I'm still unsure about how to proceed with Tariq Ramadan. His visa was approved by the State department, but then denied according the U.S. Patriot Act, presumably the "public supporter of terrorism" clause (though DHS refuses to say). He has not been accused of actually being a terrorist, nor is he under suspicion by any American or international agency. He has been accused of being anti-Semitic for condemning French Jewish intellectuals who support Israel.
My first instinct is to doubt the U.S. government's motives and methods in denying him the visa. Since it is probably his public actions that are at issue in their decision to deny him a visa, perhaps the merits of the U.S. government's decision might be worked out through a close look at Ramadan in the public record. As for his private actions and connections, I'm not in a position to know or say. Nevertheless, many specific charges have been made against him in public by journalists (especially a French journalist named Brisard), and I have a suspicion that these played more than a small part in the DHS decision to deny him a visa.
Scott Martens has done the most exhaustive research into Ramadan I have seen on the web. In the link above, he sets up the basics of who Ramadan is and why his visa has been denied.
But here, Martens goes into some depth, and reads in detail several articles published only in French to refute charges made against Tariq Ramadan by Daniel Pipes. There are dozens of strange charges that have been made, including statements made by people detained in Guantanamo on suspicion of being terrorists that they had taken classes with him (which actually turns out to be impossible chronologically). Other charges include: reports of meetings with terrorists (people Ramadan says he's never met), and mystery bank accounts (also denied).
There are lots and lots of details -- too many details for me to be quite confident in making a general judgment yet. Many of the articles cited by Pipes, Martens shows, are dubious -- or they don't say what Pipes says they say. At the end, much of the suspicion of Ramadan seems to circulate around him because his grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood (originally as a reformist movement; it became associated with terrorism more recently), and his father and brother are Islamists.
On the question of whether Ramadan is anti-Semitic, I don't buy it. He published an article in French that was published here, where he criticizes French Jewish intellectuals. Angry, yes. Anti-Semitic, no. There is more on this at Muslim Wake Up!; especially helpful is their link to this interview at Ha'aretz.
Closer to home, there is also an excellent colloquy (live on the web) with him sponsored by The Chronicle of Higher Education. He comes across well.
Postcolonial/Global literature and film, Modernism, African American literature, and the Digital Humanities.
How seriously should one take academic blogging?
I've been involved in a small way in a discussion started here (Unfogged), continued here (Little Professor), and then here (Brandon, of Siris).
The debate is on how seriously academics should take their blogs. The obvious first answer is that it depends on how seriously the blog is done. Most academic bloggers who are not pseudonymous do discuss some fairly serious issues on their blogs, though very few are exclusively serious. In these cases, the blog as a whole should not be considered seriously, but individual posts might count.
But as it is, even bloggers who are semi-serious usually feel compelled, when asked by colleagues, to dismiss blogging as a form of actual scholarship: "no, it's just something I do for fun." And it is usually fun -- more fun than writing papers for actual journals, at any rate. But could it be more than just fun?
In order for blogging to become more serious, what one would need is the institution of some kind of editorial body -- some standards. Vehicles like Arts & Letters Daily and Political Theory Daily Review collect their editors' idea of the 'best of the web,' but they limit themselves to essays published in the established media that are available on the web. It might be interesting to imagine a comparable entity that would select the best of academic blogs on a weekly or daily basis.
But isn't it possible that academic blogging with higher standards would instantly become much less fun? Who would pick the 'editors' of the vehicle I was just describing? Why not just start more digital journal/newsletters like CTheory?
There might be a middle course -- between the fun and informality of blogging and the requirements of formal scholarship as it is currently known. Perhaps (and here I'm echoing LP and Brandon of Siris) academic blogging might not ever be a venue for serious scholarship, because the institution won't accept it and because we (as bloggers) don't want to take it in that direction. But semi-serious academic blogging might be a venue for something more along the lines of academic journalism -- similar to the kinds of writing one sees in the Chronicle of Higher Education and, in the old days, Lingua Franca.
I must confess I don't really know what I think about this yet. On the one hand, the structure of academic scholarship may change as the digital revolution continues to develop. And on the other hand, blogging is such a new form (it's been around for a few years, but it's only become massively widespread in the past year) that it is impossible to see where it's going yet. If the definition of scholarship may change, it seems to me that blogging will certainly change. The problem becomes much more difficult if both variables are in flux...
Update: See the comments on Cliopatria.
The debate is on how seriously academics should take their blogs. The obvious first answer is that it depends on how seriously the blog is done. Most academic bloggers who are not pseudonymous do discuss some fairly serious issues on their blogs, though very few are exclusively serious. In these cases, the blog as a whole should not be considered seriously, but individual posts might count.
But as it is, even bloggers who are semi-serious usually feel compelled, when asked by colleagues, to dismiss blogging as a form of actual scholarship: "no, it's just something I do for fun." And it is usually fun -- more fun than writing papers for actual journals, at any rate. But could it be more than just fun?
