break

Hubert Aquin's Hamlet's Twin (original title, Neige noir) is a strange, hallucinatory, experimental novel from Québec. But in a book concerned with twins and doubles of all kinds--though with the recognition that no twins are in fact entirely alike--it is Spitsbergen, the archipelago halfway between Norway and the North Pole, that stands in for Canada, or is Canada's shadowy duplicate.

For all its twists and turns, the plot is in some ways simple enough. An actor by the name of Nicolas is playing Fortinbras in a TV production of Hamlet, but decides that he will leave the theater to write and direct his own films. Before doing that, or as part of the break from his old life, he takes his newly-wed wife, Sylvie, on a honeymoon to Spitsbergen. Once there, however, Sylvie dies in mysterious circumstances on a camping trip into the snow and ice. Nicolas returns to Norway and hooks up with his friend Eva, who soon comes to stand in for Sylvie. He also decides that his film will be autobiographical, and so that the death of his wife will be at its heart. But he can't quite bring himself to write that crucial scene.

Where things become complicated is that the novel itself is presented as a screenplay, perhaps as the screenplay for the film that Nicolas is himself writing. So it is shot through with reflections on the nature of representation, particularly the differences between filmic and literary representation, and the relation between fiction and reality. In some ways, then, Hamlet's Twin is almost classically postmodern: the distinction between characters and the people who play them, or between author, narrator, and protagonist, are all made the object of both literary play and somewhat disturbingly undermined.

And when the scene of Sylvie's death is finally written, it turns out to be particularly gruesome, and we are left to decide whether it is the product of a particularly disturbed imagination, or whether it is the violent mark of something like the real, at least within the terms of the metafictional apparatus that the book establishes. Eva, for one, becomes convinced that the film that Nicolas is writing will end up a snuff movie, and makes haste to warn the actress who is set to play Sylvie of the danger she believes is on the horizon.

For this actress, Linda, has also become another twin of Sylvie's; and moreover Sylvie is revealed to be split in other ways, too, until the fact that her body is never recovered from the Arctic wastes (and the fact that her true fate is ultimately undecideable) is a way of telling us that this character, around who the entire novel revolves, is going to remain inaccessible for us, as much as for Nicolas or the other characters. For after all, she is but a character in a novel, even though we are over the course of time slowly seduced into concern for her fate such that the graphic representation of her violent demise comes to be shocking, however much we recognize that this is, after all, just another novel.

For ultimately, Hamlet's Twin is about the hold that fiction has upon either the viewer (in the case of film) or the reader (in the case of literature). At one point Aquin points out that one difference between the two genres is that in the cinema, the viewer can't simply put down the narrative to resume it later, whereas a reader can leave a book to be continued anon. Playing with this fact, then, just before the novel's climax the narrator suggests that now might be the time for a break "for the reader who is waiting until the end of the story to make love with an impatient partner [. . .]. Come on, a nice break! It will be easier to concentrate afterwards, and tackle what is about to happen in the story" (184).

Of course, the point is that Aquin wants to implicate the reader all the more affectively and almost corporeally into the story. We are to imagine (or perhaps in fact to act out) having sex just before the representation of a most brutal perversion (though Aquin might also suggest apogee) of sexual love.

So for all its many games, its allusions and cleverness (not least the fundamental conceit that the book itself is some kind of disturbed twin to Shakespeare's Hamlet), ultimately this is a novel that, perhaps more desperately and yet unerotically than almost any other I can think of, really wants to grab us quite violently by the short and curlies. It seeks to get beyond the fact that representation is only ever going to be itself the inevitably perverted twin of the real, to break that unequal bond in order to establish a new relationship with the reader.

extrapolation

One of my panels at LASA (the Latin American Studies Association congress) turned once more to discussion of Ernesto Laclau.

I have spent a long time engaging with Laclau (and I deal with his work at length in my book's first chapter). His is an important and influential theory--indeed, I argue that it is the most complete theory of hegemony--but it is also fundamentally flawed and fatally limited.

