Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

ACCIDENTAL WORKS OF ART

            This week, I propped myself up in my study and read my way through James McNeish’s memoir Touchstones, while opera CDs blared out from my sound system.

            Among them was a two-disk recording of Rossini’s Barber of Seville.

            I picked it up for almost nothing ($3 I think) from a Warehouse bargain-bin about five years ago. It is the recording of a performance by a provincial Italian opera company. The cast features no names that anyone would recognize. The orchestra belongs to the provincial opera house. Nothing illustrious about it.

            Much as I love opera, I am not a trained musician and I do not have the ear to distinguish the finer grades of musicianship. Yet even I can tell that this is a mediocre performance. The Figaro isn’t able to set off the real fireworks that some baritones can produce with the Largo al Factotum. Like Susan Kane in the movie Citizen Kane, the poor mezzo playing Rosina almost muffs the sustained high note of the sentimental song Una Voce Poco Fa in the singing-lesson scene. I’m sure professional music critics would savage it and direct me to much better recordings of the opera.

            Yet I love this particular recording more than any of the thirty-odd other recordings I have of complete operas. Its imperfections are part of its charm. Because of badly-positioned mikes, I can hear the creaking of the stage every time the singers have to move. The sound-balance is way out of whack, so that sometimes what is being sung on the one side of the stage is barely audible.

            The effect on me is like really being in the provincial opera house where it was recorded. I am there to enjoy a second-rate company doing its very best – and I do enjoy it.

            This is an example of what I would call an “accidental” work of art. I’m sure the singers and musicians didn’t aim for mediocrity, and the sound-engineers were doing their very best – but the real and beautiful thing they have produced has nothing to do with their intentions. It is quite accidental. If they were all a bit better at their jobs, the recording would be quite unworthy of note.

            This is not a unique specimen of the “accidental work of art” phenomenon. There springs to mind a very well-known example.

            Probably no poem about cats has been reprinted  as often as Christopher Smart’s lines on “My cat Jeoffrey” [yes, that is how the name is spelt in the original].

            They are the ones that begin

“For I will consider my cat Jeoffrey

For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.

For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.”

            There are 74 lines in the poem in all,  although most anthologies (and musical settings of the poem) reproduce only some of them.

            But ironically, what we have here is at most half of the lines as they were originally conceived and written. Confined to an 18^th, century madhouse, Smart planned a huge poem to be called Jubilate Agno (“Rejoice in the Lamb”). It was to be written in the antiphonal style of the Psalms – strophe and anti-strophe. A verse beginning with “Let” would be answered by a verse beginning “For”. But this work was never completed and has survived only in fragments. Some of the fragments have “Let” verses only and some of the fragments have “For” verses only. And when it comes to the “my cat Jeoffrey” lines, all we have left are the “For” responses. It’s like having the right-hand side only of a written page.

            So, while noting and admitting the observation and lively use of language poor Kit Smart displays, here is a great poem which has the form it has only because of an accident. I wonder - if we had these lines as Smart wrote them, would the “Let” verses have smothered up the greatness of the “For” verses from the world, and made readers pass them over so that they never became a classic?

            “Accident” can, of course, mean an artist being interrupted in his/her work and never completing it as intended – but in the process leaving something better than was consciously intended. Perhaps Balzac’s best short story is Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (“The Unknown Masterpiece”), about an artist who obsessively works and works and works for years at a canvas which he believes will be his greatest work – and in the process manages to smother and blot out the inspiration that originally fired him, leaving an overworked, uninteresting canvas as the result. The implicit moral is that a great work might indeed have been produced if the artist had been stopped soon enough. Knowing when to abandon things is a key to creation. Accident, interruption, thwarting an artist’s conscious intentions, may produce much good art. (And don’t get me started on the person from Porlock who interrupted Coleridge’s writing of Kubla Khan).

            I am intrigued by this idea of accidental works of art.

            Here abandoning my own verbosity, and inviting you to submit to this blog your own examples of accidental works of art, I leave you with a poem of mine that brushes the theme before moving somewhere else.

THE THING ITSELF

An accidental work of art

the rusted hand-saw missing teeth,

smooth and half-unbolted wooden handle.

A partner of the borered shed

with slats burst open to the day,

half-in, half-out, a ryokan by chance.

Each turned by time. Function is lost

where art is the decay of use

articulating dead utility.

The blind cat crouching on the fence

no longer hunter, takes the sun,

its artistry self-centred uselessness.

The sheepshank that supported weight,

gnawed and discarded, stroked by rain,

transmutes into a short-term Henry Moore.

Time burns out the stain of use.

Alzheimic or incontinent,

the old are time’s last art. The thing itself.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“THE MAKING OF NEW ZEALANDERS” by Ron Palenski (Auckland University Press, $NZ45)

            “At what point in the nineteenth century did transplanted English, Scots and Irish, or people from anywhere else, make the mental leap to considering themselves New Zealanders?”

