Something Thoughtful

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

PROFOUND OR BANAL OR NEITHER?

            I am writing this “Something Thoughtful” for the first posting of the year, after having had a long summer break. So, as you and I are still in a semi-holiday mood, I will make it brief, unchallenging and a little frivolous.

Have you ever noticed how things that are taken to be profound wisdom are, in reality, merely commonplace ideas dressed up a little?

I first thought about this some years go when I had just been watching the (very imperfect and untrue-to-the-book) film version of Richard Hughes’ novel A High Wind in Jamaica. At the end of the film, pirates are put on trial for a crime which, despite their other villainies, they did not in fact commit. When, in spite of their innocence, they are eventually condemned to death, one pirate (Anthony Quinn) says resignedly to the other (James Coburn) “Zac, we must be guilty of something.”

What a fine expression of the Existentialist Absurd as expounded by Sartre and Co., I said. Guilty or innocent, there is something in the nature of things that will get us in the end, regardless of our will. Here is ineluctable fate.

But my wife, much more commonsensical about these things that I often am, said “But isn’t it just like that song in The Sound of Music?” She was referring to the song in the Rodgers and Hammerstein movie where, having just, against her expectations, won the hand in marriage of Captain von Trapp, a romantic Maria sings “Somewhere in my youth and childhood, I must have done something good”.

Same idea, you see. Ineluctable fate having nothing to do with our will.

I was a little deflated that my high-brow reference could be equated with something as middle-brow as The Sound of Music, but I couldn’t deny that my wife was right. It was the same thought in different words.

Here’s a more recent experience I had of the same phenomenon. In his autobiographical trilogy The Paper Nautilus, the anthropologist Michael Jackson quotes these lines from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “Sudden Light”, conveying a moment when a woman first falls in love:

“You have been mine before, -

How long ago I may not know:

But just when at that swallow’s soar

Your neck turned so,

Some veil did fall, - I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?” (quoted pg. 177)

The poem is actually listed as a “song” in Rossetti’s collection The House of Life and it begins:

“I have been here before

But when or how I cannot tell”

            So here you have the expression of an experience mixing déjà vu with the idea that one is actually destined to fall in love with a particular person. Coming from a canonical poet (well, almost…) it must be profound, mustn’t it?

But is it any more profound that the lyrics of the old Rodgers and Hart song “Where or When” from the 1937 show Babes in Arms? :

“It seems we stood and talked like this before
We looked at each other in the same way then
But I can't remember where or when

The clothes you're wearing are the clothes you wore
The smile you are smiling you were smiling then
But I can't remember where or when

Some things that happen for the first time
Seem to be happening again

And so it seems that we have met before
And laughed before, and loved before
But who knows where or when?”

Here it is – the same quality of déjà vu, the same sense of inevitable and fated love as in the Rossetti poem. But a high-brow wouldn’t quote Tin Pan alley, would he?

The moral of this tedious, truncated disquisition is a simple one. We often think something is profound simply because of who wrote it or the context in which we found it. Or it could be a matter of sheer style. To quote Alexander Pope’s definition in his An Essay on Criticism:

“True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d:

What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d.”

“Oft thought”? Yes indeed. But not put into particularly lovely words.

Something New

 

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

“THE PAPER NAUTILUS” by Mchael Jackson (Otago University Press, $NZ35); “RETURN TO RUGBY LAND” by David Scott (published by Bay Owl Press, Columbo); “PACIFIC – AN OCEAN OF WONDERS” by Philip Hatfield (Bateman Books, $NZ96:99)

            I made clear in my posting Oedipus inVarious Guises that I am not a great fan of the work of Jean Cocteau; but in his 1960 film Le Testament d’Orphee Cocteau scores a palpable hit with the best joke he ever devised. A young couple are dancing together, each draped over the other’s shoulder; but changes of camera angle show that each is scribbling away on a pad, making notes on their experience even as it happens. “Intellectuals in love,” remarks a third person. Exactly so. The urge to verbalise and trap with words every experience, and the urge to over-analyse such powerful things as love and loss, are common sins among intellectuals. And they may be part of what irks me in Michael Jackson’s The Paper Nautilus.

            As I’ve done occasionally before, I’m going to begin with a conclusion. I enjoyed reading The Paper Nautilus, admired the clarity of [most of] Jackson’s prose, and found more than a few enlivening anecdotes and reminiscences en route. But I also found some of Jackson’s underlying assumptions questionable and, given that a great part of the book is straight autobiography, found muted versions of self-justification throughout… which may, of course, be inevitable in the genre of autobiography. So I have a kind of love-hate relationship with this book – at one and the same time interested by it, finding some ideas provocative, but also irritated. You may conclude that therefore it must a good book because it is thought-provoking, and that might be your own conclusion if you read it.