In essence, what Laclau has done is extrapolate from the discussions among a small number of leftist radicals in Argentina during the early 1970s, when populism seemed the only possible horizon for politics. Their question then was how could they redeem populism for a progressive project, when there seemed to be no alternative available.

It is impressive that Laclau has managed to produce an entire politico-theoretical system from the dilemma that these militants perceived in a particular place at a particular time.

But what is extraordinary, given the subsequent adoption of this system almost wholesale by so much of cultural studies, is that if we return to the Argentine situation we see that left-populism was proved totally mistaken.

For the left was violently expelled from the Peronist coalition almost as soon as Perón arrived back in the country following his long exile. Moreover, the subsequent military coup then (and even more violently) showed that populism itself had run up against its limit when it refused to acknowledge the role of the state.

No doubt pretty much any political philosophy is at root largely an extrapolation from a particular state of affairs. Antonio Negri, for instance, is in his own way also still captivated by his observation of the rapid changes in Italy during the 1950s and 1960s, and then by his part in the resulting struggles of the early 1970s.

But Negri was at least to some extent right: the dismal failure of the Italian Communist Party’s so-called "historic compromise" revealed the political and theoretical poverty of the theory of hegemony upon which Eurocommunism (so lauded by Laclau) depended.

Negri was of course wrong about the imminence of revolution both then and, I'd argue, now, though I still think that there is much to salvage from his work none-the-less. I suppose that followers of Laclau could similarly argue that hegemony theory can likewise be salvaged even after its failure in the context in which it was originally elaborated, and for which it should ideally work best.

But they don't seem to acknowledge that failure in the first place, in part no doubt because Laclau's increasingly abstract systematization serves to obscure that context quite totally for most of his commentators.

found

Boa Vista is not far from the site of Arthur Conan Doyle's "Lost World," and at times it feels that way. The capital of Roraima State in Brazil's far north, near the border with Venezuela and Guayana, is a tropical backwater.

Down by the Rio Branco, the river on whose banks the city sits, there is a small complex of restaurants, bars, and cafes, but even on Saturday night half of them were closed and the other half were almost empty. Two solo guitarists, singing Brazilian popular hits, competed for what little attention that there was. A few couples lounged around, either at the outside tables or on the benches of the park alongside. A small child running around provided what little life that there was.

Earlier in the day there had been some kind of festivities on the other side of town, part the "Festa Junina," celebrated throughout Brazil in honor of the Summer Solstice and the Saints Anthony and John. Stalls and playgrounds had been set out, and loud music blared. But by five o'clock things had already wound down, tables were being cleared and chairs stacked.

The architecture, and the history that that architecture reflects, probably doesn't help. Boa Vista is quite clearly a planned town, with wide avenues radiating from a large (but quite unfrequented) central park. From above, or rather from Google Maps, it looks rather like the "arched window" from Play School.

Though there are a few older buildings down by the waterfront, mostly (with the exception of a beautiful church, painted in strident yellow) in a state of some disrepair, the town is now characterized by broad expanses dotted with the occasional modernist monument. The cathedral, for instance, is composed of sweeping concrete curves. A stadium further out shows similar attempts to make an architectural statement. The tallest structure in town (and no doubt the only one from which a "good view" can be found) is a concrete tube whose purpose is not immediately evident. Overall, it's as though Boa Vista had been envisaged as some kind of mini-Brasilia, a means to impose order on an otherwise dauntingly vast landscape of forest and plains.

But Boa Vista's history goes back further than Brasilia's. The small cluster of older buildings has been supplemented by a concrete, three-dimensional mural commemorating the pioneers and their "courage and hope" that founded the city back in the early to mid nineteenth century. It depicts a mounted settler who is leaping out of a canoe, his arm thrusting forwards, only to land on the shoulder of an oversized, naked indigenous youth.


For this is also the territory of Macunaíma, and so in some ways of some of Brazil's founding mythology. Macunaíma, here represented as the first inhabitant of the Rio Branco, is the eponymous subject of Mário de Andrade's 1928 novel, which traces the young man's journey from the jungle to Rio and São Paulo and back again, in the process uniting ancient and modern, indigenous and white, interior and coast in the image of a single if diverse national culture.

