The blurb for Lance Betros’s Carved from Granite (Texas A&M University Press, 2012) announces that “The U.S. Military Academy at West Point [all of whose graduates are commissioned as officers in the U.S. Army] is one of the nation’s oldest and most revered institutions.” The title of the book shows similar confidence in the institution’s longevity and power, suggesting that West Point has remained like a rock for the two centuries of its existence, especially the second century covered in this wide-ranging, sober, and sobering book.

Cadet at West Point, May 1998 (photo by AHodges7, Wikimedia Commons, Released under CCA-SA3.0 Unported License)

Sobering, because the book itself tells a different story than is suggested by its title, that of a deeply volatile and troubled institution that has expanded in size, dealt (badly at times) with the integration of women, tried to turn itself into a college from a technical training school (with variable success), gone into big-time American athletics and recruited students for that purpose, and embarked on a full-bore and largely behind-the-scenes race-based “affirmative action” admissions process that shuts out many better prepared applicants. All this is carried out at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer: West Point cadets, like all U.S. service academy students, not only get a free education but room and board, guaranteed employment on graduation, access to free military healthcare, retirement credit for federal service, and the prestige of having gone there. This contrasts to other educational options in America in a way not comparable in any Western ally. In America each state has a state university, partially funded by state tax monies but still costing on average of $50,000 for four years. Some are first rate (such as Berkeley, Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina) but all the top-twenty universities in the U.S., and many just below, are private universities such as the well-known members of the “Ivy League” (Harvard, Yale, Princeton and so on) or their equivalents (Stanford, Chicago, MIT, Duke, Vanderbilt, and CalTech) which typically cost that amount for each of four years for those students who pay full price (some are given scholarships for varying reasons). In fact the cost of West Point to taxpayers is more than twice the cost of an Ivy League education: close to half a million dollars per student. So going to one of these places is a huge gift courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer—a salient fact in this era of austerity and budget cuts.

The US has four military academies, all of which date from about the same time as their European counterparts. West Point, Sandhurst in England, and St. Cyr in France were all founded shortly after 1800 (West Point in 1802); Annapolis was founded in 1845, Coast Guard in 1876, and Air Force, when the Army Air Corps split off from the Army, in 1954. Though initially, in the nineteenth century and beyond, each produced most of the officers in its respective service, that proportion has dwindled to below 20% in all services. Most U.S. officers nowadays come from the hugely expanded Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) track where students go to normal colleges, take a normal course load with a few military classes, and put on a uniform a day or two a week (but are not in the military, as students at the service academies are), and from Officer Candidate School (OCS), where those who have done university (‘college’, as it’s called in the U.S.) on their own or enlisted seeking to be officers complete a several-months-long training course: all end as officers doing the same jobs, working side by side. There is no evidence that those coming from the service academies are better.

The U.S. Naval Aademy at Annapolis in the late 1860s (public domain, source: Wikimedia Commons)

The cost of an ROTC officer to taxpayers, trained a few hours a week, is on average a quarter of that of a service academy officer (the government gives ROTC scholarships to college of varying degrees of generosity). OCS doesn’t last four years; it lasts a few months, and anybody who has risen through the enlisted ranks or finished college on his or her own can apply to go through it. If the candidate makes it through the training (most do), he or she is an officer—at one-eighth the cost to U.S. taxpayers of those shut in behind the walls of the service academies for four years. At the academies, they may not choose their clothes – or most classes, for that matter – and are involved in a simulacrum of “leadership” exercises where students one year further down the pipeline control those one year before and determine their lives: their liberty to go into town, their presence or absence at a thousand and one functions, their sleep cycle, the times they are allowed to wear their own clothes, and their hours for homework or working out—and where no sex of any kind, even hand-holding, is allowed. For four years. The vastly more numerous officers from ROTC and OCS, again, had none of these constraints, and apparently are just as effective as officers.

So why do these institutions still exist? The blurb cited above gives some indication: people revere them and they don’t understand how they’ve changed—and how the world has changed around them. I do: I’ve taught as a civilian English professor for 26 years at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, founded with a handful of all-male students to respond to the mid-nineteenth-century realization that ships had become so complex they required some classroom instruction. We still preserve the title “midshipman” for students at the Naval Academy, in memory of their forebears who shimmied up the riggings on sailing ships a-midships (in the center of the ship) to learn their trade. At the time, universities taught largely religion and classics to gentlemen, so clearly another kind of institution was necessary: it wasn’t until 1876 that Johns Hopkins was founded as the first U.S. university based on the German discipline-centered model to give Ph.D. degrees. In the more than 160 years of Annapolis all the buildings currently there were built, the institution expanded to its current 4500 undergraduates, the lockstep technical curriculum was replaced by a slightly more flexible one approaching that of a civilian college, and we now give the standard bachelor’s degree after four years. Betros’s chronicle of women, big-league sports, and racial preferences for West Point is also, mutatis mutandis, that of Annapolis and the other academies as well. As in the case of West Point too, the proportion of the officer corps represented by Annapolis in its respective military service has shrunk from near-total dominance before World War II to the current level of about 20% .

Yet they are vociferously defended by their proponents—which usually means, those who run them and some of those who graduated from them, all at government expense. The service academies, with a tuition of zero and countless benefits, are the gift that keeps on giving. Those who have been the recipients of this astonishing government generosity tend to defend it. Not just graduates love them, however. They’re certainly pretty, so tourists are enamored of them too: the less they know about what actually goes on there, the better. And those who run them make sure they never learn.

Germany was cured of its worship of the military by the Third Reich—the uniforms, the salutes, the boots, the goose-step (Stechschritt in German, less mocking), the Fahnenweihe—consecration of the flags. But it’s still strong in America: photographers can’t get enough of ranks of healthy fit young people with short hair and wearing form-flattering identical uniforms standing in ranks, or throwing their caps in the air, as they do at our graduation. We give parades for the public on Wednesday afternoons in spring and fall, and every day at lunch there’s a show at Noon Meal Formation.

Map of the U.S. Naval Academy, 1924 (public domain, source: Wikimedia Commons)

Aside from the spit and polish that makes the service academies military Disneylands, what do taxpayers get from them? A small proportion of the officer corps. But the government could expand other programs and get those. Why do we need the service academies? We don’t. The U.S. academies are marked by wrap-around control that has largely disappeared at the service academies of allied Western countries. Students at Canada’s RMC/CMR (Royal Military College/College Royal Militaire) can marry, live off campus, and be any age that can do the physical part of things—none of which are options in the United States. Cadets at St. Cyr may also marry; the German military academies have dispensed with uniforms, the Australian is run by the University of New South Wales, and the Belgian one alternates academic blocs with training blocs, rather than allowing the training—ineffective, by almost all accounts—to encroach on studies, as they do at Annapolis and West Point. The British military has gone out of the undergraduate education business entirely: Sandhurst is now a cluster of post-graduate programs after students finish university elsewhere with their peers. In none of these countries is there the equivalent of ROTC, or the vast gulf between the 100% taxpayer-funded military academy experience (with guaranteed employment and prestige) and the staggeringly expensive civilian alternatives.

Because the actual utility of the U.S. service academies is so unclear, and their price so staggering, students are, in my experience, largely cynical and unmotivated as they realize that they are living props for the public, like the “cast members” at Disneyland, that their academic experience is compromised by the training, and the training simultaneously pointless and erratic, dependent on the whims of their classmates who are just as clueless as they are about the purpose of it all. Because the position of these academies in a changing world is so precarious, it also leads to a barrage of salesmanship from the academies themselves, eager to have the public fund them forever. (All government programs, as the U.S. right wing likes to point out, have as their primary goal their own survival.)

An official statement of the Naval Academy’s Public Affairs Officer at the Naval Academy in response to a radio interview of mine asserted that “we stand by our record of producing the nation’s finest leaders.” When I asked what this statement was based on—given that “finest” is a superlative, meaning better than any other officer commissioning source (the service academies produce less than 20% of officers in any given year)—aside from an inability to define “leaders” as opposed to officers, which of course they have the power to create, the response was this: “The statement is based on public record which shows the number of graduates who have gone on to serve distinguished careers.” So having “distinguished careers”—which Annapolis gets to define—is the same as being “finest leaders?” What about former President Jimmy Carter, the first recipient of the Naval Academy’s self-serving “Distinguished Graduate” award? He’s universally acknowledged to be a better ex-president than president, and Harvard has produced far more presidents than USNA.

Of course we can list some stellar officers who graduated from Annapolis. Are they better than ROTC officers? More of them for the period when ROTC was a larger source? And what of the opposite side of things (remember the claims are for the institution as a whole): what of those graduates who have ended their careers ignominiously? Are they also the product of the institution? Eight out of the 25 commanding officers removed for malfeasance in 2012 were Naval Academy graduates. Is there a list of them too? What of the half the class that serves its military time as junior officers for the mandatory service period of five years (or is discharged for medical or other reasons before that time)—are they finest leaders too?

Naval Academy midshipmen climbing the Herndon Monument in an old tradition (public domain, source: Wikimedia Commons)

All in all, the academies and the hype they emit in direct proportion to their increasing irrelevance remind me of nothing so much as the tottering—could we have only known it—regime in what we, in the then West Berlin of the Wall years, called East Berlin. For when I lived in West Berlin as a Fulbright Scholar at the Free University in the 1980s, some half a dozen years before the Wall fell—an event almost no one at the time seriously thought would happen—the most extraordinary thing about the grim world of East Berlin, which began one street over on the other side of the Wall, was how unselfconsciously and how relentlessly it claimed to be the opposite of what it was. East Germany, called by its leaders the DDR, Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the “German Democratic Republic”—that the Western Bildzeitung always wrote as “DDR”—‘neither German nor democratic, and no republic either’, in Willy Brandt’s phrase—insisted that it was the “Worker-Farmer Paradise,” the world’s 9^th largest industrial power. The hated Wall, that in any case was permeable to the West German radio and television secretly beamed into the living rooms of countless Easterners, was according to East Berlin not built for its true purpose, to stanch the hemorrhaging of population before its construction in August 1961, but rather to keep out Westerners who otherwise would deluge the Worker-Farmer Paradise, and to protect the socialist paradise of the East. (Of course the DDR, or “DDR”, didn’t call East Berlin “East Berlin” or even “Berlin (Ost)” as it was officially called in the West: it was “Berlin–Capital of the GDR” (Berlin—Hauptstadt der DDR), and Berlin-West, the official Western name for itself, was the oddly suburban-sounding “Westberlin,” a darkened island on the maps of the East German subway and East-German controlled S-Bahn train maps.

Then the Wall fell. East Berliners streamed out of the worker-farmer paradise that had been constructed for them, eager to be part of the decadent world of the West. In short order several things became clear: the industrial products of this “9^th largest industrial power” were valueless in a world that suddenly had access to Mercedes and was not limited to Trabants and Wartburgs, not to mention the East’s gimcrack coffee makers and vacuum cleaners that had only had value in the closed market of the Eastern Bloc. The claims to being a top-ten industrial power were grounded, in any case, on the artificially set exchange rate that determined the ludicrous but face-saving mandatory exchange rate of one East Mark to one West Mark; in the banks of West Berlin one could get 10 East Marks for one West Mark, their true value. So the industrial might of East Germany, such as it was, was already exaggerated by a factor of 10. As the months and years passed after the fall of the Wall, even worse came out: in order to achieve even the shoddy goods, the Easterners had hopelessly polluted their fields and streams. Now there is no East Germany, no East Mark, no East Berlin: one moment the East was asserting its own power, the next it had given up. The former DDR has become “the new federal states”—die neuen Bundesländer. And money flows in one direction only: West to East.

Of course everybody knew that what East Berlin said about itself was usually lies, and at best empty cheerleading (how do you define “paradise”?). But still, how amazing that they could keep a straight face in repeating these ridiculous self-representations! No less am I amazed at the ability of the US Naval Academy, similarly protected by its Wall from the civilian world it claims it exists to defend, to say things over and over that are either simply untrue or lack all foundation. For East Berlin, it was the “Worker-Farmer Paradise.” For the US Naval Academy, it’s an institution devoted to “Leaders for the Nation.”

“Finest leaders” falls in the same category as “Worker-Farmer Paradise”: it’s not an empirically verifiable claim. The students are repeatedly told by all and sundry that they are the “best and brightest”—despite the fact that “best” seems to mean only the circular notion of “being at the Naval Academy.” This self-stroking at taxpayer expense is common to all the service academies. According to its website, the US Military Academy at West Point goes even further: it’s the “nation’s premier leadership institution.” Whatever that means, aside from the fact that students have to take courses in something called “Leadership.”

The Wall that separates the 338 acres of the Naval Academy from the rest of the town of Annapolis is eerily similar to the Berlin Wall too: it has its official crossings like Checkpoint Charlie with gates and guards, is lined with sensors that catch students trying to get over it, and cuts down the length of streets so we can see the houses and buildings on the outside from the inside. It’s easy for outsiders to get in, and out, as it was for me going over to the Brecht-Theater in the East to see a play, so long as they have the proper documents (“100% ID check,” say the gates)—but almost impossible at most times for those inside to get out. (There is some amnesty, called “liberty” for upperclassmen, as there was in the last years of the Wall for East Berliners visiting family in the West: they are allowed out at specified times so long as they come back when they are supposed to.)

East Berlin put on good theater too: the last place in Europe where the goosestep was on show was Unter den Linden, in front of the Alte Wache. And the First of May parade with all the red flags! Remembering all that is Ostalgie at its most virulent. The East got people on the streets by ordering them out, or punishing them if they didn’t. Midshipmen are similarly ordered to line parade routes and cheer, and under the adoring eyes of Annapolitans, march in formation to mandatory football games at our stadium a mile out of town.

But of course you can’t believe what they say. In the U.S., selectivity of institutions (the percentage of applicants they turn away) is a close indicator of quality, at least in the public mind. Recently, as a result of a Freedom of Information request I submitted (which means federal agencies are supposed to respond honestly), it became clear that the service academies had been claiming a rejection rate comparable with only a handful of well-known universities (such as Stanford and Princeton, both well above 90%) by inflating statistics: counting as “applicants” all the high school students who sought entrance into a week-long summer program, for instance, or who began an online application by putting in their name. This allows us to claim that we had over 20,000 applicants for about 1500 admits—including the 7500 who wanted to be among the 2500 coming to the summer program. This way of counting applicants is in direct contravention to the way other schools are expected to do it, but it makes us look good, so we’ve continued to do it. Meanwhile our average scores on the national Scholastic Aptitude Tests are lower than the (solid but not stellar) University of Maryland, the state university (the city of Annapolis, where the Naval Academy is located, is the capital of the state of Maryland ). West Point uses the same definition of “applicant” as Annapolis. This practice is defended by the administration by insisting that the service academies are “different.” Fine, but shouldn’t selectivity by definition be with respect to other schools?

When asked to justify their existence, therefore, the service academies come up empty—just like East Berlin. Yet they’re the ones in control of the information—just like East Berlin. Students are not allowed to speak to journalists not certified as safe by the administration, but are to refer all questions of tourists or inquiring outsiders to the Public Affairs Officer. The fact that they are in the military (as ROTC cadets are not) means they cannot publicly contradict their superiors. So according to the institutions themselves, they are the best of the best. According to whom else? Is there any evidence from the fleet that their officers are better? None. What is clear is that Annapolis is used as the taxpayer-supported staging area for countless examples of military pomp—retirements, funerals, changes of command, aside from providing vast support staffs of maid, butlers, and groundskeepers for the brass, all of whom live in the high-ceilinged Victorian houses maintained at taxpayer expense—just like the dachas of the East German nomenklatura.