            This question is asked in the opening pages of Ron Palenski’s introduction to The Making of New Zealanders. It is the key question that motivated his research. Palenski, noted sports journalist and author of numerous books about New Zealand sporting achievements, undertook The Making of New Zealanders as his doctoral thesis in History at the University of Otago. It is a weighty, well-documented 382-page tome (312 pages of text; 70 pages of notes, bibliography and index).

           

            In answering his own question, Palenski immediately suggests what he is up against. He is taking on Keith Sinclair’s 1986 book about early Pakeha national feeling A Destiny Apart. Pakeha consciousness of a distinct national identity, argues Palenski, was being forged progressively in the late 19^th century. Pace Sinclair, it did not come into existence with the Boer War or the 1905 New Zealand rugby tour of Britain or the Gallipoli campaign. Indeed the fact that these things  were seen as nation-defining events was the result, rather than the creation, of national feeling. The emergence of a sense of national identity among Pakeha was a gradual, decades-long, late nineteenth century process.

            Chapter by chapter, Palenski sets out to prove this thesis.

            In the first, he details the binding effect of communication in early New Zealand. The telegraph, then the creation of New Zealand Mean Time in 1868, then the expansion of railways and the establishment of the Union Steamship Company, all meant that New Zealand, being settled in an age of advanced technology, rapidly developed the sense of being one unified community. The country soon by-passed the stage of meaningful provincialism.

            Then (Chapter 2) there was the press. At first, says Palenski, New Zealand newspapers were very local and overtly political sheets. He details the early, pre-cable, practice of rival rags vying for priority in reporting overseas news, by raiding overseas ships for their overseas newspapers as soon as they arrived in port. But greater uniformity of news (and hence a more emphatic shared national identity) came with the formation of a New Zealand Press Association. Further, as Palenski notes only briefly, newspapers provided the foundation for a real indigenous literature as they were the only places where New Zealand poets and short story writers were regularly published.

            It was also (Chapter 3) through the press that national symbols and phrases were popularised and disseminated. Palenski says that the phrase “God’s Own Country” [whence “Godzone”] was a common New Zealand usage before Thomas Bracken included it in a poem and Richard Seddon took it up. Bracken’s national hymn “God Defend New Zealand” was set to music and already widely sung after its first performance in 1876. (At which point one critic – accurately, in my view – described it as “a dreary dirge for a national song.”) A distinctive New Zealand flag and distinctive New Zealand postage stamps were introduced and distinctive New Zealand flora and fauna were taken up as trade-marks and images by advertisers, publishers and boosters of New Zealand tourism.

            Thus far, thus incontestable. Palenski, in his first three chapters, sets out material evidence for distinct markers of New Zealand identity before the end of the nineteenth century. But this is not the same as proving a consciousness of being a New Zealander as opposed to being primarily a transplanted Briton. In some of what follows the argument becomes more contestable.

            When he opens his fourth chapter, “Was New Zealand Exceptional?”, Pakenski contends overtly with the historian Miles Fairburn’s thesis that New Zealand was not exceptional in its development when compared with other settler colonies in the 19^th century. Au contraire, says Palenski, much of New Zealand’s polity was unique to New Zealand. He argues for New Zealand exceptionalism with reference to the Treaty of Waitangi; the relationship (more accommodating than in other British colonies) with the indigenous people, especially after wars of the 1860s and with the fact of Maori representation in parliament; the abolition of a federal (provincial) system, unlike federal Australia, Canada and South Africa; the standardising of national education with the 1877 Education Act; and the distinction of early women’s suffrage. In turn this leads him to consider New Zealand’s Liberal-era reputation as the “social laboratory of the world” and the familiar list of distinguished visitors who praised New Zealand in these terms. Consequently, he argues in Chapter 5, it was not only geographical location and the 1200 miles of the Tasman Sea that led New Zealand to reject federation with Australia when it was offered. By the time the offer was made, New Zealanders already knew they were a nation apart.

            Palenski then proceeds to deal with the event that Keith Sinclair saw as inaugurating Kiwi national consciousness – participation in the Boer War. For Palenski it is the “forgotten war”, never properly covered by New Zealand historians, and he emphasises the degree to which New Zealand involvement was on New Zealand’s terms, and was an offshoot of existing national consciousness. Referring to Maori involved in combat duties, he once again notes New Zealand’s distinctiveness in this area:

            “Maori, as in so many aspects of New Zealand life, provided a significant point of difference from both Britain and the other settler colonies in the Boer War and an appreciation of this factor is critical to the belief that the war consolidated rather than created a national identity. While other settler colonies subjugated or tried to ignore their indigenous populations, encouraged by the belief in white Anglo-Saxon superiority, New Zealand’s was absorbed and embraced.” (Pg.204)