In such narratives (and there are many other similar ones--the successful film Central Station comes to mind, for instance) backwaters such as Boa Vista are recreated less as the site of a lost world than as the place where Brazil finally finds itself.

Perhaps no more. When I asked at my hotel's reception how to get to the town center, I was directed neither to the historic nor to the modern centers, but to what turned out to be a huge supermarket some blocks from either. Are Brazilians, too, now lost in the supermarket?

elections

A couple of quick links, and some thoughts about the current state of British politics...

First, it's good to see the recent success of Sweden's pirate party. The one spark of life in an election that otherwise was pretty dismal, not least in Britain with the implosion of Labour (in itself no bad thing) but the absence of any decent alternative (hence votes for Ukip and the vile BNP).

Second, on the political mood in the UK today, K-Punk is excellent in suggesting resonances with the late 1970s and the world recently conjured up so expressively by David Peace. In his words, "It seems as if we are tumbling and stumbling back towards a version of Callaghan's era, living through a negative 1979... tumbling and stumbling out through a political-economic event horizon that marks the end of neoliberalism."

The difference is that in 1979, at neoliberalism's outset, Thatcherism did offer some kind of alternative (in the guise, of course, of "no alternative"). Politics, for better or worse, was still alive and well. And even in 1997, when Labour came to power finally almost by default, as John Major's Tories crumbled under charges of sleaze not unlike (if less widespread than) those of today, Blair et. al. did at least seem to stand for something, an "ethical foreign policy" for instance, even if those principles were soon revealed as simply an extension of the New Labour brand.

Now, however, politics is no longer about politics... It's about petty corruption. Or it's about a new constitutional project, a project to reform the voting system and (finally) finish off the reform of the House of Lords.

The turn to constitutionalism is interesting, however much it is clearly also a mark of some desperation on the part of a party that has run out of ideas and hope. It's interesting because what is at stake is the shape of the body politic itself, which is why its tied to the now wholesale disrepute of the representational system triggered most recently by stories of duckhouses and the like.

So maybe, just maybe, we are truly entering interesting times.

hook

In a strange convergence, it turns out that the disgraced financier Bernie Madoff and the young Somali sea bandit Abdul Wali Muse have both been held in the same New York detention center, prompting the question who is the bigger pirate?

Indeed, where once they were celebrated as wizards, the financial whizzkids of Wall Street, or of corrupt behemoths such as Enron, are increasingly being condemned as pirates. "Make Enron Pirates Answer" demanded the LA Times a few years ago, and now we find that Enron has "gone global" as "hedge fund pirates" stalk the world economy. The comparison with the dangerous seas off the Horn of Africa is made explicit again as we're told that "Like Somali Pirates, Wall Street Holds U.S. to Ransom".

None of this, however, should be any great surprise. As Tom Wolfe reports, financiers have long self-consciously struck a "pirate pose", not least the Hedge Fund that unabashedly goes by the name of Pirate Capital, its website featuring a series of images that switch between wooden-masted sailing boats and computer print-outs of financial accounts. As Wolfe describes the firm:

The 41-year-old hedge fund founder Tom Hudson [. . .] struck a Blackbeard pose right out in the open—Blackbeard, the pirate who took what he wanted and was accountable to no one. When Hudson launched his company in Norwalk in 2002, he named it Pirate Capital and called its hedge fund the Jolly Roger. Outside the door to his office he installed a life-size wooden figure of a storybook pirate, in full color, wearing all the pirate’s rig: the patch over one eye, the golden hoop earring through one earlobe, the tricornered hat, Captain Hook’s hook instead of a hand on one arm, the pantaloons, the peg leg, and the cutlass. He handed out baseball caps and T-shirts emblazoned SURRENDER YOUR BOOTY!, which was funny but no joke.