In order for blogging to become more serious, what one would need is the institution of some kind of editorial body -- some standards. Vehicles like Arts & Letters Daily and Political Theory Daily Review collect their editors' idea of the 'best of the web,' but they limit themselves to essays published in the established media that are available on the web. It might be interesting to imagine a comparable entity that would select the best of academic blogs on a weekly or daily basis.
But isn't it possible that academic blogging with higher standards would instantly become much less fun? Who would pick the 'editors' of the vehicle I was just describing? Why not just start more digital journal/newsletters like CTheory?
There might be a middle course -- between the fun and informality of blogging and the requirements of formal scholarship as it is currently known. Perhaps (and here I'm echoing LP and Brandon of Siris) academic blogging might not ever be a venue for serious scholarship, because the institution won't accept it and because we (as bloggers) don't want to take it in that direction. But semi-serious academic blogging might be a venue for something more along the lines of academic journalism -- similar to the kinds of writing one sees in the Chronicle of Higher Education and, in the old days, Lingua Franca.
I must confess I don't really know what I think about this yet. On the one hand, the structure of academic scholarship may change as the digital revolution continues to develop. And on the other hand, blogging is such a new form (it's been around for a few years, but it's only become massively widespread in the past year) that it is impossible to see where it's going yet. If the definition of scholarship may change, it seems to me that blogging will certainly change. The problem becomes much more difficult if both variables are in flux...
Update: See the comments on Cliopatria.
Rotten Reviews: Proust, Voltaire, and Carroll
On Friday afternoons I like to spend a little time in used bookstores poking around; it's a tradition I started in grad school, and I guess it helps me remind myself that there are still lots of possibilities out there. Despite the limits imposed by period specialization, and the exhaustion produced by studying some authors too seriously, there's always new stuff to read. My attitude on these Friday afternoon missions is not so much "aggressively pursue books I must read," but "glance at things I might want to learn sometime." It's also a nice way to stop and have an unhurried cup of coffee.
Yesterday I didn't find anything that exciting, but I did come across a little thing called Rotten Reviews: A Literary Companion, edited by Bill Henderson. It's a compilation of excerpts from 'hatchet jobs' of books we now think of as masterpieces.
The best one isn't a review, but an editor's rejection letter:
Some of the reviews make me laugh because they are, in some way, true after all. Like this one of Voltaire's Candide:
Well, I do admire Candide, but Voltaire is a bit of a hysterical ape, isn't he?
And some just make me cringe, which is what is probably supposed happen while reading a book called Rotten Reviews. An example of a cringer is this unbelievable review of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland:
I'm glad Children's Books always kept real children in mind; maybe the reviewer had an editor standing over his or her head, shouting, "Always keep REAL CHILDREN in mind!" But maybe, in this extreme case, the reviewer should have just refused to notice. Because hordes of fake children, at least, would become very fond of Alice in subsequent years.
Unrelatedly, my current favorite reviewer's synonyms for "nonsense" are "flapdoodle" and "twaddle."
Yesterday I didn't find anything that exciting, but I did come across a little thing called Rotten Reviews: A Literary Companion, edited by Bill Henderson. It's a compilation of excerpts from 'hatchet jobs' of books we now think of as masterpieces.
The best one isn't a review, but an editor's rejection letter:
"I may perhaps be dead from the neck up, but rack my brains as I may I can't see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep." (Marc Humblot, French editor, rejection letter to Proust 1912)
Some of the reviews make me laugh because they are, in some way, true after all. Like this one of Voltaire's Candide:
It seems to have been written by a creature of a nature wholly different from our own, indifferent to our lot, rejoicing in our sufferings, and laughing like a demon or an ape at the misery of this human race with which he has nothing in common. (Madame de Stael, De L'Allemagne)
Well, I do admire Candide, but Voltaire is a bit of a hysterical ape, isn't he?
And some just make me cringe, which is what is probably supposed happen while reading a book called Rotten Reviews. An example of a cringer is this unbelievable review of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland:
We fancy that any real child might be more puzzled than enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story. (from Children's Books)
I'm glad Children's Books always kept real children in mind; maybe the reviewer had an editor standing over his or her head, shouting, "Always keep REAL CHILDREN in mind!" But maybe, in this extreme case, the reviewer should have just refused to notice. Because hordes of fake children, at least, would become very fond of Alice in subsequent years.
Unrelatedly, my current favorite reviewer's synonyms for "nonsense" are "flapdoodle" and "twaddle."
Documentary on widows in India
Widows in many parts of India continue to be treated quite badly. A U.S. based Indian director named Dharan Mandrayar is making a documentary on the subject, according to the BBC:
A new film called White Rainbows tells the story of four widows in Vrindavan - who were raped, disfigured and abandoned by their families.
It is based on the real life story of Mohini Giri, today, India's leading advocate of widows' rights.
