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Politics

Briefly, the dates that have been put forward as the beginning of civil war range from 1943 through 1946. In the fall of 1943, the communist-led ELAS (National Popular Liberation Army) resistance army clashed with the smaller republican cum royalist EDES (National Republican Greek League) resistance forces. In the year that elapsed to the country’s liberation from the Axis, Greek-versus-Greek violence continued steadily, often involving the Security Battalions, armed units of collaborators that hounded down leftists, or ELAS units going after their own political opponents.

The clashes were particularly bloody in the Peloponnese, a traditionally conservative area in which the EAM (National Liberation Front) created by the communist party in 1941 that in turn established ELAS, nonetheless gained considerable support. It is not by chance that the Peloponnese has featured in accounts of this era that seek to highlight the violence inflicted by each side on the other from 1943 onward. In the most recent addition to this literature, Stelios Perrakis, who teaches economics at Concordia University in Montreal, describes the murder of his maternal uncle by a communist death squad in May 1944 in a book-length account entitled, The True Story of Murder and Retribution in Wartime Greece. Meanwhile, Stathis Kalyvas’s long-awaited and recently published The Logic of Violence in Civil War adds weight to the proposition that the Civil War began in 1943 by focusing on the continuum of brutality that marked Greece’s transition from occupation and resistance to the post-liberation era.

Things fell apart in Greece because there was no center to hold them together. The centrists, basically moderate Venizelists and EAM supporters, were too few and weak to prevent sharp polarization. But there were a few turning-points in the narrative of this new national schism (partially continuing and partially replacing the older one between Venizelists and royalists) at which it could have been interrupted.

The Varkiza agreement that took its name from a coastal location south of Athens where both sides signed an armistice of sorts in February 1945 did nothing to prevent the right from unleashing its white terror in retaliation for the left’s own terror tactics. The right became particularly emboldened when the December clashes wound down in its favor. Prime Minister Nikolaos Plastêras, a veteran republican, was soon ousted and followed by several short-lived royalist administrations that did nothing to prevent official and unofficial persecution of leftists in the months that followed. Varkiza could have reconciled the two warring sides; instead, it exacerbated the conditions that led to the country’s political life spiraling out of control.

International observers were called in, and, in late January, the American, British, and French missions began arriving in Greece, despite conditions in the countryside that were so unstable that even the prime minister, the republican Themistoclês Sofoulês, expressed doubts about the viability of free elections. The head of the American observers responded indirectly by saying that if any parties abstained, they should not complain about the outcome as far as he was concerned. Sofoulês got the hint and participated in the election, although he raised some doubts once more.

But Nikos Zachariadês, the leader of the communists, refused to go along; the party announced instead that it would abstain from the upcoming vote unless it was postponed for two months so that more people could be registered to vote. Days later, he got support from an unexpected source, The Times of London, which called for a postponement so that law and order could be established in Greece. The newspaper also asked EAM to do its part. Several government ministers in Athens announced they were ready to quit if the elections were not postponed. Even the acting regent, Archbishop Damaskênos, hardly a friend of the left, called for a two-week postponement, citing technical deficiencies in the electoral process.

In a way, the circumstances were not entirely unique and a legacy of gerrymandering and electoral games animated those who insisted that the climate was conducive to free elections. Historically, Greece’s electoral contests, including those held in the previous few decades, had never been models of an open, democratic process. The ruling party usually tailored the electoral system in order to gain the fullest advantage, and several elections had entailed serious interference by the authorities. Still, the 1946 elections appear to have taken place under extraordinary conditions of instability, which were confirmed by clashes between demonstrators and police in Athens, and violence in the provinces, on the very eve of election day, March 31.

Despite this tarnished electoral history, Greek democracy had sputtered along throughout the twentieth century, even as the military occasionally became involved in politics. And so, legitimacy was preserved, if only because the opposition to whatever government was in power bided its time for the particular crisis that would render the incumbents too weak or divided to maintain themselves in government.

As it turned out, that was the point of precipitously holding elections in early 1946 in a land divided by ideology and violence, and in a climate of fear and repression. The post-liberation anticommunist order required a fig-leaf of legitimacy, which it got. The monarchist right gained 65 percent of the vote, while the centrists secured 25 percent. Roughly 25 percent of voters had heeded the communist call for abstention, however. In the event, the foreign observers were not only quick to ratify the outcome, but, notwithstanding the prevailing conditions, they somehow minimized the abstention rate to about nine percent. That ploy in itself suggests how “fairly” the communists would have been treated had they participated in the elections.

It is no wonder, then, that Greece silently passes over the anniversary of those first postwar elections. Under different circumstances, they might have been regarded as an important moment in which democracy returned to Greece a decade after being suspended by General Iôannês Metaxas in 1936. Instead, the 1946 elections provided the monarchist right with the legitimacy and power to continue its efforts to marginalize the center and eliminate the left—which it proceeded to do most vigorously in both cases.

greekart

But what is one to make of these images, blinded as they are by the lack of light? Actually, things are more complex than they seem, for the images do in fact cohere as visual statements. The presence of darkness is treated as a given, resulting in compositions that are energized by their lack of easy readability. Yet the titles give out information; there is even a political statement inherent in the name of Vieques Backroad (2004), which refers to the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, the site of an American military bombing range, which was only closed and vacated because of public outcry and the mobilization of activists. In the photograph, a back road, not much more than a worn path, slightly curves as its moves to meet the darkness in the background. There is leafy foliage on the left and a telephone pole, outlined in what seems to be moonlight, on the right; no person disturbs the picture, whose ethics are understood from the name of the image alone. The notion of a path or journey ending in darkness is rich with metaphorical possibilities; in this case, Delatolas lets his title politicize his environmental view. As happens with the two photographs mentioned above, the darkness serves a momentous purpose, the light revealing only just enough of the image for us to make our way.

Book Reviews

[The] detective novel becomes more and more social....It’s not going to be long before we define the detective novel as a social one with a detective plot.
—Petros Markaris

Courtesy Little, Brown and Company

No other programme has ever come close to doing what it does, namely portraying the social, political and economic life of an American city with the scope, precision and moral vision of great literature….[T]he program has become richer and more ambitious with each season and now fits only into a category it defines by itself: the urban procedural. Its protagonist is the broken metropolis of Baltimore, depicted with obsessive verisimilitude and affectionate rage. (Financial Times, “A black underclass gets its own Dickens,” September 14, 2006)

Although Pelecanos renders specific sites rich in unique detail, the experience is emblematic of an American metropolis that gains little attention.

As I have argued in greekworks.com in previous reviews of Pelecanos’s work, there is no one else to my mind, with the exception perhaps of Walter Mosley or Spike Lee, who portrays the people and the astonishing streets and neighborhoods of the American city with such vivid but realistic strokes. (See my “The Psychology of Crime,” April 1, 2002; “The District,” April 15, 2003; and “Urban Blues,” November 24, 2004.) Without romanticizing his portrayal of DC, one can say that Pelecanos, like a modern flâneur, penetrates the city’s psyche, exposing his readers to a mosaic of different shapes and colors, forces and dynamics. This urban space becomes the setting in which different characters collide, but also coexist, and where the pursuit of the American dream can turn into a very dangerous adventure, where fate and free agency interact. In Pelecanos’s work, as in every good detective or crime novel, heterogeneous and multiplicitous elements—things that on first sight make no sense together—are masterfully interwoven into a narrative logic.

Pelecanos’s new book, The Night Gardener, begins in 1985 with a crime scene in a Washington neighborhood known as Greenway. This opening serves to introduce us to the book’s main characters, whose lives, despite all their differences, will be linked forever by a series of murders of young teenagers, which the press will call the “Palindrome Murders.” The three characters present at this earlier crime scene are T. C. Cook, a legendary homicide detective, and two uniformed officers, Gus Ramone and Dan Holiday, just past their rookie year. The perpetrator of this crime, the “Night Gardener,’’ is never caught, but a similar crime 20 years later raises both the fear that the serial killer has struck again as well as the hope that, this time, he’ll be caught. The latest victim is a boy named Asa, who happened to be a friend of Ramone’s young son, Diego. This most recent crime reunites the three men from the opening scene, who have gone in different directions: T. C. Cook is retired and barely recovering from a stroke, while Dan Holiday has left the force under suspicion and is in the middle of an internal investigation. Gus Ramone is the only one still on the police force as a homicide detective. This is a story, then, about what has become of these men, and of their current relationship to the young generation, which is the present and future of the city. Thus, this police procedural is a pretext for the author to elaborate and focus on the story’s urban microcosm, dynamism, and plurality of forces and characters.

The classic question—whodunit? or, who’s the Night Gardener?—is almost irrelevant since it only serves as catalyst for the writer to communicate the nature and psychological world of his protagonists and their social surroundings. At the same time, however, the violence perpetrated, like an originary event, has forever affected and disturbed the equanimity of the people involved. And so, 20 years later, we see Detective Cook haunted by the ghosts of the innocent young victims, and others, like Dan Holiday, struggling with a sense of alienation and lack of purpose outside the police force. For these two, solving the case and catching the Night Gardener is like a second chance, a return to life from a no-man’s land, more specifically, as in the description of Cook below, to a life of “goals”:

…[H]is days were long on boredom. He got up early, made out what he could of the newspaper, then spent time in his office or the workshop in his basement, looking for something to do….Cook was someone who had always lived for goals, and now he had none.

He wasn’t mentally weak. He had more reasons than most to be unhappy, but he would not allow himself the out of depression….

His circulatory system was fragile, the doctor said. No, I cannot tell you how long it will be before the “next event.”…Continue to lead an active but careful life. Take your medication. Bullshit piled on top of bullshit, on and on….

He’d sooner eat his gun. But that was a thought for another day. (pp. 264-266)

As for Gus Ramone, we see him performing as a detective but also agonizing as a father over his family, and his son’s safety, education, and future:

He was having more than second thoughts about the decision to transfer Diego out to a Montgomery County school, but at the time he’d made it he felt he had run out of options. Ramone and Regina had been in agreement that the District middle in their zone was unacceptable. Physically it was in a state of perpetual disrepair, and it was always short on supplies, including pencils and paper. With the school’s low lighting, many of the fluorescents and the incandescents either dead or nonexistent, and the metal detectors and security personnel stationed at every working door, it resembled a prison. Sure, plenty of money got pumped into the D.C. school system, but, suspiciously little seemed to funnel down to the kids. And the kids themselves had begun to find trouble, both in school and out. (pp. 74-75)

As for the new school, it was “situated in a neighborhood known for its liberal activism, a place where ‘Celebrate Diversity’ bumper stickers were commonly displayed on cars. The days Ramone picked up his son at the school, he saw that most of the black students streaming out the doors hung together and walked in the down-street direction of the ‘apartments,’ while the white students headed for their homes on the high ground” (p. 76).

This particular diversity, of course, as Pelecanos suggests in his story, cares only for a specific image of youth. On the other hand, through the experience of his own family as well as his work on the streets, Ramone exposes us to the harsh urban realities—often a consequence of specific political action (or inaction)—of children and young men, and the barriers and challenges faced by these young people in their lives. As is quite often the case in Pelecanos’s stories, the street’s intensity parallels the intensity of private space, the house. A city is not made up only of its streets, as outside and open space; as Pelecanos shows us, the intensity of home harbors its own violence. That often makes it difficult to clearly differentiate between good and bad characters, the guilty and innocent. Ironically enough for many young men, access to public space is quite often a way out from the asphyxia of the domestic realm, although, for fathers like Gus, the privacy of the house provides security from the dangers of the outside world. It is in their house that Gus feels that his son is protected. Every time he returns to the house, he tries to connect with his son as if he is acting on behalf of every other father. But that is not always the case.

In Pelecanos’s fiction, middle-class views and prejudices can turn out to be as fateful and deadly as the Night Gardener. Which is to say that nothing is given a priori—within the story’s framework, the reader can expect anything. The detective, then, following the classical structure of the detective story, is the one who brings everything together, who tries to reconcile and understand things that might not make sense at first sight. As Gus Ramone discovers during the investigation of Asa’s death, violence is often a product of unexpected places and people.

Urban experience is not, at least for the author, a force of fate that almost mathematically determines the lives of its inhabitants. On the contrary, there is always space for hope and maybe a way out in Pelecanos’s stories. After all, Pelecanos’s characters operate within boundaries that depend on a number of social and economic imperatives. In that sense, although the characters’ dependence on their own environment is almost given, their often-unconscious reaction and rebellion to these mechanisms of dependence is, at the same time, what drives the story’s plot. Yet, in the end, one wonders how much changes in the city, and what has changed in the lives of the children who inhabit it.

Each time I open a new novel by George Pelecanos, I wonder, because of my long interest in his work and the genre in general, if there is anything more or new for him to tell us. But every time I finish reading, I am surprised and impressed by his maturity and sensibility in his portrayal of the modern city. While it is quite clear that Pelecanos’s latest novel is about youth, the story of youth is also the chronicle of the city.

Our Opinion

On August 10, the British police announced that they had succeeded in disrupting an allegedly massive terrorist plot to blow up a large number of passenger planes flying from Britain to the United States. Amid the ensuing chaos, British security officials announced that 24 British Muslims, mostly of Pakistani descent, had been arrested; one person was released within a couple of days while another person was subsequently detained. All of the arrests were, and continue to be, accompanied by the now-standard frenzied speculation of al-Qaeda involvement.

Discussions, statements, accusations, and, above all, preemptive judgments—the moral equivalent in the West today of preemptive military strikes—in the days following the declared foiling of the alleged attacks centered around two distinctive and by-now familiar (if not tiresome) forms of rhetoric. On one hand, the alleged plots were denounced as the malevolent offspring of “Islamo-fascism,” which presumably instigates and actively breeds an endless cycle of violence against “us”—that is, the democratic, liberal, and freedom-loving West. No distinction was made, for example, between the arrested British Muslims and the militants of Hezbollah and Hamas—indeed, quite the opposite, the actions of the UK at Heathrow were seen as a virtual extension of the actions of Israel in southern Lebanon and Gaza. Freedom’s enemies are everywhere, after all, linked in an ideologically ill-defined (because ill-definable) but omnipresent “axis of evil” that also includes Iran and Syria (at least for the moment, as this axis is, apparently, an unending work in iniquitous progress). Thus, once again, as Heathrow airport was turned into yet another front in “World War III” (to use the favored term of some of the West’s most zealous defenders), British, US, and Pakistani security agencies all congratulated themselves on achieving another significant victory in the continual struggle against terror.

And then there was the “moderate” counterpoint to the hardline war-talk, the now routine attempt to place the 24 suspects and their alleged acts of terror within the much broader context of Islam’s supposed disenchantment with the West. Thus, according to this argument, these 24 people constituted another instance of Muslim radicalization, perceived as a backlash against colonialism, Western support of Israel, globalization, the consequent erosion of traditional societies by Western cultural and social models, the extensive ghettoization of Western Muslim minority communities, the West’s support of dictatorial and corrupt regimes in the Muslim world, and, last but far from least, the American and British invasion and occupation of Iraq (among other Western invasions and occupations).

Suffice it to say here that “Islamo-fascism” is so profoundly stupid a term as to be meaningless by definition. Putting aside the essentially secular nature of fascism itself (its past support by established religious authorities, almost always Christian, notwithstanding), it is impossible, even for those of us who cannot accept the increasingly tortured exegeses of its apologists, to conform Islam to a Procrustean mold of fascism. This is not the place for a wide-ranging examination of the subject. It is enough to add that, in a fundamental, ideological sense—which, in the end, is the only intellectually honest way such a matter can be approached—some of the actions taken, and constitutional principles espoused, by the US and UK governments over the last few years are much closer to a literal fascism than any of the declarations of al-Qaeda or other Islamist groups.

The notion of Hezbollah and Hamas as “Islamo-fascist,” by the way, is dangerously unintelligent, precisely because it obscures the two groups’ unusual—and, for their secular opponents among the Lebanese Shi’a and Palestinians, unfortunate—democratic resonance in and appeal to their respective constituencies. Hezbollah and Hamas have not only received their political mandates in free, open, and internationally monitored elections, but (even more important and the key to their respective backing in Lebanon and Palestine) are seen as communal wellsprings of social support and welfare—two facts that the American media, just to name the most egregious example, purposely, systematically, distort. It’s simpler, after all, to call Hezbollah a terrorist group rather than a parliamentary party, or to accuse Hamas of “Islamo-fascism” instead of accepting it as the elected representative of the Palestinians (mostly as a result of the obscene corruption and capitulation of the secular PLO). If nothing else, it makes the PR easier when their leadership faces Israel’s “targeted assassinations.”

