi is a fairy-teller of many forms, and her meta, magical Mr. Fox would also suit this list well. But Boy, Snow, Bird is even more interesting in some ways, a total transfiguration of the Snow White story set in the 1950s, in which a woman, Boy, runs away from a horrible father, marries a handsome widower, is envious of his beautiful daughter—and then has her own, whose dark skin reveals a secret about her husband. But it’s not only the strange alchemy of “passing” that Oyeyemi is examining here. “I wanted to rescue the wicked stepmother,” she has said. “I felt that, especially in Snow White, I think that the evil queen finds it sort of a hassle to be such a villain. It seems a bit much for her, and so I kind of wanted to lift that load a little bit.” Rescuing the wicked stepmother is a transgressive act indeed.
Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
As in Orlando, there is much challenging of traditional forms (this is apparently a historical novel), as well as gender norms and possibilities here, not the least of which have to do with the gender-fluid, bisexual, web-footed Villanelle, and who falls in love with a woman she calls the Queen of Spades—a woman who captures her literal heart. Add to all this Henri, who is driven mad by his love for Villanelle, who cannot love him back—even after he steals back her heart. Everything a fairy tale should be, in my opinion.
Donald Barthelme, Snow White
Another take on the Snow White story, this one much weirder and raunchier than Oyeyemi’s. In this formally bizarre and disjointed narrative—I mean, there is a quiz on page 88 with questions like “Does Snow White resemble the Snow White you remember? Yes ( ) No ( )” and “Have you understood, in reading to this point, that Paul is the prince-figure? Yes ( ) No ( )” “Do you feel that the creation of new modes of hysteria is a viable undertaking for the artist of today? Yes ( ) No ( )”, which is its own kind of magic, really—Snow White lives with Kevin, Edward, Hubert, Henry, Bill, Clem, and Dan, who make Chinese baby food and wash buildings and gawk at women. And…I really can’t tell you anything else that happens, except that it’s all bonkers-thrilling, an ecstasy of the disturbing and absurd.
Anne Rice, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
Erotica, particularly sadomasochistic erotica, is often transgressive, and this novel—which makes 50 Shades of Grey seem like a kids’ book—is a fine, horrifying example. To be fair, the beginning of this book, in which the Prince comes upon Sleeping Beauty and wakes her up by having sex with her, is much closer to the original—in which he rapes her in her sleep, but she doesn’t wake up until later—than the version we’ve all been fed (chaste, closed-mouth kiss, voila, Happily Ever After). But this retelling is more than a simple sexual exaggeration of the powerful man/submissive woman narrative of the original tale—all genders have the opportunity to be submissive in Rice’s world…
Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka
Kafka didn’t write fairy tales, you say? Well, of course not. In fact, he has been described by fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes as the creator of the “anti-fairy-tale,” which is a different kind of transgression that some of the others we’ve seen here. As Patrick Bridgwater put it in Kafka, Gothic and Fairytale, “The folk fairytale depicts an ordered world, Kafka a disordered one. He uses the style, structure and motifs of the folk fairytale to deny the positive aspect or ultimate meaning of the genre. Its negative aspect, on the other hand, is present in his work, in which arrogance and greed are punished.” When you become a speechless creature and your family goes on to live happily without you, that’s some strangeness indeed.
Yumiko Kurahashi, trans. Atsuko Sakaki, The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories
An amazing, surreal collection of sexually-charged fairy tales influenced by classical Noh theater. In the title story, which you can read here, a girl’s head flies off into the night to visit her beloved while her adoptive father molests her headless body. “As always,” he says, “the surface of her neck felt like a wet lip. I discovered that the headless body would surge with pleasure if I licked the wet part. Li’s head never seemed to know anything about this. Her body was unable to inform her head of its nightly experiences.”
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, trans. Keith Gessen & Anna Summers, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby
Petrushevskaya’s “scary fairy tales” are like dark spells themselves. As Gessen and Summers put it in the book’s introduction, Petrushevskaya uses the classic nekyia, Homer’s night journey, as a unifying concept:
“In this collection, nearly every story is a form of nekyia. Characters depart from physical reality under exceptional circumstances: during a heart attack, childbirth, a major psychological shock, a suicide attempt, a car accident. Under tremendous duress, they become propelled into a parallel universe, where they undergo experiences that can only be described allegorically, in the form of a parable or fairy tale. … What happens to these characters on their journey in a strange land may be read as a dream, a nightmare caused by shock, or else a momentous mystical transgression—Petrushevskaya makes a point of leaving room for both interpretations.”
Lucy Corin, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses
I could make an argument that every fairy tale is an apocalypse—an apocalypse of childhood, often, or an apocalypse of a certain way of life, a certain understanding of the world—but does it follow that every apocalypse is a fairy tale? Perhaps not (ask Buffy), but many of the vignette-sized apocalypses in Corin’s collection are—they are fairy tales of the every day, of the every moment, grand or quiet, destroying worlds or silences.
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber
Well, you weren’t getting out of this list without Gothic feminist queen of your soul Angela Carter. You knew that, didn’t you, children? Famously, Carter didn’t consider these stories “versions” of the original tales, but rather, she sought to “extract the latent content from the traditional stories.” Latent, indeed: this book contains sadism, rape, murder, necrophilia, mother-as-handsome prince, a girl who becomes a tiger, a girl who uses her hair as a garrote wire, a girl who feeds her grandmother to the wolf, and so on and so on.
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In L.A., Women Creators Discuss Gender Diversity in the Comics Industry
In a discussion during the “Women in Comics” panel, held at the Los Angeles Public Library’s Vernon Branch last weekend, five female comics creators examined the current state of gender equality and overall diversity in the comics industry.
Diversity has been an important theme for the publishing and pop culture industries in recent years, from numerous conversations at the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference to the ongoing advocacy of We Need Diverse Books.
Indeed, the demand for diversity and the changing demographics of the comics industry and fan culture in general—particularly the increase in female fans and professionals—is driving the programming and booming attendance at comics festivals and pop culture conventions around the country.
This LAPL-hosted panel expanded on that discussion, turning a critical eye toward diversity in comics material and comic book publishing.
Panel organizer and young adult librarian Corinda Humphrey recalled how her grandmother worked in Disney animation in the 1930s—a time when male and female creators were literally kept separate. “They were not to be fraternizing with the men,” Humphrey explained. “And they didn’t let women [write] story.”
While many of these institutional boundaries have since been lifted, the panel examined the ways that other subtle discriminatory measures have left a lasting mark on future generations of women. Panelist Sarah Kuhn, the creator of Heroine Complex, a DAW Books series about Asian American superheroines, recalled how gender and ethnic boundaries restricted her imagination.
“I didn’t see a lot of Asian American women, especially mixed Asian American women, ever being main characters, if they were even there at all,” she explained. “Growing up, I didn’t know I could be a main character, because I never saw it. Subconsciously, I made myself a sidekick in my own life.”
Christina Strain, a Korean-American colorist and writer that works on the Marvel series Runaways and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, said that growth of diversity in the industry helped pave the way for her to work on the award-winning projects: “All these things I’ve been able to do came from the fact I’ve worked with diverse teams. We all wanted to see a little bit of ourselves in it. That makes a huge difference.”