She says the film tells the ugly truth.
"The atrocities are manifold - one is due to hunger, the second - no shelter - they have to depend on men who in turn molest them or take advantage of their vulnerability and the third is illiteracy - they are not educated.
Dharan Mandrayar, is the film's director. An Indian living in California, he says he was shocked to discover widows were still treated in such appalling manner.
Proof that I don't understand globalization: Samuelson and Bhagwati
This New York Times piece, about how the economist Paul A. Samuelson is challenging the pro-globalization arguments of protege Jagdish Bhagwati (Mr. In Defense of Globalization), goes over my head at one moment:
Can anyone explain Ricardoian comparative advantage theory for me?
That said, Samuelson's main point -- that one long-term consequence of outsourcing could be wage losses in the U.S. -- comes across crystal-clear.
His article, Mr. Samuelson added, is not a refutation of David Ricardo's 1817 theory of comparative advantage, the Magna Carta of international economics that says free trade allows economies to benefit from the efficiencies of global specialization. Mr. Samuelson said he was merely "interpreting fully and correctly Ricardoian comparative advantage theory." That interpretation, he insists, includes some "important qualifications" to the arguments of globalization's cheerleaders.
Can anyone explain Ricardoian comparative advantage theory for me?
That said, Samuelson's main point -- that one long-term consequence of outsourcing could be wage losses in the U.S. -- comes across crystal-clear.
The Hero Sucks (Not "stunning," not "stirring," not "ravishing"...)
The Hero was really hard for me to stomach. It has several major annoyances, no logical dramatic movement, and a wretchedly jingoistic theme (genocide is acceptable in the interest of national unity).
Physically, the film is hard to listen to, especially if you see it in a big multiplex where the volume is up loud. The sound track during the fights is full of the sound of swishing and clinking swords, mixed very high to sound "big." But as I as watched the film the other night, the sound during the fights often felt more like nails on a chalboard than magical Chinese swordplay. I had to cover my ears.
So: bring your earplugs.
The visual aspects of the fight sequences aren't all that good either. There is a very beautiful swordfight at the beginning of the film, and the famous sequence on a lake is also cool as a feat of cinematography (though it doesn't register as a "serious" fight). But many of the fights are fluffy. The kind of rigorous physical engagement that has become a trademark of Yuen Wo-Ping (who did the fight choreography for The Matrix and Kill Bill) is often absent here. The fights involving women were especially fluffy -- as if Zhang Yimou and Tony Ching Siu Tung (the action director) didn't want to put their actresses to any trouble. Instead of asking them to hold swords (all of the characters in the film are sword-fighters and professional warrior-assasins), they have them flying through the air in billowing red gowns as bright yellow (paper) leaves magically gust. It's pretty, but it's not compelling.
When the characters aren't fighting, the film is incredibly, unbelievably, dull.
Oh and did I mention the fascist moral of the story? It's so repulsive, I feel I should go back to earlier Yimou films like Raise the Red Lanterna and Ju Dou to see if American movie reviewers were on crack when those came out too. Like many critics, when I was younger I tended to accept anything "exotic" as inherently valuable. I spoke in earnest tones about the great Chinese directors, Zhang Yimou, Ang Lee, and Chen Kaige (Farewell my Concubine, Temptress Moon).
But with age comes an important lesson: the fact that a film is exotic doesn't preclude the possibility that it is crap.
Physically, the film is hard to listen to, especially if you see it in a big multiplex where the volume is up loud. The sound track during the fights is full of the sound of swishing and clinking swords, mixed very high to sound "big." But as I as watched the film the other night, the sound during the fights often felt more like nails on a chalboard than magical Chinese swordplay. I had to cover my ears.
So: bring your earplugs.
The visual aspects of the fight sequences aren't all that good either. There is a very beautiful swordfight at the beginning of the film, and the famous sequence on a lake is also cool as a feat of cinematography (though it doesn't register as a "serious" fight). But many of the fights are fluffy. The kind of rigorous physical engagement that has become a trademark of Yuen Wo-Ping (who did the fight choreography for The Matrix and Kill Bill) is often absent here. The fights involving women were especially fluffy -- as if Zhang Yimou and Tony Ching Siu Tung (the action director) didn't want to put their actresses to any trouble. Instead of asking them to hold swords (all of the characters in the film are sword-fighters and professional warrior-assasins), they have them flying through the air in billowing red gowns as bright yellow (paper) leaves magically gust. It's pretty, but it's not compelling.
When the characters aren't fighting, the film is incredibly, unbelievably, dull.
Oh and did I mention the fascist moral of the story? It's so repulsive, I feel I should go back to earlier Yimou films like Raise the Red Lanterna and Ju Dou to see if American movie reviewers were on crack when those came out too. Like many critics, when I was younger I tended to accept anything "exotic" as inherently valuable. I spoke in earnest tones about the great Chinese directors, Zhang Yimou, Ang Lee, and Chen Kaige (Farewell my Concubine, Temptress Moon).