As for Islam’s “disenchantment” with the West, well, yes, of course—but two questions: Who speaks for “Islam” and what, exactly, do we mean here by “the West”? If the events of August 10 turn out in fact to be what the British authorities tell us they are—the uncovering of an enormous conspiracy to kill hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocent people—we are still left wondering: What does all of this really mean, besides criminal pathology, obviously? What makes both the London Jihadist attacks of July 7, 2005, and the allegations of August 10 so utterly chilling—even beyond the number of victims—is the fact that they were planned and executed by British-born Muslims. Terrorism of such magnitude by Western, middle-class, second-generation ethnic or religious minorities against their fellow citizens is so rare as to be unworthy of discussion. And yet, in Britain, it seems to have become a daily fear. This, in itself, is what makes the issue—and the consequences—of “Londonistan” so extraordinary, and so terrifying.

Clearly, the British experience points to an elemental methodological problem in defining European Islam as a homogeneous entity. The tendency to view the “problem” of European Muslims as a “deterritorialized” Islam is, in that sense, both wrongheaded and redundant. The issue of Muslim behavior outside the dar al-Islam has been a part of Islamic life since the time Muhammad’s followers first expanded beyond the borders of the Hijaz. (Contemporary Muslim thinkers speak of a dar al-Dawa, the “house of invitation,” or dar al-Amn, the “house of safety,” to describe the reality of Islam in the West today.) The alienation and disaffection of European Muslims are manifested very differently in each European country. The so-called disaffection of French Muslims is very different from the radical disconnection of British ones. Truth be told, we don’t even think it exists, at least not in any coherent confessional manner.

Probably the most inane, and disinformative, description of last year’s riots outside of Paris by immigrant, mostly Muslim, youth was that it was a “jihad.” A jihad? Has anyone ever seen Muslim youth in France? Even to describe these hip-hopping, vodka-drinking, all-night-party-crawling youngsters as “Muslim” makes a nonsense of language (and of Islam). Why doesn’t anyone describe their counterparts in Lyons or Miami or Edinburgh or Milan as “Christian” or “Jewish” youth? The disturbances in France were almost completely an issue, first, of class and, second, of race (specifically, of French racism); in the event, they had virtually nothing to do with religion. But, of course, class has become the dirtiest, most suppressed word in Western discourse now. We dare not speak of it; we dare not touch upon it as a global source of, and impulse to, social segregation and—such is the way of the world—violence. Which is why even fascism has now become ludicrously enwrapped in religion. We dare not say the obvious, historically and politically: that fascism always was, and still is, a matter of unhinged nationalism and class war (and disorientation). Islamo-fascism, indeed. The numerous cases of terrorism since September 11, 2001, have included only isolated instances of European Muslims attacking their fellow citizens (most notoriously, the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam). With very few exceptions, the radicalization of European Muslims expresses itself mainly in the form of contesting national (actually, social and cultural) integration—although, in France, of course, young Muslims are demanding to be integrated.

The fact, then, that a substantial segment of British-born Muslims is now violently alienated from British society—and from the rest of us, who are its fellow travelers—is an ill omen. In that sense, the estrangement of Muslims in France is genuinely healthy for French society as a whole, as it is part of a broader class confrontation that can only help to translate the hoary slogans of French republicanism into some sort of reality. In Britain, however, what we see is an Islamic radicalism based purely on permanent, unyielding, and violent existential refusal. The current issue (August 19-25) of The Economist has a special report on the ramifications of this most recent terror scare. The article that examines the current relations between British Muslims and non-Muslims is entitled “Miles Apart.” Continents, and centuries, apart would be closer to the truth.

Politics

Before I present the data from Schmitt and Zipperer’s report, however, I want to make clear that I not only share the skepticism regarding “lies, damn lies, and statistics,” but I urge it upon the reader. One of the reasons I don’t believe any numbers (on any subject) that issue from the current US government, for example, is because I know that the figures have been cooked every which way to the Sunday talk shows on which the Bush administration’s flacks will throw them out like candy in a kindergarten class. It’s Statistics 101: the most important backstory to a set of data is where they come from and why. The best data always come from widely based (that is, multiply monitored) and (relatively) disinterested bodies (OECD, UN, EU). Moreover, precisely because anybody can spin any set of “neutral” figures any which way, the most effective means to impose intellectual honesty and interpretive coherence on data is to ensure that they are strictly comparable (same category, same time frame, and, above all, same criteria) and—this is the point to Disraeli’s lies, damn lies, and statistics—not ripped out of (a, more often than not, ambiguous and even contradictory) context.

The data that follow are not only comparative but collected by an organization entrusted by its stakeholders to process the information objectively and with absolute intellectual detachment, regardless of the implications. Founded to administer Marshall Plan aid in Europe, the OECD today doesn’t merely group together the West’s top 30 economies. Its analytical and statistical resources are used specifically to scrutinize these economies (and, increasingly, many others as well, including those of China and Russia); as such, its diagnostic conclusions on the socioeconomic health of nations, as a whole and in specific areas, are universally considered incontestable. I say all this only because the data that follow on Greece are truly appalling in many ways, and there will be those who will try to deny—or, more probably, “reinterpret”—them in some form or other. That is a fool’s venture. These data are scandalous exactly because they are unimpeachable.

The numbers
The first thing to be said here is that there are certain data that the Greek government does not provide, for obvious reasons. Table 1 in S&Z concerns “household income inequality,” which is determined by what is called the Gini coefficient (named after the Italian statistician—and, interestingly enough, fascist theorist—Corrado Gini) and quantified as the Gini Index (the coefficient expressed as a percentage, that is, multiplied by 100). In “Whose Fear, Whose Rejection?,” I cited the CIA’s definition of the index. Here it is again:

This index measures the degree of inequality in the distribution of family income in a country. The index is calculated from the Lorenz curve, in which cumulative family income is plotted against the number of families arranged from the poorest to the richest….The more nearly equal a country’s income distribution…the lower its Gini index, e.g., a Scandinavian country with an index of 25. The more unequal a country’s income distribution…the higher its Gini index, e.g., a Sub-Saharan country with an index of 50. If income were distributed with perfect equality…the index would be zero; if income were distributed with perfect inequality…the index would be 100.

But Iceland is the exception that proves the rule. You don’t have to be a macroeconomist to know that when countries refuse to provide such fundamental data as the Gini coefficient and/or index have now become, they’re covering their backsides. New Zealand is, of course, notorious; it was there that a newly elected “Labour” government embarked in 1984 on what has subsequently been called—depending on the point of view—one of the most “radical,” “extreme,” or “brutal” neoliberal shreddings ever undertaken of a preexisting social-democratic state. (Georg Menz, a political economist at the University of London, has described it as “making Thatcher look timid.”) Within six years, unemployment almost tripled, reaching 11 percent, and the economy actually shrank by 1 percent (while, in the same period, total growth across the OECD countries rose by nearly 20 percent); within 10 years, 20 percent of New Zealand was living below the poverty line and UNICEF reported that the country had the third highest youth suicide rate in the world. A year earlier, a report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in the UK, Income and Wealth, found that the only comparably industrialized nation in which the gap between rich and poor had increased faster than in Thatcherite Britain in the previous decade and a half had been New Zealand. By 1999, the bottom 80 percent of New Zealand’s households had suffered a net reduction in their share of total national income, while the top 10 percent had increased their share by 15 percent and the top 5 percent saw an almost 25-percent increase in income (shades of Bush’s America). Tellingly, however, New Zealand’s ranking in the OECD fell, from ninth in 1970 to nineteenth almost 30 years later. (By 2004, it had fallen another couple of places, to number 21—just ahead of Greece.) So much for trickle-down globalization.

New Zealand is important because of the sheer perversity of its “left-wing” government during the Eighties. It anticipated by more than a decade the evolutionary adaptation of Old Thatcherism as it transmogrified into New Labour under Tony Blair’s pitiless tutelage. It is thus not merely a cautionary tale, but a representative one, veering only from the general direction of “progressive” politics in the West during the last quarter of a century in the extreme degree of its unapologetic deformation of social democracy into social Darwinism.

As I said above, Greece doesn’t calculate a Gini coefficient to track income (broadly, social) inequality. (Neither does Portugal, another country marked by the rhetorical socialism of its recent past). The government also doesn’t compute the country’s poverty rate. It is possible to get a Gini Index for Greece, however, if one goes to the UNDP’s most recent Human Development Index. The figure is 35.4, which means that the coefficient is 0.35. On the basis of the rest of the data presented by S&Z in Table 1, that puts Greece in the very bottom rank of Western social inequality, just below Portugal (whose Gini coefficient of 0.38 I also took from the HDI) and tied with the UK for the worst records in the European Union, and behind only the US and Mexico for worst of all (the latter at a breathtaking 0.49). Interestingly enough (but unsurprising), the four formerly communist societies in the survey (the Czech republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia) all had lower income inequality than Greece.

Sadly, this massive social failure is verified by another set of data. In S&Z’s Table 11, “Income mobility 1993-1995,” which measures “percent of low-income families exiting low-income status each year,” Greece’s percentage of 38.8 was the lowest of all 15 pre-enlargement EU member-states, with the exception, again, of Portugal (with 37 percent). Admittedly, this table has many gaps (as well as, obviously, the problem of data that are roughly a decade old). The gaps, however, primarily concern the former communist states and, expectedly, the Nordic nations. In regard to the latter, I may be naïve, but, somehow, I can’t imagine that societies such as those of Finland, Norway, Sweden, and, yes, Iceland would be less socially mobile than Portugal or Greece, especially when the data do show Nordic Denmark having the highest social mobility, with an extraordinary 60.4 percent of Danes exiting low-income status annually from 1993 to 1995.

More to the point for Greece, what is particularly striking in these data is the disparity between its own social stratification and those much more dynamic western European societies that, just a generation ago, were generally considered to be as—or even more—underdeveloped. Spain’s mobility from lower to higher incomes is an impressive 49.6 percent, while Ireland’s is a jaw-dropping 54.6 (Celtic Tiger, indeed). But even Italy, despite the last three decades of civil (and, for many years, armed) struggle, massive institutional corruption, secessionist movements, and Silvio Berlusconi—all of which have taken an enormous cumulative toll on Italian social order (and progress)—is marginally more mobile, with 40.6 percent of Italians moving out of low incomes annually.

The issue of skill sets is underlined by related data. Again, removing formerly communist Europe from consideration leaves Greece third from the bottom in the category of 20-to-24-year-olds not in education and not employed, with a depressing 22 percent of young people in that category. Only Italy (24.3 percent) and Mexico (26.6 percent) register worse figures. It is noteworthy that the corresponding figure for Ireland, 10.8 percent, is less than half of Greece’s; even Portugal comes in at only 12 percent for this critical segment of the population. Furthermore, at the top range of twenty-somethings (25-to-29-year-olds) who are neither in education nor employment, Greece has an even worse record than Italy (25.2 to 24.8 percent, respectively) and is only “outdone” by Mexico, with 30.6 percent.

And what does all of this youth dysfunction entail for a society as a whole? S&V’s Table 4 provides the shocking answer. In the category, “Variation in mathematics performance among 15-year-olds, 2003,” which tabulates the results of an international standardized test in math, the land that invented the word “mathematics” came in second to last after Mexico in all three categories of grading: tenth percentile, mean, and ninetieth percentile. Just to take the third group, with the best results, Greece scored 566, ahead of Mexico’s 497. The top score was Belgium’s 664, virtually 100 points higher than Greece, followed by Japan’s 660 and the Netherlands’ 657. As to why Greek schoolchildren are so behind in math, another series of data answers that question.

S&Z’s Table 6 measures “Average annual educational expenditures as share of GDP” (2002). The ranking is gruesome: Greece’s 2.7 percent is dead last in total (public and private) spending for primary and secondary education, even behind the formerly communist countries and Mexico (which, at 4.1 percent, actually spends 50 percent more of its GDP on its schoolchildren than Greeks do). Of course, when it comes to the tertiary level, Greece’s 1.2 percent of public spending is surpassed only by Switzerland (1.4 percent) and—no surprise here—the Nordic countries (Norway, 1.4; Sweden, 1.6; Finland, 1.7; and Denmark, 1.9). But that’s exactly the point—and Greece’s enormous educational (and social) problem: because the rest of the developed world spends so much more money on primary and secondary education, it need not spend so much on the highest level, as the necessary preparatory work for university education has already been done. But there’s another issue here. When measured by actual per-student expenditures in US dollars (at purchasing power parity [PPP] rates of exchange), Greece’s $4,731 for each university student is, again, dead last. In addition, Greek expenditures of $3,803 per primary-school pupil and $4,058 per secondary-school student are the lowest among Western countries, with the by-now standard exception of the formerly communist ones and Mexico. Just as an example, even Portugal spends $4,940 for each primary-school pupil and a substantial $6,921 for each of its secondary-school students.

Conclusions
With the exception of the four-year Koskotas- and Dêmêtra-determined interregnum beginning in 1989 and leading directly into the Mitsotakis government defeated in 1993, PASOK ruled Greece from 1981 until 2004. That’s a long time, essentially a generation. During that period, PASOK won five separate elections. It is impossible, therefore, not to conclude that if the social structure of Greece in 2006 is unusually exclusionary and regressive by Western standards, much, if not all, of the fault must inevitably fall on the party that governed the country for most of the preceding quarter of a century.

There’s no reason to belabor the obvious. I will only stress four points in closing for ongoing reflection.

1. Greece is a tiny, European country of 11 million. It is one thing, in other words, for a South American nation with a population ten times that of Greece, such as Mexico (whose 70-year, one-party rule, furthermore, was only ended in 2000 by the conservative Vicente Fox) to suffer structural social inequality. It is quite another for contemporary Greece to follow the same downward decline (if not yet equal terminal descent). It is also confounding (to say the least) that Greece should have almost the same rate of social exclusion as the US at a time in which Greece was governed by a rhetorically Marxian socialism, while the US was at the mercy of a bipartisan neoliberalism, some of whose most unforgiving acts of social cleansing, such as “welfare reform,” were perpetrated by Democrats. So, while the Megaro Maximou was inhabited by Andreas Papandreou and Kôstas Sêmitês during the time that Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush were in the White House, the difference in elemental social policy was nugatory.

2. It is incredible that with a labor force of a mere 4.86 million (according to the Hellenic Center for Development), 25 years of “socialist” government could not add the roughly 500,000 jobs needed to wipe out unemployment entirely. This is especially bizarre given that, during this time, Greece (fortunately) welcomed about one million immigrants to the country. Have immigrants “stolen” Greek jobs? In some cases, undoubtedly, but—in any fundamental, qualitative sense—hardly. The truth is, Greece’s governments have not been able to foster the economic or social climate for creating jobs of long-term value, either to the jobholder or the society at large. This, of course, is a critical reason for the multiple debility of current labor policy in Greece, including the obscenely high rate of both unemployment and income immobility, as well as the inexcusably low ratio of population-to-employment. (On the latter issue, it is mind-boggling that Mexico has a larger part of its 107 million people working than Greece has of its 11 million people!)

3. In Greece, however, one can always rest assured that the right is even stupider than the left. Consequently, for example, we see playing out before us at the moment the issue of the privatization of the country’s higher education, or, more precisely, the entry into the educational “market” (the terms used betray the idiocy of the “debate”) of private institutions—as if that is the major problem facing Greek higher education today, let alone education as a whole. It apparently hasn’t dawned on anyone that private secondary education by the bucketfuls hasn’t been particularly helpful when it comes to math scores—although it’s consistently served its basic purpose in Greece (as in most of the world), which, of course, is social advantage. In the event, this whole spectacle of fly-by-night American and British “universities” (degree mills is more like it) operating in Greece would be hysterical were it not so tragic for the consequences it will bring in its wake. Any modern society that spends as little as Greece does on primary and secondary education has a collective death wish. Nobody has yet explained how “private” university education is going to undo the damage resulting from the fact that Greece spends (at PPP exchange rates) $3,803 per pupil in primary school, while, just to give some examples, Germany spends $4,537, Spain $4,592, Portugal $4,940, France $5,033, and Denmark $7,727. And why will more “choice” (another moronic buzzword) in higher education matter if the resources in secondary education are so limited that the student is ill prepared in any case for viable, and substantive, university instruction? (Greek spending per student in secondary school is $4,058, as opposed to $6,010 for Spain, $6,921 for Portugal, $7,025 for Germany, $8,003 for Denmark, and $8,472 for France.) There are a multitude of problems with higher education in Greece (as with education generally), and there is a significant role for private capital in university education—including public education—but the totally disorienting disputes raging today are just a continuation of the country’s decades-old educational “wars” that have done so much to poison the educational environment and, more important, the education of Greek youth.