            In his last two chapters, Palenski enters the territory with which he is most often identified. Chapter 7 is the sport chapter, with Palenski arguing that inherited British games were approached in a distinctively New Zealand way. He makes the case for greater New Zealand egalitarianism in sportsmanship, noting among much else the absence of guides and porters in such endeavours as mountain-climbing. Finally Chapter 8 is the rugby chapter. Rugby, says Palenski, was already firmly and distinctively embedded in the New Zealand psyche before the almost-invincible New Zealand side toured Britain in 1905. He spends much time refuting (successfully) the myth that the name “All Blacks” was invented in England during the 1905 tour. It was already in common use in the 1890s. This he takes as an example of game’s adoption and acclimatisation to New Zealand.

            And here, before a final recapitulation, his argument ends.

            You will note that in typically poker-faced fashion. I have simply summarised Palenski’s book before making any critical comments, as I do want to make it clear that it covers much ground, is extensively researched and is full of interest.

            I sympathise with Palenski when I detect an undercurrent of impatience with postmodernist theory. I mentally applaud when he rejects a “Said-like standpoint” and the term “cultural appropriation” in discussing the way 19^th century Pakeha entrepreneurs used Maori motifs in their advertising and trade-marks (pp.108-109)

            At the same time, I do have to take issue with elements of the style. I assume the original academic thesis was adapted for publication. But some parts seem insufficiently purged of the academic style. For example Chapter 5, on possible federation, begins with what looks like a “literature review” of what has been written on this topic. It takes too long considering how Australia got federated before it swings back to the supposedly focal issue of New Zealand. Chapter 2 becomes a list of the names of writers and newspapers without really evaluating the national spirit that Palenski says they expressed.

            More important than matters of style, however, there is much that I take issue with in the overall argument.

            I am surprised that Palenski makes so little use of nineteenth century demographics. Had he done so, he would have found that the proportion of Scots and Irish in New Zealand was far higher than the proportion of those ethnicities (vis-à-vis the English) in Britain itself. In effect, he would have found that if ever New Zealand was a “South Britain”, it was racially a very different Britain than the original one. [Even leaving aside the whole question of the indigenous Maori]. And this could have powerfully reinforced his argument for a distinctive nineteenth century New Zealand Pakeha identity.

            On the other hand, he would, in considering the New Zealand Scots and Irish, have found how much recent historians (see Brad Patterson; see Lydon Fraser et al) have emphasised their retention of a distinct ethnic identity, set apart from what they saw as the Anglo stream. Yea verily, even unto the second generation, New Zealand Scots and Irish still saw themselves primarily as transplanted Scots and Irish. Too often, Palenski assumes that there was one standard norm of Pakeha and ignores this major factor of Pakeha ethnic and cultural (and religious) diversity. Did Dunedin Scots Presbyterians have the same national consciousness as Southland Irish Catholics or Canterbury English Anglicans?

            More generally, I think that Palenski is too certain he has proven that there was a “finished” national consciousness in the late nineteenth when it was (and still is, and ever will be in such an immigrant nation) an ill-defined consciousness very much in the making. Well into the 20^th century, there were still New Zealand-born people who referred to Britain as “Home” and even now, with a British monarch as head of state, the project of forging a distinct national identity is incomplete. Too often, Palenski turns aside from, or glides swiftly over, clear evidence that Pakeha in the late nineteenth century saw themselves as transplanted Britons first.

            Yes, New Zealand adopted a distinctive flag (Chapter 3). But surely  - as Palenski fails to note - a flag incorporating the Union Jack is still a flag proclaiming dependence on British authority. Yes, New Zealand may have been the “social laboratory of the world” (Chapter 4) but even Palenski has to note that our social legislation wasn’t as distinctive as all that. Much of it derived from Australian models and the very fact that New Zealand took such pride in foreign approval shows how much Pakeha were unsure of their own status. They still required reassurance from others that they were doing the right thing. Yes, Palenski may be right in his contention that “war is one way in which national identity is put on display to the rest of the world”. But the chapter on the Boer War really tells me that New Zealand still wanted (and got) a pat on the head from the imperial power for its participation - just as it did at Gallipoli. If this is national consciousness, it is the national consciousness of a dependent child. When he speaks of rugby and other sports, Palenski does (to be fair) note the irony of a national identity being built on English “public” school games. But he passes quickly over the implications this has for a continuing dual identity – at least as much British as New Zealand. Likewise, he does mention, but rushes past, Jamie Belich’s “recolonisation” thesis – which says that in many respects New Zealand’s growing sense of nationhood was retarded by the greater economic dependence on Britain which began with refrigeration and the export of meat and dairy products.

