If you’ve just jumped over from Damien Mulley’s blog, you might want to start by looking at some of the quizzes that form the backbone of the site. All comments and feedback welcome, so long as they’re gushingly positive.
It’s interesting to note the cultural differences exposed by the reception given by Anglophone critics to the translation of the French bestseller Les Bienveillantes, by Jonathan Littell. Praised in the French press as a latter-day War and Peace, The Kindly Ones—as it’s now being introduced to English-speakers—was walloped by perhaps the most powerful literary critic in the world, the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani:
The novel’s gushing fans, however, seem to have mistaken perversity for daring, pretension for ambition, an odious stunt for contrarian cleverness. Willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent, “The Kindly Ones” — the title is a reference to the Furies, otherwise known in Greek mythology as the Eumenides — is an overstuffed suitcase of a book, consisting of an endless succession of scenes in which Jews are tortured, mutilated, shot, gassed or stuffed in ovens, intercut with an equally endless succession of scenes chronicling the narrator’s incestuous and sadomasochistic fantasies.
(Kakutani may well be right but I’ve never fully trusted her judgement after her effusions persuaded me to buy Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: a mediocre work partly responsible for making the “misery memoir” a credible genre.)
A far more charitable assessment of Littell’s novel was reached by Donald Morrison in last weekend’s Financial Times. He finishes his review by acknowledging that Littell at least deserves to be mentioned in the same paragraph as the 19th-century giants:
Now France, or at least an American who writes in French, has given the world a huge, untidy 19th-century roman fleuve of the sort Hugo, Balzac or Zola might have attempted. A book that tries to ask the big questions. And fails magnificently.
The use of that rather fancy French literary term to describe a single-volume novel surprised me. I had assumed that a defining characteristic of a roman fleuve (or “river novel”) is that it comprises several self-contained volumes. As suggested above, Balzac had his “Comédie humaine” cycle and Zola had his Rougon-Macquart sequence of 20 books. The apotheosis of the roman fleuve arrived with Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, which requires seven lengthy volumes to reach the point where the cork-immured Marcel is ready to begin writing À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Anthony Powell ported the format into English with A Dance to the Music of Time, a 12-novel sequence chronicling the upper-reaches of English society and its mirror-image demimonde from the 1920s to the hippy-dippy 70s. It is described thus by Anthony Burgess in 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 (pick it up if you ever come across a second-hand copy):
This is a roman fleuve or river-novel. Despite its immense length it has, like Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, to be taken as a unity.
I looked at a number of other sources but although almost all emphasize the multi-roman nature of the fleuve, none indicate that it’s a sine qua non. The Larousse Encyclopedie citation offers the rather negative summation: “Roman ou récit d’une longueur excessive,” which makes you suspect the anonymous compiler got bogged down halfway through Proust’s madeleine-induced reverie. The Anglo-Saxon perspective, from Merriam-Webster, offers a sunnier take, making the roman fleuve sound like a 3-hour Sunday lunch: “a novel in the form of a long usually easygoing chronicle of a social group (as a family or a community).” From what I’ve read of The Kindly Ones, “easygoing chronicle” is not the most obvious label.
Perhaps anything over, say, 500 pages with more than 10 characters can be so designated. Perhaps, under these lax criteria, even something like Steven King’s The Stand can be referred to as roman fleuve. Keeping a straight face while doing so is another matter.
Cover designed to attract admiring glances
(This review originally appeared in my previous blog, way back in the balmy days of 2007. I thought it was worth resurrecting in the light of the book winning for its author the inaugural £50,000 Warwick prize for writing. It’s also interesting to contrast Klein’s thesis with the direction global politics appears to be taking under the pressure of recent and ongoing shocks.)