4. Finally, I will end on a personal note. Recently, I had a medical emergency in Greece, which, fortunately, ended up quite well (and with me very impressed by the proficiency and sheer abilities of Greek doctors). I was lucky, however, in the sense that when things initially took a very bad turn at the local hospital in which I found myself in Karystos, a friend immediately got on her cellphone and called her brother-in-law, who just happened to be chief of a major unit in one of the best private hospitals in Athens (i.e., the country). Although I was in pretty serious pain, my wife and our friends managed to get me on a ferryboat, which was met by a taxi in Rafina, which got me to the hospital, near the Olympic Stadium. Five days, a battery of tests, and a pretty major intervention later, I left, fit as a fiddle. All’s well that ends well—except for one thing.

If our friend (and her partner) hadn’t been there, and if her brother-in-law wasn’t a senior physician at the only hospital in Greece affiliated with Harvard Medical International, the results might have been decidedly different, and infinitely worse. Frankly, I’d rather not think about it. Suffice it to say that when my wife rushed me to the local “hospital” in Karystos, I was told by the supervising doctor that the x-ray machine was not operable (because there was nobody to operate it), an ambulance could not be spared to take me to another hospital on the mainland (although it wasn’t apparent why on that very slow Sunday), and that, generally—and with a tone of increasing exasperation—there was nothing anyone could do for me. Luckily, a young, long-haired intern, doing his agrôtiko (rural service)—to whom I will be forever grateful—had immediately put me on an IV and administered the initial injections of painkillers, muscle relaxants, and antibiotics. Even more luckily, I had my wife, our friends, and—this is where the privatization of primary Greek social services has led—my American Express card. PASOK’s partisans never stop boasting about the radical social difference their party’s 20-plus years in power has made to the Greek people. They’re right about that. As my wife and I were leaving that impressive private medical center on Kêfisias Avenue, near the Olympic Stadium, on the day I signed out, having just put the entire tab on my Gold Card, I could have sworn I was back in the States.

greekart

Book Reviews

Courtesy Yale University Press

This is in many ways an extraordinary book, wonderfully written, rich in poignant detail and anecdote that make it a thoroughly engrossing read. But when one eventually puts down this hefty tome, one has a sense that, oddly enough, despite the weight of the empirical material, its main thesis that 1945 was not the endpoint of the Second World War that we all think it was is not very persuasive, especially since it is based on a deterministic explanation of Joseph Stalin’s policies. While one can readily agree with the premise that 1945 was not the major turning-point it was supposed to have been, it is less easy to accept the conclusion that it enabled a process triggered by the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 to continue through the collapse of Soviet-style socialism in 1989.

The point of transition from war to peace is Gregor Dallas’s field of expertise. A professor of history who, following an English education, taught in the United States and then settled in France to write full time, Dallas has already written one book on the end of the Napoleonic Wars, 1815: The Roads to Peace, and another on the end of the First World War, 1918: War and Peace.

The year 1945 is, of course, when the Second World War ended, although, as Dallas urges us to consider, perhaps not conclusively. The Allies’ “Big Three”—Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin—met in Yalta in February to determine Germany’s postwar fate; they also agreed upon the Soviet Union’s participation in the United Nations and in the war against Japan. At the end of April, Hitler committed suicide as the Red Army entered Berlin (Mussolini had been executed by Italian partisans two days earlier). The following month, Victory-in-Europe Day was marked by the West on May 8 and by the Soviets on May 9. In July, the Big Three met again at Potsdam to decide the delineation of German and Polish territory, the logistics of occupying Austria and Germany, the prosecution of war criminals, and the issue of war reparations. The participants, however, were not the same as at Yalta. Franklin Roosevelt had died on April 12 and the United States was now led by Harry Truman. Even more unexpectedly, in Britain’s general elections during the conference, the Labor party defeated the conservatives, which meant that Clement Attlee replaced Churchill as Britain’s representative at Potsdam. On August 6 (four days after the conference ended), the United States dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima; it dropped another one on Nagasaki three days later. On August 15, Japan surrendered. In October, the United Nations was formed, and the trial of Nazi war criminals opened in Nuremberg in November.

All conventional accounts of these events, and what happened afterward, draw a dividing line at the end of 1945, closing the era of the Second World War and opening that of the Cold War. Not Dallas, however, who suggests instead that what happened in 1945 was the continuation of an era and a historical process that had begun in 1939 with the outbreak of the war. He points out that there was no final peace treaty to end the Second World War, as there had been in 1815 and 1919, but, rather, a series of top-level meetings and a peace conference in 1946 that was of limited range.

But Dallas mostly bases his argument on the actions of Joseph Stalin, whom he describes as striving to achieve all the gains that had been granted to the Soviets under the Nazi-Soviet pact, a nonaggression treaty signed by Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in August 1939. A secret protocol of that agreement, revealed only after the war, called for dividing central Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence, with Poland split in half. This nonaggression pact, of course, lasted only until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.

Most historians believe that the Nazi-Soviet pact was a tactical move on Stalin’s part, and many point to the inactivity of Britain and France during the Spanish Civil War, which had broken out in 1936, and the way both countries ignored the Soviets when they agreed to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938. In contrast, Dallas believes that Stalin’s move to ally himself with Hitler was the first step in a plan to dominate central and eastern Europe. He writes that Stalin “never abandoned the great dream of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, even after the Nazi invasion…” (p. 38)—but he doesn’t provide a footnote at the end of that passage. Furthermore, while Dallas adds later that Stalin only realized in the summer of 1943 that he could do without Hitler, again, there is no footnote.

One does not have to be a Soviet apologist to begin feeling the strain that Dallas places on his hypothesis that the 1939 pact somehow governed all of Stalin’s decisions during the Second World War. Stalin may have been ruthless and obsessed, but he cannot be credited with the ability of standing outside the ebb and flow of what was an especially complicated historical period, requiring continual tactical and strategic repositioning by all of the major historical actors. In fact, most recent scholarship on the war suggests a day-to-day muddling-through on everyone’s part.

Stalin’s cruelty becomes a leitmotif of this account, not because Dallas is an egregious Stalin-basher but because he needs to make the case that the Soviet leader’s actions reflected a determination to implement the 1939 accord with Hitler. But even a ferocious figure such as Stalin can be treated unfairly from a historian’s point of view. Dallas argues, for example, that the Holocaust was merely Hitler’s imitation of Stalin’s policies toward the Soviet Union’s own ethnic minorities. Moreover, for Dallas, no other major figure at the time seems to be able to approach Stalin in terms of interest-driven ruthlessness—which might be so, but it hardly makes many of Stalin’s contemporaries any less Machiavellian.

President Harry Truman, for example, comes off extremely lightly in Dallas’s account. Those two atomic bombs are passed over relatively swiftly. In discussing why Truman decided to play his part in what became known as the Cold War, Dallas suggests that it suddenly occurred to the American president that Stalin had a different definition of “democracy.” Such a benign explanation flies in the face of much of what we know about Truman’s motivations, however (see “Truman Toppled,” my review of Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945-1953 by Arnold A. Offner, greekworks.com, November 17, 2003). Further on, Dallas dismisses McCarthyism by comparing it to what happened during the postwar purges in the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc.

Yet reading through Dallas’s narrative is an enriching experience. The first thing one notices is his tendency not only to focus on individuals, and make them interesting by discussing their personalities, but also to add small details about their lives. Whether or not it reinforces his argument, this narrative strategy offers a refreshing reappraisal of the lives of persons who, after all, have been covered extensively in a multitude of studies. We learn, for instance, that Churchill liked having hot baths as a way of relaxing before making major speeches and that Jean-Paul Sartre acquired a taste for whiskey on the rocks in New York. (Dallas also mentions the thickness of the protective concrete along the bottom of Roosevelt’s train carriage.)

But events as well as people are set out with an eye for detail that provides a close, eyewitness-like perspective. These events include the heavy bombing of Berlin, an Allied operation that troubles the author less than the brutal Soviet entry into the German capital, and Britain’s repatriation of 25,000 Cossacks and other Russians to the Soviet Union—and, ultimately, to forced-labor camps in the Gulag—which is treated vividly and severely.

Aside from incorporating detail into his narrative, Dallas also innovates by informing the reader of things that were going on at the same time. Writing history always presents the problem of balancing the diachronic telling of the story with a broader narrative that encompasses other events occurring concurrently. Dallas’s solution is to engage in a synchronic account whenever he wants to make a point. For example, he breaks off his account of the Potsdam conference to describe the successful testing of the atom bomb in the desert of New Mexico.

Dallas’s most dramatic diachronic-synchronic juxtaposition is the concurrent description of the liberation of Paris and the collapse of the Warsaw uprising in August 1944. The implications of this contrast are obvious. The Soviet failure to come to the aid of the Poles as they rose against the Germans in Warsaw is proof in Dallas’s eyes of Soviet resolve to implement the terms of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and it haunts him and his book. He mentions Warsaw more than London throughout his account, and he refers to Poland more times than he does to all the other central and eastern European countries—with the exception of Germany and Russia—put together.

Indeed, this book is really about Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Poland. Italy and Japan are barely mentioned, and when other small countries—Greece, for example—are discussed, the author is not very reliable. To say that EAM/ELAS barely showed its head before the Germans left is stretching the facts. But then again, with Greece assigned to Britain as a result of the so-called percentages agreement between Churchill and Stalin in October 1944, Greece points to Allied treachery beyond the Kremlin. Ironically, Greece does fit the more general version of Dallas’s thesis that 1945 was not a terminus post ante at which a new era began in the war-torn country. Rather, debts opened in 1943 (and before) were not settled until 1949—or even, one could argue, until the transition to democracy and the legalization of the communist party in 1974.

Perhaps if Dallas had not used the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 (in which Greece was not included) as some kind of master-key to unlock all the problems raised in 1945 he would have come up with a less forceful but more persuasive thesis. Because, in the end, it does seem that, after managing their interests as best they could throughout the war, none of the viable (or surviving) political actors paused in 1945.

Book Reviews

Courtesy Canongate Books

While she has gone beyond the Odyssey text to flesh out Penelope’s story, this is essentially a retelling of the Odyssey story from Penelope’s point of view. But Atwood has dug deep into strange places for some of her material, the tale of Icarius casting her as a baby girl into the sea, for instance, a story for which the only sources are some Hellenistic-age scholarly notations on lines in four ancient texts. This is the kind of arcane, out-of-the-way story variant that appealed hugely to Robert Graves, whom Atwood acknowledges as a source for her material. He figures again in her explanation of ritual origins and sacrifice, when she deals with the murdered maidens. Graves is so preposterous as evidence (see Nick Lowe’s powerful debunking of him earlier this year in the Times Literary Supplement, “Killing the Graves myth,” January 1, 2006) that one would have to laugh except that, of course, this is fiction and anything goes.

Indeed, in making Penelope’s story contemporary, Atwood has found the perfect opening with a bit of parental abuse: Oprah would be moved by this poor girl. As the author has Penelope recount her life, she is not only haunted by the memory of her father’s rejection, but is overshadowed by her beautiful cousin, Helen. After both are dead and in the underworld, Helen—now no more than a wraith but still indulging in luxurious baths—continues to sneer at her. She calls her “Duck,” etymologizing from the ancient Greek word for duck that has given the world the classification, Anas Penelope, a certain kind of widgeon, although Penelope is generally thought to derive from the word pene, or “spindle,” because she is forever described as weaving, when not crying, particularly in the story of weaving the shroud for her father-in-law. “Ugly duckling” cannot help but come to the reader’s mind, or “waddles like a duck” perhaps, and Penelope, as Atwood describes her relationship with her glamorous, self-assured, sexy cousin, does seem quite the Plain Jane. Like the sad heroine of Welcome to the Dollhouse, you just know she’ll never get to the right table in the high-school cafeteria, just as she has to settle for dumpy Odysseus as a husband. As if that were not enough, she has to preoccupy herself with her husband’s preoccupation with Helen. There’s no question about it. Atwood has indeed brought this story up to date, making Penelope into Everygirl.

The events are told by Penelope, now dead, an immaterial ghost in the underworld, wandering in fields of asphodel. Atwood has shaped her work like ancient Greek drama, breaking the prose narrative every now and again with poetic interludes. She assigns these to a chorus of 12 women who provide a dark undertone to the characteristic voice of wife and mother that Atwood has come out of Penelope’s mouth. Accused of having a sexual relationship with the suitors, the women are condemned to death by Odysseus, whose son, Telemachus, proceeds to execute them with particular cruelty. The Odyssey narrator is careful to attach the act to Telemachus, establishing, it seems, a distinction between a prudent property-owner, lord, and master, who cannot allow sullied goods to continue at his establishment or countenance disloyalty from slaves, and his out-of-control son. Twenty-first-century readers who are quick to sympathize with the slave underclass are appalled that Odysseus cannot see that these women chose to surrender and comply to escape more aggressive rape. But he cannot, any more than his narrator can. Atwood, however, writing for a twenty-first-century audience, and from a woman’s viewpoint, makes her Penelope aghast at the news, and assigns to her the novel idea that she herself encouraged the good-looking ones to consort with the suitors so as to keep their mistress aware of the latter’s schemes. While Homer does describe Penelope as going about with a set of keys that suggest a housekeeper, it is hard to imagine that she ever talked with the slaves below stairs. In any case, as Penelope remembers it in Atwood’s narrative, she was preoccupied with fending off her mother-in-law (who sniffs her disapproval) and restraining the jealous old retainer, Eurykleia (who is spoiling Telemachus rotten). Still, conspiring with the downstairs slave women allows Penelope to position herself as just one of the girls: a slave like every woman in the house.

The chorus is scripted for other poetic performances as well, one a meditation and celebration of the birth of Penelope’s son, Telemachus, which highlights one of the ways a woman in that culture was defined. It is immediately preceded by Penelope’s proud recollection that Odysseus had remarked at the time that Helen herself had not managed to bring forth a male child (although Penelope is concerned again that Odysseus has Helen on the brain). There is a marvelous choral outburst that interrupts Penelope’s reminiscences more or less at midpoint. Entitled a sea chanty, it is a droll run-through of the travel narrative of The Odyssey, quite amusing for having a clumsy rhyme scheme that seems to have been improvised on the spot, in a sense recalling Odysseus’ spontaneous telling of his story as an after-dinner amusement at Scheria.

But, essentially, these women are there to sing of grimmer things. The crime of the hanged slave women runs like a leitmotif through Penelope’s recollections, a choral threnody culminating in a powerful finale when the chorus sings of haunting Odysseus. This is preceded by a heavy-handed script of a trial where Odysseus and his accusers have it out and, predictably enough, he is acquitted by the judge. One might be tempted to decide that Atwood has surrendered to the notion of the husband as the Big Bad Man. In point of fact, in a society where women were in every way the pawns of males of the family, worthy only of the respect they could command as exciting sexual partners and then as childbearers, there is no reason to doubt that women would loathe men. But I doubt that Penelope herself, who was reared in a world in which there had always been slavery and cruelties perpetrated on slaves, would, if she had managed to notice, have especially cared that the women were killed, or think her husband out of line, although it keeps the poem alive for a modern reader.

There are marvelous and sometimes weird touches in this book. Calling the chapter in which the slave women are killed, “Odysseus and Telemachus Snuff the Maids,” is just so delightfully a camp way to be contemporary that you want to cry. The description (pp. 85f.) of Penelope’s Naiad mother, who eats food like a sea creature, conjures up a female entity that is fearful and gross, and you have to say “Poor Penelope!” One of my favorite moments is the quoting of the maxims of that tiresome old piece of baggage, Eurykleia. Who would have known before Atwood’s masterful description how thoroughly invasive and dreadful she was? How could Penelope bring herself to descend the stairs when the old nursemaid was there to dish out still more of her maxims, as, for instance?

Mistress lazy, slaves get bold,
Will not do what they are told.
Act the thief or whore or knave:
Spare the rod and spoil the slave.

(Eurykleia! You go, girl!)

Atwood has a conceit that works well intermittently in which these legendary figures float through time and space on something like an Ethernet, and thus come down and into the twenty-first century through the television screen from which they can look out on the people of this time. Sometimes the wraiths inhabit bodies in later centuries. The idea works well at the very end when Penelope says that Odysseus came back and just as quickly went off again; in fact, she confesses that he comes and goes again and again, and, although she insists that he seems to care for her, he can’t resist turning up elsewhere over the centuries in one historical epoch after another as a variety of historical figures. Helen, likewise, goes off and comes back to report on the various lovers she has sampled over the ages. Penelope claims that she is content to stay home. One might say that she has found peace early on in life and the other two are simply anxiety-ridden overachievers who need the stimulation of another trip. (Atwood might have mentioned Attention Deficit Disorder to make the scenario truly à la page.) Yet what Atwood has let Penelope say about herself in this narrative suggests to the reader that this Plain Jane is maybe a little tentative and a little dull.

