Global literature

It used to be that the provenance of literature, especially that of the novel, was the nation.

I may sound a tad anachronistic, but I'd definitely buy into Ian Watt's (in his 1957 book, The Rise of the Novel) thesis that the novel "rose" along with the political strengthening of the nation and in some ways contributed to the myth of the nation.

But today the word transnational is sprouting like weed in our discourses of literary genre, as much as it is pervasive in the corporate parlance. We have the massive transnational corporations whose markets brook no national boundaries.

Novels too, or their provenance rather, are transcending nations in a global age. If the nation was the locus of power in the traditional novel, then what is the corresponding loci of power in global fiction? The world?

Perhaps. In a majority of 21st novels whose provenance spans the globe, one sees another major locus of power--technology. Global novels are typically starting to be concerned about the rise of technological power, a power that has no specific geographical habitus but has a borderless network.

Take for instance Dave Eggers' The Circle; the protagonist pits herself against the might of the global giant Google.

In Spark, John Twelve Hawks' hero is a global assassin and is cast in the mold of an artificial intelligence though he has a body and the form of a fully functional human being. He resembles AI in the sense that he is amoral. As the novel unfolds, the assassin begins to lose his amorality, which signals his return to humanity.

Increasingly, the provenance of the global novel then is technology and the hegemonic rule of the same.

Is the business of the 21st century novel primarily to challenge this hegemonic assertion?

Capital in the 19th century

I had a hunch that slavery was central to the United States' economic development in the early days of capitalism, and that the U.S. became a powerful economic force in the world because so much was produced--cotton and tobacco--on the back of free labor.

We can't imagine the idea of free labor anymore, neither can we imagine the conception of a fellow human as property owned by another as just another institutionalized way of being.

Edward Baptist's new book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, reminds American readers of the unpleasant truth of the history of the rise of American capitalism.

"The idea", writes Baptist, a native of North Carolina, a state whose past is rife with the brutality of the plantation economy, "that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the U.S. powerful and rich is not an idea that people are necessarily happy to hear. Yet it is the truth."

Regarding the general perception that African Americans passively accepted their status as slaves and didn't actively resist the condition of enslavement, Baptist says:

Historians have spent a lot of time talking about whether African Americans resisted. Resistance acquires a different look in forced migrations, where survival is a kind of resistance in finding ways to stand in solidarity with each other and to write stories about themselves to say: This is crime.

The vanishing of the "soul" under neuroscience

I had known the name "Crick" to be associated with "Watson" because when we studied biology in high school, we got acquainted with the structure of the human DNA as discovered by "Watson and Crick."

I had the image of a Siamese twin attached at the waist.

That "Crick" had a separate identity of his own and composed an astounding, book called The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search For the Soul was unknown to be, till it was referenced in the illuminating NYT Opinion piece by Erik Parens, an expert in bioethics. 

Parens is appreciative of Cricks scientific approach to an understanding of what it means to be human, but is critical of the one-sidedness of the approach as well.

Published in 1994, Crick's book is evidently on the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy (if "soul" is believed to be the province of philosophy).

Raised in Christianity and the philosophy that we call Platonic, Crick was taught about the impermanence of the body and the permanence and ergo superiority of the soul. The soul, preaches the Platonic Christian admixture, is "real", i.e. more "real" than the body, which is but an illusory placeholder for the soul. Moreover, the soul is capable of reason and freewill on its own.

The scientist in Francis Crick revolted against this notion of the body as illusory and unreal container of the soul, the real seat of our humanity. 

In The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick looked at the body/soul dichotomy through the lens of neuroscience and wrote of the human subject:

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Paren interprets Crick's reduction of the human subject into a well nigh object of atomic and subatomic parts:

“You” think that you are something special, a subject who experiences joys and sorrows, memories, ambitions, a sense of identity and a free will. But that, Crick wants to inform you, is an illusion. “You” are an object. “You” are your body, a collection of nerve cells, albeit enmeshed amidst many other kinds of cells.

Is book banning a covert form of book burning?

In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, books are burned with impunity by the unnamed government of an unnamed nation of the year 2053. 

Discerning readers were quick to see the ghost of totalitarianism in the novel; the Nazis were adept at burning books because books, the repository of ideas and dissidence, were the single biggest threat to Nazi authority.

What ghost of which past are revived in the eyes of our collective historical consciousness (if 21st century Americans have any), when books are banned? Banning, as I see it, is a covert form of burning, just as minimum wage labor in a society with hard core capitalistic principles, is a covert form of slavery.

Books, especially novels, are banished with regularity from k-12 curricula in the United States with mind-numbing regularity. Often times school libraries are asked to "remove" certain books from their shelves. 

A brilliant librarian once made a counter library, hidden from the view of the public, of banned books.

