Courtesy Haymarket Books

A furious Ali did more than sting the aging Patterson like a bee. He established an early dominance in the bout but preferred to drag out the proceedings by landing all kinds of punches from all angles on the hapless former champion, ignoring trainer Angelo Dundee’s exhortation to deliver a knockout punch. As he danced around Patterson, prolonging his agony, Ali combined his blows with a torrent of verbal assaults that included calling Patterson an “Uncle Tom” and demanding from the reeling fighter, “What’s My Name, Fool?”

Dave Zirin’s book has the equivalent effect on its reader. By the end of it, one has experienced a barrage of impassioned jabs against everything that’s wrong with professional sports in the United States. Zirin, a sports columnist and radio commentator, is relentless in pointing out the dark side of professional sport, not only in the United States, but also in major international competitions such as the Olympic Games. Admittedly, there is a lot to write about, ranging from commercialization to racism, sexism, social inequality, and political exploitation. In Zirin’s words, “If I had a dollar for everything that’s wrong with sports, Bill Gates would be my butler” (p. 289).

Zirin’s account is full of clever turns of phrase, and is a joy to read. One can easily forget that writing about sport can still be an art. Present-day sportswriting, with a few notable exceptions, has become clichéd and formulaic. One notices an over-emphasis on short sentences full of alliteration, outlandish metaphor, and macho values designed to entertain rather than explain. You would almost think that when Jacques Derrida spoke of the syntactical overshadowing the semantic, he was referring to articles in Sports Illustrated, the weekly magazine read by almost twenty percent of American males. What would Derrida have said if he had had access to the testosterone-driven, sports-radio talk shows that plumb the depth of good taste and intelligence?

Zirin starts out by taking issue with Noam Chomsky’s view that “sports keep people from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they may have some idea of doing something about” (p. 20). Zirin agrees with Chomsky that sport plays a bread-and-circuses function in modern society, but then goes on to suggest that Chomsky does not recognize that “the very passion we invest in sports can transform it from a kind of mindless escape into a site of resistance” (p. 21). The “we” refers to persons who find sport exciting and lose their breath with the artistry of the virtuoso athlete. Not everyone belongs to that category, and Zirin suggests that critics like Chomsky should pause and consider why sport can be so appealing. It is hard to see how that might happen, but non-sports fans will recognize the validity of Zirin’s suggestion that sport can be—and, in fact, has been—a site of resistance.

The book’s first five chapters make a compelling case that there have been instances in which certain brave individuals have stood up to the corporate sports establishment’s dominant orthodoxy, whether that was anticommunism, anti-unionism, or, especially, racism. Zirin begins by providing vivid descriptions of how Lester Rodney, former sports editor of the communist Daily Worker newspaper, engaged in a campaign against the color bar in baseball. Zirin’s account then moves on to Jackie Robinson, the first black player in American major league baseball who also became a controversial spokesman on race by criticizing the communist actor, singer, and political activist Paul Robeson. Zirin then turns to Muhammad Ali and describes his struggle against racism, his conversion to Islam, his anti-Vietnam war stance, and his battles against the white sports establishment in the 1960s and 1970s. The next chapter deals with the black-gloved protest of the black American athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith on the winner’s podium following the 200-meter race in the Mexico City Olympic Games of 1968.

Moving from issues of race to unionism, Zirin discusses how baseball players in the late 1960s rejected the tradition of company-run unions and formed their own, and then fought against the “reserve clause” that tied them to the team that had “drafted” them when they became professionals. Their eventual success in the mid-1970s ushered in the era of free agency that spilled over into other sports and revolutionized them all. Free agency limited the contracts that new professional athletes signed with teams, and enabled the athletes to negotiate freely with other teams after a stipulated period. This free-market approach meant that salaries soared upward, so much so that many now believe that athletes are overpaid, whatever that means.

The book’s last five chapters lack the cohesion of the first five, however, and are more scattered chronologically, as they deal with a number of instances of “resistance,” combined with examples of discrimination or manipulation of sports figures from the 1970s to the present. There is still plenty to write about, including, most notably, the struggle of female athletes for equality led by tennis star Billie Jean King. Zirin’s narrative extends to the impact of the United States’s “war on terror” following September 11, and ranges from the proliferation of displays of patriotism and militarism at sports events to the initial cover-up of the death by “friendly fire” of NFL player Pat Tillman, who had volunteered and served with the US army in Afghanistan.

Zirin does not acknowledge this, but he is essentially dealing with two different eras, an earlier one marked by parallel, and collective, initiatives by athletes and a later one that consists of a range of uncoordinated and mostly short-lived instances of opposition. Zirin recognizes those differences only implicitly in the final chapter, in which he writes hopefully of the stirrings of a new sporting resistance. He believes that isolated moments such as those that make up most of his post-1970s account will somehow fuse into a more recognizable “movement” of protest against the increasing influence in the sporting world of corporations, money, and a win-at-all-costs attitude.

But if we consider carefully the movement launched by Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and the baseball players who stood up against the reserve clause, we cannot help but notice that their initiatives belonged to a bigger and deeper social development in the US at the time, the civil rights movement. In other words, the resistance within the sports world reflected broader social trends and was nurtured by them. Indeed, it was a manifestation in the world of sport of those trends—do we need wonder where Carlos and Smith got the idea of raising a black-gloved fist?

If this is so, however, a present-day “resistance movement” in sport needs the wider context of a social movement resisting the social ills that unfettered corporate values inflict on society. Anyone who follows sport in North America and Europe will sympathize with Zirin’s sense of urgency. Everything, it seems, is being taken over by big money, and that win-at-all-costs mindset is turning the artistry of virtuoso athletes into a commodity used by agents and publicists to inflate athletes’ salaries, which, in turn, raise the cost of admission to stadiums and of subscriptions to sports-media outlets.

But can the sporting world resist the logic of corporate capitalism on its own? That resistance would not last long if it did not spark a wider social movement opposing business interests. If that happened, even Noam Chomsky would probably agree that sport is not all bread and circuses.

Our Opinion

The death of Geôrgios Rallês last week at the age of 87 was another of those anti-Panglossian moments in contemporary Greece when one is abruptly forced to calculate the gains and losses of what consensually passes as the best of all possible worlds. It’s fitting, of course, that such thoughts are provoked by the death of a man who was looked upon, until the very end, as an avatar of “arch-conservatism.” And while it is true that Rallês was never the sort of politician (let alone human being) to occasion either extreme hostilities or undivided loyalty, it’s equally true that he was unusually burdened by his name. Whether he liked it or not (or whether it was fair or not), it became an albatross he had to carry until, finally, in the last couple of decades of his life, most of his fellow citizens came to realize that it is as pointless to blame a man for the family he was born into as it is to ascribe some nefarious purpose to the color of his skin.

Rallês was a scion of two of the founding families—or, depending on your point of view, τζάκια—of modern Greece: the Phanariote Rallês clan and, on his mother’s side, the Corfiote Theotokês line. Whether cast as tribute or aspersion, however, Rallês would never have denied that he was born into privilege and grew up and came of age in a rarefied circle of entitlement and perpetual advantage. Grandson of two prime ministers and son of a third, it was hard to avoid the feeling with someone like him that justice is not of this world.

During a time of historical upheaval, however, privilege is more often than not a deafening and blinding disconnection, an intellectual and moral amputation of one’s existential link to one’s own society. Geôrgios Rallês’s father was Iôannês Rallês, a founder of the Security Battalions—more bitterly known to Greeks at the time as Γερμανοτσολιάδες—and the last collaborationist premier during the German occupation of the country. He died in prison in 1946 after Greece’s liberation from the Nazis, serving the beginning of a life sentence for high treason.

It must have been extremely painful for the son after the father’s demise, not so much because Iôannês Rallês had died dishonored behind bars, but because young Geôrgios henceforth had to carry the name, and the singular shame, that, in Greek, translated into “Quisling.” In the event, he was saved by the same kind of historical turbulence that had destroyed his father. In the same year that Rallês père breathed his last, civil war began in earnest in Greece. A year later, following Harry Truman’s avowal before a joint session of congress of his doctrinal intention “to support free peoples…resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” (as long as those “armed minorities or…outside pressures” were not in the pay of Uncle Sam), former German collaborators were instantly transformed into naïve but God-fearing patriots and Γερμανοτσολιάδες into latterday vigilantes defending Church, nation, and family. Geôrgios Rallês himself went back into uniform (his second time, having also served during the Axis invasion of Greece), joining the anticommunist crusade out of principle, but also, undoubtedly, out of a loyal son’s desperate need to prove the fallibility (or at least extenuation) of what had seemed an unimpeachable judgment against his generally condemned (and much despised) father.

Young Geôrgios (he was only 32) was first elected to parliament in 1950, immediately following the end of the Civil War, under the standard of the still-centripetal (but soon-to-be-dispersed) force of Greek conservatism, the Popular Party. Within four years, he had become minister to the prime minister in the government of Alexandros Papagos, the former field marshal and Civil War “victor” (the US contribution having been discreetly downplayed by Papagos’s allies, foremost among them the US itself). By the fall of 1955, however, Papagos was dead, and his party was soon to follow. In 1951, in an act of amour-propre that made the French general look like the soul of Franciscan humility, Papagos had appropriated de Gaulle’s strategy, and even ideological appellation (which, apparently, was not controlled), and had “rebranded” the Greek right (with the critical strategic support of the US) under the banner of the Greek Rally party. As soon as its founder had breathed his last, however, his replacement as prime minister (chosen without even a wink to constitutional propriety by King Paul), Kônstantinos Karamanlês, imposed a rebranding of his own and, within three months to the day of Papagos’s death, reorganized the Greek Rally into the National Radical Union.

From Kônstantinos Tsaldarês to Alexandros Papagos to Kônstantinos Karamanlês, Geôrgios Rallês followed and remained steadfast to the “evolution” (or, more precisely, migrating cult of personality) of the Greek right, being handed a number of ministerial portfolios along the way. He was nothing if not loyal. And yet, somewhere deep down in his conservative conscience and sense of social obligation, his allegiance remained above all to the belief famously articulated by John Kennedy (undoubtedly anachronistic but no less genuine in both men’s cases) that, “For those to whom much is given, much is required.” It’s no coincidence that both Rallês and JFK were “privileged sons.” Noblesse oblige? Let’s not mock the notion too quickly, although the current, notorious privileged son occupying the White House confirms the truth that dereliction of duty and outright desertion are more often the choices of dynastic offspring than service and self-sacrifice.

But Geôrgios Rallês was made of sterner stuff. The desire, Freudian or otherwise, to “kill” (that is, vindicate, or perhaps even transcend) his father’s toxic legacy might have had something to do with it. In any case, when the junta of colonels (and one brigadier) overthrew the constitutional government of Greece on the night of April 21, 1967, Geôrgios Rallês was—irony of ironies—minister of public order. He evaded arrest, holed himself up in the national gendarmerie’s operational center, and tried to convince the Third Army Corps headquartered in Thessalonikê to move against the seditionists. He failed, obviously. It must be remarked in his defense, however, that he at least made the effort—which was certainly more than can be said for the craven monarch and chief of state at the time, then-King Constantine, who quickly capitulated and gave legalistic cover to the putsch.

Rallês was arrested on three occasions during the dictatorship and also spent time in internal exile on the island of Kasos. When the junta eventually fell, the returning Kônstantinos Karamanlês immediately asked him to be his minister to the prime minister, both in the government of national unity and the subsequent government that followed the elections of November 1974. What is most characteristic of his tenure during this time is, again, how Rallês managed to balance fidelity to his ministerial obligations with constancy to his constitutional principles without violating either and remaining faithful, above all, to his responsibility to his fellow citizens. As minister to the prime minister in December 1974, Rallês was a critical part of the government that oversaw the referendum on the monarchy. Although Rallês personally supported the institution, he willingly served a prime minister who had decided that it was a permanent cancer on the Greek body politic. (Karamanlês, however, wisely maintained a public silence on the issue.) When Greeks voted overwhelmingly to establish a republic, Rallês never looked back, but conscientiously served this new republic as resolutely as he had once served the royalist constitution.