            Born in 1940, so now approaching his 80^th year, New Zealand-born, US-resident Michael Jackson, academic, anthropologist, poet, and writer of fiction and non-fiction, is here summing up key events in his life. Subtitled “A Trilogy”, the book is in three parts. Jackson’s declared theme is loss, a fitting theme for a man of his years. In my usual cloth-eared, flat-footed, bibliographic way, I offer you first a summary.

            Part One, titled “Theme and Variation” is largely in the genre of essay.  One might at first take the theme of loss to refer to the traumatic sense of loss when a loved one dies. This does figure largely in the book; but “loss” also takes in the loss of the past itself, not only in the sense of enfeebled memory that old age brings, but also in the sense that we cannot ever fully recreate or re-live the past. And then there is the past that happened before any of us were born. As Jackson says: “Do we not breathe the same air that our forebears did? Don’t the muted voices of the past echo in the voices we hear today?” (p.16)

            There is something a little watery and unfocused in this first section of The Paper Nautilus. Jackson moves from topic to topic and from example to example, sometimes only tenuously connected with one another. So we have a sort of cornucopia – or pot-pourri – of things theoretically related to the topic of memory. The long-ago small-town experiences of his grandfather are displayed. We hear of tribal rituals in Sierra Leone, in which the dead are treated as if they were still alive. We have pages on Iris Wilkinson (“Robin Hyde”) and the loss of her child. A survivor of the Holocaust speaks of those who now live only in memory. But there is also the loss of expectations. For thirteen pages (pp.39-52), Jackson recounts meeting in New Mexico, many years since he last knew him, the once-flamboyant Aaron Friesen, who, in 1950s New Zealand, had cut a dash among the literary figures of the day and was regarded as a potential literary heavyweight. Friesen has become a grumpy,  unfulfilled old man, with a patient wife who still believes he is a great writer. But she is deluded. Jackson says that on being asked to find a publisher for some of Friesen’s work, he discovered : “The poems were all in need of revision. Most were so mediocre and maudlin that not even historical curiosity could justify their publication.” (p.49) In itself, this is not an uncommon story. It is often the fate of the “big noise” on campus, or among bohemians, whose spark goes out very quickly once it is discovered that he is all show and really has nothing to say. A lost expectation.

Part Two, entitled “Significant Others” is more fully in the genre of autobiography. Jackson writes in detail about his own bohemian life in Wellington in the early 1960s and how the place strikes him when he visits it many years later. But this segues into the story of his bohemian friend Leon Donnelly, who had the makings of a Classicist, who won a scholarship to Oxford, but who turned his back on it all, basically bumming out in Athens, dabbling in painting, dabbling in [Greek] politics, and finally settling in Rangitikei for an aimless life fuelled by whisky and marijuana. Without its being directly spelled out, this too seems a story of lost potential or lost possibilites.

Jackson moves on to matters more directly concerning his own life story.

For a while he works with the homeless. For a while he works in Africa. He does an MA in psychology but gradually moves into anthropology. But the most important thing is meeting and marrying his first wife Emma. In some ways it is a turbulent marriage. The love is intense, but they wedded in the first place because both had won doctoral scholarships to Cambridge and apparently, for the purposes of accommodation, it was more convenient to be a married couple. They had a daughter and – a little awkwardly and causing some stress – Jackson went with wife and daughter to Sierra Leone to do anthropological research. What takes over this story, however, is Emma’s long suffering of cancer, the various palliatives or cures they sought, and eventually her death. This is the central loss in The Paper Nautilus and, I surmise, the key event that set Jackson writing this book in the first place. Coping with this loss sometimes has Jackson trying to reconstruct the past, reconnect with people who knew his wife, and otherwise defeat the verdict of death. And there is always the fear that he is losing the very memory of his wife.

Part Three, entitled “Constant in the Darkness”, shifts into the genre of fiction. Jackson reworks the stories he has already told in the form of a novella. The justification for writing this third, fictionalised, part comes from an idea of Paul Auster which Jackson summarises with approval: “that every person comprises several selves and that fiction writers flesh out some of these inner personae in their work, as well as events that might have come to pass had they taken a different road in life.” (p.160) So we get what might now be called a “mash-up” of what Jackson has already told us in Part Two. In the fictitious characters of Sam, Harriet and Zoe we have the same motif of a man who has one daughter and whose wife dies. But Jackson draws into the lifeline of these people things that, in real life, happened to others. For example to Sam, in part a fictitious version of Jackson himself, is attributed the story told in Part Two of a man who sold his house when his wife died, but who later wanted to buy it back as it contained so many memories of his wife. There is also a fictitious artist called Max who seems to have attributes of both Leon Donnelly and Aaron Friesen; and there is a woman called Rachel whose field of study is autobiographical memory. Each fictional character combines aspects of a number of real people.

