Not the L.A. Times Book Review

Kevin Myers' "Watching the Door": Book Review

2011-04-26T10:10:00.000-07:00

This reads as if a mad picaresque tale. Myers as first a reporter for RTÉ (Irish state radio and television) and then as a freelance journalist with no real experience, finds himself wandering into savagery as he hastens north as the Troubles explode. A soldier dies next to him; he witnesses an IRA ambush; he sees children shot to death by snipers. The adjectives pile up: the conditions in 1970s Belfast lead to a life led as lies. Insane, vile, ludicrous, preposterous characterize what happens to everyday situations turned into hidden truths, revealed only behind one’s own doors, to one’s own tribe.

The prose takes one through barricades and checkpoints wittily if not to me always accurately. Perhaps as with Myers’ own encounters when he first ventured into the statelet, today’s intrepid tourists may find the “pathological hospitality” credited to Northerners but Ballymurphy, the admittedly dull housing estate in West Belfast, seemed overstated as “mesmerizingly hideous”. Myers, a mordant critic of nationalist pieties, heaps scorn on incoherent IRA Belfast one-time leader Seamus Twomey. Those for whom Twomey claimed to speak and fight, Myers insists, were rarely asked. “The vote for hostilities was unanimous among those people with guns: and those without were not consulted”. (89)

Myers pinpoints the problem inherent in Irish republicanism as “an almost autonomous state with an internal folklore that embraces and indoctrinates those admitted to its mysteries. Suffering, either inflicted or endured, is a keynote to its ethos”. (14) He contrasts Twomey’s ravings with today’s republicans with a “telegenic veneer of suited respectability”. Twomey’s the “raw product: a man indoctrinated in the ways of death, who had repeatedly and casually caused men to be murdered. These deeds meant nothing to him: his eyes were not cold but angry, as if he lived his life in a permanently homicidal rage. His soul knew no pity, his conscience no sin”. (91)

The IRA never wants to claim responsibility, as Myers argues it, for the Troubles; republicans blame a white Cortina’s disappearance before a bombing, or they blame the system. And even when blame’s justified, as with Bloody Sunday, why its fourteen sudden deaths garner far more publicity than the fifteen blown up by loyalist terrorists a month earlier at McGurk’s pub mystifies him as a reporter. But, such news ensures his own paycheck, and his pursuit of such horrors creates his own career.

Not that the British troops, their commanders, the loyalist paramilitaries, the nutting squads escape opprobrium. “Everyone in Northern Ireland lied. Everyone, without exception: republicans, loyalists, soldiers, police—everyone. Lying is easy in such a place. It is the default mode to which everyone turns when there is no consensus about truth. In the absence of an agreed reality, truth is whatever you’re having yourself”. (117-8) Myers names the victims, and makes us watch as they die. He tallies forty people he knew who died in the North, and another eight he did not, but whom he watched die. We like him are forced to remember how statistics cloak murder, and how anguish shatters those left behind.

Myers rails against the warped Fenian perspective for those trapped there by their own stubbornness. “The Northern Irish nationalist ghetto experience” ensured that those “north of the drumlins concocted stereotypes, and then lived their lives surrounded by these people of their own imagination”. (145) As the son of Dubliners who left during WWII for work in Britain, his first name and his own English accent from his Leicester upbringing mark him as close enough to be suspected for his Catholic loyalties, foreign enough to stand out among the unionists. He’s also suspected as an undercover British officer spying on the paramilitaries. He judges himself one of the only men frequenting both the Falls and the Shankill Roads as he crosses sectarian lines to drink among those thugs who—as with the sinister UVF loyalist despot “Rab Brown”-- may plot his own demise from within the pub, if later that very night.

As the decade and the Troubles grind on, Myers loses his bearings. He struggles to find work, to keep girlfriends (although he beds an impressive number), and to stay sane amidst the “exonerative moral machinery” which grinds down his resistance to republican rhetoric and unionist idiocy. As a “semi-hippy”, his loyalty to the factions supposedly fighting against imperialism turn tested as the Official IRA’s contorted justifications for capitalist gain in the service of a Marxist revolution confound even him. (See my Amazon US review of "The Lost Revolution" by Brian Hanley & Scott Millar; this cites Myers briefly.)

Everyone fighting against the Crown gets paid by it, for housing, rebuilding grants, the dole, and this turns the first war where both enemies benefit from a common benefactor and (sometimes) foe. The years wear him down, as he hears over and over how the IRA allows its members immunity for the most hideous outrages. The cant of its volunteers and the endlessly one-sided recital of their woes disgust him. “For immunity-to-consequence was both a by-product of the Troubles, and its fuel, rather as a nuclear reactor can run on its own waste”. (230)

Still, Myers for all his acerbic contempt for all involved in taking a guerrilla war into a densely populated city manages to admit the “compulsive generosity” and unbroken gallantry of a resilient and kind resident who endures in the West Belfast ghettoes with admirable good will and innate decency. He fills the narrative with vivid reportage from his perspective, starting with the Shaws Road ambush he tape recorded after he stumbled upon its IRA setup, and continuing into Robert Bankier’s last breath as a British soldier, the final moments of Rose McCartney and Patrick O’Neill at the hands of loyalist killers, and a bomb attack Myers narrowly misses meant for that “deeply manipulative” republican apologist to “revolutionary tourists”, John McGuffin. Myers provides abundant tragedy, danger, and narrow escapes.

Luckily, he intersperses happier tales. His best, such as Lady Henrietta Guinness meeting the consumers of her family’s stout in West Belfast’s pubs, combine a poignant moment with a satirical relish for the absurd that all too often became the ordinary. He loves relating his two escapades when the man of the house returned and Myers had to hide from the cuckold; his visit to his friend Barney’s brothel, surely the least successful in all of Ulster, represents a comic triumph. My favorite episode, near the end of this often dispiriting narrative, managed to lift my spirits. His hosting of Shannon, an utterly unspeakable American feminist, who befuddles Myers with her contradictions, as a splendid set piece succeeds.

His memoir confronts his own complicity as a journalist who becomes too intimate with those who he meets, for Myers looks back upon his own compulsion to mix with the natives turned friends, lovers, and neighbors. Malachi O’Doherty’s The Telling Year: Belfast 1972 (see my Amazon or "Blogtrotter" review) documents a similar experience by a fellow journalist, but a native who finds himself reporting on his own neighbors. As for Myers, he attempts to reduce the tension. He arranges a meeting across enemy lines. This backfires. He flees to another district after loyalist brutes through whom he tried to broker a truce target him. Everyone talks to him, but Myers learns that half-truths fill their admissions. He is never trusted enough by any side.

Nobody’s innocent, at least those who he estimates provided fifty silent supporters in every community for the one among them who fired back. Certainly, his judgment of the IRA also stands for the recruits and activists whom the republicans fought. Loyalists and “security forces” indulged in their own equally lucrative, cynical, and repellent campaigns. While history often earned the appeal and politics the justification for violence and intimidation, Myers denies their ideological legitimacy. “The Provisional IRA did not consult the living, only the past and future: the present meant nothing to them”. (226)

Of the catalyst for the deaths which sparked the doomed Peace People, Myers writes that the only sacrifices which mattered to the republicans were when the wrongs were committed by the other side. In this spiral of violence, it reminded me of Orwell’s 1984. As in Oceania, the IRA declared war against one if not always two of its opponents, as allies turned sudden enemies and friends were targeted as foes. This malignant maelstrom before decade’s end spun him out of the province, as he tried to escape the degradation that corroded his professional career and personal life. As I finished, I wondered what he learned, for the back cover tells us he went on to cover civil war in 1980s Lebanon and 1990s Bosnia. (Posted in slightly shorter and edited form to Lunch.com & Amazon US 4-26-11)

David McMahan's "The Making of Buddhist Modernism": Review

2010-10-14T13:50:00.000-07:00

Meditation, compassion, tolerance; spirituality, freedom, rationality: why do these adjectives characterize modern Buddhism? Why not temple worship, ancestral cult, or monastic ritual? How do the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, or Chögyam Trungpa incorporate "strategic occidentalism" into open-minded versions of Buddhism compatible with scientific rationalism, feminism, democracy, ethics, agnosticism, and liberal Christianity? How do Tibetan, Zen, and vipassana "insight" schools of practice adapt for Westernizing markets, whether in Asia, America, or Europe? McMahan mixes theory with examples to explain how both West and East interpret dharma for modern audiences--schooled in abstract thought, raised with consumer capitalism, and participants in globalizing media.

Using Donald S. Lopez' definition of a modern form that "stresses equality over hierarchy, the universal over the local, and often exalts the individual above the community," McMahan begins his study (qtd. 8). He shows how "non-negotiable cultural assumptions" based on the superiority of equal opportunity, non-discrimination, women's rights, and democratic access underlie a sympathizer or adherent's reception. Charles Taylor's three discourses of modernity apply: scientific rationalism, liberal Jewish and Christian monotheism, and romantic expressivism combine to differentiate modern processes of accepting Buddhism from traditional cultures rooted in Asian accretions that, since Victorian times, have been critiqued by reforming progressives as interfering with a purer, primitive, or truer dharma-teaching. By demythologizing, detraditionalizing, and psychologizing, the twentieth century continued the efforts of Romantics and rationalists to prove that not only might Buddhism be compatible with post-Enlightenment thought, it might better Christian or scientific models.

By transmutation, modernizing occurs through psychoanalytic concepts filtering Buddhism through Westernized lenses. Chapter Two, "The Spectrum of Tradition and Modernism," takes the case study of the "Shukden affair" to show how tensions brought in-- via psychological definitions-- to the Tibetan controversy have been heightened as the "self-understanding" of those involved has been transformed by this modern version of dharma. The earlier "science of mind" description of Tibetan Buddhism exported early last century from Thomas W. and Caroline Rhys Davids' Pali textual efforts now expands into a Western-influenced analogy of the Tibetans' own "internalizing" of deities. Monotheistic and/or rational readers came to expect a Buddhism less populated by idols. The magic that served so potently to spread the first coming of the dharma into medieval Tibet, McMahan finds, and which sold that homeland's allure to the West through Alexandra David-Neel, now becomes downplayed.

However, not abandoned, for sorcery sidles into the psyche of its Tibetan practitioners, in this Westernized scenario. For those arguing not if but how Shukden should be propitiated, the existence of a demon deity is not a projection but a reality. While McMahan opines regarding the fatal consequences of the "Shukden affair" for three men that "people are seldom murdered over psychological archetypes," (55) I was reminded of Voltaire's aperçu: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." McMahan in his text never takes on the verification of Shukden, unsurprisingly, but he does alert readers, as in the Nechung Oracle, to encounters often obscured by mass media. Pico Iyer's recent "The Open Road" discusses this awkward P.R. situation for the Dalai Lama at more length.

Unlike Iyer's narrative, or "How the Swans Came to the Lake" by Rick Fields, to whom McMahan dedicates his book (although Fields and many related historians remain unmentioned in the text itself), this study remains largely theoretical. Not intended for a general audience, it cites Rudolph Bultmann, René Descartes, and-- on the same page-- Freidrichs Schelling & Schiller & Schleiermacher. Many topics are treated in sub-sections rapidly but efficiently; endnotes remain relatively few but the bibliography and index assist researchers. A few minor typographical errors mar the presentation, but it would prove a necessary purchase for libraries and scholars.

Scholarship enters most doggedly into the middle chapters. Taylor's discourses of modernity bring Buddhism into a complicated relationship with rationalism, Christianity, and Romanticism. Countering, since the 1870s, the charges that it represents a decayed tradition, Buddhists have rallied to compete against Western liberalism as well as cohabit with its individualism, freedom of choice, and market-driven goals. This can get complicated, for the preference for one to trust inner experience, so stressed by many exponents today, finds little support in early Buddhist texts warning not to be deluded by one's interior illuminations. Romanticism, as McMahan explores at length, and then psychology, strives to create compatible areas of common ground upon which modern Buddhism can appeal to interiorized realms open to the Western or Westernized seeker disenchanted, in turn, by empirical, capitalist, and destructive modernity.

Chapter Four extends the scientific dialogue with modernizing Buddhism. The Victorian crisis of faith entered Asian cultures, demoralized over their loss of prestige against Christian and colonizing forces. Edward Said's "orientalism" and Homi Bhabha's "hybridity," beloved by critics, here shift into concepts less applicable to East-West relations regarding a Buddhism that in Japan and Tibet had separated itself long and largely from European conquest, McMahan notes. "The discourse of scientific Buddhism" drew from Darwin, European philosophy, and rational inquiry, but it also-- as with Sri Lankan nationalist Anagarika Dharmapala's bitter tirades against monotheistic importers and imperialistic exploiters, could be forged into a rhetorical weapon with which to prove the superiority of a purified, reformed dharma-teaching cleansed of idolatry, superstition, and formulae.

Such spirited discourses also went more than the one way export erroneously assumed by facile inquiry. Paul Carus' "gospel" and Henry Steele Olcott's "catechism" trained teachers and students in Asia; Dharmapala suspected Olcott of insufficient fidelity to the dharma while Carus urged a synthesis of Christianity and Buddhism into a Religion of Science. These trajectories intersected and they also clashed.

Chapter Five elaborates Romanticism within theories of art, spontaneity, and the "wellsprings of nature"; the New Age overlaps and neo-pagan sympathies flow in and out of a section that could have benefited from deeper attention to such cross-currents. All the same, McMahan excels on his inclusion of Western Buddhist theorists Anagarika Govinda and Sangharakshita. These two men reveal their own cultural assumptions when they argue for uses of art that edge closer to European Romanticism than, say, the Tibetan demotion of individual spontaneity or innovation by its "thangka" painters. The Beats and D.T. Suzuki helped impress the pattern of a Buddhism flexible, playful, or austere upon the Western counterculture and intelligentsia; how faithful these descriptions are to the original context, on the other hand, appears rather attenuated and distant from their sources. Limitations of Western models wedged back into Asian frameworks support McMahan's corrective perspective.

Yet, by such inter-cultural exposures, Westerners can better comprehend Buddhist concepts; these interpretations after all will be inevitable in any aesthetic or philosophical dialogue that relies on translation and analogy for persuasion and perpetuation of its once-esoteric precepts. Interdependence in the sixth chapter dominates the discussion. This concept appears ubiquitous for modern audiences, even when in earlier texts, McMahan shows, it occupied a less prominent niche. Historians of religion, he posits, must remember that nothing stands still, A wise reminder to scholars tempted to castigate practices as "inauthentic" or non-canonical. And, for a teaching grounded in impermanence, perhaps a sine qua non? "Tradition-in-change," he asserts, "establishes what Buddhism is empirically" (179).

"Meditation and Modernity" enlivens Chapter Seven's presentation with what today may be the most recognizable attribute of the dharma, if one increasingly separated from Buddhism itself. The privatization and detraditionalization (awkward terms, but those McMahan employs) follow the "subjective turn" along Romantic routes. Despite the persistence of the Eastern "Other" as more "spiritual, subjective, and intuitive," vs. the Western "materialistic, rational, and extraverted" contender, there persists in the Western reception of Buddhism a strong Romantic tension. Fierce individualism alongside "cosmic unity" in New Age movements and neo-pagan communities infiltrates Buddhist modernism.

Cited by McMahan, Ernest Troeltsch in the 1930s called such a belief "the secret religion of the educated classes" (qtd. 189). More context to align such Buddhism with "spiritualities of life" might have been welcome here, as these tendencies strongly color how Buddhism is marketed and perceived among many less familiar with the scholarly precision exerted by McMahan and historians of religion. Trungpa's impact, for example, upon the institutional regimen and academic acceptance of Western Buddhism by one who left Tibet to study at Oxford before entering the Aquarian Age appears barely considered as a test of modernization upon one of the West's most prominent figures of its formation. Still, professors and advanced readers may be able to widen the relevance of McMahan's arguments in future forays across this rapidly evolving field that Fields, Lopez, Stephen Batchelor, Martin Baumann, James William Coleman, and Charles Prebish among others have begun to survey.

Emile Durkheim's construction of one's "private, optional religion" earns a glance, alongside Troeltsch's "religious romanticism." These concepts guided how esoteric teachings widened into mass-marketed signifiers of modernity, freedom, and revolt against convention. McMahan nods to a telling insight worthy of much elaboration: Jewish and Christian converts to Buddhism, he suggests, might especially promote the liberating aspects of meditation within Western methods of its transmission. Another such remark deserving of development, here made in passing, comes when McMahan cites Thomas Tweed's acknowledgment of the pre-1960s reliance upon textual inculcation rather than personal instruction for those eager to learn dharma.

The countercultural move from books to gurus, reading to chanting, exotic travelogues to meditation centers has a parallel shift into another venue previously not entered by dharma transmitters. A few within the post-1960s scientific establishment wish to chart the efficacy of a spiritual discipline that might finally be verified by laboratory experiments. This dialogue with science, McMahan hesitates, may raise more questions. "Is the evocative image of robed meditators in lotus position hooked up to their individual biofeedback machines one of seamless confluence between science and meditation, the rehumanization of science, or contrariwise, the mechanization of meditation and the acquiescing of Buddhism to the very scientific materialism it has hoped to transform?" (210)

The eighth chapter moves into literary predecessors of Buddhist modernism that helped popularize among an educated readership the concepts of mindfulness and the "affirmation of ordinary life." Earlier, McMahan glanced at the "epiphany" and alludes to its social-political contexts intriguingly; later, he extends the modernist "pre-understanding for the way Buddhist mindfulness is understood today" (225). In passing, I call attention to Paul Foster's 1989 "Beckett & Zen" as one such compatible study. This may remain an elusive project to pinpoint, but the reception of Joyce, Woolf, or Proust among the types of students with a liberal arts education who then may be most open to Buddhist equivalents for the states attained by such authors does show a novel, no pun intended, application of the concepts previously defined.

In conclusion, McMahan displays the dharma's current phenomena. Postmodern inevitably follows modern Buddhism. Another work worthy of comparison to this final section goes unmentioned by McMahan; "The Monk and the Philosopher" (1996) by Jean-François Revel and Matthieu Ricard, discusses the clash and coupling of many Tibetan and Western political, artistic, and philosophical contexts that might have deserved consideration by McMahan. Future trends he includes: a backlash returning to tradition; "free-form spirituality" divorced from Buddhism, as has been attempted increasingly with Zen; privatization and commodification; social engagement; ethics; ecology; feminism; and New Age appropriation.

Case studies pass rapidly, but "The Mystical Arts of Tibet" tour by monks shows, in its program analyzed, how "global folk Buddhism" can be "translated into the language of Buddhist modernism" precisely and provocatively. (257) Among the cosmopolitan elite, the dharma uses global English as it adapts to the local vernacular. The impact of commodified, popular, and packaged Buddhism within consumer-driven, mass-market culture, conveyed by media and commerce earns passing comment. This fascinating topic may well generate in-depth follow-up.

Again, it may be a sign of the book's success that I wanted to find out far more about these quickly reviewed topics. I sense the compression exerted by a publisher upon the length of this work tilted the work more to satisfy the historian of religion than the general reader who might welcome a longer tour of the popular culture contexts. Yet, this book is more about the making than the merchandising of what has become marketed and manifested as modern Buddhism. Among its passing attractions further research will emerge, into the impermanent, ever-changing parade of the dharma's production, importation, and reception across the world.

Note: (Coleman, Foster, Iyer, and Revel & Ricard have been reviewed by me on Blogtrotter and Amazon US summer 2009.) Book photo: Article from "The Diplomat" of Franklin & Marshall College, where McMahan teaches: "My, How Buddhism Has Changed."

This is a copy of my review in "The Journal of Buddhist Ethics"17 (2010): 41-49. Cross-posted today to my regular blog, "Blogtrotter."