The next few years were to witness Rallês’s three great contributions to his country and fellow Greeks. In 1976, he undertook the ministry of education while still serving as minister to the prime minister. With these two crucial portfolios under his wing, he introduced the language reform that abolished the administrative use of katharevousa; made demotic Greek the official and permanent language, both of instruction in all levels of Greek education as well as in public administration; and finally ended the language wars that had plagued Greek society for most of the twentieth century.

Two years later, Rallês became foreign minister and undertook the final negotiations for Greek accession to the then-European Economic Community. It was under his watch that Greece acceded to the EEC as its tenth member in May 1979.

Perhaps Rallês’s greatest moment, however, came precisely at what seemed to be his lowest ebb as a public man. After Karamanlês’s decision to promote himself to the presidency of the Greek republic, Rallês was elected head of the New Democracy party (the fourth major reinvention of the right in the post-Civil War period) and succeeded Karamanlês as prime minister. Although it was a poisoned chalice for him, since it was widely expected that PASOK would win the next parliamentary elections, it proved vital for the country at large. Soon after assuming the government, Rallês found himself addressing a throng of New Democrats in Êrakleio’s Freedom Square. When he mentioned the name of his political opponent, and PASOK’s founder and leader, Andreas Papandreou, however, the noisily partisan crowd responded with a Greek version of booing. It was then that Rallês countered with the three words that have subsequently become indelibly linked to his name, and probably constitute the only phrase that most Greeks identify with him: Δεν θέλω ου (I don’t want booing).

It’s much more concise, and admonitory, in the Greek. It quickly became a joke. It was one of those many moments in modern Greek life when the wicked satirical gift of the Greeks was too clever by half and, ultimately, lost the point of its parody. Andreas Papandreou went on to win the elections of October 1981, of course, and Rallês quickly retired to the backbenches.

It took many years for Greeks to finally understand what that “Δεν θέλω ου” had really meant. The person that Rallês had defeated for the leadership of New Democracy when Karamanlês chose to ascend to the presidency was the party’s ostensible favorite, Euangelos Averôf, a man for whom the term, “hardliner,” seems an almost excessive kindness. Much can be said of the author of that (very personal) “history” of the Greek communist party during the Civil War entitled By Fire and Axe. (It was characteristic of Averôf to blame all the burning and chopping in Greece between 1946-1949 on just one side, while conveniently ignoring the much more technologically efficient devastation inflicted by his own—with, for example, the first use of napalm after the Second World War, and years before this particular weapon in the arsenal of democratic freedom would achieve its notoriety in the rice paddies of Vietnam.) Suffice it to note here that it would have been inconceivable for someone like Averôf, when confronting a political opponent (especially from the left), to admonish his partisans, “Δεν θέλω ου.”

Kônstantinos Karamanlês understood that better than anyone, which is why, behind the scenes, he threw his backing to Rallês. It is very difficult for people now, a quarter of a century later, to remember the almost palpable tension in the country during the runup to the 1981 elections. Everyone in those days—pundits, street-vendors, one’s concierge, even one’s spinster Aunt Eufrosynê—expected PASOK to win. Paradoxically, that collective sense of inevitability heightened the apprehension. Especially for voters on the left, it was feared that the final end to their half-century in political and civic exile would be somehow sabotaged. Again, it is easy now to scoff at this (seeming) paranoia, but Greece in 1980 was only six years distant from dictatorship. Rallês’s “Δεν θέλω ου” was a laconic, and unquestionable, warning to his more extreme supporters that times had indeed changed, and it cleared the path for the real normalization, and authentic democratization, of Greek public life.

After losing the elections, Averôf took over New Democracy, but it was too late by then for the return of the living dead. Indeed, in the face of Andreas Papandreou’s actual program of “αλλαγή, εδώ και τώρα” (change, here and now), it was risible, not to say downright ridiculous, to paint this anemic (in truth, pathetic) agenda as “revolutionary” or even threatening in any way. As for Rallês, nothing so became his parliamentary life as his leaving it. Staying in the backbenches through the various ups and downs in Greek politics and in his own party, he finally decided in 1993 that he had no ethical choice but to resign his parliamentary seat, even though his own party was back in power. His resignation was purely on a matter of principle and in specific opposition to then-Prime Minister Mitsotakês’s disastrous handling of the Macedonia issue. Rallês felt that Mitsotakês had failed to accept a compromise on the name of the republic of Macedonia because of fear of losing the next elections, and that his position had alienated Greece from its traditional friends and allies. Rallês also believed that Mitsotakês had played the most cynical sort of politics with the future of the country. He was right on all counts, of course, and, predictably, Mitsotakês’s cowardice cost him the next election and put an end to his political career.

Geôrgios Rallês left behind two children, neither of whom is in politics. This is his final gift to his country. This privileged son of privileged sons saw how ugly privilege can turn when it ignores all those who are deprived of it. Being Iôannês’s son was possibly the best thing that ever happened to Geôrgios: if nothing else, it taught him the treachery of lineage. Look around today, in this Greek “republic” that only a generation ago abolished dynastic rule. Government has become the plaything of dynasties: Karamanlêses and Mitsotakês-Bakogiannêses and, above all, Papandreous. Indeed, it’s the “radical socialists” who’ve flooded this so-called republic with dauphins, princess royals, and princelings of every sort and bastard conception: Gennêmatases and Aleurases and Koutsogiôrgases. It’s a sad comment on the degradation of civic life in Greece and yet more evidence of the fact that, as Geôrgios Rallês proved in his own life, it’s harder to become an honest man than to be born a prince.

Arts & Letters

Compared to that Frogs, this production was a minimalist delight, challenging the audience to find something other than the strident entertainment that Broadway-inspired performances usually offer. Of course, it helped to have the Aristophanic original well in mind, the necessity of which might, on the other hand, be considered an unfair imposition on the viewer. In Aristophanes in Birdonia, the director found the essence of the Birds, which he brought over intact to a contemporary audience several millennia later. This was all the more remarkable for its being conceived in terms of dance. Ancient comic choruses sang and danced in costume, but we have no more notion of the choreography than of the outfits that were worn. The Birds turns on the collision of two styles of life, the Athenian go-get-’em, kick-shove-gouge urban velocity versus the need-nothing, want-nothing, freewheeling, empty-air-seeking avian manner. In Aristophanes, this distinction—so far as latter-day readers can recognize—comes through the difference between belly-laughmaking, non-stop punning, and outrageous topical allusions spoken by the principals and the exquisite, finely tuned, metrically sophisticated lyrics sung by the bird choruses. The production’s choreographer, David Gordon, is a legend who goes back to the days of the Judson Memorial Church’s Dance Theater, at which, beginning in 1962, dancers and choreographers shaped dance history by creating postmodern dance. In this production, he transformed the effect of the Aristophanic lyrics into dance movements that were spare and exquisite, too understated for modern tastes perhaps, but distinctly lyrical when read against the bluster of the new arrivals. The ancient comic drama’s structure has been maintained although much of its dialogue has been abandoned (it seemed necessary for one character to remark how talky the evening was for a dance production).

The play turns on the desire of Peisthetaerus (“the Persuader”) to get away from the stress-filled environment of the city to find peace and quiet among the birds in the sky. Escapism is in the plot of every surviving Aristophanic drama; indeed, Euelpides, the sidekick in this play, has a name that means “ever hopeful.” While the idea of escape seems natural enough for a playwright and audience sick to the death with a long war that seemed to be going nowhere, it may be the case—although we really do not have a large enough sample to generalize—that it was as much an inescapable staple of the comic view of things as resignation was to the status quo in tragedy. The name of Peisthetaerus “the Persuader” is indicative of his fundamental character or personality, that is, someone who’s pushy, a manipulator—in sum, everything an Athenian was and, ironically, what Peisthetaerus seems anxious to leave. Athens and the Athenians were notorious for their aggressive personality, as evidenced in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, in which he describes the Spartans and Corinthians complaining of the polypragmosyne of the Athenians, their pushy, controlling, into-everybody’s-business manner.

It seems clear enough that the ancient audience would have discerned a somewhat veiled topical allusion in this scheme: Athens two years earlier had sent an armada against Syracuse with the intention of bringing the island of Sicily into its trading and tributary orbit. It was a misguided undertaking, launched with high hopes—in its own way utopian—which collapsed in a mighty defeat in Syracuse’s harbor. Are not all such ambitious schemes utopian and doomed to fail? Without the kind of heavy-handed hinting that characterized the Lincoln Center Frogs production, America’s adventure in Iraq became the evening’s subtext for the action. But like the Aristophanic original, every kind of topical allusion came thick and fast from the mouths of an entire cast inspired by Olllie’s plan to establish a city and, thus, a constitution. The American constitution became the running source of gags, the most delightful being the separation of church and state inspired by the impenetrable barrier that the birds were meant to erect between humans and the gods: their new city, Birdonia.

Inevitably, the play has been drastically reduced in scope, allusion replacing exposition. The shape has been preserved, however, by the clever introduction of what one might call a master of ceremonies, in this instance a character enacting the playwright himself. The ever wonderful Valda Setterfield, Gordon’s partner in matters theatrical and personal, assumes the role of Aristophanes, amusingly enough calling attention to the complication of being written into his own play. Not the least of Setterfield’s delightful attributes as an actor is her grand patrician accent, which not only establishes the playwright in the hierarchy of the Western literary canon, but separates her performance from the Aristophanic drama being danced and acted around her. By explaining what is happening or about to take place, the Aristophanes figure both instructs the audience on the plot movements that are otherwise too brief to notice and brings them outside the drama to consider it as an artifact, the way the author does. In this way, the audience can take the measure of the proceedings as a distillation or sketch of an ancient theatrical piece. What is being danced and dramatized is in fact an abstraction.

Part of the fun of the original play is the impossibility of juggling the demands placed on the two Athenians and their bird associates, not only by the constant stream of visitors but also by the problems arising from their civic association. The two seekers of peace and quiet have seemingly destroyed whatever chance they might have had for them. Yet the structure of comedy prevails in the sudden entrance of Prometheus to tell of the plight of the gods, who have been denied the sacrifices of mortals because of the barrier imposed by the birds. He proposes that Peisthetaerus demand a wife from the gods as a bribe. In this way, the play can move to the traditional ending of comedy, which is marriage, song, dance, drink, and the prospect of sex. That it is an irrational change of plot direction is immaterial in something so loosely conceived. Because it heralded the ending, the ancient audience was habituated to expect that it “fit,” in some sense or other.

The ending in this present production is startling. Suddenly, Stan can take no more of the tension and anxiety of the new city, and announces that he is returning to Earth, despite Ollie’s pleading. In a curious switch, nowhere to be found in the Aristophanic original, Ollie—the controlling, instigating man—surrenders to his feelings for Stan, or to his fear of loneliness, and leaves as well. It is a remarkable scene of contemporary comedy in which the two men realize that their plan was a disaster and retreat from it, a happy ending of sorts in which good sense prevails; and when one man hitherto noted for his self-aggrandizement realizes that he needs his friend more than the fulfillment of his ambitions, up comes another happy ending, this one personal.

At this point, a spectator was ready to applaud. But for reasons that defy analysis, the director imposed a 15-minute reprise of the dancing birds, this time joined by Aristophanes, Ollie, and Stan. Perhaps he wished to recreate the sense of celebration with which the ancient comic dramas always ended, that is, the wedding or the banquet. Perhaps the members of the dance troupe rebelled at the inordinate amount of time allotted to dialogue and acting in what was meant to be an evening of dance. Whatever occasioned this last segment, it severely undercut the sense of what the evening was all about, intruding with a wide paintbrush, one might say, on what had been a delicate sketch, or pencil outline, of an ancient artifact.

Book Reviews

The detective’s role is precisely to demonstrate how “the impossible is possible” (Ellery Queen), i.e. to re-symbolize the traumatic shock. To integrate it into symbolic reality. His very presence is a kind of pawn guaranteeing in advance the transformation of the lawless sequence into a lawful sequence: in other words, the re-establishment of “normality.”
—Slavoj Zizek, The Detective and the Analyst

Courtesy http://www.boutique.info-grece.com

There are not any fish living in this particular “Aquarium,” only the well-known TV personality Aspasia Komi, who once a week invites politicians, businessmen, and the occasional soccer player or weightlifter, accuses people, makes disclosures about scandals, and in the end dismisses her guests with a smile. Before, I used to spit and leave. Now, I still spit but watch them, like one out of ten Neo-Hellenes. (p. 24)

And there seems to be nothing potentially promising or exciting in his life, at least for the next few months of his medical leave. Until….