To put it simply, I am not sure that this mash-up really works, or that it adds anything to what we have already been told. It may be argued that the whole book is an exercise in showing how the essential idea of loss can be conveyed in three different genres. But my own instinct says that if Jackson wanted to write a fictitious account of people and ideas that intrigue him, then he should have attempted a novel with more complex and developed characters, rather than this somewhat schematic novella.

Thus for my flat bibliographic account of The Paper Nautilus. But what are my real discontents with it?

First, a prejudice of mine. I am middle-class, but I am not happy in the company of middle-class or academic bohemians. By this I mean people who see themselves as being an exception to the rest of the middle-class, more perceptive than those other middle-class yobs and therefore superior to them. The Paper Nautilus is replete with globe-trotting bohemian bourgeois, even the dishevilled and bum-like ones, who are always capable of coming up with an apt literary quotation in the conversations they have, or who can cite a work of art. And boy, do they loathe the mass of society without noticing what they have in common with others. Take this example - when pondering on his relationship with Leon Donnelly, Jackson muses “Was it simply habit that bound us together? Or a similar loneliness, born of a shared love for the same landscapes but a common estrangement from the settler culture that had imposed itself on the land and never come to terms with it?” (p.142 – emphasis added). When I read this, I felt like shouting “But you’re part of the settler culture yourself, sunshine, and you’re as much involved in imposing yourself on the land as anyone else.”

There are also moments when Jackson mentions something in passing without really analysing it. Speaking of Lansana Suma, at one time an anthropology colleague in Sierra Leone, he notes: “… he railed against the privileges of expatriate whites and their sordid adulteries, and cursed anthropology, which he regarded as the bastard child of slavery, along with colonialism and the extractive economies that were destroying his country’s future.” (p.130) Apparently Lansana Suma moved out of academe and into promoting Islam. Jackson attributes Lansana’s angst to the force history itself. Having only a layman’s idea of what academic anthropology is, I’m in no position to condemn it as “the bastard child of slavery”, but I have often wondered how much it in fact imposes upon other peoples categories devised largely by Europeans. More to the point, I can sympathise with Lansana’s railing against “the privileges of expatriate whites and their sordid adulteries ”, especially when he is up against whites who casually mention sleeping with African prostitutes. But Jackson seems not to see it this way.

In another area of my discontent, I wonder if, in Part Two, Jackson is really showing raw honesty, or theatrical display, when he reproduces letters he exchanged with his wife early in their marriage? They reveal very intimate things and were obviously written, on both sides, in a state of high emotion. Is he honouring his late wife’s memory in sharing with the world a particular letter from Emma? It says “you also know about my nymphomania between  that parting [from another lover] and meeting you. I even slept with my best friend’s husband.” (p.100) It might be therapeutic for him to recall and deal with all these things, but it is in no way enlightening for his readers.

Somewhere in the same ballpark, I make it clear that I sympathise with a man who has felt the extremest form of joy when he first met his wife, and who suffered the deepest and most traumatic forms of misery and despair when he wife died after prolonged illness. Any devoted husband would howl with anguish. But Jackson is writing many years after the event, and the style in which he writes is overwrought and theatrical – a dream of passion, an enforced ceremony – as if we are being invited to admire the depth of his feelings.

 Of his first meeting with his wife, he writes: “But then I met Emma, and for the first time in my life everything became clear. Emma was my caryatid, the column that held me up, a figure that filled my heart with such love and longing that when we were apart , I felt as though my soul had suffered a partial eclipse.” (p.93)

Of her death from cancer he writes: “Knowing that she was dead and could not be perturbed by anything I did or said, the most dreadful cries of lamentation burst from my throat, cries of agony that would reverberate for years, despite the poetry wrung from my soul like blood from a stone.” (p.147)

“Catyatid”? “Lamentation”? “Reverberate”? THEN, I am sure these reactions were sincere and heartfelt. NOW the language is artificial and self-consciously “literary” and the actor is on stage in full make-up, trying to recreate what he once felt.