Patricia Monaghan's "The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog": Book Review

2010-09-17T13:15:00.000-07:00

Believe me, I approached this book with plenty of misgivings, given the title and the promotional hints. I do not know how much is savvy marketing--the more academic side of Monaghan's here put forth, as opposed to her being the author of "Wild Women," or the one subtitled "myth, marigolds, and mulches". Her eponymous web domain seems to have faded (when I wrote this in 2005, but now it's back) but looking for information about her as I was reading this, she is noted as a leading popularizer of the Goddess and the reconstructed rituals that rejoin (as in the root of "re-ligion") people to nature. This insistence likewise permeates this 2004 investigation into "the landscape of Celtic myth & spirit."

It's carefully written. I usually "heard" her voice on the page, and as she notes in an aside, I assume that much of what she shares was freshly conveyed in a daily notebook on her travels and through her studies, and then expanded and mulled over much further before coming to print here. I admire Monaghan's determination to excavate using etymology. With a solid grounding in Irish as well as a rare combination of scientific training, her ecologically aware, if persistently soft-focused, depictions of the intermingling of the spiritual, the ecclesiastical, the historical, and the anecdotal make for quite an ambitious product belying the quick title-and-cover glance that casual prospects might give to this if in a New Age bookstore's "Celtic & Druidry" section. More power to her and her readers--they'll pick up more learning and not only lore than they may have bargained for. But you have to put up with, or become enchanted by, visions of she and her pals declaiming Yeats to the wind.

She eschews footnotes but acknowledges any idea or source not her own, and an annotated booklist and source locator appends the book. (Errata: Lughnasa appears also as Lehynasa on p. 273; Kevin Danaher's book was not printed by Cork's Mercier Press in 1922 but 1972--otherwise I found no glaring errors or typos, impressively.) Honestly, New Age is not the first shelf I turn to when seeking books of Irish interest, but you need to be as eclectic and alert as is Monaghan when searching for elusive traces backwards into the "symbiosis" that she posits exists between Christianity and paganism in Ireland, over more than 1500 years.

Other reviews have been more impressionistic, but let me give you a quick view of what in Irish is called "dindsenchas," as Frank MacEowen in his blurb calls "place-bonding stories," that tie toponymy to theology, ecology, and psychology in Monaghan's circuit sun-wise around the island. Beginning in the West, at Gort in Co Clare, she ties her Burren travels to the Hag, or "cailleach." Then she goes to Connemara for the "red-haired girl" and fairies--who are not Disneyfied delightful sprites. Up to Sligo, Mayo, Roscommon on the trail of Medb (Maeve) and the Morrigan, amidst Cruachan, Knocknarea, and holy wells. Then northerly for Emain Macha and Newgrange, with her own theories about a feminized Sun and the Irish ritual landscape thoughtfully told.

A chapter inevitably a bit apart relates her own struggle with the North, and her self-awareness of being seen as the Other. It's clumsier and more self-consciously told, but more direct and reality-based. She confronts her own resentments of those she perceives as eying her differently. It's a bold departure from the rest of the book, and she does not shy away from reality. She cannot offer any new insights, and she probably knows this, but her encounter with her darker side balances her cheerful nature throughout the rest of her travelogue.

I think her musings here about rapacious and/or romantic Viking ancestors accounting for her blue eyes went a bit overboard, and I don't doubt that Monaghan might agree and/or battle me into giving in to her determination to include her reveries--she's that kind of fair-minded investigator--but at least she does not back down from the strength or the fancy of her convictions. This is the model she admires and seeks to project into the Irish past as well as to gain sustenance from the faint but stubbornly grooved and cyclical tracks of its past power for our present. I did wonder at times why [feeling as I read a bit left out; compare neo-paganism, itself about 70% female practitioners] so few men compared to so many women sought to resurrect and rekindle its meanings and symbols, but the feminine-dominated powers, as she argues, gain the prominence even in the old tales and placenames more than males. (As in Ireland-Eriu, the latter meaning "fertile field," a rare point she does not explicitly define here for herself).

Monaghan tends to follow her instinct wherever it leads. She does not avoid the scholarly, but never lets it crush her soul. She has found a much more gentle and inspirational (in the root sense) sacralized landscape than I have encountered in Ireland. She has the advantage that many Irish Americans do not of direct connections and still-connected cousins due to more recent immigration in her family. This allows her more of a base from which to leap out across what she views ahead of her, intellectually, spiritually, and physically, This is a bold attempt to confront what always stoked my own thoughts: how far beneath today's Irish psyche and habits and mentality do you have to scratch before the pagan emerges?

Helped by her ability to navigate pop culture, dictionaries, her own widespread support network of family and friends, and her inbred wanderlust from her being raised in Alaska, she brings her pagan and her Christian sides together most evidently in the visit to the unprepossessing exterior of the re-lit pagan fire for Brigit in Kildare. This joins the two realms in which she and so many Irish, according to her study, wander. Then, down to the sacralized cow, Tara, and the central Uisneach hill for fire ceremonies and Bealtaine. The scholarship dragged a bit more than elsewhere, but coupled with a moving meditation on the death of her friend Barbara, this makes for an honest encounter again with mortality. She points out that it's not the inevitability of death we fear, but its timing.

Finally, she rounds out the tour in Kerry. She did not connect Mis with Austin Clarke's 1970 poem "The Healing of Mis," or cite Emmet Larkin's 1970s model of the devotional revolution of the later 19c that transformed Ireland into the 20c stereotype of a priest-ridden backwater by extirpating many remnants of its folk beliefs, but her thoughts on the pagan sexuality nearly extinguished by a post-Famine Church make for convincing speculation. Danu's "paps" and how its worshipers erected atop her nipples as stone cairns above a gentle-breasted hilled landscape make for a perspective that, as she asserts, only a woman as herself noticed after so many male-dominated studies never had--or at least demurred from recording! In the wrap-up chapter, she and a friend go in search of first-hand folkloric recovery of their own sacred place, Garravogue near the Cavan border. They circle back and extend the circle into a spiral, fittingly, as they revolve around Ireland's own places made holy.

Now, Monaghan has commonsense, more than some who have written about her book credit her with in my judgment as this Connacht-blooded Irish comments to/of another, her family from a point about equidistant from my two family origins only a few miles. By the way, her comments about the inevitable assurance from the locals of "only a mile more" and "sure you can't miss it" ring true for any stranger in search of rural landmarks, ruins, or simply the right road. She remarks on the county-town-parish-townland (she calls the last "farm") narrowing that Irish engage each other with when first nosing about the other's bonafides correctly, as I am of her now. This type of sensible observation, I hazard, makes her more observant and less beguiled by what she ponders in the more ethereal and filtered views she frames--and to be fair she mentions the rain and mud too when they often appear. I learned a lot from her, found that she often stayed one step ahead of me on her associations with the literary and historical and mythic resonances from what she traversed to keep me nimble, and that she wrote sensitively (if a bit too purple-prosed in parts, although these were helpfully often italicized) about her own heartfelt recoveries with the tangible traces of ideas and events long thought intangible.

Skeptics, rationalists, and unbelievers would hate this book, but I prefer, as she does, to think that few actually deny all hope of some presence outlasting our own. This book, challenging in many parts and not all that wince-making in others (these sections are relatively few to her credit), will teach any seeker a lot about facts as well as fable. Monaghan digs into the former to find the latter, and vice-versa.

P.S. A book only published in Ireland, the similarly unfortunately titled "Emerald Spirit," (Cork: Mercier Press, 2003) by another American, David P Stang, makes a wonderful counterpart. John Moriarty's mythopoeic and densely argued work may be too recondite for many, but also may please readers of Monaghan; Clare seanachie Eddie Lenihan's penetrating look into faerie lore and fact, "Meeting with the Other Side," (reviewed by me as are some of Moriarty's books) also is highly recommended if you want more about the play and peril between our realm and that elusive presence still said to swirl about the Irish countryside. Mapped well recently also by Cary Meehan in her "Traveller's Guide to Sacred Ireland" (also reviewed by me).

Slightly revised from my 2005 Amazon US review, as Patricia-Monaghan.com is up again. In earlier form also published by The Blanket as "A book better than its title" in 2005. Posted to Lunch.com 9-17-10. See my 2007 article that cites Monaghan and other Irish-language learners who come from America to learn Gaeilge in its "native habitat": "Making the Case for Irish through English: Eco-critical Politics of Language by Learners." It's more lively than that title implies.

Joshua Cohen's "Witz"

2010-06-21T14:21:00.000-07:00

This cultural satire, or theological parable, or existential lament, invents an exhaustive excursion through the obsessions generated by the death of all but one of the Affiliated. The words derived from "Jew" never appear. Their absence haunts this ambitious novel, subtitled "The Story of the Last Jew on Earth."

Their erasure may recall Georges Perec's fiction without the most common letter, "e," translated as A Void; Perec was orphaned during the Holocaust in France. For Joshua Cohen’s own version of a "lipogram," a work with a missing symbol, Benjamin Israelien’s void after another, now total, global decimation of the Chosen People erodes him from the inside out. His inauthenticity as a Jewish survivor provokes the animosity of the rest of the world.

In a manner less than clearly explained by Cohen, nearly everybody else chooses to become "Affiliated." They take on the characteristics of the dead. For, in a sudden, inexplicable event, the Jewish people (somewhat inflated in numbers to the formerly lucky "eighteen" number of millions) perish on Christmas Eve, 1999. A few remain, the firstborn, but only until the following Passover. Then they perish. Ben alone remains to become what turns out more the scapegoat than the Messianic harbinger with tidings of comfort and joy. Cohen stretches his somber saga over eight hundred pages.

The novel's span challenges neat summation. Briefly, his family and his birth-- full grown, bearded, hirsute—takes up the first couple of hundred pages with fine print and extended riffs. Cohen relishes food, babble, trivia. The demise of the Jews quickly gives way to their kitsch revival, "in a language nobody speaks but everybody’s studying."

Cohen hurries over whatever sense would be in this catastrophe, oddly. He grants us a few powerful scenes of media coverage of this sudden death. Logic diminishes; a reader must put up with whatever Cohen dishes out to a put-upon Ben and the sketchily drawn cabal that unsuccessfully manages his marketing.

This set-up does allow for send-ups of motivational speakers, a surreal array of ministering Marys who never get the full attention I anticipated, and a suggestive interlude among the Hopi who await their own universal calendar-flip. Cohen likes lots of words. "Lunkfast, linner, and dunch" step forward. I favored a night "lunesilvered," "groves nymphabandoned," "thanatopsical tourists," and holiday giftwrap in "Fluseason Green.”

He makes us pay attention to the page. Via Joycean delight or Pynchonesque wit, we do gain enjoyment, however parsed out. The reader feels grateful for small rewards. It takes patience to stay afloat amid so many verbal depth charges. Submerged into this book, you gasp for air. The force of Cohen’s atmosphere presses down on you.

Cohen tends, as in a Cormac McCarthy-like passage about apocalyptic chaos, or one about Cities of Refuge as living hecatombs in the desert, to rush past potentially promising situations. The novel pulls Ben across the desert, with "the sadness inspired by trash that will outlive you, that must." At Los Seigeles (Vegas), he enters a hotel, its interiors "brushed like the hair of virgins, marble veined like the legs of old, and glass as fragile as their bones." Death outlives lust in this sober if earthy telling.

The Hopi appear to offer Ben a chance to compare his dystopic revelations with their end-time predictions, but Cohen shoves Ben past this opportunity. He compulsively returns to pun-filled, bitterly comic, and harshly grating recitals of Jewish urban angst. It's back to Joysey, and New York City, "the land of the locusteaters, drinking the blood of their neighbors for overpriced brunch."

Ben stops at where he would have gone to school, “yet another inheritance deferred.” There, "chalk remains from the happy clap of appreciative erasers smeared into the spirals of shoes out on permanent recess." Cohen can write, certainly. But does he write.

He spirits off Ben, sort of, to Palestein along with a red heifer, in a section too casually told, and also, sort of, to Polandland. There arises Whateverwitz, the camp where the few left non-newly Affiliated meet their doom. "In order to Polish them off," the few resisters are “punctually leisured to death." These passages evoke Kafka, and call on him from the graveyard. They can captivate or chill the reader, but the narrator hastens us as if an impatient tour guide past their detailed, but distanced, intrigues before we can let their emotions sink in.

It's no wonder Kafka and his Castle edge into the setting at this re-created Whateverwitz, in an inverted "Messianic victory of the bornagain." Why the rest of humanity would wish to convert never gets answered. (Who supervised their conversions after the demise of the firstborn, with all those but Ben born-Jewish dead, I wondered?) People simply change, in a dream logic that pulls along enigmatic, infantile, behemoth Ben against this current of subversion.

I felt that Cohen insisted on a chiasmus -- an inversion of Jew and non-Jew, persecution and acceptance -- that left him no other choice than this for his story. God hovers off stage, as a truly alienated Doktor Froid tells Ben. "We're the first people, also the last; the two qualities negate each other," which leaves the now-unearthly, earth-entrenched Affiliated "fascinated by the end of it all." As for their purported Creator, this One "doesn’t live where he works, doesn’t bring the office home with him, no mixing business with pleasure." Transcendence refuses to descend for Ben’s Messianic disguise.

This pace barely bothers with plot. Cohen's concern’s not with character. Instead, Cohen determines to force us to accept his world based on ideas, language, and monologues more than dialogues. Perhaps as with Torah or Talmud, this text documents an anthology of human foibles and restrictions and pleas rather than a seamless literary narrative, despite (or in spite of) its very craft.

Cohen seems to want to spite us as he does his protagonist and his caricatured antagonists — with whom the author often barely bothers to account for their sinister actions beyond a perfunctory directorial nod. This attitude distanced me from Ben. I could identify about as much with Ben as with Pantagruel and Gargantua.

A Rabelaisian bout of cunnilingus with a stand-in for his dead mother (it's a long story, take my word for it, and the only extended sexual encounter in a book that sorely ached for the saving grace of the erotic) leaves Ben with the loss of his tongue. With such material dished out in such heaps, the difficulty of empathizing with Ben or his handlers or walk-ons flitting about wearied me.

Hours stretch to days, for a reader facing prose that nears a Hebraic Finnegans Wake. Cohen's omniscient narrator reflects how "we live because we stay inside -- that only with roof and walls are our lives saved; on the lawn and behind its fence, the car parked, the gutters blooming, there we erect our truest Temple." A bookish insularity permeates these pages; the world outside, so distorted, warps into a grim spectacle.

The firstborn before they will succumb to another plague wonder: "what is a question? How to answer. Will you be at all. Or will you opt out. Don't you want to be. When you're all grown up to dead. Their seder to be interrupted -- libelous, the matzah weeps blood. The seat at the head of the table is empty and will be forever. You'll get used to it." Passages like this may elicit emotion, but they nestle within adamantine blocks of prose. Chunked chapters may crush the patience of all but the few readers nimble enough to catch the Yiddish, the Hebrew, the Judaica tossed here into a tall, deep scrap pile.

Cohen may despair over his own affiliation. Ben stands at the waves of the Pacific: "... at least, that's what we’re constantly telling ourselves: you want out, you got out; forget, forsake, change your name and your address, your nose and your friends and those pants, see what I care, go and intermarry the winds..." Cohen's creation's shrouded by Ben's conception as doomed by "life passedover, the unlivable liveddown, the divine decree of unlovable fame as proclaimed by prevailing silence."

In its messianic themes, breadth of Jewish references, and dense erudition, Witz recalls Arthur A. Cohen's In the Days of Simon Stern (1972). In its headlong final rush into the evocation of the Holocaust by its last survivor, Joseph Cohen, it echoes passages from George Steiner's The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.(1980). This stand-alone coda of thirty pages as one death sentence after a life lived in pain and struggle is titled "Punchlines." Breathed into one long recital -- after eight hundred pages of Ben’s tale, which lurched about as its protagonist did in an unstable, wobbly gait -- the novel's last gasp finds its stand-up routine that knocks them dead, a negative correlation, its center of gravity.

In "Punchlines," jokes don't get a rise out of you, but settle into an ironically respectful Jewish tone. ". . . Corfu’s deportation that goaded load took a month the Hungarian moon over Reich and raum and when the Egyptians finally arrived at Auschwitz everybody was already Tod dead to the Zugang the chaingang the gained slain world the love of my Birkenau Mutter whom last I saw would've whispered in my father’s ear slicedoff severed and served to a dog or a God what a waste of a perfectly good train she was funny. . ." Here, the tale casts its dark magic, however attenuated and horrible to behold.

In its demands, Witz nears Tolstoy's epics in length and Kafka's fables in tone. Combine these with Ben's character of gargantuan appetites, albeit one who eludes the sympathy of the patient, if baffled, reader. The result may be less successful than some of Cohen's storied predecessors, yet it may surprise you. A few readers may undertake Cohen's rigorous wake. It resurrects linguistic excavations and intellectual fixations as a narrative "Exodust" that burrows into a tome nine years in the making. (A shorter version of this posted 6-21-10 to Amazon US and my other blog' "Blogtrotter." The longer version as above 6-25-10 to PopMatters.)

Jillian Venter's "Gothic Charm School": Book Review

2010-05-14T14:05:00.000-07:00

"Nice costume! Halloween is over, freak!" How should a black-clad denizen respond? "The Lady of the Manners" explains Goths to the rest of us-- and "mundanes" to Goths. Once you wear black, should you ever talk back? Can Goths age gracefully, under umbrellas and sunscreen? How do you get makeup stains off the sink? What one-liners have Goths heard far too many times from the likes of gawkers like you?

Expanding her Gothic-Charm-School.com "gothy advice column," Venters in this spirited primer encourages: "Good manners for Goths, why you shouldn't dress like the Crow, or how, if you're going to wear whiteface, you should make sure you apply it on your damn ears and neck." (5) She emphasizes how "Goth is a subculture and (for some) a way of life, not an emotional template." (19)

This underlies her whole approach. She denies any "secret Goth cabal." She patiently relates the historical background, pop cultural contexts, snarkiness and cattiness, gossip, accoutrements, sartorial fripperies, sounds, and sights that Goths gravitate towards. She explores her subculture wittily.

She advises how Goths should act among themselves, online, at jobs, and in public. "You chose to dress that way, which means you don't get to complain about the attention your appearance garners." (186) Politeness rules, which appears to be a tricky point among an assemblage so devoted to gatekeeping, backstabbing, and mopes. A sub-heading is telling: "Why no one has an 'original' Goth look, so get over yourselves already." (199)

Her later chapters address her cohort, with plenty of detail on couture, cosmetics, and wardrobe-- not costume. Aware of how rumors about doom, depression, death, and decadence dog her trenchcoated, booted peers, she also reminds "Snarklings" that the way Goths respond to both taunts and inquiries represents for "norms" the way that those leaning towards the dark side will be perceived. "The Goths who express themselves through their wardrobe aren't doing it to draw attention to themselves; they're applying their preferred aesthetic and bringing the world around them closer to what they want it to be." (45)

Speaking from decades of experience, she relates to worried parents, co-workers, friends, and possibly romantic partners (I wondered if Goths ever date exogamously?) how to behave around crushed velvet and heavily mascaraed companions. She admits her own predilection to dress everyday as if the evil twin of Mary Poppins. But she warns neophytes: "Think long and hard whether you have the physique to wear the costume; it is a sad, harsh fact that nothing becomes an object of ridicule faster than a heavier-set person dressed up as a character previously portrayed by Brandon Lee." (98)

Taking on a persona that one must dress the part for takes courage. Yet this also leads one into conformity. Venters directs her Goth audience towards lightening up. She twists what people inside and outside her charmed circle expect. "Not only does the Lady of the Manners now derive quite a bit of amusement from her over-the-top moments of gothness, but she tries to hone and refine the more clichéd aspects of herself in order to make them the more perfect examples of those clichés." (113)

This reminded me of Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex keening, so early in the punk movement that paralleled my own coming of age, "I Am a Cliché." Commodification with Hot Topic (and Emily's Strange, strangely unmentioned) signals "mainstream acceptance" rather than prolonged denigration. Venters navigates deftly between the two perils of giving in to what the subculture pressures a "Goth cabal" (or should it be "cabbalist"?) initiate to imitate-- and the stronger current that pulls one outside into making a living. She spends considerable time on socializing, rumor-peddling, and gossip, as these, reinforced by clubbing and costume balls, strengthen the subcultural bonds Goths, as with any such group (say, sports fans) thrive among.