Book Reviews

Courtesy Canongate Books

Sedimentary rock is formed over vast expanses of time, as layer upon layer of sediment is deposited on the sea bottom.

Being formed in this way, such rock is usually arranged in a succession of horizontal bands, or strata, with the oldest strata lying at the bottom.

Each band will often contain the fossilised remains of the plants and animals that died at the time at which the sediment was originally laid down.

The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book, each with a record of contemporary life written on it. Unfortunately, the record is far from complete. The process of sedimentation in any one place is invariably interrupted by new periods in which sediment is not laid down, or existing sediment is eroded. The succession of layers is further obscured as strata become twisted or folded, or even completely inverted by enormous geological forces, such as those involved in mountain building…. (Italics and larger typeface in the original, pp. ix-x.)

As the author implies in these opening lines, her own story can be viewed as part of the process of sedimentation that supplements the already existing layers or records of specific myths, like those of Atlas and Heracles: a record that is far from complete, an archive that is constantly subjected to temporal or spatial erosion and the threat of extinction. As with some of her previous work, Winterson employs the idea of materiality not only to explore one’s relationship to our past histories and myths, but also to our present time, in order to demonstrate through writing how particular myths keep expanding and extending beyond their own time and space.

And so, without violently removing them from it, Winterson “reads” Atlas and Hercules as figures outside their own mythopoeic context and uses them to:

Explore loneliness, isolation, responsibility, burden, and freedom too, because my version has a very particular end not found elsewhere….

Weight has a personal story broken against the bigger story of the myth we know and the myth I have re-told. I have written this personal story in the First Person, indeed almost all of my work is written in the First Person, and this leads to questions of autobiography.

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real. (pp. xiv-xv)

Winterson’s tale then becomes what literary critic Phillip Stambovsky calls a ‘‘mythicized autobiographical” story, in this case understood as or told through the myth of Atlas and Hercules. Autobiography here supplements all the other elements (in the myth) and vice versa: one cannot be separated from the others. In that sense, the author uses not only mythical sources to construct and represent her own self, but writing itself naturally becomes part of the process of textual sedimentation and archivization. Winterson’s rewriting of myth is an example of modern transformation and recontextualization without, however, negating or destroying the original myth’s permanence in time.

The myth of Atlas (his name probably means “he who carries” or “he who endures”) is the story of a Titan, son of Iapetus and Clymene, the guardian of the pillars of heaven who took part in the rebellion of the Titans and was punished by Zeus and the victorious gods to carry the vault of the sky on his shoulders. He lived in the far West, in the country of the Hesperides, and was referred to by Herodotus as Atlas, the mountain in North Africa (this is, of course, one of many versions of Atlas’ story). In Ovid’s Metamorphosis, we see Atlas turned into a rock by Perseus, who confronted him with Medusa’s head after slaying the Gorgon. During his eternal punishment, Atlas encounters Heracles, the most famous Greek hero, on his way to collect the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, one of the twelve labors. Since Heracles himself cannot collect the golden apples (according again to a version), he persuades Atlas to perform this task for him after he relieves the giant from his burden by taking over the sky vault. But while Atlas thinks that Heracles can go for a while carrying his weight, he is tricked by the Greek hero, who persuades him to take over again for a moment so Heracles can put a pillow on his shoulders and finds himself once again bound in his eternal punishment. Heracles picks up the Golden Apples and leaves; he later dies after wearing a poisonous tunic that his wife Deianeira has given him believing that its magic will make him renounce his mistresses and love her forever.

What is it, then, that this author, Jeanette Winterson, contributes to this myth; what is, to use her own words, “the record of contemporary life written on it”? Why does she keep emphasizing the need to ‘‘tell the story again”?

Contrary to some previous (post)modern tales, Winterson’s novel does not attempt to rewrite the past in order to question the origin or legitimacy of ancient texts. Her intention is not to question what is turned into a myth, and how it is done so. She attempts, rather, as the literary theorist Linda Hutcheon would say, to ‘‘de-naturalize the temporal relationship’’ that frames the author’s rewriting of the story of Atlas and Hercules. She does so by constantly retelling and therefore recycling particular stories (the geological metaphors are quite indicative here). In other words, the purpose of Winterson’s tale is to emphasize the relevance of the classical story within a contemporary—sometimes autobiographical, sometimes historical—context and address issues of desire, selfhood, fate, and freedom.

Like my brother Prometheus, I have been punished for overstepping the mark. He stole fire. I fought for freedom.

Boundaries, always boundaries.

I keep telling the story again and though I find different exits, the walls never fall. My life is paced out—here and here and here—I can alter its shape but I can’t get beyond it. I tunnel through, seem to find a way out, but the exits lead nowhere. I am back inside, leaning on the limits of myself. (p. 14)

Although these words are spoken by Atlas, they could very well serve as a reflection of the author’s own understanding and preoccupation with freedom and boundaries. Starting with Atlas’ narrative (told in the first person) and through her masterful and poetic use of language, Winterson demonstrates her ability not only to tell the story but also to bring it as close as possible to her own experience.

I found that where the world was close to my ears, I could hear everything. I could hear conversation, parrots squawking, donkeys braying. I heard the rushing of underground rivers and the crackle of fires lighted. Each sound became a meaning, and soon I began to de-code the world….

I can hear the world beginning. Time plays itself back for me. I can hear the ferns uncurling from their tight rest. I can hear pools bubbling with life. I realise I am carrying not only this world, but all possible worlds. I am carrying the world in time as well as in space. I am carrying the world’s mistakes and its glories. I am carrying its potential as well as what has so far been realized….

There is no longer Atlas and the world, there is only the World Atlas. Travel me and I am continents. I am the journey you must make. (pp. 24-25)

Heracles, on the other hand, is a macho character, driven by his sexual desires, a man who seems incapable of serious thought but who nevertheless believes he understands his place in the world and, so, overvalues his significance and strength. And yet, at the same time, even if only for brief moments, Heracles questions his identity as a heroic figure, as well as the burden of his fate—or the requirement for his posthumous fame—to perform one labor after the other. There are moments in the story in which

[Heracles] no longer understood the journey, or rather he understood there was a journey. Until today he had gone about each task unconcerned by the one before or the one after. He had met the challenge and moved on. He did what he had to do, no more, no less. It was his fate. Fate could not be questioned or considered.

Today was different. Today, for the first time in his life, he thought about what he was doing. He thought about who he was.

Ladon had told him to go home. What if he did? What if he walked out of the garden and turned away. He could find a chip, change his name. He could leave Heracles behind, an imprint in time, like Ladon, that would fade as the grass grew.

What if he bent the future as easily as an iron bar? Could he not bend himself out of his fate, and leave fate to curve elsewhere?…

“Go home, Heracles”… no, he would never go home. It was too late (pp. 43-44)

Although, in the end, Heracles is unable to escape his fate, or to choose his own path, he nevertheless falls into an “existential” anxiety, albeit for a moment, because of his inability to explain the rationality behind his own actions. Outside his traditional role and boundaries of destiny, and carrying the weight of the world this time, Heracles feels vulnerable but at the same able, despite the unpleasantness, to experience the weight that the Other carries on his shoulder. We hear that:

Heracles was more afraid now than he had been in his whole life. He could accept any challenge except the challenge of no challenge. He knew himself through combat. He defined himself by opposition. When he fought, he could feel his muscles work and the blood pumping through his body. Atlas was right, it was too heavy for him. He couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t bear this slowly turning solitude. (Italics in the original, pp. 71-72.)

For Heracles, ‘‘inwardly, some part of him was riven—not by doubt—he did not doubt what he must do, but by a question. He knew what, he no longer knew why?”(p. 45) Unlike Sisyphus in Camus’s story, Heracles is unable to find meaning in his task.

The question of ‘‘why’’ and its relationship to meaning, suffering, responsibility, and freedom haunts the two mythic figures in the story, and brings them together despite all their other apparent differences. While Atlas uses thinking as a way to avoid death, Heracles chooses material labor and heroic action. The switch of roles between the two (when Heracles takes over Atlas’ task so the latter can bring him the Golden Apples) only renews their anxiety and experience of eternal loneliness.

[Atlas] tried to understand the ways of gods and men, and was mentally constructing a giant history of the world. His thoughts kept him from dying. His thoughts kept him from feeling. What was there to feel anyway—but pain and weight?

Now, gazing at this tiny world, he felt an emotion he hardly recognised. He did not dare to name it.

Heracles, his strength bound without motion, was having a panic attack. He was not alone. There were no fires, no lights, no cooking smells. There was no one to listen to his stories, or to get drunk with, or to praise him. His only company was the hornet buzzing outside of his head, the thought-wasp, buzzing Why? Why? Why? (pp. 66-67)

Winterson masterfully explores how these myths reflect on contemporary selfhood, how they contribute to the ways we construct and, most important, represent our notions of self and identity. In that sense, the novel mirrors the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, how we use myths and fiction(s) to talk about ourselves, and how writing about the self very much depends on the fictional and the imagined. In the end, as the author suggests, it is perhaps only within a specific mythopoeic context that we can invent and talk about ourselves, forge our own desires and destiny: “Looking at the glowing globe, I thought that if I could only keep on telling the story, if the story would not end, I could invent my way out of the world. As a character in my own fiction, I had a chance to escape the facts” (p. 139).

Winterson’s story is about the weight we all carry on our shoulders, and the philosophical questions related to it. It is a meditation on our ability to go beyond boundaries that have been defined or imposed on us by others. It is a story about our ability to imagine transgressing, like Atlas, the material weight we carry with us. The author’s writing and imagination become means of liberating both herself and the original mythical figures—specifically, Atlas, whose mind is freed of any material condition. Writing becomes a moment of mutual realization. The writer reinvents herself through the telling of the myth. While we are aware, as readers, of the distinction of the author’s voice (and personal experience), there is no binary opposition between the author and the figures in the story. While the story reflects on one’s ability to break boundaries, it is also about creating new ones. It is about learning to live with your weight, that of your own past, and, most important, that of the stories carried by myth.

The beauty of Winterson’s tale rests in her ability to carry the weight of her own life and past, but also of particular myths, through her writing. Although she recycles old ideas about fate and responsibility, the story is so beautifully told and so engagingly interwoven with personal life that it renews our interest in the old myths—and thus rekindles our desire to tell or write the story again and again.

Our Opinion

[T]his inclination to aggression…in ourselves and…in others, is the factor which disturbs our relations with our neighbor and which forces civilization into such a high expenditure. In consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration. The interest of work in common would not hold it together; instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests….

It is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness. I once discussed the phenomenon that is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other—like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch [sic], and so on. I gave this phenomenon the name of “the narcissism of minor differences”….
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

While Freud failed to mention Turks and Greeks among his adjoining communities “related to each other” but “engaged in constant feuds and…ridiculing,” many (Greeks and Turks, mostly) have made that connection in the decades since he formulated his famous notion of “the narcissism of minor differences.” We’re not so naïve as to compare Greeks and Turks to the English and Scots (let alone to citizens of Berlin and Munich). While Turkey and Greece are each often insufferably narcissistic, their respective self-absorption is many times related to quite major differences (religion, language, radically differing cultural antecedents, most obviously). Still, that former president of Greece who once notoriously (and pompously) described his countrymen and -women as a “siblingless people” was as deluded (or ideologically disposed) as Atatürk when the latter concocted his fantastic “historical theses” about the (essentially racial) superiority of the Turks. Identity fabrication can get pretty ugly—and, occasionally, even homicidal. That’s why even minor differences can lead to competing narcissisms, and irreconcilable divisions.

In April, for example, the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation (CyBC) announced the results of a survey. We quote from the article by John Leonidou in the Cyprus Mail (“Most Greek Cypriots ‘don’t want to live with Turkish Cypriots,’” April 5, 2006):

Despite the vast majority of Greek Cypriots theoretically remaining in favour of a united Cyprus, 48 per cent of them are against the idea of living side by side with Turkish Cypriots.

According to a survey conducted by the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation…48 per cent of those asked said they would choose to live separately from Turkish Cypriots, to 45 per cent opting for co-existence. More worrying still, the vast majority of Greek Cypriots under the age of 35 are against the idea of living with their Turkish Cypriot neighbours—a result which casts considerable doubt over how willing Greek Cypriots are to rejoin Turkish Cypriots on a united island.

The study revealed that 63 per cent of Greek Cypriots within the age group of 18 to 24 are against the idea of living with Turkish Cypriots, while for the age group 25 to 34, 59 per cent are against the idea.

The same cannot be said for Greek Cypriots over 55. Greek Cypriots, aged between 55 and 64, were 59 per cent in favour of living with the Turkish Cypriots while those aged 65 and up were 61 per cent in favour.

The overall percentage of people wanting to be reunited with Turkish Cypriots has dropped dramatically since 2003—the year the checkpoints opened allowing the communities to mingle for the first time in almost three decades....

This report’s dispiriting nature is equaled only by its surrealism. It has been over 30 years since the forced division and Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus provoked by the Greek military dictatorship in 1974. The only Greek Cypriots, therefore, who actually have a real memory of living alongside Turkish Cypriots are those above 55—all those, in other words, who were at least in their early twenties when the island was divided and, as such, have a font of genuine bicommunal experience from which to draw some existential (and social) conclusions. They indicated a clear desire (almost three to two) to construct an integrated republic. In fact, those 65 and older—old enough, that is, to remember living with Turkish Cypriots when the island was a cauldron of intercommunal conflict ensuing from the anticolonial struggle—were marginally even more supportive of integration. Those 34 and under—who’ve never experienced bicommunal life because they were born about the time of the island’s division or later—are opposed to the very idea of integration, however, with the youngest Greek Cypriots most opposed.

And most separatist, for whom an “ideal” Cypriot republic would apparently be founded on apartheid. Understandably, those who’ve lived segregated (which is to say pathological) lives are, at best, uncomprehending about the virtues of what Freud called “work in common.” After all, again as Freud notes, “instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests”—especially when those passions are reinforced by reactionary education, fanatical religion, and politicians who are both cynical and craven. Nonetheless, one would think that all those 24-and-unders, born in the last quarter of the twentieth century, would be capable of a social vision that was slightly less occluded. In the event, the CyBC’s poll pointed clearly to the victory of the rejectionist front (aligning “communists” and right-wingers in a condominium whose only social coherence seems to lie in shared paranoia) that did, indeed, occur last month in the Greek Cypriot parliamentary elections.

***

Meanwhile, back in the real world, a week before those elections, Mustafa Yücel Özbilgin, a justice of Turkey’s highest constitutional tribunal, the Council of State, was assassinated (and four other justices wounded) when a man ran into the court’s chambers, screaming “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) and “I am a soldier of Allah,” and firing point-blank at the justices. One of the wounded judges, Mustafa Birden, had provoked the ire of religious conservatives by ruling that schoolteachers, who are legally banned from wearing the Islamic headscarf at work, could not cover their heads even on their way to school. Generally, the Council of State has been in the forefront of defense of Turkey’s Kemalist constitution, which is often referred to as “secular” although a more accurate term would be repressive.

That same day, just a few hours later and thousands of kilometers to the West, in what seems to be an utterly different planet (if not a parallel universe), Greece’s current president was proving how the narcissism of minor differences can lead to cognitive dissonance of major proportions. At a press conference following his address to the European parliament in Strasbourg marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Greece’s accession to the European Union, His Excellency, Mr. Karolos Papoulias, warned all and sundry that Turkey has “some very serious problems,” that its government “needs to get a grip on them,” and that “I do not think that Turkey will be able to have closer ties with the EU by violating fundamental rights.” He went on to clarify that, “We are talking not only about the Kurdish minority, but about human rights in Turkey in general. This is an issue, a problem, to be faced by the Turkish government.”

At the very moment Mr. Papoulias was “berating” Turkey (to echo Kathimerini’s headline of the story), Turkey’s government was, of course, trying to deal with the political—and constitutional—ramifications of the physical attack on the Council of State. That same day, Turkey’s president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a staunch Kemalist, assured anyone who might have any doubts (including, presumably, the country’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has consistently expressed his opposition to the headscarf bans) that the judicial system would remain steadfast in its loyalty “to the secular and democratic republic.” Just to prove the point, the next day, thousands of protesters—including judges dressed in their robes—marched to Kemal’s mausoleum in Ankara, chanting, “Turkey is secular and will remain secular.” Upon reaching the building that houses the remains of “the father of Turkey,” many of these “secularist” demonstrators kissed its marble façade. In Turkey, it seems, “secularism” only proscribes religious cults.