But with age comes an important lesson: the fact that a film is exotic doesn't preclude the possibility that it is crap.
Bhangra Aerobics -- Hareepa!
I had heard rumors of this, but couldn't bring myself to believe it. Now I see that it is in fact true. Apparently, you can even get "masala bhangra" exercise videos by Veera Mahajan and Sarina Jain.
For better or worse. It seems mostly benign, though the following sentence troubles me: "Like yoga, bhangra has the potential to grow and grow." Um, yoga and bhangra are not in the same cultural space.
For better or worse. It seems mostly benign, though the following sentence troubles me: "Like yoga, bhangra has the potential to grow and grow." Um, yoga and bhangra are not in the same cultural space.
Also: Amitava Kumar's latest (Husband of a Fanatic)
And while we're reading the new Outlook, I have to say that this review of Amitava Kumar's Husband of a Fanatic by Swapan Dasgupta, strikes me as completely unfair.
Amitava Kumar is angry, but he has a right to be. Secularism in India is a mess. Life for people with foreign passports in the U.S. since 9/11 has also been a mess, though for a different reason: the immigrations system in this country has more or less completely broken down.
I am going to go out and get this one.
Amitava Kumar is angry, but he has a right to be. Secularism in India is a mess. Life for people with foreign passports in the U.S. since 9/11 has also been a mess, though for a different reason: the immigrations system in this country has more or less completely broken down.
I am going to go out and get this one.
Khushwant Singh's latest
I have to admit I have a bit of a soft spot in my heart for Khushwant Singh, who was one of the first novelists to seriously write about India's partition (1947), with his book Train To Pakistan (1956). He is also the best known secular/modern Sikh writer working in India.
I even once tried to write a paper about his work -- mainly focusing on his impact on Indian journalism in the 1970s, when he was the editor of the now-defunct Illustrated Weekly in Bombay. It seemed to me that his willingness to take the magazine in a "tabloid" direction had a revolutionary impact on Indian journalism, and helped to loosen its Victorian and vestigially colonial values. It also brought him into direct conflict with Indira Gandhi at the time of the Emergency.
Thirty years later (and nearly fifty years after Train to Pakistan), it's amazing that Khushwant still around, and still having an impact -- if a smaller one. But this review of his latest book of short stories in Outlook doesn't exactly make me want to run out and get the book. You would think that a guy who is 90 years old might have developed a little bit of sophistication in his treatment of women.
I even once tried to write a paper about his work -- mainly focusing on his impact on Indian journalism in the 1970s, when he was the editor of the now-defunct Illustrated Weekly in Bombay. It seemed to me that his willingness to take the magazine in a "tabloid" direction had a revolutionary impact on Indian journalism, and helped to loosen its Victorian and vestigially colonial values. It also brought him into direct conflict with Indira Gandhi at the time of the Emergency.
Thirty years later (and nearly fifty years after Train to Pakistan), it's amazing that Khushwant still around, and still having an impact -- if a smaller one. But this review of his latest book of short stories in Outlook doesn't exactly make me want to run out and get the book. You would think that a guy who is 90 years old might have developed a little bit of sophistication in his treatment of women.
I need lots of advice like this...
Thanks, Little Professor, for explaining something to me that had been mysterious.
How to approach academic publishers is big on my mind these days... I'm working on my own proposal...
How to approach academic publishers is big on my mind these days... I'm working on my own proposal...
John Hollander is a genius
A little while back I quoted from John Hollander's brilliant Ghazal, in Agha Shahid Ali's anthology Ravishing Disunities. Then today I came across another (slightly) Indian-themed poem in an anthology called Poetry 180 (edited by Billy Collins).
It begins with a particularly maddening/surreal epigram from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
It begins with a particularly maddening/surreal epigram from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
"For Fiddle-de-dee"
by John Hollander
"What's the French for fiddle-de-dee?" "Fiddle-de-dee's not English," Alice replied gravely. "Whoever said it was," said the Red Queen...
What's the French for "fiddle-de-dee"?
But "fiddle-de-dee's not English" (we
Learn from Alice, and must agree).
The "Fiddle" we know, but what's from "Dee"?
Le chat assis in an English tree?
--Well what's the French for "fiddle-de-dench"?
(That is to say, for "monkey wrench")
--Once in the works, it produced a stench.
What's the Greek for "fiddle-de-dex"?
(That is to say, for "Brekekekex")
--The frog-prince turned out to be great at sex.
[snip]
What's the Pali for "fiddle-de-dally"?
(That is to say, for "Silicon Valley")
--Maya deceives you: the Nasdaq won't rally.
What's the Norwegian for "fiddle-de-degian"?
(That is to say, for "His name is Legion")
--This aquavit's known in every region.
What's the Punjabi for "fiddle-de-dabi"?