Paul Hodkinson's Goth: Identity, Style, and Subculture (2002) studies this phenomenon as a participant-observer sociological thesis; Nancy Kilpatrick's The Goth Bible: A Compendium for the Darkly Inclined (2004) intersperses comments from Goth respondents with her own topical entries. As with Gavin Baddeley's Goth Chic: A Connoisseur's Guide to Dark Culture (2006), defining Goth reveals its widespread (post-)Romantic aesthetic within past and present Western society. Whereas many Goth surveys tend towards the encyclopedic, Venters as "Lady of the Manners" adopts a personal, chatty persona.

This makes her "Essential Guide for Goths and Those Who Love Them" a welcome, brisk introduction. As with some of her predecessors, however, there's minimal attention to sexuality (as opposed to flirting) or music (as opposed to brief discographies) given their role in the scene. Music's treated only in her penultimate chapter.

For me as a preternaturally pale, (post-)punk veteran, "Goth-friendly" by her classification but admittedly on the outside looking in, I wished she'd covered music much more. But she carefully expounds on club etiquette and proper conduct. I note how often decent behavior goes unmentioned in any coverage of this subculture (or any such, for that matter). Many Goth overviews downplay its sounds and dampen its erotic sensations. Perhaps these elude explication. The visual appears more readily transmitted. Venter's enchanted by signifiers: the dress, the looks, the ambiance-- as signs by which Goths identify each other, congregate for safety and camaraderie, and reinforce their own codes and defense mechanisms.

That defense must be established seems a circular action. Goths have set themselves apart, so they may bristle and snarl back when outsiders edge too close, touch their finery, taunt their stance. Venters steps into this standoff. She reminds her fellow creatures of the night how etiquette confers dignity. The more stereotypes are diminished, the greater the hopes for Goth's acceptance and sustainability.

What of Goth's future? She speculates on a Steampunk-Goth evolution. I share her hopes that "Eldergoths" may age gracefully into "subcultural migration" and cross-fertilization. Concluding, she predicts that her fellow revelers need not "grow out of" this embrace of the macabre, the haunted, the morbid underside of what's relentlessly peddled to all of us as a sunny, cheerful, bright-- and forced-- demeanor. Morbid but not moribund-- now there's a forecast any blanched, parasoled Goth might smile up at. (Posted Amazon US 5-15-10.)

Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day": Book Review

2010-04-29T21:18:00.000-07:00

It's set a hundred years ago but not much has changed. "This big parade of modern inventions, all spirited march tunes, public going ooh and aah, but someplace lurking just out of sight is always some lawyer or accountant, beating that 2/4 like clockwork and runnin the show." (33)

Investigating Anarchists in Chicago, Lew's "down in the deadfalls where the desperate malcontents convened, fingerless slaughterhouse veterans, irregulars in the army of sorrow, prophesiers who had seen America as it might be in visions America's wardens could not tolerate." (51) This novel fills with unease, unrest, and privation.

Modern chemistry replaces alchemy as capitalism "really gets going," true, as Merle says. But, Webb suggests: "Maybe 'capitalism' decided it didn't need the old magic anymore." He goes on: "Why bother? Had their own magic, doin just fine, thanks, instead of turning lead into gold, they could take poor people's sweat and turn it into greenbacks, and save that lead for enforcement purposes." (79) This tale pits the haves vs. the have-nots, relentlessly; both appear trapped by their ideology.

After their Arctic expedition by balloon, each of the Chums of Chance gaze "at the enigmatic miniature he had purchased, representing a faraway disposition of rocks he would probably never get to see, and try to glimpse, even at this degree of indirectness, some expression of truth beyond the secular." (126) The yearning for a higher meaning permeates this panoramic, unsettling, recondite, and arcane narrative.

It's as if a brane slithered next to our world for a slightly alternate history, a counternarrative full of what science fiction and adventure tales might have imagined for early 20c readers of pulps, westerns, and Oriental mystery. "Let us imagine a lateral world, set only infinitesimally to the side of the one we think we know, in which just this has come to pass." (230). The era described, at the end of the Victorian reign, sounds not much different than what transpired, in its "grim realities." Aging and Death are resisted, within "this all-enveloping pantomime" enacted by twin professors Renfrew and Werfner, England and Hanover, temporal flow of Time against sinister Power half-glimpsed.

This malevolent tension between those who favor the spirit and those who triumph by the sword permeates this plot. As with Asia, where "two distinct versions" endure: "one an object of political struggle among the Powers of the Earth-- the other a timeless faith by whose terms all such earthly struggle is illusion. Those whose enduring object is power in this world are only too happy to use without remorse the others, whose aim of course is to transcend all question of power. Each regards the other as a pack of deluded fools." (249)

Into this standoff, time-traveling agents enter. Mr. Ace: "Glossy black eyes, presented as weapons in a duel. The gently damaged, irrevocably educated eyes we associate with the visiting dead. When he smiled, or attempted to, it was not reassuring." (415) The trespassers back from the future do not bring solace.

Neither can science, even theories of higher mathematics where more than one character seeks answers. "Vectorism, in which Kit had once thought he had glimpsed transcendence, a co-existing world of imaginaries, the 'spirit realm' that Yale legend Lee De Forest once imagined he was journeying through, had not shown Kit, after all, a way to escape the world governed by real numbers." (675)

Meaning may beckon earthier pilgrims too. Shambhala in Central Asia possibly exists; the quest for a terrestrial paradise consumes the next chapters that particularly engrossed me. The Pure Land sought by Buddhists, the rebirth by penance, the advent of The Compassionate, Tibetan tales of wisdom all flicker as if in a comforting mirage, or fevered vision. But transcendence passes and again, war and murder stalk the Balkans and Venetian shores closer to the heart of a Europe to be torn by hatred and profited from by Capital.

Yashmeen leaves an Austrian passage as "she gazed backward at iron convergences and receding signal-lamps. Outward and visible metaphor, she thought, for the complete ensemble of 'free choices' that define the course of a human life. A new switching point every few seconds, sometimes seen, sometimes traveled over invisibly and irrevocably. From on board the train one can stand and look back, and watch it all flowing away, shining, as if always meant to be." (811) A very Buddhist concept, amid the chaos to be unleashed by spies and soldiers around her and her companions.

Contrast with Cyprian's filtered thoughts, from "this bottom dead center of the European Question, this bad daydream toward which all had been converging, murderous as a locomotive running without lights or signals, unsettling as points thrown at the last minute, awakened from because of some noise out in the larger world, some doorbell or discontented animal, that might remain forever unidentified." (845)

Later, out in Mexico during its revolutionary melee, Frank hears a 'brujo' muse about the destruction wrought by progress. He wonders: "who at some point hadn't come to hate the railroad? It penetrated, it broke apart cities and wild herds and watersheds, it created economic panics and armies of jobless men and women, and generations of hard, bleak city-dwellers with no principles who ruled with unchecked power, it took away everything indiscriminately, to be sold, to be slaughtered, to be led beyond the reach of love." (930)

Every few pages, no matter the convoluted plot or the erudite references, passages such as this leap out of the prose. This makes this book such a powerful read, a novel of ideas, yes, but one where-- and I differ a bit from conventional criticism of the book here-- you do care about the impact of lofty schemes upon little people. The characters do flit and pass and I wish I had a scorecard to keep track. The aims of this famously difficult author (thanks for those Wiki-linked annotations) may be ambitious as before, but there is an outrage at inhumanity which makes this much more than a parody of styles, a catalogue of registers. The Albanians watch the intruders from the West: "what were they doing out here this late in history?" (948) We, like them, wonder. Caught up as they all are in a geopolitical, intellectual, puzzling game, we have no clue either.

The Tree of Diana, in film-crazed Hollywood, will then blossom, silver amalgamated with quicksilver under a lens, nitric acid added to animate it. For this element too is alive: "Has its own forks in the road, choices to make just like the rest of us." (1060) Convergences and coincidences in a book begun and ended with the Chums of Chance fill this narrative. Even the natural world shares the patterns grooved deep.

It's a human book, for all its superhuman scale. Yashmeen's love for Cyprian, his for a higher calling, the familial ties that try to resist the juggernauts of death machines driven by Capital: touches of intimacy soften the epic, relentless, global scale of this ambitious novel. As with an epic, the individual struggles to stand out in a starring role. The cast threatens here to exceed thousands.

Pynchon attempts to straddle three decades of planetary chaos while focusing on a dozen or so people caught up in the whirlwind. The pace lags, as when the crew of the "Inconvenience" floats over the Great War and the refugees in its aftermath as if far too detached from the human suffering. I failed to feel as if I was in Mexico during the Revolution, or lost in the Balkans or studio-birthed L.A. except for momentary passages. The little men and women do get crushed, after all, on the other hand, and this plays into the difficulty readers may have in reconciling their humanist expectations for the novel to the pitiless, yet fitfully compassionate movements of this grand scheme. This telescopes and then draws back, over and over.

Years pass in a paragraph as the Soviets rise and the Tsar falls yet another paragraph is given over to a debate about potato salad among Iowan transplants to L.A. That paragraph, however, took place a mile from my house. So, I attest in the local geography back then applicable, the author got all his left turns right and knows to his dubious credit as we natives may that rats do nest up in palm trees.

In the end, as we know from the Colorado mines and Haymarket and the L.A. Times bombing all attributed to Anarchist terror rather than plutocratic suppression, the "commonwealth of the oppressed" succumbed. Scarsdale Vibe imagines above Denver where the strikers are to be mown down or driven off what may not be so much prescient ten decades ago as predictable: "Where alien muckers and jackers went creeping after their miserable communistic dreams, the good lowland townsfolk will come up by the netful into these hills, clean, industrious, Christian, while we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos befitting our station, which their mortgage monies will be paying to build for us." (1001)

Was it worth the dozens of hours? Yes, uneven as it was, it would not let go of my imagination. I'll take its ups and downs over smoother paths worn down by more timorous novelists and predictable thinkers anytime.

(Posted to Amazon US 4-28-10; P.S. On the current Tea Party resistance to Big Government and not Big Business, see Tamerlane's "A Thin & Weak Brew"-- and my comment re: this novel and anarchism.)

Kevin Kiely's "Francis Stuart": Book Review

2010-04-03T15:57:00.000-07:00

Kevin Kiely. Francis Stuart: Artist and Outcast. (Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2007) €22.95; paper. vii. 365 pp.
Review for 'Etudes Irlandaises' to be published there in shorter form.

A quarter-century of a friendship between a student and an elderly author frames this authorized biography of Stuart. His marriage to Maud Gonne’s daughter Iseult, contentious relationship with Yeats, and imprisonment for anti-Treaty gunrunning earned this troubled young poet attention even before his stint in WWII Berlin. His broadcasts from the Nazi capital gained him infamy, his alleged collaboration and purported antisemitism continued to rile critics a half-century later, and he remained to the end of his long life, as Kiely’s subtitle situates Stuart, opposed to conformity.

All the while, he wrote, over twenty-five works. Most of his novels– often written in haste, for money, and under stress-- remain out-of-print, often deservedly; on the few in print, notably his autobiographical fiction Black List, Section H (1971), his vexed reputation rests. As an outsider committed to relegation to the margins as his portal into truth, aesthetically and personally, his stubborn refusal can annoy. Much of Kiely’s thorough account finds his patient biographer struggling to explain Stuart’s mind-set. As prickly as his prose-style can be in its hesitant, awkward, and determined expression of moral confusion, spiritual longing, and social malaise, Stuart’s ambiguous frankness permeates his best writings.

Kiely unravels what earlier studies, a short 1974 monograph by Jerry Natterstad and a basic 1990 life by Geoffrey Elborn, could not have revealed. With access to previously closed Department of Foreign Affairs files on Stuart copied from originals (destroyed in Berlin) by the Irish Legation who tracked him, and with intimate knowledge from long conversations over the decades, Kiely depicts a respectful, never fawning or ingratiating, portrait of enigmatic Stuart. Although lacking lengthy analysis of his fiction and other writings, it replaces Anne McCartney’s erratic 2000 thesis for a spare survey of Stuart’s literary production over nearly eight decades. Perhaps after Kiely’s arrangement of first-hand reporting building upon previous criticism and archival records, in-depth investigation into Stuart’s fiction may progress more confidently.

After introducing Kiely’s relationship with Stuart, the book moves chronologically. Thirty-three chapters divide up a life beginning in 1902, when his father, a struggling emigrant from Antrim to Australia, committed suicide. Stuart’s mother took him back to Co Meath; he was raised in British boarding schools. He dropped out of Rugby, and early on displayed an inability to settle down. Before he was eighteen, he courted Iseult Gonne, who already at twenty-five had fended off two of Yeats’s marriage proposals and had been a lover of Ezra Pound.

Kiely glosses over, oddly given his subject’s iconoclasm, Stuart’s sudden conversion before eighteen to Catholicism; his father was of Ulster Presbyterian stock and his mother from a British Loyalist military family. Sexually inexperienced, spiritually yearning, Stuart sought Iseult’s glamour even as he recoiled from Yeats’s grasp. Before nineteen, Stuart fathered a daughter, Kay; he was off at Maud’s Glenmalure cottage "trying to write and awaiting a permit for his motorcycle when he received the news by telegram" of her birth. (50)

His fecklessness repeated with his hesitant role in the Civil War; he supported De Valera while rejecting his Catholic-Gaelic vision. Jailed for fifteen months, he emerged from the Curragh with his poetry already published. Thanks to the patronage of Yeats, who had just won the Nobel Prize, Stuart emerged into a limelight he fled. Overwhelmed by Maud, Yeats, and Iseult with new son Ian, Stuart retreated to Wicklow’s Laragh Castle, bought by Maud for the family. He travelled to Paris, meeting briefly Joyce, but Stuart preferred the Dublin company of Liam O’Flaherty, Beckett, Con Leventhal, and Arland Ussher. His novels began to be published, garnering mixed reviews as they appeared in rapid succession. "As a writer, he eventually became dubious about ‘art’ and fine writing; and used language with expert suspicion as if it were borrowed, flawed and brittle. His mature writing style is reluctant and dissenting." (27)

His publisher, Victor Gollancz, characterized Stuart as more a "poet-philosopher" than a novelist. Pigeon Irish and The Coloured Dome (both 1932) revealed his mystical, utopian, restless spirit bent on apocalypse, purgation, and renewal. Try the Sky merged his initial Fitzgerald-Hemingway influences into the first Irish fiction about the Nazis, based on a Vienna visit. Glory deepened his fascination with dictators and fascists. This attraction influenced The Angel of Pity (1935) as nihilism contended against esotericism. His later 1930s novels about adultery, fraud, and horse racing reflected his fancies, but he needed a cause.

Kiely asserts that the "core events of Stuart’s life" began only after the death of Yeats. Iseult suggested her unhappy husband travel to Berlin on an academic exchange program in April 1939. His biographer reiterates how Maud and Iseult "can be accurately portrayed as typical of a minority of Irish people who were also pro-German because they were anti-British." (119) Kiely carefully cites Stuart’s distaste for Hitler. Kiely sets a context for Stuart’s opinion formed then that fifty years later would spark outrage: "if there was a Jewish idea, which was surely a contradiction, it was a hidden, unheroic, and critical one, a worm that could get into a lot of fine-looking fruit." (qtd. 121) Kiely relates this aspersion to Stuart’s distrust of romantic Iseult’s proud abstraction, as opposed to the subversive Jewish reliance upon the sensually concrete.

Stuart’s German years have been documented extensively, but Kiely adds details from copies of wartime files kept by the Irish government. (He makes a minor error with the "Republic of Ireland" [124] opposing at the outbreak of WWII the British seizure of ports; the de facto Republic was not declared officially until 1948.) The complications of Iseult’s affair with a doomed German spy while Stuart took a mistress, and while he commenced radio talks transmitted to Ireland, challenge elucidation. Kiely accepts that those charging Stuart with Nazi support can be justified, but Kiely rejects an equation with "sympathizer" for Stuart. "The issue of collaborator and traitor is another matter." (137) Such diplomacy permeates this biography.

A hanger-on among Irish and British disaffected expatriates, Stuart distanced himself from propagandist Lord Haw-Haw. Stuart imagined escaping Berlin for Moscow with a young student, Gertrude Meissner. Renaming her Madeleine, they commenced a relationship that would endure until her death in 1986. Interrogated by the Gestapo, an apolitical intellectual revolutionary disenchanted with collectivism or capitalism, Stuart sought dissension. The Irish Legation refused to help him as Germany’s defeat neared. The couple roamed as refugees until they were interned for eight months after the war in French-occupied Austria.

Seán MacBride, now seeking political power, disdained his sister’s unfaithful husband. Unable to divorce, fearing that her former lover Ezra Pound’s insanity brought on by his arrest as another fascist abetter would repeat with Stuart, and not knowing the full extent of Madeleine’s relationship, Iseult waited with Kay and Ian for Stuart’s peacetime repatriation. He, trying to create fact out of his fiction, insisted that his ménage à trois be imported into Laragh Castle.
Resisting deportation from Paris, Stuart welcomed Irish exile. "He had an instinct that his poetic destiny involved social ostracism." (qtd. 176) This self-appraisal from Black List energized his postwar novels. The Pillar of Cloud, Redemption, and The Flowering Cross, written in Freiburg, Austria, present the artist as outcast. As the titles promise, religious symbolism mixes with bohemian misfits grappling with evil in a war-ravaged Europe unable to understand their aesthetic communism and moral defiance.

Returning from Paris to Laragh, Stuart found Iseult finally resigned to her husband’s infidelity. After Iseult’s death in 1954, Madeleine and "Grim" settled in London. On the night-shift as a museum guard, Stuart labored in near-poverty while continuing, as always, to publish novels. In 1958, the married couple moved to Co Meath. Victors and Vanquished, with its Berlin Jewish family facing the Holocaust, previewed what in1961-62 became Black List, with Stuart assuming the role of "H." "Whether H is an outcast or traitor, as for Stuart, it is up to each reader to decide for themselves."(149) This stance sums up Kiely’s steady reaction to Stuart’s elusive convictions.

Stuart’s masterwork lacks sustained analysis here for its halting style. Its eerily transparent prose evokes an evasive teller’s attempt, in autobiographical fiction, to testify to his past. Kiely, although underplaying this unsettling impact of Black List, provides as he intends the details of its production, and Stuart’s decade-long effort to find a publisher.

The return of the Troubles, with one who had fought in them the first time, revived protest, first for Stuart’s well-titled play Who Fears to Speak (1970), and then his experimental novels Memorial and A Hole in the Head. Kiely finds that these two "dare go as close to deranged prose as composition will bear." (269) The 1970s found Stuart returning to Dublin and attention. (A small addition: Stuart translated then from French an account by Christian de la Mazière of his service with the Waffen SS, Le Rêveur Casqué, issued in Britain as Ashes of Honour; Kiely omits that an American printing appeared in 1974 as The Captive Dreamer.)

The new assembly Aósdana invited Stuart, and eager for the pension, he accepted despite his often-stated disdain for artists who glean honors. While he parodied it in his innovative The High Consistory, this and Faillandia, also preoccupied with alternative visions of an satirized Ireland, kept Stuart’s 1980s novels appealing to a small readership. A Compendium of Lovers presented another farrago of cosmic speculation, theological musings, and autobiographical fancy. Determined to defy expectations, fêted by Haughey while protesting Reagan, Stuart’s last decades would draw him back into public debate.

Kiely avers that Stuart lacked "a definitively prescriptive morality." (285) At 85, marrying Finola Graham, an artist born in 1945, Stuart upended expectations. He searched within "apparent failure" a reason to endure. Intrigued by Edward Schillebeeckx’s presentation of a human Jesus left behind on the Cross, Stuart in the puzzling polemic The Abandoned Snail Shell attempted to explain his understanding of the Risen Christ as one who in defeat found triumph.