            None of this is to deny the real and demonstrable evidence for New Zealand national consciousness that Palenski presents. It is simply to suggest that much of it can be contextualised differently. For every “proof” of Kiwi consciousness in the late nineteenth century, one could find in the record an equal “proof” of persistent identification with Britain among Kiwis. To get all rhetorical, I want to ask if New Zealanders were “made” in the late nineteenth century – as in the title The Making of New Zealanders -  then why were our writers and poets in the 1930s so aggressive about (as they saw it) for the first time creating a truly national literature? How come Michael Joseph Savage could still say in 1939  “Where Britain goes we go”? Why was Bill Pearson still having anxious hysterics about the nature of New Zealanders in his 1951 essay Fretful Sleepers? Why wasn’t New Zealand history taught in our universities until the 1960s and why did Keith Sinclair and W.H.Oliver, in the late 1950s, see themselves as having to present the case for writing nationalist history at all? There was, well past the middle of the twentieth century, much uncertainty about what is meant to be a New Zealander anyway.

            Etcetera. Etcetera.

            My point is that national identity is a fluid thing and you really can’t fix down one time (late nineteenth century or much later) when most New Zealanders were comfortable with being New Zealanders. Palenski’s thesis is only as valid as the Sinclair one that it specifically contests. Perhaps it would be better re-titled The Beginning of the Making of New Zealanders.

            I do not want to finish on this sour note, however, as I have to acknowledge that this book is filled with interesting insights and with factual information of which I had hitherto been ignorant. To give some examples, I wasn’t aware that different parts of New Zealand operated in different time zones until 1868, or that telephones were being used in New Zealand within three years of Alexander Graham Bell’s taking out his patents in 1876 (Chapter 1).Nor did I know that British coinage remained New Zealand’s legal tender until the 1930s (Chapter 3). It was a shock to discover how close New Zealand came to being another convict colony like New South Wales (Chapter 4).On the other hand, it was heartening to find that at least one reason for rejecting federation with Australia was a fear that Maori would be disenfranchised in a Greater Australia (Chapter 5).

            I may disagree with the overall argument of this thesis, but it is a solid work of scholarship and a big contribution to a debate on national consciousness that is far from closed.

Interesting but otherwise irrelevant footnote – Palenski’s Introduction gives a clear account of Lord Macaulay’s famous image of a future “visitor from New Zealand” sketching the ruins of London from the broken arch of London Bridge. As Palenski rightly notes, it became a cliché for English editorialists in the nineteenth century to quote it whenever New Zealand was mentioned. In Ian St George’s edition of William Colenso’s letters-to-the-press Give Your Thoughts Life [look it up on the blog index at right], there is reproduced a letter Colenso wrote in March 1864 (pp.175-176) in which he points out that Macaulay probably unconsciously plagiarised the idea of a “traveller from New Zealand” gazing on the remnants of London or Paris from a French book, the preface to an account of La Billardiere’s voyage in search of the missing explorer La Perouse. These perfidious Albionites are always nicking good ideas from the French! (Just compare the original Eiffel Tower with the Blackpool Tower, mon ami.)

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

 

“ROOTS, SCHMOOTS” by Howard Jacobson (first published 1993)

            When I read a book that investigates the development of national identity, like Ron Palenski’s The Making of New Zealanders, I immediately wrestle with the question of what national identity is anyway. This in turn makes me think of ethnic and linguistic and religious identity. And my mind goes back to a book I read nearly twenty years ago, in which a witty author gives a vigorous drubbing to many of the pieties that are supposed to be honoured by his own ethnic group.

            A man, in other words, who knows that there’s more to being human than adhering to a particular ethnic (or national) group.

            The travel book Roots, Schmoots is a Jewish author’s scolding of a lot of received Jewishness.

            A few words on the author. Howard Jacobson is an English-Jewish Manchester-born Cambridge-educated novelist, columnist and writer of non-fiction. He’s written eleven novels and volumes of short stories and won the 2010 Booker for his novel The Finkler Question. Though definitely (and vocally) not American, his comic tone of voice has most often been likened to New York Jewish writers like Philip Roth. Jacobson is an atheist-inclined agnostic, but he is no bigot about it. He once appeared in a televised debate supporting the proposition “Stop bashing Christians – Britain is becoming an anti-Christian country”. Despite his satire and criticisms of aspects of Jewish life, Jacobson is also a vocal opponent of the anti-Israel lobby, especially the Jewish part of it. He has sometimes taken on Noam Chomsky for the dodgy scholarship and questionable knowledge of history behind Chomsky’s anti-Israel statements.

            For my peace of mind, I also have to add something peculiar. The English-Jewish novelist Howard Jacobson is no relation of the equally-talented South African-Jewish novelist Dan Jacobson. I say this because both men have written novels that put a modern interpretation on Biblical stories – The Rape of Tamar (Dan’s) and The Very Model of a Man (Howard’s). They sit side-by-side on my bookshelves.