Until, like a deus ex machina, Iasonas Favieros, a prominent citizen and owner of a large engineering company with activities in Greece and throughout the Balkans, decides to commit suicide in front of millions of viewers, in reaction to Komi’s “investigation” of his business and to his enemies’ protests against his “diaplekômena symferonta” (interlocking interests). In the midst of answering her questions, Favieros pulls out a pistol from his pocket and kills himself. A shocking event, indeed, even by Greek standards, according to which the media are ready to cross any line for more viewers and higher ratings. In the days that follow, everyone speculates about possible explanations for the event, and it doesn’t take long for a right-wing group to claim responsibility for Favieros’s suicide, accusing him of subverting the purity and homogeneity of the nation by bringing foreign workers to Greece to work for him. The only person who does not buy the official explanation of Favieros’s death is Haritos, who sees this case as the perfect opportunity to escape the “oppression” of his family and reestablish himself as the most capable and credible inspector on the police force.

Like any good mystery writer—and especially through his use of language, hyperbole, and irony—Markaris is able to capture the anxieties and fears of a nation and culture undergoing transformation. Through Haritos’s navigation of the urban space, the reader is able to revisit and familiarize herself with the topography of the city; more important, one can reflect on how urban space and its transformation mirror the social strata of the city and its inhabitants, and the city’s relationship to history and the past. In Haritos’s visit to Favieros’s office, for example, Markaris uses both the building’s exterior and interior as a signifier of the kind of life that Favieros had led. As Haritos tells us:

I expected to find myself in front of a modern cluster of offices constructed of dark concrete and one-way windows, but I stumbled upon a recently restored three-story, neoclassical building. The modern cluster of offices was behind it. At first I thought they were two separate buildings, but looking at the structure from the side, I discover an aerial bridge like a glass bowl, connecting the neoclassical with the modern. The social game of hide-and-seek that Iason Favieros played is corroborated by his business. On the face of it, he didn’t want to be a neighbor of the big sharks of Ekali, but his house in Porto Rafti was the house of a big shark. On one hand, he preferred neoclassical over modern buildings; on the other hand, behind the neoclassical facade was the cluster of modern offices. He wore Armani suits, but always rumpled and without a tie. Of course, it could be the “mixoparthenia” [phony innocence] that leftists feel for their own wealth, which they cover with a fig leaf, not so much for others but so that they won’t have to see it themselves. It could also be the syndrome of illegitimacy from which they suffer and which allows them to continue their game of hide-and-seek game just because of the momentum, like a useless exercise. (p. 107)

It becomes obvious to Haritos that both the exterior and interior of the building are indicative of the identity, and life, that Favieros lived, and they make the inspector’s job more complicated. As he concludes after his first visit to Favieros’s business: “…in the end, you lose your head because you don’t know who Favieros really was” (p. 114). Beyond the immediate reference to Favieros’s enigmatic life, however, Markaris uses these types of examples to reflect on the complexity of Greek history, culture, and identity, in which past and present are tightly interwoven. As it turns out, Favieros was not only well-known because of his current business activities, but also because of his former leadership of the student movement against the military dictatorship of 1967-1974, which resulted, on one hand, in jail and torture during those years, but also favored his business enterprise when his acquaintances, who shared a similar experience, became members and ministers of the current government.

It is the past, then, that holds the key to the present for Haritos. Through his understanding of the past, Haritos is able to uncover the truth about Favieros’s life, the motives for his suicide, and the possibility that someone else may have been behind it. When public suicides of other reputable members of Greek life continue, Haritos is convinced that he is actually dealing with the homicide of people who share the same history and past. What makes reading this book so enjoyable is Haritos’s commitment, both to uncovering the truth and understanding the past, quite often with a heavy dose of cynicism. Like Oedipus without the complex, he moves backward in order to move forward. Just as during his visit to Favieros’s headquarters, he navigates through different spatial and temporal zones, and this is what will allow him eventually to solve the case. It doesn’t take him that long to become conscious of the fact that Favieros’s life, identity, personal story, and, ultimately, death are firmly rooted in the past, and one needs to look backward in order to have a context for the present. In so doing, Haritos realizes that the past is the “purloined letter” that allows him to solve the mystery of the suicides.

Through Haritos’s investigation and tracing of Favieros’s life (as well as of the lives of the other victims), however, Markaris also questions and examines the relationship between history and its representation. In other words, through the detective’s slow discovery that Favieros’s life is more complicated than, and quite different from, the one constructed for and presented to the public—a heroic figure of the resistance against the junta—Markaris ultimately, I believe, questions the very nature of the representation of history itself. Favieros’s public and heroic past becomes a well-constructed narrative that determines his present context. It is, in a sense, a fictionalized historical representation that Markaris, often with a heavy dose of irony, examines and questions. Whose facts make it into history, Markaris seems to ask, and what are the conditions of historical representation itself? If the architectural paradigm that I mentioned earlier reflects the enigma of Favieros’s life, or the relationship between his present and past, Markaris’s novel and the way it is constructed question the conditions of the knowledge of that relationship itself. And if that were not enough, Markaris looks at the public arena of Greece as a space in which everything is pretty much permitted, a local extension of a globalized world in which ideological and political boundaries and balances are almost irrelevant. Is there a possibility, then, of reinventing any political space in a society that resembles or shares the conditions of globalization itself? How can we talk about proper political space when it is devoid of any forms of antagonism?

For Markaris, it is quite obvious that the role of crime fiction—and of a detective—is situated within the frame of these questions. As he recently stated in one of his interviews:

…[M]y generation, as far as it remembers itself, existed in a world that was maintained by the balance of terror between the two blocs, the Western and the Eastern: a balance that put a check on both sides. The collapse of this balance resulted, on one hand, in the Western bloc’s arbitrary rule. In the East, on the other hand, many leading members of the left have transformed themselves into businessmen—many having appropriated the property and financial means of the former “socialist” state, while at the same time developing Mafia-like activities and connections. In the Third World bloc, armed action has degenerated into blind terrorist attacks. Let’s not kid ourselves, the world we live in is lousy, but it’s a paradise for the writers of detective fiction. (Eleutherotypia, Bibliothêkê magazine, August 5, 2005, p. 16)

It is no surprise, then, for us to read about Favieros’s and his friends’ transition from prisoners during the dictatorship to influential members of the economic and political elites. We witness former internationalists turning into prominent members of the bourgeoisie who exploit the working class (these days, immigrants). We see torturers and fervent anticommunists producing and selling Che and other revolutionarily themed T-shirts. We see Haritos’s friend, Zisis, an old leftist and member of the resistance to the junta, now maintaining complete files on all public persons in Greece, and becoming a kind of informer himself. In Haritos’s own words:

Often he [Zisis] agrees to give me information from his archive, but he never shows it to me. To my question as to why he gathered all of this material, he answered that he did it out of spite. The state kept a file on his entire life, so now he started a file on all well-known public figures, in order to create some balance. (p. 201)

It should come as no surprise that the conclusion of Markaris’s novel is quite explosive and unpredictable. In our post-political or post-ideological age, as the novel suggests, we should expect everything.

Overall, O Tse Autoktonêse is the most interesting of Markaris’s books. Without any sense of sentimentality or nostalgia, he is quite capable, through a specific genre, of portraying a world that, despite its transformations, is still very much haunted by its past. While this past is very much linked to the present, the author rightly avoids using the past’s political space, conditions, and practices as a possible way of undermining today’s global capitalist system. At the same time, I often found myself uneasy about the way Markaris revisits or portrays the past. What appears to get lost along with the disappearance of boundaries and the reversal of roles is the very specificity of that past itself. What the novel does, perhaps unintentionally, is incorporate the past into the current state of history in which everything goes, in which former leftists and communists now have different roles, and the ones who refused to change or were unable to deal with the new order of things have been pretty much marginalized or disappeared from history’s record. While one can agree that the novel accurately reflects the current post-political or post-ideological Geist and conditions of our times, one can also argue (without any sense of nostalgia or sentimentality) that the complexity of recent Greek history, and of the left’s role in and contribution to it, cannot be reduced simply to binary oppositions and empty signifiers. What conclusion should the reader reach about the Greek past when former communists and leftists in the novel have turned into capitalist sharks, while others have been marginalized or turned into informers? How can one avoid thinking that the reversal of reality and roles on both left and right, the collapse of boundaries and meaning, affect the specificity of the past, its role and significance in Greek history, and, perhaps most important, our memory of it?

Politics

The following essay was first published, in a significantly different form, in the Greek journal Synchrona Themata (number 91, October-December 2005). greekworks.com translated and updated it for our current edition. Both this essay on the conference, Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the Empire: Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy, and the preceding one, “The Historian, the Philologist, the Minister, and the Traitors: Thoughts from Turkey on a Historical Conference,” were translated by Mary Kitroeff.

It was so gross and laughable for a civil court to rule on the academic credibility of a university conference that it produced a highly emotional climate. Those who had orchestrated this farce ensured that the decision was made late enough to preclude the universities responding in time. The next day, however, as organizers met to decide how to proceed, it became clear that the jurists’ association had made a critical mistake. It had acted against two of the universities involved in the conference, Boğaziçi and Sabancı, but not the third, Bilgi. So, when authorities were asked if there was any objection to holding the conference there, they responded in the negative. Consequently, the gathering was finally held at Bilgi, with the three-day program compressed into two days.

The following morning (Saturday, September 24), when people started arriving at the conference—by invitation only, since it was closed to the public—they found it guarded by security forces. Those who got there early had no problem. A small crowd had, of course, already gathered, but this was chiefly made up of journalists with cameras—or so we supposed—and the curious. Those who arrived later, however, such as the veteran politician Erdal İnönü (son of İsmet) or the journalist Cengiz Çandar, became targets of “outraged” citizens who clearly disagreed with the conference and expressed that fact with eggs and tomatoes.

So, many things have changed. The same is true of the protest meetings held recently in front of the ecumenical patriarchate, in which no more than 150 people thundered forth that they had collected “millions” of signatures calling for the patriarchate’s expulsion from Turkey. The media in Greece presented this marginal movement as an expression, more or less, of public opinion, or even as being engineered by the Turkish government. The same holds true for the Armenian conference. I shall never forget the image in a conference hallway of a woman, who had constantly intervened on the first day and obviously disagreed with the conference’s aims, winning her 15 minutes of fame in front of a dozen cameras at the very moment that next to her, Halil Berktay, a leading figure at the conference, was being interviewed in front of a solitary camera.

***

Let us now come to the substance of it all. It could be said, of course, that the fact that it was finally held was the substance of this conference. When all of us, particularly the few non-Turks invited because of our academic credentials, saw the host of intellectuals, university professors, and journalists gathered together that morning, we naturally felt that we would rarely again have such an experience. That is why, before I deal selectively with some of the papers, I would like to make some general remarks, the first of which is that the importance of this conference, and the reactions it provoked throughout the entire period leading to it, rallied people who differed widely from one another, and had been divided by various dissensions and rivalries, around a common objective. They sat next to each other at the same meeting and, like the old friends they were, delivered the message of a common cause.