Of course, those who live by the sword also die by the sword: even before the current downturn, Pirate Capital faced mutiny as it tried to make its own staff walk the plank. But you could never suggest that the firm ever hid its piratical intentions. Rather, it gloried in them.

And now comes The Invisible Hook by Peter Leeson, who is apparently "Professor for the Study of Capitalism" at George Mason University. His website too is adorned with pirate imagery, and no wonder: his book is a whole-hearted celebration of piracy as a model for free-market economic practice.

Eighteenth-century pirates, Leeson want to argue, were the very model of rational economic actors whose bloodthirsty ways were merely the outcome of a commendable search for profit. Moreover, in balance pirates in fact did more good than harm, precisely thanks to their clear-eyed desire to maximize their personal earnings. Contrary to reputation, they were peace-loving democrats who merely cultivated a violent image as part of an enormously successful brand-management campaign. If we study Golden Age piracy, Leeson suggests, we learn the universal truth of the adage that "greed is good":

Pirate greed is what motivated pirates to pioneer progressive institutions and practices. For example, this greed is responsible for pirates' system of constitutional democracy [. . .]. Pirate greed is also responsible for some sea rogues' superior treatment of blacks. (179)

Mind you, Leeson also warns us that we should be careful not to learn too much from pirate self-organization: just because they arguably instituted a form of "workers' democracy" doesn't mean that contemporary corporations should feel constrained to follow suit; after all, workers would tend to support "risky decision making," while external financiers rightly reject such risks as they have "to bear the full costs of failure" (183). Oh, just imagine what a pickle we'd be in now if risk-loving workers held sway over the sensible inclinations of finance capitalists!

Ultimately, this is a superficial and even silly book. It's an exercise in market-choice dogma rather than a real investigation into the economics of piracy. Though it claims to overturn the ways in which we think about sea banditry, the version of piracy that it promotes is on the whole as abstract and idealized as the Disney caricatures that apparently first inspired the author's interest. It's just that these are idealized rational economic actors, rather than barbarous if comic exotic rogues. Either way, we get caricature. Pirates are merely the ruse for a not-so-very hidden agenda: here, a sort of duffer's guide to economic dogma.


In some ways, the failures of Leeson's book are predictable. Piracy has long served as a screen on to which all sorts of prejudices or idées fixes can be projected. As Leeson himself notes almost in passing, pirates have been cast as proto-communists as often as they have been presented as neoliberals avant la lettre; they have claimed for gay rights and queer theory as much as they have been condemned for their barbarous machismo; and they have been cast as forming ideal democratic societies as frequently as they have been represented as savages who care for neither morality nor legality.

But rather than repeating his own simplistic morality tale of greed is good, Leeson might have explored the fundamental ambivalence that enables piracy to serve as a Rorscharh Test for so many distinct political and social positions. If, for instance, the joint stock company incarnates what Marx termed the "communism of capital," perhaps these "sea-going stock compan[ies]" (41) have something to tell us about the capitalism of communism, or about a certain indecideability between a line of flight that seeks to escape all constituted authority and a constituent power that creates ever-new constitutions.

Leeson is really no more interested in politics as such than he is in history; the whole point of the book is show the purported superiority of classical economics to explain any aspect of human behavior. But he has to tangle with politics from time to time. Leeson's manifest libertarian impulses, that lead him to disparage the notion of state regulation at almost every turn, also force him to suggest a fine distinction between state government and private governance. If greed is good, then government is generally bad; but governance is praised as a form of privatized, self-regulating government. And this idealized conception of governance comes to sound remarkably like hegemony: it is voluntary, non-coercive, and contractual. For Leeson, pirate ships are not only exemplary instances of economic rationality; they are also (almost) perfectly functional hegemonies. And perhaps it is this, rather than the economic as such, that explains piracy's strange allure: it offers a counterpart to the pseudo-hegemony of the nation state, a romanticized conjunction of liberty and self-organization.

mutiny!