History showed that there was no purpose to East Germany except its own survival. But isn’t that enough? Similarly, we might ask, why should the service academies be required to justify their existence? Haven’t they always existed? Aren’t they, as their most verbal alumni loudly repeat, “national treasures”? Have they not in fact produced many generals and admirals who have defended the U.S. in her hour of need? Why should we mess with success?

The historical record of the US service academies is based on a world that is no longer. The U.S. service academies, like East Germany, were at least plausible in their early years, when they filled a gap due to the absence of universities that taught more than religion and classics. But even this was mere theory. The military needed something grittier more attuned to the complex machines of ships and warfare. But in today’s world the officers don’t run the submarines—the enlisted do that, because the machines are so complex; and colleges offer countless practical majors. Why does the United States need a parallel system of military-run colleges that cost so much and invest so much time for little to show, like a second stand-alone Germany when the much larger first seems to work so much better? East Germany was initially defended by a number of writers and intellectuals such as Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers, and Christa Wolf. But as the grim reality of life there became plainer and the blossoming life in the West more florid, the voices became fewer and the pretensions to justification became ridiculous.

The historical record of the service academies is based on the fact that until World War II, they produced the lion’s share of officers—so the wars that were won were won by the service academy graduates, and they filled the lion’s share of top slots—presumably the “leaders” that the USNA PAO was referring to. (We don’t talk about the US wars they lost, such as Vietnam, or more recent conflicts.) Then ROTC expanded, both in the 60s and 70s, to the point where now the service academies produce only a tiny minority of officers. So of course the proportion of top jobs filled by service academy graduates has plummeted. Do they stay in longer? The most recent data indicated a 6% greater retention rate over time—including the years when ROTC was not so dominant—which is to say, insignificant. Are they better officers? No evidence that this is so. Better “leaders”? Start by defining terms. And again, no evidence precisely because it’s a vacuous claim—the Worker-Farmer Paradise all over again.

Though some form of service academies have existed since the 19^th century, their current form as military-run undergraduate colleges is quite recent, and exists in relation to quite a different world outside. Before the 1960s they did not compete with the college education that goes along with a ROTC officer production pipeline, awarding a sui generis diploma. But in the 60s and 70s, as Vietnam made the military less popular, the service academies introduced majors (before, all students took an engineering-based progression of courses) and earned the right to award a bachelor’s degree. So they’re as much college as our ca. 4500 students are ever going to have. And they compete as officers, more tellingly, with graduates of normal colleges, who vastly outnumber them. And are apparently not better than them as a group.

As the French novelist François Mauriac wrote, he liked Germany so well he was glad there were two of them. So let’s concede that the claims of the service academies are silly, and their products are no better than others. All institutions engage in harmless boosterism and cheerleading, we might say. Why shouldn’t we be happy there are a multiplicity of commissioning sources? It’s sort of like the rainforest—we can’t right now say what the point of all that biodiversity is, but it’s bound to come in handy some day.

First of all there’s the fact that the academies are so hugely expensive to U.S. taxpayers. A service academy officer, again, costs taxpayers eight times what an OCS officer costs—many of whom pay for their own college and join the military after—and four times what the average ROTC officer costs. Even the most generous ROTC scholarship pays the price of a private school, about $200,000 these days for four years, whereas the service academies range from over $400,000 to close to half a million dollars per student—all paid for with taxpayer money.

In the same category of problem is the fact that a place at the service academies is one of the biggest government giveaways to individuals, and is awarded behind closed doors by people who refuse to identify themselves based on criteria that these unseen dispensers of public largesse refuse to outline even in the most cursory fashion: I have been through two rounds of appeals on Freedom of Information Act requests where the Naval Academy refused to say who admitted whom based on what. A service academy education is a free gift of the taxpayers worth twice even the closest competitor, with incalculable prestige and guaranteed employment after, as well as the lifetime aura of being a graduate—awarded by people who don’t provide the money, and with no oversight to correct the appearance of favoritism. This is not about access to military service: any American can go to college on his or her own dime and apply for OCS later, or join the ranks of the enlisted and work his or her way up. It’s a system of Deciders who refuse to identify themselves giving benefits to those they wish to give them to, with no questions possible and no justification necessary.

Currently the Deciders, whoever they are, give this huge benefit to many children of senior officers, the children of current administrators, and a raft of other special projects they deem worthy, such as Division I (‘Big School’) college athletics so Navy football can play the University of Notre Dame’s team. Why shouldn’t Navy play Division I football if Notre Dame does? Because it’s government money to produce officers, not an alumni-funded university. West Berlin here pays for East Berlin to continue with its PR blitz.

To justify their vast expenditure and to keep their niche, the East Berlin-like academies emphasize their differences with their equivalent of West Berlin—the world of civilian education that is their competitor on the other side of the Wall. We do X, Y and Z (ranging from having students memorize reams of useless information to taking courses they will never use, to marching up and down with a rifle to punish them for what their officer believes to be an infraction—though of course we will not throw them off this government dole even for major infractions because we claim that they are the “best and the brightest”). So too the East Berlin regime and its apologists saw positives in the drab, no-advertising decaying East—freed from the dreaded scourge of consumer choice. The East was pure: so too the Naval Academy tells its denizens over and over that they are “held to a higher standard”—effectively, morally purer than the decadent world outside the Wall.

Last but far from least, as the constant lies of the East Berlin hype apparatus meant that all its citizens were cynical non-believers, so too the students at the service academies—I know by talking to them—are complete disbelievers in the hype that spews from the academy’s Public Affairs Office. They want to believe they are the “best and the brightest,” but few believe that the spirit-crushing combination of monotony and unpredictability over little things, the constant assurances that they have “killed a whole platoon of Marines” at the slightest infraction, makes them better leaders. They don’t know what would, but they know it’s not this.

What we learned from the fall of the Wall is that social engineering to produce a perfect society does not work and always goes horribly wrong—perverted to the benefit of the upper echelon few, and resulting in dispirited, under-producing passivity. The louder the service academies trumpet their benefits—and fail to produce any data that would prove their assertions—the more likely it is that they too will one day simply implode. Like East Berlin in the 1980s, the service academies exist in a world that has slipped from their control.

Lance Betros: Carved from Granite. West Point Since 1902
Texas A&M University Press, College Station 2012.
ISBN: 9781603447713
Hardcover, 544 pages, US$ 40.00.

Bruce Fleming is Professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, having previously held teaching positions at Vanderbilt University, the University of Freiburg, and the National University of Rwanda. His most recent books are Running is Life: Transcending the Crisis of Modernity (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America 2010) and Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide (Fairfax, Virginia: Potomac Books). In addition to his scholarly work, he has contributed opinion pieces to the New York Times, Wahington Post, Baltimore Sun, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

(c) 2013 The Berlin Review of Books.

“Inferno”. It’s the title of the first part of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. It’s the name of my favourite Jon Pertwee “Doctor Who” story. It’s also the name of Dan Brown’s new Robert Langdon novel, a book almost four years in the making, and a book I’ve been looking forward to.

The Harrowing of Hell, from a 14th-c. manuscript (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Looking forward to a Dan Brown novel is a curious psychological phenomenon. Brown has never gathered accolades with respect to clever prose or complex characters. Indeed, until the publication of his third book, “The Da Vinci Code”, a Dan Brown book was merely something you wouldn’t feel guilty reading in an airport lounge. However, that particular book, about the Jesus bloodline, made Brown an overnight literary sensation, for what seem now to be unlikely reasons. So, my nervous excitement about reading a new Dan Brown novel was borne out of curiosity. Would “Inferno” spark the zeitgeist like “The Da Vinci Code” had?

So, what’s it like? Well, it’s not as good as “Inferno”. Or even “Inferno”, but you’ve probably already guessed that.

“Inferno” is a tale about a symbologist (a profession only found in the works of pseudo-theorists and novelists) combating great evil by looking at art. Frankly, it sounds like a pleasant job, except that between moments of quiet reflection there are kidnappings, firefights and chase scenes.

Symbology: it’s not your standard academic gig. Then again, what is these days, in the age of interdisciplinarity? We’ll all be fighting shadowy cartels in the future. Indeed, given the rise of the modern, profit-making university, many of us already are.

“Inferno” has all the stock Dan Brown features. Characters with distinguishing but unnatural traits (pustulant sores for one, female baldness for another), a daring damsel (with exceptional talents and, crucially, the ability to fall instantly in love with the protagonist), a conspiratorial cartel with no ethical compass and, finally, a hero in Robert Langdon, an academic who is more obsessed by the suits he wears than the courses he teaches at Harvard. [1] It has twists-a-plenty in the final few pages and a “shocking conclusion” designed to make you, the reader, think.

“Inferno”, like all the Robert Langdon novels thus far, is about symbols. Symbols and the hidden messages they encode in the architecture and art around us. In previous adventures Langdon has interpreted the artistic landscapes of Rome, Paris, London, a small portion of Scotland (Rosslyn Chapel) and Washington, D.C. Now Langdon is in Florence (a step up from Washington, D.C., I feel) and cannot remember the last two days, is being pursued by someone on a motorbike and has just discovered that his jacket has been restyled without his permission. [2]

If you had read the previous books, you’d be forgiven for thinking Professor Langdon should take this as “business as usual”. After all, he’s been targeted for death by a Pope of the Catholic Church, hounded by the albino assassin of Opus Dei and been involved in a Freemasonic conspiracy to hide the existence of the Bible. Surely, he should be comfortable and confident in the face of danger by now?

But no. Langdon wears a perpetually perturbed face through this book, one that Brown does not hesitate to add adjectives to whenever it is grammatically possible (and, in a few cases, where it isn’t possible; rules of English be damned!). Yes, it’s true that he knows how to escape museums and he can recognise the engine of any car and the make of any gun, even at a distance, but he has to be led around by a faithful assistant if you want the plot to ever progress. Otherwise, all he does is stare at art and give potted history lessons.

“Inferno” could almost be considered as a “Your First Conspiracy Thriller” since it has all the necessary elements:

Mystery: The suggestion the international symbol for biological hazards really represents a three-headed devil and there are Malthusians out there who are going to stop the plague that is humanity.

Secret societies: The Consortium, who are working together with a rogue member of the Council for Foreign Relations, in opposition to the WHO.

Betrayal: The people Langdon thinks are on his side end up being tools of the villain and the people Langdon thinks are out to get him are, in fact, trying to rescue him.

Travel: The main character travels to exotic locations like Florence, Venice and Istanbul over the course of a single day. [3]

However, “Inferno” also features a few Dan Brown specials:

Weird science: There is a lot of talk about Transhumanism and super-evolved brains.

Symbols: The bon mot of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon novels; this time the focus is on the life of Dante Alighieri and his works,

Politics: By the end of the story, you are meant to come to a stunning realisation that will change the way you think about the human overpopulation problem.

So, how is “Inferno” as a novel? Well, it also has the standard set pieces you would expect: chase scenes, a succession of daring escapes and the obligatory chapter-long pieces of exposition. People swap sides and the sinister organisation, which is made out to be very powerful, also turns out to be comprised of very, very stupid people.

Dan Brown (photo by Phi|ip Sca|ia, released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License, Wikimedia)

As previously mentioned, Brown’s prose is, at best, mediocre and the characters are a mixed bag. Some of the incidental players are quite well-drawn; there’s a security guard in Florence who stands out, but the main characters are drawn hastily without much depth. The Director of the WHO cannot bear children, which seems to be the extent of her personality, whilst the villain, who dies seven pages into the novel, is merely pretentious and prone to asserting things in flashbacks. Still, when it comes to disservices to characters, it is Robert Langdon who seems to be the most under-utilised character in the story. His role in “Inferno” seems to merely that of a museum guide, whilst the love interest, Sienna… Well, she is both unbelievable as a character yet strong with respect to the role she plays in the narrative. She has a preposterous backstory which never quite goes anywhere but at least she takes charge of the situations she and Langdon get into. [4]

I’ve always maintained that the Robert Langdon novels started off as mediocre and have proceeded to only get worse. “Angels and Demons” was a decent thriller; it hurtles along and has a quite clever twist. “The Da Vinci Code” triggered something in its readers which propelled the book to the top of the charts and made it something you could respectably read outside of an airport lounge, despite the fact it was a messy, overly ambitious book. “The Lost Symbol” … Well, Robert Langdon spends almost sixty pages in a pagoda and the twist ending is that the Freemasons are hiding the existence of the Bible.

Yes, the Bible. I’m still bitter about the time I wasted reading that one.

“Inferno” is better than the “The Lost Symbol” (thus invalidating my claim that the books are getting worse) but not as good as “The Da Vinci Code” (which still allows me to claim that whatever peak Dan Brown might have achieved, it is behind him now). It lacks the cleverness of “Angels and Demons” or the interesting source material of “The Da Vinci Code”.

It does, however, have a central mystery more interesting than hiding the existence of the Bible.

“Inferno” is a novel about conspiracies, and as such it’s hard not to compare it to other novels that also feature conspiracies as crucial plot points. If “Inferno” were to be compared to Umberto Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum” or Dom DeLillo’s “Libra”, then it would not fare well. However, this would be an unfair comparison; Brown’s obvious and stated literary predecessor is Sydney Sheldon. Compared to Sheldon Brown is, at best, a hazy reflection of a competent writer, but even this comparison is unfair, at least to Sheldon. It took Brown five years to write a follow up to “The Da Vinci Code” and four years to write “Inferno”. Sheldon’s books may not have moved the literary world, but at the very least he could churn them out. Brown seems to mistake years and years of research, much of which could be easily cribbed from commonly available guidebooks and online encyclopedias, as a hallmark of the quality and importance of his work. Given the length of time he takes to write these books, it points to a certain lack rather than some imagined ability.

It’s hard to talk about “Inferno” without talking about the conspiratorial conceit which drives the plot. So, spoilers: “Inferno” is about a a vector-virus called “Inferno”, one which will render two thirds of the human population infertile [5]. “Inferno” the virus was created by a Malthusian anti-hero with the express purpose of saving humanity from the perils of overpopulation. The story of “Inferno” is the race to find the virus before it is released, only to find out that the virus is already global and cannot be stopped. [6]

View from the Campanile, Florence (photo by Scott Raymond, released under Wikimedia Creative Commons License)

As grand schemes goes, this conspiracy is both terrifying in extent but oddly pedestrian in execution. Nothing anyone does in the novel prevents the release of the virus because the virus was already airborne a full week before Langdon wakes up in Florence. The conclusion of the novel, the realisation that the chase has been for naught because the virus has already gone global, leads to a strange polemic by Robert Langdon, a professor of Art History (and Symbology), who both argues and subsequently persuades the director of the WHO that thinning out the human herd maybe isn’t that bad an idea after all.

With the exception of “Angels and Demons”, Brown has been dishing out morals at the end of each of his Robert Langdon stories. In “The Da Vinci Code” he wanted us to appreciate that all we know about Christianity is basically the result of political decisions by the Churches. In “The Lost Symbol” Brown set out to repudiate the claim he is anti-Christian by showing how important the Bible is. In “Inferno” he wants his readers to accept that overpopulation is a real problem and we need to fix it now.