Last week of September this year is the banned books week when we remember this most ignominious of all anti-social and anti-intellectual activities undertaken by school boards across the nation. However, the recent case of book banning was not undertaken by school authorities but by some of the parents and grandparents of kids attending Highland Park schools in the affluent suburb of Dallas, Texas.

Seeds of Nazism/totalitarianism may be embedded not only in governments but also in the general public. 

From my metaphorical observation deck, upon which I perch myself and try to observe society through the mist of half-knowledge and half-truths that filter down to me through the media, I see the emergence of a very tyrannical American public who impose their narrow world views on everything, ranging from foreign policy to family and education, down to how to best care for the self.

Parents and grandparents of children who attend institutions of education for the relatively well-off, whether they be P.S.'s or private schools, are a particularly egregious group in this regard. They have a conviction of what's "good" and what's "bad" for the intellectual nurturing of their wards. 

Grandparents are worse off than the parents, as they are retirees, taking care of their grandkids because the grandkids' parents have divorced, leaving their children behind to be raised by their parents who have the house and the money. As retirees, they have too much time on their hands to meddle into the curriculum choices of the schools their grandkids attend.

The seven books that the consortium of parents and grandparents want the Highland Park school district to erase from their curriculum are as follows:

I know why some of the books may stir controversy in the placid moral and intellectual universes of the so-called children, whom the parents and grandparents are trying to raise in a sanitized world, free of the germs of inconvenient truths of society.

Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha is bound to get the boot with its commingling of purity and prostitution (two sides of the same coin, the second P being more intellectually honest than the first). Which Dallas mind will see the fun in that?

As for Toni Morrison, almost everything she writes is banned from the intellectual diet of American children. Why? Oh, because she has painted a cosmos of slavery where there are no chirpy birds or bespectacled cutsie Harry Potters to come to the rescue of folks who are mindlessly brutalized and rendered unto property. 

No searing portrayal of American poverty will sell in the heartland of unfettered capitalism--Texas. No critique of capitalism will be brooked. So a book on the invisibility of the American poor (too redolent of the invisibility of the blacks before civil rights) will be unpleasant to say the least.

If words like "absolute truth" and "half-Indian" show up in the title itself, even if the title is of a book by Sherman Alexie (a "half-Indian" himself), it's bound to appeal to the imagination of Texan grandparents.

The dog book by Gareth Stein is a mystifying selection in the ban bucket: Apparently, the canine perspective is celebrated when it shows up through the scrim of Disney. Otherwise, it's bad.

Jeannette Walls is brutally honest about the perils of growing up a girl in working class America, so off goes her memoir into the burning pyre.

John Greene? How can this fella who writes young adult romance and who has worked hard over the years through social media and what not, to build a huge fan base of swooning young adults, offend? The plot of some of his novels can be morbid, but offensive?

But overall, the books were banned for having too much sex and such other social taboos in them. Sounds believable? 

I have a sneaky feeling that the books were banned/burnt because they have the capacity to stir a moral fibre of the sleepwalking American youth. Thus they are dangerous.   

Of quantum physics and the heart of darkness

Sir Francis Bacon, the Renaissance Englishman who is credited with the art of a post-Aristotelian classification of knowledge into fields and disciplines, once said, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province".

He had meant that to improve the human condition (an endeavor described by Bacon as his "moderate civil ends") one had to subject everything to intellectual scrutiny.

On the one hand, by declaring "all knowledge" to be one's "province", Francis Bacon had opened up to the lay person, the "generalist", as it were, such hermetic bodies of knowledge as the sciences (back then metaphysics and alchemy with a sprinkling of nascent physics); on the other, he had exposed specialized knowledge to the hazard of being dragged out of context and circulated in a half-baked way in general human discourse.

For instance, as Professors of Philosophy and Physics respectively, at Stony brook University, Robert Crease and Alfred Goldhaber, say, the use of scientific terminologies, like "quantum", pervades general cultural discourses in today's day and age. Non-scientists appropriate scientific words and adapt them to their local cultural chit chat.

The writers, especially, the physics half of the writing duo, I believe, may harbor an ambivalent attitude to such free uprooting of words from their scientific terrains and re implanting them in non-scientific one's. They may interpret the appropriation as a misappropriation.

Thus when Lady Gaga contrasts her notion of the fragility of memory in one of her music videos with the uniqueness of the "atoms and particles in quantum physics," the physicist may be peeved to counter that Lady Gaga's referencing is "inapt" because, "in quantum physics, atoms and particles, unlike memories, can lose their individuality, for any two of the same kind cannot be distinguished from each other." 

The philosopher, however, would rationalize the "inapt" use of scientific terms by the non-scientific community as inevitable:

Every major scientific development has served this function, delivering a stock of new tools for describing aspects of human life. Newtonian mechanics offered novel images of causality and attraction; evolutionary theory gave us ways of discussing survival and fitness.