Edmund Fuller's edited collection Mutiny! The Most Dramatic Accounts of the Great Mutinies--On Land and Sea--of All Times was published in 1953, and you can tell. In fact, most of the individual contributions were written in the 1920s and 1930s (1907 in the case of the account of the mutiny against Henry Hudson). Hence there is much talk of "tittle-tattle" muttered by dastardly "curs" against "true-hearted Englishmen." We are in most cases to sympathize with the beleaguered authorities and to despise the knaves who conspire against them.


Still, Fuller's introduction, "The Nature of Mutiny," is of some interest, and undercuts (perhaps better, explains) the fierce dichotomies that will follow. For in Fuller's view, "mutiny is apt to have an intimate, familial quality about it" (xii). In other words, the opprobrium heaped on mutineers comes from the trauma of discovering yourself betrayed by your most intimate companions.

Hence there is an affective distinction between mutiny and revolution:

A man seldom knows personally, or is associated with, the people against whom he is moving in revolution. In most cases of mutiny a man not only is acquainted with, but is in some manner of working relationship with the persons against whom the mutiny is directed. (xii)

Moreover, this is why the shipboard mutiny is paradigmatic: at sea, men are confined together in close quarters for months or even years. And this forced intimacy is two-sided: "It can increase tensions by the inability of people to separate from each other. At the same time it offers a closeness well adapted to conference and conspiracy" (xiii).

Fuller makes a couple of other points. First, he wants to distinguish mutiny from labor disputes. Mere refusal to serve is not mutiny; it is a strike. I think the point here is that a labor dispute is not a wholesale assault on constituted power. Myself, I wonder how far this distinction can be upheld. And second, he argues that the days of mutiny are in effect over: "To all intents and purposes the traditional mutiny at sea has gone out of existence. It died with sails. Technology ended the era of mutiny" (xi). By this he means that mutiny can no longer be sustained, as there is no place to hide: "it just is not practical any longer to try to seize a ship and take it over on an impromptu basis. There's no future in it" (xi). And indeed its striking that may of the mutinies described took place so far from home that the mutineers could either try to disappear (as in the case of the Bounty) or could spend the long homeward voyage perfecting the stories they would tell before the coming courts martial (as in the case of the mutiny against Henry Hudson).

More importantly, however, Fuller suggests that it is the massification and division of labor that makes mutiny impossible on a modern ship: a few renegades may be able to take hold of a sailship, but "to seize a steamship is another story. It would take a full complement capable of the necessary engineering skills involved" (xi).

In short, for Fuller at least, mutiny is pre-industrial. It involves betrayal within the family (or the gang, the tribe) rather than insubordination from the masses within the workplace.

reassembly

Ursula Biemann's Performing the Border is an exploration of the gendered space of the high-tech maquila zone on the US/Mexican border. It focuses particularly on the murders of young women committed in and around Ciudad Juárez, arguing that this serial sexual violence is of a piece with the serialized assembly work performed within the factories themselves.

The film also examines the notion of the border and the ways in which it is represented. It opens with the notion that the border is portrayed as a wound that has to be sutured, not only by the construction of physical obstacles (fences, walls, and so on) but also through constant electronic surveillance. Yet the film further suggests that were it not for its perforations, the multiple crossings to and fro, then the border would not exist as such: it would be no more than the sum of its physical obstacles.

Hence the notion of the border's performativity, by which Biemann means a conjunction between material space and discursive space, as well as the tension between the two. The border as metaphor depends upon and is in some sense parasitical upon the gendered bodies that traverse it.

The space of the border is highly gendered in that it draws and exploits a migrant female labor force that works either in the factories, or in domestic employment, or in prostitution. For Biemann, these three placements of female labor and sexuality are complementary, not least in that the low wages paid in the factory system practically compel many women to turn to prostitution to supplement their income, but also more generally in the highly sexualized spaces of entertainment (bars, nightclubs) that have sprung up around and about.

Ironically, some of this sexualization is a result of the ways in which the maquilas' remapping of gendered relationship allows also for the expression of women's desire in new ways: it is women who are now the bread-winners of the family, or these are women who have been disconnected from the families that they have left behind in the migration north.