But there was more to come. The day after the demonstrations, Gen. Hilmi Özkök, chief of Turkey’s general staff, felt the need to express his gratitude to the defenders of “the secular and democratic republic.” “The protests and the people’s sensitivity is truly hope-giving and admirable,” the good general proclaimed, and then came the stern counsel: “But this reaction should not be limited to a single day, to a single event. It must gain continuity and it should be followed by everyone all the time.”

Whenever Turkish generals advise that a political current “gain continuity,” most of their fellow citizens rightly have a tendency to run for the hills, or at least for their passports and the nearest airline counter. Which is why Prime Minister Erdoğan called the general’s statements “irresponsible,” adding that, “people…in positions which require responsibility…should know what we should advise and how.” Mr Erdoğan concluded that, “We should all make efforts to strengthen democracy, secularism…and the rule of law.”

The problem is that we think that Gen. Özkök knew very well what he was advising “and how.” Contrary to most of the received liberal wisdom both inside Turkey and out, we also believe that, while Gen. Özkök is undoubtedly an authentic secularist—or, rather, Kemalist—it is Mr. Erdoğan, the once and future Islamist, who is more genuinely committed to strengthening democracy and the rule of law in Turkey. The paradox is more apparent than real. Mr. Erdoğan understands—because he’s spent time in its prisons as a consequence of it—that the Turkish republic has borne the burden from its foundation of an illiberal (quite literally, quasi-fascist) constitution whose “secularism” was not the considered distillation of Enlightenment tolerance but of a garrison state that saw, and continues to see, religion as a threat to its monopoly of civil, and even political, power.

greekworks.com is committed to—even zealous about—secularism, but we’ve continually said that secularism built on a legalistic edifice of compulsion and, worse, repression is a constitutional disaster waiting to happen. Genuine secularism arises from democratic deliberation and consent; its consensual basis is so evident, transparent, and extensive that it precludes even the possibility of constitutional revisionism. (That has been the case in France for the last hundred years and in the United States for the last two hundred, although the latter has lately presented a distinctly problematic profile regarding precisely the extent of its constitutional dedication to secularism.) Turning a half-millennium-old theocracy (the Ottoman empire, whose head was not only sultan but Islam’s caliph) into a secular regime (the Turkish republic) by diktat is not “modernization” (as it has been perversely described over the years by Kemal’s devotees, from Lord Kinross to Bernard Lewis to Richard Perle to Gen. Özkök). It is arbitrary repression; and while it can last one day or a thousand, one year or a century, it is as authoritarian, and thus fragile, an act a hundred years after the fact as it is in its first hour. Of course Islam is back in force in Turkey—it had never disappeared. It was just driven underground by the security apparatus of a repressive state. That is precisely why Mr. Erdoğan is probably the only person in Turkey right now who can finally achieve a democratic constitutional settlement between mosque and state that will lead to authentic secularity. (And speaking of the narcissism of minor differences, as a polity and civil society that still privileges Greek Orthodoxy, and remains constitutionally incapable of sundering the connections between state and church—thus fostering a climate of religious fundamentalism that has, quite literally, led to the ayatollahization of the Church’s leadership—Greece’s claims of democratic superiority on this matter ring brazenly hollow.)

***

Just to prove that major differences can be as narcissistic as minor ones, however, on the same day that Judge Özbilgin was dying on the operating table in the unsuccessful, six-hour attempt to save his life, the EU’s enlargement commissioner, Mr. Olli Rehn, joined Mr. Papoulias in internationally browbeating the Turkish government. Speaking at a press conference in Sofia, he stated that, “It is necessary that the Turkish government take immediate action in order to restart the momentum of reforms in the country and also to respect its commitments, as regards the Ankara protocol, to full [EU] member states,” concluding, in a hardly veiled threat, “That is the best and only way to avoid a recess later on this year in the negotiations between the EU and Turkey.” In Ankara meanwhile—yes, in Ankara!—the Finnish prime minister (a compatriot of Mr. Rehn), who was visiting the Turkish capital in preparation for his country’s assumption of the EU presidency next month, also called on Turkey to ratify the Ankara protocol, which extends the EU customs agreement signed by Turkey to Cyprus. Two days later, in Brussels now, Mr. Rehn was back at it. Speaking to reporters again (after meeting with Turkey’s chief EU negotiator), Mr. Rehn was in full-pontification mode. “There is a sense of urgency and it is now the time for Turkey to regain the momentum of reforms, and enhance rule of law, human rights and freedoms,” he said, adding, in a truly astonishing summation, “We have a major challenge ahead of us. By speeding up the reform process, we can avoid negative repercussions in the negotiation process.”

We can’t help but be reminded of the old joke, “What’s this ‘we stuff,’ white man.” One doesn’t have to be Turkish to look upon all this officious sermonizing, and holier-than-thou posturing and hectoring, as positively breathtaking in its seemingly lunatic refusal to ignore Turkey’s social and political realities—and the unceasing efforts by Mr. Erdoğan’s government to radically alter and reorder them. Over a year ago, we wrote:

Every confirmation of concrete progress made by Turkey to meet EU standards and demands—which, lately, has almost invariably dictated fundamental Turkish constitutional reform—is countered by criticism that Ankara is failing to fulfill all of the so-called Copenhagen criteria….[One can add the Ankara protocol to that now.] It seems that Turkey’s critics either do not understand how utterly radical the effort to put the country on a permanent path to democratic government and, above all, the rule of law is, or they, in fact—and we believe this to be much closer to the truth—want to see Turkey fail, if only to validate their own prejudices about the “incompatibility” between Turkish society and European “civilization.”

We then went on to warn that, “Some of the issues that Turkey will have to address on its way to (re)joining Europe are so deeply embedded in the modern Turkish state’s mythology that it will be impossible to deal with them without provoking almost pathological reactions” (see greekworks.com, “Turkey in Europe.” April 26, 2005).

Welcome to “secularism” in Turkey, among other fissures under the surface of the Kemalist “order,” which can no longer cover them over. We were not prophets (indeed, we now regret the timidity of that adverbial “almost”); we were simply conscious of the profound nature of the genuine modernization that is finally taking place in the country, one of whose fundamental requirements is the complete dismantling of the Kemalist regime. What we find inexplicable and, frankly, grotesque is the spectacle of Europe’s great and good lecturing Turks on “regaining the momentum on reforms” at a time when the country is on the verge of civil strife precisely because of the extraordinary toll taken by the (necessarily constitutional) reforms to date.

***

A couple of days after the Greek Cypriot elections, a Turkish and Greek fighter collided over the Aegean. The Greek pilot, Kônstantinos Êliakês, was killed. The Turkish pilot survived. (There were rumors that he pulled a gun on Greeks trying to rescue him. Because of the respective motivations, both truth and falsity in this case are equally depressing.) This continual, and truly stupid, “mock” aerial combat has, of course, gone on for decades (provoked mostly by Turkey) and it was only a matter of time before calamity ensued. It is a testament to the skills of the pilots on both sides that more men have not died so senselessly. Predictably, in the aftermath of Capt. Êliakês’s tragic demise, a poll commissioned by an Athens daily showed that 64 percent of respondents in Athens and Thessalonikê opposed Turkish entry into the EU, while only about 23 percent supported it.

The question that nobody asks in Greece, naturally—because to do so would entail more intellectual honesty than is seemingly abroad in the land—is what the alternative, for Greece’s security, is to Turkish accession. Is there any Greek in his right mind who actually believes that a moorless, scorned Turkey, rejected by the European Union—and, so, under no further obligation to heed its counsel on any issue, let alone on all those it might consider of vital national interest—would be less of a threat to Greece, and to the peace of the eastern Mediterranean as a whole, than a Turkey fully integrated into and, therefore, fully circumscribed by, the EU on virtually all matters, foreign and domestic? Is there anyone mad enough to believe such a preposterous notion? Well, then, if not, why this continual, disorienting, and, in the end, patently useless resistance to the only course that can lead to radically different, and unprecedented, relations between the two countries?

There is some heartening news in all this bleakness, however. The fact is that we have seen the future, and you can take it to the bank—literally. The recent acquisition of Finansbank, Turkey’s sixth largest bank, by the National Bank of Greece speaks louder, and infinitely more eloquently, than all the sloganeering, posing, and differential narcissism of Greek presidents, mediacrats, and assorted professional jingoes. The very process of negotiating its entry into the EU has changed the reality, both in Turkey itself and in its relations with its only neighbor that is actually an EU member. Once upon a time, Greece’s current president was foreign minister of a government that prided itself, and actually boasted of being guided by, the Marxian canon. We suggest that Mr. Papoulias delve into it again. Material relations in—and among—societies reflect political realities much more acutely and faithfully than political rhetoric or constitutional preambles. The significant investment of Greek capital in the Turkish economy heralds a much more profound and intimate integration of the two societies in the coming decades.

We repeat: we are not naïve, either about the difficulties of Turkish accession to the EU, or about the nature of Turkish society and—to us, much more relevant—the regime that has tormented it for so long. Several months ago, we noted that, in addition to a desire to join the European Union, Turkey was racked by “...ambivalence…panic...arrogance, and…even a reverse anti-European bigotry, and…active opposition to conforming to European values because they are considered to be ‘anti-Turkish’” (see greekworks.com, “Turkey’s Eurotunnel,” October 14, 2005). We believe that Mr. Erdoğan’s major problem right now is not his Islamist political base, which, as a master politician, he thoroughly controls. His problem is the Kemalist regime: both overt and hidden in what Turks call “the deep state.” He must finally decide to take it on, in one fell swoop, instead of allowing it continually to sabotage his political agenda and set its own (from murdering Kurdish activists, to prosecuting writers and journalists for “insulting” Turkey, to banning newspapers).

There really is no other way, for him, for his country, or for peace in the eastern Mediterranean. Because, as strange and even discomfiting as this might sound to both Turks and Greeks, and as difficult as it might be for them to accept it, Judge Özbilgin and Capt. Êliakês were victims of the same regime. Kemalism is dying. Unfortunately, it falls to Mr. Erdoğan—and to everyone who wishes only the best for Turkey—to ensure that its death throes do not claim more innocent victims. Confronted by the truly modernizing and democratic vision of Turkey’s European integration, the Kemalist center can no longer hold. It is now too fraught with contradiction; too weighed down by the accumulated, historical burden of the corruption and violence committed in its name; too incapable of self-reformation, let alone of a radical break with its past; too mired in arbitrary, abusive power; and, worst of all, too blind to the needs and demands of the people that it has violated and terribly misgoverned for all these years. Mustafa Kemal died decades ago. It is way past time for Turkey to bury Atatürk as well.

Sports

The founder of the Olympic Games was famously dismissive of spectators and of their value to organized sport. When the Olympics experienced the first example of nationalist friction at the London Games in 1908 (among the Americans and British, of all people), Coubertin blamed the crowds, not the athletes. Spectators, he wrote, tended to get overexcited, which clouded their already limited grasp of the principles of fair play. There were several other occasions when Coubertin, who spent his life promoting the purity of sport, doubted spectators’ contributions to athletes’ performances. Moreover, he thought that building big stadiums (presumably to house those excitable spectators) was a deplorable waste of resources.

Of course, Coubertin died in 1937 at the age of 74. He had lived, in other words, in an era when sports fans were extremely well-behaved by today’s standards. The 1930s were an era in which fans displayed extraordinary politeness to opposing teams. In the first World Cup, held in Uruguay in 1930, fans thronged the port of Montevideo and warmly applauded the arrival of the visiting national teams. In 1935, a soccer match between the English and German national sides, planned long before Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, went off without incident in London despite rising tension between the two countries. British spectators stood politely as the German national anthem was played, and as the large contingent of visiting German fans sang Deutschland über alles. When the game took place, there was no disruption.

By that time, however, hooliganism, known as “the English disease,” had spread to the rest of Europe, initially through the behavior of British fans traveling to international matches, most notoriously when Liverpool fans stampeded toward Juventus fans at the Heysel stadium in Belgium just before the kickoff of the European Cup final in 1985. Thirty-nine Italian and Belgian fans died, and hundreds were injured. As a result, British teams were banned from playing in European club competitions for five years.

But homegrown hooliganism proliferated in almost all European countries, and it shared many characteristics with its British counterpart. Violence was accompanied by a barrage of abusive taunts of all kinds and was fueled by the infiltration of ultra-rightist groups. Chauvinistic and intolerant attitudes only grew in the post-Cold War era of nationalism and xenophobia directed against immigrant workers.

Coubertin was at least spared the pain of seeing his notions of “pure sport” defiled by the increasing commercialization of professional sport, and spectators’ transformation into consumers in an era of “free enterprise.” The modern spectator-consumer, obliged to pay through the nose, now tries to make the most of the “rights” that accrue to any paying customer.

In her book, The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion and Nationalism in Greece, sociologist Alexandra Halkia has suggested that Greeks consider their sexuality as a Zorba-like idiosyncrasy, and an expression of their “freedom” from social constraints. Halkia does not examine soccer chants, focusing instead on a marginally more highbrow form of expression, the lyrics of contemporary rebetika. The Greek soccer world would have been a relevant and very helpful source of data, however. Fans of Olympiakos Piraeus, a soccer team that scores all too often (albeit with the occasional help of referees), greet their team’s goals with a chorus of “E-tsi ga-maei o Pi-re-as!” (That’s how Pi-rae-us fucks!).

With the police looking the other way, organized gangs of fans, patronized by club presidents, feel free to stage pitched battles in and out of stadiums and even in city centers. Their antics, and the indifference of the soccer authorities (not to mention the government) have persuaded most Greek soccer fans to stay in the safety of their living rooms and watch the games on television. Total attendance figures for Greek soccer matches have consequently dropped precipitously over the past 15 years, and even the national team’s victory in the Euro 2004 tournament has not helped matters.

It is precisely this volatile mix of racism and nationalism that concerns Chancellor Merkel and everyone in charge of security at Germany’s World Cup. The 2005-2006 season of European soccer was marred by especially egregious instances of racist taunts, with Spaniards being the main offenders. In the worst incident, the home crowd in Zaragoza made grunting monkey sounds whenever Barcelona star Samuel Eto’o touched the ball. Eto’o, who is from Cameroon and had just been named African player of the year for the third consecutive time, began walking off the field and was only persuaded to stay by his teammates, two Zaragoza players, and the referee. At 0-0 with 13 minutes left to play, the game continued and ended with Barcelona defeating Zaragoza 2-0 and Eto’o scoring the second goal. Afterward, the Zaragoza team got off with a mere €9,000 fine.

This incident, and the light fine imposed by its soccer federation, propelled Spain into a most unwelcome spotlight. While the level of racist virulence is certainly the same in several countries in Europe, west and east, Spanish officials demonstrated an extraordinarily inept touch in dealing with the offenders. When Eto’o had been harassed in the same city during the previous season, Zaragoza had been fined a paltry €600. And when two players of the English national side suffered the same treatment playing against Spain in Madrid in 2004, the Spanish government sent a letter of apology to Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Eto’o scoffed at the €9,000 fine imposed on Zaragoza for its repeat offense. The Barcelona striker suggested instead that the local team be banned from playing at home for a year. That, of course, would have inflicted a huge financial loss on Zaragoza, and was naturally ignored by the Spanish soccer authorities. It would have sent a powerful message, however, and made incidents at the World Cup less likely.

Coubertin would certainly have agreed with Eto’o. Irritated by the behavior of some unappreciative spectators at the Amsterdam Olympics of 1928 (whose faults, however, pale in comparison to those of their counterparts in Zaragoza), he wrote: “I would like it if we were to treat today’s spectators like great children, walking among them with enormous cards to teach them how to appreciate a splendid athletic feat, and how out of place on such occasions are those outbursts of crude nationalism that give our era a semi-barbaric stench.” The French baron could be very old-fashioned at times, but his attitude toward spectators sounds like good advice for the German chancellor, who understandably fears that her country will once again be identified with that “semi-barbaric stench” from the past.

Politics

Trudging through a sea of mud returning from a Catholic mass conducted in the chapel of an American military camp, it strikes me that this is not quite the experience I’d expected my Iraq embed to be when I signed up. Looking back, I realize that I’ve seen the inside of more chow-halls run by the prolific and well-connected Halliburton subsidiary, KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root) than of Humvees, the armored vehicles used by American soldiers on patrol. I’ve spent more time talking to regular infantrymen about their backgrounds, and the lives to which they’ll be returning after their tour of duty in Iraq, than about their feelings about actually being here. In fact, I come to the startling conclusion that I’ve spoken with more soldiers from Georgia during my two weeks with the US army than with ordinary Iraqis out in the street.