Besides, as the philosopher would add,

Nothing is intrinsically wrong with applying scientific language metaphorically to human experience. Metaphors are valuable when our experiences are enigmatic or difficult to capture, when existing words don’t fit the situation at hand. Even the incorrect use of technical terms can meaningfully express what we intuit but cannot otherwise say.

The philosopher would point to the perfect marriage of imperfect use of science in the service of the perfect expression of human experience that like physical phenomena, is always innately complex.

But what if the "knowledge" thus appropriated in the Baconian spirit of free-spiritedness, is not from the discipline of science, but from the discipline of the humanities?

I would think that there would be no one to defend or attack the usages, and a deafening neutrality or indifference would ensue.

For, unlike the sciences, the humanities, particularly literature and art, have somehow been perceived in cultures worldwide as everybody's province, including those of scientists and economists (consider the use of literary texts as springboard to launch a treatise on the 21st century global economy in Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century).

It's as though nobody could be bothered to fact check the use and/or abuse of literary references in the non-literary discourses of our cultures, because the humanities is seen since the time of Plato as a flaccid placeholder for everything and anybody can put anything they want in it or take out anything they want out of it, without fear of being rapped on the knuckles for decontextualizing.

While the Stony brook professors pointed out the plusses and minuses of living in a culture "awash in references to quantum leaps, parallel worlds and the uncertainty principle" (including, President Obama's use of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle"), there has been no such discussion of the plusses and minuses of President Barack Obama's reference to the contraption of Islamic fundamentalism called ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), as the "heart of darkness."

While a loose use of the word "quantum" can do some damage to our understanding of it by being propagated as an imprecise concept, a loose use of the core of one of the Western world's most paradigm-shifting of novels, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, won't raise an eyebrow because we assume the descriptor to have no precise historical or geographical province.

Literature is imprecise and cloudy, a cipher, as Plato would have put it--a world of representations not facts, that contribute to the battening of our false consciousnesses anyway.

Yet, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness published in 1899, at the height of European material and territorial exploitation of Africa, is a potent historical document, with a precise geographical referent, despite the metaphorical resonance of the title.

The referent, if one reads the novel closely enough, is so not Africa; it's Europe, or the heart of Europe as signified in the novel itself by the river Thames, and more specifically, Belgium, which is not named but on whose brutal history of colonial rule in the Congo, the novel's idea is based.

Paradigm-shifting literature is a literature of dissent; it opens people's eyes to that which remains hidden by the manipulation of mainstream politics. Today we associate the heart of darkness with anything that is obviously barbaric, but back then Conrad would have liked the reader to see the heart of barbarism in what conventional wisdom took to be the heart of civilization--Europe.

Mahatma Gandhi understood this ironic transposition (I'm not saying that he read Conrad's Heart of Darkness) when he remarked that the "idea" of the "West" is "great". 

In the Heart of Darkness Mr. Kurtz is the European "white" man who turns dark in his soul; it may be simplistic to think that Africa corrupts Kurtz; Conrad says pretty clearly, that all of Europe went into the making of Kurtz.

No one expects the President of the United States, even someone as erudite and intellectually discerning as Barack Obama, to particularize the reference to reflect what Joseph Conrad originally meant (all of Western bungling has gone into the making of the ISIS), but someone ought to say something about the usage of a literary term that's gone so far from its roots as not to be recognized as originating from the Conradian province.

Literary terms, I'm sad to say, has become a spin-off of spin-offs with no record-keeping of when the spin-off began. Today, art terms suffer the same fate as literary one's; the pilfering of the term "surreal" to mean anything that's is beyond rational explanation or merely strange, is too disturbing to contemplate.

The humanities in this sense has dwindled to the status of a temple prostitute, the (in(famous) and sexually exploited temple-women of ancient India whom the whole village had sexual access to, and on whom any male could lay claim during the sexual act.

I mean to say that like the temple prostitute, literature has become communal property with no distinct identity of its own like the sciences have.

Jane Eyre: Know thy context or be conned by the text

I noticed that the newest film adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre has been rated PG-13 for its “chaste passion” and “discreet violence”.

Additionally, Jane is marketed as a "mousy governess" on the poster.

I understand the commingling of passion with chastity—for the heroine, Jane, is an embodiment of chastity (i.e. she will be kissed by nor open her legs to anybody) which tempers the passion she develops over time for her beau, the Earl of Rochester. 

What I don’t quite get is the reference to the “discreet violence”. Does this refer to the burning alive of Bertha Mason, Rochester’s West Indian wife, who is neglected by her husband once he brings her over to England? He enjoys her estate, gets rich off her, and then conveniently decides that she is mad and confines her to the attic of her house.