Part Three is avowedly fiction, but is nevertheless a reflection on autobiographical events. On the death of his wife Harriet, the fictitious Sam is reported as thinking thus: “Within days he realises that he possesses only fragments and will never be able to compose a meaningful mosaic with them. He agonises over whether he knew her at all, and whether loving someone, living with them from day to day, is a matter of not knowing but of something beyond our conceptual grasp – like the genius of Django Reinhardt  with his two paralysed fingers, Bach’s counterpoint, or simply the inertial force of habit.” (p.190 emphasis added). Okay, it is clear that we cannot hold in our memories all there is to remember about somebody we loved. Indeed, the reflection is obvious to the point of banality. It is banally obvious, too, that nobody can know everything there is to know – such as every single thought – even about somebody with whom we live intimately. But to extrapolate from this that “he [never] knew her at all” or that living with and loving somebody “is a matter of not knowing” is a way of avoiding the real situation of (genuine) love and marriage. To use an unfashionable word, faith – and trust – have to come into it. I do not and cannot know everything there is to know about my wife – but I know her, in our everyday life, better than anybody else does or can. We shape each other. We are not asocial, autonomous individuals. Being two autonomous individuals appears to be Jackson’s conception of marriage.

Which very thought brings me back to the “intellectuals in love” tale at the head of this review. To over-think love and loss, to break them down into discrete parts, is to destroy them and give a special place to one’s own feelings. The ego struts.

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A book by another, very different, New Zealand-born expatriate.

            Born and raised in New Zealand, David Scott has lived elsewhere for the last fifty years, and is currently resident in Sri Lanka. In 2011, he came back to New Zealand to follow the Rugby World Cup over the eight weeks of September and October. A Sri Lankan newspaper had commissioned him to file stories on each match. That year, the All Blacks won the cup, as they did in the next RWC contest. Return to Rugby Land, which chronicles Scott’s 2011 visit, was first published as an e-book in 2015 and only now appears in (printed) book form.

Any rugby-centred book I receive is likely to provoke me into giving the history of my complete and lifelong non-engagement with the game; but I will refain from doing that here. I already explained my attitude towards rugby in my review, on this blog, of Desmond Wood’s New ZealandRugby Country, back in 2017.

Return to Rugby Land gives accounts of each match in italics, and does indeed have whole sections dealing with the nature of rugby and its impact on New Zealand society. As Desmond Wood did, David Scott takes time to analyse the origins of rugby as an English public school invention, and to de-mythologise the idea that in New Zealand the game first flourished among rugged farmers. In fact, quite early in its New Zealand history, the game was played mainly by townies and urban professionals with middle-class aspirations. Scott also analyses such matters as the significance of the All Blacks’ pre-game haka, and how rugby reflects racial and class attitudes in New Zealand, and what role women have (or have not) played in the game.

Sometimes Return to Rugby Land gives the impression that Scott is walking on an intellectual tightrope. He clearly likes the game itself and is a connoisseur of tactics and skill as displayed by teams and individual rugby-players. There is no national chauvinism in his reports on matches and no “boosting” of the All Blacks. But as a middle-class intellectual, Scott understands there is a thuggish and yahoo aspect to much of rugby fandom; and partly in response to this, there is a snobbish disdain for the game among many middle-class intellectuals. Until very recently, there had been in New Zealand a lack of serious commentary on the game’s cultural impact. Of this, Scott says:

 “Is this neglect a reflection of an intellectual disdain for the masses’ culture? Do they think cultural cringe is solved by delving into the uneven output of art and literature while ignoring the great passion for sports?... Is a lady in a Blue Bulls helmet belting out an aria per se more refined than Vivian Richards or Dan Carter in their pomp?” (p.75)

So here is the voice of a man with mixed feelings. I think I can, as a non-rugby-follower, identify with this. In 1981 I joined marches and demos against the New Zealand tour of the Springboks, who still represented an apartheid-ruled South Africa. But my righteousness (or self-righteousness) was accompanied by a twinge of conscience. Wasn’t I in fact also enjoying myself by striking a blow against those yobs and slobs who liked rugby? Would I have protested against a tour by an opera company from a totalitarian state, as opposed to a tour by a rugby team? Snobby old middle-class intellectual me…

Having noted all this, I have to point out that rugby itself is only one part of Return to Rugby Land. The book’s subtitle is “Expatriate Reflections on the Rugby World Cup 2011, Sport, Society and New Zealand” and most of the text is concerned with Scott’s re-engagement with the country he had left so long before. Sometimes this takes the form of harmless travelogue, and descriptions of places Scott grew up in (Oamaru, Blenheim), with mildly nostalgic (or satirical) notes on how things have changed. He looks at Palmerston North more-or-less benignly, knows we are better drivers than Sri Lankans, and observes the poverty of the Far North.