(That's to say, for "crucifer lobby")
--They asked for dall but were sent kohl rabi.
[snip]
Having made so free with "fiddle-de-dee,"
What's to become now of "fiddle-de-dum"?
--I think I know. But the word's still mum.
Vanity Fair: The Foibles of Movie Reviewers
We saw Vanity Fair yesterday. It's very well done, I think, though it perhaps does have some flaws. Reese Witherspoon is constantly compelling -- unnervingly bright -- as Becky Sharp. Witherspoon has a trademark look ("determination") that is perfectly suited to the role she's playing; also crucial is the look she has when she's been put down (with a flick of the eyes: "you are of course right, and there's nothing I can say, but did you really have to just say that?"). There are some very funny moments, though I think the jibes about Goneril and Regan went over the heads of the audience in Orange, CT; I was the only one laughing (but then, I am such a geek).
In this case, the film itself is not so much the story as are the legions of mediocre film reviewers out there. When an overly-hyped director comes out with a movie that doesn't quite hold together, they're quick to smell a flop (it may well happen -- the theater was nearly empty on Friday night). Also, when anyone does an adaptation of a work of literature, reviewers are quick to comment on the faithfulness of the adaptation without giving any real indication they have read the book being adapted.
At least Stephen Holden of the New York Times gives us an actual interpretation of the novel en route to his final thumbs-down:
Everyone agrees that the aristocracy are bad. (Bad, bad aristocrats! No more inbreeding for you.) But is Becky Sharp good? How do you read the book? Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune doesn't think so:
All of this is arguable. Is Nair's version really a softer side of Becky Sharp? In my view, there is some softness there in the novel itself, though it comes in through the back door. Part of the pleasure of Thackeray's novel is that the reader identifies with Becky not despite, but for her shallow unscrupulousness and disloyalty. Thackeray knows his own shallowness, and that of his readers, only too well, and he plays it through to the end. The bottom line is, we like her anyways -- and the only way to transfer that delicate sense of bemused attraction to film is by flattening some irony, and have Reese Witherspoon put on her million-dollar, movie-star smile for the camera.
[UPDATE: Check out a real Victorianist's response to the film over at The Little Professor.]
Even if in disagreement, at least there is informed opinion in these reviews. The reviewers in other papers, as well as magazines like Time and Rolling Stone, are not so erudite. For instance, Bruce Westbrook of the Houston Chronicle calls the story (unclear whether he's talking about the movie or the book) an "epic tragedy," which is wrong on both fronts. He also refers to Becky as a "budding feminist," which is very much a questionable characterization, both in Nair and in Thackeray. (It's arguably untrue in Thackeray, arguably true in Nair)
And Richard Schickel, in Time, shows he clearly hasn't read the novel, when he writes, "[Nair's film] is more exotic than Thackeray's, more laden with the booty of a burgeoning colonial empire, but Nair, Indian by birth, is entitled to her opinions about the exploitations on which England's wealth was based." Not only is it not true (there's a fair amount of exoticism in the text of Thackeray's novel), but the second clause in Schickel's sentence doesn't respond to the first. How exactly does Nair's emphasis on the exotic reflect an opinion on the "exploitations [sic] on which England's wealth was based"?
This leads me to a more generalized gripe about race and marginality:
When reviewing a costume drama directed by a person who is not white (such as Shekhar Kapur with Elizabeth, the Hughes Brothers with From Hell, or, here, Mira Nair's Vanity Fair), there is a strong temptation to comment on the background of the director. In Mira Nair's case this is somewhat appropriate, as Thackeray's birthplace was in Calcutta, and she says in an otherwise uninspired interview with Deborah Solomon that she directly remembers walking past Thackeray's bungalow on her way to "People's Protest Theater" in her college days. She also changes the story at some key points to play up the Indian/Imperial background. The ending especially is a surprising, er, departure from Thackeray. So it's fine and dandy to talk about Nair's Indian-ness, but within limits, and not at the expense of her accuracy and attention to detail to Thackeray's England.
In Shekhar Kapur's case the critical interest in his background became a serious distraction. Critics seemed not to be able to see Elizabeth for what it was -- a very ambitious, if still flawed, film. They were instead looking for the gaps, the apparent limits in the Indian director's knowledge of the English Renaissance. There was a smug emphasis on "correctness," which is annoying in light of the substantial historical research that goes into the making of costume dramas these days. The research behind films like Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love dwarfs the knowledge of the average reporter from the Raleigh News-Observer, who nevertheless feels empowered to write phrases like, "He seems to have gotten Elizabethan England right, but..."
A final case in point is Phillip Wuntch, of the Dallas Morning News . Wuntch's take as a whole is essentially the party line for people who didn't like the movie -- Nair has softened Becky. But in the midst of saying nothing in particular comes a bit of nastiness:
A little too much identification?! What does that mean?