The death of Kay was followed by a Channel 4 documentary about the Holocaust. His interviewer implied that Stuart’s residence in Berlin was antisemitic. This airing resurrected fury. In late 1996, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, wife of Conor Cruise O’Brien, rallied for Stuart’s resignation from Aósdana. The motion fizzled when few of his peers supported Stuart’s expulsion; Mhac an tSaoi herself left the guild. Many in the liberal media supported Stuart’s critics, others defended him. "A suitably penitent Stuart," after over a year of media frenzy, publicly repudiated any "imputed tendencies to anti-Semitism," Kiely remarks, "in his person or his writings." (312)

Stuart later won a libel suit against Kevin Myers of The Irish Times, but this affair took its toll on a very old man. Cared for by Ian, he went to Laragh, His son intervened as his father ripped up Iseult’s diary. Harboring guilt, Stuart appears never to have resolved his relationship with her. His final work, the novella King David Dances, explores the impact of Heidegger, typically combined with its protagonist’s search for his lost cat.

Back with Finola on the coast of Co Clare, Stuart looked out over Galway Bay. He fantasized sailing off to Aran with a cat and a crate of sherry. Nearly 98, after coming down with a Christmas flu, he died in 2002 in an Ennis hospital; "just on his last breath he opened his eyes so wide, as if at last he had seen something revelatory." (326-27) Kiely reports that The Irish Times reported his place of death as his flat at Fanore, another case of printed invention ending this author’s long tussle with unequivocal fact.

Declan Kiberd's "Ulysses & Us": Book Review

2009-12-15T14:25:00.000-08:00

A critic strives to reconnnect ordinary readers with a book meant for, and about, the rest of us. His colleagues strangle "Ulysses" in theoretical nets; average folks often fear, mock or abandon it. Unfairly, Kiberd insists; Joyce teaches us how to understand his narrative.

Kiberd rues: "A book which set out to celebrate the common man and woman endured the sad fate of never being read by most of them. Was this a case of bad faith or bohemian hypocrisy in a work which idealised just the sort of simple souls who could never hope to read it?" (7) This guide and commentary-- unlike his own handy Penguin 1992 Student's Annotated Student's Edition (never available in the US and enmeshed in the copyright battles over the Joyce estate abroad; based on the Bodley Head 1960 printing)-- does not seek a line-by-line commentary. However, it'd be a welcome primer. As with David Pierce's similarly themed, recent "Reading Joyce" (see my Amazon review), Kiberd blows away dust. Neither book might be the very first to consult when taking up this novel, but they'd come early on in one's supplemental instruction. Both scholars show us how a century ago readers came to face this work, and how, after nearly another century, aided by scholarship, we can restore the wonder of this dazzling narrative.

Bohemia may have inspired early Joyce, but "Ulysses" determines to be less Stephen Dedalus and more Leopold & Molly Bloom: it's a bourgeois setting. It celebrates the mundane and tells how to recapture the awe in the everyday moment "In that context, Ulysses exists like a blasted road sign in a war zone, pointing at a future that is exhilarating to precisely the extent that it is uncertain and open." (21)

This work promotes an engaged Everyman, but the failure of the 20th century it heralded shows that its "world so lost turns out to have been far better than that which replaced it." We lack middle-class culture that modernism, social democracy, and the text sought to place within our grasp. Instead, "mass entertainment" reduces "all the oppositional forces of modernism" to supplant them with "only the identikit shopping mall, the ubiquitous security camera and the celebrity biography." Our train conductor will not regale us with a quote from Shakespeare as we alight in Limerick; "overpaid experts and underpaid service providers" replaced the sidewalk flaneur and public character on the street with us, scurrying towards our locked cars "from one private moment to another." (24)

The next chapter on the novel's ties back to the Irish past and its revival promises an emphasis, for once, on Irish-language predecessors. This subject could display Kiberd's bilingual expertise. Yet, beyond typically provocative asides such as how the novel might be reconfigured as "a central text of the Gaelic revival," this theme languishes in far too brief a section. (36)

Eighteen chapters follow. It would have helped to have a preface to this book explaining Kiberd's overall aims. Kiberd gives over the bulk of his necessarily brisk explication; by titling each of his chapter commentaries on "Ulysses" with a verb he neatly remind us of its predominant action: "Waking; Learning; Thinking; Walking; Praying; Dying; Reporting; Eating; Reading; Wandering; Singing; Drinking; Ogling; Birthing; Dreaming; Parenting; Teaching; Loving."

Stephen keeps the British confused; his rebellion's neither as lackey nor terrorist. "He refuses to be easily decoded. So in truth does Joyce's book." (49) The novel rescues one day from dullness. On 16 July 1904 when not much happened historically, a lot gets recorded imaginatively. This frees its Irish characters.

Shifting from Stephen with Deasy's conversation, via Sandymount strand, then to Bloom's monologue, Kiberd links them with an easily overlooked motif. His observant eye assists experienced readers to recall images and associations rewarding repeated visits to the text. While "Deasy valued shells" for what they were as objects, "and not for the life which they contained," young Dedalus "seeks their inner meaning, the soul which animates their exterior form." (64) Bloom will soon praise the first man bold enough to eat an oyster; later Kiberd muses about Bloom's attraction for Molly as "Sirens" ends: "The rhythm of sex, like the rise and fall of the sea-tides, produces desire and then forgiveness, a sound to be heard in the seashell thrown up on the beach (though what is heard is really the pulsing of the listener's own blood)." (177-78)

Like "Ulysses," Kiberd's focus rapidly may alter. The chapters move quickly as their source-text does. The pace of both author and critic demands attention to details. A Latin Quarter hat, Plumtree's Potted Meat, the "U.P." postcard message, Bloom's defecation all earn scrutiny. The first three episodes present "a version of the problem to which Bloom might be the answer." (80-81) Styles alter every chapter, Kiberd suggests, to further the reader's education as much as Stephen's, as the bohemian pose of the student with the hat weakens under the force of the bourgeois life examined scrupulously-- by a newspaper ad, a rumor, the body's demands-- so as to release wonder from daily routine.

A critic may, after immersion, adapt the text so long cited into his or her own prose. Kiberd begins "Dying": "At funerals people formally mourn the dead person, while privately experiencing an even deeper sadness for those who remain in the world." (100) The chapter on another theme starts: "Reading was often the last thing on Joyce's mind when he visited the National Library. Like many Dublin libraries, it was used more for talk than study." (157) Kiberd remarks about the city he shares with Joyce: "In Dublin there are only two kinds of joke-- those that were once funny, and those that were never funny." (104) The avuncularity of these comments shadows their sharpness, in true civic register.

The difficulty of keeping a tone, for author, emerges for this critic early on in the interior monologues. Even by the newspaper visit, the insertion of headlines shows the dangers of misleading a reader, as a sub-editor often has not studied the articles themselves under pressure of deadlines. Kiberd uses this example to illustrate Joyce's risk-taking. Unsure of his own tonal perfection, Joyce warns of language churned out mechanically, formulaically "Joycean." So, the author as a clever modernist keeps updating his art, with no version staying "final" or "official." Similarly, as this editor knows, he and his colleagues add to the textual indeterminacy of never one "authorized" text of "Ulysses."

Instability in "Cyclops" widens the gaps as the narrative continues. Bloom's monologue goes missing. Interior richness fades at Barney Kiernan's. The Gaelic literary tradition's oral culture's "shreds and radiant fragments" break the chapter's juxtapositions into banal barstool dialogue. Not even Joyce, Kiberd holds, could sustain the "density" of earlier chapters, and gaps open up to allow other voices to enter the novel.

Similarly, as Bloom's watch stops at the time of the assignation of Blazes Boylan with Molly at 4 p.m., so the narrative skips and hastens. What in "Nausikaa" alternated between Bloom and Gerty and then merged briefly increases in "Oxen of the Sun" as Joyce takes on all of English literature (with as Kiberd notes the exceptions of Chaucer and Shakespeare) as the author determines to escape any system able to hold him down. Kiberd emphasizes the novelty of "Ulysses": "its strategies changed as it was written, by way of the writer's reaction to the reception of earlier episodes, and with no clear sense of the total conception until the final phase was written." (225) The pace quickens and the prose often thickens, until, in Nighttown, it leaves chronology behind for "the timeless zones of the unconscious."

We learn in "Ithaca" much about Stephen and Bloom that monologues could not tell us. Their conversations in "Eumaeus" remained wayward, warm if tentative. These sections, often discouraging readers, regain their worth in Kiberd's interpretation. A combination of the parental role of Bloom in the former and the catechetical mode of the latter chapter shows how the intellectual may reclaim the ordinary. After Stephen leaves, thoughts of a psalm of liberation accompany him. Left behind, Bloom goes to bed. There the novel was supposed to have ended.

Yet, "as Molly counter-signed her husband's passport to eternity," surprises await. (259) Masturbation, uniting solitary spouses that day, found both Blooms soon thinking of each other. This subversive action, Kiberd holds, represents a satisfaction that neither the glimpse of Gerty or the embrace of Blazes could. As for the often contradictory sections of Molly's revelations, Kiberd proposes that she be treated not "as a definite person," but "'the voice of the book,' a voice that breaks out of gender confines and individual identity." (272) As for her husband, so for Molly; they can be seen "moving out of time and into the infinite."

Five chapters of this study close with literary antecedents. The influence of the "Odyssey" moves Kiberd to regard Homer's epic as anticipating "many features of the lives of the civic bourgeoisie," while Joyce's response laments "bourgeois virtues that were fast disappearing." (282) Prophetic modes in the Old Testament fulfilled in the New play off of latent powers unleashed in "Ulysses." Lacking any quotation marks within, this novel encompasses all voices that predicted it.

Dante and "Hamlet" offer two examples of how masters may guide followers through danger, on pilgrimage and in coming-of-age. These essays recall Erich Auerbach's comparative perspectives, and roam as widely. Throughout, Kiberd grounds most of "Ulysses" in its quotidian, even modest, assertions of the mundane as magical. The interpreter of the past strives to recover a fidelity that the present can never match. Yet, in this dismantling of the original, a new text responds and renews it.

Response and renewal, by ingesting earlier texts and cannibalizing his own, characterize Joyce's process to resist incorporation and parody by his literary heirs. Kiberd reiterates the contents of "Ulysses" that emerge once its scaffolding falls away, its veils drop. As wisdom literature no less than the Torah: "Everything was in the holy book, including all that had been known to predecessors." (301) The Irish epic binds the sacred to the mundane. Bloom's humility corrects Stephen's aestheticism. The body, as both Blooms show, can soothe the overexcited mind. Intellect need not be divorced from experience, as the sacramental transformation in "Ulysses" emerges by "an almost tantric sense of delayed gratification." (353) In a world far busier than Joyce's, Kiberd urges readers-- in this helpful guide by another textual master-- to reclaim the magic within not only this great story's telling, but in our own relationships, objects, thoughts, and words.

P.S. I caught three minor slips in this work that relies on a wealth of knowledge as vast as its inspiration. "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha" Kiberd attributes on pg. 191 to the Buddha, but this koan conventionally has been credited to the founder of the Zen Rinzai sect, Linji. "St. Theresa" should be Teresa, as "of Avila"-- not Therese of Lisieux-- part of one of "saintly couples" on pg. 275, here aligned with St. John of the Cross. The "famous NASA photograph of the earth" was not "taken from the moon in 1969." (327) It was sent as "Earthrise" from the lunar orbiter Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve 1968.

(P.P.S. Again in the transatlantic publishing battle, those Brits beat us Yanks. So, is copyright [as with so much in the Joyce industry] to blame? Why Eve Arnold's ca. 1952 snap of Marilyn Monroe graces the Faber cover while we're peddled Norton's duller shot of the early edition of this big fat tome by duller comparison beats me.) (A somewhat briefer review appeared on Amazon US 12-15-09.)

Tony Bailie's "The Lost Chord": Book Review

2009-11-08T12:08:00.000-08:00

Phil Lynott's swagger combined with Rory Gallagher's blues: while Gino Morgan's story's filed under fiction, it reads like fact. Not a novel so much as one of those rock-star biographies penned not by the star, but by one who knew him or her back when. And now, when the money's low and the fame's dimmed for the groupie, the sidekick, or in this case the rhythm guitarist, it's time to cash in what memories can be resurrected from the drug-addled informant. This novel reads as if such a true-- taken with the proverbial grains of coke-- story of life on the road with one more famous than one's self, often penned by a ghostwriter if not written entirely by a journalist or a hack, out of the taped transcripts and the press kit clippings and the bleary pub crawls.

An Irish journalist, Bailie provides an intriguing framework for this milieu. Manus Brennan alternates, as the novel begins, his current fate, literally washed-up on the shore, looking for wrack to light the fire that keeps his boozy body warm. He had joined Duil, a hard-rock Irish band who reminds me of Thin Lizzy's hard rock with a dash of Horslips' progressive folk. Seven years after the band's dissolution, Manus begins to narrate his tale, blended with his reply to what the few who bother with asking him anything really want to know: where's Gino?

This attendant status, Manus admits, makes him "a second-rate guitarist in a first-rate rock band." Nobody cares much about him, actually. Anyone interviewing him wants to know what he knew about Gino, six-foot-five, swarthy, sexy, and shapeshifting. While eager biographers already have published books on what might have happened to Gino-- who at the peak of debauchery vanished on tour in Germany-- the mystery of his disappearance fuels only improbable rumors that remain uncorroborated.

Into this miasma, Martina Lucas, a Californian with an "expensive" accent (as a less-affluent native of the Golden State myself I'm still pondering this adjective), enters Manus' aimless existence. His wife's left him, he's practically a recluse, and any music he tries to make with a band after Gino comes with an inevitable tag: "Manus Brennan (ex-Duil) on lead guitar." Even when he tries to establish his own talent, he's only hired for his past brush with fame, in the figure of Gino. Gino's fate fuels gossip among fans and tabloids. Martina's own interest in Manus appears only another manipulation of the servant who once waited on the fabled lord.

Speculation draws Manus towards Martina, who in turn seeks to use Manus to draw out the other members of Duil. She's keen on promoting her own tale to peddle to the press about Gino. Perhaps Martina's scamming the band, as her appearance's timed with Duil releasing old tapes and passing them off with their manager's connivance as Gino's contributions mailed in after his vanishing act seven years before. The mythmaking process enchants not only fans but the press and Duil's other members, who silently collude in their own desperate attempts to pay their debts and live off of their only meal ticket, Gino, after he goes missing. If he's not there, his mystique must do. Bills need to be paid. Complicating this state of Duil's predicament after Gino left them with their creditors calling, Martina suspects that Gino arranged his own departure, and that his junkie chic comedown was more a pose than an affliction. Her theory of monastic intrigue impels a doubting Manus to follow. He wonders if her search will be better substantiated than the earlier reports purporting to solve Gino's fate.

Bailie explores the experiences of a type of protagonist little attended to in fiction. Adding to its interest, the novel enters a place once and long relegated to the margins of British popular music. There's no overt time period to betray the immediacy of the action, but Bailie, by keeping the plot clean of any real-life band comparisons, wisely allows us to think of this quest occurring within a time less linked to a particular trend or era, pixellating magnification capabilities aside.

The island's rock scene itself gains little overt attention, although the clash of Irish trad with arena power provides quite an appealing subplot. It's an Irish novel more in its matter-of-fact presentation of traditional musicians, brief snatches of scenery, or the passing observation.

"The evening is heavy with rain as we leave the sodium lit distortion of Belfast behind us and climb up to where the city peters out in the foothills of the Black Mountain. Bundles of houses appear now and again, separate from the suburban sprawl but with no real identity of their own. The road I drive is narrow and twisting and made dangerous by the floods of rain that pound it." (171)

The precision of the detail, sparely given, echoes Bailie's poetry. He's a local, who gives us what we need, and moves on.

A non-Irish writer would have likely ladled in more garish color. Mercifully free of whimsy, light on the emotions, and efficiently paced, the story moves with more direction if as much economy as its feckless teller. We get the backstory of Gino and his bandmates through the straightforward, more serviceable than striking prose style that fits its speaker, an observant but not unconvincingly eloquent man down on his luck whose only way back into fortune is his link to his former semi-celebrity days.

I'm not sure if this was Bailie's intention, but reading this I found a tonal harmony. Parts of Manus' narrative fall into that rather stolid evocation of one who recollects in tranquility one's barnburning days. Less as a prime mover and more as a rolling stone, Manus found himself with an offer he could not refuse. He joined Duil when they were already famous, and he after a concert of theirs.

The dutiful details emerge parallel here in fiction to how many rock-star stories are told in fact. It blurs and bores a bit at times, as Manus seeks to align his wavering existence against the energy of the magnetic personality, Gino. Manus was recruited by him at 19; now 33, he already feels as if he'll be living in the past, the few years with Gino will be Manus' only success in the decades to come. This verisimilitude makes sense. Manus lacks the charisma of the lead singer. It's always Gino's tale the hearer wants; Manus must endure as a means to this end.

The supporting character to the star never grabs, of course, the spotlight. Yet, Bailie's oblique strategy allows us to witness fame at this slight but persistent remove. Gnosticism, the appeal of the resurrected hero, and the veneration of idols all enter this book lightly, but offer a thoughtful gloss on the rock-star milieu that perceives its legends emerging, if we entered another dark age, via oral transmission. Two thousand years from now, what saints might elicit our prayers? We invent deities no less than the early Christians, seeking to recover the light that Sufis, rabbis, and lamas saw. This meditated perspective, at a half-turn from one who first worshiped the band as a fan before joining Duil, gives us a Gino less mundane than Manus witnessed in his first incarnation. "His gaunt craggy face could twist into the grimaces of a thousand agonies before settling into the smile of benign sainthood." (15)

Therefore, in Gino's after-life or half-life as attested to by those who were his eyewitness apostles and those who report on the messiah second-hand, the novel gently shifts gears into in an energy more mysterious. Perhaps Gino's appeal lay not only in his riffs or his songs, but in his aura? How, exactly, can one explain a celebrity's charisma-- perhaps in the root meaning of that word? In this evangelical register, unlike its earlier emulation of the many rock-star biographies written by others who knew so-and-so, "loyal acolyte" Manus' tale betters so many half-awed, half-jaded accounts of gods made flesh on stage. Duil, which is a word never defined (perhaps as this home-grown novel comes from Belfast's Lagan Press), means "desire," that strong lure that pulls you along. You may not realize you're hooked.

Available directly from: The Lagan Press, Belfast. Posted belatedly to British Amazon 11-8-09 and cross-posted 6-6-08 to "Blogtrotter".

Malachi O'Doherty's "Empty Pulpits": Book Review

2009-09-20T18:19:00.000-07:00

Why has Ireland secularized so suddenly? Can we learn from Catholicism's institutional erosion how entrenched religions may erode elsewhere? Will the Irish evolve into belongers rather than believers?

O'Doherty fills a short book with deep questions. An astute observer of the corroding of another iconic Irish symbol, republicanism ("The Telling Year: Belfast 1972" & "The Trouble with Guns"), his West Belfast upbringing and (unmentioned here but see his memoir "I Was a Teenaged Catholic") hippie-era stint in India under a Hindu guru's tutelage inform his thoughtful investigation. This account leaves out his own story, but it's covered elsewhere. Here, he surveys liberal forces which, since the 1990s most visibly, undermined a supposedly monolithic theocracy.

Not quite: modernization drew many Irish away from agriculturally centered lives where a priest at Mass enforced not so much dogmatic dictate as support, socializing, and stability. My review will delve into detail, for O'Doherty's thesis to my knowledge challenges the standard Usual Suspects: sex abuses by the clergy, immorality transmitted by Dublin 4 media, and Anglo-American hedonism. He argues that the habit of trusting in a priest for advice on one's relationships, one's prospects, and one's soul had weakened as the Irish began listening to talk shows. Audiences applied pop-psychology to handling their own dilemmas as the post-Vatican II Church ignored the problem of evil, dismissed Purgatory and Hell as likely destinations, and downplayed sin. The clergy conservative and liberal often left a less rather than more relevant Church as the enormous outcry over Humanae Vitae weakened any authority of that celibate clergy over a married congregation. All this occured decades before the sex scandals`and clerical abuse reported at century's end.