This is because (and this is my third observation), while the conference’s ostensible subject may have been the Armenians of 1915, in the end, first and foremost, it was about contemporary Turks. It was a conference about the Turkey of today and tomorrow, able to face the past, without neuroses or panic, of the peoples and history it has inherited. It was ruefully pointed out by Etyen Mahçupyan that, in the end, it is not the Armenians who are in need of support and help in order to get over what happened to them, but, rather, the Turks, who have ignored their own history completely until recently and are discovering it now in a traumatic way. Furthermore, in their summations, the organizers sent a clear message on behalf of all those who have striven or are striving to rid this country of the shadow of the 1980 coup: namely, that this was the first truly free conference to call into question the mechanisms and structures of the Evren junta, which, to some extent, continue to function even today. Some organizers described to us the enthusiasm, and the sense of collective action and solidarity, that had been created among them by an atmosphere that, I suppose, is reminiscent of the intense politicization in Greece of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

It would be impossible to deal with all the papers that were read separately. If, however, I was to attempt a very rough categorization, I would say that there were those of a chiefly historical character—including, among others, the papers by Selim Deringil, Edhem Eldem, Taner Akçam, Erol Köroğlu, Meltem Toksöz, Fikret Adanir, Aykut Kansu, and Ayhan Aktar—and those whose point of departure was the manner in which the problem is handled today. This latter category was more numerous and comprised the presentations of Murat Belge, Ahmet İnsel, Etyen Mahçupyan, Melissa Bilal, Baskın Oran, and Fatma Müge Göçek.

A much more poignant misapprehension in which he was directly involved was related by Dink at the conference. To begin with, he argued that, regardless of the term used to describe the events of 1915-1916, nothing changed in the end because those who had experienced them and transmitted their memory to the generations that followed were not going to alter their feelings because of a particular word. (This observation reminded me of the indignation with which a refugee, then over 100 years old, reacted in a program commemorating the anniversary of the Asia Minor disaster that I saw last summer on Greek television. When faced with the “dilemma” of whether the events of 1922 should be described as genocide or “simple” memory, to be preserved, she had responded: “neither genocide nor memory, because we know…”). But the climax in Dink’s address was still to come. He recounted how an aged Armenian woman had visited her birthplace somewhere in Anatolia and breathed her last there. A local notified Dink, who in turn relayed the news to the dead woman’s daughter, who lived in Paris. When the daughter came to Istanbul and called the person who had found her mother, she burst into tears. This person had suggested that the body not be taken to Istanbul, but should be buried where the old woman had died, in Anatolia. She would be buried as one of our own, in our (Muslim) cemetery, the person had added, so she could finally stay in the soil on which she had been born and had grown up. Dink concluded: “They’re afraid that if the genocide is recognized, we shall have our eye on compensation and the return of land. Well, yes, we do have our eye on that land, but not to have it returned; rather, to be buried deep within it.”

Dink’s address was the climax of the conference. I don’t think there was anyone in the room who could restrain his tears. It is worth noting here that one of the nodal points of the conference was the way in which one can or should deal with emotion. Historians such as Oktay Özel stressed that we have no right to ignore the emotions of the subjects or groups we study. All we can do is try to understand the role that these play in human relations and in their resulting conflicts. In the event, emotion was present at the conference, both as methodological tool and collective expression. Participants were unafraid of either tears or memory, both of them forms of timely redemption. Dink’s address stood out for an additional reason: the game of misapprehensions played by those who took redemption as their starting-point. Oral Çalişlar, a well-known journalist for Cumhuriyet, in speaking precisely about journalists’ responsibility for spreading false information and shaping public opinion, told us that, coming into the conference hall, he had run into a young colleague who notified him in alarm that the Armenians had admitted their designs on the land of Anatolia!—which is what this young journalist had understood from Dink’s talk (and which would have been comic were it not so tragic).

I will now turn to some other papers. The well-known writer, Elif Şafak, spoke of Zabel Yesayan, an Armenian feminist writer at the end of the Ottoman empire whose critical attitude toward Ottoman authority, her own community, and the authorities in what became Soviet Armenia, where she took refuge after the events of 1915-1916, brought her into conflict with everyone and ultimately condemned her to marginalization. This woman’s story was not only part of the histories of the feminist movement and the Armenian community in Turkey. It was a bright page in Ottoman history. Şafak did not hesitate to acknowledge how much poorer Turkish history had become without these excised and forgotten pages. For his part, Taner Akçam—whose varied activities (including his book, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide) acknowledge the Armenian genocide and, for that reason, subject him to many attacks—presented an important aspect of the tragedy through the transcripts of the trials held in 1918 for the various crimes of the members of the Committee of Union and Progress. Ottoman officers and local officials were dismissed or even executed because they refused to obey the government’s orders. Clearly, the trauma of these events, not only for relations between Christians and Muslims, but also among Muslims themselves, go very deep.

In two other papers, Fethiye Çetin, author of the novel Anneannem (My Grandmother), which became a bestseller in Turkey, and Dr. İrfan Palalı told the story of their grandmothers, who had been converted to Islam, as were thousands of others: children in the vortex of the disaster. It is interesting that in the days following the conference, similar stories sprang up constantly in the newspapers. One had the impression that Turkish society had begun to realize the self-evident: that all those Christians who were not privileged enough to emigrate to a country with a population of their co-religionists, such as Greece, but managed to escape the slaughter and hardships, were perforce incorporated into Turkish society, changing their religion and identity. And this is a gain for many contemporary Turks who feel no disgrace in acknowledging ancestors whose origins were not necessarily in Central Asia. For some, of course, it continues to be a source of shame. These are not easy matters. In spite of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the audience at the conference was ready to accept such views, there were also reactions. Apart from the woman who constantly interjected and finally stated that she was deeply moved by the sufferings of all the populations, Christian and Muslim, a retired dean of a school of dentistry accused the organizers and speakers of not showing the same sensitivity to the massacres and persecutions suffered by Turks in Bulgaria, Greece, and elsewhere in the Balkans, and of not protesting when Turkish intellectuals were prosecuted in Europe for denying the Armenian genocide.

The reverberations from the conference have not died down even now. It is worth noting that an e-mail list created after a series of Turkish-Armenian workshops in the United States organized by Fatma Göçek and Ronald Suny (see my previous essay, “The Historian, the Philologist, the Minister, and the Traitors: Thoughts from Turkey on a Historical Conference,” greekworks.com, December 27, 2005) was expanded to include all those who had taken part in the conference and anyone else who was interested, thus providing an international forum for dialogue. Göçek and Suny were recently awarded a special prize by the Middle Eastern Studies Association in the US for their work.

In Turkey, meanwhile, this particular conference forced supporters of the official line to respond with their own series of conferences. The first was held at Ankara’s Gazi University and provided an opportunity to its organizers to “strike down their ignorant opponents.” The interesting thing is that some of these opponents were also invited, and two, Baskın Oran and Fikret Adanir, accepted and took part. In recent weeks, there has again been a great deal of activity centering on these issues. Inter alia, prosecutions were initiated against five journalists over articles during and after the Armenian conference. In addition, the controversial trial of Orhan Pamuk was finally begun, adjourned, and then summarily canceled and all charges dropped. Pamuk had been accused of insulting Turkish national identity by maintaining in an interview in a Swiss newspaper last year that “in this country [Turkey], one million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds lost their lives and nobody talks about it but me.” Whatever one may think about Pamuk as a writer and a human being—and there are very many who accuse him, wrongly in my view, of having stirred up all this fuss in order to win the Nobel Prize in literature—it is impossible not to recognize another link in a chain of dramatic moments in which what is at stake is Turkey’s ability to disengage itself from the morass of the past and confront itself and the world with greater self-confidence. The story, in other words, doesn’t end here.

Book Reviews

Courtesy Yale University Press

Haag has poured all his genuine affection and knowledge of Alexandria in this work. It is really two or three books wrapped in one, for it includes biographies of the three writers and several minor characters, discussion of the respective literary output of the three, descriptions of the city, and detailed explanations of the major historical events that shaped Alexandria and Egypt. Impossible at it may sound, these different histories are brought together seamlessly in a smoothly flowing prose. That’s just as well, as it feels at times that Haag is pouring out the entire contents of his research notes. Some readers may find the biographies of the minor characters or the extensive historical accounts distracting, but it is testimony to Haag’s storytelling ability that these digressions do not seriously undermine the narrative’s momentum.

The city certainly comes alive in Haag’s vivid descriptions, as the reader is immersed in the atmosphere of the streets, the neighborhoods, the beaches, and the sea that are so crucial in understanding life in twentieth-century Alexandria. Many of its important denizens come to life as well, and aside from the three main protagonists, whom we get to know very well, one or two lesser-known persons receive some deserved historical recognition. Among them is the American judge, Jasper Yates Brinton, who experienced the political vicissitudes of the colonized city with the dignity of a true gentleman from Quaker Philadelphia.

The range and depth of this account rest on a great deal of research. The footnotes list numerous secondary sources, published and unpublished correspondence and private papers, as well as personal communications that Haas managed to acquire. He thanks just over 100 persons in his acknowledgments, but one has to search the footnotes to discern whose memories or privately held documents became part of his story and who provided merely anecdotal or background evidence. Nonetheless, Haag clearly engaged in much patient detective work tracking people down and persuading them to share their knowledge. 

A photograph on the inside of the book’s cover that shows Haag with Eve Durrell née Cohen, Durrell’s second wife, standing on top of the famous Cecil Hotel in Alexandria, suggests that she, of all informants, played a large part in helping him construct his narrative. This is borne out in the final third of the book, in which Haag moves away from Cavafy and Forster to focus on Durrell.

Indeed, one wonders whether access to Eve as well as other sources helped Haag decide that Durrell was as important as Cavafy and Forster in understanding Alexandria. At first glance, this seems rather obvious. Durrell’s best-known work, The Alexandria Quartet (four books entitled Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea, published between 1957 and 1960) was set, as the collective title suggests, in Alexandria. The Quartet is a celebration of the loose and torrid lifestyle of the city’s foreign elite and contributed to glamorizing Alexandrian cosmopolitanism in the minds of the reading public in the West.

Durrell, nonetheless, does not measure up to Cavafy and Forster in the eyes of fellow writers, critics, or the public. Cavafy was ahead of his time in many ways, and it took a while for the literary establishment in Athens to notice the Alexandrian poet. It was even later, in 1919, after he had published the poems evoking Alexandria’s history, that Forster introduced Cavafy’s work to the English-speaking world. Since then, several major writers, including W. H. Auden, are on record as expressing their intellectual debt to Cavafy’s work. The first English translation of the Cavafy canon appeared in 1951; since then, the poet’s work has been translated into most of the world’s languages and his reputation has increased steadily.

Forster’s A Passage to India, which appeared in 1924, is ranked by many as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. It found favor among liberal moralists such as Lionel Trilling, who wrote that it was not only about India but also about “all of human life.” As with Forster’s other acclaimed work, Howards End, however, it can also be read as an indictment of Britain’s class system and, of course, as a critique of British imperialism and its racist foundations.

In contrast, Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet drew diametrically opposed reactions: some critics believed he deserved the Nobel Prize, others were as unenthusiastic as Alfred Kazin, who wrote in 1962 that, “Mr. Durrell seems to me fundamentally a writer concerned with pleasing his own imagination, not with making deeper contact with the world through his imagination.” The distanced dreamlike world of Alexandria’s cosmopolitan bourgeoisie was not as appealing to many readers as it was to the Quartet’s author. Durrell’s biographer, Ian McNiven, noted ironically that Durrell seemed inconvenienced whenever “…the world situation kept intruding.” For many, Durrell’s strengths lie in his series of spectacular travel books, not the Quartet.

The gap between the Quartet and reality is not merely a matter of poetic license if we are to consider this work as representing life in Alexandria. Durrell’s Alexandria is autobiographical, not historical, as in Cavafy’s poetry or Forster’s prose, which refer to the ancient city. Durrell experienced Alexandria in a very narrow way. Cavafy and Forster, however—their privileged status notwithstanding—did not identify with the assumptions of British and European superiority over the Egyptians, which created an apartheid-like division between foreigners (or those of foreign origin) and local Egyptians. Their ideal Alexandria lay in the historical past, not the colonial present. Moreover, their homosexuality set them at an “angle” to Alexandria’s colonial universe (to echo Forster’s famous description of Cavafy as a “Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe”). And, of course, it brought them into contact with young Egyptian men and their world, if only briefly in Cavafy’s case, but in a more engaged way for Forster, whose affair with bus conductor Mohamed El Adl is one of many liaisons Haag describes with grace and sensitivity.