There's the bad odor here, not just of a boys' club (notice how many film reviewers are men!), but of a white boys club in particular. The reason complacent reviewers like Wuntch can't empathize with Becky Sharp (either as villain or as hero), is that they simply can't imagine what it might be like not to be born with the Keys to the Estate. For Nair, they can only quip, "nice try, but your film about social climbers... well, it smacks a little of social climbing, frankly." Give me a break.
In this case, the film itself is not so much the story as are the legions of mediocre film reviewers out there. When an overly-hyped director comes out with a movie that doesn't quite hold together, they're quick to smell a flop (it may well happen -- the theater was nearly empty on Friday night). Also, when anyone does an adaptation of a work of literature, reviewers are quick to comment on the faithfulness of the adaptation without giving any real indication they have read the book being adapted.
At least Stephen Holden of the New York Times gives us an actual interpretation of the novel en route to his final thumbs-down:
But "Vanity Fair" has a deeper conceptual confusion. In mixing satire and romance, the movie proves once again that the two are about as compatible as lemon juice and heavy cream. The Thackeray novel is a sweeping satire of the rampant drive for upward mobility in a Britain newly flush with the wealth flowing from its colonies. Thackeray grounded the novel in an omniscient, often caustic voice looking down (and askance) at his characters and their foibles.
The movie flashes to comic life in those scenes that convey Thackeray's disdain for the preening foolishness and snobbery of early 19th-century British society and the crass symbiotic relationship between money and aristocracy. Then, as now, you could buy your way to the top, and one of the sharpest scenes observes a crude premarital negotiation that goes nowhere.
Everyone agrees that the aristocracy are bad. (Bad, bad aristocrats! No more inbreeding for you.) But is Becky Sharp good? How do you read the book? Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune doesn't think so:
In Thackeray's "Fair," we see an initially poor but pretty, witty lass clawing up to the British elite, pitting herself against its fools, fops, frauds and fellow schemers. The mostly unsentimental Thackeray thought she was a villainess. But was Becky good or evil -- or somewhere in between? Heartless schemer, social climber and conscienceless seductress -- as the great novelist kept insisting? Or a kind of prefeminist pragmatist fighting for her rights to rise in an amoral society forcing her to be "bad" -- as Nair seems to feel?
The book sees it one way, the film another. Here's my vote, though, for the bad Becky, the one the brilliant Nair suggests, yet can't quite bring herself to reveal.
All of this is arguable. Is Nair's version really a softer side of Becky Sharp? In my view, there is some softness there in the novel itself, though it comes in through the back door. Part of the pleasure of Thackeray's novel is that the reader identifies with Becky not despite, but for her shallow unscrupulousness and disloyalty. Thackeray knows his own shallowness, and that of his readers, only too well, and he plays it through to the end. The bottom line is, we like her anyways -- and the only way to transfer that delicate sense of bemused attraction to film is by flattening some irony, and have Reese Witherspoon put on her million-dollar, movie-star smile for the camera.
[UPDATE: Check out a real Victorianist's response to the film over at The Little Professor.]
Even if in disagreement, at least there is informed opinion in these reviews. The reviewers in other papers, as well as magazines like Time and Rolling Stone, are not so erudite. For instance, Bruce Westbrook of the Houston Chronicle calls the story (unclear whether he's talking about the movie or the book) an "epic tragedy," which is wrong on both fronts. He also refers to Becky as a "budding feminist," which is very much a questionable characterization, both in Nair and in Thackeray. (It's arguably untrue in Thackeray, arguably true in Nair)
And Richard Schickel, in Time, shows he clearly hasn't read the novel, when he writes, "[Nair's film] is more exotic than Thackeray's, more laden with the booty of a burgeoning colonial empire, but Nair, Indian by birth, is entitled to her opinions about the exploitations on which England's wealth was based." Not only is it not true (there's a fair amount of exoticism in the text of Thackeray's novel), but the second clause in Schickel's sentence doesn't respond to the first. How exactly does Nair's emphasis on the exotic reflect an opinion on the "exploitations [sic] on which England's wealth was based"?
This leads me to a more generalized gripe about race and marginality:
When reviewing a costume drama directed by a person who is not white (such as Shekhar Kapur with Elizabeth, the Hughes Brothers with From Hell, or, here, Mira Nair's Vanity Fair), there is a strong temptation to comment on the background of the director. In Mira Nair's case this is somewhat appropriate, as Thackeray's birthplace was in Calcutta, and she says in an otherwise uninspired interview with Deborah Solomon that she directly remembers walking past Thackeray's bungalow on her way to "People's Protest Theater" in her college days. She also changes the story at some key points to play up the Indian/Imperial background. The ending especially is a surprising, er, departure from Thackeray. So it's fine and dandy to talk about Nair's Indian-ness, but within limits, and not at the expense of her accuracy and attention to detail to Thackeray's England.