While working as a writer on the Syfy Network’s adaptation of Lev Grossman's novel The Magicians, Strain pitched three Korean characters for the first episode. Without her presence on the writing team, she said, the show’s producers would never have considered creating those characters.
Cecil Castelluci, writer on DC Entertainment’s relaunch of the comics series Shade, the Changing Girl, reminded the panel’s attendees that fans can ensure that comic book publishers include diverse characters in their products. When readers love a character or series, they need to “support it, support it, support it!” she explained.
The increasing popularity of book format comics—graphic novels—is also helping to support diversity, Castellucci said. She outlined how fan input at a crucial stage in the monthly periodical comics publishing cycle can help save a series.
“Monthly comic book sales [tend to] dwindle after the first issue sales. But they get a boost when collected into a graphic novel,” she explained, highlighting the importance of trade paperback sales for up-and-coming voices and new series.
“A comics series can be tanking after the first few issues in a monthly comic book, but [the publisher] will wait to see before they cancel it,” Castellucci explained, in order to see how the monthly series will do once collected in trade paperback.
Comic book veteran Strain agreed, sharing a story from her own career about the growing importance of book format comics: “Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane survived for the many years it did purely because people bought trade [book collections].”
Despite the industry’s long history of excluding minorities and women, Kuhn also acknowledged that great strides had been made toward more diversity in comics. But she cautioned that it’s not enough to simply have diverse characters. “We also need to look at the other side, so we can see diverse creators who are writing their own stories,” Kuhn said.
Panelist Talya Perper, the writer behind the Steven Universe: Anti-Gravity graphic novel from Boom! Studios, encouraged young creators to take the diversity problem into their own hands.
“If you notice there’s no character representing what you represent, you have to make it. You just have to do it,” she concluded.
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March 21, 2017
‘The Death of Expertise’ Explores How Ignorance Became a Virtue
“The Death of Expertise” turns out to be an unexceptional book about an important subject. The volume is useful in its way, providing an overview of just how we arrived at this distressing state of affairs. But it’s more of a flat-footed compendium than an original work, pulling together examples from recent news stories while iterating arguments explored in more depth in books like Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason,” Susan Jacoby’s “The Age of American Unreason,” Robert Hughes’s “Culture of Complaint” and, of course, Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 classic, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.” Nichols’s source notes are one of the highlights of the volume, pointing the reader to more illuminating books and articles.
Photo
Tom Nichols
Credit
Sara Cooney
Nichols reminds us how a “resistance to intellectual authority” naturally took root in a country, dedicated to the principles of liberty and egalitarianism, and how American culture tends to fuel “romantic notions about the wisdom of the common person or the gumption of the self-educated genius.” (Though the country, it should also be remembered, was founded on the Enlightenment principles of reason and an informed citizenry.)
Nichols argues that the “protective swaddling environment of the modern university infantilizes students,” and suggests that today’s populism has magnified disdain for elites and experts of all sorts, be they in foreign policy, economics, even science.
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Trump won the 2016 election, Nichols writes, because “he connected with a particular kind of voter who believes that knowing about things like America’s nuclear deterrent is just so much pointy-headed claptrap.” Worse, he goes on, some of these voters “not only didn’t care that Trump is ignorant or wrong, they likely were unable to recognize his ignorance or errors,” thanks to their own lack of knowledge.
While the internet has allowed more people more access to more information than ever before, it has also given them the illusion of knowledge when in fact they are drowning in data and cherry-picking what they choose to read. Given an inexhaustible buffet of facts, rumors, lies, serious analysis, crackpot speculation and outright propaganda to browse online, it becomes easy for one to succumb to “confirmation bias” — the tendency, as Nichols puts it, “to look for information that only confirms what we believe, to accept facts that only strengthen our preferred explanations, and to dismiss data that challenge what we accept as truth.”
Citizens of all political persuasions (not to mention members of the Trump administration) can increasingly live in their own news media bubbles, consuming only views similar to their own. When confronted with hard evidence that they are wrong, many will simply double down on their original assertions. “This is the ‘backfire effect,’” Nichols writes, “in which people redouble their efforts to keep their own internal narrative consistent, no matter how clear the indications that they’re wrong.” As a result, extreme views are amplified online, just as fake news and propaganda easily go viral.
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Today, all these factors have combined to create a maelstrom of unreason that’s not just killing respect for expertise, but also undermining institutions, thwarting rational debate and spreading an epidemic of misinformation. These developments, in turn, threaten to weaken the very foundations of our democracy. As Nichols observes near the end of this book: “Laypeople complain about the rule of experts and they demand greater involvement in complicated national questions, but many of them only express their anger and make these demands after abdicating their own important role in the process: namely, to stay informed and politically literate enough to choose representatives who can act on their behalf.”
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Unlearnable Lessons on My Father’s Deathbed
I was at my father’s side much of the time in his final weeks, a witness to both the gifts and miseries of being near death. Nurses came and went, patient, long-suffering. They sat beside him for hours at a time, dousing spongy lollipops in water and then rolling the wet and heavy heads over his parched lips so he might receive a scant few drops. They held my father’s hand when he raved, the victim of morphine-induced hallucinations, and changed the dressings on his ulcerated legs. Oh, those legs. They were truly painful to behold: matchstick thin, purple, the skin cracked—and no good for walking, though he didn’t always understand that. Once, he beckoned me over in a state of alarm, signaling with a bony finger for me to lean in. I put my ear to his mouth. “Someone’s broken my legs,” he said, the urgent words slipping and gurgling over the water in his lungs. “Help me.”
There’s a famous line from a Basil Bunting poem that says, “It is easier to die than to remember.” No matter the care and precision with which the stonemason in Bunting’s poem wields his mallet and chisel, his marks are destined for erasure: “Name and date / split in soft slate / a few months obliterate.”
The lines came to me in those awful weeks when I realized just how bloody hard it is to die. The body will not be easily stilled; its pumps and circuits and muscles and pulleys resist shutdown. How a body as incapacitated as my father’s managed to fight back with such punch astounded me. It is a lesson I will not soon forget.
Remembering, by contrast, was like a subterranean lake of crude that had just been struck by a Texan drill: it spurted out forcefully, unstoppable, and at all hours, day or night. My father’s childhood, in particular, came back to him in vivid scenes, like a streaming video projected across the drawn curtains at the far end of the room. Across the velvety folds he saw himself, a boy in shorts, at the family house—vast, lime-washed—in colonial Rangoon, skating over polished hardwood floors in his stockinged feet. A miniature Fred Astaire. Or he watched himself tour the garden’s grassy groves, loitering, idling, waiting for curious insects on leaves to take flight, or for swans to push off from the end of the huge pond that his Iraqi Jewish father had built at the bottom of his wannabe-English lawn.
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At night my father remembered the dead. They came to him in his dreams, pleading; his mother wrapped in her shawl, wringing her hands, his grandparents smiling and nodding. He must come, they said. He must join them. Bathed in the hazy glow of fond remembrance—warm, inviting—they’d entreat him, and my father would be seductively drawn in. He’d feel his spirit keening, his heart longing, his whole being forgetful of where it belonged, wanting to respond, only for him to awaken suddenly, shaken by an eleventh-hour horror of what actually heeding those ghostly callings might mean.