If my embed has taught me something about the insular and isolated military world spawned by the occupation of Iraq, it has also opened my eyes to the widening unpopularity of this war among ordinary soldiers, who can’t understand why they’ve been deployed here. Contrary to all the criticism directed at the embed experience, it is one of the more enlightened policies followed by any military. It offered me the kind of access to the everyday life of US troops that I could never have gotten otherwise. Whoever gripes about embedding as an implicit consent to censorship has clearly not been through the experience. You may sign away your right to sue the military in the event of fatal or disabling injury, but I felt no sense of being controlled in anything that I did or anywhere that I went.

The officers I was with always put their troops and interpreters at my disposal and went out of their way to aid my reporting. As for those scribes who wonder why they do not have more access to ordinary Iraqis while embedded, and interpret this as a form of control, they miss the crucial point: embedding is a perfect reflection of the sad truth that the vast majority of the American troops currently occupying Iraq hardly ever leave their bases to come into even minimal contact with Iraqis.

Baquba
Baquba was the city to which I was dispatched. A violent sectarian town in Iraq’s second most violent province, it has an almost equal Sunni-Shi’a mix with a 10-percent Kurdish minority. These statistics have condemned Baquba to a regular slot on the news, as bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings rip through it on a daily basis. In the center of town, where I was billeted, a group of about 100 US military police are gradually handing over power to the recently reconstituted local authorities. In the absence of an effective governing mechanism, however, it is questionable to what extent their successors will succeed in preserving stability.

On patrol with the Iraqi police around Baquba, the local reception is mixed. While Arab culture frowns upon public displays of disfavor, the courtesies exchanged are formulaic and lack warmth. The Arabic graffiti on the walls tell another story, however, with praise for the resistance and a mixture of support and condemnation for the recently approved constitution. As for the self-censorship so much in evidence during the time of Saddam Hussein, it was creeping back. Speaking to a villager outside the city, I asked him about the sectarian situation. My interpreter modified my question, telling the villager, “He’s asking about the sectarian situation. Isn’t it true that you’re Sunni but are married to a Shi’a?” The peasant responded with an eager nod, and I was treated to an enthusiastic rehash of the fallacious notion that Iraqis cannot possibly be responsible for the sectarian violence now being continually perpetrated as they coexisted with each other under Saddam. And as with most other troubled Arab countries, the cure-all solution of blaming foreign forces is now invoked. A constellation of neighbors is blamed for Iraq’s troubles: from Syrian mujahideen to Saudi financiers and Iranian infiltrators.

Back at base, I spend most of my time sitting in the Joint Cooperation and Control room, an Iraqi-American-manned emergency call center that collects news of all the violence coursing through the province and sends it on to the analysts at FOB Warhorse. Phones ring every few minutes to report another abduction, drive-by shooting, suspected improvised explosive device (IED), or detonated car-bomb. Just on March 30, there were 25 incidents reported, including a bicycle bomb, several kidnappings and drive-by shootings, three IED explosions, and the discovery and defusing of several more. The next day, there were only 10 incidents, a low for the troubled area, but they included the potentially inflammatory killing of a Sunni sheikh and the abduction of another. A week before, double bombings had hit two Sunni mosques on Friday, the Muslim holy day. They were presumably a riposte for the bombing of a Shi’a mosque a day earlier.

It’s the “lighter” side of the US army’s continuing incapability to find credible Iraqi partners to which to hand over the swathes of civil-strife-wracked countryside, villages, and towns. In two weeks spent inside a network of US military bases—from the oil-rich, northern city of Kirkuk to the troubled capital and finally to Diyala, the second most violent province in Iraq—it became clear that the Pentagon is anxious to retreat inside several sprawling bases and away from the mounting chaos gripping the center of the country. Minimizing the number of dead US soldiers even as tens of thousands of troops are slated to be sent home in the run-up to midterm US elections later this year is similarly calculated to allay the domestic political pressure on the Bush administration to disengage from Iraq.

Mehdi works for the Americans because he needs to make enough money to marry his 25-year old fiancée. An economics graduate from Baghdad University in 1992, he says that he remained unemployed for 11 years because he was not a member of the Ba’ath party. But the danger of being killed by insurgents because of his affiliation with the Americans made him search out work in Baquba, a two-hour drive from his home in Baghdad. Once there, he stays for 48-hour periods and sleeps at the base. “It’s better to work here,” he says. “No one knows me. I don’t have relations with anyone. It’s safer this way.”

When he steps out for a cigarette, Boschert joins him and continues the teasing. “So this is your country, Mehdi! How do you feel about it?”

“I’m proud of it,” Mehdi says to a look of baffled disbelief by the American. “I’m not proud of what they [the insurgents] are doing to it, though,” he qualifies.

Baghdad again
My assignment was over a few days later, and I returned to Baghdad. Flying over the capital in a Blackhawk helicopter piloted by a fervent Christian who’d graduated from West Point, I was shocked to see the state of the city. As the helicopter gunners scanned the rooftops for snipers and the co-pilot released flares to ward off heat-seeking missiles, the squalor of Baghdad unfolded below me: derelict cars rusted in ponds of open sewage; children running barefoot through mud-clogged streets; traffic jams seething nervously at intersections, the drivers constantly on the lookout for the next, unannounced, car-bomb.

The following morning, a friend picked me up in his car and we drove out of the Green Zone and into reality. My friend would be taking me on the 20-minute drive to the airport—possibly the most dangerous stretch of asphalt on the planet and so prone to attack that the Americans run just one, heavily-armed convoy on it every 24 hours. It was the same one I had taken into Baghdad, and it leaves at an unannounced time well after midnight and several hours after the curfew has kicked in.

Now, I was riding with Waleed in the front-seat of an ordinary Nissan, completely unarmored, and without so much as a bullet-proof vest on. Chatting in Arabic, we set off through Baghdad’s morning traffic, crossing a busy market area as I cast involuntary glances at the rearview mirror to check if we were being followed. When I made a move to put on my seatbelt, Waleed stopped me. “Don’t do that,” he said, “it’ll attract attention to us.”

We reach the airport safely after negotiating a series of some 10 checkpoints that include baggage searches, a session with bomb-sniffing dogs, and several body searches. The Babel terminal merits its name. Several races jostle with each other, seething and heaving bad-temperedly against the check-in desks as they complain about their delayed or canceled flights. “We just don’t have enough airplanes,” one airport official cries out despairingly. Waleed tells me that flight-times are so unpredictable because airspace is controlled by the Americans, who refuse to notify Iraqi officials as to when permission will be given for flights to take off. All in the name of OpSec (operational security).

A strange atmosphere pervades the terminal: part high-living, Sixties cosmopolitanism, part Lebanese, civil-war-era fin-de-sièclism. Powdered ladies sporting dyed, coiffured hair hug faded, leather suitcases to their ample bosoms and jostle with US television news-crews carrying shockproof cases of equipment and still wearing their bullet-proof vests and US-issued press credentials. Iraqi employees wearing nametags emblazoned “OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM” check passports. Above, phalanxes of neon lamps rib the Babylonian arches forming the ceiling.

After a four-hour wait, endless haggling, and frequent explosions of anger by passengers who have risked their lives to arrive at the airport only to be told their flight has been rescheduled, a compromise is reached. All passengers flying on the separate domestic flights to the northern cities of Sulaimaniya and Erbil are crammed on the international flight to Damascus. The small number of mostly Iraqi passengers returning to their Syrian exile look on in horror as around a hundred mostly Iraqi Kurds and Western security contractors are directed to their gate.

An hour later we land in Erbil. As it is an internal flight, there is no passport check. But we are confronted with the red-white-and-green Kurdish flag upon arrival and no sign of the Iraqi federal flag. It is another reminder that things are never quite what they seem in Iraq.

Arts & Letters

It was only four years ago that he made his major breakthrough with the US premiere of his stunning oratorio, La Pasión según San Marcos (The Passion According to St. Mark). This spectacular, multidisciplinary piece—which encompasses elements from Afro-Cuban dancing and a Brazilian capoeira performer to the Jewish Kaddish prayer of mourning—re-envisions the Christian Passion narrative through both a Jewish and contemporary Latin American lens.

Born in Las Platas, Argentina, to parents of eastern European Jewish heritage, Golijov spent his childhood surrounded by Bach, Jewish liturgical music, and the nuevo tango of Astor Piazzolla. As a young man, he moved to Jerusalem and fell in love with great Arab singers like Oum Kalthoum and Fairuz. Now living near Boston, the 45-year-old uses these long-time influences and new inspirations as colors in his own highly nuanced and incredibly fresh compositional voice.

Earlier this spring, Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series hosted a month-long festival of his music, The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov, which included performances of his chamber opera, Ainadamar (Fountain of Tears), a meditation on the life of Federico García Lorca; an evening split between many of his small chamber pieces and arrangements for string quartet, played by the Kronos Quartet, and his song cycle Ayre; La Pasión según San Marcos; and an evening with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, in which the ensemble performed his pieces, Yiddishbbuk and The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. In addition, Lincoln Center gave greater context to Golijov’s work by presenting a number of concerts that explored the composer’s musical roots, which span Argentine tango to klezmer. (Full disclosure: I wrote the program notes for the performances of both the Kronos Quartet and St. Lawrence Quartet; during the festival, I also chaired a panel discussion with Golijov; Peter Sellars, the renowned director who staged Ainadamar; and Oscar-winning composer (of the music for Brokeback Mountain), musician, and frequent Golijov collaborator, Gustavo Santaolalla.)

Those who are not aware of but would like to explore Golijov’s music should not miss the ongoing Golijov recording project currently being undertaken by Deutsche Grammophon (DG). There are certainly other notable recordings of Golijov’s music, including—to choose just two among many—the Kronos Quartet’s 1997 Isaac the Blind (Nonesuch) and the German label Haenssler Classics’ 2001 issue of the Pasión. DG, however, has made a commitment to record three albums of Golijov’s music, and the first two fruits of this endeavor were released recently.

The first, a Grammy-nominated recording of Ayre, features Dawn Upshaw, the soprano for whom the piece was composed. It is a kaleidoscopic setting of a range of poetry for which Upshaw and the instrumentalists (who call themselves the Andalucian [sic] Dogs) shift among personas, darting between, say, ethereal evocations of medieval Spain and a mournful recitation of the work of the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish. The second, released just last month, is of Ainadamar, and the three lead roles are sung by the artists who created them: Dawn Upshaw as actress Margarita Xirgu, Kelley O’Connor as García Lorca, and Jessica Rivera as Xirgu’s student, Nuria. They are joined by members of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus and Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Robert Spano, another artist who has been a longtime advocate of Golijov’s work.

greekworks.com: I’ve been revisiting the music that is being included in the Lincoln Center festival, and one idea I’ve been thinking about quite a bit is music being made and experienced not just as music, but also as theater or ritual experience. Of course, I think that’s true of the Passion and also of Ainadamar, but I’m wondering if that idea plays into your other works.

Osvaldo Golijov: Yes, but in the end, maybe the best theater is the theater of the imagination, with music that is not staged. In that sense, I think that Ayre is very theatrical, as is Isaac the Blind. Yeah, definitely, I feel that my music is theatrical, but not necessarily tied to physical characters and situations. I don’t know, sometimes it’s philosophical theater.

gw: So Ayre is not necessarily tied to a narrative, then.

OG: No. There is a musical narrative, but I don’t think it follows any literary or non-musical narrative.

gw: But when you do write things that are more theatrical—say, either Ainadamar or film scores [including that of the upcoming film by Francis Ford Coppola, Megalopolis]—is that a fundamentally different approach to writing?

OG: Well, for instance, in an opera, you have the words, right? And the characters as well. That’s different, because the words guide you. I do believe in musical narrative in other pieces, but I’m not following a script, so to speak, in words….What I mean is, all good composers, I think—even the ones that people say write absolute, pure music—use a narrative: symbols, or situations, or characters. It’s the reason that noble music is in E-Flat major, in Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony or Mozart’s Symphony No. 39, or that Haydn’s sunrise music is in D major, or whatnot. People associated keys or gestures with theatrical images; in the contemporary world, the vocabulary for these images has expanded, but it’s pointless to ignore it.

gw: Those resonances are still there.

OG: Oh, yeah. Those resonances from the past are there, but also there are new archetypes.

gw: And when you say new archetypes, what are you thinking of?

gw: Do you think those sorts of new things have the same universality, or even that the old points of reference have universal meaning?

OG: Well, things always rely on conventions, or accepted conventions by a group of people. That’s why certain private codes never make it to the audience; mystical composers have their own codes. They hear one thing when they hear their music, but the public hears other things.

gw: That presents an interesting conundrum of sorts, I think. Certainly, the sound of a motorcycle would be universal—anywhere in the world it would be recognized at this point. But I wonder about certain gestures or inflections. In your music, for example, if there’s even a hint of flamenco, and its feeling of duende [deep emotion], would that have the same sort of resonance to an audience at Lincoln Center that it would, for example, to an audience in Spain or Argentina?

OG: No, I think that they’ll have different reactions, but there’s a certain core reaction. These emotions are like a field, you know? They generate a field. People in Lincoln Center will be one part of that field and people in Spain somewhere else. But they’ll be somewhere in the same field, I think—I hope so.

gw: So much of your work deals with identity, and the idea of embracing multiple, personal identities. So what does identity—cultural identity, religious identity, or even musical identity—mean to you at this point?

OG: [laughs] I don’t know. That’s why I keep exploring it! But I think it’s not just about me or my identity; it’s about us and our identity. It’s more and more not about the quote-unquote “purity” of identity, even in folk traditions. Today, there are very few isolated places in the world. So identity is a very fluid concept, and, in my music, it’s not about “flamenco,” it’s about using three seconds of flamenco because a certain emotion is needed. I modulate between cultures. I use cultures and identities in the same way that other composers might use tonal areas. Like, let’s modulate from C major to E major, like Mahler would do, or maybe C minor to E major, which is an amazing modulation. Why? Because C minor was death, and E major was heaven, paradise.

So, today, we use other means to go from the fear of death to heaven. It’s not simple—what Mahler did wasn’t simple [laughs]—but, again, since that understanding is not shared anymore by people, you have to find how people associate the fear of death today, by which kind of musical gesture. How do you modulate to another place? So that’s why I shift. I mean, that’s my way; I’m sure there are a million other ways. Maybe if I were a better composer, I would be more consistent within one language.

gw: I know that you grew up listening to all kinds of music. What are your earliest musical memories?

gw: The pieces being programmed on this festival were all written within about 13 or 15 years of each other, no?

OG: Thirteen, yeah.

gw: Looking at them in such close juxtaposition, do you think that the performances are going to inform each other?

OG: I think so, yeah. The earliest piece is Yiddishbbuk, which is very concentrated. That was when I was thinking that music should sound like an open wound, so to speak—very essentialist and condensed, concentrated, distilled. Then the next piece is Isaac the Blind, which is completely different in a way, like long narrative, more general and maybe less pure, more inclusive of everything, of humor, of all kinds of moods and atmospheres that I didn’t have just two years earlier.

gw: So, was that piece really a turning point for you?

OG: It was in the sense of saying that art and music should not only express the continuation of the late Beethoven quartets in their depth and seriousness, but that every generation is allowed every mood: humor, sexiness, all kinds of so-called “lighter” emotions. Those feelings make us more human, more complete. And Beethoven himself didn’t start with the late quartets! He wrote the Fifth Symphony first, right? He earned the late quartets. In conservatories and in universities, it was always, “Oh, yeah, where do you go after the [Beethoven] Grosse Fugue?” It’s like, “Hello, I’m not at the end of my life.” You know what I mean? [laughs]

So, then, a piece like Isaac the Blind is more like Schubert, you know? Instead of a very directional music that goes from Point A to Point B to Point C, it allows for detours, for getting lost in the forest a little bit, stopping to have some water, looking at the birds, falling asleep—it’s a really different way of narrating.

gw: And, of course, I would imagine that the Kronos Quartet evening, which includes stuff like your arrangement of the Bollywood song, “Aaj Ki Raat” [written by R. D. Burman], and works you collaborated on with the Mexican rock band Café Tacuba, illustrates that point even further.

gw: Another interesting facet of this festival is that it juxtaposes your music with a performance by clarinetist David Krakauer and his group, Klezmer Madness!, as well as two tango shows, one of classic tango featuring the singer, Cristóbal Repetto, and a very modern one by Gustavo Santaolalla’s group, Bajofondo Tango Club.

OG: I think this shows that nobody works in a vacuum. We all influence each other. These concerts review my sources, so to speak, even though I didn’t grow up listening to David Krakauer—he’s taking klezmer to a new place, but the root is the same root from where I started. The same is true of the tango performances.

gw: Obviously, this festival brings together a lot of people with whom you’ve collaborated over the years.