More often, however, Scott is concerned with social, historical and political commentary. His views are very left-wing. He is anti-monarchy (fair enough – I’m with him on that one, though it doesn’t keep me awake at night). He wants to distinguish himself from the milder middle-class left-wing (thus playing another tightrope game) and he describes the New Zealand Listener as “the local journal of what-is-good-for-you” (p.20). Every so often he endorses, or is at odds with, the views of his brother-in-law the historian Jamie Belich.

Some of his historical comments are spot-on. He is right to demolish the idea that New Zealand never had its own equivalent of the old White Australia policy, noting: “New Zealand managed to keep a whites-only immigration policy longer than Australia, masked only by myths of harmonious race relations and letting Pacific islanders in to do unskilled work.” (p.47) His pages on Maori-Pakeha relations are very accusatory of Pakeha colonisation and exploitation of Maori (but then, which serious writer isn’t now?). But he also backs away from the more extreme Maori nationalism that would deny Pakeha true membership of this country (see especially pp.129-137).

At one point, he ventures to tell us that nationalism is actually a nasty capitalist plot, devised to divide the struggling masses. Thinking of how Communist Han Chinese deal with Tibetans and non-Han Muslims; and thinking of the current Hindu Supremacist Baratiya Janata government of India, with its profoundly racist ideology; I am very sceptical of Scott’s claim. Nationalism and racism have been around since before capitalism existed, and (if we are unlucky) could well be around after capitalism has gone. The notion that capitalism is always behind extreme nationalism comes from the days when Communists saw themselves as “internationalists” and thought, naïvely, that the workers of the world would inevitably unite.

While Scott’s interpretations can be interesting and provocative, they often have the glibness of a Marxist undergraduate who hasn’t bothered to revise or critique his views since student days. Apparently what New Zealand needs is an anti-capitalist revolution (see especially pp. 172-177). Ho-hum.

Given that it is based on observations from 2011, and that it was written by 2015, parts of Return to Rugby Land now look a little dated. Scott is shocked at the prices now being asked for baches. Regrettably, we have lived with inflated house-prices for so long now that we are no longer shocked. Contemporary with the time he is reporting is the Rena running aground on the Astrolabe Reef – an event that is now receding into the depths of our memory. When Scott comments on New Zealand’s involvement in overseas wars, he mentions in passing New Zealand’s commitment to an international force in Afghanistan. If he were writing now, he would surely have mentioned Nicky Hager’s book about New Zealand actions in Afghanistan, Hit and Run, and the controversy that has surrounded it. He takes a crack at the notion that “boomers” should be targeted for “intergenerational theft”, saying this is a “diversionary tactic” to make us not see the evil capitalist machinations that have divided us; and that “it fits in neatly with the aspiration to cut back superannuation costs”. (p.214) I wonder what he would think of Green MP Chloe Swarbrick’s recent inane taunt “Okay, boomer” and the kerfuffle that came from it? So I could go on, noting many other instances where this book is not quite of this moment.

Despite everything, though, Return to Rugby Land does say many cogent and perceptive things about New Zealand and is much more than “the book of the tour”. It is written well in a brisk and informed – if highly opinionated  - style and worth the reading.

NB The New Zealand retail price of Return to Rugby Land is $NZ24; but the author informs me that it is best to order it at  www.pererahussein.com. or to get the e-book version at www.lightwoodbooks.com. 

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            Philip J. Hatfield’s Pacific – An Ocean of Wonders is a very handsome , broad-paged hardback which gives me the same sort of aesthetic delight that I enjoyed when reading John McCrystal’s Singing the Trail. Images are as important as text here, and the images Hatfield has collated are outstanding. My only quibble is with the title. The words “an ocean of wonders” will immediately raise in most readers the expectation that this will be about the greatest ocean’s natural wonders – fish-life, whale-life, bird-life, coral reefs and atolls, the ocean’s vastness, the living things that can be found in the deepest marine trenches, wind patterns and tsunamis; and the lives and customs and art-works of the indigenous peoples who live on the edges of, or on the islands of, the Pacific.

But this is not what Pacific – An Ocean of Wonders is at all about. Refreshingly, it does include those indigenous peoples who lived and live on the continental shores of the Pacific, from the Aleutians to the Pacific shores of North and South America, Australia and Asia. Too many books about the Pacific assume that only islanders surrounded by ocean are to be considered as peoples of the Pacific.. But, after in Part One (“An Ocean of Peoples”) briefly mentioning the ancient settlement of the Pacific by Austronesians and others, this book turns to its real subject, which is the exploration of, and engagement in, the Pacific by Europeans, Americans, Chinese, Japanese and other colonisers.