Durrell, however, worked as an apparatchik in the British colonial power structure and apparently came into contact exclusively with the social elites of the foreign communities, not the petite bourgeoisie that was fairly large in the case of the Greeks, Armenians, and Italians. Accordingly, the Quartet evokes an Alexandria defined exclusively by its social elite at a time when, as Haag shows, Egyptian nationalist sentiments were on the rise. Another Alexandrian writer, Stratis Tsirkas, has shown in his Akyvernites Politeies (Drifting Cities) that Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism can be evoked through the foreign petite bourgeoisie and the Egyptians, as well as the haute bourgeoisie. (See my “The Political Tsirkas,” December 18, 2002, as well as Part 1 and Part 2 of Stelios Vasilakis’s “Stratis Triskas’s Anti-Orientalism,” December 18, 2002, and February 17, 2003, greekworks.com.)

Durrell’s myopia has been deplored by a range of historians writing on twentieth-century Alexandria in ways that echo Kazin’s stern criticism: “Alexandria…its mingling of so many races and nations, gives a sensitive civil servant like Mr. Durrell a chance to relish the sweetness of the primitive and the corrupt, to eat his fill of the honeyed air, without ever getting any closer to the actualities of real political life and real Near Eastern dirt than he ever needs to.” And it is about to get worse for Durrell. In a forthcoming volume on “cosmopolitan Alexandria” edited by Deborah Starr, Robert Vitalis of the University of Pennsylvania cites several examples of overtly racist depictions of Egyptians in the Quartet.

To be sure, Haag knows enough so as not to adopt a starry-eyed attitude toward Durrell, the third part of his Alexandria “tercet,” and he is brutally frank about the misogyny and narcissism that suffuse Durrell’s correspondence with Henry Miller. Yet Haag also tries to explain Durrell’s mindset by citing his insecurity, anti-rationalism, and dalliance with metaphysical worldviews. Still, in the final analysis, Haag has done a better job than Durrell in evoking Alexandria’s cosmopolitan past, even though he has burdened his account with the author of the Alexandria Quartet.

mediawatch

To see a great film only on television isn’t to have really seen that film. It’s not only a question of the dimensions of the image: the disparity between a larger-than-you image in the theater and the little image on the box at home. 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. To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers.
—Susan Sontag, “The Decay of Cinema”

Newsreel
Nobody has more acutely (or accurately) defined the importance of cinema for an entire generation than Susan Sontag, in an essay she wrote for The New York Times about nine years before she died. In “The Decay of Cinema,” Sontag pointed to “the onset in the last decade [the piece was published in February 1996] of an ignominious, irreversible decline” in film. Ironically, as everybody else was marking the centenary of its birth (officially, December 28, 1895, at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris) with the most self-serving (and painfully inane) predictions of many more years of robust health, Sontag was soberly (and astutely) delivering film’s eulogy. More than just burying cinema (in lieu of vacuously praising it), however, Sontag, being an incisive coroner, also delivered a postmortem on its demise. (In a poignant irony, Sontag died on the very day—December 28—that her beloved cinema was born, and was buried in the same City of Light in which the felicitously named August and Louis Lumière had pierced the darkness of the Grand Café 109 years earlier.)

Just as its extraordinary maturity in the twentieth century resulted from its social afterlife, the cinema’s physical death was anticipated by and ineluctably bound to its social redundancy (which is also, by the way, a critical factor in the decline of culture generally in the “developed” world today). I quote Sontag:

Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia—the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired. Each art breeds its fanatics. The love that cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral—all at the same time. Cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life.

What makes Sontag’s recreation of cinephilia achingly genuine is her description of its almost palpable erotic impulse.

Until the advent of television emptied the movie theaters, it was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive. Example: It looks good to wear a raincoat even when it isn’t raining. But whatever you took home was only a part of the larger experience of submerging yourself in lives that were not yours. The desire to lose yourself in other people’s lives…faces. This is a larger, more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. Even more than what you appropriated for yourself was the experience of surrender to, of being transported by, what was on the screen. You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie—and to be kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image.

Annette Insdorf begins her biography of Francois Truffaut in the same mode (albeit more explicitly).

Truffaut’s early film-going experiences were flavored by what we might call “sinema”: not only were his excursions into the darkness clandestine, but they were accompanied by a growing awareness of sexuality. A fine example of this conjunction in the boy’s mind (around the age of twelve) is his recollection of lost panties in the 4,500-seat Gaumont-Palace in Paris during the Occupation. He learned from his friend—whose mother worked at the famous theater—that after the last show every Sunday night, at least sixty pairs of panties would be found under the seats: “I hardly need to add that these sixty little weekly panties—we never failed to check the exact number…—made us dream in a direction that had little to do with the art of cinema or the ideas of [André] Bazin.” (Francois Truffaut, p. 15)

Memoir (of only a few, but true, pieces)
I’ve always said that I was socialized by the movies; I’ve always been absolutely convinced that, after a certain point, which I can readily identify, the movies changed my life more than anything else, including my ethnic identity (whose formation was, to a very real extent, an accident of birth) and the religion in which I was raised (but about which, as a child, I had no say). My devotion to the movies, on the other hand, was my choice, an allegiance founded on my will, which is why it confirmed me in—and often led me to—my politics, my social understanding (and whatever social vision arose from it), my existential self-awareness, which includes any personal esthetic I ever developed, and, to echo Sontag, my perception of desire and, most of all, sense of love.

It is, of course, ludicrous even to imagine anyone today making a comparable statement based on the films of the last 20 years. Sontag spoke of a “reduction” of film that “has produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn’t demand anyone’s full attention”—and, in fact, couldn’t even if it wanted to. There are many causes for this, social and esthetic (although the social, in an art form that exemplified “mass culture” for so many decades, and was a central, intimate part of “common” people’s lives during that time, is critical in this case). Some of it, however, has to do with simple, old-fashioned laziness, which, as our parents used to warn us, invariably leads to mental and existential sloth. If you love movies—if you love anything in life, another human being most of all—laziness inevitably compromises and confounds and corrupts that love. When I was an undergraduate in the late Sixties, there were scattered courses in film (literally, one here, one there), but certainly no curricula of any intellectual rigor, let alone departments, with the obvious exception of NYU’s program, which, however, was looked down upon as vocational education more than anything else, and those at USC and UCLA, which were considered, again, to be industrial trade-schools feeding Hollywood’s need for hacks. (As the universities in Babylon’s backyard were also keenly aware of the movie industry’s deep pockets, intellectual flattery was a strategy for financial support; it’s a shame Brecht never wrote a play about American academe.) Consequently, when I went off to graduate school in 1972, I followed a traditional path although, like so many of my generation, I’d been obsessed—intellectually, socially, morally, and, most of all, existentially—with cinema for many years.

I plead guilty to the fact that I am now, have been for roughly 35 years, and will always be a Sarrisian fundamentalist. Future cultural historians who look back upon the critical shards and intellectual fragments of “film studies” in this country in the last third of the twentieth century will be able to confirm the obvious: that Sarris’s critical intelligence was definitive although his enemies and, by definition, intellectual inferiors all won out in the end. No need to name names. What is important is that a profound sense of film history, represented not only by Sarris but by Kevin Brownlow and Richard Koszarski and the late William Everson and Jay Leyda (the latter two among the original pillars of NYU’s film program), was defeated by a ubiquitous notion of theory or “critical reading” based upon a grotesque ignorance of film. This phenomenon, of course, is true of the humanities as a whole; history, regardless of disciplinary qualification or “discursive” form, has been replaced by theory. What is even more inexcusable is that this has often occurred in the name of a “leftism” that is not so much infantile as it is protozoan.

In the event, when I returned to Columbia to enter its film program, some people who knew me were surprised. By that point (1979), I’d done some writing and had published a few things in “respected” film journals, mostly left-wing (in those days, the notion of a conservative film culture was oxymoronic), and it was assumed that somebody “like me” should be at NYU, queuing for the anointed-grad-student-graced-to-write-for-October line. But I thought that NYU had nothing to teach me (I’d already read Marx, and would continue to read him with or without NYU, or graduate school, for that matter). I thought that education should be an engagement. That, even though I’d seen a lot of movies by the time I was in my late twenties, I had this nagging feeling that I hadn’t seen enough—and that, even if I had, I hadn’t seen them properly, under the scrutiny of those who could (con)test my knowledge and understanding and assumptions. Andrew Sarris might have been a legendary anti-Marxist (although I always thought that anyone with his intellectual penchant for hermeneutical oppositions was a classic example of a dialectical thinker), but nobody could deny that he had seen a lot of movies in his life. More to the point, because he had, because the more you saw, the more you knew (and yet, paradoxically, the more you needed to see)—as Sarris told all his students, in cinema as in life, wisdom is a cumulative virtue—he understood their context(s): individual, collective, esthetic, social, artistic, industrial, historical, analytical. The irony in all this, of course, is that it took the self-described “bourgeois” Sarris to teach a self-described Marxist the meaning, and importance, of historical context in cultural analysis—and I suspect I wasn’t the only one.

***

“One can’t live without Rossellini,” declares a character in Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (1964)—and means it.
—Susan Sontag, “The Decay of Cinema”

Of the five nominees for Best Picture, the most money was made by Brokeback Mountain, at number 29, with $75.4 million; followed by winner Crash (number 49), with $53.4 million; Steven Spielberg’s Munich, at number 63, with just over $46 million (as opposed to his Number 4 War of the Worlds, which grossed over $234 million); Good Night, and Good Luck at Number 89, with $30.3 million; and Capote (Number 103), with $23.4 million. There are many ways to look at these figures. Here are two: the biggest moneymaker of the five nominated movies, Brokeback Mountain, made just under one-fifth of the total of the biggest moneymaker overall, Star Wars: Episode III; or, Star Wars: Episode III made a little over sixteen times what the worst moneymaker of the five movies contending for the Academy Award, Capote, made. Any way you slice it, it more or less comes out baloney for the notion that the vast majority of the American television audience watching the Academy Awards this year actually had any connection whatsoever to the movies that had been honored by nominations. (While this is an admittedly arbitrary calculation, I find it instructive that if we multiply those 38.8 million by $6.40, the average price of a movie ticket in the US last year, the result is $248.3 million: more than three times the gross for Brokeback Mountain and over 10 times that for Capote—but still over $131 million less than Star Wars: Episode III earned.)

Living without Rossellini (or Norma Desmond)
Hooray for Hollywood anyway? Not exactly: it’s called Tinseltown for a reason. What you see is hardly ever what you get (especially with “hard numbers,” which is also why accountants have a term for the genuinely weird science of addition and subtraction in US moviemaking: they actually call it “Hollywood accounting”). Let’s look at the top-grossing movie for 2005 again, which is also Number 7 among the 10 top-grossing films of all time. Star Wars: Episode III did make $380 million dollars, but that was on a total of 59.2 million tickets sold. (If you multiply that last figure by the $6.40 average price of a movie ticket in the US last year, you get $378.9 million, almost precisely the amount that the movie is credited as making.) Indeed, if we take the top 10 films of all time, not by cash pulled in—which obviously skews the data to more recent productions because of an entire century’s inflationary spiral (according to the MPAA, the average ticket price in 1910 was seven cents)—but by the number of tickets sold, the winner is…Gone With the Wind, with 206.4 million.

Now, let’s look at GWTW a bit more closely. Like Crash in 2006, GWTW won the Oscar in 1940 for Best Picture of the previous year. Unlike Crash, however, which about eight million people have seen to date, 25 million people had seen GWTW a year after its release (the movie actually premiered in Atlanta at the very end of 1939, just 10 days before Christmas). Just to keep the context for those audiences, that’s 25 million in a population of about 132 million in 1940 (or 18.9 percent), as opposed to eight million in a current population of roughly 298 million (or 2.7 percent). But there’s more.