This poses a bit of a problem: Robert Langdon is obviously Dan Brown’s “Mary Sue” complex, but in some ways Langdon is smarter than Brown. One of the really big problems I had with “The Lost Symbol” is that whilst Brown might well think the Bible is an important text, the Langdon character, always presented as the arch-skeptic, never convincingly buys the explanation that the Bible is the real treasure of the Freemasons.

The same problem crops up in “Inferno”. Brown is concerned with overpopulation. Langdon, when asked about it halfway through “Inferno” shrugs off the question, as you might think he would, but, by the end of the day (literally, since the novel takes place over a very short amount of time) he sides with the Malthusians, speaking not as symbology expert Robert Langdon but, rather, as the voice piece of Dan Brown the author.

This is not the only problem with “Inferno”, because the bigger problem is the question of why Langdon is even in the story in the first place. I can’t help but think that the symbology in this story is window-dressing which justifies this being a Robert Langdon novel, rather than some other Dan Brown story. In the previous Langdon novels the symbols drove the plot because there were encoded messages hidden in art that only Langdon could decipher and these messages, when decoded, challenged our view of history. This time… The symbols only drive the plot insofar as the villain/anti-hero has decided to hide his last message to humanity in a riddle. Langdon is a kind of passerby in this novel, rather than the driving force of it. As such Dan Brown has written a novel to give the character of Robert Langdon something to do rather than because there was a mystery his character was crucial to solving.

This does not bode well for the future of the Robert Langdon series.[7] Langdon is only interesting insofar as he gets the job done. In “Inferno” all he ends up doing is persuading the WHO to allow for a little light genocide.

Hardly the role of an art historian in today’s modern society, is it?

Dan Brown: Inferno.
Doubleday, New York 2013.
ISBN: 978-0385537858
Hardcover, 480 pages, US$29.95

Notes:

1. I do wonder what Harvard thinks of this fictional association with Robert Langdon? I was shocked to hear Cambridge taught Sociology, so I can’t imagine Harvard’s too pleased to be linked with the made-up discipline of “Symbology”, even if it is just the fever dreams of Dan Brown and his “Mary Sue” complex.

2. We’ve all been on benders like that, haven’t we? Langdon’s forgotten escapades even involved stealing the head of Dante. Which at least elevates it above most normal benders but still doesn’t quite beat Dave Lister’s epic drunken Monopoly game.

3. It’s almost as if he played the Assassins’ Creed games over the holidays and decided that Enzio and Robert are essentially the same person.

4.  In many ways Brown (with the exception of the Director of the WHO) tends to write more believable female characters than male ones.

5. Shades of the game “Mass Effect” here; given this and the locations cribbed from the “Assassins Creed” games, I can only surmise that Brown spent the last four years playing computer games under the guise of research.

6. Shades of the graphic novel “Watchmen”; Brown has also been reading comics.

7. Brown has threatened to write another twelve of these books; at one every three or four years, Langdon is going to be fighting evil societies well into his eighties.

-

Matthew Dentith is an epistemologist whose chief research interests are conspiracy theories and other types of alternative explanations/theories. He wrote his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Auckland and has a regular slot on the radio on the University of Auckland’s 95bFM Breakfast Show.

(c) 2013, The Berlin Review of Books.

Consideration of Luca’s life and work readily suggests a poetics of dislocation on several, intensifying levels. Dislocation, firstly, in the assumption of the pseudonym by the emerging Jewish-Romanian artist (born in 1913 in Bucharest), inhabiting (according to Dominique Carlat’s major 1998 study, Ghérasim Luca l’intempestif) the name of a deceased monk of whom it was noted, in a detail retained from the dead man’s obituary, that he was a ‘linguiste émérite’. This initial act of self-dislocation is amplified by the defining event of migration, with the movement into another language and its cultural scene as an inseparably traumatic and transformative one for the migrant writer. There is thus a Romanian-language as there is a French-language Ghérasim Luca, whose genetic links and underlying preoccupations are perceptible, and who yet require that they be distinguished from each other. A further dislocation is that of poetic practice in its confrontation of the historical forces compelling such migration and this is realised, ultimately, in the violence very dramatically done to language in Luca’s written and spoken performances, where the language itself is anatomised, estranged and realigned in the expression of foundational scenes or urges. All these dislocations make of this particular poet one who wrote, as it were, from ‘without’ – both external to the ambient order and in a state of permanent ‘want’.

Of course, Luca’s exemplar status within the theoretical discourse of Deleuze and Guattari’s littérature mineure, being the referenced writer who most directly becomes ‘bègue de la langue’, who would make language stammer, warrants in itself that unfamiliar readers in English take a serious look at his works. But the theoretical attractiveness of this position, in particular for how it contributes to a reconceptualisation of the marginality of the poetic, should not overshadow the range of Luca’s merits and inventions as a writer and performer of poetry. The Ghérasim Luca apparently revealed through littérature mineure, the poet of ‘Passionnément’, belies the coherent diversity of a broad body of practice. Indeed, as this late volume (La proie s’ombre was first published by José Corti in 1991, three years before Luca’s suicide at the age of 80) of poetic writings demonstrates, the by now critical commonplace linking ‘minority’ and ‘stammering’ requires reappraisal as only one part of a broader exploration of language’s contingencies and the opportunities for creative intervention which these offer.

Gherasim Luca (photo: Wikipedia Romania, released under GNU FDL licence)

Many of Luca’s works bathe in a carefully modulated and sustained sense of menace where language’s porosity, the compossibility of contrasting and overlapping meanings, heightens the lack of ease that is fundamental to the poet’s artistic subjectivity. Rather than a performance of unhousedness here, Luca is particularly attentive to effects of homophony, punning, indeterminacy, and the specific logical circuits and resonances made available by particular given words. Both French and English titles of the work allude to the self as an elusive object of poetic practice – and specifically to its capacity for reflexive action. Luca’s great gift is in the creative negotiation of this inner distance between the hunter and the hunted – something like a creative principle of dis-identification which keeps the scaffolding of identity in clear sight (thematically and performatively). Self-Shadowing Prey thus begins à l’orée d’un bois, the ‘edge of a forest’ which almost immediately becomes an openly ‘mental’ one (or, as Luca immediately puns with perfect homophony in French, a mantal (‘mantil’ in Caws’s version of Luca’s coinage, that is – mantis-like) space, where the mental is already the scene of ‘an old insect anguish / waking up as man’ (2)). The reflexive movement thus emerges not as the inner dynamic of a self homing in on its human core, but rather as the profoundly disquieting presence of an unspeakable biological substratum, troubling and repelling the circling efforts of language. The head is a globe, within whose tropics ‘the myth of a kind of utopian / jungle surges into the world’ (6). Both attracted and repelled by this primal scenario, consciousness is experienced as the sense of a lack among ‘those exiled from the center / and from the shade of a golden foliage’, exiled ‘between the walls of their somber cities’ (8). Yet the effort of poetic work is always from within the mental space – that is, compromised and bound up in the strictures and improbable connections of a given language. Thus, in ‘Towards the non-mental’, the centre-justified verse figures the mental process as an obsessive circling in and around the phenomenon of thought itself, a process sustained through language’s inexhaustible but insufficient resource of comparison. The movement is both violent and self-cancelling: ‘the thought [la pensée] turns upon itself  / with a static frenzy’ (27). Moreover, (the) thought is seen as ultimately irreducible to anything outside itself, the thinker-poet concluding with ‘a headache comparable / to the static frenzy of a thought / comparable to the incomparable’ (31).

The territory of Self-Shadowing Prey is thus the mental, Luca’s fundamental subject the idea that language-thought is distressingly confined therein. Yet this is leavened in parts of the volume by the recurrent interest of the poet for the I-Thou scenario. Protocols of exchange and reversal supplant the frenzied circling about the self in these instances, while retaining much of the latter activity’s uncanny attention to the secret affinities between words. In texts such a ‘Zero Gunshot’, an intimacy emerges as the elaboration of a kind of idiolect – not so much a fully private language as a relentless intensification of the potential of a number of words to generate multiple levels of association within a private logical circuit. The extent to which the active embrace of the accidents of language is key to the success of such texts is underlined by a translational gain in that piece, where a lascivious-sounding ‘ma langue glisse’ reappears as ‘my tongue slips’. The accident, the slip of the tongue, appears here as the highest form of design, faithful to Luca’s surrealist pedigree, but central also to what one might call a deconstructive intention at work across the full range of these texts.

Gherasim Luca: 'Vierge à la Colonne', collage. (Source: Wikipedia Romana, used under GNU FDL licence)

This exploitation of contingent associations and connections (language’s apparent accidents), rather than specific conventional or grammatical properties of the language in question, becomes the motor of poetic practice. Hence a paradox that is fundamental to Luca’s work: it highlights the contingency of language in a way that radically embeds the poem linguistically, one that goes beyond the standard untranslatability of poetic writing, in the system of its emergence. Translator Mary Ann Caws reflects in her introduction on the opportunities offered by Luca’s text for ‘an explosive meditation on the possibilities of surrealist translation in the broadest sense of the word’ (vi / vii) – while ascribing the attractiveness of her translation project to its ‘obvious impossibility’ (i). She is right on both counts, in that the project’s necessity and its insufficiency are fundamentally connected. A reading of the unimpeachable English versions, presented in the first half of the volume, will certainly convey a sense of the special mental landscape of the poet Luca as well as the intensity of the poetic voice, but can but hint at the infernally logical circuits of association proper to the anatomist of language, writing in (and around) French. The French-language original, reproduced in the second half of the volume, is thus a necessary shadow at the back of its translated self – like the prey of Luca’s title, it is the unbridgeable but passionate distance between it and its other self that makes their relation fascinating.

One feature of the writing in Self-Shadowing Prey which transcends largely intact the extreme difficulties of translation is the importance of pacing and varied repetition to the achievement of some of Luca’s troublingly memorable effects. The piece which conveys these effects most fully is the longest of those in the main part of the volume, and also the last. Titled ‘The Forest’, it is a work of almost brutal word play, arguably the most refractory to translation in the volume, but its power lies in a variably incantatory structure which lends hypnotic plausibility to Luca’s improbable yet elementary associations.

The volume concludes with an ‘Annex’ containing three further pieces. In ‘The Key’, remarking that ‘you don’t get out of the absurd / except through the absurd itself’ (82), the poet voices an anti-utopian critical position that is a good deal more frontal than in the preceding pieces, giving rise to a more overtly and conventionally political-sounding poetry. ‘Le Nerf de bœuf’ (the name of a kind of whip used for flogging, that is untranslateable when, as here, the necessary association with the nerve and the nervous are maintained in the title ‘Ox Nerve’) transposes the conflict scenario back into an imagined geopolitics of the body, culminating in the perspective of an apocalyptic viscerality (Luca’s text abounds in connotations of a nuclear age, but the Cold War is as much within as outside the subject). Finally, ‘Uninitialled Crimes’ [i.e. ‘rhymes’] concludes the volume with a bewildering inventory of –isms whose essential ‘homophony’ confirms their status as the verbiage of abstraction and generalisation, all under the insufficient genius of comparison so readily facilitated by language. These pieces are more in Luca’s declamatory vein, even if the underlying analysis is consistent with the implications of the earlier texts. Throughout, his dissection of language discloses telling contingencies even as it performs disquiet. It is this unceasing sense of troubled urgency that demands attention, and ensures this brave translation project is also an entirely welcome one.

Ghérasim Luca: Self-Shadowing Prey
Translated by Mary Ann Caws
Contra Mundum Press, New York 2012.
ISBN: 9780983697213.
Paperback, 248 pages, USD 18.00, GBP 14.00, EUR 12.00

Michael G. Kelly teaches French and Comparative Literature at the University of Limerick in Ireland. He is the author of Strands of Utopia. Spaces of Poetic Work in Twentieth-Century France (Legenda, 2008), and co-editor of Chantiers du poème. Prémisses et pratiques de la creation poétique moderne et contemporaine (Lang, 2013).

When first reading Campbell Jones’s Can the Market speak? I simply treated it by the author’s self-imposed standards: a philosophical enquiry into the market and “the structure of the ideas and fantasies that come with the category of the market” (7). If I had finished writing this book review before Cypriot bank heist and the run on banks it would have probably remained at the level of summarizing the book, and making some snarky comments on particular points I liked or didn’t like.

Protests outside the House of Representatives in Nicosia, Cyprus, in November 2012. (Photo: Tco03displays, source: Wikimedia, modified and used under Creative Commons ASA3.0 Unported License)

The euphemistic ‘Stability Levy’, which would steal up to 10 per cent from people’s savings, breathed new life into the wide-ranging critiques of the  market advanced by Campbell Jones. The question I asked myself was whether this short book could give meaning to this European Lehman Brothers moment  and the ensuing collapse of the market the following Monday morning. In his book, Campbell Jones argues that there is a long history of personifications of the market. Adversaries and apologists of the market alike have attributed human characteristics to non-human entities to display the powers of capitalism.

While on the surface Jones’s book deals with the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia in which a speaker communicates to the audience by speaking as another person or object, Can the Market Speak? starts to raise far more interesting questions in the context of the ‘Stability Levy’. Firstly, it teaches us an important lesson of how power, authority and control, in short, hegemony, manifests itself in advanced capitalist countries. Secondly, it raises issues in regard to Lukacs’s concept of ‘reification’ which explains how people’s relations are transformed by commodity-exchange. Thirdly, the title itself reflects the current balance of forces between labour and capital in our societies.

Hegemony and the market

Every Economics, Business and Political Science student will have been taught that the markets are ‘rational’, ‘robust’, and ‘efficient’. While the reality couldn’t be further from the truth, these tenets act as an ‘organizing principle’ of the current status quo, permeate every aspect of social life and legitimize the exploitation and destruction of humans and their environment in the name of ‘efficiency’. By solely focussing on the personification of the markets, Jones reveals a contradiction in capital’s attempt to paint the markets as behaving rationally: The supposed rational actors inside of the markets are guided by “the invisible hand of the market”. In other words, underlying the very rationality of the market one finds irrationality, superstition and quasi-religious metaphysical bullshit.

Jones’s psychoanalytic and theological critiques of the prosopopoeia of the markets disclose how hegemony manifests and legitimises itself. His psychoanalytic critique analyses power as ‘displaced’ and hidden. Rather than manifesting itself through the truncheon of a police officer, the prosopopoiea expresses individual actors’ interests i.e. capital’s interests. While psychoanalytic critique remains, or once again has become, fashionable it doesn’t assist us in understanding the real social relations that the market masks behind its veil of rationality and efficiency, nor does it help us to analyse what happens when these so-called hidden powers come out into the open when losses are socialised and profits are privatised .

His theological critique of the prosopopoeia of the market, on the other hand, elaborates on what the dominance of the markets tells us about the kind of society we inhabit. In doing so, Jones links the commonly-used phrase of ‘having faith in the market’ to Foucault and the Nietzschean notion that “God is dead” – and has been replaced by the will of the market. Akin to God, the market has its priests, prophets and messengers who are endowed with god-like authority and power.

It is not necessarily clear as to why one requires these critiques to understand the function of the personification and prosopopoeia of the market. In particular, they do not help us to understand how these ideological constructs work to win the masses to accept and consent to their daily misery and exploitation as I will go on to argue. This is strikingly true at a time when power remains anything but hidden, and steps out into the open with police truncheons beating Greek protesters and the IMF stealing Cypriots’ deposits. Neither can these critiques explain how the system veils exploitative social relations at the point of production, or how the high priests of finance that were speaking through the market could not foresee the great financial crash of 2008.