Overall, Biemann suggests that in the border zone a series of fundamental distinctions become blurred: the boundaries between self and other, subject and space, city and country, inside and outside, nature and artifice are also questioned as robotic, repetitive assembly work fragments women's bodies, making them disposable and marketable components.

Finally, these are the conditions in which a new kind of serial killing emerges. Serial murder is traditionally connected with industrialization and urbanization. It echoes the repetitious dehumanization typical of the assembly line. Biemann implies that this new mode of postmodern industrialization, outsourced to the fringes of the nation state, also enables a new type of serial murder in which the killer is as anonymous and interchangeable as the object of his violence. There is no one serial killer in Ciudad Juárez; there are many, perhaps a majority of whom have themselves killed only one women but who insert themselves into a standardized pattern established for them by an economic and technical logic of outsourcing.

In the border zone, as all boundaries are in flux but gender is insistently performed and gender relations brusquely refashioned, dispossessed men who find that their identity has been reduced to statistical quantity, or to the simulation of patriarchy, violently seek to demarcate the one fundamental difference that remains, that between man and woman.



YouTube Link: the film's opening few minutes.

merchants

Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Haiti: State Against Nation. The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism is a comprehensive account of Haiti from independence in 1804 to the downfall of Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier in 1986. Precisely the fact that Trouillot feels the need to go back to the early nineteenth century in order to explain Duvalierism demonstrates how deep-rooted he feels the problems that plague the country to be. And though the book concludes with the end of the Duvaliers, it hardly evidences much optimism for what would follow. As Trouillot confesses, "If wishes alone sufficed, I would have ended on a more cheerful note" (228). He is as scathing about intellectuals and others who opposed Duvalierism as he is of the sycophants who enabled it to survive so long: "For if the Duvalierists are understandably among the villains of the story, there is nevertheless no clear champion of the popular cause" (228).

One wonders what Trouillot made of the rise of Aristide and Lavalas. Unfortunately, as far as I can see he has published nothing on the topic--and my understanding is that sadly he has been quite seriously ill for some time, so is unlikely to write anything on Haiti again in the near future. He argues here, however, that "any solution to the Haitian crisis must face the peasant question" and "it must find its roots in the resources of that peasantry" (229). Perhaps, for Trouillot, Lavalas may have offered the possibility of some kind of "solution" to the deeply-entrenched crisis that he analyzes as having afflicted the country almost from the moment of its birth.

It's important to note, however, that the role that Trouillot argues for the Haitian peasantry is quite different from that taken by peasants in just about any other Latin American country. Indeed, though it is to be welcomed that Haiti is now (finally) being studied as part of Latin America, and not utterly ignored as has been the predominant tradition, Trouillot's book does also demonstrate the significant ways in which Haiti's history and social and political structure have long been very different from the Latin American mainland, or indeed the rest of the Caribbean. Above all, it seems clear that social struggles in Haiti have not primarily revolved around the ownership of land.

Whereas in most of Latin America throughout the nineteenth century and up until fairly recently, the prime source of social conflict has been the disparity between large (often absentee) landholders and subsistence farmers, this does not appear to have been the case in Haiti. Here, in Trouillot's account, the Revolution decisively destroyed the power of the landlords. Against even the desires of the so-called leaders of the Revolution, who "all agreed on the need to maintain largescale export-oriented plantations," the former slaves utterly refused such an arrangement: "they knew that the plantation system was close to slavery and they rejected it" (49). Hence very early on land was redistributed to the peasants, although this did not of course necessarily mean an end to economic or social inequity: the elites "surrendered land in order to win control of the state" (48). In so far as landlords became rulers, however, they did so as "often nothing but rulers" (76).

What resulted, then, was what Trouillot terms a "republic for the merchants" in which the state gained a high degree of autonomy (and hence separation from civil society), its relations with the peasantry mediated through the merchant class, and its exploitation exercised through taxes, particularly export taxes levied at the custom houses. "It is thus fair to say," Trouillot concludes, "that the landlords have remained, since the 1840s, in the shadow of the alliance of rulers and merchants, never again becoming an autonomous social force" (78).