If the quarantining and subsequent death of Bertha Mason is emblematic of violence that's "discreet", then the whole history of colonial violence, the substructure, upon which the superstructure of 19th century British prosperity lay, is discreet. 

But was this violence inflicted discreetly? Hell no; it was as overtly inflicted as is the modern day violence of a Ray Rice on his fiancee. The choice of the adjective "discreet" could be attributed to the race of the colonial master vis-a-vis the race of the servant subjugated by the former with impunity, back in those days. 

Bertha Mason’s treatment, we know today, is a direct consequence of her race—she was black. 

In the novel, Bertha hardly speaks; she is never seen. Only when the Rochester abode (which is refurbished with wealth from Mason's ancestral sugarcane plantation in Antigua) is up in flames, do we know that the madwoman in the attic is responsible for the arson.

Once the context is read into the novel, the violence done to Bertha hardly remains “discreet”.

Oh, and Jane can by no means be described as "mousy" (the film's poster sums up Jane's journey as a journey of increasing self-confidence). Her reticence is not a sign of her feminine diffidence; it's a pre-Victorian virtue, a virtue that would have been commendable in a young woman back then.

Context matters, else Jane Eyre would belong to the same category of fiction as The Nanny Diaries.

Dear planet, we're feasting off you as you spiral deathward

Station Eleven is the author's 4th novel. Emily St. John Mandel the writer based in you-know-where, had despaired of finding a publisher for this most dystopian of all American novels because she had surmised the wave for the genre to have peaked and subsided. 

The fiction market is saturated with dystopian novels. Like the literature of the Cold War that expressed a collective anxiety of a nuclear destruction of the world, today's dystopian fiction is dominated by contemporary fears of climate catastrophes, pandemics, and epidemics, among others. However, there have been one too many dystopian novels of late, making, Ms. St. John Mandel, a relative newbie to the genre, anxious about the economic prospects of her book.  

To her surprise, however, no sooner than Station Eleven was completed, it found itself at the center of a minor (three-day long) bidding war, with Knopf snagging the deal with a six-figure advance, an amount that's three times that generated by her three previous novels taken together.

The money is good news because (good) writers deserve to make a living off their products just as app developers. But does the appetite for dystopian, post-apocalyptic fiction tell us something about ourselves and our real-world attitude toward apocalypses? 

Take the recent epidemic of ebola in countries in West Africa. In terms of real action all that Americans could muster were something akin to fear-triggered hysteria of contamination. "Keep the African savages from the borders of our country" was the general collective scream that emerged from the millions of tweets generated by the news of the outbreak. Not much else in the way of empathic action was committed. I can imagine an entire posse of fantasy/post-apocalyptic/dystopian fiction mongerers based in you-know-where, frenetically cranking out plots of a post-ebola world order ruled by an African warlord who is the sole survivor of the viral attack. 

That we are "entertained" by the world-is-coming-to-an-end spectre, is not unprecedented. During major global Wars and conflicts of the past, ranging from World War 2, the rise of fascism, through the Cold War and the ambiguously worded War on Terror, the book and movie market have been traditionally been glutted by visions of the ending of a familiar world order. This is what a market-based economy does: ossifies, and some would say, deflects, real fears of real impending doom, into dollars and emblems of entertainment, thus deferring perpetually the action that's badly needed to stem the tide of the doom.

The planet slowly spins netherwards but the maximum we can do is to convert the descent into subject matter for fiction to be bought, read and "engaged" with at a very nominal level of entertainment.

The one thing that differentiates the 21st century apocalyptic fiction from the Cold War one is the envisioning of a post-.Today's young, educated, readers, the future-conscious, career-conscious and cautious folks that they are, want to plan ahead of time. Thus the dystopian fiction of today, as epitomized by the likes of Ms. St. John Mandel's, tells us repeatedly that the "end" is just a new beginning.

The world of Station Eleven is an emergent, post-present world, one that has been wiped off by the flu virus. It's like a startup cosmos all over again.

Bloody servants

Works of art, be it paintings, fiction, play, poems, films, that are based on servants and explore the master-servant relationship of power in any society, interest me.

Murderous servants fascinate me because my study of servitude tells me that its a condition that at one point or the other (even when servitude is socially sanctioned) is bound to beget violence. I'm eager to read Jean Genet's The Maids, a play about two murderous maids who kill their mistress primarily because the play looks at the imbalance of power between master and servant and decides that its unsustainable.

The play is based on a real-life murder (famously known in the media as the Papin case) of an affluent mistress and her adult daughter by two domestic helps in Depression-era France. 

There are, I hear, scenes in the play, where the two maids, both sisters, role play their mistress when she is away. The mistress is very rich and very callous and can't tell one maid from the other. The maids fiercely hate her. When the mistress goes out (which she does frequently), the maids go to play a sinister game where one sister dresses up as the mistress and the other gruesomely murders her or tortures her. They act out their fantasies this way.