It puzzled me then and it puzzles me now, but right until the end he did not want to go. Bedridden, acutely dehydrated, barely able to move except for a bothersome agitation in his hands, pumped with sedatives, his breathing aided by oxygen, his bowels emptied into disposable paper pants, he clung determinedly on. Much of the time he was delirious, and he could not sleep for feverish dreams. He vomited in reaction to his meds and railed against the unfairness of it all. But still he would not countenance a final departure.
At first I put this inability to let go down to his having unfinished business to attend to (he wanted to see loved ones one last time, and to set his mind at ease about my mother’s welfare). I assumed, wrongly, that he entertained ideas about a “good death.” To my mind, the tableau before me resembled a medieval painting in which the viewer was meant to read a parable of just that: an old man reclining on his deathbed, his body wasted, yet lavishly robed, and a long file of well-wishers in attendance, come to say their respectful good-byes.
I remember thinking at the time that my father was never more dignified than when he lay dying. Reanimated by the attentions of loved ones, he managed to prize open a tiny chink in the gloaming through which the last of the sun’s rays might shine: he would blow a kiss at a grandchild or squeeze the hand of a relative in confidence. Occasionally he succeeded in smiling a crooked smile, defying the slack-jawed myopathy that afflicts the dying, when the mouth forms itself into the dreaded Q-shape that doctors know as a sign of approaching death.
We, the women of the family, in a family of women, fluttered about, bringing before him grandchildren, brothers, equally aged school friends, sons-in-law, cousins; like magicians pulling rabbits out of hats, we were eager to please. We stroked his hair and stilled his fretful hands, and we reminded him of good times. When he thanked me for these stringlike runs of small ministrations—“You are a lovely person,” he said—tears sprang from my eyes like water jets. It was the first time in my life he had ever expressed such gratitude.
His unfinished business done, however, my father panicked. There was nothing left he could think of to do—and nothing to divert him from the knowledge of how little he actually could do. Only later would I allow the suspicion to form that my father’s terror of dying had its origins elsewhere, and that the ars moriendi was of no metaphysical concern to him. For though an octogenarian on the outside, inside he was still a child.
Once this notion took hold, it stuck. I knew its rightness in my bones. In spite of appearances, my father had never grown up. He was the puer aeternus, the eternal boy, who, in the scheme of emotional development outlined by Carl Jung, forever identified with the pristine, omnipotent, infinitely possible self that characterizes the childhood ego. That self had remained intact through any number of disappointments, bereavements, and geographical relocations, not to mention marriage, fatherhood, and the unarguable signs of aging. At 87, my father was still a boy in shorts, skipping around the garden. He was monarchic, demanding and filled with utterly impractical heroic intentions: “I am thinking of going to the south of France for a few days, just to see the sun,” he announced one day; he was 84 at the time and shortly to become the dependent owner of a walking frame.
To all intents and purposes my father’s long life resembled a closed loop: he went only so far along life’s road and then, developmentally speaking, he retraced the path back to source. Put another way, he spent the second half of his life future-proofing himself, squandering its opportunities for reflection and learning, and with that its opportunities for novelty, joy, and surprise.
At one level, I sympathize with his rage against time’s maddening shortness. A middle-aged woman, I’ve begun to experience the accelerating years myself: there is the evidence in the mirror, startling and nonnegotiable. But I’ve become acquainted with an everyday acceleration as well, the way successive nights and weeks and months seem to tailgate one another with increasing insistence, like the turning pages of a book of animation: flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip. And there I am, a line figure kicked from page to page, tripping up over myself, barely able to take stock of my surroundings before being kicked on toward the final scene, and my own all-too-human conclusion.
My father’s furious backpedaling, I now see, was the best he could do with limited tools. Then again, if time’s trickery is a matter of degree, with increasing age winding up the torque, then perhaps by the time you get to 87 you can only wonder at how entire decades are crunched down, or forcibly compacted, the way bodies of cars are reduced to dense cubes of metal with no beginning or end; or with beginning and end welded together into a state that defies any narrative extension.
From The Middlepause: On Life After Youth by Marina Benjamin. © 2016 by Marina Benjamin. Reprinted with the permission of Catapult.
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Colin Dexter, Whose Creations Included Inspector Morse, Dies at 86
“I don’t take all this awfully seriously,” Mr. Dexter told The Irish Times in 1995. “There are more important things in life than detective stories. For me it is just a bit of fun. I’ve never had to meet a deadline, never had to make a living out of writing a book. I just happened to be lucky.”
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John Thaw in “Inspector Morse,” a television series based on Mr. Dexter’s books.
Credit
via Everett Collection
Readers and his fellow mystery writers did take the books seriously. In 1989 the Crime Writers’ Association of Britain gave him its Golden Dagger for “The Wench Is Dead,” in which Morse solved a century-old murder while recuperating in a hospital. Mr. Dexter received the award again in 1992 for “The Way Through the Woods,” and in 1997 he received the organization’s lifetime achievement award, the Diamond Dagger.
ITV brought the Morse books to television in the series “Inspector Morse,” with John Thaw as Morse and Kevin Whately as Lewis. It ran from 1987 to 2000 (it was seen on PBS in the United States) and generated a sequel, “Lewis,” with Mr. Whately in the lead role, and a prequel, “Endeavour,” with Shaun Evans as Morse at the outset of his career.
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“He was one of the greatest crime novelists of the 20th century and deserves to be ranked alongside Chandler, Christie and Doyle,” Andrew Gulli, the editor of The Strand, a mystery magazine, wrote in an email.
I.M.T.D.O.J. (1). Video by CriminalWorld1951
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Norman Colin Dexter was born on Sept. 29, 1930, in Stamford, Lincolnshire, where his father, Alfred, ran a small garage and his mother, the former Dorothy Towns, worked in a butcher shop. A bright student, he won a scholarship to Stamford School, a prestigious private institution.
He completed his compulsory military service in the Royal Corps of Signals, where he became a Morse code operator, a false clue for fans of the mysteries: Inspector Morse was named not after the code but after Sir Jeremy Morse, the chairman of Lloyds Bank and, like his friend Mr. Dexter, a crossword devotee.
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Mr. Dexter earned a bachelor’s degree in classics from Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1953. He embarked on a career as a teacher of classics at Wyggeston Grammar School in Leicester and along the way earned a master’s degree from Cambridge in 1958. Growing deafness forced him to retire in 1966 from Corby Grammar School in Northamptonshire, where he had been senior classics teacher.
For the next two decades he was the senior assistant secretary at the Oxford Delegacy of Local Examinations, which set exams for secondary schools. He retired in 1988 and turned to writing full time.
He is survived by his wife, the former Dorothy Cooper; a son, Jeremy; a daughter, Sally; and two grandsons.
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Morse, like Sherlock Holmes, achieved a level of popularity undreamed of by his creator. With the television series, and Mr. Thaw’s brilliant interpretation of Morse, Oxford found itself besieged by tourists eager to visit the pubs and hotels that figured in the series. The local tourist board came up with Morse walks to accommodate demand.
“I wanted to make him sweet and cerebral, a whiz kid with an alpha-plus mind,” Mr. Dexter told The Chicago Tribune in 1993, adding that although he shared with his detective a love of classical music and English literature, he could not compete in intellect.
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“People think I’m clever, but it’s not true,” he said. “The only thing I’m good at is crosswords.” He devoted a book to his hobby, “Cracking Cryptic Crosswords: A Guide to Solving Cryptic Crosswords,” published in 2010.