It’s reification, stupid!

Inasmuch as the prophets of high finance couldn’t foresee the 2008 financial crash, Jones cannot grasp the ideological problems of capitalism without an analysis of the fundamental structure of capitalist society. In History and Class Consciousness [HCC], Georg Lukacs argues that commodity exchange increasingly penetrates all aspects and expressions of life and reshapes them in a reified manner. In his own words, it is the “universal structuring principle” [HCC, 85] beneath a “mystifying veil of reification” [HCC, 86]. What does this mean for Jones’s work?

The high priests of finance are trapped by the confines of bourgeois thought and the very logic of the system which forces them to act in certain ways beyond their self-proclaimed ethics or values. Their sooth-saying is nothing but a mere reflection of the need for capital accumulation. Lukacs argues that both workers and capitalists exhibit an ever-increasing “lack of will” [HCC, 89]. Power might manifest itself through these modern-day soothsayers but it doesn’t tell you the whole story of the structure of ideas that comes with the market.

Further, Jones analyses how human relationships are transformed by commodity-exchange permeating all aspects of society. His analysis remains limited in its achievements yet raises pertinent questions. The mysterious nature of the commodity means that relations between people take on the character of “a thing”, acquiring what Lukacs calls “phantom objectivitity”, concealing “every trace of its fundamental nature” [HCC, 83]. In other words, commodity relations and the hegemony of the market dehumanise and turn all human functions into a commodity itself totally opposed to people’s own personalities. By applying this analysis we come to understand that Jones mistakes the effect for its cause. The personification of the market and self-objectification of humans are the effect of the system’s guiding principle of commodity-exchange. To be more concise, the personification of the market is a symptom of a society ruled by commodity-exchange and the accumulation of capital.

In such a society ‘the consumer’ as the subject replaces the worker. By accepting this as a fait accompli Jones cannot answer the question where counter-hegemonic power could manifest itself, namely, at the point of production which contains within it “in concentrated form the whole structure of capitalist society” [HCC, 90].

Can zombies learn to speak?

Critics of capitalism and the market have always evoked images of monsters, zombies and vampires to describe the dehumanising effects of the system. While Karl Marx labelled capitalism “vampire-like”, Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi called Goldman Sachs “giant vampire squids”. The Canadian Marxist David McNally even published a dense 300-pager called Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism. Drawing on popular films and culture McNally observes that zombies have no speech. This is important in regard to Jones’s book.

Financial markets: Can they speak? (Photo: Katrina Tuliao, Source: Wikimedia, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License)

In Shelley’s Frankenstein’s Monster, the monster learns how to read revolutionary books and also learns how to speak. In a more recent zombie movies – The People under the Stairs,  – the zombies have had their tongues cut out by a rich property developer and never learn to  to speak – even at the point where they rebel. This film sums up precisely what Campbell Jones argues when he says that capitalism renders the vast majority of people voiceless. But it also can tell us something more fundamental about the current balance of forces between capital and labour.

Despite global mass movements challenging the dominance of the market zombies still haven’t learnt to speak. This is true on two accounts: Firstly, even the most radical thinkers of our day and age remain trapped within the confines of the market. Whether they advocate ‘market socialism’ such as Seth Ackerman in Jacobin magazine or simply blame the actors inside of the market – ‘giant vampire squids’ and ‘fat cats’ – they fail to blame the system as a whole. Much of today’s anti-capitalist critique seeks cosmetic changes to a dehumanising system instead of aiming to construct alternative institutions and parties which go beyond the market and at the same time advocate its destruction.

This is crucial given the weakness of trade unions and social democratic parties in challenging the market. Traditional social democracy has silenced workers by speaking on their behalf in parliament. Even those trade unions fighting austerity measures in their respective countries are mediating between labour and capital. A minor but quite telling tactic of these unions has been to give out vuvuzelas, whistles and other gimmicks to their members so to drown out rank-and-file members’ far more radical demands in a racket of distorted noises. In many ways, these examples chime with Campbell Jones conclusion that the zombies remain voiceless yet those hiding behind the markets can’t hide any longer.

In conclusion, Campbell Jones work raises a number of pertinent questions in regard to concepts such as hegemony, reification and the balance of forces between labour and capital. His book might not have all the answers to those questions but it can allow the kind of discussions which might arrive at them. Having had our tongues cut out by property developers and the priests of high finance, we will need books like Can the Market Speak? that believe in zombies’ ability to speak.

Campbell Jones: Can the Market Speak?
Zero Books, London 2013.
ISBN: 978-1-84694-537-3
Paperback, 81 pages, US$11.95/GBP7.99

Mark Bergfeld  lives in London, UK. He was a spokesperson for the 2010 UK student movement and is currently reading for a PhD in Online Networks and Political Organisation. He tweets @mdbergfeld and his published writings can be found at http://mdbergfeld.wordpress.com.

(c) 2013 by The Berlin Review of Books.

by András Nagy

The name is already a “mask”, a metaphorical incognito and a personal statement, the composition of Szent, “holy” (sacred, saint), and of kút, “fountain” (source of water, well), with archaic orthography (“th” at the end instead of a simple “t”) in Hungarian and with a reference to noble origins (the “y” instead of a common “i”). The somewhat grand pen-name was to be a substitute for the family’s German-sounding name Pfisterer (hard to pronounce in Hungarian due to the two consonants in the beginning), while its meaning had lost its concrete reference to its ancestral identity, which was not of noble origin either. This statement however created a very meaningful identity from the very first steps of the author Miklós Szentkuthy, one of the greatest in Hungarian literature and certainly one of the most original, most challenging, and most productive writers of the 20^th century, with many aspects still to understand, to reveal, and to come to terms with, both in Hungary and beyond.

Relatively or absolutely “small” nations — like Hungary — can and do produce great works of art that make significant contributions to the self-esteem of the relevant nations, in aesthetic and spiritual dimensions, often opposing the turbulence of national history. This may also serve as “secret” knowledge about the real wealth of a nation deprived of material wealth. It may be even more important in those countries that were denied freedom and independence for a long time in history, thus their accumulated political frustration could have been compensated for in more abstract or more sophisticated ways. Szentkuthy’s magnificent oeuvre is a perfect example of a genius living through the most difficult and often highly tormenting historical times of the 20^th century yet remaining untouched by the different totalitarianisms, by wars, and by revolutions; and it is his oeuvre which emphasizes the importance of ideas, values, and achievements which are far beyond everyday crises and conflicts, whether they be social, political, or economic. It recalls the archaic and paradoxical Epicurean wisdom that “they” can kill him but can’t really cause any serious harm to him.

The “secret” knowledge of national greatness is particularly true for Hungarian literature, as it is a basic ingredient of the national identity and self-consciousness (contributing greatly to national pride of the “Magyar” people), while it is nearly impossible to “communicate” it to those living outside its linguistic borders. The language is ethnically isolated, not Indo-European in its origin, hard to translate faithfully to any other language, however extremely fit for artistic use. All these difficulties become nearly “visible” in Szentkuthy’s texts, for in his oeuvre language includes everything, even if narration, metaphors, description, reflection and all possible (and translatable) poetic and rhetorical categories are substantial in his novels, yet the real medium is Szentkuthy’s language, used and paraphrased in an originally poetic way, which is deeply rooted in his knowledge and in his experience of the philosophy of language, while applied with a very personal and playful emphasis of artistic communication.

Miklós Szentkuthy, in his library/study, during the recording of 'Frivolities and Confessions', 1983. Photo Edit Molnár, with kind permission of the Fondation Miklós Szentkuthy (c).

Thus Szentkuthy’s literary individuality is created and presented by his characteristic use of Hungarian, deeply rooted in his own history, both in the given (inherited) and in the chosen (willfully obtained). He was born into a family in which significant ancestors on the father’s side already paved the way toward artistic sensitivity, mainly in the world of theater; that later also shaped Szentkuthy’s rhetorical patterns and helped in per-forming his texts, which sometimes were composed as “staging” different characters, conflicts, ideas, with their typical voice, role, influence. His artistic identity beyond writing was often manifested by theatrical features; once, for example, while dressed in a cardinal’s robe, Szentkuthy blessed Budapest, the sinful city; while in social situations, when arguing, talking, and entertaining friends, he was a remarkable master of performance. These ancestors were followed by Pfisterers who represented a typical Central European bourgeois life, based on modest professions that excluded any kind of “extravagance”, art included. In the case of Szentkuthy’s father, this resulted in the lack of appreciation of literature in general, as practically useless and uncertain for making a living. However, once his son showed signs of his enormous talent, this paternal rejection turned into an absolute devotion to the young Pfisterer’s ideas, wills, and choices, even if contradicting the ones the father shared. On the mother’s side, the Jewish historical and spiritual tradition was transmitted probably on a more subtle and suppressed way than the father’s inherited identity, influenced by the mentality of a lower middle class ancestry, thus religious and “racial” differences were further deepened by a social abyss. Finally, Mrs. Pfisterer represented the nearly maniacal “Victorian” avoidance and negation of anything sensual, erotic, thus absolutely excluding sexuality. Both parents were “madly” and unconditionally loved by their only son, prodigious in the respects mentioned above, and the offspring’s love accompanied his elders far beyond their presence in this world.

The schism between devotion to and negation of the family’s values, the ambiguity of unconditional love for the parents versus unconditional rejection of their mentality and preferences, created a tension that proved to be highly inspiring for the young writer, who soon devoted himself mainly to art, literature, and aesthetic joys; jointly and sometimes un-separately with his sensual “intoxication”, that included a constant and insatiable longing for pleasure, should it be carnal, aesthetic, physical, or spiritual. It originated in his extreme sensitivity, expressed also in Szentkuthy’s overwhelming eroticism, yet in the archaic sense of the world: Eros being the ultimate driving force for all that moves in nature, as those are being driven by pure desire. This schism soon concluded in his works with the simultaneous presence of polar opposites, in the constant oscillation of extremes, a dynamic switching between the two mutually excluding Weltanschauungen. All that became determinant for the author in his works to follow, in all levels of his production, from composing metaphors to building characters, from forming sentences to drawing conclusions, providing one of the most typical features of Szentkuthy’s oeuvre.

The sacred connotations of the pen name referred to the author’s chosen identity concerning both the nation (Hungarian) and the religion (Catholicism) that pre-determined the texts flowing from the “holy fountain”. The ethnic and linguistic identity was expressed by the use of the language, extremely “flexible” on the one hand, yet focusing on the difficulties of the messages to communicate, resulting in a distinct and highly recognizable style of the author. The “holy” mandate and the erotic motivation were permanently confronted in the young mind by all the challenges of life, serving as a permanent source of temptations, usually successful, thus concluding in failures and in sins that inversely demonstrate the power of pure and unconditional faith. All in this case reveals the somewhat encyclopedic approach of the author who, by creating an immense body of texts was consciously focusing on the reinvention of a Catalogus rerum, an inventory of all things. The emphasis on the fullness and the “Gargantuan” drive behind embracing totality was modeled more on medieval monks and on patristic and scholastic thinkers (hermits, heretics, saints, church bureaucrats, etc. — all familiar to Szentkuthy and often presented in his novels) than on the encyclopedia-champions of the Enlightenment, as for the author unconditional faith was needed, expressed also by daily rituals and supported by theological and philosophical revelations. Szentkuthy was one of the few great religious authors of the 20^th century of striking originality, while his sincere and ardent Catholic belief included attending ceremonies as well as being absorbed in solitary prayer, obtaining contemporary theological and philosophical knowledge to face the immense contradictions of the contemporary world. Augustine and Pascal, Heidegger and Nietzsche, medieval mystics and contemporary physics contributed to the forming of Szentkuthy’s religious Weltanschauung, which did not exclude closely observed dogmas and the continuous study of the Bible, accompanied by the biography of saints — but also demanded regularly committing sins of different types, so as to repent afterwards and to have first-hand familiarity with the challenges and torments of the unconditional faith of a fallible human.

This dynamics of the heavenly and of the infernal often served for Szentkuthy as synopses for novels as well as for individual chapters, for shaping characters presented and for episodes to demonstrate, influencing metaphors, images, aphorisms — providing a complexly epic interpretation of his very own experiences, doubts, and revelations. His extensive knowledge and his intense religious belief together with his very special angle of observing the world, however, seemed inadequate in comparison to the inherited conventions of late 19^th-century/early 20^th-century Hungarian novel-writing, which was still dominated by realism and by psychology, even if more and more often questioned. While using a narrative structure for the novel was central for the young Szentkuthy, its dominance seemed to be somewhat dated when it came to writing about his experiences and his ideas, not to mention his overflowing erudition of story-telling, offering dozens of epical directions, angles, and scenarios, all leading to the same conclusion simultaneously. The complexity of the composition together with doubts about the linear and causal logic of narration, the questioning of the exclusive role of psychology, culminated in Szentkuthy’s radical renewal of the epic form, as expressed masterfully in his first break-through novel, Prae. The landmark book, published in 1934 (at the author’s own expense, or rather at his father’s) was preceded by shorter and less ambitious works of the adolescent writer (published mainly posthumously). These texts already revealed the author’s originality and his artistic power, together with the search for a method of writing which, in its extensity and dynamism recalled a historical type of identification, expressed in the title of the novel written when Szentkuthy was a teenager, Robert the Baroque. The time of his shaken and then renewed Catholic faith, the recreated totality of the world in the Baroque “passion”, with the universe permanently in motion described by overflowing metaphors, adjectives, events, and references remained characteristic of Szentkuthy’s prose in the decades to come.

Prae was incomparable, unparalleled, and unprecedented in Hungarian literature, and probably beyond. The inspiration for writing the novel came on a trip the Pfisterers, Sr. and Jr., took together in 1928 and had a fundamental impact on the author’s imagination, creativity, and writing method for years to come. Prae took the form of a monologue mainly, in thousands of pages, playing with voices, times, characters, identities, and events, enough for dozens of novels, in a text flowing without any interruption (avoiding any typographical or “formal” structure as well), reshaping the form and the very meaning of the novel for the 20th century. European culture and history was infiltrated through the mind of a highly cultured and visionary youth, applying masks as characters and as incognitos, focusing on the dual character of mind and body, of soul and flesh, of desire and fulfillment. The novel served also as an immense “inventory” of the intellectual sensitivity of the young Szentkuthy, filtered through an extensive knowledge obtained by every possible book he could lay his hands on and through the no less enormous amount of sensual experiences he had had by that time. The novel has no traditional narration, no psychologically motivated characters, and applies the most incredible settings, which seemed to be “monstrous” to some of the critics and to many readers as well, challenging the dogmas and conventions of prose-writing, creating a new “canon” for himself. Even if the book did not sell and remained unread for years to come, few contemporaries of the author revealed the new horizons that were opened up for the epic forms after the era of realism. Prae was a contemporary of Musil’s The Man without Qualities, not much “younger” than Joyce’s Ulysses (to be translated later by Szentkuthy himself), and it came on the heels of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time published less than two decades before. The Hungarian author could have been inspired by the renewal of the novel as demonstrated by his European contemporaries, yet his version of redefining epics, prose, and narration was different from the aforementioned writers. Easy to read and yet profound in its conclusions, Prae overflows with stories, ideas, and dialogues yet is strictly and masterfully composed, playing with the different layers of history, art, and culture, just as with various traditions of literature — despite appearing chaotic, it remains homogeneous as an entity. It is an early chef d’oeuvre while being “only” a draft for the “real” novel to be written afterwards – as indicated by the title Prae.