One needs to understand this lurid desire on the part of the maids not as psychopathy, but as the innate condition, I believe of subjugation.

When subjugated and shorn of freedom, the human instinct is to lash out in very many ways.

In the Caribbean the slaves had institutionalized this practice of staging strange plays at night, after a days back-breaking labor on the sugarcane plantations. In these plays some would dress up as the masters and others would be themselves--the servants, that is, with the difference that they would be empowered enough to kill the masters. The ritual castration of masters was essential for the indentured servants; it kept their rage in check. So the masters connived.

Connivance is absent in Genet's play as connivance comes from understanding. The mistress is a rich, flaky girl, who hasn't a fibre of nuance or political suaveness in her being. The end result is consequently bloody.

An unusually composed Medea

Just finished watching Lars Von Trier's Medea.

From trash poem to welcome sign

Let no one say, and say it to your shame,
That all was beauty here, until you came.

A sign bearing these lines stand in Upper Manhattan's Fort Tyrone Park. They are beautiful, aren't they? asks a visitor as she finds the words to be poetic: they make her feel wanted.

She is then on a mission to track down the source of these lines. Upon Googling nothing shows up. The lines are then discovered to be fragments, carefully chiseled out of a longer early 20th-century poem:

Friend,
When you stray or sit and take your ease
On heath or hill, or under spreading trees,
Pray leave no traces of your wayside meal,
No paper bag, no scattered orange peel,
Nor daily journal littered on the grass;
Others may view these with distaste, and pass;
Let no one say, and say it to your shame,
That all was beauty here until you came.

This isn't a poem of sweet cajoling, but one with a scolding attitude, "grumpy lines" as the visitor calls them. The history of the poem is part of the burgeoning history of trash and trash talk in post-World War I Britain, a time when, liberated by rising economic fortunes and goaded by a desire to cultivate leisure, members of the British working and middle classes took to traveling from the cities to the countryside either in motor cars or on bicycles. The countryside, for so long a pristine habitat reserved for the ruminating walks of the upper class, was seen to be everybody's public space then.

Forced to contend with the despoiling of the countryside, the elite began to express deep chagrin about the litter that the lumpen visitors tended to leave behind.

In his book Landscape and Englishness, David Matless records the backlash against the new tourism which really was a backlash against the violation or a "flagrant breach of the national good form."

So, in short, the two lines that comfort the modern visitor to the Manhattan Park is in essence clipped from a longer trash poem that in class-conscious Britain had issued moral caveats.

Two truths and a lie

Novelist Lily King, says that one of her favorite exercises in the creative writing class she teaches, is to ask students to write the first paragraph of a short story. The first two sentences of the paragraph have to be two truths like "my sister has brown hair" and "her name is Lisa"; followed by a third sentence which is a lie, like, "Yesterday she went to prison." Why the "lie"? Because,

It's the lie that brings the story to life, makes it hum. The lie is the steering wheel, the gearshift and the engine. The lie takes your two true sentences and makes a left turn off road and straight into the woods. It slams the story into fifth gear and guns it.

By "lie" King means imagination which allows a novelist to "slip out of the shackles of history." In an interesting piece on the inception of her new, highly regarded novel, Euphoria, based on the life of the legendary American anthropologist, Margaret Mead, King shares the story of her "lies" as she plots the lives of Mead and her two fellow anthropologists, husband Reo Fortune and lover, Gregory Bateson, and runs free into the "jungle" of her imagination.

The stringer's tale

Praised by writer Pico Iyer as a journalist with the verve of a V.S. Naipaul, Anjan Sundaram has been reporting for the New York Times on Africa for a while.

Stringer is about his days as a stringer for AP in the Republic of Congo; instead of the usual gripe against the life of a stringer, Sundaram says something extraordinary about stringing: Astringer, writes Sundaram, makes a better reporter than a full-time foreign correspondent, even though stringers get less than minimum wage and risks her life by living inside say a village that is at the center of a civil war. 

In contrast to a stringer's report, reports by star foreign correspondents are distant, oversimplified and frequently de-contextualized. Star foreign correspondents tend to live away from conflict zones and consequently are rarely in direct touch with those affected by civil and military strifes. They stay for a few weeks in the best hotels in hub cities, that are removed from the scene where events are unfolding.

The reports that emerge from such distant or mediated encounters with the real tell stories that are only seemingly about others, but really are "about ourselves." The "telltale signs" of such stories is

is "a distinct assuredness":

Confusion and vulnerability are stripped away, as are the contradictions and subtleties of life. People and places are reduced to simple narratives--good and evil, victim and killer. Such narratives may be easy to digest. But they tell us only a portion of the story.

Medea: A Bad Mom or A Beleaguered Barbarian?