            Now after all that, let’s return to Roots, Schmoots.

            The descendant of “Litvaks” (Eastern-European Jews – especially from the Baltic region), Howard Jacobson at the age of fifty was profoundly contemptuous of pious and overly sentimental books written by Jews seeking out their ancestors. He was determined not to write such a book himself. So Roots, Schmoots is as much a flight from, as a reconciliation to, his own roots.

            In this travel book, Jacobson for some of the journey leaves behind in England the (Catholic, Australian) woman he was married to at the time. (He has been married three times in all.) At first he travels among English Jews. He is clearly both amused and alarmed by the recent resurgence in very conservative Orthodox Judaism in England. His secular sympathies are always in evidence.

            The book really hits its stride, however, when he crosses the Atlantic. Over half of Roots, Schmoots gives his impressions of Jews in the United States.

           

            He goes to the Catskills, where traditional Jewish holiday camps of the “Borscht Belt” are now down on their luck as they are either taken over by (exclusivist) Orthodox Jews, or close down as their wealthier clientele make for warmer places like Miami. Even so, he still finds Jewish parents battling for places at table and trying to play match-maker with their eligible grown children.

            He goes to New York. The Lubavitcher cult wait for the Messiah in the person of an elderly rabbi. In the SoHo art-world set, Jews act out fantasies of being characters in a Woody Allen movie. Brighton Beach has become down-at-heel and shabby. Jews, newly arrived from Russia, have hopes of making it rich by selling Judaica to New Yorkers, but meet with complete indifference.

            Jacobson heads west. He looks at a Holocaust museum – and is unimpressed. He goes to a gay synagogue where they pray for those who have died of AIDS and women who died in illegal abortions (“the martyrs of the sexual revolution” as Jacobson puts it). He goes to a Protestant church where a Jew-for-Jesus is preaching. For no particular reason he also goes to a Mormon tabernacle. He visits Boot Hill in the hope that he can find some Jewish connections with the Wild West.

            In the second leg of his journey Jacobson goes (this time with his wife) to Israel. He has some strong and often unpleasant impressions. One is the anti-Arab extremism of the Jewish “settlers” on the Left Bank, who tend to be Orthodox and puritanically-conservative and who clearly hope for the construction of an exclusively Jewish theocracy. Another is his natural sympathy for the old-style Jewish socialists living in the dwindling number of functioning kibbutzim. And there is his discomfort at the shabbiness of tourist attractions in Haifa.

            Only in the last few chapters is he able to go where his more recent ancestors came from – Lithuania. He witnesses a chilly state, at that time just beginning to thaw out from Communism, but with all the Soviet-era discomforts still in place. Among Jews there, he detects fear of a resurgence of anti-Semitism. After much searching he finds the unkempt and untended Jewish cemetery where most of the village whence is grandparents came are buried. He has, at least for the purposes of this book, found his roots.

            Jacobson’s style throughout is sardonic and peppered with one-liners, like a travelling stand-up comic. The book sometimes wanders off theme (why did he visit that Mormon tabernacle?) and is best read in short bursts. As it is an insider’s book, Jacobson is licensed to make jokes at the expense of his fellow Jews. Sometimes the tone is that of an agnostic English gentleman who is contemptuous of tradition (especially religious tradition) and feels the past is something to be escaped from.

            There are some interesting insights. One is his judgement that the Holocaust “industry” (as he calls it) too often reduces Jews to the status of helpless victims, and feels compelled to depict non-Jewish European peasants as illiterate oafs. This is how he reacts to the Holocaust museum in America at which juncture, surprisingly, he also says some negative things about Elie Wiesel. At the same time, even though he is an agnostic, Jacobson instinctively sides with the religion of his ancestors when it seems to be under attack (he is very contemptuous of the Jew-for-Jesus).

            There is another aspect of his agnosticism which I find revealing. At one point he visits a mainstream synagogue with the sentimental desire to fully participate in a service, just for old time’s sake. He is horrified to discover how blandly secular and lacking in traditional ceremony and colour the service now is. I’ve found exactly the same attitude in agnostics of Christian background when they put their noses inside a church for the first time in years. They come for a purely aesthetic buzz and instead are annoyed to find people who actually believe in this religious stuff unadorned. Jacobson’s attitude reminds me of Melvyn Bragg, in his recent superficial book The Book of Books – about the English-language translation of the Bible – lamenting the language of the defunct Anglican Authorised (“King James”) Version, and wishing it could still be used in churches. Never mind what’s being said, just so long as it sounds quaint and euphonious.

            When I’ve said all these things, though, the best thing about Roots, Schmoots is the way Howard Jacobson judges his own community by broad, humanistic values. He’s sometimes affectionate, sometimes negative and often satirical about fellow Jews, but he’s never under the illusion that they are a special category of humanity exempt from human weaknesses, follies and misjudgements.