It is part of the ill fate of Hungarian literature rooted in the artistic and intellectual traditions of Central Europe that Szentkuthy’s novel remained substantially unabsorbed in its time, unappreciated, and sometimes ridiculed,  even if the best minds and the most sophisticated literary critics understood the magnitude of the undertaking and the importance of the originality of the novel. The lack of substantial coming to terms with Prae has a lot to do with the Magyar difficulties of collective identification, with the problems of national and literary self-consciousness, with the hopeless making up for lost historical time — and with many more factors that determined the fate of the novel and of its author in a country where literature was considered more than just one form of art. Szentkuthy fully understood the ambiguous critical responses, together with the basic indifference of the intellectuals, which was often emphasized by the sharp and often vitriolic criticism of colleagues, and even of friends. He had to realize that the traditions of the novel in Hungary would strongly resist his efforts to change the genre, that his renewal of the language, his method of composition, and the whole idea of the novel as redefined by him became more of an isolated episode than a new trend that others would observe and perhaps follow. It must have been a bitter pill to swallow, particularly for an ambitious and talented youngster who had sacrificed so much of his time and energy for the enormous undertaking. When Prae was published for the second time, nearly half a century later and finally appreciated by a larger audience (due in part to slight modification in the book’s composition, creating typographical metamorphoses in the text for easing its reception), it was already too late, both for the author and for the public, even if modern and postmodern novels were modeled on the “monstrous” masterpiece and were inspired both by the creation of Prae and by the understanding of its historic “failure”.

The promised and proposed future that was pr(a)e-pared by the young author had to take a different direction then, so in subsequent years Szentkuthy broke up his imagined greater composition of a novel into smaller pieces, as if to offer the audience, in a piecemeal fashion, the work that was too much to stomach in one go. The series of novels were composed as chapters for a larger body of text to be written consecutively, however obviously differing in their contextual meaning, as the larger opus was based on smaller segments created as autonomous entities. The vision of the author, together with his belief in the larger epic forms, took the shape of a Breviary belonging to the legendary St. Orpheus, unknown to the Catholic tradition yet clearly and exactly referring to the recreated identity of the author. Work on this project was interrupted for decades and was only completed by the older Szentkuthy.

The inspiration for writing The Breviary of St. Orpheus arrived again when travelling yet, strangely enough, it came from the direction of music and the visual arts, proving the complex and thorough sensitivity of the writer. It happened during a trip to Italy when Szentkuthy suddenly understood Greco’s technique of painting and his method of “compressing” visions, ideas, and narrative structure into one image, while the religious crisis expressed in the pictures culminated also in breaking with the conventions of his artistic contemporaries. The title was borrowed from Monteverdi’s Orfeo, for the composer was a hero of Szentkuthy’s novel and his famous musical piece was masterfully described in it. The protagonist Orpheus, the mythical poet and symbol of love and lyrics, did and could communicate with the whole world around him for he was both human and superhuman; he could even communicate with plants and animals, was loved by the gods, and could finally defeat death. The symbol of the artist later became a metaphorical image for Christ himself, as someone entering the underworld and returning from it, representing the “Good Pastor”, bringing His divine word as songs to this world. The beginning of the author’s name is identical with that of the title (Szentkuty: Szent Orfeusz) and indicates the autobiographical inspiration of the novel, the shaping and modifying this self-portrait, expressing also how the young writer was facing crucial issues of his life and of his time. However, both the composition and the poetic and rhetorical patterns were somewhat “domesticated” in this text as compared with Prae, for each segment included narrative histories and thoroughly described conflicts of different characters, building more upon the traditions of novel-writing than before. Episodes were unfolding based on a narrative structure, even if often on symbolic ones representing great saints and sinners, like the story of Casanova and of 17^th- 18^th-century Venice. The hagiography of different popes, the emphatic description of heretics and of inquisitors, determined the horizon of the novel, which was set mainly but not exclusively in history, seen from the contemporary world, and the author regularly and willfully (yet somewhat anachronistically) recalled many requisites and approaches of modern civilization.

History was not “only” the setting but also the context of the creation of the novel, and political events would soon interrupt Szentkuthy’s ambitious and outstanding undertaking for no less than 30 years. The flow of the segments of the projected novel first stops temporarily in 1942, then is postponed again and again, not to be continued until 1972. It is hard to imagine more active and more productive years for a writer than those of the three decades spent without the writing of the imagined opus magnum, which, however, he always kept in mind. The fatal interruption did not mean silence in any sense, “only” the suspension of the Breviary and a preference for different forms, as dictated by time and conditions. Szentkuthy started to write shorter epic pieces and composed studies and essays; later, translations were included in his oeuvre and when novels finally started to emerge again, they were more official commissions than self-conceived works. As is obvious from the years mentioned (1942-1972), history played the lead in determining the very conditions of writing, and sometimes even those of surviving. First Hungary’s pre-fascist cultural and spiritual context created unfavorable conditions for the young and radical writer who was even sued by the state prosecutor for defamation of religion and for pornography. Later the approaching war became devastating and hard to survive, while the Soviet liberation was utterly revealing and hardly less dangerous than the German occupationother. After some hopeful and productive years (1945-1948), the Stalinist dictatorship created unfavorable conditions for Szentkuthy, as the official cultural policy rejected the Weltanschauung and the style of the religious and bourgeois writer,  as a result of which his works were banned. When in 1949 the book Europa Minor was published, Szentkuthy clearly referred to a new stage in history that brought the openness of a cultural tradition to a bitter end. Szentkuthy’s character helped him not only to survive the most tormenting times but to keep his integrity, his intellect, his morality, and his sense of humor, not being tempted by any of the totalitarianisms or intoxicated by their ideologies, nor destroyed by them. He hardly touched directly upon current historical or political issues, but indirectly dealt with them in a critical fashion — an oblique reading of his novels reveals his ideas, experiences, and fears of the 20^th century, with a great amount of criticism in an indirect manner and in a context that included metaphysics, theology, and the philosophy of history.

Besides his intellect and his character, an emotional shelter was also needed to survive the difficult years, and it was provided by his life-long love turned into a marriage at quite an early age. However, this bond “arranged in Heaven” did not exclude his constant need for new, inspiring, and controversial adventures on Earth, ranging from wonderful conquests  to the most vulgar services of prostitutes. It was a way of compensating for a fatally broken self-esteem – “another flower to the grave of the cross-eyed kid” as he reminisced about his many successful affairs once  –  yet there was the overwhelming drive  to both break the commandments as often as possible in order to repent and, thereby, to fight against the anti-sensual legacy of the beloved and betrayed Mother, defeating her maniacal shyness and chastity.

Miklós Szentkuthy, age 26, photographed in 1934, the year of the first publication of 'Prae'. Photo with kind permission of the Fondation Miklós Szentkuthy (c).

It is hard to know who was the real Szentkuthy: the devoted husband or the insatiable seducer. Probably both. The mask in general is an important part of the identity of the personality; paradoxically it may be even a synonym for it as the use of the borrowed “face” tells more of the person applying it than the features he is born with. The experience with identities was regularly developed into novels applying different protagonists, characters, and roles, yet Szentkuthy had to realize in the years to come that daily life must also be lived in different masks. A mask was needed to hide those features of his very self that were rejected by the more and more intolerant authorities that directly and indirectly attempted and partly infiltrated his life and even his works. However, with Szentkuthy’s intellect and unlimited free spirit, the attempts to control him regularly failed as he was happily using different incognitos and roles, while keeping deeply hidden what was behind the masks. These secrets were carefully registered and kept in a “giant-diary” as he liked to call it, hundreds of thousands of pages of the most authentic chronicle from his early age until almost to his death. It included significant entries for each day, obviously touching upon the most personal and the most abstract issues, being both extremely vulgar and extremely subtle, as well as ideas and recollections of people and events he came across, likely matching the same high artistic level and aesthetic quality as the rest of his work. Even if it will not be revealed still for many years to come, it is an important part, if not the most important one of the author’s oeuvre. Szentkuthy suggested in an interview that his whole oeuvre could be defined, described, and interpreted as a “giant-diary”, modeled on the textual corpus of Saint-Simon and of Montaigne. Stories, novels, studies, essays, etc. may turn out to have a wholly different meaning once read in the  larger context. It is easy to imagine then that once the diaries will be opened – this will occur for the first time in 2013 – readers will have to reinterpret all of Szentkuthy’s writings in a radically new way. Surprises, and even revelations, of literary history are to be expected in the years to come.

The diary’s ultimate frankness and uncontrolled sincerity probably assisted Szentkuthy greatly in accepting the sometimes strange roles he was offered, as he could be sure that his integrity remained untouched due to the psychological process of writing the diary day to day (recalling also the situation of confession). This helped him maintain his ardent belief that once new generations would come they would be able to reveal and to wholly understand what happened to him and to his writings. His focus on the next generations could well have been the conclusion of his praxis and devotion as a teacher, both a mask to wear for leading a “bourgeois” life (once he could not live from his writings), and also a happily accepted duty he spent many years of his life with. “Fityó”, as he was nicknamed by his students (importantly enough making fun of his family name Pfisterer [pronounced Fisterer] and not on the writer’s chosen identity), was a legendary teacher, a charismatic personality and an often capricious man to work with, a “larger than life” figure not only in virtue of his tall figure, but more importantly, in virtue of his enormous intellectual capacity and rhetorical skills, which seemed to be wasted on a world of undisciplined adolescents. Yet he could, on occasion, save important moments to be able to write, which might happen in a pub close to the school, in his studio, or in the lovers’ rescues.

Many years later Szentkuthy characterized his literary output of the difficult post-war years as a “self-portrait in masks” and a paradoxical way of expressing the unchangeable features of the personality in the process of permanent metamorphoses. Though the definition refers to novels written in a different tone from his early masterpiece, the created identities clearly reflect his outlook. Szentkuthy’s “voice” can also be clearly identified in those literary works he was translating, partly as a way of making a living and also of being present in the literary life, through masterpieces that were also windows to a continent that was not always “closed off”. Swift, Dickens, Twain, Joyce, and many other – mainly Anglo-Saxon – authors were interpreted by Szentkuthy in those years when his own works were not allowed into print. Translation however was never an “applied art” for him, but another creative way of playing with identities. The challenges for the translator were often enormous, like in translating Ulysses many years later, which practically became a form of co-authorship with the great Irish writer, whose novel was obviously untranslatable word by word. Thus, an emphatic and creative re-writing was needed to give back to Hungarian the sense of the radically new prose born close to Szentkuthy’s early masterpiece.

 Yet there is another mask that changed and influenced the writer’s and translator’s creativity: that of the essays and studies, sometimes inseparable from the fiction-writer’s work and often reflecting the translator’s challenges. Szentkuthy sometimes experimented with different ideas; in other cases he was commenting on and analyzing works of art, whether they be visual, musical, or literary. Starting already at a young age (for example composing an original and thought-provoking thesis on Ben Johnson after graduation), Szentkuthy wrote landmark studies throughout his life, dealing with contemporary issues “masked” as works of art, with trends and traditions to come to terms with, being very concrete and yet framing the argumentation by philosophy, theology, and/or the social sciences. Szentkuthy’s remarkable intellectual capacity, together with the drive to read as much as possible of contemporary literature, of art, of history, of philosophy, of theology and of different sciences resulted in a series of masterfully composed and passionately written theoretical treatises. All these reflect the style and eloquence of a writer, yet with the metaphysical depth of a great thinker. Accidental ideas and editorial assignments together with research conducted and summarized for his novels revealed the intellectual capacity of a writer, in the archaic sense of the word, for whom a real Catalogus rerum was the focus, behind the varying phenomena of existence.

Facing all challenges and temptations of his time, the writer’s drive was the strongest in Szentkuthy’s life, as the short segments that have since become available from the “giant-diary” suggest. His whole life was serving “only” the writer’s needs and passions, while experiences and influences supported “only” the forming of the artist’s identity. The hundreds of thousands of pages may reveal that the entire chronicle of a long and rich life was nothing else but raw material for the author. This became visible when the historical pressure somewhat eased following the 1956 revolution, when finally Stalinism was over and over time the terror became somewhat milder. At least one of the masks could have been removed then, so professor “Fityó” could ask for retirement. At the age of 50, while still full of energy and of accumulated strength to continue his authorship, Szentkuthy could finally dedicate all his capacity and time to further develop and to conclude all that he had started 25 years ago, hoping with good reasons that the different detours and literary role-playings might serve the author in him. The time hadn’t arrived yet to further compose the interrupted Breviary; however, in various ways the novels started to flow again. These books were auto-portraits also, in the forms of masks that finally could be published by the state-controlled publishing houses and thus it was possible to have some critical reactions and readers’ responses, which were important even for the most self-assured writer. The gigantic figures Szentkuthy would use as a template for his masks were mainly artists like Dürer, Haydn, Mozart, Goethe, Händel, and that turbulent ex-monk of the order of St. Augustine, Martin Luther. while popular and easy to read, these texts contained many elements of the artistic achievements of Szentkuthy’s novels produced by that time, all of which took the form of the so-called “artist biography”, and also paved the way for the genius’ final masterpieces, which concluded his authorship in the 1970s.

When the author was well over sixty, the artistic tolerance that partially characterized Hungary’s “soft dictatorship” opened the way for Szentkuthy not only to rejuvenate his creativity, but finally to throw away the masks he was forced to wear. While there remained enough of what he willfully created, the literary tradition he once established also became visible through a new generation of writers who were indirectly influenced by him through his Hungarian translations and publications of novels that broke with the novel-writing traditions the same way he had many years ago. Time thus “opened up” and the young Szentkuthy’s works were published, read, and discussed together with the texts of the old one, who could finally turn back to his most important and most ambitious project, the Breviary of St. Orpheus, no longer with any restrictions, and with no concerns blocking his inspiration or the very process of creation. His imagination, his sense of composition, the expressivity of his language and immense erudition remained the same as before, as it became obvious when one novel after the other was written, presenting the author’s all-encompassing vision of the world as he had found it and as he left it. Virtuosity and discipline, incorporation of contemporary novel-writing techniques and the polemical relationship with the conventions of prose shaped the masterfully written books that finally found their way to timely publication and provoked vivid and appreciative responses from readers, critics, and colleagues.

The time of “harvesting” thus overlapped with the rediscovery of the early phase of Szentkuthy’s authorship in which the “torso” of the greatest Hungarian modern novel – Prae – reemerged from the depths of the literary-historical memory and confronted the representatives of the renewal of novel-writing traditions with a glimpse of the opportunities that had been missed in Hungarian literature many decades ago. This was also the time when Szentkuthy’s presence and authority was of major importance for literary historians, writers, and intellectuals, thus interviews and radio and television programs regularly featured him, often  themselves resulting in books — since the author’s eloquence resulted in texts that were, though improvised, nonetheless ready to go to print. The later series of his books, when viewed as part of the collected works, clearly showed the magnitude of Szentkuthy’s oeuvre. At the same time, it shows the enormous potential which had emerged in Prae, yet which was not further developed the way it could have been.