The subtitle's off. Irish majorities retreat not from "Religion" but its organized, "white ethnic Christian mainstream" manifestations. Britain ebbed, now Ireland. O'Doherty offers the Irish as exhibit A of how quickly a people can abandon organized religion. Although Islam and evangelical Christians claim many, he wonders if their own domination may wither as quickly as the mainstream Western European churches. Yet, how do we measure rates of retreat from verities? O'Doherty compares prayer to masturbation: we'd be perplexed to verify who does it and who doesn't.

Practically, catching up with Europe, Irish use of the local church seems only for rituals. People ignore it but for baptisms, weddings, and funerals; as regular attendance plummets, those churches will close. Converted to cafés, discos, or libraries, Protestant edifices portend the fate of many parishes as vocations vanish, an aging priesthood dies off, and a remnant of clergy obeying conservative (or else they will not be appointed) bishops recite the formulaic dictates from a frustrated papacy bent on enforcing doctrine rejected by "a la carte" Catholics.

These turn away from the "mesmerisation" that compelled their ancestors to act as if they believed, for fear of ostracization. Claire Keegan's novel's cited: "God is an invention created by one man to keep another at a safe distance from his wife and land." (16) But, who could admit this aloud? The thinker of that line still attends Mass. "He knows the power of his neighbour's opinion and will not have it said that he's ever missed a Sunday."

That man's grandchildren sleep in. Not Mass but mass media speaks for them. Not that many articulate their drift from the Church so clearly, but by the rise in out-of-wedlock births, unmarried couples, and divorce, the restraints that compelled rural Irish to hold family together to stay on the land have disappeared along with that way of life when the priest seemed to govern the ritual way of life as if natural.

Pilgrims still climb Croagh Patrick in ancient ritual. Still, "everyone who goes before you damages the path and makes your own way harder." (53) It's more "spiritual than religious" for most faithful now, O'Doherty avers. The Irish convert what was social pressure to into individual options. They exercise along with a longing for transcendence up a rocky sharded path that nobody makes easier on their ascent for any following them. Seems an stubbornly Irish metaphor, somehow.

Collective emotion, O'Doherty knows as a journalist, can substitute for professed fidelity. The media replace the Church for public trust. But, they peddle ambition and avarice alongside sexual liberation and unconventional lifestyles. O'Doherty recognizes the lure of other spiritual messages for a people who may lack deeper awareness of their own abandonment of Catholic piety. How long can such a society endure? He wonders if-- like the British monarchy-- the Church will survive "on nothing but the occasional derision of the same people if it is to survive at all." (74) That is, the potency of space and time once dominated by a ruler over a people in one kingdom or the Church in its subjugated neighbor island can rouse the masses-- as in Pope John Paul II's visit or the death of Princess Diana-- but most of the time it will linger on as a quaint relic.

But, the monarchy dimmed over centuries; why has the Church collapsed so quickly? He touches on a novel insight: the media moralizes now over what the clergy warned us about once: "diet, smoking, alcohol and safe sex". Thrift = recycling; abstinence = safe driving; care for creatures = animal rights. This book's full of these reflections, even if some chapters halt suddenly a few pages on. While I agree with O'Doherty's perspective, the book underplays coverage of many fascinating topics. They appear too sporadic or fitful in their articulation. Editing may be to blame.

For instance, O'Doherty touches on the difficulty Catholics have in switching to Protestantism, rather than vice-versa. The evangelicals attract new Irish migrants as well as those tired of Methodist or Anglican (C of I) models. For Catholics, their congregations, for lack of a worship alternative, stagnate as the parishioners practice a variety of non-Catholic spiritual pursuits separately. O'Doherty for my money in buying this missed his round. Why not interview the abbot of San Francisco's Zen Center, Paul Haller born on the Falls Road, to exemplify a journey away from tradition into ecumenism? Haller's mentioned but in passing and the Black Mountain Belfast Zen center's not at all: a curious oversight given its potential.

Similarly, O'Doherty suggests objections to the late (Fr.) John O'Donoghue's popular "Anam Cara" book and Mary Kenny's "Goodbye to Catholic Ireland" (see my Amazon US review of her revised edition) but fails to elaborate. He refers to Roger Scruton's intriguing comparison of love with religion to counter the New Atheists but this only piques one's interest beyond the single paragraph summary. A predecessor with interests intersecting with O'Doherty's, Desmond Fennell, might have enriched this study. To elucidate a debate between Christopher Hitchens and "lapsed atheist" commentator John Waters (not the outré US filmmaker for you non-Irish readers), Hitchens' rather facile put-downs earn many pages. Nevertheless, Daniel Dennett's evolutionary psychology in "Breaking the Spell" fits perfectly O'Doherty's own speculations. An expert who could have bolstered the book's thesis, Dennett's only named once.

However, quick nods remain to Stephen Pinker and John Grey. They consider moral evolution as a sign of hope-- or at least a way we cope with mystery-- without belittling why many of us, post-Darwin, cling to an irrational yearning for the divine or the metaphysical. Richard Dawkins in a more nuanced manner publicly than Hitchens denigrates believers even if as "moderns" they dismiss fundamentalist tenets. O'Doherty counters this condescension. The last third of his book takes on the New Atheists. He wonders if today's religion isn't measured by declining church attendance, but a "still almost universal" belief in God. "Is it a sense of there being some indefinable spiritual context to our existence which feels stronger and clearer when you are listening to Beethoven or having an orgasm?" (123) This defines religion as provocatively post-denominational. I'm sure many welcome such analogies.

John Waters' weakness, O'Doherty holds, is that one cannot equate the Church with religion. "If the church was not the embodiment of religious sentiment in Ireland, then the collapse of that church cannot be read as the death of such sentiment." (126) Believers agree with naysayers: the Church was dysfunctional. What will replace that stubbornly inculcated "faith of our fathers"? Fatalism grounded in the seasons and the crops, as with religious propitiation of the powers held once to be, cannot serve a suburbanized seeker. A stable congregation sat in a country pew; their grandchildren live apart from stars and cows yet wander on interior journeys.

Ireland encountered secularization later, but when it came the last part of last century, it accelerated. It left many of our generation with memories of hegemony by priests and nuns over psychically fragile people, many uprooted from rural life by its mechanization. As for O'Doherty, those who managed to blaze their own inner path away from Catholicism post-Vatican II had to fend for themselves amidst an outwardly conforming culture where the family enforced fidelity, at least in a superstitious or superficial devotion. For those younger, raised in cities and housing estates, lacking an upbringing when the Church ruled, a maturer model may supplant habit.

While this aspect again deserved more attention, O'Doherty briefly mulls over Rabbi Julia Neuberger's contrast with a Judaism where defining God and demanding obedience is not the norm. Rather, practicing ritual and service "within a community" defines one's religion. "Belief in God was fluid. It came and went." (199) Family and continuity matter more than episcopal dicta or papal encylicals. Of course, Catholicism's vertically enforced rather than laterally interpreted as with Judaism. But, post-Catholic Ireland may blossom if in a more flexible, less fearful direction. New Atheists assume wrongly how a contemporary "religious" follower cannot deviate from the proclamations set down in scripture or pronounced from a pulpit. The rationalists become as fundamentalist in their set-up of a straw man believer as those they chastise for "Iron Age"-codified stupidities as obesiance.

Finally, glancing at how Polish immigrants to Ireland demonstrate in their tentative assimilation the power or lack of from a nation as "Catholic" as was once Ireland, O'Doherty raises a thoughtful case study for comparison. Nigerian arrivals enliven evangelical sects, but these often divide, sectarianism if along newer divisions. O'Doherty strives for fair-minded judgments that respect all who believe and all who confront faith. For the Irish, unpredictably, prophets now emerge as "singer-songwriters, poets and novelists" who summon us "into our bedrooms and down country lanes," he concludes, rather than preaching encyclicals from emptying sanctuaries. (P.S. See my reviews of O'Doherty's "Telling Year" & "I Was a Teenaged Catholic.": posted as this on British Amazon [no U.S. listing] 9-20-09. Crossposted "Teenaged" and "Empty" reviews to my regular blog, "Blogtrotter.")

Malachi O'Doherty's "I Was a Teenage Catholic": Book Review

2009-07-25T17:35:00.000-07:00

Theology vs. decency? During the Troubles, this Belfast journalist mulls over how Irish Catholicism and Ulster evangelicalism tangled his generation. Long an astute observer of republicanism, he proves here a diligent seeker into belief. Stubbornly skeptic, he concludes that in a sectarian North both sides may be groping, along with increasingly secular or agnostic counterparts, towards a simple human need: to test tradition that we're born into against our hard-won experience.

Like the republican and loyalist movements, Catholicism and Protestantism have operated in the North of Ireland upon fundamentalist tenets; their adherents generally claim allegiance not after mature choice, but by habitual upbringing. "I fostered fantasies of my own martyrdom, perhaps because that was all I could ever imagine my teachers would approve in me." (22) Early on, O'Doherty chafes against a 1950s childhood among the Christian Brothers. He insists upon testing what he's told to avow against his own bold life, and he finds wanting the faith of his fathers.

Yet, such a fantasized martyrdom "became more tangible against the background of Northern Irish sectarianism." (28) Circa 1968, "I was deciding that I wasn't a Catholic when others were deciding I had no say in the matter." (53) Losing his commitment before his convictions, his faith withers. He leaves a career in journalism after three years covering Irish strife, and after three aimless years in England he snags a vague job offer to compile a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita for a Hindu sage. He's off in the mid-'70s down the countercultural trail to an Indian ashram outside Delhi.

Swamiji looks like a mop of black hair, whether back or front. Loneliness consumes O'Doherty, and he tells movingly of the despair that kindles desperate trust in a stronger man than what one perceives as oneself. Beaten down by the Brothers as a boy, he struggles as a man nearing thirty to recognize how the soul's longing can or cannot be separated from devotion to a cause. Those who resisted the Christian Brothers, he notes, belatedly became Provos in the IRA, bowing to an Irish need for old conservative ways drummed in by parents and teachers. Threatened early on by the British Army in an home invasion, O'Doherty covers the Troubles for three years, while figuring out how far he can go down the path to belief as a secularized Irish man, schooled in the tenets of a creed and a cause both of which he has disavowed. After England, in India his need for uplift returns. He's attracted to an even more idolatrous manifestation in the utter obesiance a guru demands from a disciple.

He drifts, it seems, into lengthy meditation, mind-expanding to the point he envisions his head swelling like a ball, until he sees a white disc hover before his eyes, after years of relentless practice. Yet, he shrinks from Swamiji's Brahmin disdain for everyone else. O'Doherty, of no caste, is as untouchable as the Hindu tradition he cannot defend for his own adaptation or appropriation. Compared to Catholicism, at least its worst priest, he reflects, would have to care for a beggar he publicly met on the street; gurus like Swamiji loftily disdain any such charity. He grows impatient with O'Doherty's humanism, while Swamiji tries to impel his Irish charge to bend to traditional ways. But, as in Ireland, O'Doherty cannot kneel.

No surrender brings eventually his epiphany: "I cannot die to the world to save my soul." (134) Religion, he reflects, seems in the Irish to be divided between magic and fatalism; neither can soothe his innate rebelliousness. After a year apart from Swamiji wandering India and resuming his writing career, he goes back to the North as a religious affairs correspondent, whose specialty becomes the soundbite from the field, or the parade route, without profanity but with enough naivete or hatred from his earnest or fiery interviewees in the field that will get the best bits aired.

The first part of this narrative began as he braved a protest while working for the BBC in the Protestant enclave of Harryville; as his name reveals O'Doherty's counted among the enemy. After the central Indian portion, the story pivots back to his continued immersion in the North, where religion battles with politics. It's where one standing on the sidelines with a BBC microphone in hand must jump into the fray again, still marked by friend or it seems more often by foe by the faith he left behind. He's a wise interviewer; he stays detached. His discovery: God keeps out of our affairs, entreaties by gurus and claims by visionaries to the contrary. "Our language about God is like the language which in our dreams describes the world. In both we are insulated by metaphor from what we cannot know or must not know." (169)

As expected by readers of "The Trouble With Guns: Republican Strategy and the Provisional IRA" (1998), O'Doherty can be prescient about the dangers of rigid fidelity to irrational ideals and rabid trust in destructive ideologies. He's at home with Irish end-games of all pursuits. I note that he has since written more about republicanism as "The Telling Year: Belfast 1972" and continued decline in Irish religion as "Empty Pulpits." I look forward to these; unlike other analysts of the Troubles and Irish culture, he's able to link the rise and fall of monolithic republicanism and inescapable Catholicism to the maturation of his fellow citizens.

He proposes that the peace process and the collapse of clerical authority came about when "literal minded and obedient religion" dissolved, and when the republican cause found itself concurrently unable to command once unswerving ranks of those who learned that for contraception or decommissioning, "truth itself became negotiable." (137) O'Doherty lacks fellow commentator Eamonn McCann's radical stance, in his similar blends of autobiography and analysis "War and an Irish Town" and "Dear God"; the two authors share an ability to move between the personal and the political nimbly, although McCann's harsher on these twin fallen idols than O'Doherty, whose faith led him not to Marx but to India along the way, expanding his perspective in metaphorical and practical ways neither lad raised in postwar Northern Ireland might have imagined. O'Doherty's tenure in these twin fields of wartime dissension and religious agitation provides many anecdotes, at first appearing perhaps as casually as this short but densely packed and philosophically challenging book's title.

That is, it seems a throwaway line. But, "teenaged Catholic," existing in the past tense for this first-person subject, stands for a whole world-view, one that younger folks like myself (exactly a decade younger), cannot truly remember. O'Doherty's exploration takes familiar topics such as priestly scandal, poverty, hypocrisy, Ian Paisley, theodicy, and the impossibility of proving God's existence. "And if God is a myth, he is the patch we cover ourselves with." But, he's too smart now to deny God. "I take God to be the mirror in space of the whole self, to which nothing need ever to be said, which acknowledged, can be taken wholly for granted." (169-70) Facing death in his family, he accepts it as "Nature's rebuttal of tradition." (166)

This 2003 memoir stands beside his peer's eloquent 1995 defense of a similar agnostic balance that measures an adult's distance from pre-conciliar Catholicism, by the late Waterford-born, Cork-based journalist-poet Seán Dunne. "The Road to Silence" tracked an interior journey paralleling O'Doherty's, if removed from the Troubles in the relative calm of the South and the Continent. Younger journalist-memoirist, Manchán Magan, in his "Manchán's Travels" in early '90s India, provides another skeptic's testimony, another republican-raised Irishman's more recent reaction to Hindu fanaticism and the predicament of outcasts and India's poor. All three writers share respect for their Irish culture, and objectivity about their own loyalties as men who've outgrown their childhood pieties, political or spiritual, while becoming cautious and patient enough to listen to the yearnings and to record the longings of those at home or abroad who hold dogged beliefs or generous decency within themselves as believers.

Enriched by his probably unique comparison of a Belfast boyhood with a Hindu exposure, plus a journalist's objectivity with a cradle Catholic's scrutiny, O'Doherty combines disparate threads and casual scenarios. Upon reflection, for this reader he reveals a carefully arranged pilgrim's progression through the byways and highways that all of us, whatever our denomination or lack thereof-- or muddle between-- can recognize as an modern man's honest tale of how he tried to look God in the eye, and what happened when he faced that moment and decided to turn away.

(I've reviewed Dunne & Magan on my "Blogtrotter" blog and on British & US Amazon; also see my review of "The Miracle Detective" by Randall Sullivan on Amazon US about the Marian apparitions at Medjugorje that O'Doherty also recounts in a vignette here; Posted to Amazon US and Britain 7-25-09.)

Stephen Batchelor's "The Awakening of the West": Book Review

2009-07-24T14:03:00.001-07:00

"The Encounter of Buddhism & Western Culture" examines two millennia of Europe's vexed and visionary experiences when meeting what's not quite an Asian religion, but more than an exotic philosophy. Batchelor, a Scot who was both a Korean Zen and Indo-Tibetan monk before espousing an agnostic dharma interpretation, proves ideal for introducing the characters and meetings that confounded Jesuits and friars, excited explorers and mystics, and unsettled despots and dictators.

He begins by listing five "attitudes" in the "long, uncertain relationship of the West with Buddhism." Blind indifference, self-righteous rejection, rational knowledge, romantic fantasy, and existential engagement. Outside of a few ancient Greek contacts, Europeans lacked knowledge until the 13th c. when Catholic clergy ventured far enough east. From then until the end of the 1800s, the West tended to denigrate or at least dismiss Eastern teachings. The Romantic movement broke with the Enlightenment by exaggerating the Oriental Other. Others in the 19th c. strove by reason to bring science to study the East, accompanying the colonial expansion.
Finally, in the last century, a few Westerners started to practice Buddhism; until nearly 1970, however, most of those in Europe practically knew each other, so small were the numbers before the Tibetan diaspora and the counterculture built upon an earlier interest in Zen among the Beats and intellectuals to bring in the flourishing of Buddhism among many disaffected with traditional beliefs, alongside others blending the dharma with conventional faiths-- or psychotherapies-- today.

Batchelor notes how in the 13th century of change, when Asia and Europe were roiled by political and military conflict, three traditions took root in Asia that in contemporary Europe now number the most adherents. Karma Kagyu became Chogyam Trungpa's Shambhala school; Soto Zen shifted with D.T. Suzuki's books and Shunryu Suzuki's San Francisco Zen Center & Tassajara emerged from this California 1960s epicenter; Nichiren's insistent renewal allied with Japanese lay evangelism turned into Soka Gakkai worldwide.

The Japanese and Chinese, faced with missionizing Jesuits, found their Asian tolerance strained by European claims that the truth lay only in the Catholic way. Batchelor fairly sets out the horrific tortures inflicted by the Tokugawa Shogunate upon the recalcitrant martyrs, but he also shows how rare a Buddhist-affiliated state has generated violence against its ideological foes, as opposed to the colonial and contemporary norms. Korea, Japan, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and India: the list of places where Buddhism has fallen before tyrants lengthens in our own times. In Thailand and Southeast Asia, the movement for an engaged Buddhism tackling injustice and advocating pacificism takes up an eloquent chapter that shows how the "interbeing" of Thich Nhat Hanh and the "universal responsiblity" of the Dalai Lama connect to overthrow the notion of Buddhism as a self-involved, nihilistic, dreary, and moribund religion. This notion, spread by Western philosophers, scholars, missionaries, and early translators, served to taint Buddhism for centuries, and still lingers in many prejudiced accounts we find now.

Sir William Jones, who figured out in 1786 that Sanskrit was the root from which Indo-European languages sprouted, as with many British in India, ignored Buddhism. It had been wiped out by the Moghul invaders centuries before; it lingered in a few Himalayan redoubts beyond real contact with all but a few intrepid travellers. Hinduism regarded it with as much disdain as the West. "Jones believed that Buddha was the teutonic god Wotan or Odin." (233) This level of ignorance took many years to overcome.

Eugene Burnouf (1801-52) stands out midway through the book as a diligent Sanskrit-adept investigator; his philological and Orientalist lessons would rub off on his student Ernest Renan who famously tried to historicize the life of Jesus. Extreme rationalism brought extreme prejudice; the hostility to a declining Catholicism exacerbated among Enlightenment-inspired intellectuals a dismissal of any elaborate rituals within the Buddhism imperial reports discussed. A Protestant-like Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Thailand became favored in the later 19th c. by Theosophists, colonial translators, and native reformers.

Unknowingly, the search for an "Aryan" homeland to which Jesus retreated in his "lost years" for Indian wisdom, free from Jewish influence, provides a detour that Batchelor notes in passing. Antisemitism was fostered by European scholars bent on prying Judeo-Christian origins away from even the Gospels. Romantic Orientalism cast a long shadow over Indo-European studies. 19th c. German contributions that tried to push aside Latin Renaissance biases themselves have since then suffered by reputation. The barbarians were celebrated rather than Romans, via this search for Eastern origins for a purified "race" generated by Hindu and Buddhist distortions.