OG: Yeah, a lot of people who helped me, because my music wouldn’t be anywhere without these people. My music was created specifically for these people. Other people today play it really great, but I needed these people for that music to be born. When I write a string quartet for Kronos, it will be a completely different string quartet from what I write for the St. Lawrence, even if they can play each other’s quartet. But for that music to be born, I need to know who is going to bow—I know how David Harrington [from Kronos] bows, as opposed to Geoff Nuttall [from the St. Lawrence]. Different musics come out of that knowledge.

I don’t think that my music comes from me, but rather that I absorb, I process, and I give back. I absorb from my surroundings, and my surroundings are my friends, the performers….I wonder, for example, what Stravinsky would have been like if he weren’t working with Nijinsky, and if Nijinsky wasn’t showing him how to do the steps, to jump on two feet. It’s a mistake to think that it only comes from the soul of the composer. I mean, yeah, maybe it comes from there, but before there, it was somewhere else.

gw: So, working with these musicians is a crucial part of your artistic process.

OG: I know I am lucky. Beyond lucky….For example, I feel that I’ve learned more from Kronos than from my composition studies. I always feel that they are my composition teachers. I wouldn’t have written the Passion if I hadn’t worked on [the 2000 Nonesuch album] Caravan with Kronos. They are so crazy. They said, “Oh, let’s play with [the Romanian gypsy band] Taraf de Haïdouks.” Before, I would think, oh, yeah, maybe I could notate certain things from Gypsy music, but it’s always going to be quote-unquote “concert music,” you know what I mean? They are my teachers. They helped me to lose my fear.

mediawatch

Senator Lane: There’s a saying, Fletcher: To the victor belong the spoils.

Fletcher: There’s another saying, Senator: Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.
—From The Outlaw Josey Wales

Excuse me, but it is NOT a story about “two cowboys.” It is a story about two inarticulate, confused Wyoming ranch kids in 1963 who have left home and who find themselves in a personal sexual situation they did not expect, understand nor can manage. The only work they find is herding sheep for a summer—some cowboys! Yet both are beguiled by the cowboy myth, as are most people who live in the state….How different readers take the story is a reflection of their own personal values, attitudes, hang-ups….Far from being “liberal,” Hollywood was afraid of the script as were many actors and agents….(“At close range with Annie Proulx: Pulitzer prize-winning writer shares insights in short story, film adaptation of ‘Brokeback Mountain,’” by Matthew Testa, Planet Jackson Hole, December 7, 2005)

Like all genres, a western is an exercise in (or a variation on) narrative and/or syntactical convention. But that’s not even the point. Proulx’s assault on Hollywood’s timidity and hypocrisy gets to the deeper issue. As Bazin understood (and this is really what he was getting at), Hollywood is different from the cinema of the rest of the world (with the exception, confirming the rule, of the appositely named Bollywood) in that it is esthetically structured as a “system.” That is its “genius.” Even with the studios’ postwar demise, the “classical” nature of the American cinema was such that it could not function other than “systemically”—or, put another way (often disparagingly rather than as commendation), generically. Even Godard, later to expound on the axis of esthetic evil of “Hollywood-Cinecittà-Mosfilm-Pinewood,” said in his early years that nobody knew how to tell a story better than the Americans (a lesson, by the way, that this most elegant of filmmakers took to heart). Truth be told, if one accepts the principle of an (undoubtedly overdetermined) communicative “necessity” in human (that is, social) narrative (that is, exchange), well, then, there’s only a finite number of ways to skin a story.

And which is also why making a “gay cowboy movie” is easier said than done. Not because of the “difficulty” or “sensitivity” of the subject. (Why should it be any more difficult or sensitive than other adult issues?) No, the problem is, to update Sam Goldwyn, that messages are best sent by e-mail. The specific, esthetic problem for any filmmaker of talent—as opposed to a preposterously overrated one like Ang Lee—is that the very phrase, “gay cowboy movie,” defines the syntactical demands of the film project. The noun “movie” is qualified by the adjective “cowboy,” which is further qualified by the adverb “gay.” Generically speaking, then, what we’ve got here is a cowboy movie—or, to give Lee the benefit of the doubt and decidedly more emotional amplitude to work with, a western—that, in this case, is thematically renovated (and expanded) through its gay perspective. The point to genre, after all, is precisely its ability perpetually to innovate and, therefore, develop. Indeed, no film genre has witnessed more (pardon my language, ma’am) “contestation” since the end of the Second World War than the western.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), The Wild Bunch (1969), Little Big Man (1970), Soldier Blue (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Hired Hand (1971), High Plains Drifter (1973), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976): I have more or less arbitrarily chosen, once again, 10 good to great revisionist westerns, none of them Ford-made but all released at least three decades ago. It is instructive to survey (some of) their thematic terrain. Prostitution as a more worthy vocation than religion (McCabe & Mrs. Miller); drug addiction as rational solace for women under American patriarchy (McCabe & Mrs. Miller again); indentured servitude as preferable to marriage (The Hired Hand); frightful brutality as the social glue of American society (High Plains Drifter); ecological ruin as the price of social order (High Plains Drifter again); corrupt law systemically repressing honest (and invariably plebian) “lawlessness” (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid); national heroism (and the attendant flag-waving) as the cynical and counterfeit product of hucksters and charlatans (Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson); and, of course, violence: ceaseless, ubiquitous, irrational, often grotesque, almost always suicidal, and on occasion genocidal violence (all of the above but especially Once Upon a Time in the West, The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man, Soldier Blue, The Hired Hand, High Plains Drifter, and The Outlaw Josey Wales). The Outlaw Josey Wales is, indeed, the most emblematic film of all. Directed, as was High Plains Drifter, by Clint Eastwood, it also happens to be, as he’s often said, Eastwood’s favorite of the films he’s made. It’s “moral” is actually quite stupefying: simply put, that the only recourse for honest, peace-loving American men and women is endless and armed resistance to the government of the United States, whose only apparent institutional function is to aid and abet the systematic pillage, rape, and murder of all the human beings—white, black, and, especially, red—unfortunate enough to be living within its borders.

With these kinds of precedents—not to mention the ensuing revisionism of the last 30 years—one would have thought that it would have been possible to make a more daring, or at least less soporific and slightly more mature, “gay cowboy movie” than Brokeback Mountain. Unfortunately, American culture is now so morally obtuse that a film such as (what a coincidence) Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby is denounced, by both left and right, because it’s main character chooses death over permanent paralysis, and her suicide is assisted by a man who understands the utter rationality of her wishes. Americans now live in a society, in other words, in which, for the left, “sensitivity” trumps not only democracy but language, and meaning. People are no longer “crippled,” emotionally or physically, let alone “handicapped,” but merely (magically? miraculously? supernaturally?) “challenged,” or, at worst, “disabled.” As for the American right, John Ford would not recognize it—and Clint Eastwood has said that he can’t. Its defense of “individualism” apparently now only applies to those not yet born. As for the rest of us, we either submit to the “homeland’s” collective (albeit arbitrarily determined) authority or face ostracism (and sometimes a lot worse) for the Godlessness, un-Americanism, or—one size fits all—sheer evil of our views.

Earlier this year, Daniel Mendelsohn wrote a review of Brokeback Mountain for The New York Review of Books (“An Affair to Remember,” February 23) in which he expressed his admiration for the movie and praised what he called its “many excellences.” Obviously, I disagree with that central part of his critique (and with its over-the-top title). Still, I found it characteristically astute (I can’t think of a more genuinely learned, and keener, theater critic in the States today than Mendelsohn). I’ll leave it to others to judge which of us is more or less right on the larger issues. Much of Mendelsohn’s essay, however, was taken up with an incisive analysis—and rebuke—of the movie’s advertising campaign. I quote:

…[A] month after the movie’s release most of the reviews were resisting, indignantly, the popular tendency to refer to it as “the gay cowboy movie.” “It is much more than that glib description implies,” the critic of the Minneapolis Star Tribune sniffed. “This is a human story.” This particular rhetorical emphasis figures prominently in the advertising for the film, which in quoting such passages reflects the producer’s understandable desire that Brokeback Mountain not be seen as something for a “niche” market but as a story with broad appeal, whatever the particulars of its time, place, and personalities. (The words “gay” and “homosexual” are never used of the film’s two main characters in the forty-nine-page press kit distributed by the filmmakers to critics.) “One movie is connecting with the heart of America,” one of the current print ad campaigns declares; the ad shows the star Heath Ledger, without his costar, grinning in a cowboy hat. A television ad that ran immediately after the Golden Globe awards a few weeks ago showed clips of the male leads embracing their wives, but not each other.

…[T]o see Brokeback Mountain as a love story, [however,] or even as a film about universal human emotions, is to misconstrue it very seriously—and in so doing inevitably to diminish its real achievement.

Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the “closet”—about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes it and then exacerbates it. What love story there is occurs early on in the film, and briefly….The sole visual representation of their happiness in love is a single brief shot….That shot is eerily—and significantly—silent, voiceless:…we are seeing…what the boys’ boss is seeing through his binoculars as he spies on them.

As for Mendelsohn’s spot-on aside about that 49-page press kit, further comment is superfluous. I’ve seen a few Hollywood press kits in my time and, believe me, they tend more to kitchen-sink marketing rather than subtle understatement. If you can’t bring yourself to mention the word “gay” in 49 pages about Brokeback Mountain, the silence is achingly deafening.

Most important of all, Mendelsohn’s shot analysis above is brilliant. A crueler critic could go further and say that the mediation of the binoculars “objectifies” the love between the two boys to the point of making it seem completely inhuman (human beings usually use binoculars in the woods to spy on species other than their own). Eerie and voiceless doesn’t begin to describe the zoological nature of that shot. If this is liberal “sensitivity,” I can understand why the word “gay” went unmentioned in the almost 50 pages of the film’s press kit.

Soon after it came out, Brokeback Mountain became the target of an uncommon wave of Internet parody. Googling “Brokeback parody” gave me 362,000 responses (“Bush and Cheney in Dumbfuck Mountain” and, of course, the trailer of Brokeback to the Future being among my favorites). These spoofs flooded gay sites as well as straight ones. In a report by ABC News (“The Oscar for Best ‘Brokeback’ Parody Goes to…,” Rogene Fisher, March 6), Robert Thompson, professor of television at Syracuse University, offered the opinion that “more people have seen fake Brokeback Mountain trailers than the actual trailer.” When they came out, everybody took this “fun” as simple, innocent acknowledgment of the movie’s “cultural moment.” According to the ABC report, a spokesman for the film’s distributor said that, “…even Ang Lee is laughing.” The question is, following Prof. Thompson’s line of thought, are all those laughing, and in particular the ones who haven’t seen the movie, laughing with the filmmakers, and their work, or at them—and, worst of all, at the film’s ostensible subject?

***

And then there’s Capote. Early on in the writing of this essay (see Part 1 and Part 2, March 22 and May 6, greekworks.com), I came across an interview given by Gore Vidal to Sheerly Avni of the Website, Truthdig.com. I quote:

May we ask you about “Capote”?

Oh, Capote. [Sighs.] I spent half a century trying to avoid him, in life, and now suddenly I’m surrounded by him.

He was a pathological liar. He couldn’t tell the truth about anything, and he’d make it up as he went along. He always wore dark glasses, and his eyes would drop behind the dark glasses, and he would seem to be looking down at his nose, and then as he got more and more frenzied—the lies really very frenzied, they were orgasmic—you would start to see the eyes begin to roll up to see if you’d fallen for what he was saying.

And it was always about famous people, some he’d barely heard of before. I remember he told me once “I’m the American Proust.”

So I said, “So who’s your Mme Verdurin?”

“Who?”

He had not heard of one of Proust’s principal characters. He was confidently illiterate. It’s highly suitable that he would become iconic, because he didn’t know anything, and never told the truth. Doesn’t he fit in the age of Bush?

Did you find the movie to be an accurate reflection of his personality?

Well no, but it wasn’t supposed to be. It was a good movie, and they touched upon his treachery towards the two boys. He wants them to swing, because if they don’t he can’t finish his book and if he hasn’t finished his book, he’s in trouble.

Kenneth Tynan, a great critic of that period, did an attack on “In Cold Blood.” It ran in The Observer in London. The headline was “For Cold Cash,” which was about the right tone, and that was pretty much the tone of the movie. The movie is quite brave about showing somebody who did not have any redeeming characteristics, nor did they pretend he had.

And how about the book itself?

Oh, I couldn’t read it. I read a bit of it in The New Yorker and thought; I’m not interested in murders, and pointless ones at that! I don’t know what excitement he got out of it. Obviously some voyeuristic aspect of himself was well served by contemplating it.

I know, I know: consider the source. My point here, in truth, is not to use Vidal as expert witness on a fellow writer (although—full disclosure—I believe that Vidal is probably one of the last, and most, expert witnesses left to the recently concluded American Century). I didn’t think much of the film, but, like Vidal, I thought it an honest depiction of a quintessentially false human being. I also agree with his peers that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of Capote was eerie in its physical accuracy and well-deserving of an Oscar. As for In Cold Blood, I can’t make a judgment because I, too, have never read it as, again, like Vidal, I have never been much interested in the sociology, let alone the esthetic, of “pointless” violence. (I have a deep respect for Norman Mailer’s work, for example, but have never cared to read The Executioner’s Song.)

What is most revealing about Brokeback Mountain and Capote is the sad conjunction of esthetic insularity—a particularly egregious lapse, one would think, for movies competing for the Oscar as Best Picture—although each film came to its respective failure from opposed directions and strategies. Capote is at least an honest movie. It is also (like Good Night, and Good Luck) quite affecting in its depiction of another time, in this case one in which writers mattered in America—or at least in Manhattan—and when the country’s citizens didn’t limit their reading to books by Michael Moore or Dan Brown. (One of the film’s most astute historical reconstructions, in fact, has nothing to do with Capote, but concerns Harper Lee, and the publication of To Kill A Mockingbird. I was one of those hundreds of thousands—millions?—of junior-high-school students who read the book in English or social studies class, and I can still remember its effect on me. It was truly a time when “popular literature” could be true to both of its functions.) In the end, Capote’s failure is due to its subject—a cruelly egotistical and endlessly deceitful writer whose only authentic interest was in himself and, not at all coincidentally, celebrity—rather than to its filmmakers. They did the best they could under the circumstances. I just don’t understand why they bothered, and I can’t imagine that most other moviegoers would either.

In a word, dissociation. The fact is, despite its self-congratulatory and specious embrace of “diversity,” Hollywood has become so detached from the daily life of most Americans that, in its search for “realistic” stories, it has lost all sense of both reality (which is to say authenticity) and, much more important for a filmmaker, idealism—that almost palpable need for art, for esthetic sublimation verging on material transubstantiation—in one’s life that, more than anything else, has always driven people to the movies. That is why the much-vaunted American ability for storytelling so admired by Godard has deteriorated, and why so many American movies nowadays are incoherent, when they aren’t silly. It is also why when a filmmaker comes along who actually knows what (s)he’s doing, it is so obvious, and the resulting movie is so unusually good.

Nothing reveals the multiple failures and hypocrisies of Brokeback Mountain so much as the numerous virtues and honesties—indeed, the integrity—of Transamerica, which came out about the same time. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by saying that the fact that Duncan Tucker, whose first feature film this was, is actually gay—and not a film-school graduate, but somebody who had kicked around for a long time just trying to get a handle on the world—had a lot to do with the sheer truth of his film, not merely sociologically (which is actually an insignificant “truth” in art) or even emotionally, but, above all, esthetically. At the end of this film, it is obvious that the person who made it knows what he is talking about, and that he understands dysphoria, whether of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or just plain old class. From beginning to end of Brokeback Mountain, one has the frustrating sense that its director actually understands nothing about his subject: whether it’s sexual identity, Wyoming, the Sixties, marriage, or the existential difference between herding sheep and driving cattle. Indeed, in the end, one realizes that the entire film is about Brokeback Mountain, about nothing else, in other words, than a backdrop, in which location, location, location becomes the enormous pathetic fallacy replacing actually existing human beings.