            If you like, you could say it’s a book about the limits of ethnic identity.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

 

PROPAGANDA BY OMISSION

            The week I am writing, the American TV star Andy Griffith has died at the age of 86.

            I’m not going to give a sentimental retrospective on the man because, amiable chap though he seems to have been, much of his persona and style were not to my adult taste.

            Nor am I going to do what some of the less gooey and more hip American obituarists have done (like the one in the Los Angeles Times, which you can check out on line). This was to remind readers that the single great big-screen performance Griffith ever gave was before he became a TV star. In Elia Kazan’s 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd (scripted by Budd Schulberg) the 31-year-old Griffith played a homespun, cornpone, just-plain-folks Southern fellow called “Lonesome” Rhodes who becomes a TV star by apparently guileless charm. But the film reveals “Lonesome” Rhodes to be a cruelly manipulative shyster who regards his worshipping audience as suckers for believing the sentimental drivel he trades in.

            It’s a sharp satire on TV’s cult of personality, and it was rumoured to be based roughly on the 1950s American TV personality Arthur Godfrey. The irony is that homespun Southern charm was exactly what Griffith deployed during the eight years when he played the sheriff of Mayberry in the sitcom The Andy Griffith Show. Not that anybody is suggesting the real Griffith was anything like the fictional Rhodes.

            Anyway, as I said, I’m not going to remind you of this.

            Instead, the name Andy Griffith reminds me of a moment when my eyes were opened to the real nature of television.

            There I was, aged about 13, watching The Andy Griffith Show on our single-channel black-and-white TV.

            I wasn’t a complete innocent. I was already wise to the fact that an awful lot of American sitcoms back then had leading characters who were widowers with offspring – thus allowing the scriptwriters to have cuddly family-oriented father-and-little-son scenes, but also the possibility of Dad having (perfectly chaste, of course) romantic episodes with female guest stars. The Andy Griffith Show; My Three Sons; The Courtship of Eddie’s Father etc. etc. There were plenty of shows of that era that pulled this particular stunt.

            So there was Sheriff Andy with the soppy stuff involving “Opie”, played by Ronnie Howard.

            I enjoyed seeing Sheriff Andy always besting his incompetent and jittery deputy Barney Fife, played by Don Knotts. This was because there was a boy at my school who had an uncanny resemblance to Don Knotts and therefore whom everybody called “Barney Fife”. He hated it, which meant the teasing persisted, and it didn’t help that his name really was Bernard. Schoolboys are cruel little buggers.

            But the moment of truth came one day when I was watching charming Mayberry, with Sheriff Andy going about his business and helping old ladies across the road and giving wise homilies to Opie; and Barney Fife doing something amusingly cretinous; and Aunt Bee making apple-pie to serve on the ironed tartan-patterned table-cloth.

            And my Dad takes his pipe out of his mouth and says : “Have you ever thought how odd it is that there are no blacks in this Southern town?”

            And from that moment, I wasn’t able to see the show in quite the same light.

            Dad was right, of course. In the whole eight years of The Andy Griffith Show (or at least the ones we saw broadcast in New Zealand), there never once was a black character, never once was any mention of contentious current events involving different races (this at the height of the civil rights struggle), never any suggestion that Mayberry consisted of people other than nice, white, mono-cultural churchgoing Southerners; though I do remember one episode in which an Englishman passed through as a tourist and pleasant fun was made of his quaint ways and funny accent.

            Thanks to Wikipedia, I know that Mayberry was apparently based on Andy Griffith’s real hometown, Mount Airy, North Carolina. I discover that this is a hill town with, as it happens, very few blacks in its ethnic mix. It’s your white Baptist Bible Belt. At the same time, again thanks to Wikipedia, I know that nearly a quarter of the total population of North Carolina is black (21.5% to be precise). So my father’s point remains a valid one.

            Funny to see a Southern town without any blacks in it.

            You may think I am making heavy weather of something trivial. I mean, it was only a sitcom, for God’s sake. I wasn’t expecting serious dramatizations of current event in a piece of escapist fun, was I?

            Indeed not. But my father’s question made me suddenly and uncomfortably aware of how much television builds its fantasy worlds by omission.

            Nobody could accuse The Andy Griffith Show of being racist. I’m sure you could go through every episode and not find any demeaning comment made about race, any vulgar reference to “niggers”, anything calculated to cause disharmony between ethnic groups. But that’s because, in its alternative vision of the South, blacks simply didn’t exist. They were written out of the script.

            Since then, I’ve often had time to reflect that the best propaganda works by omission like this. Say negative things about a person or group, and the audience can see your propaganda purpose and maybe question it. Pretend a person or group doesn’t exist, and the audience won’t give them any consideration. They become peripheral to “normality”.