Buddhism as such misreadings show is often misunderstood by us. It was misused to train kamikaze pilots; but it also inspired Soviet "samidzat" tracts and learning was preserved even in the gulags. Although many have tried to crush it, as we see in Asian totalitarian states today, many try to save it at the cost of their lives.

Philology for rationalists, fantasy for romantics, but neither IE-professors or New Age dabblers pin the tail on this varied elephant, to adopt a Buddhist analogy! "To fix the elephant in space or time is to kill her. The elephant breathes and moves-- in ways one cannot foresee." (274) It's not an ethical system, psychology, philosophy, faith, mysticism, devotion, meditation, or therapy. But it can use all of these aspects. Batchelor, anticipating his 1997 book "Buddhism Without Beliefs," tells us that its "attitude towards life is neither rational nor non-rational; based neither on feeling, intuition nor sensation. Yet it includes them all."

Finally, as Batchelor's own young monastic quest demonstrates, the counterculture allowed contact with real Buddhist practice for more than a few European scholars, officials, missionaries, or explorers. It's still in a "transitional" phase, and the book alternates often between historical accounts and recent adaptations of the various schools and movements as they journey westward, often brought by Europeans training in Asian monasteries before going back home, but as often Asian monks and experts travelling to the West to start or assist at new centers across Europe and the Americas. "It required two World Wars, Hitler and Stalin, the threat of nuclear war and environmental destruction and, in many cases, a hefty dose of LSD to render Europeans sufficiently humble to seek their lost spiritual centre elsewhere." (275)

Breaking the "grid of reason" and twisting the "dreams of romanticism," the dharma manages today to transcend, in Batchelor's view, a heretical Buddhist practice in Europe now. Protestant revolt had earlier broken Catholicism's "stranglehold" but also "ruptured the cohesion of the European soul." He finds Buddhist heresy a positive force; moving "outside the Judaeo-Christian-Hellenic tradition" forces adherents to choose the dharma in the same way that Asians do traditionally. Intriguingly, he finds: "It makes little sense to regard oneself as a Buddhist by birth." (276) The choice to practice, not one's birth culture or the bought décor, makes one a Buddhist.

While some of the chapters drag with recitals of names and dates that any history may find inescapable, especially one that pioneers study of its subject, as with the American counterpart, Rick Fields' "How the Swans Came to the Lake," (1992), Batchelor weaves many disparate strands into an intelligent narrative. He adds a short glossary, endnotes, a bibliography, and index that assist our comprehension of a saga stretching over two thousand years, and across half the earth in its quest.

The middle of the volume, which takes on "Everyman" in his attempt to make Buddhism matter, provides the sharpest insights, as perhaps these energize from their author's own formation at this period of what's been labelled subsequently "methodological agnosticism" applied to the dharma's Western adoption and modernizing representation. In the heart of his book, Batchelor grapples with the force of culture and tradition for a European determined to become a Buddhist. He finds the salvific Christ a "consoling fiction," as he opens his book quoting Voltaire's estimate of history as a "convenient fiction." Buddhism, as its teachers show, depends on "transmission" from expert to learner; this chain can be tracked back in documented lineages to the historical Buddha. One cannot "grow up" in the practice, but must take it on actively. He cites an Hasidic tale of a rabbinical student going far to see how his chosen master ties his shoelaces. This sort of unexpected meeting, Batchelor explains, shows the type of unplanned teaching that characterizes true encounters.

People want to pin down their version, their part of the elephant that they touch and see and smell. They miss the rest of the great beast beyond their grasp. Reification presents a danger. Attributing permanence, substance, and condition to that inherently changeable, evanescent, and dependent upon its components is the basic dharma that defining Buddhism resists. Batchelor stresses adaptation for the West, and for the East as its westernized; he reminds readers that any form of the dharma must be transformative, forced to change to a new enviroment for it to survive among its practitioners. This evolution happens in the culture as well as within the practitioner. "As long as the practitioner remains unaffected, the Dharma can be no more than a consolation, a diversion, a fascination or an obsession." (279)

Later sections take us through various contemporary expounders of teachings. With "engaged" Buddhism, Batchelor finds an antidote for the pablum often "soft-peddled" as dharma that panders to romantic, nihilistic, consumerist, or passive fads. Delving into the recently popular "interdependence" concept, he finds that Thich Nhat Hanh's "interbeing," developed out of the peaceful opposition that brought down the Catholic despot Diem in 1963, can topple oppressors. (Of course, I add, military might as wielded by the U.S. and its Vietnamese puppet regime insured that the non-violent alternative did not last long.)

Globalization reminds us of interbeing in another context. The "'poisons' of the mind (delusion, greed and hatred) to be uprooted through Buddhist practice have become institutionalized in the forms of the multinational corporations, consumerism, and the arms industry that increasingly dominate life on earth." (361-2) If one acts with true compassion, one cannot sit on a cushion all day. One must get out and take time to make changes to trouble the complacent and comfort the weak.

Batchelor ends this book as he began, with the Dalai Lama being recognized by Vaclav Havel after the fall of Communism. Nearly twenty years on, reading his accounts, I wondered if any hope was left for Tibet, Burma, Vietnam, North Korea, or Laos where the "sangha" has been terrorized but where perhaps in a few redoubts monks, nuns, and laity try to rally opposition peacefully. He concludes with an telling and haunting anecdote from oral history conveyed firsthand that's missing from "convenient fictions" of the historical record. The Dalai Lama in his official autobiography "Freedom in Exile" omits his real encounter at the Wall of another East-West divide now broken by capitalism, migration, and global diaspora. He was on the East side, not the West as he writes.

On that side, the GDR's Communist Party had fallen earlier that same day. The Stasi, the secret police, escorted him and his entourage into then-Soviet Zone at Checkpoint Charlie. A Citizen's Action Movement had rallied, wishing to take over East Germany to make it non-aligned, demilitarized, nuclear-free, and "environmentally aware." (376) This CAM told the Dalai Lama he'd be their "first official guest," and that Tibetan independence would be recognized. But, his handlers were nervous and got him back to the western side of the Wall. West Germans intervened, and reunification under the consumer oligarchy that epitomizes Western democracy in Europe followed for the GDR.

Petra Kelly, Green Party leader, and her companion Gert Bastian told him this story. They were in the crowd that saw the Dalai Lama light his candle on the other side of the Berlin Wall. Petra had illicitly arranged the car that took the Tibetans to their clandestine (and heretofore unknown to Batchelor) roundtable. Four days after Kelly told this story, Gert fatally shot her and then himself. No suicide note, no explanation, at least of the New Year's Eve, 1992 completion of this book's manuscript. Out of such stories, multiplied in unpredictable, inspiring, and depressing fashion, history emerges into written form, and out of the scraps gleaned from past notes and testimonies, Batchelor has created an engrossing story himself.

(P.S. Readers wanting more about Shunryu Suzuki: see my review of David Chadwick's "Crooked Cucumber." Also, see my review of "Buddhism Without Beliefs"-- both on my "Blogtrotter" blog and on Amazon US recently, where this review was posted 7-24-09. His newest book, "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist," awaits my reading and reviewing. Author's website: "StephenBatchelor.org".)

Donald Lopez' "A Modern Buddhist Bible": Book Review

2009-07-17T10:30:00.001-07:00

>"Tired of listening to eulogistical messages with empty contents," a Thai activist castigates Buddhist leaders for smugly promoting their tolerance, scientific compatibility, and downright goodness while his people starve under dictatorship. The selections compiled show a Buddhism that turns from worship and ritual towards meditation, but also towards social justice. Many books on Buddhism tend to be slim, full of platitudes, and self-congratulatory. This one strives for a truer depiction of how, from 1873-1990, Buddhist leaders and popularizers have engaged contemporary problems, and also have perpetuated modern fantasies, about the truth of the dharma.

Jack Kerouac claimed to have stolen a copy from San José, California's public library of an earlier assembly of Buddhist scriptures arranged by Dwight Goddard as "The Buddhist Bible." The incongruity and the compatibility of such a juxtaposition reveals Western and modern attempts to package dharma for a popular audience schooled in Holy Writ, and then, like Kerouac, wanting to step beyond it or integrate it into a modern encounter between East and West, mystic and mass-market, venerable and hip. Out of such conventional dichotomies, such authors as included here seek also to bridge cultural gaps, correct (or in earlier decades continue or distort) misunderstandings, and to realign Buddha's instructions as operating manuals in an age of faster transport, bolder power, and quicker communication.

The editor introduces modern Buddhism that "rejects many of the ritual and magical elements of previous forms." Instead, "it stresses equality over hierarchy, the universal over the local, and often exalts the individual above the community." (ix)
It does not improve earlier Buddhism so much as-- and the Protestant and/or secular, New Age, and/or rational qualities of many who started the effort from both Eastern and Western backgrounds must be emphasized-- seeking a return to a truer, more primitive, simpler practice. The ancient form is argued to be the most modern.

Lopez, a Tibetan expert, does insert practically verbatim parts from his 1998 debunking "Prisoners of Shangri-La" as he introduces Evans-Wentz' "Tibetan Book of the Dead," for example. Some earlier excerpts such as the historically important Madame Blavatsky with her Theosophical flights of fancy, Evans-Wentz' rather lugubrious interpretations, and Sir Edwin Arnold's once popular "The Light of Asia" will probably bore today's reader. But, they are necessary to show the start of the dialogue between Eastern reformers and Western explorers who discovered Buddhism and wished to present it as an alternative to imperialism, Christianity, and Darwin; or, perhaps rather compatible with at least the last two.

I found my own favorites. Shunryu Suzuki (see my review of David Chadwick's "Crooked Cucumber" biography) sensibly sums up Soto Zen's stress on simplicity. "It is like studying a foreign language; you cannot do it all of a sudden, but by repeating it over and over you will master it. This is the Soto way of practice. We may say either that we make progress little by little, or that we do not even expect to make progress. Just to be sincere and make our full effort in each moment is enough. There is no Nirvana outside our practice." (135)

Alan Watts seems to have fallen out of favor among current audiences, but he prepared the way for Shunryu Suzuki's impact in the San Francisco counterculture. Unlike the Beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Snyder) here featured, in his 1959 essay "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen," Watts appears to have outlasted the Beats when it comes to a prescient observation of the permanence of true insight vs. the fads of a passing trend-- an aspect that continues to color how Buddhism gets marketed globally more than ever. Watts starts by nodding to the Japanese twist. Zen historically attracted the samurai class for its power to get rid of their self-conscious youthful education. But, this plays into the "Japanese compulsion to compete with oneself-- a compulsion which turns every craft and skill into a marathon of self-discipline." I thought of the bizarre game shows that try to humiliate or reward contestants with death-defying or at least stomach-churning feats. Watts finds that Japan's version of Zen "fought fire with fire, overcoming the 'self observing the self' by bringing it to an intensity with which it exploded." (161)
For Westerners raised within a Jewish-Christian culture, whether or not adhering to its beliefs outright, Watts understands the appeal of a Buddhism that the Beats enjoyed, one that did not preach or moralize. Yet, Watts knows the dangers of distorting dharma into existential folly. He insists that anyone from the West must get beyond being "swayed by its promises unconsciously." One must be able to take or leave "the Lord God Jehovah with his Hebrew-Christian conscience" but "without fear or rebellion." A comparison may be Rodger Kamenetz' studies (reviewed by me) in "The Jew in the Lotus" and "Stalking Elijah" about how Jewish and/or Buddhist seekers try to balance their psychic inheritance with their practical search.

Watts finds that unless one is freed from the "itch to justify" one's self, one's

"Zen will be either 'beat' or 'square', either a revolt from the culture and social order of a new form of stuffiness and respectability. For Zen is above all the liberation of the mind from conventional thought, and this is something utterly different from rebellion against convention, on the one hand, or adapting foreign conventions, on the other." (165)

He contrasts the "underlying protestant lawlessness of beat Zen" as calculated to annoy the squares, who seriously try to pursue the "satori" or breakthrough by gaining official stamps of calligraphed approval. Their own spiritual tourism, their rush to wander Asia to find what they can obtain in their own garden, also presents dangers, when such "fuss" gets "mixed up with Bohemian affectations." (168; 171)

Chogyam Trungpa in the last selection, after the next dozen years of the Beats turned hippies found many Americans unable to handle true wisdom, also finds that without a "spiritual friend who is a doctor with a sharp knife," seekers will fail to free themselves from "spiritual materialism" and "shopping" for one layer after another to put on and discard as they wander the bazaar of the next hip spirituality.

Thich Nhat Hanh offers another alternative to such restlessness within the modern heart. "A human being is like a television set with millions of channels. If we turn the Buddha on, we are the Buddha. If we turn sorrow on, we are sorrow. If we turn a smile on, we really are the smile. We cannot let just one channel dominate us. We have the seed of everything in us, and we have to seize the situation in our hand, to recover our own sovereignty." (205)

Allying individual renewal to social transformation, Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, and Taiwanese activist Cheng Yen urge smiles to accompany little shifts in personal behavior that start to ripple out to those around us. While B. R. Ambedkar's Indian manifesto shown earlier tying Karl Marx to a revolutionary dharma may have never come to fruition, nor the Thai Buddhadesa's call for "dictatorial socialism" to overcome the dictators in his homeland, the gentler calls for reform dominate later appeals to apply the dharma to change the world, rather than play into stereotypes of a navel-gazing Buddhism concerned only with monastic ritual, inner exploration, or exotic mantras.

Arranged chronologically by the birth of their authors, the thirty-one selections do not follow any logical pattern otherwise. As with "Prisoners of Shangri-La," this anthology will prove difficult to plow straight through; a glossary does help somewhat, but not a book I'd recommend to beginners. Try Rick Fields' narrative history of Buddhism in America, "How the Swans Came to the Lake," first. Lopez can be less than helpful in some of his too-compressed introductions; I am not sure where a "Calvinist convent" is for Alexandra David-Neel's early education. Some excerpts are astonishingly dull, predictable, or obtuse. Still, this forces the reader like it or not into hearing a diverse array of voices demanding renewal and rebirth of Buddhism. I shared a few of my favorite passages above.

Lopez views the modern Buddhist movements as their own sect. Not mutually exclusive of earlier forms, but often compatible if with "its own lineage, its own doctrines, its own practices." Here, from "a cosmopolitan network of intellectuals," he attempts to present "its own canon of sacred scriptures." (xxxix)

While William Burroughs' rejoinder "Show me a good Buddhist novelist" (155) remains to be proven, given the lack of fiction and not much poetry of any worth within these pages, I do hope a century later readers of a "21st Century Buddhist Bible" may find much to celebrate in the genres not only of polemic, sermon, address, scientific speculation, and inspiration, but in the realms of the creative arts. (Posted to Amazon US today, and also on my shorter blog where many other reviews appear, "Blogtrotter.")

Donald Lopez' "Prisoners of Shangri-La": Book Review

2009-07-16T16:04:00.000-07:00

How we idealize Tibet as the white man's spiritual treasury, protected by monks within frozen lairs, links seven essays. Acerbic, dispassionate, and unromantic, Lopez demystifies what much coverage of the Dalai Lama and centuries of fables have obscured: Tibet's reality. This book talks little of politics, but much about the predicament that the West has placed Tibet within: we cannot allow it to escape our own fanciful prison, within which levitating lamas, carefree peasants, and many monks pursue beneath rarified skies the mysteries of a higher realm.

This emphasis, despite Lopez's knack for deadpan dismissal of tall tales, can be dispiriting. While I admire his efforts to dismantle the Orientalist construct that freezes Tibet, I wondered why he remained so dispassionate about its current plight. The final chapter, "The Prison," appears to castigate the Dalai Lama for his difficult balancing act between political leader and spiritual director, but it's hard to see why Lopez ignores the destruction of so much of the learning and culture that he, as a professional Tibet expert, would surely lament.

Perhaps the "surely" betrays my own prejudice, however. In professorial mode rather than as gulled tale-teller, he seeks to distance himself from Western stereotypes of Eastern wisdom. He studies how Western reception makes "things Tibetan become not particular to a time and a place, but universal, and in the process Tibet is everywhere and hence nowhere, functioning as an element of difference in which everything is possible." And in this non-historical, non-geographical, nonsensical depiction, Westerners form their own deluded knowledge of what they claim to know.

Chapter One examines at great length the term Lamaism as a definition for what Tibetans believe. Often Protestant or rationalist interpreters sought to taint Tibetan practice and belief as "papist," and while Lopez does not cite Ram Dass' later summation of Tibetan Buddhism as "Roman Catholicism on LSD," this later, and perhaps approving, tie of the Vatican to the lamasary may be a rare instance of a positive spin on the topic. Even early friars visiting Lhasa despaired at finding an eerie funhouse mirror of Catholic ritual seemingly repeated by the panoply they found. It later became justification for the fears of the West that the Church and Tibet both represented, to be conquered by either reforming Christians and/or rational imperialists. He concludes: "The very use of the term Lamaism is a gesture of control over the unincorporated and the unassimilated, used first by the Qing over Tibet, then as a code word for 'Papism' by the British over Catholic Ireland and Europe, and finally by European Buddhology over the uncolonized and unread." (44)

Chapter Two extends the reach of the West through Jung's commentary and the various editors and renderers of the mislabelled (to allude to the 1920s King Tut craze, a point Lopez does not mention) "Tibetan Book of the Dead." Lopez repeats a minor error in recounting the tale of its earliest popularizer, Walter Y. Evans-Wentz. Lopez notes that Evans-Wentz "enrolled at Stanford, where he studied with William James and William Butler Yeats." (52) While W.Y. Evans-Wentz pursued Yeats to his Irish home at Coole in the summer of 1908, and dedicated his 1911 "Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries" (originally his Rennes thesis, published by Oxford) to WBY, I can find no record in the standard biography by R.F. Foster that Yeats himself taught at Stanford, only that his lecture tour from 27 Jan.-3 Feb. 1904 covered the Bay Area, with a lecture on 29 Jan. at Stanford. ("W.B. Yeats: A Life" 1:305; Foster makes his own minor slip, indexing "William" rather than "Walter.")

Lopez, here and in his edition of the life of Milarepa, appears to borrow the last phrase of the blurb (repeated on Wikipedia) in "Fairy Faith" that's "about the author." This claims: "He received both his B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University, where he studied with William James and William Butler Yeats." In "Fairy-Faith," Evans-Wentz dedicates it to AE (George Russell) and Yeats, "who brought to me at my own alma mater in California the first message from fairyland and who afterward in his own country led me through the haunts of fairy kings and queens." This seems more accurate. The earlier claim repeated by Lopez about the "where" is the point in question; Evans-Wentz came in 1908 to learn from Yeats; Yeats did not come to teach Evans-Wentz per se-- unless a few conversations with WYE-W by WBY during California speaking engagements count as such.

Returning to the main text, I disagree with Lopez' assumption that Sogyal Rinpoche's "Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" too heedlessly sidesteps the idea of the "six realms of rebirth" by avoiding a "literal rendering." (80) As a Californian, I liked Sogyal's analogy of my state as, for "the demigod realm," reified by deluded, "high on meditation," surfers and lounging, affluent layabouts. He, as Lopez glances at only, simply gives us a comparison Westerners can relate to. He later shows in his book much more about traditional depiction of the bardos, but his purpose is not the straight translation (or as Francesca Fremantle later in "Luminous Emptiness" strove to do, the applicability of it to life and not only the afterlife) or commentary that Thurman may have favored--admittedly with his own very contemporary slant. After all, Fremantle & Chogyam Trungpa, Thurman, and Sogyal Rinpoche tried to shift the text from Evans-Wentz's esoteric eclecticism and Jung's archetypes so as to position it for post-hippie, post-lysergic readers today. This mission in the Penguin complete edition (by Gyurme Dorje, Graham Coleman, Thupten Jinpa, with the inevitable if certainly welcome prefaces and comments by the Dalai Lama) continues to strive to overcome Evans-Wentz's Theosophical & New Age bias. And, as Lopez deadpans, if E-W had found in the 1919 detritus of a returning British officer instead a Buddhist logic tract, we'd be telling a far different tale of the dharma in the West today.