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Mr. Dexter often played Hitchcockian games. He appeared fleetingly on camera in cameo roles in “Inspector Morse”: Oxford tourist, doctor, prisoner, college porter, bishop, professor, bum. In 1996 he revealed to The Observer that all the characters in his first book had been named after regular competitors in the newspaper’s crossword competitions.
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For years, Morse operated without a first name, until Mr. Dexter gave him the initial “E” in “The Wench Is Dead” and, a few years later, announced that the letter stood for “Endeavour,” conferred by Morse’s Quaker parents.
Mr. Dexter killed off his detective In “The Remorseful Day,” published in 1999, but pleaded not guilty to the crime.
“He died simply because he’d drunk far too much and his liver was in a pretty terrible state, he smoked far too many cigarettes and his lungs were none too good, and he took virtually no exercise,” he told The Strand in 2005. “I think it was in the cards very early on that he was not going to live long at all.”
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Elif Batuman on Fictionalizing Her Life, and Learning to Fact Check
In 2015, the New Yorker writer Elif Batuman was given a book contract to write an autobiographical novel about a Turkish-American journalist moving to Turkey to write for a New Yorker-like publication. Batuman herself had spent several years there writing about politics and culture.
The contracted novel turned out to be a difficult project “I had a middle, but I couldn’t find the beginning,” said the 39-year-old Batuman, in a telephone interview from her home in Brooklyn. “I found that I kept going further back into the characters’ histories,” she said. “I found myself writing about these characters in college. I kept going back to times when everything was pure.”
Batuman knew that she had written something about similar characters before. When she was 23, on leave from a PhD program, she had worked on a long, unpublished autobiographical novel of her freshman year at Harvard.
“I thought, why am I trying to remember things like a chump when I already had written hundreds of thousands words on this subject?” said Bauman. “The old manuscript was absorbing and fun in a way the new novel was not. I wrote this one instead.”
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Batuman has just published The Idiot, which follows Selin, an 18-year-old from suburban New Jersey as she navigates her way through her first year at Harvard. Selin is a true innocent, with a sharp observant eye. The novel is a witty portrait of a writer as an unformed young woman, who finds her calling in the lecture halls and on the streets of Cambridge, Mass., and later in a rural village in Hungary.
In Russian class, she meets Ivan, a Hungarian mathematician. Selin and Ivan start an epistolary courtship through email. Selin has no sexual experience. Ivan is 21 and has a girlfriend who comes and goes. They spend all night in his dorm room just talking. Selin is honest and without guile. When asked if she likes beer, she says, “I don’t know.” When asked if she’ll have a beer, she says, “Okay.”
“At the time I was revisiting the manuscript I wrote in 2001, I was rereading Proust,” said Batuman. “I came across that passage that adolescence is the most awful time, where later we would give anything to erase practically everything we ever did. What we should really regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity.”
“I think in the spontaneity of Selin saying, ‘I don’t know’ and ‘Okay,’ there is a way that the character is vulnerable, which is the way that I was vulnerable,” she said. “It is a moment of openness.”
“Later, you look back, and nothing went right with the romantic situation, how absurdly everything ended up,” she said.
“The only way these things happen is when we don’t have structures and conventions, and fear and experience. We don’t compare ourselves to others, a skill that we acquire as adults, that allows us to act more gracefully. These are the things that are missing. It’s how we get hurt, but it’s how we notice and feel things we never have access to again.”
Batuman’s obsession with Russian literature started when she read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in high school in New Jersey, where she was raised by her parents, who were both Turkish-born medical-school professors. “I was really moved by it,” she said. “There is something about the story not being over when you think it’s going to be over, and not necessarily ending on a note you think it’s going to end on.”
After 400 years of murderous czars, the penal colonies of Stalin, the horrors of World War II and now the opposition-crushing autocracy of Vladimir Putin, Russian literature tends to be stripped of the nostalgia and optimism often found in American novels. That darkness would appeal to an adolescent Batuman.
“There is a way of working at narrative in Russian literature that was true to me, that was more painful and pessimistic than American literature,” she said. “In a way, it’s less pessimistic, if you were a person who didn’t see all these happy endings everywhere and felt that there was something wrong with you, that you couldn’t get with the program.”
“There is something very affirming about the idea that the narrative is the big thing,” said Batuman, “and it is not clear if it is good or bad, or if it is moving in a good or bad direction. It’s just moving. You have to draw meaning from the whole.”
Batuman immersed herself in the Russian language at Harvard, and went to Stanford for a PhD in comparative literature. In 2010, she published the delightful The Possessed: Adventures in Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which chronicled the obsessives and eccentrics who study Russian language and culture. At one point Batuman gets involved in a love triangle that begins to mimic a Dostoevsky plot. In another chapter, she goes to Russia and explores the theory that the novelist Leo Tolstoy was murdered.
“I had wanted to write The Possessed as fiction,” said Batuman, “but everyone told me that no one would read a novel about graduate students. It seems almost uncivilized to tell someone writing a novel, ‘No, you have to call this a memoir.’”
Both The Possessed and The Idiot are titles used by Batuman in homage to her favorite tortured Russian writer, Dostoevsky. “Fyodor Mikhailovich,” writes Batuman in her acknowledgements, “what writer could ever touch the hem of your lofty garment?”
Returning to the grad school manuscript that would become The Idiot, Batuman looked back at her 18-year-old self. “I was 38 when I picked up the manuscript again,” she said. “Twenty years had passed. I didn’t feel like that anymore. Going through the drafts, I thought, what had I experienced in life and writing? There were all these awkward, changeable, embarrassing, almost shamefully embarrassing moments of what felt like, in retrospect, stupidity.”
Batuman had to fix her original prose. “In the early drafts, the book was written in that early 1990s way of long lyrical riffs and theoretical Ashbery-Barthelme-inspired language games, written by a 23-year-old graduate student, thinking, ‘oh, I am much smarter than she is.’”
“The original manuscript was much longer than the book,” she said. “So revision consisted of less of rewriting than cutting.”
Editing the book 15 years later, Batuman discarded most of the language games, finding them hard to read. “The only parts of the writing that really moved me were the ‘embarrassing ones,’” she said, “the visceral descriptions of being young and profoundly lost. A lot of the revision was letting those passages stand by themselves. That’s when I decided to call the book The Idiot.
In The Idiot, Batuman excels at setting up the absurd moment. Despairing over her love for Ivan, Selin goes to a student mental health clinic where a young psychologist triumphantly declares Ivan a figment of her imagination. Impulsively, Ivan invites Selin to go to Hungary for the summer to teach English. She agrees. Their platonic courtship continues, but they never consummate their affair.
“One reader was very angry with me,” said Batuman. “‘I spent the whole book waiting for them to have sex,’ she told me. She looked at me like she was asking what do you have to say for yourself?”
To explain her literary strategy, Batuman went back to the Russians. “I do have literary and artistic reasons why they never have sex,” she said. “One of the stories that really impressed me was Anna Karenina. As a novel, that made an impression on me, showing me what the novel can do. The reader is so sure that certain things are going to happen… everyone is sure that Anna is going to die in childbirth. Her husband thinks so, her doctor thinks so, Vronsky thinks so. As a reader, you think, what is going to happen to an adulteress in the 19th century? Then she doesn’t die. Anna is just as appalled and as shocked as anyone else. She has to keep going somehow.”