To start on a superficial note: Naomi Klein, scourge of corporations and hollow brand iconography, is well-served by the publishing behemoth (Pearson PLC, as embodied by Penguin Books) charged with distributing her latest treatise, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Coming in a shade of yellow typically associated with radioactive and biological hazard signs, the book’s phosphorescent cover arrests the eyeballs of both prospective buyers and—perhaps equally important—like-minded strangers sharing the same commuter train or coffee shop as the reader. Against the lurid cover, the black lettering of the title has an austere cast, suggesting the contents within are likely to yield unpalatable truths that must nevertheless be choked down.
And the book does, in its 460+ page survey of free marketeers’ exploits across the globe over the past 30 or so years, present some pretty dismaying information. Beginning with the first “experiment” in implementing the laissez-faire doctrine of Milton Friedman in Pinochet’s Chile, Klein presents an exhaustive (and occasionally exhaustingly repetitious) analysis of how right-wing ideologues have exploited (and later engineered) crises to impose radical policies that would have no hope of being implemented had not democratic checks and balances been suspended or violently overridden.
Klein’s thesis is, pace Friedman and his “Chicago Boys,” there is no natural harmony between free markets and a free society. In fact, there is an inherently violent disjunction between the two: the theories of Milton Friedman (who, you might gather by now, is a sort of monetarist Sauron looming over this book) presage a society in which a select band of “winners” can amass immense fortunes while the great bulk of society—the “losers”—can basically go boil their heads. Countering this few-against-the-many economic landscape (with a touch of trickle-down to ameliorate the lives of sommeliers, landscape gardeners, and chauffeurs) are the egalitarian tendencies associated with one-person-one-vote democracy. As it’s unlikely the masses will voluntarily vote for their immiseration, Friedman’s theories can be implemented only when most people have no say in the matter—or are too afraid or stunned to raised their voices.
And this is where the “shock” of Klein’s title comes in.
Klein adopts the age-old yet fashionable metaphor of the “body politic” to demonstrate parallels between electric shock treatment administered to individual “patients” (and, later, torture victims) and the “shock therapy” acolytes of Friedman diagnosed as a remedy for ailing societies. Commencing to build on this slightly over-extended analogy, Klein points to how CIA-funded experiments conducted by Donal Ewen Cameron at McGill University, Montreal, inspired interrogation techniques that would later be codified in the intelligence agency’s “KuBark” document.
Cameron appeared to treat patients under his care like rhesus monkeys, subjecting them to electroconvulsive treatments at frequencies far in excess of standard practice. Cameron’s aim was, apparently, to “depattern” his patients so that their minds would become tabulae rasae, wiped clean and ready to accept whatever the doctor (and society) wished to inscribe.
Applied in the only marginally less darker realm of the interrogation room, Cameron’s techniques were used to create pliable detainees who would submit to their captors’ requests for information with calvish obedience.
Klein moves from the micro- to the macro- level by claiming that events such as Pinochet’s coup on 11 September 1973 and the “Shock and Awe” campaign against Iraq mirror the techniques of the torture chamber. Electrodes are attached to the most sensitive parts of the body politic as tanks roll down the street, explosions illuminate through the city’s skyline, and neighbours vanish into thin air.
In such a way entire countries are “depatterned,” rendered docile enough to accept free market medicine.
Except when they aren’t. The Shock Doctrine eats its metaphorical cake and has it by quoting the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation manual to the effect that brutality can have the unintended consequence of breeding defiance. So “Shock and Awe” can produce a Chilean revolution, but it can also lead to Iraq.
(In addition, Klein’s contention that the Falklands War produced a Pinochet-style crisis that allowed the Thatcher government to win an election seems to place rather too much emphasis on that bloody spat in the South Atlantic. Sure, bashing the “Argies” helped secure Maggie’s crushing 1983 election victory but having Michael Foot as the leader of the Labour Party probably helped her a good deal more.)
And just as Klein unearths numerous examples that demonstrate the phony connection between democracy and laissez-faire capitalism, a similar debunking of cause-and-effect can be prompted by considering how even greater “shocks” than the ones chronicled in this book ushered in economic systems that were anathema to those educated at the “Chicago school.”