However this may not be the last word. Szentkuthy’s masks will not be wholly removed until the giant diary is opened this year and we are confronted with the personality’s naked face. Or, we may be involved in another masquerade – could it be an eternal one in which life and death no longer matter, and to which Szentkuthy invites us along as participants?

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Born in 1956, András Nagy studied humanities at the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, where he later became a research assistant at the University, obtaining a university doctorate on Kierkegaard, based on a research project in collaboration with the Hungarian Academy of Science. He subsequently started the Kierkegaard Cabinet, an independent research centre hosted at ELTE.  His first volume of fiction was pulished while still a student, and has since been followed by several books, including essays and scholarly contributions. He has also worked as a scriptwriter for film and theatre productions. In 1998, he was elected President of the Hungarian Centre of the International Theatre Institute (ITI); later, from 2004 until 2010, he was the Director of the Hungarian Theater Museum and Institute. He currently teaches as an Associate Professor in the Theatre Studies Department at the University of Veszprém, and lives in Leányfalu (near Budapest), with his wife and children.

(c) 2013 by The Berlin Review of Books.

Do you participate? If not, why not? You should get involved, make a contribution, let them know what you think. Be part of something! It’ll be collaborative and democratic. And fun, too!

The demand to participate is now an everyday experience. Television and radio shows endlessly plead, tell us your views, while online articles are trailed by a snaking list of readers’ comments. Politicians affirm their commitment to ‘public consultation’ and test each idea within specially-designed focus groups. Cultural institutions must offer interactive displays, issue evaluation forms and carefully monitor attendance figures. Academic projects are praised for the number of partners involved, the voices heard, the collaborations undertaken. Group work and class discussion have become the foundations of teaching practice. Underpinning these diverse trends is the sense that participation, in and of itself, is a positive thing – regardless of the end result. Taking part is what counts. Participation is both the aim and the justification; passivity must be renounced; to be a spectator is no longer enough.

That a society governed by the imperative to participate, and constantly buzzing with opportunities to socialize, should lead to boredom and isolation was of great concern to David Foster Wallace. In The Pale King, posthumously published in 2011, he wrote: “This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”[1] Characteristically, Wallace offers no straightforward answers as to what this “something else” might be. Yet, in the midst of relentless calls to participate, his emphasis on dullness, on the ways we try to distract ourselves and on the terrors we might be escaping feels radical. Wallace’s suspicion about the ‘information society’ also offers a useful framework when considering the broader desire for participation today: no one really believes that all these activities are about encouraging people to work together, about hearing diverse voices or strengthening social bonds. Why, then, do so many people want to take part? Why do they want so many others to join them? Something else, perhaps way down, is going on here.

Installation by Gerwald Rockenschaub, Documenta 12, Kassel 2007 (Photo: David Gomez Fontanilles, Source: Wikimedia Commons CC Attribn Share Alike 3.0 Unported License)

Despite Wallace’s own status in contemporary culture, which continues to rise five years after his death, literature is perhaps the wrong place to look for insights into the participation imperative. After all, Simon Critchley is not the only theorist to claim that the novel is now an “utterly marginal phenomenon.”[2] Art, Critchley argues, is where it’s at: “It is simply a fact that contemporary art has become the central placeholder for the articulation of cultural meanings – good, bad, or indifferent.” Sure enough, the notion of participation is at the heart of contemporary artistic practice and theory. Take, for instance, Francis Alÿs’s When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), in which the Belgian artist recruited 500 Peruvians to shift a 1,600-foot sand dune by four inches; or Tino Sehgal’s work, structured around conversations and encounters to which visitors themselves must contribute. For The Battle of Orgreave (2001), Jeremy Deller brought together ex-miners, local residents and historical re-enactment societies to re-stage a confrontation between miners and the police that first took place in 1984; while, in 2008, visitors to the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern were subject to an unannounced demonstration of police control techniques orchestrated by Tania Bruguera, in a piece entitled Tatlin’s Whisper #5. In all these cases, as well as in countless other works produced around the globe in the last three decades, the creation of a physical art object has been superseded by a process or performance emphasising participation. The collaborative models these works entail suggest broader social and political possibilities, but they are often coated in the uncritical and hyperbolic language of the art world – a discourse that again asserts an unthinking affirmation of participation. What does it mean, though, to participate in an artwork? Who is the author of these works? Are they innately superior to those created by a single person alone or do they ignore the multiplicities involved in any act of authorship? If authentic participation, involving real agency, is desired, then how scripted can the performance be? And how, ultimately, should these works be judged, especially given the problems of documentation and exhibition they entail?

Sceptical voices have increasingly emerged in the light of such questions. Hal Foster has complained that “contemporary exhibitions often feel like remedial work in socialization: come and play, talk, learn with me.”[3] Moreover, Foster claims, the collective endeavour involved in such artworks no longer has any political meaning: “today simply getting together sometimes seems to be enough.” The architect and writer Markus Miessen has also questioned the associations frequently drawn between participation and empathy, consensus and democracy. For Miessen, “Any form of participation is already a form of conflict.”[4]

A similar desire for conflict – for art that provokes and disrupts, is abrasive and perverse rather than soothing and consensual – is the driving force behind Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012). Bishop’s book is exactly the kind of historically aware and politically sophisticated study that participatory art so badly requires. She assesses the current vogue for collaboration and participation in the context of the many attempts made during the twentieth century to rethink the role of the spectator, the artist and the artwork. Despite her initial caveats about the study’s scope, which is mainly limited to Europe, but which also includes work from Argentina, Cuba and North America, she includes a fascinating array of examples, each thoughtfully considered and skilfully summarised (no easy feat given that so many participatory projects involve a lengthy back-story). She is especially generous, but by no means uncritical, towards artistic intentions and the range of meanings provoked by individual works. This is part of a broader commitment to aesthetics. Bishop laments “the paucity of our ability to defend the intrinsic value of artistic experiences today,” which means that participatory art is often justified, rather lamely, for its apparent social benefits. To counter the deadening forms of evaluation now frequently employed in the public funding of art – such as statistical data based on audience demographics – Bishop’s book emphasises a position of critical spectatorship. She calls for art that challenges and confronts social problems, but she also demands “more bold, affective and troubling” forms of criticism.

Three crucial turning points in the historical development of participatory art structure Bishop’s book. The first set of examples – the Italian Futurists, Russian artists working in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Dada movement in Paris – cluster around 1917. For this historic avant-garde, participation was inextricably linked with political commitment, though in the case of the Futurists, whose assemblies were chaotic events with a proto-Fascist charge, Bishop makes the astute if uncomfortable conclusion that “destructive modes of participation might be more inclusive than those that purport to be democratically open.” Contemporary participatory art, by contrast, often involves little risk and few dangers. The “situations of negation, disruption and antagonism” found earlier in the twentieth century have given way to a “softly-softly approach.”

Jeremy Deller, Reenactment of the Battle of Orgreave (2001), Photo by Independent Curators International via Flickr for non-commercial use under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 License

The second turning-point she emphasises is 1968, the last blast of Western leftism. “To be free in 1968 means to participate,” declared the graffiti of the time, but such positivist messages accompanied a growing awareness that participation by the many might simply mean profit for the few. Indeed, the commercial logic driving the participation imperative has become increasingly visible in the decades since. As Bishop notes, “Northern Europe has experienced a transformation of the 1960s discourse of participation, creativity and community; these terms no longer occupy a subversive, anti-authoritarian force, but have become a cornerstone of post-industrial economic policy.” As such, political resistance to neo-liberalism often adopts forms of negation, such as boycotts and strikes. Yet, the ability of contemporary art to critique neo-liberalism seems hindered by its own status within the current economic climate. Today, the artist, in Simon Critchley’s words, “has become the aspirational paradigm of the new worker: creative, unconventional, flexible, nomadic, creating value, and endlessly travelling.”[5] The cycle of auctions and exhibitions, launches and biennales, publications and panel discussions, funding proposals and collaborative projects that make up the art world tend to sustain, rather than contest, the notions of participation and collaboration promoted by neo-liberalism. This is a decisive shift from the experiments in art and theatre, such as the Situationist International, which emerged in the years leading up to 1968 – movements which Bishop argues should be regarded “as variations on a common theme of opposing imperialist capitalism in favour of generating a collectively produced cultural alternative.”

1989 marks Bishop’s third turning-point in the history of performative art: the end of a leftist dream, of course, but also a catalyst for collective desires to be pushed into artistic practice. Here, the key term is ‘project’, which has come to hold such a prominent place in contemporary culture. Everyone now works on ‘projects’, a term which implies research, collaboration and interdisciplinarity, but which also maintains corporate overtones. Bishop outlines the differing attitudes towards the artistic project that developed in the post-Cold War era. Her conclusions partly stem from the ‘Interpol’ exhibition which took place in Stockholm in 1996, bringing together artists from Western and Eastern Europe to collaborate within an apparently open structure. The project’s failure – conflicts between the participating artists led to violence, the destruction of work and bitter exchanges in the press – certainly refutes any notion that collaboration inevitably leads to consensus. For Bishop, though, the exhibition revealed vital geo-political distinctions concerning the role of the artist: “The Europeans embraced indeterminacy and participation in so far as it contributes to individual careers (the next project, another exhibition), while the Russians viewed art as an existential act, of sabotage if need be.”

Perhaps the most ethically complex aspect of contemporary performative art concerns situations in which artists and curators find themselves in the position of “a human resources manager” – hiring participants to perform within a project. An early example of this trend can be found in the work of Maurizio Cattelan, who in 1991 assembled a football team of North African immigrants to play in an Italian league, their shirts emblazoned with the slogan: “RAUSS.” The Spanish artist Santiago Sierra has gone even further, creating self-explanatory pieces with titles such as 12 Workers Paid To Remain Inside Cardboard Boxes (2000) and, most controversially, 250cm Line Tattooed on 6 Paid People (1999). This use of non-professional, outsourced labour is part of what Bishop calls “delegated performance.” Assessment of the recruitment procedures involved in such works often focuses, quite understandably, on questions of class, authenticity and exploitation. As Bishop notes, a surge of “moral queasiness” follows when artists make use of (and thus make visible) the patterns of exploitation that take place in other working environments on a daily basis. As ever, though, her reading of the situation feels sharp and fresh. Rather than repeating the standard Marxist line condemning these works as exploitative, she suggests they “offer an alternative form of knowledge about capitalism’s commodification of the individual.” In the tradition of Sade and Klossowski, these works are about the perverse pleasures of self-exploitation – a form of participation far more disturbing than most contemporary practitioners care to acknowledge.

Still from video documentation of 'When Faith Moves Mountains', by Francis Alys (Source: Creative Commons public domain video on the artist's website)

The final chapter of the book focuses on recent artworks with explicitly pedagogical roots and ambitions. At a time when universities are being increasingly stifled by bureaucratic demands and restrictive forms of evaluation (including the so-called ‘impact agenda’), when lecturers are expected, as Bishop says, “to train subjects for life under global capitalism,” a raft of works have emerged emphasising a more creative approach to education. Bishop’s contextualisation of these works, which references Paulo Freire, Joseph Beuys and Jacques Rancière, among others, is excellent. However, in discussing the programme of lectures, workshops and performances arranged by Thomas Hirschhorn as part of his Bijlmer-Spinoza Festival (2009) or Tania Bruguera’s experimental art school in Havana, Bishop’s analysis is tinged with self-consciousness: as she admits, such works trespass on her own professional field – she teaches and researches at the City University of New York – and, we might surmise, provide a painful glimpse of what higher education might look like if governed by alternative priorities. The differing durations of art and education are an issue here, as well as the spectatorial conflict that overshadows these projects. As Bishop explains, “art is given to be seen by others, while education has no image.” What does it mean, then, for an educational environment to become an artistic spectacle? Can these works have meaning for spectators not involved in the formal pedagogical process? How can a long-term educational project be communicated to a wider audience? The aesthetic potential of reading lists, explanatory texts and photographs of class discussions is naturally limited.

This conflict reinforces one of the common themes running throughout Bishop’s book: the problem of documenting and exhibiting participatory artworks. For example, Jeremy Deller’s aforementioned The Battle of Orgreave now exists in multiple formats – a CD of oral testimonies, a book of essays and personal accounts, an archive of materials relating to the original confrontation, and a film of the re-enactment directed by Mike Figgis – all of which complicate the status of the main ‘event’ itself. By contrast, Tino Sehgal is famed for his refusal to create any official documentation of his work, which is to be considered a temporary, intangible experience (a stance which creates complications regarding ownership and intellectual property rights). However, institutions and foundations now frequently demand visible evidence of funded projects, galleries require material to be exhibited and art historians need images to illustrate their analysis. Artificial Hells itself contains dozens of images, yet inevitably photographs of participatory projects – children having their faces painted, group conversations, galleries displaying performance archives – often lack visual flair. In one sense, then, participatory art seems to resist mass commodification and glitzy spectacle. At the same time, its temporary nature can merely create another exclusive ‘experience’ for a savvy urban crowd – one more way to drown out the “terror of silence with nothing diverting to do.”

Contemporary art, therefore, maintains a peculiar position in debates around participation. As Bishop’s book makes clear, art is particularly susceptible to superficial forms of participation, yet equally it has the potential to produce new and challenging models. Indeed, perhaps art’s elevated status in contemporary culture, if we accept Critchley’s earlier claim, can be attributed to its close association with participation during an era when that concept seems so vital. In this sense, it is no surprise that art has outstripped the novel as a marker of cultural meaning: forms of participatory literature seem much harder to imagine, though the recent surge in literary festivals and creative writing workshops might be seen as nods in this direction.

There is, however, another question to be asked when faced with the participation imperative: what happens if we don’t get involved? Artificial Hells might be profitably read with ideas of solitude, apathy, dullness or withdrawal in mind. Such notions take on additional political potential in a society where calls to participate predominate. Here, a stance promoted by Slavoj Žižek is especially intriguing:

The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active’, to ‘participate’, to mask the nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, ‘do something’; academics participate in meaningless debates, and so on. The truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw. Those in power often prefer even a ‘critical’ participation, a dialogue, to silence – just to engage us in ‘dialogue’, to make sure our ominous passivity is broken.[6]

Silence, then, is not just terrifying for us: it feels foreboding for authority, too. Of course, such a claim seems ironic coming from Žižek, himself a relentless production-line of books, articles and speeches. Yet, his analysis here is not only pertinent to the practitioners and theorists of participatory art; it is a challenge to anyone who finds the current demand for participation to be strange and stifling. Get involved! Participate! Tell us your views! Perhaps, to be free in 2013 means detachment. 

Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship
Verso, London 2012.
ISBN: 978-1-84467-690-3
Paperback, 383pages, US$29.95/GBP19.99

Richard Martin completed his PhD at the London Consortium. He has taught literature, film and critical theory at Birkbeck (University of London), Middlesex University and Tate Modern. His first book, The Architecture of David Lynch, is forthcoming from Berg.

Endnotes

[1] David Foster Wallace, The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2011).
[2] Simon Critchley, ‘Absolutely-Too-Much’, The Brooklyn Rail, July/August 2012.
[3] Hal Foster, ‘Arty Party’, London Review of Books, Vol. 25, No. 23 (4 December 2003).
[4] Markus Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010).
[5] Critchley, ‘Absolutely-Too-Much’.
[6] Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile, 2008).

(c) 2013 by The Berlin Review of Books.