The average ticket price was 23 cents in 1939 and 24 cents in 1940, according, once again, to the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood’s official trade group). However, Gone With the Wind was an event in 1939-1940—a real Hollywood event, which is to say a national cultural (that is, social) experience, not the pathetic media simulacrum that passes as cultural occasion nowadays and lasts for the functional social equivalent of a nanosecond. Consequently, although the average ticket price for movies at the end of the Great Depression was about a quarter, it cost 75 cents to catch a morning or afternoon performance of GWTW and a whole dollar for evening performances. Nonetheless, although MGM (with which Selznick had made the distribution deal) and the theater-owners were charging, respectively, more than three and four times average prices, the crowds overran the moviehouses. So much so, in fact, that within a year, roughly 8,100 theaters had booked the movie—as opposed to the 1,905 theaters that have played Crash until today. Finally, the $14 million dollars brought in by GWTW the first year of its release would be worth approximately $184 million today. However, once again, if we factor in population, it would actually be worth about $415 million, which, of course, is not only almost eight times Crash’s gross, but (yes, Virginia, there once was a world before George Lucas) some $35 million more than top-grossing Star Wars: Episode III.

Much has been made over the last couple of decades of the “grittier”—or, at least, more “sophisticated”—quality of American movies in this period compared to the allegedly predictable “crowd-pleasers” and intellectually and psychologically “simplistic” films of Hollywood’s earlier years. After all, Hollywood’s contemporary cheerleaders argue, how can one seriously compare a film like Crash to a movie like, say, Grand Hotel, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1931-1932 (for the first six years from 1927 to 1933, the annual awards covered the film “season”). Personally, I can think of any number of ways, but, for the sake of argument, I’ll grant that Crash is “manifestly” a more complex film than Grand Hotel. The problem is selective memory. Following are the Best Picture winners for the last quarter of a century: Ordinary People (1980); Chariots of Fire (1981); Gandhi (1982); Terms of Endearment (1983); Amadeus (1984); Out of Africa (1985); Platoon (1986); The Last Emperor (1987); Rain Man (1988); Driving Miss Daisy (1989); Dances With Wolves (1990); The Silence of the Lambs (1991); Unforgiven (1992); Schindler’s List (1993); Forrest Gump (1994); Braveheart (1995); The English Patient (1996); Titanic (1997); Shakespeare in Love (1998); American Beauty (1999); Gladiator (2000); A Beautiful Mind (2001); Chicago (2002); The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003); Million Dollar Baby (2004); and, now, Crash.

Gritty? Sophisticated? Gandhi? Out of Africa? Driving Miss Daisy? While, admittedly, the Eighties look particularly egregious now (although these films looked just as bad when they were released), with only Platoon, and possibly Amadeus, breaking up the unrelenting unremarkability of this quintessentially meretricious “product” (as Hollywood likes to call it), the next 15 years don’t look much better. Indeed, with the singular exception of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby, the decade-plus run from The Silence of the Lambs to The Lord of the Rings is downright demoralizing for what it tells us about the apparent senility of the American cinema. Let’s now go back to 2005’s top 10: Star Wars: Episode III, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Chronicles of Narnia, War of the Worlds, King Kong, Wedding Crashers, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Batman Begins, Madagascar, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. What strikes one immediately, of course, is the almost universally (innately?) juvenile nature of their subject matter. Looked at in that chronological context, Crash is, in fact, one of the better films to win the Oscar in the last 25 years.

1927-1952 (not including Gone With the Wind)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-1930); It Happened One Night (1934); You Can’t Take It With You (1938); Rebecca (1940); How Green Was My Valley (1941); Mrs. Miniver (1942); Casablanca (1943); Going My Way (1944); The Lost Weekend (1945); The Best Years of Our Lives (1946); Gentleman’s Agreement (1947); All About Eve (1950); and An American in Paris (1952).

And that doesn’t include a peculiar “split” during Oscar’s birth year. It is well-known that Wings won the first Academy Award for Best Picture in 1927-1928; it is hardly known that, during its first three years, the “Best Picture” award was called the “Best Production” award and that, although Wings won it in that first year, an award was also given (for the first and last time) for “unique and artistic production.” That prize went to Sunrise, Murnau’s classic and arguably—for many cinephiles, including me, undoubtedly—one of the finest works in the history of the cinema. Those “illiterate” movie moguls back then obviously knew a thing or two about “sophistication” themselves. Now, on to the postwar, post-television period.

1953-1979
On the Waterfront (1954); The Apartment (1960); Lawrence of Arabia (1962); Midnight Cowboy (1969); The Godfather (1972); The Godfather, Part II (1974); One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975); Annie Hall (1977); and The Deer Hunter (1978).

To be continued

Our Opinion

Last week, the Swiss senator Dick Marty, chairman of the Council of Europe’s committee on legal affairs and human rights, issued his interim report on the allegations that the CIA had operated secret prisons in Europe into which it deposited human beings detained through the now-notorious US policy of “extraordinary rendition,” the Orwellian term for what is, very simply stated, state-sponsored kidnapping. The Council has appointed Mr. Marty to investigate the unusually credible reports that European countries have implicitly—and, more often than not, explicitly—collaborated with the US in this systematic and gross violation of the most elemental rule of law. All “suspects” who are “extraordinarily rendered” are, in every sense of Anglo-American law, and the entire history and precedential weight of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, completely innocent, as their “crimes” have neither been publicly (let alone legally) catalogued by any prosecutorial organ or proven by any judicial procedure—which, of course, is what makes this grotesque “rendition” of justice so “extraordinary.”

Yet, this is precisely the kind of “justice” and defense of “freedom” that the entire world now expects of a United States that has increasingly become the mother of all rogue states. Extraordinary rendition reminds us of nothing so much as Operation Condor, that infamous “counter-terrorist” operation of the 1970s conducted jointly by the then-fascist regimes of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, with the implicit blessing of the US secretary of state at the time, Henry Kissinger, and the explicit logistical support of a US “communications installation” in the Panama Canal Zone. According to John Dingis of Columbia’s school of journalism, author of the definitive study of this vast network of state-sponsored mass murder, it was this installation that was “employed to co-ordinate intelligence information” among the six dictatorships. It was monstrously successful: it is estimated that Operation Condor, and related activities, left at least 50,000 people dead and 30,000 “disappeared.” Another 400,000 were imprisoned and, to varying degrees, almost universally tortured.

So, on second thought, the current rendition of US “anti-terrorist” policy is not so extraordinary after all. In any case, it’s not the first time that Europe has been enmeshed in it. Under Operation Condor, however, Europe was a victim—as France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain (in the dying throes of Franco’s own dictatorship) were targets of its assassination squads—as, ironically, was the United States: Orlando Letelier, who served Salvador Allende as both foreign and defense minister, was murdered by a car bomb in the middle of Washington, DC, to which he had escaped after the coup in Chile of September 11, 1973, thinking that he had managed to secure sanctuary in the great republic of the norteamericanos. Little did he suspect that the land of the free and the home of the brave was working hand-in-glove with his assassins to secure, not his sanctuary but his slaying—another extraordinary rendition of the notion of freedom.

So, as we see, the US is a past master at rendering “democracy” and “the rule of law” and “justice” and, above all, “freedom” in any number of formerly inconceivable and quite extraordinary ways. Once upon a time, however, it merely aided and abetted others as they “disappeared” people; today, it does so directly, without qualms or scruples of any sort. Most (virtually all?) of the desaparecidos in the West today have vanished at the hands of the United States—although it is also true that, as Senator Marty put it caustically, the US is still queasy enough about getting its hands too dirty that it chooses to “outsource” the subsequent torture to, say, Egyptians or Afghans. But while the US clearly prefers that its Muslim prisoners be tortured by its Muslim allies, there is nevertheless room also for the Europeans to prove their support of the “indispensable nation” in its “global” war on terror by doing the quintessentially lackey work of clean- and cover-up.

“I am scandalized,” Senator Marty has said, “that a few kilometers from where I live people can be lifted by foreign governments. When someone goes on holiday in Macedonia they are lifted by foreign agents.” The problem is that there are very few other Europeans in positions of authority who seem to be as scandalized as Mr. Marty is. Take Gerhard Schröder, for example, the former “socialist” chancellor of Germany who was so vocally “opposed” to the US invasion of Iraq. Well, now it appears that, according to the Associated Press, Germany allowed “more than 400 overflights and landings” (our emphasis) by CIA-run planes carrying on extraordinary renditions while Herr Schröder headed the German government. According to Amnesty International, “six planes used by the CIA for renditions…made some 800 flights in or out of European airspace” before these operations were discovered. Predictably, every European government implicated in these “torture flights”—from the UK and Spain, to Germany, Sweden, and Ireland, to Poland and Romania—has denied involvement. As Senator Marty has said, however, “It is highly unlikely that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were unaware” of what was happening. Indeed, as Mr. Marty quite intelligently pointed out even before issuing his interim report, “It’s not possible to transport people from one place to another in such a manner without the secret services knowing about it.”

Unless one’s secret services are totally, criminally, inept—which, frankly, we don’t believe the European services are. Nonetheless (and, once again, predictably), the guilty are claiming a pristine purity. The state department’s spokesman has rejected the interim report as the “same old reports wrapped up in some new rhetoric…nothing new….” Homeland security chief Michael Chertoff responded (in Paris, ironically) that, while he had not seen the report, the US government, in any case, “acts in accordance with the law and with respect to the sovereignty of host countries in which it operates.” Unsurprisingly, the British are the most put out. Former Europe minister and current Labour MP Denis MacShane—like his boss, Tony Blair, an acolyte of America’s extraordinary rendition of global hegemony—made a less-than-subtle reference to Senator Marty’s nationality by saying that his report had “more holes than a Swiss cheese.” It “simply re-circulates newspaper allegations and sustains the anti-American propaganda that seeks to divide the democracies of Europe,” he concluded in a summation of stunning disorientation.

Unlike Mr. MacShane, we believe that what is dividing the democracies of Europe is not “anti-American propaganda” but American actions. In the event, we have only three brief points we would make at this juncture.

First, Dick Marty is not only a lawyer but a former, highly experienced prosecutor who became known in his native Switzerland for his vigorous actions against organized crime and drugs. Indeed, he was honored by the US justice department under Ronald Reagan, as well as by the International Narcotic Enforcement Officers Association, for his achievements in the area of drug legislation. In other words, as a criminal-justice professional, Senator Marty can smell the rats when confronted with their invisible presence.

Second, governmental denial of guilt is almost invariably a prelude to that guilt’s establishment. Again, the case of Germany under Gerhard Schröder is, unfortunately, instructive. Recently, following the revelations of German collusion in extraordinary rendition, another, even more obscene case came to light. Apparently, the Schröder government—specifically, agents in Baghdad of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or Federal Intelligence Service)—assisted the US in choosing bombing targets in Iraq. These included the attack on a restaurant where Saddam Hussein was believed to be dining that led to the death of 14 civilians. In fact, the current German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier (another “socialist”), was in charge of the BND at the time as chief of staff to Mr. Schröder. He is now denouncing all allegations of German-US intelligence-sharing in Iraq as “scandal-mongering” and claims—in words unusually resonant of the strategic mystification of his fellow European socialist, Denis MacShane—that a parliamentary inquiry would lead to “anti-Americanism” and a rejection of NATO.

Our final point is also the most important one: namely, that those who believe that evidence of governmental criminality must always be predicated on the existence of a “smoking gun” live in a self-created bubble of such breathtaking naïveté that it amounts to congenital—and, for the government(s) committing the crimes, convenient—credulity. We will never find Hitler’s master plan for the Holocaust. Nor will we ever discover the directive by which the moribund Ottoman state ordered the extermination of the Armenians. Governments are not stupid; they are self-preserving and highly rational corporate bodies who understand that their survival depends on bureaucratic discretion. The bigger the crime a government intends to commit, in other words, the less it will be articulated, let alone memorialized—which is finally to say that governments hide their smoking guns behind smoke and mirrors.

Europe today stands at a crossroads. While it claims to represent another way forward for the West, distinct from that of the last remaining hyperpower, the world has a right to its increasing skepticism. In the last few years, Europe seems to have become an effete, almost apologetic, minion of the presumptive hegemon. It is distressing, to say the least, particularly because it is so reminiscent of Europe’s own recent past. Quisling, of course, was a European, and it was in the last global slaughter that the word “collaborator” ceased denoting innocent association and came to mean nothing less than complicity in the most monstrous guilt.