In Shekhar Kapur's case the critical interest in his background became a serious distraction. Critics seemed not to be able to see Elizabeth for what it was -- a very ambitious, if still flawed, film. They were instead looking for the gaps, the apparent limits in the Indian director's knowledge of the English Renaissance. There was a smug emphasis on "correctness," which is annoying in light of the substantial historical research that goes into the making of costume dramas these days. The research behind films like Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love dwarfs the knowledge of the average reporter from the Raleigh News-Observer, who nevertheless feels empowered to write phrases like, "He seems to have gotten Elizabethan England right, but..."
A final case in point is Phillip Wuntch, of the Dallas Morning News . Wuntch's take as a whole is essentially the party line for people who didn't like the movie -- Nair has softened Becky. But in the midst of saying nothing in particular comes a bit of nastiness:
In the movie, she is almost the same. But at times it’s a big "almost." Director Nair and the screenwriters haven’t de-clawed Becky, but they’ve softened her sting. The India-born Ms. Nair lists Vanity Fair as her favorite work of fiction. In interviews, she’s stated that growing up in a caste-conscious, colonized society allowed her to identify with Becky’s determination to crash 19th-century England’s rigid social codes. Perhaps there was a little too much identification. However, Reese Witherspoon plays the remorseless social climber almost entirely as Thackeray wrote her
A little too much identification?! What does that mean?
There's the bad odor here, not just of a boys' club (notice how many film reviewers are men!), but of a white boys club in particular. The reason complacent reviewers like Wuntch can't empathize with Becky Sharp (either as villain or as hero), is that they simply can't imagine what it might be like not to be born with the Keys to the Estate. For Nair, they can only quip, "nice try, but your film about social climbers... well, it smacks a little of social climbing, frankly." Give me a break.
Another Subcontinent
A colleague at the University of Colorado, Arnab Chakladar, has started an Indian-oriented, mostly non-academic chat room called Another Subcontinent.
Through it I came across this conversation between Amitav Ghosh and Homi Bhabha. It goes well with my review of the novel The Hungry Tide.
(But what is pretty boy/actor/rugby star Rahul Bose doing there? He should be here in the U.S., promoting Everyone Says I'm Fine!)
Through it I came across this conversation between Amitav Ghosh and Homi Bhabha. It goes well with my review of the novel The Hungry Tide.
(But what is pretty boy/actor/rugby star Rahul Bose doing there? He should be here in the U.S., promoting Everyone Says I'm Fine!)
Notes on Parataxis (Moretti on Joyce's Ulysses)
Franco Moretti's chapter on Joyce's Ulysses in The Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez is not arranged as a singular argument so much as a series of provocative buzzwords: advertising as flirtation rather than adultery; passivity (consumption) rather than activity (production); parataxis rather than linear narration; absent-mindedness as a modernist aesthetic (“Bloom is perhaps the most absentminded character in world literature); accumulation of thoughts rather than epiphany-transcendence; the novel as an “epic of socialization.”
Moretti identifies a rough homology between the constant stimulation of modern urban life and the logic of advertising – expressed through metaphors and stylistic elements. The first (and perhaps most memorable) metaphor is the turn from modern life as seduction (in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, a nineteenth century novel) to flirtation (in Ulysses). What is unique about bourgeois urban life is the emphasis on the things one desires (imagines), but doesn't touch. Moretti thinks of this as flirtation (we could also call it window-shopping). If advertising and commodity culture produce a measure of intoxication and disorientation, it is a newly mild form – not a strong neurosis. The experience of shopping in the big plazas of Paris or London at the beginning of the twentieth century was novel, but not in the sense that it led to neurasthenia (the way working on an assembly line sometimes did) or hysteria. Moretti questions a study by Dubuisson that seemed to suggest that an overload of consumer-oriented stimuli is leads women to become kleptomaniacs:
Moretti frequently refers to a literary device known as “parataxis” (placing ideas side by side with no grammatical connection), and poses it as a way of describing of Joyce's method in Ulysses – a term that is more precise than “stream of consciousness.” Parataxis is for Moretti the chief stylistic innovation of the novel, and it is designed as an structurally 'weak' response to the flood of language produced by modern advertising:
Throughout, Moretti's analysis borrows terms from the early sociologist Georg Simmel, whose “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) is a classic of urban sociology. But he argues that Bloom demonstrates a response to the challenges of urban life that is quite different from what Simmel envisioned:
Bloom picks up stimuli, but rarely (or never) acts on them. If this is an “epic,” it is an epic where the hero does virtually nothing but walk around all day. But this passivity can also be characterized more positively:
Moretti argues that the fact that Joyce continued to add content to his book in revision after revision is a function of the use of parataxis. What Joyce added (one can compare the early Little Review versions of the chapters with the final, Gabler edition) didn't extend the action of the book so much as create new eddies of thought within the extant episodes. The additions are effectively involutions, and they could go on forever:
More links on Moretti and Parataxis:
The Complete Review, on The Atlas of the European Novel.
An article by Moretti in New Left Review, "Conjectures on World Literature" (2000).