In a subsequent post I will look at the conclusions that Trouillot draws from this anomalous social structure, which enables the face-off between state and nation that he sees coming to a head under the Duvaliers. I will also examine how this relates to the concept of hegemony that Trouillot employs, and particularly to Laclau (who provides the book with one of its blurbs, but I will argue singularly inappropriately).

appreciation

Ian McGuire's Incredible Bodies is a campus novel, and true the genre also therefore a comedy of academic manners--or their lack. In the spirit of Lucky Jim, the protagonist Morris Gutman is a insecure and harried lecturer (assistant professor) near the bottom of the totem pole in an English department at a university located in a drab provincial British town. He labors without success on the work of a marginal writer, and lives in fear of his colleagues, his students, and his family alike who in turn collectively regard him with a mixture of disdain and (worse still) pity.

By one of those strange coincidences, however, that drive comic novels, Gutman finds himself accidentally dispatching one of his tormentors, a horribly over-confident and over-articulate graduate student by the name of Dirck van Camper, and subsequently presents an essay of van Camper's, entitled "Total Mindfuck: A Study in Ethics and Embodiment," as his own. Gutman's luck starts to change.

Now fêted by all and sundry, not least his over-theoretical and over-sexed colleague Zoe Cable, Gutman finds himself at the forefront of the burgeoning discipline of Body Studies, and enjoying all the perks of a successful academic life: conferences in Los Angeles, approbation from the Dean, a book contract, and co-directorship of a "Research Hub." Naturally, such an idyll can only last so long. Gutman finds that his fall from grace is as abrupt as his meteoric rise. Moreover, he plunges far further than he had previously ascended: divorce, alcoholism, jail.

In the end, however, things start looking up again for Gutman. A series of further coincidences enable him to seek his revenge on those who have brought him low: directorship of the Hub is once more on the cards. But an encounter with a long-lost acquaintance who had chosen not to go on to academia from his PhD puts him right: the moral of the story turns out to a refusal of the entire game of "outsmarting other people, being clever, cleverer, cleverest" and accepting rather a "life of cheerful underachievement" (366).

For all the satire, then, (and McGuire's novel skewers academic fashion more effectively than many others in the genre) Incredible Bodies is ultimately shaped by something more like compassion. It revolves around an appreciation for what is under-appreciated, perhaps precisely because it is under-appreciated. Here, for instance, is Gutman's wife's reflection on her relationship with this consummate loser:

Her love for Morris was still there, she realised. It was like an outfit hanging in her wardrobe which she didn't wear anymore, but couldn't throw away. Every now and then, when she was looking for something else, getting ready for her day, she would notice it again. Now as he lay there, silent, perfect [. . .] she thought it possible she could try it on again, it might suit her. She took a blanket from the rocking chair and laid it over Morris so just his head was showing. He smelt of something, of what? Of Morris. She groaned at this evidence of his absoluteness. (371-72)

Finally, this novel is less notable for the comedy (though it is certainly funny) than in fact for its unexpected affirmation of a form of embodiment (habits, affection, smells) that somehow perpetually escapes the fashionability of "Body Studies."

consolation

The Wednesday quotation, part XII: Anthony Lane on "Lips" (on the right in the photo), the lead singer of Canadian heavy metal band Anvil:

How can you not love a man who thinks like that, dredging the television of consolation from the swimming pool of disaster? ("Rock Solid", The New Yorker [April 20, 2009])

Citadelle

The Saturday photo, part IX: the Citadelle Laferrière, Haiti.


OK, I know it's not actually Saturday, but I hope to say more about this in the next couple of days. I have, however, much to do in the meantime...

labor

I just saw Eugenio Polgovsky's Los herederos. It's a quite remarkable film.

The movie's topic is, essentially, child labor in rural Mexico. With no voice-over, no interviews, no title cards, and no framing or explanation, it follows a series of campesino children from diverse parts of the country as they go about their daily tasks. These range from domestic duties such as fetching firewood or water, making tortillas or feeding the family's animals, to artesanal, industrial, or agro-industrial enterprises such as carving and painting handicrafts, making bricks, helping to plough and sow a field, or working in the harvest for tomatoes or beans.