“There are certain ways that narratives seem to be going,” said Batuman. “The way we feel most strongly is with sex, where everything seems to be leading to consummation. As the reader, that’s what you want to happen, and maybe it doesn’t. You are in this interesting space.”
“I wanted that feeling at the end of the book, where Selin’s gone to Hungary to be with Ivan,” she said, “but she doesn’t end up seeing or calling him. She’s there for another reason.”
“After he leaves Hungary and nothing has happened between them, and that part of the story is over, I didn’t want the book to end there. Some people who read it said, ‘Why does the book go on so long after that?’ I wanted the experience of falling outside the romantic plot.”
“Things don’t always stop where you think they are going to stop,” Batuman said. “You can have this experience of getting up in the morning and living your life like you are in a story. I felt like I was in a movie. Ivan went wherever he went off to and took the movie with him. It’s something I’ve felt in my life and it’s the most painful.”
After 12 years writing for The New Yorker, first as a freelancer, then as a staff writer, Batuman finds writing a novel to be an enlightening change. “The New Yorker does it right,” she said. “I feel lucky to learn how fact checking works and to learn the norms of reporting.”
“The things that interest me and the stories I want to write, their factual accuracy is not something I want to make a claim about,” she said. “I don’t want people to know what details are true and which ones aren’t. I love the novelist’s freedom of going into different people’s subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.”
For fictional material, Batuman doesn’t stray far from her own history. “This book is based on my experiences,” she said. “I’m Turkish-American, I was a freshman at Harvard in 1995 and 96. I did teach English in Hungary in the summer of 1996. I’m an autobiographical writer in the sense that whether in fiction or nonfiction, the issues and relationships and phenomena and problems I’m most interested in exploring are the ones I’ve experienced personally.”
Selin goes to Hungary on a badly designed teaching program. The rural villagers embrace her. She stays in a house where the husband puts a stuffed weasel in her room. An abrasive German teacher takes Selin home for a jarring dinner with her family, whose members proceed to bicker. “Selin is having dinner with these people,” said Batuman. “She thinks, oh, this is part of becoming a writer. Becoming a writer is being open to everything.”
“Part of this comes from being children of immigrants,” said Batuman, “and being so conscious of not having a script for what is normal and not normal.”
“I did have this feeling in my own life that my parents sacrificed a lot for me and I had opportunities that no one in my family had had,” she said. “I wanted to be a writer and it’s churlish and babyish to say ‘no’ to too many things. You should see them all and do them all.”
Well, maybe not always saying yes. “I am writing a sequel to The Idiot, and it has more about sex,” said Batuman. “It’s where saying ‘yes’ all the time quickly becomes problematic. When does that instinct to say ‘no’ actually kick in?”
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Presidential Politics As Reality TV and Realist Fiction
This essay originally appears in the Winter 2017 issue of The Point.
When, during the final debate of the 2016 presidential campaign, Chris Wallace asked Donald Trump whether he would promise to accept the election results and Trump responded that he would rather “keep you in suspense,” and when, at a campaign rally later that week, Trump announced dramatically, “I will totally accept the results of this great and historical presidential election—if I win,” commentators were quick to point out that his remarks were like something out of reality TV. This was a common refrain throughout a campaign that featured a contest between a former First Lady with a complicated backstory and a celebrity real-estate developer best known for firing aspiring entrepreneurs on a successful reality show. Trump especially, it was often said, was a master at leveraging our desire for conflict and suspense to keep the spotlight on himself. On November 8th, we were waiting for the results of the vote, but we were also waiting to find out what Trump would do if he lost.
Perhaps because I have long loved reality TV—though it has taken me some time, as a literary scholar and psychoanalyst-in-training, to grow comfortable admitting it—the comparisons struck me as flat-footed. In the strict sense, presidential campaigns have been a kind of reality TV since the first televised presidential debate in 1960, and in recent election cycles we have become increasingly accustomed to the camera catching candidates in private or “unscripted” moments (as in reality TV, just how unscripted they are tends to be a matter of controversy). What was distinctive in this case, for those of us familiar with the genre, was not that Trump knew how to take advantage of generic narrative devices like suspense and shock, it was that the contest between Trump and Hillary mimicked in so many ways the dynamics—including but not limited to gender dynamics—that we have grown accustomed to seeing on our favorite shows. Our focus on Trump as an actual reality star—and our submission to his demand for that singular attention—risks obscuring the extent to which reality TV can also help us understand our response to Hillary, and the relationship between the two candidates.
The Apprentice casts Trump as the consummate winner, and the most important advantage he was able bring to his presidential bid from his stint on reality TV was his reputation as a man who could not lose. Yet reality TV has been defined as a genre not only by competition shows like The Apprentice but also by shows about groups of women, which generate drama by staging an almost continuous confrontation with loss. The demand that women reckon with loss is part of what allows us to classify shows like Teen Mom and The Real Housewives of Orange County as specimens of “realism,” in that they share many of their conceits and conventions with the 19th-century novels that were the earliest exemplars of the genre. and it is precisely such a reckoning that we have demanded of Hillary again and again.
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Realism is always about the politics of social life. As such, it is about acts of looking. By this I mean that realist narratives place their subjects in a field of vision. Tolstoy did this repeatedly, writing scenes—the opera in War and Peace, the horse race in Anna Karenina—in which audience members are pictured staring at each other as much as, or rather than, the spectacle before them. In the latter scene we witness Vronsky exchanging glances with some of his fellow riders, Vronsky failing to see other riders and Karenin in the stands watching his wife as she watches Vronsky fall, realizing from her reaction that he has been made a cuckold. In the realist novel, “all the world’s a stage”—but what creates the drama is not the author calling the shots from the sky, but merely all the other sets of eyes.
These eyes bring with them a new kind of moral imperative. When I am seen by another, I am forced to acknowledge that I am, for others, an object. Having a sense of myself as an object can be variably exciting or degrading, but either way it tends to mitigate grand pretensions. Before the advent of the novel, literature was most often about heroes and great deeds: the feats of Achilles and Odysseus, the fates of King Lear or Prince Hamlet. Realism by contrast dethrones the royal predominance of any individual, picturing instead a wide array of characters—not only noblemen and kings but also children, commoners and criminals—as worthy of interest in their own right. Indeed, for the modern realist protagonist, grand aspirations often get in the way of prosaic achievements. We suspect from the beginning that Pip will eventually be divested of his “great expectations,” just as Balzac alerts us in his title that Lucien de Rubemprés will “lose” his illusions. Tolstoy’s Napoleon is no Achilles, because he is a character not of the epic, but of the novel—he may not know it at the beginning of War and Peace, but he will by the end.
This is not to say that other forms of literature do not picture their heroes’ defeats: tragedy of course revolves around failure, but there is a magnificence to tragic pain that ennobles its subjects even as it humbles them. Realism on the other hand has little patience for megalomania, whether in the form of the actual French invader (as in War and Peace and many other novels) or in the glimmerings of his ambition that hibernate, as Tolstoy put it, inside all of us “little napoleons.”