So Part One tells us about the Chinese entry into the Pacific under the Ming dynasty, then the incursion of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English and others, their rivalries, their hunger for resources, piracy, licensed privateers and so forth.

Part Two (“Empire of Islands”) concerns the age of more systematic exploration by Europeans – the voyages of Laperouse, Bougainville, Cook and others. Then the ongoing mystery (to Europeans) of the forbidden islands of Japan, and Western entry there in the mid-19^th century; the age of whaling; the tightening of British imperialism with its Opium Wars with China; Darwin’s voyage and conclusions about evolution; the period when it was sometimes feared that the Pacific had become the “American Lake”, and America took over Hawaii; the practice of “blackbirding”; and the Russo-Japanese War.

Part Three (“Islands in a Globalised World”) simply follows the same sort of historical events into the 20^th and 21^st centuries – Japan in the 1^st and 2^nd World Wars; the problem of Taiwan, still claimed by mainland China; nuclear testing in the ocean; and only a very little on indigeous peoples and the lives before the book discusses huge pollution of the ocean, and the rising tides that are threatening some island states.

So this is decidedly not a book devoted to natural “wonders” but to recent history and very much to a Western perspective. Taken as such,  its text and images make a wonderful art gallery, which, for me, made reading it (and looking at its illustrations) an exercise in wool-gathering. Those wonderful Japanese prints (reproduced on pp.21-23), made in about 1803, of a Japanese whale hunt. All those fantastical maps and charts, drawn by early European explorers, which were based as much on guess and wishful thinking as on observation. The rarely-seen landscapes of Hawaii that William Wade Ellis made from his voyage with Captain Cook. And more than I will list.

Target audience? The browser. And perhaps those looking for a good present.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "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 four or more years ago.

“EMPIRE OF ILLUSION” by Chris Hedges (first published 2009); “REVUE DES DEUX MONDES” (issue of December 2016 / January 2017); “LETTRE OUVERTE AUX FUTURS ILLETTRES” by Paul Guth (first published 1980). 

 

I was going through a fund-raising book-sale at the local high school when my eye was caught by the subtitle of Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion, and I snapped the book up. The subtitle read The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. “At last”, I thought, “a book that points out how much public discourse has been corrupted and cheapened by the dominance of television and the internet.” I looked forward to a book detailing how news has been reduced to soundbites and staged events; political debate has become wholly personalised and trivialised; anything higher than purely functional literacy has declined in all developed countries; and there is a rage, even among supposed intellectuals, to ridicule, cheapen or scoff at canonical classics for their lack of cultural relevance.

That would have been my kind of book.

But actually, that was not what Hedges’ book delivered, much as I did end up agreeing with some of the points Hedges made. Hedges is, among other things, an ordained Presbyterian Minister, but he is also very much on the radical left – or at least that part of the radical left that can maintain itself in the comfort of academe.

Basically, Empire of Illusion is a diatribe against the corporatisation of America, the use of the mass media as a distraction rather than a force for education and enlightenment, and the loss of real democracy. America, in Hedges’ view, is a culture in deep decline. Reading his book, I was aware that it was written a decade ago, some of its topical references are already a little faded, and the presidency Hedges sometimes takes on, for colluding with big corporations, is the Obama presidency. In his final pages Hedges suggests that America is ripe for a fascism-tinged demagogue who will feed dreams to the disempowered American working-class, once they realise how badly they have been ripped off. My guess is that if he were writing this book now, Hedges would have much to say about Donald Trump.

In his first chapter, Hedges looks at the (then) popularity of the World Wrestling Federation. For working class males, the WWF is a marker of their frustration – they are, Hedges theorises, invited to get vicarious revenge on the possessing classes by means of the (staged and faked) rivalries of the wrestlers. From this, Hedges segues rather uneasily into the decline of real literacy in America. A linguistic analysis of speeches by successive US presidents shows that the age-level required to understand presidential oratory has declined steeply over the last 150 years. So those frustrated and disempowered working class men no longer have the linguistic abilities or conceptual skills to understand what disempowers them – and their leaders increasingly speak to them in baby-talk.

In his second chapter (necessarily a revolting one to read), Hedges looks at the massive American pornography industry, which has become increasingly based on male fantasies of violence directed against women. Pornography was always built on male dreams of dominance, but what is now “mainstream” is sadism and dehumanisation. In this, Hedges reads alienation and a perversion of the search for love. (And perhaps also reveals that he was writing before such phenomena as the #Me Too movement.)