Recently I saw the trailer of the National Theatre of London’s forthcoming play Medea. First to appear is the back of a woman’s head, lush with dark hair; then comes the distant laughter of children against the background of a dense forest through which the woman, now shown in noire attire literally and figuratively, walks holding the hands of the children. 

The children evanesce leaving the woman alone, stranded. She turns to look at us; her face is contorted with emotions I can best identify as sinister, exuding ominous foreboding. It’s the face of Medea; all the familiar threads of the disquieting, the darkening and the threatening hang loose, waiting to make the fabric of the totality of what we recognize today to be the figure of the Western literary canon’s poster child for the mother from hell. 

The face could very well have belonged to Lady Macbeth the mannish wife in Shakespeare’s great tragedy of Macbeth, who famously taunted her husband’s manhood with the image of herself as the woman who is virile enough to dash the head of a baby suckling at her breast. But Lady Macbeth didn’t have any children; she was merely hypothesizing; one could be certain that had she had “babes” she would not have had the heart to break their heads. Euripides’ Medea, on the other hand, kills her children—all four of them--to earn eternal damnation in the annals of motherhood. 

Yet, Euripides did not conceive of Medea as the sum total of her filicidal instincts. Around the time Euripides composed the wondrous tragedy of this doomed heroine of mythology, the maternal bond between mommy and child was not as culturally fetishized as it is today. How would Medea have been judged back then in the Greece of 3rd century B.C.? 

The first time I had closely read Euripides' Medea, it was as a young English major, in India. The professor who taught us ancient Greek drama, had, in his own way, forewarned us about the pitfalls of reading literary texts out of context. He meant that we just might not be able to access the real kernel of Greek drama, without knowing any Greek and without having any idea of the moral universe to which these plays were literary responses.

To better understand what I read, I took a fast and furious tour of the Greek alphabets; I also did a quick read of Robert Graves' Penguin edition of the Greek myths to get a hang of concepts like oikos, daemon and hamartia, among others. Armed with a fragile, but what at that time, seemed an adequate notion of the Greeks as a whole, I approached the big stars of the Grecian dramatic pantheon, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

What stood out, for me, was the spree of inter-family killings in these plays. To goad a son to kill his own father was a rather routine act of a Greek mother and wife, as is evidenced by Clytemnestra's nagging of her son Orestes to slay his father Agamemnon upon his return to Thebes from the 10-year Trojan War. But the killings in the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles were done for the sake of preserving a higher moral order, in the scheme of which mere familial love paled into insignificance.

So, when I read Medea, I was baffled. In this most celebrated of the tragedies by Euripides, Medea is a woman, who kills her children, not for any higher moral purpose, but putatively to seek personal revenge. The story of Medea goes thus: She is a barbarian—counterpart of the modern foreigner—who’s married to Jason, a Greek and has children with him. They live in the Greek city of Corinth. The play opens with a wrathful Medea, furious at having learned of Jason’s plan to marry Glauce, the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. An angry barbarian female is a threat to national security, and to preempt harm, Creon exiles Medea. The play ends on a note of sad mayhem. Medea knifes her children to death and poisons both Creon and Glauce. Medea then flees to Athens with the bodies of her dead children.

Blood is shed in Medea, but compared to fellow Greek tragedies the number of bodies felled are fewer. However to our very modern bourgeoisie sensibilities, the one momentous act of filicide committed by Medea has the impact of a million slaughtering on the battlefields of Troy. 

As purveyors of modern adaptations of pre-modern literature, we are intolerant of some of the familial acts therein (we have less compunction in approaching Oedipus’ incestuous act with a lighthearted, almost jocular attitude) and relatively forgiving of others (Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his pre-teen daughter Iphigenia is just fine); our somewhat dour sensibility crucifies the slaying by Medea of her children as extreme monstrosity, the product of a psychopathic mind. Emphatically, in our eyes, Medea is a rotten mommy cum psychopath bundled into one, a pin up for motherhood gone horribly awry. 

Witness the frames of references within which the ancient Medea typically pops up—every time there is news of a maternal filicide, in Texas or more recently in Utah, discourses in the media illuminate the horror of the act by invoking Medea. Medea could well nigh be a byword for the cannibal-mom, a woman deranged, scorned, fallen into postpartum depression and a woman who ill-deserves the sacred mantle of motherhood to begin with. Snapped, the Documentary series aired on Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen Network, have women who “snap” because male hypocrisy has reached a critical mass in their lives and they can take it no more. The women who snap go on a homicidal rampage and the ghost of Medea flits across the TV screen like a Tasmanian devil overdosed on anti-estrogen.

Yet, the ancient Greeks would not have beheld Medea as a mad woman that ought to be locked up for good in the attic and from whom the neighborhood children ought to be protected. In light of the cultural mores as portrayed in Greek drama, the cruelty, in itself, ought not to have raised eyebrows—Medea’s slaying of her children is no more or no less scandalous than the inadvertent slaying by Oedipus of his father. 