Again, there’s no place here for a review of this admirable film, other than to say that Felicity Huffman was cheated of the Best Actress Oscar (Reese Witherspoon has almost as good a voice as June Carter Cash, but why that translated into an Oscar for Best Actress is a mystery to me). I will say one thing, however. One doesn’t have to be black to recognize the consequences of American slavery (or of Hurricane Katrina), or Jewish to understand the lynching of Leo Frank, or Indian to grasp the immensity of American genocide (or of its aftermath), or a woman to comprehend the almost infinite brutality of men, or gay to know that the murder of Matthew Shepard was part and parcel of the exterminationist rationale that built Auschwitz. One of the most psychologically accurate moments in Transamerica—and a brilliant metaphor on the part of Tucker, who also wrote the script—is the love story (unrequited at film’s end) between Bree (Huffman) and Calvin Two Goats, the Indian rancher from New Mexico (played iconically, as always, by Graham Greene). Calvin believes that every woman is entitled to “a little mystery.” It is in fact clear that Calvin is not only a wise and tolerant man, but an intelligent one; it is even clearer that he knows that Bree’s past is more complex than mysterious and that he doesn’t care in any case. As the film’s tagline says, “life is more than the sum of its parts.” A Native American in white America would know that better than most people—and just about as well as a transsexual.

***

This essay has tried to examine the increasing gap between Hollywood and its audiences, that is, the increasing “depopularization” of what was once the most emblematic popular art. Of course, as the ideological vanguard (or moral fifth column) of global Americanization, Hollywood today has reached a “market penetration” unimagined even by the old studio moguls, who made the first organized American attempt to take control of international moviemaking in the late Twenties. (It is, of course, a deliberate, strategic misnomer, perpetrated by its American evangelists to disorient the rest of us, to call “globalization” what is, in fact, a historically unprecedented attempt to impose the social structure, economic rationale, and, above all, moral self-definition of one society upon every other society on the face of the planet.) In truth, Hollywood today is a carrier of such massive, global subversion that it is difficult to describe it in any way other than as a cultural, and moral, virus.

But let’s not get carried away. To echo the old master, they’re only movies. Besides, Hollywood has proven in the last couple of decades to be a shadow of its former self, which has been the point to this essay. While it is embedded in places today it could only dream of two generations ago, what it has gained in territory, it has lost in conviction—just like the American empire it serves. Once upon a time, both in America and the West, Hollywood manufactured our dreams; it now mirrors our nightmares. Look again at this year’s five Best Picture nominees: Brokeback Mountain; Capote; Crash; Good Night, and Good Luck; and Munich. Even Gone With the Wind is more hopeful a film than any of these. (The “red earth of Tara” is more than a consolation. It is the Promised Land. “After all,” as Scarlett says in the film’s famous last line, “tomorrow is another day!”) Despair is rarely a path to coherence, let alone lucidity. That is the problem with a “realism” that is closer to Grand Guignol than to any recognizable reality, and why a poseur like Quentin Tarantino specializes in—what else?—pulp fiction.

***

I saw Good Night, and Good Luck in both New York and Paris (as I did Capote also). The first time, I was with Stelios Vasilakis, in a huge multiplex on Union Square that caters to the weekend date crowd. Behind us sat a couple of young women and one man “of color.” They did not cease to babble, munch, slurp, and, for about the last third of it, mock the film. Why had they come to see it? What did they expect? Did they expect anything? In the end, that emptiness of expectation, that vacuum of sensibility seemed to explain it all: it wasn’t that they were incapable of understanding the specific history reconstructed by the film; it was obvious that they were oblivious to the very notion of history. It was even clearer that color does not make consciousness and that those of us who once believed that black America would save white America had failed to account for actually existing America, which dooms both black and white to an equality of ego. Being in New York on a visit, I was happy that I was returning to Paris in a few days.

Back in Paris, my wife and I saw the film in one of the (many) cinemas on Boulevard Saint Germain catering to that shamelessly bourgeois area’s shamelessly bourgeois residents and (global) drop-ins. At the end of it, we both had an almost palpable sense from its doleful reaction that the audience had no idea of what had just transpired on the screen. It was almost as if it had simply come together, sacramentally, in a ritual of politically correct anti-Americanism. It was all about today, and Bush, since people had no sense at all of yesterday, and Eisenhower. I was born in 1950, and grew up in the America of that decade. In a scene in the film, Edward R. Murrow interviews Liberace for Person to Person. I remember the original broadcast. The film’s period soundtrack (luminously performed, onscreen and off, by Dianne Reeves) acted like an aural memory bank. Like Capote, what is most poignant about Good Night, and Good Luck is that, if you’re old enough, it takes you home again, or, more exactly, recovers a by-now irretrievably lost country. Leaving the theater, I realized that the distance between the New York I had left and the Paris in which I now lived—and between lumpenbourgeois New Yorkers and authentically bourgeois Parisians—was much shorter than I had once thought.

Which is also why “illusion” is often more realistic than reality. Tomorrow is another day. Nobody’s perfect. So, as Fran Kubelik advises in The Apartment’s quintessentially Wilderesque last line, “Shut up and deal.” Indeed. If the movies can no longer provide us with the hope that a good hand is possible, that another shuffle of the cards will give us back some of our ransomed future, what will? The extraordinary conceit of Sullivan’s Travels, the crystalline brilliance of Preston Sturges’s existential perception, is not that comedy eases the pain of daily life, but that comedy changes the nature of that life. That comedy is, in fact—as every major comic artist, from Aristophanes to Brecht (and Billy Wilder) confirms—a subversion of daily life. The point is not that movies should not be serious, but that the seriousness of movies is thoroughly sabotaged by—and, for that reason, utterly opposed to—solemnity. (Godard, for example, has always been a master not only of cinematic playfulness, but of a very conscious slapstick.) What we have seen increasingly in Hollywood over the last couple of decades is the concurrent solemnification of seriousness and the trivialization of comedy. The latter category has now been almost completely swamped by the cinematic version of chick-lit and, for “men,” a genre of fratboy “humor” that bears precisely the same relationship to real wit that a dungpile bears to a good meal.

And, so, the audiences dwindle. Because, simply put, they no longer see themselves on the screen. That, of course, as Susan Sontag wrote in the essay I cited in the first part of this essay, was always the cinema’s ultimate seduction: that it was not Cary Grant up there on the screen, but you. Or, better yet, you as Cary Grant. Well, Cary Grant is dead. As is Jimmy Stewart and Katherine Hepburn and Henry Fonda and Marlene Dietrich, as well as Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe and Jimmy Dean and Natalie Wood and Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. Of course, Shirley MacLaine is still alive, but she’s been channeled into a Hollywood that is unrecognizable from the one in which she came of age “moviewise” (as The Apartment’s characters would have said).

I began with Sontag; I end by repeating her:

To see a great film only on television isn’t to have really seen that film....The conditions of paying attention in a domestic space are radically disrespectful of film. Now that a film no longer has a standard size, home screens can be as big as living room or bedroom walls. But you are still in a living room or a bedroom….

***

Postscript. As I was nearing the end of this (very long) essay, I discovered a review of Brokeback Mountain in New York’s Gay City News (“West of Never: Hawking Sentiment Carefully Divorced from Gay Identity,” December 8-14, 2005). I smiled when I saw the name of the reviewer, Ioannis Mookas, and immediately proceeded to read. I wrote above that Daniel Mendelsohn’s review was “by far, the most intelligent assessment I have read of the film.” Make that second most intelligent. I recommend that all interested read Ioannis Mookas’s review. Final disclosure: I have not seen or spoken to Ioannis in some years. When Stelios Vasilakis, then at the Vryonis Center for the Study of Hellenism, and I, then at the Foundation for Hellenic Culture, expanded the Thessaloniki/New York festival of Greek and Balkan films, the person we hired to run it was Ioannis Mookas. We knew then that he knew a thing or two about the movies.

Book Reviews

Courtesy McFarland & Company

African tragic drama based on ancient Greek tragic models or structures can be highly problematic for the intellectuals and critics of that continent, as Wetmore demonstrates at some length. First, since the experience of Greek tragedy first came to Africa through the theater produced by the Europeans who colonized the continent, there is the suspicion that the African perception of this drama is, so to speak, equally “colonized.” Conversely, there is the theory that Greek tragic drama reveals its primitive, collectivist, social roots so completely that it is “outside of the European experience” and therefore available to cultures that still maintain their integrity despite the pressures of colonization. Because Greek tragedy deals with a religious system that is pre-Christian, it also does not have the taint that later European theater brought to Africa. Its polytheism and emphasis on fate in particular provide a welcome relief from Christianity’s father-son, redemption paradigm. While hotly disputed, Martin Bernal’s argument that black Africa had prehistoric ties with the people of the Greek mainland—thus locating Africa as the major influence upon later Greek culture—is nonetheless an attractive position for playwrights wishing to get at ancient Greek models without the noxious, intermediate conduit of Europe. Still, as Wetmore points out, the theory of Afrocentric classicism is almost entirely an American invention, mostly enthusiastically endorsed and disseminated by Americans.

Naturally, there are problems with these various ways of theorizing. One that Wetmore never addresses is the subject of defining Greek tragedy. He talks of the Nietzschean Apollonian/Dionysian origin of tragedy without indicating that this is a philosophical esthetic abstraction rather than a historical account of the origins of tragedy. In response to Nietszche, the classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz said that tragedy might be defined as the various theatrical pieces put on in the theater of Dionysos at the festival in Athens in the fifth century BCE. These plays are, of course, so diverse that, taken together, they defy definition beyond the correspondences of form and occasion. We might add the problem of a paucity of samples, considering how many we know were produced for the festival, as well as others, in the fifth century alone, which means that, statistically speaking, we do not have enough examples to make secure generalizations. We can speak of Euripides’ Medea, for instance, for that is a text we confidently assume to bear a reasonable resemblance to the script used by the actors in 431 BCE. We know nothing about the physical fact of the performance, however, and very little of the other two plays that formed the conventional trilogy in which Athenians wanted their plays presented. We really don’t know very much at all, in fact. Ironically, African playwrights and critics who speak of “tragedy” or “Greek tragedy” are buying into a dubious abstraction of genuinely European origin.

Likewise, Wetmore’s discussion of Aristotle’s well-known theory of tragedy does not go far enough in distancing Aristotle’s words from the historical facts, which for the most part preceded Aristotle and for which we are always asked to take Aristotle’s word for it, another habit of mind distinctly European in the sense that a knowledge of the Greek past was first formulated by the Romans and then entered mainstream European thought via the Renaissance. And then there is the abstraction of genres, first suggested in ancient Greek literary practice and finally hardened into theoretical taxonomies by the Alexandrians in the third century BCE. These became central to the Renaissance understanding of literature, hence very much a European construct. Last but not least is the idea of the canon, again an Alexandrian notion, but central to the European idea of literature. One must ask oneself why African intellectuals and playwrights took up tragic drama so enthusiastically. It is not clear that they saw right away the colossal, tragic fact of their colonization and brutal use by Europeans. One cannot avoid considering that tragic drama has a certain cachet to it that other literary forms do not. Art Spiegelman’s Maus took some getting used to for persons deeply wedded to the hierarchy of genres.

There is an interesting historical perversion at work here. African playwrights look to ancient Greek tragic models, and read and discuss Aristotelian and later theories of tragedy. Although ancient tragedy antedated its theory, in other words, theory preceded tragedy in Africa. This produces an interesting perception of belatedness that cannot be dismissed when dealing with artifacts of these various African cultures. Two misleading theories of ancient tragedy—that it was a vehicle for political ideas and that it was a teaching device—are especially important for many African playwrights, who, as a result, have gotten themselves into serious trouble with the oppressive regimes under which they have produced their plays. Greek tragedy, by contrast, is theater produced by the city-state of Athens, the scripts chosen by an official who was more like a director of public works than a theater critic. The ideas these plays present are essentially commonplace if we generalize from the limited evidence: fate wins out; struggle with authority, divine or human, ends in trouble; life is so miserable it is better not to have been born; ambition is hazardous; living above the station into which one is born is dangerous; etc., etc. One can argue that tragic drama reinforces the status quo: as an anti-democratic call to quietism and resignation, its redeeming feature is the glorious if self-destructive act of a rebellious central figure, an object lesson rather than a role model. Needless to say, this is the cheapest and most misleading of generalizations on my part, but it is meant to suggest that the political activism of African playwrights may be based on false premises.

Wetmore points out that the theory of ritual origin of ancient Greek tragedy is especially potent for African playwrights because the various religious experiences of Africans are so closely bound to ritual. Introducing ritual into their dramas makes them African while at the same time reaffirming their Greek connection. Wetmore describes (pp. 71f.) the horrific moment in the premier of a play by Wole Soyinka when the stage directions called for the slaughter of a live goat. The scene of the startled audience at the Mbasi Club who had no experience of such a thing combined with the horror of the cast, which could not expertly dispatch the animal (a gory detail no doubt omitted in rehearsals), would be entirely funny if it were not so awful for the reader to imagine. Ritual is one thing; theater is another. As Wetmore notes at another point (p. 100), theater that addresses contemporary African problems—such as the dramatic spread of AIDS and the reasons for it—and is designed to be shown to a rural population, is not structured on Greek dramatic models. Rather, as he says, political plays based on Greek models are rooted in urban culture, and written by those connected with the universities. That fact alone suggests that any real independence from Europe—after all, what are universities?—is just not going to happen. Producers of subsequent performances of the plays discussed in this book from other parts of the world should take this fact very seriously indeed.

There are potent historical truths that are natural material for tragic drama. One is the clash between the artificial political boundaries drawn by the Europeans across the African continent and the natural boundaries created by tribal identities: the hatreds such oppositions can produce are all too well-known in the contemporary world. Wetmore describes in some detail the conception of Ola Rotimi, who, at a time of tribal civil war in Nigeria, used this truth to produce a version of Sophocles’ Oedipus called The Gods Are Not To Blame in which the Oedipus character, as the newcomer in town, assumes his innocence because he is from a different tribe from the slain king, only to learn at the end not so much the taboo of their consanguinity but of their tribal affiliation. Another ingredient much used in African tragic drama is the Yoruba idea of destiny and fate called iwa. Before a human is born, the fetus is confronted with a choice of fates. That which it picks must be lived, and only through ritual can whatever evil that particular fate has in store be averted. Every culture, of course, contends in its own way with the conflict between fate and free will; think, for instance, of what Yahweh knows when he warns Adam and Eve away from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. With their iwa, Yorubans have achieved an irrational fusion between the two that is a potent element of their theater. Wetmore makes the observation (p. 117) that, in the Yoruban view of things, Oedipus was mistaken not to have made sacrifice to the gods so as to try to avoid his fate when he learned back in Corinth that he was doomed to kill his father. For the Greeks, on the other hand, there was no way to change what was going to happen between the old man setting out from Thebes and the young traveler on his way from Corinth when they met at the crossroads. Fate, however, is finally beside the point in Sophocles’ play. The Sophoclean drama does not teach us that we are fated to act in a certain fashion; rather, it reveals a human being caught in an act that he both desperately tries to deny and equally valiantly determines to understand. That, rather than the Oedipus complex, is why the play meant so much to Sigmund Freud.

One can criticize Wetmore’s penchant for introducing theoretical interpretation when it serves no purpose. For instance, he prefaces his discussion of Edufa, a version of the Alcestis created by the Ghanaian playwright, Efua Sutherland, with certain critical opinions and interpretations of Euripides’ play by the classical establishment, none of which has the slightest relevance to Sutherland’s version. It is only what the Euripidean play means to Sutherland that is relevant; the rest is theory and vaporizing and simply gets in the way. One senses a dissertation lurking in the background of the exposition. The play is interesting as an exploration of how tragedy for an African can result from the failure to observe religious ritual; in this case, the reliance of Edufa (Admetus) on modern medicine, rather than the old ways of the community and his family, to save his wife. Tied up with this is Edufa’s estrangement from his father, another major flaw viewed tragically in this play.

The chapter on Antigone in African drama is especially valuable; its lengthy and detailed account of productions allows the reader to make valuable comparisons. Most readers will know The Island by Athol Fugard, a white South African who wrote tirelessly during the days of apartheid, exposing it as a devastatingly tragic situation for both blacks and whites. The moment of truth, as it were, is when the two black political prisoners who are rehearsing the Sophoclean play for a prison performance reach the moment when the Antigone character recites the speech in which she declares that there is no law of Zeus that can compel her to act as Creon wants her to. It is such a powerful indictment of the rule that imprisoned these two men that they are reduced to tears, something that indeed invariably befalls the audience. Fugard is a dramatist who perhaps defeats the notion of using ancient Athenian models for modern African theater. He perhaps understands better that great theater comes out of a dramatic situation that is made by the society of which his audience is part. Nothing could be more heart-wrenching and desperate in his Master Harold and the Boys than that moment when the white boy must humiliate the adult black male in order to keep the balance of racial relations that his love for the black man threatens to upend. Again, the conversations between the white couple and their black male friend in Fugard’s A Lesson from Aloes reveal nothing so much as the fundamental deformation of humanity and human relations as life was played out in South Africa in the days of apartheid. It is a world far removed from ancient Athens, but because we ourselves participated in it—even if remotely—it is far more devastating as drama.