When Raoul Schrott, one of the most versatile German writers of poetry, fiction and literary theory, joins forces with Arthur Jacobs, a distinguished psychologist at the Free University of Berlin, in order to produce a book on “the brain and the poem”, one is prepared for an expedition into an uncharted territory of considerable width and depth. In 1997, Schrott caused some stir with his book Die Erfindung der Poesie (The invention of poetry), in which he presented and commented early specimens of Sumerian, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Old Irish and Welsh poetry, all translated by himself. A writer of such wide-ranging familiarity with ancient poems would surely want to take the next step towards uncovering the roots of poetry by tracing them, with the help of a psychologist, in the human brain.

The book consists of nine main chapters with the titles ‘on reading’, ‘movements of thought’, ‘metaphorical speech’, ‘sound and painting’, ‘music’, ‘verse and rhyme’, ‘writing and speech’, ‘pictorial spaces’ and ‘figures of thought’. The headings of the sub-chapters, 38 altogether, reveal Schrott’s solid grounding in the classical tradition, since they abound with names of figures of speech that only well-versed students of literature, if at all, would normally know, such as metalepsis, synecdoche, metonymy, adynaton, and aposiopesis. These hard words would scare off the literary laity, if it were not for the 37 ‘boxes’ inserted into the sub-chapters, where the psychologist Jacobs pulls the literary balloon down and ties it to empirical facts in the brain.

Thus, the book actually consists of two books, one in large and one in small print. The main chapters, in large print, when read in continuous succession, form a kind of encyclopedia on the roots of human culture, with detailed information on the mental processes that underlie our responses to visual, acoustic and verbal stimuli. We learn about the subtleties of prosody in various languages, we are introduced to the complex systems of rhythms and metres in classical Greek poetry and exposed to the fundamental principles of music. Much of this information is so technical that the layman will have to rely on it without being able to verify its truth. Even if specialists should find fault with some of Schrott’s statements, he opens up vistas of what one might call the early childhood of human culture.

The same can be said about the other half of the book, the one in small print. The 37 ‘boxes’, when read continuously, form an encyclopedia of the neuro-psychological processes that govern our perception of the world and our cultural activities. However, the alternating presentation of chapters from two different ‘encyclopedias’ tends to blur rather than enlighten the reader’s insight. Since the neurological discussion does not proceed in textbook fashion, but pops up in digressions, the reader will find it increasingly difficult to relate it to the argument of the main chapters. Nevertheless, the chapters on either side of the dividing line contain enough food for thought and insight to keep the reader’s curiosity alive and motivate it by successive ‘aha’ experiences.

Raoul Schrott (photo by Tobias Falberg, released under Wikimedia Creative Commons ShareAlike 2.0 Gerrmany license)

The real crux of the book is not its organization, but the fact that it falls short of its goal. Nearly everything that is being said about the neurological responses to visual, musical or verbal stimuli in poetry applies to such stimuli in general, irrespective of their aesthetic quality. Most of what Schrott points out in poems could as well be found in prose or unpoetic mechanical versification. In fact, quite a few of the examples he refers to are trivial or nonsense verses with no claim to poetic value. A book on ‘the brain and the poem’, however, should aim at raising, if not answering, the one question that the title makes the reader wait for: What goes on in our brains, when we respond to a poem that elates us by its poetic quality? It may well be that this is beyond the scope of neurological research, but then the book cannot deliver what its title promises. The reader would feel less disappointed if he had bought the book under its subtitle ‘How we construct our realities’, since this is what it is about. One gets the impression that poetry is only a teaser to lure the reader into the neurosciences, especially so, when Schrott begins every main chapter with a short quotation from Voltaire’s Candide, whose connection with the main line of argument is, at best, rather strained. Even inside the chapters one often wants to cry out with Hamlet: “More matter with less art!”

In quite a few cases, especially when interpreting poems, Schrott lets himself get carried away by his intellectual enthusiasm.  Then he tends to go over the top and sometimes gets dangerously close to the ridiculous. Here is a random example: when commenting on a poem by Salvatore Quasimodo he comes across the line traffito da un raggio di sole (‘pierced by a ray of sunshine’) which serves him as an example to demonstrate how precisely a poem represents reality. ‘Piercing’, he argues, means a frontal penetration of the body at a right angle, and that is only possible at 3 p.m. Literary interpretations abound in such wild speculations, and creative minds like Schrott are especially susceptible to such lapses from the heights of poetic intuition to the sandy plains of oversophisticated mush.

The two authors should have made up their minds more resolutely about which way to go: either focussing closely on poetry in particular or concentrating on the neurological processes at the root of cultural activities in general. If focussing on poetry was their aim, they should have raised the question: Why do certain texts arouse aesthetic pleasure and what happens in the brain, when we feel the urge to read a poem again and again? Without this target in view, poetry can only be studied as one of many forms of texts, either spoken or written, which the brain has to decode and translate into meaning.

Salvatore Quasimodo (photo: Nobel Foundation, source: Wikimedia Commons, Swedish copyright expired)

The subject of pleasure is touched upon only briefly in the very short sub-chapter on ‘verse-length and stanza combination’, and even here the only thing the reader learns is that the brain reinforces successful perception by producing endorphins that cause a feeling of pleasure. But there is no model to explain how verse, rhyme or any other form of poetic order stimulates the production of these chemicals. In the final box, number 37, which is by far the largest and serves as a summary, the aspect of pleasure is again mentioned in passing. From a psychologist one would have expected at least a reference to studies in empirical aesthetics such as those by D. E. Berlyne, who was among the first to focus on aesthetic arousal. But Berlyne is mentioned only in passing in a short chapter that deals, among others, with authors of thrillers like John Grisham.

By the end of the book the reader has learnt a lot about the frontline of contemporary neurology, but not enough about the specific impact of poetry on the brain. In the preface to the book there is a brief reference to the American mathematician Birkhoff who, a hundred years ago, had suggested a formula for quantifying the aesthetic pleasure a work of art can yield. Many years later, Max Bense and Rul Gunzenhäuser followed his lead and refined the formula on the basis of information theory. When finding Birkhoff’s name in the preface, this reviewer felt alerted and hoped for a replacement of the information theory model by a neuro-psychological one, which in his eyes would be more adequate. But throughout the book, the idea of aesthetic pleasure is conspicuously absent. One gets the impression that Schrott, with his vast knowledge of poems of many languages and his insight into poetry from a practicing poet’s point of view, digs so deep into the ground to lay the anthropological foundations of art in general that, by sheer quantity, he smothers the flame which he tries to rekindle again and again by beginning each new chapter with a quotation from Candide.

Reading poetry is inevitably linked with value judgments. We simply cannot read a single line without feeling that it is either a good or not-so-good one. Occasionally, Schrott passes judgments inadvertently. For instance, when he quotes a frequently anthologized poem by Jakob van Hoddis, he finds some fault with it, whereas other poems which never made it into anthologies seem to be more to his liking. Quite a few of his examples, by the way, are translations from foreign languages, which means that they are already divested of their best-fitting poetic attire. Poetry depends entirely on the perfection of its form, and form is more than putting together elements from a poetic inventory. It is the fusion of these elements into a mysterious unity, which brings about the poeticity of resulting text. This mystery escapes the neurologist’s analysis as much as it escapes Schrott’s subtle highlighting of the rhetorical figures of speech in the poems he refers to.

After so much criticism of the shortcomings of the book it is time to return to its virtues. There are few books on the neurological responses to art and reality that equal this one in stimulating power. Schrott, a true poeta doctus and an allround scholar into the bargain, manages to stir up settled beliefs and assumptions in a reader’s mind and makes him think of poetry in statu nascendi. This impact outweighs the frustration the reviewer felt in front of this copious buffet where only the main dish is missing. One other thing, however, is missing, too, and in this case most readers will agree, namely a register of names and subjects. Without such a directory the book is more like a succession of Powerpoint lectures in print than a textbook to be studied and consulted forwards and backwards, as one would normally do with a book so full of scholarly and scientific information.

Raoul Schrott & Arthur Jacobs: Gehirn und Gedicht. Wie wir unsere Wirklichkeiten konstruieren.
(The Brain and the Poem. How We Construct our Realities)
Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2011.
ISBN-13: 978-3-446-23656-1
Hardcover, 528 pp., EUR 29.90

Hans-Dieter Gelfert was Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Free University of Berlin and, since his retirement in 2000, has been a freelance author and reviewer. He is the author of 24 books, including most recently a biography of Charles Dickens (Charles Dickens: Der Unnachahmliche, C.H. Beck, Munich 2011). In 2011, he received the George F. Kennan Commentary Award for an article on ‘The contradictory USA. Between religion and enlightenment, between Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street: Why Americans are as they are’.

(c) 2013 by The Berlin Review of Books.

“Once upon a time there was . . .”: The very opening formula of fairy tales suggests quaintness, the patina of the long-ago, the flavor of the outmoded. If fairy tales, as a genre, are the opposite of modernity, why is it, then, that they have survived thousands of years? One answer is that they deal with things that are timeless and universal, basic aspects of the human condition – offering the reader, in Tolkien’s words, consolation, the recovery of a clear view, and the chance to escape the bleakness of the quotidian. Another is that, being originally transmitted orally, they have no definite shape and are thus infinitely adaptable to the needs and interests of their specific audiences. We tend to forget this, since the most successful recorders of fairy tales, men like Charles Perrault, Antoine Galland, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen or Joseph Jacobs, have given their tales permanent shapes, turning what once were protean entities into classical texts with a canonical status.

Little Reding Riding Hood (from a 1927 cover); source: Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Nevertheless, fairy tales have of course continued to be re-told, adapted, transformed, modernized. Seen from this angle, there is little unusual about the collection of modernized fairy tales to be reviewed here. What makes it particularly interesting is the fact that The Fairies Return Or, New Tales for Old, which was recently published with an introductory essay by the renowned folklorist Maria Tatar, is really a reprint of a collection that first appeared in 1934. The modern editor makes much of the fact that the original collection was commissioned and edited by Peter Davies, who was the adopted son of James Barrie (the author of Peter Pan); but since Davies never bothered to explain what exactly he was up to, his editorship as such says little about the book. What does make this collection unique is that it is one of the first collections (if not the first) of radically modernized fairy tales written specifically for an adult audience. (It is true that England has also a long history of stage adaptions of fairytale material, “Christmas Pantomimes” and “Fairy Extravaganzas”, that dates back to the late 18th century, but that is a different matter.) It thus reflects not only the ambivalent contemporary attitudes towards fairy tales, but more generally the concerns and preoccupations of the British society of the early 1930s.

The fourteen tales that were chosen for ‘modernization’ are still well-known, belonging to the very core of the European fairytale tradition; the authors of these new versions, alas, will be much less familiar to most present-day readers, even though they are all fine writers who were quite popular at their time (as Tatar explains in her biographical appendix). Here is the complete list: “Jack the Giant Killer” by A.E. Coppard; “Godfather Death” by Clemence Dane; “The Fisherman and His Wife” by E.M. Delafield; “Little Snow-White” by Lord Dunsany; “Aladdin” by Anna Gordon Keown; “Sindbad the Sailor” by Eric Linklater; “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” by A.G. Macdonell; “Puss in Boots” by Helen Simpson; “The Little Mermaid” by Lady Eleanor Smith; “Little Red Riding-Hood” by E. Œ. Somerville; “Cinderella” by Robert Speaight; “‘O, If I Could but Shiver!’” by Christina Stead; “The Sleeping Beauty” by G.B. Stern; and “Big Claus and Little Claus” by R.J. Yeatman and W.C. Sellar.

All these tales are highly entertaining, but the description of each and every one in a review would perhaps be a bit tedious. Let us see, instead, what they have in common and how, on the other hand, the authors’ responses to the same task go quite different ways.

The first observation is that to all writers, modernization of fairy tales means amplification; or, to be more precise, providing details that make their fictional worlds seem more ‘real’ than the silhouette worlds of traditional folktales. In other words, these stories are closer to what is now known as fantasy fiction – urban fantasy, predominantly, since most stories are set in a fantastically transmogrified London or in other large cities. Secondly, modernization to these writers means taking an ironic stance – a self-conscious awareness of the strangeness of the worlds described. In many cases, this ironic stance produces humorous treatments of the well-known plots; but it does not necessarily preclude the option of taking fairy tales seriously.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, sketched by their brother Ludwig Emil (source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain).

To most writers, modernization also involves transferring the story into their own modern world – thus, in most cases, using the well-known plot structure as a means not to make fun of fairy tales, but to present the ‘real world’ in a satirical light. The opening tale, “Jack the Giant Killer” by A.E. Coppard, can be read as a political allegory since the giants named Demos, Kudos and Osmos, who at first seem friendly and harmless enough but are really man-eaters, might be taken as metaphors for the threat of Nazism (that pursues its aims by appearing in turns populist, glamorous, and bullying). More frequently, the target of these satirical stories is what is known as ‘High Society’: the ambitions of ‘upstarts’, the shallowness, vanities and snobberies of those who regard themselves as being above the common people. It should be noted that this subversive element is already contained in some original stories such as the Grimm brothers’ “The Fisherman and His Wife” or Perrault’s “Puss in Boots”, but Davies’ authors apply it also to such classics of feminine romantic daydreams as “Little Snow-White”, “Cinderella” and “The Sleeping Beauty”, where the obligatory marriage to Prince Charming is either presented in a heavily ironic light or does not happen at all. In this group of satirical re-writings, the three new versions of Arabian Nights’ stories stand out. Keown’s superbly funny “Aladdin” shows us a stolid Scottish gentleman’s attempt – by and large successful – to integrate the demon he accidentally raised, complete with tail and horns, into the most respectable Edinburgh Society; Linklater’s “Sindbad the Sailor” presents the story’s protagonist as a cynical and totally unscrupulous tourist manager, and Macdonell’s Forty Thieves are London City investment sharks who meet their comeuppance through the astute good-for-nothing Ally (short for ‘Alistair‘) Barber.

Other stories strive not so much for satirical effects than for augmenting the serious or humorous potential of the original stories. Thus, Clemence Dane’s “Godfather Death” intensifies the grim message of the Grimm brothers’ tale by transferring it into the England of World War I and the 1920s, and Lady Eleanor Smith recaptures the melancholy strain of Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” while divesting it of all supernatural trappings. In E.Œ. Somerville’s “Little Red Riding-Hood” the wolf is replaced by a young man with the surname Wolfe, but the story, set in rural Ireland, is nevertheless full of wonder, being brimful of fairies, leprechauns and other creatures of Irish folklore, and presented in the a delicious tongue-in-cheek kind of Irish brogue. Christina Stead enriches the black humor of the Grimm brothers’ “Fairy Tale about One Who Left Home to Learn about Fear” by supplying a great many ghastly (and, alas, only too realistic) details, including a strong sexual element. Finally, R.J. Yeatman and W.C. Sellar (who became immortal through their hilarious survey of English history, 1066 and All That) expose the inherent brutality of Andersen’s “Big Claus and Little Claus” (itself imitating the coarse humor of genuine folktales) by impersonating a narrator, and inventing an audience, who are just as gross – and sadistic – as the original story appears when stripped of its patina.

All in all, the ‘modernized’ fairy tales in Davies’ collection are not only highly entertaining: they are in turns funny, sad, frivolous, haunting, exuberant and wise; and they also reveal that there is much more than meets the eye in that sacred treasure trove of world literature that is usually, and erroneously, relegated to the nursery.