Book Reviews

The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life. Men lived among mighty mountains and eternal forests for ages before they realised that they were poetical: it may reasonably be inferred that some of our descendants may see the chimney-pots as rich a purple as the mountain peaks, and find the lamp posts as natural as the trees. Of this realization of a great city as something wild and obvious the detective story is certainly the Iliad….The lights of the city begin to glow like innumerable goblin eyes, since they are the guardians of some secret, however crude, which the writer knows and the reader does not….A city is properly speaking more poetic even than countryside, for while nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones.
—G. K. Chesterton, A Defense of Detective Stories

Courtesy http://www.boutique.info-grece.com

The helicopter touches the cement, the door opens, and a young woman about 25 years old comes out, full of make-up and adorned, one of those we called minxes [sousourades] in my village.

“We’re here!” she cried jubilantly.

Suddenly the people burst into applause and she was moving full of airs and graces. Behind her, however, instead of tents and blankets, appeared a bearded man with a camera on his shoulder, and two guys who unloaded boxes, tripods, and spotlights.

“Hey, they’re from the television,” a disappointed voice is heard, and the clapping goes flat, like a soda whose bubbles are settling down.

“Are you from the television?” The mayor approaches the girl ready to draw his sword.

“Later, later,” she brusquely responds. “I want to see the collapsed houses first. Do you have any here?”

“No, luckily we don’t, but….”

“I told you, you won’t find anything,” says the cameraman to the reporter. “We came for nothing; let’s go.”

“Impossible,” she says and grasps the microphone. “We’re late and I’m going to miss the window.”

“But do only the demolished houses matter?” says the mayor, full of indignation. “We’ve been in the streets, under the rain, for five hours, without lights, telephones, and we don’t dare return to our houses; and no one cares for us. What should we do? Do we have to demolish our own houses for you to show some interest?”

“This is it!” she cries enthusiastically. “The criminal apathy of the state! Who’s the mayor? Do you have a mayor here?” (p. 22, this and all subsequent translations are mine)

Although the story begins on the island, we soon move to Markaris’s more familiar urban territory, Athens—a city plagued by a garbage strike, a familiar experience in the summer months.

The center of Athens is littered with the garbage that the rain sweeps along. You reach your destination crossing the National Park of garbage: Milko boxes, plastic bottles of Coca-Cola, empty beer cans, and empty containers of Fage yogurt. And let the radio claim that the sanitation workers’ strike is over. The trash remains unassailable. Obviously, they’re waiting for it to dry in the sun and then come out and collect it. (p. 133)

Slowly and methodically, Markaris traces and adumbrates the fabric of modern urban life and the disintegration of more traditional social norms and structures. Sometimes directly, but often not, Haritos becomes the witness to a life and a world in which everyone seems to be a guardian of some secret—a world in which (to repeat the cliché) it is impossible to distinguish between the innocent and guilty, the good and evil. This is a world in which the political actuality and social fabric are transformed on a regular basis, as they become increasingly part of a more globalized form and order. Of course, that makes it all the harder for Haritos to keep up with the investigation, since it is not just a matter of finding the person(s) behind the crime. In the event, he is less a police officer than a crucial witness whose gaze reflects a more complicated and less transparent political and social arrangement. An anachronistic and often conservative figure, he is not always able to make sense of what is taking place even within his own life and family.

Markaris’s world is a place where notions of legality and legitimacy have been deconstructed, where the interests of the politicians and people like Kousta “interlock.” Through his references to soccer “interests” (or, as they’re called in Greek, “paragontes”) and populist political figures, the enormous economic stakes involved in soccer, the relationship among various agents of the underground economy, and the influence of polling firms, Markaris masterfully portrays a world that is very familiar to Greeks. After all, what Greek is unaware of the colorful soccer paragontes and team-owners who, through their actions and behavior, often monopolize the nation’s attention? Who doesn’t know of their well-known connections to the world of nightlife and organized crime? Or of the financial scandals and wrongdoing that have become part of the country’s daily routine? And, finally, what about the daily media bombardment of polls that tell Greeks everything they presumably need to know?

In the middle of all this stands Inspector Haritos, navigating and negotiating carefully since there is no longer a clear demarcation between who is inside or outside the bounds of legitimacy. Markaris’s fiction makes clear that very few people are really innocent: everyone is morally implicated in this lousy world. As the title of the novel warns, Haritos finds himself confronting a “zone defense” that makes it difficult to reach the goalkeeper or even the opponent’s area. In this story, Haritos is not only vulnerable and exposed to his superiors’ intrigues and ambitions, but indeed to the entire political structure and context in which he operates. And if that were not enough, he has to deal with his poor health. Having suffered a minor heart attack, Haritos appears to be a more vulnerable man, who has to negotiate his power and role not only with his superiors but also with his own wife and daughter (the latter becoming his official driver at one point). The figure of Markaris’s detective has become more human, and thus more susceptible to both political and natural forces. By the end of the novel, Haritos appears to jump from one world and text to another, momentarily transcending himself and recalling some of the classic detective figures of earlier times—even while his action brings him back to a hospital bed.

Markaris’s second novel contains some of the main elements that we encounter in his first book although this one seems to have more of a local flavor. One could argue, however, that, in the end, the Greek world described in the novel is just another example of similar phenomena that we can easily discover everywhere. Still, despite its heavy dose of cynicism, Markaris’s fiction mirrors contemporary Greek life—or, if you prefer, a reflection of Greek life as presented daily by the media. We might debate the accuracy of this representation of modern life and its anxieties, but we would nonetheless have to agree with Markaris’s claim in a recent interview that the “detective novel becomes more and more social, and in its Mediterranean form, more political. It’s not going to be long before we define the detective novel as a social one with a detective plot.” (Eleuterotypia, Bibliothêkê magazine, 8/5/05)

Overall, this is a compelling novel, and one that faithfully records a society in transition and the increasingly internationalized nature of its organized crime. Markaris is a great storyteller who is particularly talented, in his simplicity and liberal dose of humor and irony, at describing a culture suffering the strains of modernity. What is missing in this novel, however, is a more conscious engagement with the past—and, more specifically, Greek history—as a way of understanding the present, and its personal stories and identities. Nonetheless, although the author departs from the turbulent and complex past of modern Greece that he touches upon in his first novel, he will return to it in his third and finest novel, O Tse Autoktonêse (Che Committed Suicide, 2003), which I will discuss in my third and last piece on Markaris’s work.

Book Reviews

Courtesy Miramax Books

Courtesy Houghton Mifflin

As to how people died on September 11, Frédéric Beigbeder’s primary fictional narrator, Carthew Yorston, describes in detail for almost half of Windows on the World what it was (read: might have been) like to be trapped in that restaurant on that morning; as to the book’s other half, Beigbeder pontificates in first person on what he perceives to have been the attacks’ causes and effects (when not writing about himself). His first line of reasoning (that the US reaped what it sowed) isn’t particularly original or inspired; his second—that the terrorists did not reap what they sowed—is, I would argue, pretty much full of holes four and a half years after the crime and almost three years after the invasion of Iraq.

As to how the bereaved (might have) managed to go on, Jonathan Safran Foer’s protagonist, Oskar, a child savant whose loving father perished in one of the towers, determines to solve the mystery of a key his father had to no known lock; this key-to-no-lock is, for the novel’s sake, a fitting metaphor, because there are no answers in Foer’s world as to how anything could be the same again when nothing would ever be the same for those who lost loved ones that day. As to the why of September 11, Oskar, despite his precocity, curiously doesn’t ask. His long-estranged grandparents, survivors of the 1945 Allied devastation of Dresden, eventually reveal in their own counter-narrative what Foer’s own astonishingly simple answer happens to be: history repeats itself.

It’s somehow telling that both writers resorted to counter- and parallel narratives to try to get at the meaning of an attack that paralyzed much of lower Manhattan for some days and in a way permanently eliminated that diminishing if not imaginary divide that still separated (or so we New Yorkers liked to think) the American heartland from its cultural capital on September 10, 2001. Indeed, the attack on New York in particular sanctioned an anyway-long-delusional nation to further deceive itself (then and since) into believing that, when those planes flew into the Twin Towers, each and every resident of the United States had come (and to this day remains) under assault. In Windows on the World, Beigbeder extends this conceit to the West: what happened on American soil must, it seems, inevitably occur elsewhere. Sitting in Le Ciel de Paris, the restaurant in the Tour Montparnasse, where some of his parallel narrative takes place, Beigbeder speculates on September 11, the differences between the US and France, the meaning of 1968, his personal past, or anything else that comes to his mind. At one point, he almost wistfully imagines planes targeting the Montparnasse tower; at another, he remarks speciously: “I hope America will always be ten years ahead of us: that would mean the Tour Montparnasse still has ten years” (p. 76)—or, at this moment, about five and a half. In Extremely Loud and Extraordinarily Close, September 11 is the calamitous episode used to explore, and epitomize, personal tragedy. Indeed, if there were no counter-narrative in the book told by the grandparents who survived Dresden, the attack on that day—and the entire novel—would stand within a historical void.

Admittedly, fiction is both the perfect and a problematical medium for grappling with the whys and wherefores of September 11, 2001. That these two books are flawed would not be so disheartening were they not flawed in such sobering ways. That Foer equates an attack that reduced 16 acres of prime Manhattan real estate to rubble and killed less than 3,000 persons with one that, through incendiary carpet bombing, leveled an entire city—which had no military value—and killed upwards of 130,000 civilians, confuses an act of terrorism with something that was both a war crime and a crime against humanity. That Beigbeder shows up in his own fiction without bothering to address what John Lanchester terms “the arbitrariness and artificiality of narrative” or the “morality of making people up, and then devising trials and torments for them, designed to expose and test their deficiencies” confuses ego with enlightenment (see Lanchester’s “A Will of his Own,” his review of J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man in The New York Review of Books). Despite—or, indeed, because of—these defects, however, both books deserve to be read.

***

Carthew Yorston, trapped in Beigbeder’s novel during breakfast with his two young sons at Windows on the World on September 11, is as much caricature as character: a wealthy, 43-year-old real-estate agent from Texas who calls himself an aristocrat; a member of the Sons of the American Revolution; a patriot; a man who knows the Twin Towers’ statistics; and a divorcé. Not present at breakfast is Carthew’s girlfriend, Candace (younger than him, perhaps his middle-age crisis), a Victoria’s Secrets model—“You know the type. She makes J-Lo look like a bag lady.” (p. 4)—whom he met on the Net and who wants to get married, have children, and, consequently, live together: three mistakes, as Carthew sees it, that he doesn’t want to repeat. At 8:31 am, when his narrative begins, Carthew is feeling as though he’s the center of the universe: his kids loved coming up the WTC’s high-speed elevators, they are all now seated at the restaurant on the 107th floor with the day stretching before them to include a trip to the Statue of Liberty and the South Street Seaport, and the glow of his late New York nights with Candace is radiating still. “In two hours,” Carthew oddly informs us then, at the end of this first narrative, echoing an evocative line from the film American Beauty, “I’ll be dead; in a way, I am dead already” (p. 5).

The others present on the 107th floor are also caricatures: a corporate couple (he in a Kenneth Cole suit, she in Ralph Lauren) who are (Carthew can simply tell) having an affair; Lourdes, a (Christian) Hispanic employee at the restaurant; Jeffrey, a (Jewish) customer; and Anthony, a black security guard (who is, of course, Muslim). The bases, in other words, are covered; and although character sometimes breaks through—at least in Carthew’s case, for he’s allowed reflection—the cast remains mostly stereotyped for those minutes left to them. (Time is marked by chapters, which begin at 8:30 and end at 10:29.) And, as the moments wind down for those who will perish, death is as caricatured as life: the corporate couple make love in the face of certain demise; Lourdes loses faith in being rescued only to come to rely on her higher faith; Jeffrey opens a bottle of aged Haut-Brion that Anthony refuses, because of his religion, to share (which leads Jeffrey to accuse Muslims of the attacks); and Carthew at one point not only thinks about Cat Stevens (whose music he admires and who, of course, converted to Islam and became Yusuf Islam) but also swears an oath—cynically or ironically, it’s difficult to tell—that “If we make it out of here, I’ll convert to Islam” (pp. 243-245).