Lopez raises an excellent question. Perhaps New Age devotees of Evans-Wentz's Theosophical and willfully eclectic "California Cosmology" (see Ronald Hutton's "The Triumph of the Moon" history of modern paganism and witchcraft) and eager Tibetophiles such as Tim Leary, Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), and Robert Thurman might agree: early Buddhism anticipates later Western physics, regarding deeper levels of consciousness accessible by psychedelics, meditation, tantra, or combinations thereof. Yet, Lopez interrupts, why do we believe Buddhists and their sympathizers? "When we read the claims of Hindu fundamentalists that locomotives and rocket travel are described in the Vedas or that the beam of light emitted from S[h]iva's brow is really a laser, we smile indulgently." Compare to Buddhist claims from the same time and culture for "a universe that moves through periods of cosmic evolution and devolution," for which many may "assume that this is simply something that physicists have not yet discovered." (76)

Such claims permeate those who, as with Lama Govinda, may not even know Tibetan, yet speak as purveyors of hidden wisdom from "treasure texts" long preserved in Shangri-La. By contrast, Lopez is almost gentle in Chapter Three with Lobsang Rampa, the "mystifier" in a double sense, born Cyril Hoskin in Devonshire. He handles the persistently popular New Age assertions that this British man had his "body actually taken over by the spirit of an Easterner"-- to quote him-- and so he "became" a lama, although unable to speak any Tibetan in his Anglicized manifestation, although he could communicate with cats. His many pulp paperbacks recount his adventures in Tibetan and spiritualist realms, and while shelved among "occult" titles today, Lopez notes with a touch of sympathy how many of his professional colleagues first learned about Tibet in the pages of such as 1956's début by Rampa, "The Third Eye."

Chapter Four takes on "om mani padme hum" at much length, equalling that of "lamaism." Again, he delves into how interpretations-- eventually by Tibetans themselves in their explanations-- turn into a rote recital of "the jewel in the heart of the lotus" to sum up this endlessly recited formula as speaking for Tibet.
I found its most evocative, if provocative, exposure near the end of a rather exhausting chapter. It may be that early missionaries quailed at its meaning, if they dared to penetrate its mystery. If the "feminine form of the Sanskrit vocative" for "mani padme" apparently as "O Jewel Lotus" appeals to Avalokiteshvara, who holds both items, why would this masculine figure receive a feminine form? Lopez quotes June Campbell's "Traveller in Space"-- it's unlikely that "mani" means phallus, as "vajra" [often "thunderbolt" in common translations] is "more common." Campbell posits "mani" as clitoris and so the mantra invokes "the deity of the clitoris-vagina," an indigenous deity before the coming of the dharma, who underwent a sex-change by those Campbell deems "the zealous missionaries of Tibetan Buddhism." (133)

The tendency to misinterpret art in Western exhibitions and catalogues takes up Chapter Five; Chapter Six presents a fascinating topic that I have never seen raised in a popular account of Tibetan Buddhism. Jeffrey Hopkins, along with Thurman the pioneer of Western transmission of Tibetan dharma into academia, is also a practitioner. Many of his American Ph.D.'s-- as with Lopez, I gather-- in the field turn "scholar-adepts." Unlike Continental scholars emerging out of Oriental Studies programs, for the U.S., the seminary model influenced the Religious Studies set-up for colleges here. Tibetan Studies Ph.D's often link their study to their practice.

Perhaps, one cannot easily sever study from inculcation, as one seeks "salvation by scholarship" in by collegial tenure rather than as a celibate monk. This intrigued me, for how many other departments may boast this psychic identification by professors? Can one teach communism or Freud or Islam without avowing its tenets? Certainly. Given the transmission that Buddhism relies upon of the teaching in a one-on-one chain over 2500 years, I wonder if this can be adapted to academia, or if the monastic pattern will be substituted in universities. What he does not explore is whether a non-believer in the dharma can truly comprehend Tibetan texts, that need-- if Lopez and Hopkins are correct-- to be taken in by those encountering them by methods defying mere translation or equivalents.

Lopez shows how Hopkins at the U. of Virginia took his students into in-depth re-thinking so they could learn the syllogisms and rationales upon which non-Western philosophy as taught by the lamas rested for their students. This re-orientation of the mindset necessary for understanding Tibetan teaching, due to its difficulty, means that a UVA dissertation may still aspire to the level that, among Tibetans, may be reached by a twelve-year-old schoolchild in a monastery. It's that arcane. Just comparing the Tibetan transliterations to their Western compression shows the challenge of crossing what I imagine may loom as a considerable barrier for those not fluent in Sanskrit and Chinese before tackling Tibetan and its cousin languages.

The final chapter raises how we construct prisons around fantasies. Pico Iyer in "The Open Road" (reviewed by me last year on "Blogtrotter" and on Amazon US) raises the same example as Lopez. How many who revere in stadiums or seminars the Dalai Lama know of the "Shugden affair"? Westerners tend to respond to a secularized, ethical, and non-theistic, non-ritualistic, ecumenical style of Buddhism as packaged for wide audiences. "The Tibetan Buddhism practiced by Western adherents was generally of the Buddhist modernist variety, with an emphasis on meditation on emptiness and on compassion, and did not include ritual offerings of fire from a lamp made of human fat with a wick made of human hair." While Tibetan teachers themselves propitiate this controversial "demon" deity, such veneration to say the least does not constitute the retailed version of what gurus offer to their students abroad.

And, on such contrasts, Lopez ends his uneven but worthwhile 1998 study. This book feels as if he wrote separate essays on aspects of how Westerners interpret Tibetan Buddhism, and then he later linked them, often loosely, and widened them for a broader readership. Unlike Jeffery Paine's popularized "Re-Enchantment," Lopez includes substantial scholarship with complete references; many of the endnotes are essential for complete appreciation of what can be advanced academic discourse. Despite the apparent outreach to a wide readership, this book tells almost nothing about the basics; I'd recommend it after Paine, who while he eschews the learning appended and permeating Lopez, would be more accessible for newcomers. Thomas Laird's "History of Tibet" compiled with interviews with the Dalai Lama would also be a good start for those craving more background. (I reviewed Fremantle, Thurman, the TBoD editions by Dorje et al., Laird and Paine on Amazon US and my regular blog "Blogtrotter"; I also recommend and reviewed Richard Gere's reading of the Fremantle-Trungpa TBoD ed., and Patrick French's disillusioning "Tibet, Tibet" about the aftermath of Western activist enthusiasm for what seems increasingly the lost cause of Tibetan freedom.)

Jeffery Paine's "Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West"

2009-06-28T19:02:00.000-07:00

"When the story is told in these pages began, had most Americans tried to locate Tibet on a map, they would have pockmarked half the globe with bad-guess pinpricks. By the time the story ends, some Hollywood stars know more about Tibetan Buddhism than the Dalai Lama does-- or at least they act that way." Paine's wry sideswipe at Steven Seagal shows the wit and tone of this thoughtful-- if erratically edited-- introduction to a subject that will likely leave you craving more insight.

Paine takes us through not so much the tenets of Tibetan Buddhism, described by Alan Watts as "Roman Catholicism on acid"; the appeal in the West of what's surpassed Zen since Watts & the Beats lies in its panoply of approaches towards wisdom, its exotic teachings, and its colorful characters. As Paine in his best chapter, on the Dalai Lama's appeal to live with utmost conviction yet astonishing flexibility, shows us, most Tibetans despite their escape from the horrors of decimation seem-- unlike so many presenters of religious doctrine-- to be enjoying themselves amidst their substitution of dogma or dictate with philosophical ambiguity, non-theistic contemplation, unpredictable practices, and creative props that both represent and deny the ultimate existence of gods. Not taking themselves seriously, the Tibetan lamas teach us, he displays in case studies of teachers and students, how to approach our life with the sense it's a game, played that comes and goes perpetually beyond the brief brackets of our birth and death in our present form.

"With its compact emphasis on individual meditation, Buddhism may fit the overpopulated" century as "it can accomodate itself and take up less space." (136-7) He wonders if more people sought diminishment of goods, more people might "possess an 'overabundance' of food and housing." Many in these pages dream of a transformed world through ethical principles based in Buddhism that others may incorporate, if free of the panoply that surrounds Tibetan versions of its teachings. Paine defines universality, individual responsibility, and heightened capabilities for personal growth turned social improvement as three civilizing features the dharma can share with other religions and moral systems.

Certainly, the appeal of a self-generated, yet outwardly directed, way of life that avoids fruitless fretting about salvation, eternity, and sin may be timed for our times better than Vedanta was for Christopher Isherwood's Hollywood, or even Zen, Paine hints, for its countercultural adoption. This issue deserved far more depth, but Paine does touch on essential points. He wonders if religions would improve by being more contradictory, communal vs. individual, mystical vs. practical, angelic or unadorned, "flinty" or "firm," as they adapt to a human nature more akin to Buddhist notions of impermanence, the unknowable, and the evanescent that underlies the illusion of relative, conventional "reality" as a transcendent, perpetual state.

These ideas burrow into the text, more in its latter chapters. He begins with Thomas Merton's in retrospect still-naive pilgrimage, when the Dalai Lama was little known by most in 1968. Harold Talbott, whose own journey from Fifth Avenue scion to Buddhist scholar gains attention later on as one of three case studies, served as Merton's go-between. Paine gives a solid overview of what in the anthology "Merton & Buddhism" more recently has gained needed scrutiny by scholars. Tibet's context within Western imperialism follows, with French explorer and writer Alexandra David-Neel's long life (1868-1969) spanning the cultural shift from fabled Shangri-La to hippie destination, if one no less exotic in the eyes of typical Westerners.

The romanticization, decried later by Patrick French in "Tibet, Tibet," and the adulation of the Dalai Lama, have long been present in the West. The difference is now, unlike when Diane Perry grew up in the 1950s in London, millions know now what few knew only in fragments, as Merton did, given the lack of communication with the West by lamas who had not yet gained Western followings until around 1970. Thubten Geshe and then notoriously Chögyam Trungpa spearheaded the British and American popularity of Tibetan lore. Paine's ability to get inside the minds of both teachers and students shows him at his best as a writer and interpreter throughout the book.

Trungpa, he suggests, soon figured out that Westerners could be jumpstarted into higher-level teaching than customary in Tibetan monasteries. Inspired by Shunryu Suzuki's similar shifts when he brought Zen to San Francisco earlier, Trungpa decided to shift into higher gear. Paine explains: "Meditation is so empty of content that it's hard to turn it into spiritual materialism or appropriate it for egotistical purposes." (93) For newcomers, who had lost "the principles of sacredness," Trungpa reduced the dharma to a secular-friendly core; for those who wanted to restore the Tibetan brocades, visualizations and enthronements commenced.

Therefore (as the uncredited Fields narrates in his history), Tibetan monastic practices began to be transferred outside their origins. By the 1990s as the process advanced, Alyce Neoli/ Catherine Burroughs emerged as a "tulku" of a reincarnated female "lama" chosen by the same Penor Rinpoche who later "recognized" Seagal-- after a few donations were made. The uncredited Kamenetz records that when the rabbis found out about how a "tulku" was found, they wondered: what if the lama makes a mistake? I wondered this too, when reading Martha Sherrill's "The Buddha from Brooklyn" about Alyce who became Jetsunma; Paine takes a sympathetic tone towards her, noting Tenzin Palmo's conclusion after reading Sherrill: "her follies are such the way such a being would behave," as recounted by Sherrill, "if he or she lacked the proper training." (158) Tenzin should know, as a girl attracted to a teaching she could not even define as Buddhist, so little being known then about Tibetan dharma by all but a few scholars from a few glimpses such as David-Neel's.

Tenzin Palmo's transformation's amazing; born a Cockney fishmonger's daughter Diane Perry when nobody born humble in postwar Britain knew of such teachings, ordained in 1964 as one of the first Western nuns, she later spent twelve years as a hermit in a cave 13,200 feet high in Ladakh, and then returning from her harrowing yet inspiring story to found a nunnery. David-Neel saw Buddhism from the outside; Perry became Tenzin to enter it.

The widening attraction of hitherto inaccessible teachings from a remote land rippled out from the hippies to the celebrities and by films. Not only explicitly about Tibet as in the 1990s, but filtered through "The Matrix" and "Jacob's Ladder," the bardo dramatized for everyday folks. The fact I don't explain that term speaks for the rapid spread over a generation of a thousand-year-old, isolated, esoteric science of the mind into popular culture, as if a medieval monk found himself lauded in Manhattan.

This may be a fad, or it may be a genuine sign of shift: Robert Thurman argues the latter, while Jean-Francois Revel & Matthieu Ricard ("The Monk & The Philosopher" 1996) James William Coleman in "The New Buddhists" (2001, neither work cited here) examines the appeal of Buddhism for many intellectual elites in the West; the teachings he finds have not trickled down yet. Pankraj Mishra from the Indian p-o-v also wonders about Buddha vs. Nietzsche at length in "An End to Suffering" (2004). Paine favors Shakespeare, Henry and William James as his references, well-employed if hard for an eager reader to track back-- more later about this shortcoming.

Paine, considering music and film, seems to feel the dharma's widening, but I wonder about the permanence of its impacts. De Tocqueville noted the American withdrawal from "delineation of the soul to fix exclusively on that of the body, and they substitute the representation of motion and sensation with that of sentiment and thought."

Daringly, Paine then links this prescient observation to Buddhism, which as with film uses projection to record sensory experiences and motion while leaving the soul's mysteries intangible. "Hollywood calls the illusions it makes from bodies, sensation, and motion 'cinema.' Buddhism calls the illusions made from them 'conventional reality.'" Paine provides a novel image when recounting how cinema and Tibetan Buddhism are both roughly a century old in their Western transmissions: "In both a movie and Buddhism, 'reality' is palpably, sensuously before us, making us laugh one moment and cry the next, but then vanishing insubstantially when the projectionist (or, in Buddhism, our projection) flicks off the switch." (179)

Paine again excites the reader by his ability to convey the wonder: he juxtaposes Talbott's Gatsby-esque tale of reinvention. Here, as with "tonglin" and "ngondro" and "chöd" Paine illustrates Tibetan terms deftly. "Our usual mental states are like the audience in a theater that gets caught up in the drama that unfolds." Contrast this with the emptiness and luminosity registered by Tibetans at this high stage. The state of play demanded as in quantum physics demands Talbott as a "dzogchen" practitioner abandon "reality" as it seems solid to our senses, for a mind so trained "resembles the playwright who exults in the creative play with which he maneuvers his imaginary puppets."(221)

His next case: a (psuedonymous to protect her reputation) Princeton deconstructionist feminist mid-life wonders about the appeal her tentative forays into Tibetan practice and reading reveal. A literary critic such as herself, Paine relates, follows a long path of scholarship most of her career, with "few genuine knock-you-off-your-chair discoveries left to be made." Tibetan Buddhism provides "Christine" with "her ticket into the unknown," after idly finding used at the Strand Bookstore Sogyal Rinpoche's influential "Tibetan Book of Living and Dying." Yet, her colleagues, disdainful of any belief, may belittle her quest, so she pursues it in the morning at home, gingerly but with increasing fascination.

San Quentin's death row houses the final American turned Tibetan student, if at a distance behind bars. Jarvis Masters contemplates karma, impermanence, and mindfulness as translated into taking responsibility for one's actions, accepting how reality itself changes during one's sentence as faced with honesty, and how one must faced with one's term should cultivate an awareness to embrace not endure the present situation. As with Alyce Zeoli or Diane Perry in their ignorance of Buddhism constructed before their exposure to it a homespun notion of its dharma independently and even intuitively, so in prison, Paine considers, such stories "from both the sickbed and prison cell, indirectly support Buddhism's claim that it is not a religion but something that occurs 'in life'-- not a man-made, synthetic medicine but a plant with healing properties that grows of itself." (251)

The narrative concludes on such graceful notes. Still, the story needed more unfolding, given that Paine admits seven years' labor on its contents. Intended for the general reader, so lacking by his design footnotes or works cited, this superficially but persistently disappoints in its scattershot mention of many who've preceded Paine; Paine assures their books can be readily found, but his decision to eschew documentation makes this an uneven book, riddled with typos. W.Y. Evans-"Wenz" repeats, "Llasa" alternates with "Lhasa." "Arbie's" and "Guiness" appear; Stephen and Martine separately are surnamed "Bachelor" while "Into the Wild" is attributed to "John" Krakauer. The lack of credit given such as Rodger Kamenetz' "The Jew in the Lotus," the 1994 account of the 1990 visit by rabbis to Dharamsala, proves odd; Rick Fields' pioneering 1992 "How the Swans Came to the Lake" may also be familiar to readers already, but why not mention these popular and enduring predecessors that showed many Americans (as they did me) perhaps their first glimpses into Tibetan Buddhism?

These persistent shortcomings noted, the strength in Paine's narrative lies in his metaphorical mind. As he struggles, for instance, to match the mansion yearned for in Christian mentalities of the afterlife with the adding on of another room in a modern mind making room for hitherto unknown Tibetan dharma, he falters. But, he more often succeeds.

(P.S. I've reviewed Coleman, French, "Merton and Buddhism," Kamenetz, Mishra, Revel & Ricard, and Sherrill on Amazon U.S. and my "Blogtrotter" daily-ish blog; Sherrill's review's also in May on NTLATBR blog where longer reviews are cross-posted.)

Martha Sherrill's "The Buddha from Brooklyn": Book Review

2009-05-21T18:07:00.000-07:00

From the title, I figured an Allen Ginsberg-goes-to-Katmandu spiel. Far from it. This deserves wide attention for its insights into how a cult of personality may evolve into a sincere religion. A half-Italian (quarter-Jewish) gal from Brooklyn, although she moved to Florida at 14 and spent her time since in the South, Midwest, and now Maryland, the soon-to-be four (or five) times-divorced mother of many defies expectations of whom a "tulku," or reincarnated holy one in the Tibetan tradition, would be.

Is she genuine? The question perhaps lies beyond Western ways of verification. Gurus have been notorious before. Sherrill constructs a story about this sometimes sleek, sometimes frumpy, Lee Press-On Nails and black leather-clad mother that spirals downward and inward as hints early on expand, halfway through this brisk, intelligent book. As if for dazzled children, the lady in question exerts considerable appeal for adults as she exhibits the wonder of the spirit. The aura she creates energizes the channeller-healer and her New Age followers into Buddhism after a lama visits their center. He recognizes Catharine Burroughs (already changed from Alyce Zeoli) as the return of a 17th c. Tibetan holy woman. She will take the name Jetsunma Akhon Lhamo and command an increasingly devoted, in the full sense, congregation. It includes her friends and family, who now venerate her as a guru in Tibetan fashion, prostrating before her.

Meanwhile, while the monks and mostly nuns at what becomes America's largest and most stable Tibetan Buddhist monastery work themselves ragged to build the temple and then the forty-foot stupa (sacred monument; if they said prayers for the bugs killed in the construction, why did they have to cut so many trees down for it, and why destroy a sixty-five acre grove across the road for their temple?), Jetsunma takes on a combination of consumerism and confrontation that unsettles a few of her charges. Two nuns were her lovers; so were two monks, both of whom marry her more or less sequentially. She loves and leaves them in quick time; she also tells members to divorce their spouses, and takes on one member's child as her own adopted one while coveting another couple's child. The community winds up giving half its income to her, tax-free $10k monthly, even as the monastics live spartan lives full of sacrifice and unending toil to serve her and her plan to build the stupa and expand the monastery. They also help fund her hair-care product scheme and its infomercials, which fail to capture the public.

Jetsunma claims the stupa's building trumps finding a cancer cure or running a soup kitchen. The romantic love that attaches so many to join her monastery and temple proves her charismatic power over often professionals and well-educated folks seeking her insights, from around the DC area. Sherrill, as a Washington insider used to profiling celebrities, struggles to understand her charm. The vowed members of the temple must obey her, as a guru's commands cannot be denied, under "samaya" that instills in Tibetan practice a total obligation to a lama as part of the demanding and punishing way a follower finds enlightenment by endless abnegation.