Although the realist novel’s “realism” is usually evaluated in terms of its verisimilitude, the most important strand in the genre’s DNA is its staging of the confrontation, as Freud might say, between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. In his essay “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” Freud describes two dialectically opposed currents that interact within the human psyche. The pleasure principle fantasizes about past pleasures in order to secure maximum enjoyment, while at the same time guarding against the incursion of pain. But, says Freud, when fantasy proves incapable of ensuring the satisfaction of real needs, another psychic principle develops: the reality principle. Associated with the civilizing effects of experience and education, this is the mental tendency that requires us to recognize we exist among others, thereby helping us to acknowledge our own limitations and accept the possibility of loss.
It is no accident that early realist literature pictured women’s losses more insistently than they did men’s. The rise of the novel in late 18th-century Europe coincided with the entry of women into the marketplace and their emergence as both public subjects and readers. These developments account for the genre’s focus on the tensions between interiority, private life, domesticity (the marriage plot) and the trauma of being seen in public. They are also related to one of its most common trajectories, whereby a female character was forced to pay the ultimate price for failing to adhere to “reality,” which usually meant getting married, having babies, and playing the part of the good housewife. In the early realist novel, women who transgress the bounds of the marriage plot are almost always penalized: if they are not killed off for sexual misbehavior then the marriage bond is shown to subsume whatever ambition might have exceeded it. While Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary wind up dead for seeking something outside of their marriages, Dorothea Brooke starts off in Middlemarch as an intellectual powerhouse but ends up “absorbed into the life” of her husband and “only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother.”
In novels split between men and women—Anna Karenina, Daniel Deronda—the men invariably come out on top (Levin and Daniel end up happy while Anna and Gwendolen end up either dead or depressed), in large part because being a happy-enough woman in that historical moment was a difficult proposition, but also because of the assumption that women were particularly vulnerable to the consequences of public disapproval. Yet men also have their brushes with failure. What realism calls disenchantment—and what psychoanalysis might describe as coming to terms with castration—is experienced by both sexes. Like the cities they are often set in, the novels of Balzac and Dickens are overpopulated with bodies, often dramatizing the thinness of the line between the haves and the have-nots—and therefore, from a psychoanalytic perspective, between men and women (the embodiments of having and not having, at least in fantasy). What a woman never has, a man can always lose. Like a psychoanalytic cure, a realist novel requires a reckoning with such disappointments for us all.
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Reality television, though seemingly so distant from Tolstoy and Eliot, is a form of “realism” nonetheless, and it plays on these same tropes and crosscurrents. Certainly it trains our attention on the dramatics of everyday life, as part and parcel of a social-media culture that deems our choice of dessert to be a subject worthy of mass dissemination. The democratization of realism is apparent in the way reality TV brings attention to variously underappreciated subcultures—not only the rich and famous of LA but also antique collectors in New England, duck hunters in Louisiana, truck drivers, little people, what have you. Above all, reality TV takes the narrative motor of Tolstoy’s and Flaubert’s novels—the interplay between seeing and being seen—and literalizes it, making it the basis for the whole show.
As such, a concern with sexuality and femininity is central to the genre: the Real Housewives franchise, Wives and Girlfriends, Teen Mom, Basketball Wives, the Kardashians empire, and countless other series all revolve around female desire and the related topics of domesticity and the nuclear family. Most conspicuously, these shows allow us to look at women’s bodies in their various postures: sometimes beautifully made up, perfectly clothed, manicured and surgically altered; sometimes (though less often) at home, in sweatpants and eating; sometimes pregnant in either of these states. Our reactions to these bodies are unpredictable: sometimes we want to look like them, sometimes we want to fuck them, sometimes we want to be them, sometimes we want to kill them. But among these various forms of excitement, what is it we’re trying to see?
If the early realist novel’s exploration of feminine interiors and states of dispossession made such a question somewhat complicated to answer, reality TV gets down to brass tacks: vaginas are everywhere on these shows. The Kardashian women, for instance, regularly discuss their lady bits’ appearance, their urinary habits, and the “rearrangement” of their genitalia following childbirth. After the birth of her daughter, Kim made sure to reassure her sister—and the public—that her vagina was “better looking than before!” In an episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County, Tamra, having recently separated from a controlling spouse and begun an affair (well documented in supporting footage) with a younger man, mentioned to Vicki, facetiously, that she was thinking of undergoing vaginal rejuvenation: she had pushed out four babies, after all. Vicki, who didn’t like to talk about sex and whose own marriage was going downhill fast, responded that because she had undergone two C-sections, her own female organ was still as good as new. (Whether the editors were aware of the joke—what good is a pristine vagina if it’s not going to use?—was unclear.)
Similarly, in the most recent season of The Real Housewives of New York, Jules visited her plastic surgeon to discuss a wound to her vagina, complaining that the resulting swelling made it look like a “ball sack.” Sexual difference was thus evoked, reversed, and reasserted in one and the same gesture, as the wounded vagina came to resemble the male genitalia and medical aid was enlisted in returning it to its properly modest state: “My perfect little pistachio.” In fact the entire eighth season of RHONY revolved around vaginas; Jules’s accident coincided with Bethenny’s medical scare involving the removal of uterine fibroids and copious bleeding. That most of these encounters involved a surgery—whether to remove something that shouldn’t be there, to remove something that was supposed to be there for nine months but shouldn’t be there any longer, or to remedy a deformation as a result of something passing through—may reveal what is at stake. As women’s lives are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from men’s, it has apparently become important to, so to speak, grab onto the one thing that seems to define femininity with any certainty. Realism has always revolved in one way or another around questions of gender and sexual difference—of who has what—but in reality TV they become explicit, and explicitly competitive: it’s like a perpetual game of “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”
At the same time, the vaginas on reality TV are usually located in the context of the nuclear family, and in this sense the racy exposures are reined in by social and generic conventions. The prevalence of the marriage plot in 19th-century Europe—when holy union was the surest route to economic security and social acceptance—is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the extent to which such a plot has persisted in the similarly marriage-obsessed 21st-century reality TV. The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, The Millionaire Matchmaker, Bridezillas, Get Married, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?—the list goes on and on—all depend on assumptions similar to those that informed the traditional novel: that single men and women represent problems in need of a solution; that the solution (“Get married!”) doubles as a social imperative; that marriage also means the acquisition of property and social capital (the millionaire shows); or, as in the Real Housewives franchise, that our interest in witnessing a woman’s desire is compounded if she is identified as a housewife, no matter her actual marital status or independent successes—because housewives, as private figures, have secrets.
To some extent, the continuities between reality TV and the early realist novel, despite the historical gap separating them, speak to how powerful the narrative motor of the marriage plot is. At the same time, they also testify to the extent to which, even and perhaps especially today, we count on realist genres to restrict the very things we get a voyeuristic pleasure from witnessing. Despite the fact that almost half of the women in the franchise are single, we still insist on calling them the “Real Housewives,” no doubt because housewives are desperate and this is sexy, but also because there is some comfort in this designation, given the ways in which the housewives often prioritize fame or business over their husbands and children. Such tradeoffs are related to the forms of punishment that awaited the heroines of realist novels when they became too focused on themselves. Many of the Real Housewives shows (and especially the reunion specials, in which the women look back on the season as a group) revolve around the question of who is “supportive” enough of the others in their various ventures, and whether a given cast member is willing to “own” her mistakes and “work on” herself.
These shows require of their stars a perpetual negotiation with the reality principle, in updated form. You may get to star on a reality show, where you’ll be watched by millions, but you have to share this space with seven other women and be a good, supportive friend to them. You have to be willing to concede your failures and reckon with the consequences of your pursuit of your desires. You have to be willing to apologize for what you do in private. You have to promise to reform.