As Tony Judt described in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, the Europe that emerged from World War II had been radically and brutally “simplified” with ethnic minorities purged, borders redrawn by armies, and politics shaped by the garrisons from the superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States. The peoples blinking in the cold light of peace—”troglodytes” as the anonymous author of A Woman in Berlin described the survivors emerging from the bomb shelters—would have placidly followed anyone who promised bread and soup.
A Real Shock: Berlin Skyline 1946
Following the trauma of war, the economic model that became the successful paradigm for most of Western Europe (Ireland, for example, remained mired in stagnation) was the social market economy. This is because it seemed to work: the combatants’ wartime economies were already essentially socialised and the Keynesian approach of pump-priming was perfectly suited to nations that needed massive investment to rebuild their capital stock. In addition, strong trade unions, who demanded (and were granted) high wages, were tolerated as their members help form the backbone of an emerging mass consumer society.
Up until the oil shocks of the 1970s, the “social market” model (which even the United States had in a more limited form) appeared to be the only game in town.
But when the instability and crises arose in the 1970s, policymakers in several countries turned to Friedman’s model simply because the old ways no longer seemed as effective as before. For example, increased expenditure now seemed to fuel inflation without lifting employment. In addition, Klein’s presentation of “developmentalism” as a success story in South America’s southern cone that was destroyed by crisis-lead free-market ukases ignores the fact that Argentina’s best days, for example, probably came to an end as early as the 1950s, when a self-sufficient Europe no longer required the county’s agricultural exports. Unsurprisingly, when crises of the 1970s and 1980s unfolded the juntas and political elites decided the new treatment must be better than the regimen that had apparently sparked the emergency in the first place.
It is testament to the stimulating, far-reaching nature of The Shock Doctrine that it compels the reader to argue with it, to shout back such counterexamples. Although the book draws very heavily on secondary sources, Klein is astute in the material she chooses to mine, plucking damning quotations from gung-ho reformers whose commitment to abstract notions of efficiency and performance leave no room for unquantifiable sentiment. For example, one vulture encountered at a trade show called “ReBuilding Iraq 2″ chillingly asserts “The best time to invest is when there is still blood on the ground.”
Finally, this important book will gain a readership because it adroitly taps into a growing uneasiness over the price being paid by the many for the comfort of the few: That ineffable sense of guilt that arises when watching some natural disaster besetting non-white people on your new Plasma screen.
In Benjamin Kunkel’s 2005 novel Indecision, a character speculates about a magical fruit: after you taste it, whenever you put your hand on a product or commodity, how that item was grown or manufactured becomes instantly transparent. The effect, the character muses, would be like the static shock from a door handle.
In a world lacking such an enlightening substance, reports from writers such as Klein are the next best thing. The shock delivered is invigorating.
Of the previous three “Words” posts, two have focused on words derived from Arabic and one has dealt with a Latin word. The roots of today’s word do not have to be traced too deep to reach Ancient Greek but “eristic” was employed in a relatively recent New York Times Magazine article on that epitome of modernity, the Internet.
The adjective “eristic” describes someone or something that
A) displays random behaviour
B) enables a person to learn or discover for themselves
C) wants to win an argument at the cost of reaching the truth
D) evokes a visual or physical work of art through literary description
Highlight the text in the quote box below to discover the correct answer.
It’s option C. According to the New Oxford Dictionary of English, “eristic” dates from the mid 17th century and can be traced to the Greek word eris, meaning “strife.”
The word was used in a New York Times Magazine piece that appeared 3 August 2008, which focused on the phenomenon of Internet “trolls”—posters to online forums who aim to provoke and shock other Internet users:“Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech?”
Incidentally, options A, B, and D offer rough-and-ready definitions for the Greek-originated words stochastic, heuristic, and ekphrastic, respectively.
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