Most cogent to the theme of literacy is the third chapter, in which Hedges speaks of the corporatisation of American universities. All of them – and perhaps especially the prestigious Ivy League ones (Harvard, Yale, Princeton etc.) – are now the recipients of huge grants from corporations. Result? The universities dance to the corporations’ tune. Business studies are privileged and the humanities (literature, languages, history) are squeezed out. In most leading American universities now, fewer than 8% of students opt for humanities. Those who take business studies are trained to be good corporation people and not to question the existing economic system.

Saddest chapter in some ways is the fourth one, called “The Illusion of Happiness” in which Hedges considers the “positive psychology” movement, whereby underpaid workers are persuaded that they are part of a “team” and are “associates” of their employers. In the absence of labour unions, this cult provides the illusion of solidarity while trying to keep workers quiescent.

Hedges rounds off with a very generalised chapter on the nationalist illusion which seeks to persuade Americans that their country is a great power when its infrastructure is crumbling, it is deeply in debt and its economy is increasingly dependent on unpayable loans. It is here that he predicts the rise of demagogues before he finishes with an unconvincing peroration on the essential decency of human nature.

Given that the book is subtitled The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, I am surprised at two major omissions from Hedges’ diatribe.

 In his third chapter, when he considers the corporatisation of universities, Hedges takes a brief swipe at the impenetrable goobledegook which now passes for discourse in some humanities departments. This he diagnoses as a code designed to protect a power elite. Yet he nowhere mentions the scourge of postmodernism, which, more than anything else in humanities departments, has reduced intellectual discourse to a sterile linguistic game and has stripped such discourse of any moral content. As Hedges is big on lamenting the lack of morality in public life, it is odd that he has not noted a movement which denies any concepts of right and wrong. I looked carefully, but I am sure that the word “postmodernism” appears nowhere in this text. And I saw no analysis of the weakening of the humanities themselves as students more often took modish courses such a Communication Studies, Film Studies, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies etc rather than the study of canonical literature.

Most howlingly obvious, of course, is Hedges’ failure to mention Hollywood and its propaganda machine. (When I use the term “Hollywood” I mean the whole film-and-TV nexus.) Surely any book which purports to take on “illusion” in America has to take on this major entertainment-and-distraction force. I think there is a political reason for this. On a few occasions, Hedges notes that both Democrat and Republican parties are corporatised, beholden to powerful lobbyists and have lost the essential concept of real public service. But his deepest ire is saved for the Right. It would therefore be deeply embarrassing for him to discuss Hollywood, which essentially votes Democrat and pushes propaganda issues that the Right eschew.

Without any consideration of postmodernism and Hollywood, any book aspiring to chronicle “the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle” in the USA is severely defective. Empire of Illusion has many interesting and illuminating anecdotes, but does ultimately become a rave disconnected from any theoretical anchor.

            After reading this book, I went on line to find reviews of it. They divide evenly between those who accept Hedges’ argument uncritically (the type who give “Five Star” ratings in those thumbnail “reviews” that follow publicity blurbs); and those who point out the severe defects in Hedges’ analysis. Many note Hedges’ tendency to recycle – and quote in detail – the arguments of similar Jeremiads. The more astute decried Hedges for assuming (falsely) that there was once a golden age of liberal discourse in the USA. The reality is that there never was any such thing – and the proportion of the population that read or discussed “seriously” was always about the same size that it now is... but the decline of more-than-functional literacy in what were once the "reading classes" is still a reality.

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            So Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion was not quite the book I was looking for. It does not tackle the general loss of more-than-functional literacy. By chance, I found something nearer the mark in two French publications.

            Is there a crisis of literacy in the Western world? Many people think so. Never before have more people been functionally literate in the Western world, but the habit of reading and studying in detail, as a matter of course, challenging books or literary classics is dying, regardless of the number of book clubs there are.

            In France in January 2017, I bought a copy of the Revue des Deux Mondes to read on a railway journey. The Revue des Deux Mondes, a book-sized monthly magazine, is one of France’s longest-established literary and cultural publications, founded the best part of two hundred years ago (in 1829 to be precise). Its current politics could best be described as centrist – pro-European, pro-Republic, anti-populist, but also wary of the extreme left  - although its chief mission is a cultural one, and this involves a long defence of French literary culture. To make a very loose comparison, the type of French people who read the Revue des Deux Mondes (or Le Figaro Litteraire) would be the same sort of literati who would read the Times Lit.Sup. or the New York Review of Books in English-speaking countries. The issue I picked up was devoted to a reassessment of Alexis de Tocqueville, which is very appropriate for this magazine on two counts: first, because de Tocqueville was one of the magazine’s most distinguished contributors in the mid-19^th century; and second, because de Tocqueville’s defending democracy, while also providing a reasoned critique of democracy’s flaws, is the general stance that the current Revue des Deux Mondes still maintains.