What, I presume would have aroused the moral chagrin of the literary Medea’s contemporaries, is the fact of her outsider-status, and the fact that she dared to marry a Greek despite being a Barbarian. In the traditional myth of Jason and Medea, the couple’s marriage was not recognized by the state as a bonafide marriage, and it could be surmised that the children of the interracial union were perceived as half-breeds, the mulattos of the time. According to a version of the myth, the children were killed by a mob of furious Corinthians because Medea had killed their king; it could be that the mob fury was a manifestation of a collective xenophobia. 

Perhaps Euripides’ tweaking of the myth was intended to give Medea a bit of agency in sealing her own fate. To make Medea the slaughterer of her own children affirms the fact that she is a barbarian, bound, at the slightest provocation, to deviate from norms of civilization. One can’t help but feel that her filicide in the play is a reflection, not simply of her failed motherhood, but primarily of her barbarism; in other words, what Medea does fulfills an apriori stereotype of her. 

In Euripides’ Medea, the eponymously named heroine is a doubly marginalized figure of the woman and the barbarian, a hyper-second class citizen by virtue of both gender and race/citizenship. In the play, as in life, she would have been judged as such, not on the basis of her maternal instincts.

One hopes that National Theatre’s production of Medea desists from reducing this most fascinating of all female protagonists in Western literature, to one thing or the other, for Medea remains firmly etched in my memory as a study in grief and rage in context. 

The Man Booker Prize

Long List (2014):

TO RISE AGAIN AT A DECENT HOUR, Joshua Ferris (American) (Viking)

THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH, Richard Flanagan (Australian) (Chatto)

WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES, Karen Joy Fowler (American) (Serpent's Tail)

THE BLAZING WORLD, Siri Hustvedt (American) (Sceptre)

J, Howard Jacobson (British) (Cape)

THE WAKE, Paul Kingsnorth (British) (Unbound)

THE BONE CLOCKS, David Mitchell (British) (Sceptre)

THE LIVES OF OTHERS, Neel Mukherjee (British) (Chatto)

US, David Nicholls (British) (Hodder)

THE DOG, Joseph O'Neill (Irish/American) (Fourth Estate)

ORFEO, Richard Powers (American) (Atlantic)

HOW TO BE BOTH, Ali Smith (British) (Hamish Hamilton)

HISTORY OF THE RAIN, Niall Williams (Irish) (Bloomsbury)

Dazzled to death

Having seen Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the classic Cold War spy tale by John Le Carre, I'm eager to see, A Most Wanted Man, a movie (release date, July 25, 2014), based on another spy novel by the maestro.

But my interest in A Most Wanted Man is mostly piqued by the fact of the actor (sadly no more) Phillip Seymour Hoffman's presence therein.

Hoffman plays the role of the central character, an ex-spy and a tortured soul who has to adapt and adjust to the new geopolitical imperatives of an era defined by 9/11. 

Hoffman is Le Carre's personal choice; the novelist plays an active role in selecting actors for films based on his novels. 

Of Hoffman, Le Carre says the following:

His intuition was luminous from the instant you met him. So was his intelligence. A lot of actors are intelligent, but Philip was the real thing: a shining, artistic polymath with an intelligence that came with a pair of headlights and enveloped you from the moment he grabbed your hand, put a huge arm round your neck and shoved a cheek against yours; or if the mood took him, hugged you to him like a big pudgy schoolboy, then stood and beamed at you while he took stock of the effect.
Phillip took vivid stock of everything all the time. It was painful and exhausting work, and probably in the end his undoing. The world was too bright for him to handle. He had to screw his eyes or be dazzled to death. He went seven times round the moon to your one, and everytime he set off, you were never sure he'd come back, which is what I believe somebody said of the German poet Holderin: Whenever he left the room you were afraid you'd see the last of him. And if that sounds like wisdom after the event, it isn't. Phillip was burning himself out before your eyes. Nobody could live at his pace and stay the course and in bursts of startling intimacy he needed you to know it.

"Dazzled by death" is part of a fabulous characterization of Hoffman as man and and artist, as it brings to mind the figure of the moth. The moth, as Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley said, is drawn to the flame (he says "star" as in "the desire of the moth for the star/Night for the morrow"), almost by instinct. It took half a century for a Virginia Woolf to bring out the dark side of the moth's devotion: death. In The Death of a Moth, a short essay, Woolf ponders on the brief life and imminent death of a moth that veers toward a candle she has lit in her room. She looks at the moth and thinks of how the flame dazzles it to death.

A good way to go, confronted by that which bedazzles.

And the Pulitzer goes to...

This year's Pulitzer Prize for poetry has been awarded to Vijay Sheshadri for his poetry collection, 3 Sections.