The Fairies Return Or, New Tales for Old. Compiled by Peter Davies. Edited and with an introduction by Maria Tatar.
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2012.
ISBN: 9780691152301
Hardcover, 368 pages, US$24.95
 

Dieter Petzold has taught English literature, and occasionally Folklore, at the universities of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany), North Carolina (U.S.A.) and British Columbia (Canada). He is also the author of Das englische Kunstmärchen im 19. Jahrhundert (1981) and of numerous articles on fantasy fiction and children’s literature.

(c) 2013, The Berlin Review of Books.

“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
John 8:32

This passage of the Bible is inscribed on the marble walls of the lobby of the CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. After passing through heavy security, this is probably the first thing visitors entering the building would see. Homeland – the 2012 award-winning American TV series – Obama’s favourite, we are being told – raises one important question: What is, then, the price to be paid for knowing such truth?

“I have never been so sure and so wrong”. This line in the mouth of Carrie – a manic bipolar CIA officer determined to stop Nicholas Brody, a former Marine and prisoner of war, who has been released from Iraq after eight years of torture and has been “turned” by Al-Qaeda – is the quintessence of the whole series, now in its second season.

Homeland brings together two essential dimensions of truth and identity, in a breathtaking superposition of identity of the self and political identity. The two main characters – Carrie and Brody – have both multiple identities. Carrie goes through phases of mania and depression. At the peaks of her condition – when she is hyperactive or utterly dejected – she delivers essential truths about the identity of her counterpart, Brodie, and about the future of the United States.

Promotional Poster for 'Homeland' TV Series (Scaled-down thumbnail image used under Fair Use; non-replaceable illustration for review purposes)

Brodie is Carrie’s enemy and her raison d’être. As such, naturally, he becomes her lover. Brodie is an equally ambiguous character. He has been turned, yet not completely: as such, he is a classic case of double allegiance. He is a congressman and yet is ready to blow himself up in a room where the top US military and the vice-president are gathered. Brodie is the reflection of the fantasies of the West, whose patriots fear being invaded from within by their natural enemies: Muslim fundamentalists. Last but not least, Brodie is also bisexual, another fear of the “enemy within”, i.e. the deep drives of the unconscious we all have to deal with. Believe it or not (for anyone who has not watched the show, this might seem a bit of a stretch), Brodie has been sexually ‘turned’ by US number one public enemy, Abu Nazir – a fancy Bin Laden.

There is no truth without ambivalence. This is the striking message carried by Homeland. Heroes are also traitors, and masters of intelligence are also delusional. Yet, there is something special in the way in which ambivalence is staged here: the essential dramatic texture of the whole story is based on the fundamental ambivalence not only of the characters, but of the values they embody and of the emotions they solicit in us. As if the series was able to broadcast the slow but inevitable loss of the monopoly of truth – the Good Truth, the Right Truth, the one we attain through the appropriate methods – which America is facing today.

Carrie is a modern oracle. Her outstanding ability to track the truth is invaluable, and her bosses at the CIA know this very well. Yet, her methods are sometimes odd, based on intuition instead of evidence, and her style of inquiry too disrespectful of rules. She allows herself to make unauthorized moves in order to come up with results, thereby putting herself and the CIA at risk. At the same time, she is a very attractive woman, with a restless mind of rare subtlety.

Brody is the mirror image of Carrie’s ambivalent truth: he has actually been turned by Abu Nazir, but now that he is back, he hesitates, goes back and forth, from the horrible tortures he underwent in Iraq, to the memories of the discovery of a new world of values with Abu Nazir, who protected him, helped him and became his lover. His being turned touches upon all the dimensions of his life: psychological, sexual, political and religious. When – at the beginning of season 2 – his wife discovers that he prays as a Muslim, she exclaims in horror: “This just can’t happen!”.

Brody elicits in us mixed feelings: we are horrified by the intolerant and narrow-minded reaction of his wife, who cannot acknowledge another religious credo, but are also horrified when we discover that he is actually ready to kill the vice-president. Yet, his reasons for losing faith in his country are the killing of civilians, including children – notably, of Abu Nazir’s son.

Brody’s truth is unstable, Carrie’s truth is volatile, and the audience is trapped in their ambivalent posture, going back and forth between heroism and cowardice, between objective truth and intuition, between reasons that are too many in number, yet seem all in all plausible.

What is shocking to an audience of our generation is that, for the first time, a U.S. TV show puts on stage the duplicity of truth, as if discriminating between good and evil were a long bygone endeavour. And this state of permanent moral ambivalence permeates the psyche of the audience to the point of exhaustion: we simply cannot bear such an uncertain world. We oscillate between the two sides of the truth as the plot unfolds through a series of spectacular turns and twists that are the mirror of this feeling of instability.

Carrie and Brodie are imprisoned in their double truths and are looking for a way out. They disturb the certainties of the people around them. They also dissolve the simplistic commitment to “The Truth” and “The Good” of the other characters. Indeed, the other characters are monoliths by comparison. Thus, Carrie’s mentor is a (good Jewish) father figure, Saul Berenson, who has just broken up with his wife, an Indian woman, whom we see (towards the middle of season 1) leaving her husband to return “home”. There was no place to stay for her in Saul’s patriotic and monastic life in Washington DC. Brodie’s wife is middle-class America at its best, with all its limitations. Her truth is simple and transparent. She strives for stability and a linear career that will land her husband in the White House (and, as for herself, will ultimately allow her to host charity dinners with the wives of other DC power brokers).

The uncertainty of the global order becomes the psychical instability of its subjects, in a sort of “collective manic-depression” in which we can no longer choose the right course of action, but can only oscillate permanently between a two-sided truth. Ironically, during the Cold War, bipolarity was used to refer to the stability of the balance of power that ruled the relation between the Soviet Union and the United States. In the post-9/11 era, bipolarity is internalized in the deep instability of the self, which reflects the trouble relation between the US and its ‘devils du jour’, both internal and external.

Homeland reminds us that the moral and political order of our world and its cognitive/epistemic order are impossible to disentangle. The ‘homeland’ that we all miss today is the homeland of a simple objective truth about how things are and how they should be. A truth that used to reassure us and made our decisions and actions grounded on a firm footing. As Odysseus already knew, outside our lost homeland, there is hell, permanent doubt and, in the end, loss. 

Homeland (TV Series, 2011-)
Starring Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, Morena Baccarin et al.
Showtime (CBS Corporation), New York.

Gloria Origgi is a philosopher and a researcher at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris (Institut Nicod). She is the author of numerous articles in social epistemology and related areas; her most recent book is on the issue of trust as a philosophical problem (Qu’est-que la confiance? Vrin, Paris 2008). Ariel Colonomos is a senior research fellow at CNRS and a research professor at Sciences Po, Paris. He has previously taught at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and is the author of the forthcoming book The Gamble of War: Is It Possible to Justify Preventive War? (Palgrave-Macmillan, London 2013).

(c) 2012 The Berlin Review of Books.

“So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter,” said Gordon Allport, an American psychologist and one of the founders of the study of personality. Scientists have studied the effects of mirthful laughter, positive thinking and optimism on feelings of self-worth, mood disorders and depression since the 1970s. In The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking British author and Guardian feature writer Oliver Burkeman takes issue with “the cult of optimism,” the convention that phony smiles, jovial laughter and positive thinking is a surefire path to happiness. Positive thinking is the problem, not the solution, Burkeman teaches us. He believes people have come to trust that a “Don’t worry. Be happy” attitude toward life is the only route to contentment. People seem to be of the conviction that if you have negative thoughts and see your own limits, you cannot be happy. So to be happy we must set out on a journey that changes your mindset from negative and inhibited to enthusiastic, fervent and animated. We are told to visualize our dreams and goals, eliminate the word “impossible” from our vocabulary and put a big fabricated smile on our physiognomy. All that actually can lead to unhappiness, Burkeman says.

Not. (Photo Jean.Julius/Wikimedia Commons used under CC Attribution Share Alik 3.0 Unported License)

Negative thinking, in Burkeman’s sense, is not exactly the opposite of positive thinking. It involves turning toward our insecurities, flaws, sorrows and pessimism and finding ways of enduring those episodes by embracing them. We should acknowledge that because we are human, we sometimes fail. By admitting that we sometimes screw up and that some things really are impossible for us or are as inevitable as is death, we will feel more content. This is the basic premise of the book.

Burkeman’s Antidotecontains countless staggering insights that I could write many pages about. But it suits the situation to engage in a bit of negative thinking, in this case about the book. I have three main concerns about The Antidote. First, it does not accommodate scientific evidence that suggests that positive thinking can have vital effects on stress, anxiety and depression. Second, it perpetuates the old mistaken belief that stoic philosophy consists in negative thinking. And third, despite claims to the contrary, the book really isn’t all that different from many trade books advocating positive thinking or exposure therapy in the cognitive-behavioral therapeutic tradition. I will deal with these issues in turn.

A good laugh and a positive mindset work wonders for the immune system

Not forcing a positive attitude to life, as recommended by Burkeman, could have unintended consequences for psychological, physiological and neurological function. For example, there is evidence to suggest that a good laugh and a positive attitude can regulate distress. Dr. Lee Berk, an immunologist at Loma Linda University’s School of Allied Health and Medicine, has studied the effects of mirthful laughter and a positive mindset on the regulation of hormones since the 1980s. Berk and his colleagues found that a positive outlook could help the brain regulate the stress hormones cortisol and epinephrine. The team has also discovered a link between a happy attitude and the production of anti-bodies and endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers. Even the expectation that something positive, entertaining or funny is coming suffices to bring about worthy effects, reports Dr. Berk.

Burkeman doesn’t spell out how his negative path can make up for the psychological, physiological and neurological effects of positive thinking or whether not gleaning these benefits from being positive could have detrimental health consequences.

The stoics on stretching the soul

Throughout the book Burkeman covers a wide range of spiritual philosophies and practices, such as Hellenistic stoicism, Zen Buddhism and Memento Mori, philosophies and practices that often are said to focus on negative thinking. He takes these philosophies to support his negative path. “If you go back through the history of philosophy, spirituality, the stoics of ancient Greece and Rome, the Buddhists, and then also linking up with contemporary approaches to psychology, you find something else, which is actually that trying to let those feelings be and not always struggling to stamp them out is a more fruitful alternative,” he told NPR on November 13, 2012.

Why the long face? (Antisthenes, c. 445-365 BCE; 'founder' of the Cynic school of philosophy; photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons CC Attribn. 3-0 Unported License)

Ascribing negative thinking to these indomitable practices, however, is—if not astucious—then misleading. Though often parodied as apathetic, the stoics thought of the goal of life as engaging in a process of rational decision-making (Baltzly, D., “Stoicism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Zalta, ed.). The stoics’ utmost virtues are rationality and self-sufficiency. Unruly passions, such as bodily pleasure, fear, lust and distress, are “excessive impulses which are disobedient to reason” (Arius Didymus, 65A). They are to be dealt with accordingly. Though contemporaries of the stoics often described them as men of stone, the stoics did not shy away from pleasurable and gratifying feelings. Tranquil emotions and sentiments, such as joy, wonder, kindness, generosity and warmth, were perfectly acceptable from their point of view. These more quiet emotions and sentiments are consistent with a rational mind and are not in any way excessive. They are a natural stretching or expansion of the soul.

Unlike Burkeman, the stoics did not focus on negative thinking but on rational thinking and action. Extreme passions are things we undergo. The calmer sentiments are results of things we do. Negative thinking is perfectly acceptable from a stoic point of view, as long as it is something we do, and not something that happens to us. But negative thinking is by no means a requirement, as far as the stoics are concerned. What’s important is that we don’t let our passions take possession of our agency. It is in this sense that you ought to be “apathetic.” You should be the owner of your agency. Being in control, however, does not rule out being a warm, generous and kind person who has mostly positive thoughts.

So the stoics advocate a path through life quite different from that defended by Burkeman. According to him “efforts that involve struggling very, very hard to achieve a specific emotional state” is counterproductive. But struggling to achieve a specific emotional state was exactly what the stoics were encouraging. The stoics considered it a part of life to struggle hard to achieve an emotional state void of outrageous and disgraceful passions but not void of tranquil delights of the soul, positive imagery or reasonable optimism. You should not go on a “character holiday” by getting in the grip of lust or by acting in ways that are out of character for you. You should temper your affective states to ensure that you remain in character.

Exposure theory on the subway in London

In the end, what Burkeman has to offer isn’t all that different from standard cognitive-behavioral therapeutic practices, which include the positive thinking methods he so strongly criticizes. Cognitive-behavioral approaches to resolving unsettled emotional conflicts and soothing the passions seek to break the connection between memories and fear, worry and distress by changing the way you think about past events. Cognitive processing therapy, for example, seeks to change your emotions and beliefs after a trauma or a series of upsetting events. When you go through distressing events, your beliefs about trust, control and safety change. One of the main components of cognitive processing therapy is to compare your beliefs before and after your disturbing experiences. When successful, the method can help you alter your frame of mind. For example, you can reprogram the way you remember a stressful past event by associating the memory with more constructive beliefs, “It was not my fault that I was assaulted.” “I deserve to be with someone who doesn’t treat me as badly as my ex.” “I am safe now.”

The idea that we should accept negative feelings, thoughts and experiences as essential aspects of life and not as something that must be avoided is also a common theme of the philosophies behind cognitive-behavioral approaches. Burke himself recommends a commonly used approach for dealing with fear: Exposure theory. He recommends that his London-based readers take the subway and say the name of each station out loud just before the train arrives at the station. Embarrassing? Sure. But the lesson is that people get to experience that doing something humiliating is not nearly as bad as they thought it would be. Sure, they have to suffer through some incredulous stares. But they won’t get arrested or tackled to the ground by fellow train riders.

This sort of method for becoming friends with your negative thoughts is the bread and butter of exposure therapy. Instead of making you process the scary events cognitively, exposure therapy makes you face your fears. By facing your uncertainties, this type of therapy helps you break the connection between negative memories and the returning feeling of dread. Edna Foa, Professor of Clinical Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, invented a variation on the old classic, which she calls “prolonged exposure therapy.”Prolonged exposure therapy requires that you gradually get closer and closer to the appalling situation. The exposure can break the connection between your negative memories and your angst. When you disassociate negative memories from torment, the memories will continue to be perceived as negative but they will no longer cause actual dread and worry. Setting aside the sophistications of Foa’s variation on classic “abrupt” exposure theory, what Burkeman is recommending is akin to these types of therapy. Accept your fear and your failure, don’t repress them or hide them under a bogus positive mindset.

Despite its scientific and philosophical shortcomings, Burkeman’s Antidote is well worth a close read. It contains many of the gems we know so well from the Guardian writer’s popular Saturday column “This Column Will Change Your Life,” a personal favorite of mine. Like the column, The Antidote offers a spirited and witty account of some of the best ways to get through periods of distress or sorrow or sheer annoyance and shows you how to deal with your negative feelings and pessimism without burying them underneath a fake ten-thousand dollar smile.

Oliver Burkeman: The Antidote. Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking
Canongate Books, Edinburgh 2012.
ISBN-13: 978-1847678669
Paperback, 236 pages, GBP 8.99

Berit Brogaard is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the St. Louis Synesthesia Research Team at University of Missouri, St. Louis.

This review was first published on the author’s group blog ‘New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science’; it is here reproduced with kind permission of the author.