            But what does this have to do with a crisis of literacy? Well my attention was immediately taken by what opened the issue of the Revue des Deux Mondes that I bought. It was a 14-page-long interview with the centrist politician (and former Minister of Education) Francois Bayrou. He begins by saying that he has always been an avid reader and goes on at some length to condemn what he sees as the dumbing-down of current French lycee (high school) education in the humanities. He is appalled that “un gouvernement dit de gauche” (“a so-called leftist government”) has “supprime les humanites classiques en France” (“suppressed the classic humanities in France”). He points to the removal of Latin and Greek from any high-school syllabus, arguing that these studies have been condemned as “elitist”. The reality, he says, is that knowledge of true Classical literature was the backbone of the French literary tradition, a means of learning structure, order, clarity and reason in writing. He points to figures in French literature and politics, in no way reactionaries, who benefitted from, and praised, such a Classical humanities education: Leon Blum, Jean Jaures, Victor Hugo, Voltaire, many humanists etc. He also says that the state high-school he attended as an adolescent took in pupils from all social classes, was in no way elitist, and encouraged in all students the ability to think and write well by having instruction in the Classical humanities.

            This may sound like a very specialised (and French) concern where literacy is concerned. But it is part of the current trend - certainly prevalent in New Zealand schools – to turn students away from really demanding books, or books that do not have an immediate “relevance”. Apart from worthy adolescent fare (usually American – The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird etc.), how many schools now never introduce pupils to genuinely canonical works? As a high-school teacher of English for thirty years, I was sometimes able to get senior pupils to study the likes of Great Expectations, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Vanity Fair, Sons and Lovers and Dubliners – but most often I was surrounded by teachers who thought we should always study only shorter and snappier stuff so as not to alienate pupils from reading itself. I myself also often taught the shorter and snappier stuff, but I doubt that this approach ever really encouraged young minds to look for anything more challenging.

            The second French text on looming cultural illiteracy, which I bought on an earlier trip to Paris, was Paul Guth’s Lettre ouverte aux futurs illettres (Open Letter to Future Illiterate Ages). I will make it clear at once that this text, published in 1980, takes a more conservative and nationalist view of the looming threat of illiteracy than does Francois Bayrou’s interview in the Revue des Deux Mondes. You might be alarmed that at one point the author quotes with approval a statement by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Nevertheless, the book is not extremist and it makes many good points.

            Paul Guth (1910-1997) was a well-known French humourist, columnist, sometime novelist, and frequent recipient of awards from the Academie Francaise who had also been a high-school teacher for many years. His approach is made clear in the book’s blurb: “En les privant de l’etude des classiques, du latin, de l’histoire de France, des ennemis de la liberte s’efforcent de defranciser les jeunes Francais. Par un veritable lavage de cerveau, ils les amputent de la memoire collective, sans laquelle une nation ne peut subsister.” (“By not allowing them to study the classics, Latin, and the history of France, the enemies of freedom force young French people to become less French. By real brain-washing, they cut them off from our collective memory, without which a nation cannot endure.”) As you can see, this complaint has as much to do with national identity as with the loss of literacy itself.

            Lettre ouverte aux futurs illettres is organised as a series of ten (long) letters addressed to “Jacques”, a fictitious young student who is idealistic, but alienated from the school system and unsure how worthwhile his studies are anyway. Guth begins by saying he resembles many students he met in his teaching career.

            In his ten letters, Guth condemns the current lack of patriotism; the politicisation of teaching and the syllabus; the displacement, in the popular mind, of classic texts by TV shows; and the exclusion of Latin from the syllabus.

            Two chapters are longer than the others.

            One of these is called “Le Laxi”, which is apparently a French term for excessive inclusiveness, whereby any old tripe is held up by teachers as if it were a text worthy of study, as opposed to canonical literature. In this chapter Guth says basically what part of the Francois Bayrou interview says – that very left-wing leaders like Leon Blum in the 1930s were also certain that canonical literature was essential.

            The other longest chapter condemns the newly prescribed teaching of French history, which removes all colour from history and makes it a series of dull and loaded sociological statements. What Guth is arguing for here is a return to “narrative” history, which is far more memorable to young minds and which provides a solid chronological basis on which to build further, more scholarly, studies in history. 

            Having read my summary, you are probably now ready to condemn the late Paul Guth as a reactionary nationalist, out of touch with modern pedagogy. But my own conclusion would be that he is more aware of what really interests students than many who think they have found better ways to teach literature and history.