Born in Bangalore, Sheshadri had moved to the United States as a child, attended Oberlin College, got an MFA at Columbia University, and currently lives in Brooklyn while teaching poetry at Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville.

A poem, entitled "Imaginary Number" goes thus:

The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
is not big and is not small.
Big and small are
comparative categories, and to what
could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
be compared?
Consciousness observes and is appeased.
The soul scrambles across the screes.
The soul,
like the square root of minus 1,
is an impossibility that has its uses.

O Shakespeare! My Shakespeare!

Just as Karl Marx's political philosophy has been adapted by diverse nations across the world, and Jane Austen's novel, Pride and Prejudice has been translated into innumerable languages (including Oriya, a language spoken in the East Coast of India), so there is hardly a language into which Shakespeare's plays hasn't been wrought.

Shakespeare has been embraced by Americans, not simply because America was a British colony once upon a time, but also because the plays of Shakespeare lends themselves to adaptation as there is an unsurpassable universality in their kernel. A Shakespearean contemporary had said that Shakespeare is "nature itself."

James Shapiro has edited an anthology of essays on Shakespeare by famous Americans from all fields, including politics and sports, and Shakespeare in America is said to be a terrific read.

I was struck by Bill Clinton's name as the provider of the volume's foreword. Maybe he consorted with the Merry Wives of Windsor!

Casualties of globalization

Dave Eggers has taken upon himself the task of chronicling the changing landscape of an emergent America in the global economy. In A Hologram for the King, we read about the erosion of the culture of manufacturing in this nation; a particular victim is Alan Clay, who has been edged out of the manufacturing competition and cornered into the slot, Eggers disdainfully refers to as "consulting". Consulting, in the eyes of Clay's father, a retired worker for a national railroad company, is a pansy occupation which has emasculated the American labor ethos.

Eggers pitches Clay as a representative American worker, shaped by traditional American middle-class ethos. However, he is still a fictionalized version of the American middle-class man whose entire way of life has been affected by economic globalization.

In Factory Man, veteran journalist Beth Macy, gets the saga of the aforementioned demographic straight from the horse's mouth. The book is a work of non-fiction with the same kind of sublimity achieved by the best works of fiction as Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Aman Sethi's A Free Man, among others.

For me, it's a must read, as I take a keen interest in work that records the histories of the lives of ordinary, sometimes poor, citizens of the globe who contribute toward the globe's changes yet remain invisible and unacknowledged.

The reign of Capital

Yet another book on "Capital"?

Novelist Rana Dasgupta's new work of nonfiction has a punny title, playing on the political and financial significance of the word capital, for the book is both on money and on the presence of new wealth in New Delhi, the capital city of India.

According to the New Yorker Magazine:

In the interviews with rich young Indians that make up much of the unsparing portrait of moneyed Delhi, no telling detail seems to escape Dasgupta's notice. His novelistic talents are matched by his skill at eliciting astonishing candor from his subjects. The best passages are incisive summaries of the human and environmental costs of the elite's wealth and privilege and his persuasive predictions of crises yet to come. Dasgupta constantly seeks to upend conventional wisdom about Delhi, the murky circulation of its money, and the roots of its periodic outbursts of violence, making this one of the most worthwhile in a strong field of recent books about India's free-market revolution and its unintended dire consequences.

The fictional Avocado

Esther Greenwood, the protagonist in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar loved her avocado.

She reminisces about the "pear" when a literary luncheon gets dreadful:

I bowed my head and secretly eyed the position of the bowls of caviar.... Under cover of the clinking of water goblets and silverware and bone china, I paved my plate with chicken slices. Then I covered the chicken slices with caviar thickly as if I were spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread. Then I picked up the chicken slices in my fingers one by one, rolled them so the caviar wouldn't ooze off and ate them.... Avocados are my favorite fruit. Every Sunday my grandfather used to bring me an avocado pear hidden at the bottom of his briefcase under six soiled shirts and the Sunday comics. He taught me how to eat avocados by melting grape jelly and French dressing together in a saucepan and filling the cup of the pear with the garnet sauce. I felt homesick for that sauce.

The avocado's fortune has waxed and waned in literary representation. In a New Yorker fiction, "Here's the Story" (June 9 & 16, The Summer Fiction Issue of 2014), by David Gilbert, the avocado is used as a figurative bone of contention between a husband and a wife who are unhappily married:

His wife hated avocados, something about the mushy texture reminding her of rotten flesh, as if she were on intimate terms with decay, and no doubt the girls would follow suit, but maybe he could show them the pleasure of the pit, how you could cut around the middle and twist and the halves would come apart at the hard center, a world hidden within a world...and how you could remove the pit and poke in a few toothpicks and rest this Sputnik half submerged in a glass of water, and in a few weeks you'd have the beginnings of a tree right there on the windowsill.