No one will ever know the details of what happened in the time remaining to those who were at Windows on the World that morning after they were trapped. In the face of terror and desperation, I for one am not sure that sex, or finger-pointing, or specious conversions took place, but maybe they did. At any rate, Beigbeder is either brave or silly to say so, but I leave that judgment to his readers. The strength of his writing—which shortlisted him for the Prix Goncourt and won him The Independent’s foreign fiction prize in 2005—most certainly lies in his descriptions of what people (might have, must have) suffered above the inferno as water in the coolers began to boil: these are all harrowing without being sensational, heartrending without being mawkish. Beigbeder’s sense of the human heart comes through loud and clear: it dies hard, and when faced with certain, untimely death, is capable of momentous dignity.

But, then, there is Beigbeder’s parallel narrative. Each of these chapters is also assigned a time from 8:30 to 10:29—not on September 11, but at later dates—perhaps to indicate that nothing important (let alone definitive, in the most terminal sense) happened to any of us who were not killed on September 11 or, more provocatively, to suggest that everything that happens at any given moment is as significant, or meaningless, as anything else. For Beigbeder is nothing if not brashly at ease with his own contradictions in Windows on the World, and, like anyone full of himself, seems to be both a decent guy and not a particularly nice one. He claims to love Hugh Hefner and the idea of being a playboy; he’s a writer in his native land, in which, he asserts, “works of art are exceptionally pedantic and self-satisfied” (p. 19); and he maintains that he decided to become famous because he couldn’t get laid otherwise (p. 83). “My motto: become what you despise,” he writes (p. 220). As what he most despises, it seems, is being an artist in a world in which art has become completely narcissistic, he goes about narcissistically beating that dead horse. He unabashedly counters Carthew’s fictive background with his own (what else?) unhappy childhood, before going on to confess that he prefers peep shows in Montparnasse (his sex drives are of more interest to him than they were to this reader) to antiwar demonstrations (as Iraq’s future is being debated at the UN), and that his girlfriend—to whom he cannot commit—has left him for good (at 9:18, one morning). Her departure, and his writing of this book, frees him to go to New York City to visit Ground Zero, examine the architectural models at the Winter Garden and the objects found in the rubble on display at Saint Paul’s, and ruminate on the meaning of terrorism and its effect on Manhattan.

It is here that Beigbeder’s parallel narrative reaches confused extremes. For despite the fact that Beigbeder insists that, “Terrorism does not destroy symbols, it hacks people of flesh and blood to pieces” (p. 172)—the inarguable premise of Carthew Yorston’s narrative—it’s difficult to know what he’s talking about when he uses the word “symbols.” The towers are down, the debris is being cleared as Beigbeder writes, and the “symbols” of what he earlier describes as “the collapse of a house of credit cards” (p. 8) are destroyed, long gone. What’s left are words, Beigbeder’s, in this instance—“The moral of this story is: when buildings vanish, only books can remember them” (p. 137)—and life. Except that life as Beigbeder encounters and sees it in Manhattan is hardly one most New Yorkers live. For, in his eyes and, if we are to believe him, his experience, Manhattan is an ongoing party (or maybe an endless bedroom), a place where “…their terrorization has produced precisely the reverse of what they had hoped for. Hedonism is at its peak. Babylon lives again!…Terrorism terrorizes no one: it shores up freedom. Sex dances with death.” (p. 189)

If “their” terrorism terrorized no one, those subsequent high alerts orchestrated by the Department of Homeland Security would never have been sounded or taken seriously, shelves emptied of duct tape, countless people rounded up and deported, countless more refused US entry visas and turned back at borders (including a relative of my nephew’s wife, who was recently handcuffed and interrogated for more than a day at JFK and finally returned to the Czech Republic on grounds that several years ago he had been rejected for an extension on his US visa), or the Global War on Terror declared or supported. If hedonism is at it peak—and I’m not speaking solely of sex here, but of a sense, and understanding, of pleasure—a lot of New Yorkers I know are missing it this time around, whether or not Babylon lives again (although it should be noted that the real Babylon certainly isn’t alive and well in its native land). Sex may indeed dance with death in the works of Sade, Beigbeder’s compatriot, but no one has argued to my satisfaction that it’s a liberating influence anywhere in the United States of America today. As for terrorism “shoring up freedom,” the Patriot Act, and a hard look at the far, Mesopotamian reaches of the US’s (alleged) reaction to terrorism, presents a much darker picture.

Given the entirety of Windows on the World, it’s clear that Beigbeder knows all this. But as a master of contradictions, he doesn’t (perhaps can’t, won’t) stop himself, and he never goes so far as to draw that line between audacity and stupidity. That’s a provocation in its own right, of course, to be taken seriously.

***

Jonathan Safran Foer’s stylistic aplomb and gorgeous prose make Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close gratifying despite its main character/narrator, Oskar, who is (but surely wasn’t meant to be) somewhat annoying. Child narrators are irksome in general. Not having complex emotional or emotive ranges, they’re mostly literary devices that need to be forgiven their quirky propensity for narrowing, and sometimes collapsing, experience around them and being the arbiters (and centers) of their own peculiar universes. Oskar is like a child with Asperger’s Syndrome on speed: his favorite book is Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time; he considers himself an “inventor, jewelry designer, jewelry fabricator, amateur entomologist, Francophile, vegan, origamist, pacifist, percussionist, amateur astronomer, computer consultant, amateur archeologist, collector” (p. 99); he collects coins, rare butterflies, Beatles memorabilia, and semiprecious stones; he incessantly makes up bons mots, and spends more time Googling than is humanly possible. He is also a sleuth trying to solve the mystery of a key he has found in a vase bought by his father some time before dying in the World Trade Center. As the key is in an envelope with the word “Black” on it, Oskar resolves to find and visit every person named Black in New York City in order to find the lock this key fits, and solve what he sees as the riddle of his father’s death.

We consequently follow Oskar’s episodic, shaggy-dog, helter-skelter and very high-speed search (which leads to one endearingly deaf Mr. Black, who speaks only in sentences that end in exclamation points, at high volume). In search of “Black,” by the way, Oskar only wears white. As he is also afraid (since September 11) of elevators and public transportation, he races up and down stairwells, takes cabs, and walks about, outpaced only by his mind. The Blacks he meets are from all walks of life and, in fact, come in all colors, and they all submit with extraordinary patience to his sometimes startling and often outrageous questions. “Could we kiss for a bit?” he asks Abby Black, whom he has found living on Bedford Street, after speaking to her at length:

“Excuse me?” she said, although, on the other hand, she didn’t pull her head back. “It’s just that I like you, and I think I can tell that you like me.” She said: “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”…I asked why not. She said: “Because I’m forty-eight and you’re twelve [Oskar has lied about his age].” “So?” “And I’m married.” “So?” “And I don’t even know you.” “Don’t you feel like you know me?” She didn’t say anything. I told her, “Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are.” (p. 99)

Oskar’s widowed mother, from whom he appears to be estranged, spends a lot of time with Ron, whom she’s met at a bereavement support group after his wife was killed in an automobile accident. But Oskar’s Grandma Schell lives across the street, and she and he keep each other company via walkie-talkie and by putting signs in their windows for one another in the dead of night. Grandma Schell is one of Foer’s two counter-narrators to Oskar’s tale; the other is her husband, Thomas, who abandoned her when she was pregnant with Oskar’s father and who has now returned (to New York and to her, from abroad) upon their son’s death. Their letters (Grandma Schell’s to Oskar, and Thomas Schell’s to his dead son, written over the years but never sent) inform us that they are survivors of Dresden. Grandma Schell’s sister, with whom Thomas was in love and who was carrying his child when the Allies leveled Dresden, did not live through the bombing; years later, Thomas accidentally meets his lover’s sister in New York, and they marry despite the fact that he is still devastated by his loss and in shock because of Dresden’s destruction. Indeed, Thomas Schell is so traumatized that he can no longer speak, has “YES” and “NO” tattooed on his palms to answer questions by raising one or the other hand, and, although perhaps in his right mind, incapable of enduring life as most live it.

Before leaving his pregnant wife, Thomas encourages her to write a book, which he doesn’t realize is a tome of blank pages; after abandoning her, he writes the letters he never sends to their son, one so crammed with words that they can’t possibly fit on the page (as reproduced in the novel, this letter is typographically tracked tighter and tighter as the leading diminishes, until all that is left is a mass of black ink). Foer uses many such touches as “documentary” evidence to support his narratives: photographs (some from Oskar’s scrapbook entitled Stuff That Happened to Me, others of people Oskar interviews and catches on camera, one of the Brooklyn Bridge, and so on); “reproductions” of scratch-pads from a store where Oskar’s father (and other doodlers) tried out a series of pens; a letter in code; a letter with certain words circled in red throughout; and pages with one line of type. Whether such support is needed is questionable, especially as these “documents” are as fictive as all the narratives they are meant to document.

In the end, Oskar meets his grandfather, who is still aphasic, and shares with him his greatest secret: the five messages left by his father on the answering machine on the morning of September 11, after the planes hit, which only Oskar has heard. And Oskar also admits to his grandfather that he has found on the Internet a Portuguese video of bodies falling from the towers, and that he has been trying to recognize his father among them but can’t because of the pixelation when the images are enlarged. Oskar’s grandfather asks: “You want him to have jumped?” To which Oskar responds:

I want to stop inventing. If I could know how he died, exactly how he died, I wouldn’t have to invent him dying inside an elevator that was stuck between floors, which happened to some people, and I wouldn’t have to imagine him trying to crawl down the outside of the building, which I saw a video of one person doing on a Polish site, or trying to use a tablecloth as a parachute, like some of the people who were in Windows on the World actually did. There were so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his. (p. 257)

He will, of course, never know. But Oskar and his grandfather will together steal away to open his father’s grave, and place into its empty coffin all the letters Thomas Schell Sr. ever wrote to his son. And Oskar will be softened toward his mother and Ron by his grandmother’s last letter to him (for Grandma Schell leaves and follows her husband after all these years), in which she recounts how she thought to tell her sister how much she loved her on the eve of Dresden’s destruction. Her sister was already asleep, however, and Grandma Schell didn’t wake her, thought it unnecessary to do so, believing, naturally, that there would be other nights, another time. She closes her letter with:

Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar.
It’s always necessary.
I love you,
Grandma (p. 314)

The key, Oskar knows by this time, is a key to nothing. Not astoundingly, his audience knew it all along.

***

That the American heartland’s embrace of New York on September 11 has not lessened comes as no surprise to those of us who lived in what we imperially called The City (the way Greeks still refer to Istanbul) for enough years to have witnessed—over a period that began long before that September morning in 2001, and has hastened since—New York’s embrace of the heartland. The grit, toughness, and razor’s edge that was Manhattan has dissipated, disappeared. Those neighborhoods that were once poor or “uninviting” (to anyone not from Manhattan, that is) or hardly neighborhoods at all are now much like theme parks whose only mark of distinction is their clientele: middle America for the South Street Seaport and Times Square; posh for the meatpacking district, Soho, and Tribeca; and “in” for the Lower East Side. And while the Time Warner building finally gave New York a mall to call its own, the city had become mallified a long time before, home to blockbuster-sized superstore chains from pretty much everywhere in the heartland and boasting a Starbucks on just about every third corner.

This New York, however, is curiously absent from both Windows on the World and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The city seems to continue to be, in both novels, what it was always said to be: a place that can be anything and everything to anyone and everyone. In Foer’s New York, a nine-year-old can go from one neighborhood to another, by cab or on foot and often alone, without ever having reason to be afraid, wary of strangers, or worried over; in which people he doesn’t know open their homes and sometimes their hearts to him; in which everyone—rich, poor, old, young—is, despite anything else they might be, kind. And then there’s Beigbeder’s New York: still, and perhaps more than ever (if we’re to believe him), Sin City, a site of unrelenting sexual energy, endless possibility, continual promise—the Big Apple as La Grande Bouffe.

There’s just one problem: those towers did come crashing down, and September 11 is now a seminal moment, not only in New York’s ongoing mythology but, much more to the point, its daily reality. It’s one thing to misunderstand, misinterpret, or misrepresent the city; it’s another thing altogether to misconstrue or misapprehend the importance of what actually happened on that day.