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At the height of the reign of reality television, the country’s most important political contest was for the first time between a man and a woman. The split screen during the televised campaign debates—Hillary on one side, Trump on the other—hearkens to the gender war at the center of many realist narratives. If split novels like Anna Karenina and Daniel Deronda implicitly stage a competition between the sexes, then in the debates this contest was given visual form.
An indication of this dynamic was the persistent conflation of Hillary’s physical integrity with her ethical integrity. The trouble for Hillary with the email scandal, writes Victoria Malkin, was that it tells us “what we always suspected, that she advocates holding a private position.” As opposed to Trump’s bluster for the camera, Hillary maintained something on the inside. Women’s privacy, and especially getting to see what it conceals, is terribly exciting; this is part of the pleasure that the realist novel and reality television are founded on. But that private position also “evokes dread” precisely by remaining hidden. In this sense there could have been no more perfect representation of the unconscious foundation of the election than the opposition between—and interdependence of—Anthony Weiner’s public member and Hillary Clinton’s private server. Weiner availed himself of social media to make even more visible something that was already visible enough. But with Hillary’s server, we must break in—what fun!
Of course Trump does not respect women. But the more important thing to see is how Trump benefitted from a culture whose various (realist) conventions encourage a simultaneous fascination with and horror at femininity. Apparently vaginas are everywhere for Trump, as well. The one-liners aimed at women throughout the campaign—ranging from “That’s good legs” and “Two fat thighs, two small breasts, left wing” to “Lock her up” and “execute her”—reflected the aggression provoked by women with whom he had to share a stage, a screen and then a presidential campaign. The English novel as a genre started out with a rape—Clarissa’s—and to the extent that realism is about our precarious positioning as both subjects and objects, it is fitting that it was founded on the degradation of the female body. The common liberal lament (alongside “I want to see a woman elected, just not this particular woman”) that there was nothing exciting about Hillary has always seemed to me a bit disingenuous: in one way or another many of us—not just men or misogynists or republicans—were excited at the prospect of seeing Hillary . . . beaten. Politicians fall off of stages all the time, but there was something especially thrilling about the prospect of seeing Hillary—a woman, but also this particular woman—fall.
What might the 19th-century novel have done with or to Hillary Clinton? A woman with big ambitions, she withdrew from her early achievements in Washington, D.C. to marry Bill and live in Arkansas. She changed her name, dress ,and hairstyle to get her husband votes and stuck by him when he strayed; after decades in and around public office, she sought to rule the nation. During bill’s first presidential campaign she said she never wanted to stay home baking cookies and then, to make up for the “gaffe,” agreed to submit a recipe to a contest with Barbara Bush; her cookies line was then repurposed (or re-repurposed) as a bid for female empowerment as it flashed behind Beyoncé at Hillary’s final rally in Cleveland. Much like the housewives, she both submits to and reaches far beyond her marital designation—but unlike them, she is reluctant to apologize for either her private or her public stances.
None of this is to say that Hillary didn’t have her faults. She was, as everyone knows, a flawed candidate. What interests me is the extent to which the woman’s “flaw” was both overdetermined and arousing in its own way. For better or worse, Hillary, in her very flaws—her privacy, her secrecy, her guardedness, her position as wife—was woman. And perhaps, with her hawkishness and her wealth, she was, in alternation with this castrated position, the phallic woman—the scariest kind. She was an establishment insider, and though inside is traditionally where we like our women, this position also became the source of our complaint against her. We call her “Hillary” in part to cement her in this place, and in part to mark the impossibility of her public emergence from it. We like her best when she is crying—in new Hampshire in 2008—or conceding. We prefer her to be making manifest her position of loss, her state of not-having. After it was over in 2016, the question became whether a man would either prosecute or pardon her for her sins.
Trump on the other hand is, as we know, a winner; much like Weiner, his family name announces his preoccupations and motivations. He also tells us about his winnings in various ways: he speaks in the superlative mode; everything in his orbit is the most, the best, the biggest. Hillary was not the only one whose private investments were at stake in this election, but men’s appurtenances are easier to grasp as public fodder: thus all the talk about the size of Trump’s hands. In this sense his rather blunt and unstudied use of language is merely a verbal substitute for all the big things he shows us: his big buildings, his enormous facilities and franchises.
In contrast to the documentary-based reality series like Real Housewives, unabashed and unrepentant winning really is the whole point of the competition-based shows. Even more so for Trump, who, as the star and host of his own competition show, never had to give anything up. In the coterie of aspiring entrepreneurs featured on The Apprentice, he was the only one truly incapable of losing. And unlike the injunctions of the realist novel, there is nothing in his genre of choice necessarily requiring him to submit to being divested of anything: there is no requisite institution of the reality principle. Whereas 19th-century European novelists adopted napoleon as a character because his real fall was interesting to them as both an ethical conceit and a historical touchstone, Trump has ridden his delusions of grandeur into the oval office.
The contrast demonstrates how, in 21st-century America, a man can acquire power not despite but because of his lack of genuine interest in social responsibilities or democratic norms. If the realist novel insisted that all its characters come to terms with losses and disappointments, it appears that reality television may only demand these submissions of its women. Trump is reported to have particularly mistreated the women on his show, rating the female contestants according to their physical attributes. It is only appropriate that the host of The New Celebrity Apprentice is former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who performs a further iteration of the celebrity-politician-celebrity exchange—and who is another famous harasser of women.
In these ways Trump presents himself as something like the mythical figure that Freud called the “primal father.” In Totem and Taboo, this is the man who has all the women and who is not subject to the limitations of castration or the (psychoanalytically related) incest taboo: he is a man who can grab all the pussies he wants and call his own daughter a nice piece of ass. Maybe Trump finds this kind of self-assertion necessary to supersede his own father, whose middle name was Christ. In any case he has so far managed to disavow the extent to which he himself might ever be the object of unfavorable ratings—in other words, he strenuously represses what is unavoidable in the position of someone so insistently seen.
But if Trump’s brand of reality TV does not require him to confront loss, its status as a visual medium determines the direction from which he has always perceived the greatest threat. In a series of interviews conducted in 2014 with the biographer Michael D’Antonio, Trump confesses that the thing he fears most is not being invited on television anymore—a condition he equates, in reference to the former talk-show host Arsenio Hall, to being “dead as dog meat.” His ascension to the presidency likely guarantees that he will never have to suffer Arsenio’s sad fate, at least until he is forced to confront the inevitability of that final loss that faces us all. In the meantime we can only hope that, earlier than this, reality itself will deliver unto him his own form of napoleonic comeuppance.
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Like a good speaking subject, Freud tended to undo his own assertions, and by the end of his essay on the reality principle he advances the conclusion that the pleasure and reality principles are in fact mutually reinforcing, as opposed to competitive in their purposes. It is not so much that the individual sacrifices her own pleasure in service of, say, the public good, but rather that she determines that the best way to preserve her own fun is to wait for it, and to get real.