There was for awhile a journal called Parataxis, which focused on Modernist literature. I've never read it, but it seems pretty serious.
And here is a reviewer in the Guardian using "parataxis" in describing Don DeLillo's style in his novel Underworld.
Moretti identifies a rough homology between the constant stimulation of modern urban life and the logic of advertising – expressed through metaphors and stylistic elements. The first (and perhaps most memorable) metaphor is the turn from modern life as seduction (in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, a nineteenth century novel) to flirtation (in Ulysses). What is unique about bourgeois urban life is the emphasis on the things one desires (imagines), but doesn't touch. Moretti thinks of this as flirtation (we could also call it window-shopping). If advertising and commodity culture produce a measure of intoxication and disorientation, it is a newly mild form – not a strong neurosis. The experience of shopping in the big plazas of Paris or London at the beginning of the twentieth century was novel, but not in the sense that it led to neurasthenia (the way working on an assembly line sometimes did) or hysteria. Moretti questions a study by Dubuisson that seemed to suggest that an overload of consumer-oriented stimuli is leads women to become kleptomaniacs:
It is like moving from the world of adultery . . . to that of flirtation. Because advertising does, to be sure, conquer the customer, but it does not dishonour her. It weakens the resistance of the super-ego, and the reality principle; but it does not produce that army of 'real mental cases' described by Dubuisson.
Moretti frequently refers to a literary device known as “parataxis” (placing ideas side by side with no grammatical connection), and poses it as a way of describing of Joyce's method in Ulysses – a term that is more precise than “stream of consciousness.” Parataxis is for Moretti the chief stylistic innovation of the novel, and it is designed as an structurally 'weak' response to the flood of language produced by modern advertising:
Words words words words. It is a bombardment that no one expects, and that nineteenth-century grammar is incapable of withstanding. Attention, clarity, concentration: the old virtues are worse than useless. Instead of harmonizing with advertising, they perceive it as an irritating noise. A different style is required, in order to find one's way in the city of words; a weaker grammar than that of consciousness; an edgy, discontinuous syntax: a cubism of language, as it were. And the stream of consciousness offers precisely that: simple, fragmented sentences, where the subject withdraws to make room for the invasion of things; paratactical paragraphs, with the doors flung wide, and always enough room for one more sentence, and one more stimulus. (134-135)
Throughout, Moretti's analysis borrows terms from the early sociologist Georg Simmel, whose “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) is a classic of urban sociology. But he argues that Bloom demonstrates a response to the challenges of urban life that is quite different from what Simmel envisioned:
Bloom notices everything, but focuses on nothing; a glance, then on again. It is the metropolitan way: the way to avoid being overwhelmed by the big world that is concentrated in the bit city. But what has it made possible?
The brain, Simmel answers: the life of the intellect. Joyce, however, suggests the opposite: not an 'increased awareness' but instead an increased absentmindedness (Bloom is perhaps the most absentminded character in world literature), but has also changed its function. Instead of being a lack, an absence, it has become an active tool: a kind of switchboard, simultaneously activating a plurality of mental circuits, and allowing Boom to pick up as many stimuli as possible. (137-138)
Bloom picks up stimuli, but rarely (or never) acts on them. If this is an “epic,” it is an epic where the hero does virtually nothing but walk around all day. But this passivity can also be characterized more positively:
But in a dramatic change of function [from the paralysis of Dubliners], Joyce places Bloom under the microscope, and discovers that in his passivity there is not just in-activity and lack of action. There are also positive quantities: receptivity, variety, openness to the world. In Bloom, as we have seen, absentmindedness itself is a mobile, active force: even if it does not 'produce' anything in the strict sense, it nevertheless enables him to find his bearings in a very complex situation, and to organize it. (143)
Moretti argues that the fact that Joyce continued to add content to his book in revision after revision is a function of the use of parataxis. What Joyce added (one can compare the early Little Review versions of the chapters with the final, Gabler edition) didn't extend the action of the book so much as create new eddies of thought within the extant episodes. The additions are effectively involutions, and they could go on forever:
Great is Joyce's delight, we might repeat with Spitzer, in multiplying dependent clauses – except that those clauses are clearly not dependent. Even where a degree of subordination can be glimpsed . . ., Joyce's parataxis functions to the opposite effect: it constructs separate, independent sentences. Nothing is 'in its appropriate place,' here: or rather, the appropriate place for things and thoughts is no longer, as in Proust, a matter of 'precedence or subordination,' but always equal and independent. (151)
More links on Moretti and Parataxis:
The Complete Review, on The Atlas of the European Novel.
An article by Moretti in New Left Review, "Conjectures on World Literature" (2000).
There was for awhile a journal called Parataxis, which focused on Modernist literature. I've never read it, but it seems pretty serious.
And here is a reviewer in the Guardian using "parataxis" in describing Don DeLillo's style in his novel Underworld.
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