The children involved in these activities are of all ages, from (literally) babes in arms, who are on their mothers' or sisters' backs, or set down to sleep in a row of crops, to young adolescents. On the whole, however, the focus is on kids of around seven, eight, or nine years old.

What's striking first is how fully and unquestioningly these children are part of the labor process. There is very little discussion or conversation at any stage. At no point is there any protest. Equally, however, at almost no point does anybody have to tell them what to do: they already know, and simply get on with it. Moreover, with rare exceptions (a trio of young boys bringing home a mule, for instance), there is little if any larking around. Nor, on the other hand, is there much sign of boredom or even tiredness. The kids are almost entirely focused on what they're doing.

This focused attention comes perhaps from the children's sense of the importance of their labor. Or from their recognition of the risks that it involves. One young boy is carving what eventually appears to be a cat from a block of wood, first with a machete and then with a sharp knife. He cuts his finger, but continues until blood starts to get in the way of his work. He asks (what is presumably) his little brother to "get the tape." He asks him to do it "quickly," but there's no real sense of urgency, and he carries on whittling in the meantime. The tape turns out to be regular scotch tape, which he wraps around the tip of his finger before continuing on.


In short, there's a certain affectlessness that pervades the movie. It's broken from time to time: we get the occasional grin, the occasional instance of self-consciousness in front of the camera. Sometimes the smallest kids stumble and fall, but almost none of them cry or scream. No wonder the director should state that he felt fueled by "rage and awe", as though to supply an affect that was otherwise missing.

In watching his film, however, which steadfastly refuses any discourse of denunciation--indeed, any discourse at all--it is now we, the audience, who are compelled to bring to the experience the missing affect.

teta

Congratulations to Claudia Llosa and, by extension, to Peru for the success of La teta asustada, which just won the Berlin Film Festival's Golden Bear for best picture.


A couple of notes...

First, the English title Milk of Sorrow is not even close to the Spanish original. I would have translated it as "The Nervous Tit." I haven't seen the film myself yet, but I would hope that the resonance with "nervous tic" might prove appropriate. Of course, some could think that the film was a psychological portrait of a common garden bird.

Second, this here blog has tried to provide a guide to Peruvian cinema. I'd like to think that this collection of reviews is the most comprehensive to be found online in English. It even features an essay on the topic, complete with a fairly detailed account of Llosa's previous movie, Madeinusa.

Finally, for offline resources on Peruvian film, you'll have to wait for Jeffery Middents's forthcoming book. Middents himself is, naturally enough, rather cock-a-hoop at Llosa's recent success.

Japón

The final shot of Carlos Reygadas's Japón has to be one of the most extraordinary long takes ever filmed...

inequality

The following is a draft of something scheduled to appear in an upcoming number of the LASA Forum...

The central concern of literature is not so much inequality, but difference. And so it should be. Literature enables an exploration of otherness, variety, and singularity. It does so by allowing readers to feel or sense other worlds, different from their own, thereby relativizing their own experience, such that they recognize that they, too, are different. Hence literature differs from film, at least as described by the Frankfurt School theorist Siegfried Kracauer: film often encourages its spectators to see themselves as the same, as part of a mass; but literature tends to emphasize either individualism or a much more diffuse sense of commonality. Film constructs a mass audience of equals; literature posits a common readership characterized by diversity. Even critic Benedict Anderson’s famous argument about the role of the novel and novel-reading in the construction of nationalist sentiment stresses the range of sensastions to which, for instance, picaresque narratives expose their readers: a “tour d’horison,” in the case of José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento, of “hospitals, prisons, remote villages, monasteries, Indians, Negros,” whose exemplary differences combine to constitute the collectivity that will be called Mexico. In short, literature is more about imagination than calculation, experience than measurement, affect than effect.

Read more... (.pdf document)