Realism is full of ladies in waiting—unfulfilled housewives, for example—and certainly Hillary knew that for her to become the first female president it would take a lot of time; maybe that’s why she got the marriage plot out of the way first. That her public service was as much for the benefit of her private pleasures as it is for any other politician is a fact we have trouble with but need to get used to, especially since that difficulty may be part of what determined her brand of—sometimes disappointing—political realism. writing in the New York Times, the columnist Mark Leibovich said of Clinton:
She told me that her primary objective as president would be to encourage connectedness, to have actual conversations. Clinton has always preferred to build narratives from a granular level: start with details and allow a message to emerge more slowly. In college in the late 1960s, she resisted revolutionary change in favor of grinding out incremental progress inside the system. She has no patience for messianic rhetoric and hyperbolic slogans and grandiose speeches. It can make her an awkward fit in this campaign environment, harder to break through and determinedly not dazzling.
This description sounds rather similar to Eliot’s closing lines about Dorothea in Middlemarch:
Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. . . . a new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. . . . but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Eliot was talking about the anti-heroics of the democratic era, the time of realism, in which the grand gestures are foreclosed, individual ambition bows to collective demand, revolutions are hard to come by, and change happens incrementally. But she was also talking about what was realistic in her time for women in particular, who tended to live hidden lives. Hillary spent the better part of her life in the public arena, and women in today’s realistic genres are as visible as anyone. Yet the assumption that Hillary’s refusal of messianic rhetoric was merely a personal characteristic or a political strategy may be misguided. Female heroics are still hard to come by. We still demand that the woman’s public presence be wedded to something of the personal. We still stand aghast when she reveals, instead, a gap between her public position and her private one.
For my part, somewhere in the course of writing this article, I became so appalled that I decided to throw out my television. I dismantled the whole structure, including the enormous IKEA stand that I have always hated, and dragged it out to the curb. It was right after the final debate, and also in the middle of The Real Housewives of Orange County season, just as things were beginning to heat up between Kelly and Tamra. But I haven’t looked back. For me, as for many of us, I suspect, the election came as a reality check. It’s time for a new genre.
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Bookstore News: March 21, 2017
Rockport's Toad Hall celebrates 45 years; new Brooklyn store to open May 1; Hartford store moves; London store for Afro-Caribbean authors may close; and more.
Rockport's Toad Hall Bookstore Celebrates 45 Years: The venerable non-profit North Shore bookstore is celebrating its 45th anniversary this week with its first fundraiser. The money raised will be used to buy books.
Brooklyn's Books Are Magic to Open May 1: The new bookstore in Cobble Hill run by author Emma Straub will open in or around May 1 and the store is currently hiring staff, booking events, and ordering books.
Hartford's Book Club Book Store & More Moves: The three-year-old store has moved from a small store in Broad Brook, Conn. to a new space in nearby South Windsor.
New Beacon Books in North London May Close: The bookstore, which opened in 1966 and focuses exclusively on books written by African-Caribbean authors, has reduced operating hours due to a lack of customers.
New Owners of Bellingham's Village Books Interviewed: The three employees who recently purchased the 36-year-old store share their story and thoughts for the future of the shop, which may include adding more digital offerings and yoga.
Singapore's Haji Hashim Bookstore Adds E-commerce: The Muslim-Malay bookstore, originally established in 1922, has launched an online bookstore, The Buku Bookstore, to reach new audiences and customers. It is run by the great granddaughter of the store's founder.
This article has been updated to correct the location of Toad Hall Bookstore.
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Chuck Berry’s Memoir Grabs You Like a Song
This same instinctive feel for language flows into the autobiography. You’re not far into it before he describes a friend who is “as ugly as death eating a dirty doughnut.” A few pages before that, a girl is so pretty that the author “would have daily taken out her garbage just to be near her can.”
His sentences pop, as if he had a Coolerator crammed with them. He writes about the world like a man noticing everything for the first time.
Mr. Berry’s lyrics did not often confront race directly. He wanted his songs to have mass appeal, and that meant getting white listeners as well as black ones to put dimes in the jukebox. But in his autobiography, race is nearly always front and center, and there are powerful and awful scenes.
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Chuck Berry's Rock ’n’ Roll Legacy
Jon Pareles, a music critic for The New York Times, reflects on the pioneering music and attitude of the rock legend Chuck Berry.
By Carrie Halperin on Publish Date March 18, 2017.
Photo by Donal F. Holway/The New York Times.
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When he was a young man, word got around that Mr. Berry had slept with a white woman. Cops hauled him in, he writes, and a sergeant “positioned himself beside me with a baseball bat cocked on his shoulder as though my head was to be the baseball. I was told that if I lied just once, the sergeant would try for a home run.”
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He gets out of this scrape by playing the fool, aware how close he’d come to death — a death no one would have investigated.
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Mr. Berry’s book details the indignities of touring in the South as a black musician during the 1950s and ’60s. There are the restaurants that would not seat him, the hotels where he could not book a room. He is ruefully funny about the lengths to which strip club bouncers would go, in New Orleans, to keep a black man out while maintaining a veneer of politeness.
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He also writes about how, in St. Louis, where he was born, a mixed-race couple spotted by police would be hauled in for mandatory venereal disease shots.
Chuck Berry being Chuck Berry, he comes up with his own portmanteau for the South’s racial attitudes during this era. That word is “hospitaboo,” a combination of “hospitality” and “taboo.” It means, he writes, “how do you do but don’t-you-dare.”
Mr. Berry had an outsize libido, and it got him into trouble. He had more than his share of what he calls “mal-publicity.” He was arrested in 1959 for transporting a teenager across state lines for immoral purposes. (He says he did not know she was underage.) He had fetishes. In 1990, after this book was published, he was found to have videotapes of women using the toilet in his restaurant.
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I’m not here to defend this behavior. I’m here to say that in “Chuck Berry: The Autobiography,” he writes about sex with a wide-awake candor that’s unusual and refreshing. An erotic banquet spread itself before him, and he partook. He then went back for seconds.
He doesn’t pretend otherwise. But he doesn’t stint on the complicated and complicating details. Mr. Berry’s recall is amazing. Reading about his best-remembered kisses, cuddles, crushes and hotel room exploits is like reading the gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin on his favorite meals. Women adored Mr. Berry as much as he them.
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“I was slow with shyness when it was in the vein of trying to suck face,” Mr. Berry writes about his teenage years, in a line that feels as if it could have been plucked from one of his songs. He got less shy.
He married when young, and he bears down, in his book, on the meanings of intimacy. You sense that he is working out his grateful feelings in front of your eyes.
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“Night after night we were discovering different new desires and ways of satisfying each other,” he writes. “Fantasies that I had long dreamed of were realized, along with pleasures unfamiliar to her but enjoyed harmoniously. Fetishes, latent in my anticipation, were whispered softly in the warmth of close embraces and fulfilled in the fevered moments of devotion for each other.”
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Sex for Mr. Berry was the only thing that rivaled being onstage. “The greatest highs I’ve ever had in my life have come from a mob of as many as 62,000 voices,” he writes, “and also from the moan of one.”
The first third of Mr. Berry’s memoir is better than its second third. The final third crumbles, as did his career, into recriminations over bad business deals and legal woes. But this powerful and original book has sticking power. It doesn’t contain a false note.
“I don’t advocate sorrow,” Mr. Berry writes. “I pursue happiness in all avenues of life, and so I shall avoid funerals, even my own.” Mr. Berry’s book, reread now, is a kind of jazz funeral, a woozy second-line parade through the streets. It’s an earful.
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