            We hug artificial dreams created by cutting bits of reality out of them.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

 

“ZEN UNDER FIRE – A New Zealand Woman’s Story of Love and War in Afghanistan” by  Marianne Elliott (Penguin, $NZ34:99)

            Marianne Elliott is a New Zealand lawyer who went to Afghanistan in 2006 as part of the United Nations Assistance Mission. Her role was to investigate and report on human rights abuse and to contribute to the process of reconciliation between communities. She had already been part of a Middle East mission in Gaza. She tells us candidly that when she arrived in Afghanistan, she had been looking unsuccessfully for a boyfriend and had an unsatisfactory emotional life, in which she tended to bury herself in work:

            “My romantic history to date had taught me to be wary of placing too much value on a relationship. My work had generally been a more reliable source of fulfilment and passion than my boyfriends.” (Pg.47)

            Zen Under Fire is her story of some of her time in Afghanistan and of her official role. But it is also about her emotional life there and her relationship with an American. Out of tact and delicacy, she identifies him by the pseudonym “Joel”.

            After six months in the capital Kabul, Elliott was sent to the provincial UN office in Afghanistan’s third largest town, Herat. An anecdote in the opening pages tells us that, upon her arrival, the senior site officer took off on a vacation and left her in charge, saying blithely “You’ll be fine… so long as no one kills Amanallah Khan.” Whereupon, of course,  somebody did kill this particular village leader and Elliott was thrown into the painful and painstaking process of negotiating with village elders and trying to reconcile feuding tribal and ethnic factions.

            She rapidly discovered that more people have died in tribal feuds in Afghanistan than in the Taliban insurgency. As a human rights lawyer, she at first wanted to make her top priority prosecuting those who violated human rights. It took her some time to accept that reconciliation was her major role, and that ensuring continuing peace between groups sometimes meant allowing malefactors to remain unpunished. The lesser evil had to contribute to the greater good.

            Implicit in much of what Elliott writes there is a strong sense of personal values. She is anti-materialistic, declaring of her legal career in New Zealand: “Working on cases in which business partners fought ferociously over financial losses taught me the perils of coveting money.” (Pg.21) She had high hopes for improving the world by means of an essentially pacifist creed, but she admits that her ideals were sometimes dashed. When offered work elsewhere, she was momentarily tempted to toss in her job in Afghanistan. She writes:

            “I am reluctant to leave Afghanistan just yet. Why? Because what brought me to Afghanistan in the first place was my belief in the possibility of a safer, fairer world, and in my ability to play a role in bringing that world about. Somewhere in that muddy courtyard in Shindand, or in the weeks of sadness that followed, I lost that belief in myself and in the possibility of a better world. I want to recover it. I need to. I’m not willing to leave Afghanistan until I have. I’m determined to find a real way to be of service to Afghanistan, despite the challenges of the past weeks.” (Pg.79)

            She does find satisfaction in such service, but there is throughout the book a sense of unease about how well the civilian (UN) and military (NATO) components of the peacekeeping mission work together in Afghanistan. Elliott sometimes openly expresses scepticism about the quality of military “intelligence” (she usually puts the word in inverted commas – see Pg.238). She tells an anecdote of a macho US intelligence officer asking about “Hezbollah” (rather than Taliban) activity in the area where she is working, apparently not caring that Hezbollah is a Lebanese Muslim group which has nothing to do with Afghanistan. She also notes the major difficulty that, in the minds of many Afghans, humanitarian aid is paired with military action, especially as US forces use humanitarian aid as a means of pacifying villages. Hence those are the very villages that the Taliban target. Elliott argues with a colleague in the UN Political Affairs unit who says that human rights can wait until there is stability in Afghanistan. Elliott ripostes that there can be no stability for Afghans who continue to suffer from crooked or violent political leaders (pp.172-173).

            In spite of all this, most of her stories about colleagues (military or civilian) are positive, with some people showing special fortitude. After diplomatic pressure, a French aid worker is released, frail and starved, by his Taliban  captors. Despite his condition, he still insists on telling TV cameras surrounding his stretcher that his chief concern is with his Afghan fellow-workers who are still captives (Pg.157).

            It is inevitable that there is a certain feminist angle to this book. Especially in her encounters with abused women and children, Elliott confirms that sexism is built into such a patriarchal society. There are frequent reports of rape and other atrocities practised against women; of women and girls kept in slavery by tribal leaders; and of routine intimidation. Elliott interviews a young woman who has burnt herself after being jailed for the crime of zinna [adultery], which really means running away with her boyfriend rather than undergoing a forced marriage. She also reports on an Afghan woman official being investigated for [petty] corruption when it is clear that her male superiors are more on the take than she is. Elliott’s view is that the woman is really being  targeted for her independence, unorthodox dress standards etc.

            As a Westerner used to more gender equity, Elliott knows she enjoys more rights than some of her “cases”. Investigating human rights, she comes to see the necessary interview process as often being an intrusion on women who have already suffered rape and/or humiliation. This line of thought also leads her to express some annoyance at those male UN officers have difficulty accepting her leadership position, or see her as too emotional in her reactions to things.

            As inevitable as the feminist angle, there is a degree of “First World Guilt”. Working among people who live in the most wretched conditions, the New Zealander remarks “I have seen Afghan homes that make New Zealand prisons look lavish.”  (Pg.85). Of one interview subject, she writes:

            “The woman tells me she is thirty-four years old. We are the same age. I am shocked. It is not the first time I realise how my privileged life has protected me from the ageing process. Once, in a salon in Kabul, a beautician quizzed me for an hour about my secrets to youthfulness after she learned my age. I didn’t know how to tell her my secret was to have all the food and drink I have ever needed, free health care and protection from the environment in the form of a warm, dry home and gallons of sunblock. Apart from the sunblock, they weren’t exactly things I could bring back from New Zealand for her in a bottle.” (Pg.65)

            Allied with this sense of guilt, there is an awareness that too often Western news media present a simplified view of Afghanistan and its troubles. Toward the end of Zen Under Fire, Elliott tells of giving an interview to a New Zealand journalist in the hope that he would report accurately on the travails of the people among whom she was working. Instead, the chap merely cranked out the type of clichés about Afghanistan that Western readers want to hear. It would appear that this dispiriting experience was one of her reasons for writing this book.

            The reality, as she sees it, is that there are many signs of communal hope in Afghanistan. One is the receptivity of elders and Afghan officials to ideas on the proper and correct enforcement of the law, without prejudice. Elliott records her delight in running, with her friend Kate, workshops on this:

            “I watch intrigued as the buzz spreads through the room. The participants embrace the exercise wholeheartedly and I hear voices rise in friendly debate. I wish that more people could see the Afghanistan that I am seeing. This is such a contrast to the version of this country shown in the Western media: images of a country filled with ruthless terrorists, corrupt leaders and helpless victims. Instead, here is a room filled with public servants enthusiastic about learning all they can to do their best for their country and for the people they serve.” (Pg.108)

            As my trundling and just-the-facts-ma’am review should so far have shown you, I find much of interest in this book, especially in its reportage and clear sense of what life is like in a country under much stress. At the risk of seeming to question a work of such high ideals, however, there are some things on the debit side.

            Although the book is called Zen Under Fire, I’m not sure that there is enough Zen here to justify the title.

            Elliott expresses her philosophic convictions clearly once:

 “I find extraordinary power in Pema Chodrin’s simple yet profound Buddhist practices and teachings and I’ve begun to read other Buddhist writing as well. Perhaps Afghanistan is the right setting to be introduced to the Buddha’s teachings on the four noble truths. There is certainly no avoiding the first of them  - that life is suffering. But I have been struggling to accept the second noble truth – that suffering is caused by attachments or craving and aversion. I have no problem seeing how my suffering is caused by these two tendencies. But I struggle to see how the suffering of a mother who can’t feed her child might be caused by her own attachments.” (Pg.204)

            Elliott makes frequent references to her yoga instructor and the yoga that helps her relax tense nerves and centre herself, especially in a dangerous country where she can’t take the jogs she is used to. In the last pages, she expresses sorrow that in the four years since she left Afghanistan, the situation there has degenerated. But she now teaches yoga and learns can now live better with herself.

            Even so, the book’s title suggests more of a conflict between ideals and reality than is actually delivered.

            Likewise, I’m not sure I like that subtitle “A New Zealand Woman’s Story of Love and War in Afghanistan”. It suggests a novelette, or at least give rise to novelettish expectations. Maybe this is because I’m not as sympathetic as I could have been to Elliott’s account of her on-again, off-again (and finally off-permanently) relationship with “Joel”. She eventually goes completely cold on him (Chapter 38) when he doesn’t even phone to enquire how she is faring after the Taliban fires rockets at the compound where she is living. I am sure this was very important in Elliott’s own life. But as it ends up amounting to nothing, it comes across as a short-term affair rather than a story of any particular commitment. For this reader at any rate, the “Joel” passages were unwelcome interruptions to the more important story, no matter how truthful they may be.

            Finally, there is a odd lack of style and structure to this book. The tentative tone doesn’t disturb me. The whole book is written in the present tense which (as every journalist knows) not only creates a sense of immediacy but also creates a sense of uncertainty about what’s coming next. But I am disturbed by the lack of dramatic emphasis which a more experienced write may have been able to create. Zen Under Fire has clearly been worked up from the diaries and notes kept at the time, and it could have benefited from more editorial trimming.

            Rather than end on that sour note, however, I emphasize that Zen Under Fire tells us much about Afghanistan that simply doesn’t appear on the news.