The followers fear losing karma and creating bad energy among other "sentient beings" if they disobey her. A visiting monk warns that such a system distorts the dharma teaching just as the Tibetan forms have warped the original dharma of the Buddha's message, but he doubts if reform can come in their lifetimes. The Asian models instill obedience, and by "any means necessary," Jetsunma will even use seduction if it lands her followers who will then be open to dharma, in her logic, and the way of the Buddha.

Such reasoning lures Sherrill to relate stories she tells from within the circle-- Jetsunma's third husband, her attendant, male and female consorts, and a nun who wavers in her commitment. The children appear less vividly. Sherrill seems to have been prevented in talking to the earlier two-exes and Alyce's mother so as to have access to Jetsunma. (I note that my hardcover book lacked the small picture of the guru on the paperback cover; surprisingly or not, no photos of the KPC temple or its members are shown.) Sherrill appears, late in her quest, to veer away from the increasingly complex imbroglio into tangents, talking with Deepak Chopra, Tammy Faye Bakker, Dr. Laura Schlessinger in her attempt to comprehend how charisma and money combine for certain purveyors of self-help coupled with spirituality. She's on to a great topic, but this distracts her from the Tibetan Buddhist adaptation to the West that needs elucidation.

This lack of follow-through examination of Tibetan practices in one instance left the narrative less than complete. I sensed that the lamas allied with the one who "recognized" Jetsunma were about to rescind that judgment when a lawsuit threatened; the sudden withdrawal of the case left me wondering if indeed a guru's "recognition" could ever be in error. The trouble, or the blessing, for those truly convinced of "guru devotion" is that "Correct View" allegiance allows one even to lie if a guru's involved, from what Sherrill tells us, and this whole predicament seemed less than clear in her treatment of the attempt to get Jetsunma's bonafides withdrawn by the lamas in charge. The dangers for a Westerner of explaining, or following, absolute conviction that a guru will guide one to enlightenment no matter how bizarre or extravagant their behavior, as in the case of Chogyam Trungpa's "crazy wisdom" alluded to in this book, complicates the matter considerably.

The temple increasingly takes on an aura familiar to those who know of religious domination by powerful leaders, and certainly Jetsunma embodies such magnetism, turned towards confusing and contradictory directions. She seems to retreat from Tibetan fidelity after the mid-90s, and in her mid-forties may have tired from such intense scrutiny, moving her core group again-- to the New Age bastion of Sedona, Arizona.

Yet, Sherrill does not end her story with a pat moral. I leave out the latter episodes, but the last seventy-five pages marvelously increase the suspense that this author creates out of this subject. One time, she fears that "there was no emptiness," that all around Jetsunma betrays only desperation, not aspiration. Then, she reconsiders, in the tradition of earlier cults turned respectable faiths.

I leave the relevance of the dog's tooth as the decoy Tibetan tale and her interpretation for you to find out. Sherrill takes on a great challenge personally and journalistically, and I admire her tale-telling skills in her intricately arranged construction of the facts, and her own exploration of spiritual appeal amidst material temptation. The lesson she learns may elude our rational expectation, but "the lotus has its roots in the mud" proves an relevant and appropriate phrase.

(See my related review of Jeffery Paine's 2004 "Re-Enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West" posted 6-28-09, here, on "Blogtrotter," and on Amazon U.S. He has a chapter on Jetsunma. My regular blog, "Blogtrotter," has many reviews related to this wider topic as well.)

Michael Parker's "Northern Irish Literature: 1956-2006": Book Review

2009-03-15T13:10:00.000-07:00

I paste below the entirety of my review from this issue: Estudios Irlandeses 4 (2009): 139-42. Also on Amazon US.

Michael Parker. Northern Irish Literature: The Imprint of History. 1956-2006. (Basingstoke, Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Northern Irish Literature, 1975-2006 (Volume 1) 357 pp. + xx & Northern Irish Literature, 1975-2006 (Volume 2) 334 pp. + xix.

Reviewer: John L. Murphy.

“Each gives the other’s lines a twist,” claimed Michael Longley about his fellow poets in their northern statelet who conversed and contended with each other (qtd. 1: xviii). The twists, and the contortions, of Northern Ireland entangled themselves into its intricate poetry, drama, fiction, and criticism over the past fifty years. Michael Parker straightens out their creators' mutual connections, and tracks their deviations from each other's lines. His narrative of the long escalation and gradual easing of the Troubles, historically analysed and politically amplified, accompanies his two-volume critique of selected literary productions from the province.

Parker, professor at the University of Central Lancashire, compiled The Hurt World, an anthology of short stories about the Troubles, along with an examination of Heaney; he co-edited essay collections, one on postcolonialism, and another on contemporary Irish fiction. His qualifications show his familiarity with an abundance of authors, famous and otherwise, worthy of inclusion. Nearly free of jargon— although “verfremdungseffekt” leaps out of a Mahon critique— and accessible to those outside the academy, these paired volumes were eleven years in preparation.

They combine close readings-- from lesser known and more familiar poets, playwrights, and short story writers, and novelists-- with a detailed history of political conflicts in the province from the implementation of both British decolonisation and IRA’s Operation Harvest through the decommissioning of the IRA and the recent institution of power sharing.

Rather than endlessly reciting texts and dates, Parker analyses fewer authors. He selects representative works from men and women, unionists and nationalists. By a chronological presentation, he tallies a half-century’s responses to violence and its cessation. Exploring instability, he addresses the “twist” of “the other’s lines” drawn on paper—or sketched as boundaries sundered by invasion, subversion, or imposition. Each chapter opens with an historical description, interspersed with microscopically close readings of one text. Literary criticism, journalism (both contemporary and retrospective reports), and interviews enrich contexts within which writers respond to escalating disruptions.

Addressing Sam Thompson’s Over the Bridge, Parker reveals his strategy. First performed in 1960, this play “anticipates the apprehensiveness of many subsequent ‘Troubles’ writers over direct representations of violence” (1:7). The oblique, or detached, preference that Ronan Bennett has argued dominates many Northern Irish writers’ responses does not jibe with Parker’s alignment of those who may hesitate, but who do not beg off their engagement with the tensions that trap them alongside their neighbours. Sifting through material that has been refined by previous investigators, Parker’s careful recovery of artifacts may overwhelm a casual observer. For example, volume one lists over 1250 notes for about 260 pages of text. Maps, timelines, and bibliographies follow. Yet, Parker’s diligence reveals determination to present honestly actions blurred by revision.

Summarising NICRA’s August 1968 march takes a long paragraph. Six citations move from Communist organiser Betty Sinclair to Marxist Anthony Coughlan’s clash with NICRA back to Sinclair before quoting Gerry Fitt, Bernadette Devlin, and an historian on the IRA. In one endnote, Parker substantiates Coughlan’s claim with a paper now in Roy Johnston’s collection; Parker locates an error from a leader interviewed by historians in their Dungannon account which relied upon this reference. Parker then quotes from Johnston’s letter to him in support of his own correction.

These superscripted numbers add up to hundreds per chapter, but by this diligence Parker accumulates a comprehensive evaluation of primary and secondary sources from participants as well as commentators or critics. Furthermore, Parker remembers the telling detail. At the much-mythologised Dungannon where NICRA faced an RUC police cordon and “1500 counter-demonstrators from Paisley’s UPV,” that NICRA contingent heard Sinclair, perhaps cannily given the media’s presence, exhort two-and-a-half thousand marchers to join her in “We Shall Overcome” (1: 75). Most had never heard of it. They reverted soon to “A Nation Once Again.”

Reacting to the August 1969 riots that overcame such civil rights protests, John Hewitt struggled with what many of his peers would face: how to transfer words and thoughts from the private domain into a larger political narrative that demanded articulation? Parker recovers Hewitt’s An Ulster Reckoning along with works such as Heaney’s “The Tollund Man” or “Punishment” which cloaked Irish struggles within earlier sacrifices. Parker quotes Heaney’s self-scrutiny regarding linguistic failure to do justice to local atrocities. “Now there is of course something terrible in that, but somehow language, words didn’t live in the way I think they have to live in a poem when they were hovering over that kind of horror and pity. They became, they just became inert, strangely, for me anyway” (qtd. 1: 176). Heaney’s own hesitation emerges in his stumbling account of his own contortions which would be preserved by his bog-buried victims from Iron Age Scandinavia in Wintering Out and North.

Yet, Parker reminds how poets could overreach. Auschwitz cannot be compared with Belfast. The lingering gaze of Heaney over the body of the young girl condemned for her dalliance unsettles Parker. When authors succeed in capturing the difficulties of poetically conveying their responses to their provincial horror, Parker acknowledges their triumph. If they stumble, he proportionately corrects their fall.
“Punishment,” as Parker limns Heaney’s attempt to “understand the exact/ and tribal, intimate revenge,” integrates Heaney’s expression of nationalist fears in the early 1970s that Catholics faced assault from both loyalists and “security forces.” Parker warns, however: “yet to comprehend the motives of others is not necessarily to endorse their actions, or to be free of one’s own conflicting allegiances” (1: 245). The voyeurism, the lingering scrutiny, the helplessness of the aroused but impotent onlooker dramatised by Heaney, Parker explains, remains unsettling. It implicates “all those reading the poem” and reminds them of the Northern predicament, and its inextricable complexity for those witnessing the Troubles— as spectators.

The second volume, after the murders and attacks by 1975 appeared to have perhaps reached that infamously assessed level of “acceptable violence,” looks beyond verse and drama. As the conflict protracted, novelists and story creators entered the fray. They tended towards more nuance through sympathetic characters as flummoxed as their creators in attempting to understand what they told—perhaps to an international audience. Heaney’s success spurred Muldoon; Montague sparked Medbh McGuckian.

For fiction, fewer predecessors guided. Volume one dissects no fiction; Volume two examines eight novels or stories out of thirty-four exemplary texts. Benedict Kiely’s novella “Proxopera,” Jennifer Johnston’s Shadows on Our Skin, or Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal, all of which gained an international readership, nevertheless betray how the Troubles defied complete success in narratives as well as in many staged or versified versions. Parker accurately pinpoints the failures in this trio to avoid stereotyping, simplification, caricature, or sentiment. By comparison, Parker’s enthusiastic introductions to writers left out of the canon invite readers to rescue abandoned texts. Una Woods’ The Dark Hole Days, judging from his praise, deserves much more elaboration; Anne Devlin’s “Naming the Names” benefits from its shorter length, for Parker can better interpret its intricacies within the chapter’s limits allotted to early 1980’s fiction.

Similarly, as with volume one’s unfortunate lack of space devoted to Pádraic Fiacc’s marginalised, markedly angrier verse, and his once critically castigated “Troubles poetry” anthology The Wearing of the Black, certain texts promoted for display languish too shadowed. Sineád Morrissey’s verse earns its showcase; Eilish Martin’s poetry collected as “slitting the tongues of jackdaws” merited a longer run. Gary Mitchell’s play The Force of Change with its look into UDA interrogations by the police at Castlereagh prison gains welcome elaboration; Michael Longley’s sensitive verse in The Echo Gate also deserved sustained accompaniment.

Such compression may prove a slight weakness inherent in any editorial construction, joining a detailed provincial history with textual analyses, within so few pages. Parker deserves not blame but praise for alerting audiences to many of the forgotten selections he recovers. With care and precision, he directs the reader towards in-depth encounters with poetics, symbolism, and dramaturgy; simultaneously he balances his examinations with wide-ranging perspectives on an immense amount of interviews in print, on television, or the radio, blended with political and social events throughout the North over five decades.

Despite his ambitious project, Parker never loses sight of the reader unfamiliar with this genre. Readers studying these two books will find fresh texts to pursue. Those familiar with politics may be less so with lesser-known poets; those expert on drama may encounter a novel previously ignored. Parker, steadily arranging a well-ordered sample of reactions to unrest, keeps his prose direct, intelligent, and respectful of the human costs involved-- rather than a routine slog through statistics, acronyms, or slogans.

Muldoon’s sequence concluding Quoof sums up 1980s despair at hatred’s routine. Parker proposes “The More a Man Has, the More a Man Wants” registers “the near-complete desensitisation of a culture and a people. Its narrator’s deadpan delivery is symptomatic of this virulent condition, which at times seems to number compassion, art and meaning alongside its many individual casualties” (2: 97).

As the survey nears the millennium, the outlook brightens. A “postmodernist distrust of grand narratives” as attention shifts from an insular redoubt to global geopolitical change encourages Northern Irish writers to examine domestic and family concerns (2: 225). National identity retreats as a preoccupation of poet, playwright, or storyteller; the Good Friday Agreement offers them and their fellow residents a chance to tick “both/and” and not “either/or.”

However, intimate dimensions of identity, Parker corrects, emerged earlier. Nick Laird’s nimble, clipped, and quirky verse captures the Northern demotic. Often warped into exaggeration or derision, Laird’s charged syntax speaks for many of his counterparts as he restores a visual, raw, and daringly compassionate delivery into figures consigned to cartoonish roles as thugs, terrorists, or tramps. Those men assembled in To a Fault, Parker reflects, exemplify “Edna Longley’s contention that ‘the speech or eloquent silence of the father’ is one of the most important, recurring motifs in Northern Irish poetry” (2: 230). Their shared experience of enduring the Troubles, Parker continues, “intensified solidarity between generations, as well as within communities.” Today’s churches, paramilitaries, and police have all been reduced. They dominate fewer enclaves of sectarian adherents. Laird, and many of his peers, turn now away from these superstructures. They portray rather those who lived under them, within the rubble, who rebuild, resist, and revive.

Alan Gillis’ “Progress” from Somebody, Somewhere (2004) ends Parker’s second volume. Gillis shares Laird’s conversational and lyrical shifts. Gillis shapes an image that in clumsier hands “so easily might have descended into embarrassing and tasteless whimsy” (2: 238). “Progress” deserves citing in full as an expression of an aspiration Parker brings his study towards.

They say that for years Belfast was backwards
and it's great now to see some progress.
So I guess we can look forward to taking boxes
from the earth. I guess that ambulances
will leave the dying back amidst the rubble
to be explosively healed. Given time,
one hundred thousand particles of glass
will create impossible patterns in the air
before coalescing into the clarity
of a window. Through which, a reassembled head
will look out and admire the shy young man
taking his bomb from the building and driving home.

Among younger generations of Northern poets, literature may provide-- after long agony from many of its creators at its passivity amidst destructive acts-- a source of healing now in its lineaments. Parker’s coupled volumes thoroughly excavate literature from the six counties’ political ruins. Writers refill the social gaps with home-grown speech. “Progress” arranges a young Belfast poet-critic’s final “twist” of lines into a municipally healing shape, after fifty years of provincial contortion.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
John L. Murphy coordinates the Humanities sequence at DeVry University in Long Beach, California. He reviews widely in print and on line. His research interests include republicanism in Irish literary culture, and the representation of the Irish language in English-language texts.

Patrick French's "The World Is What It Is": Book Review.

2008-12-17T16:13:00.000-08:00

Patrick French's "The World Is What It Is": Book Review.

This authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul has provoked controversy for its prickly subject, who read the entire manuscript and altered nothing; it's also garnered praise for its author, who drew on the entire archive of what he notes may be the last major writer who's left an entirely paper trail, instead of disc drives. I've only read a bit of Naipaul: "Among the Believers" about his travels in the non-Arab Islamic realm, and "The Return of Eva Perón," essays on Michael X, Perón's Argentina, and Conrad. After finishing French's bold, compassionate, and fair-minded study of this formidable master of masks, I will seek out more. That's a recommendation for both the irascible author and his patient chronicler. This is not a flawless analysis, therefore not five-stars, but French's careful discussion often approaches perfection. I admired (and reviewed) French's "Tibet, Tibet," a brave book that took on an iconic figure and asked similarly tough questions honestly.

Often, reviews have commented on VSN's fearsome reputation more than French's nuanced interpretation. What's needed now: a flavor of French's prose. I will excerpt how he filters VSN. French introduces his aims as a biographer: "not to sit in judgement, but to expose the subject with ruthless clarity to the calm eye of the reader." (xv) The myth, as VSN himself mentions, rests in those who follow; the writer keeps only the control over his books.

His tiny birthplace, forty miles by forty, occupies an uneasy place for self- promoting, self- entitled VSN. Self- described as "a Trinidadian of Hindu descent," he's a British subject unable to find a homeland. Marginalized, he returns to the center of the disbanded empire to seek his rightful place. The colonial society that raised him, divided by castes and religions, ethnicities and politics, could not sustain his energy. To escape, he had to assume the master's mask. Yet, Oxford "was a traditional, English, clubbable, unreal way for a young man from the Caribbean to be living, and it left him feeling lonely and unfulfilled." (91-92)

French evokes well the snobbery of the Isis student magazine for which VSN worked; the insularity of the university clashed with his hopes of a literary career that he desperately pursued while nearly starving in post- WWII, discriminatory, and hardbitten society in London. He and his student- teacher wife, virgins when they met, lived on very little. They moved from friend to flat and back. They were not suited for each other, totally, but at his young age, VSN stayed with the first shy woman who befriended him. He told her, at their age of twenty, how he resisted reforming, rebelling, or resisting. Instead, he insisted to her on being accepted.

He enters Britain at its capital core, pioneering the post- colonial counter- diasporic critique. "Legally prevented" after graduation "from migrating inside the new Commonwealth," VSN in the early 1950s sought a career in a nation with few East or West Indians. This "double exile" as "a deracinated colonial" as the Empire contracted left VSN anxious, yet determined not to retreat. With little steady work, landlords hostile at best to his presence, and widespread prejudice, he complained to his wife, Pat: "That is what the whole policy of the Free World amounts to. Naipaul, poor wog, literally starving, and very cold." (135, 137) The self- pity mingles with a level- headed appraisal of the situation for this internal exile.

"I am the spectator, the flaneur par excellence. I am free of the emancipatory fire." (qtd. 101) French deftly measures Trinidad's racial divide between Indians and blacks, He traces how Eric Williams rose to unsettling populist power there. Later, West Indian intellectual C.L.R. James early on challenged VSN for exposing the depredations of their Caribbean homelands without relativism, without the imperial context of the white man's impact. VSN rebelled against any "betraying his essence" by averting one's eye.

VSN refused to back down; as one character puts it: "Hate oppression; fear the oppressor." The emancipated dark subaltern, VSN warned (in my phrase), could be as dangerous as the retreating British sergeant. He later mused how totalitarianism often disguised itself under an "illusion of serving virtue"; writers seeking truth cannot collude with this pretended core of virtue. (qtd. 469) This confident stance did not endear him to his Black Power peers, nor did it assuage the troubled consciences of many American, European, or Indian liberals.

It's sobering to find, well into his success, that VSN labored nearly destitute. He travelled to India, Africa, Trinidad, Europe frequently, but often relied on expense accounts, wealthier friends, or an absent friend of a friend's flat for accommodation. This led, however, to estrangement sexually and psychologically from loyal but bewildered Pat as his fame spread. The self- pity that he expressed to Pat early on deepened. Depression drove him to prostitutes. Shame grew; so did his capacity to transcribe follies of his fellows. He cultivated his imperious aura.

All along, as to his one-time protegee Paul Theroux, VSN rehearsed a familiar refrain. "Think of it like this: imagine the despair to which the barefoot colonial is reduced when, wanting to write, and reading the pattern books of Tolstoy, Balzac et al, he looks at his own world and discovers that it almost doesn't exist." (qtd. 269) True, but as French delicately counters, this "shrewd piece of self- presentation" repackages scholarship winning, Oxford- educated, critically lauded VSN as irredeemably "unprecedented, underprivileged, alienated." His pride and his determination segregated him from his Third World brethren, whether writers or workers. This pride kept VSN a difficult person to please despite plaudits brought by his fiction and commissions enabling his TV, radio, and print journalism.

"Ambitious, protean, made of smart material, deracinated by the accelerated politics of the end of empire, Vidia made a conscious choice to refashion himself." (209) India attracted him; the West Indies perplexed him. Out of this inability to fit in, overqualified and often overwhelmed by his intelligence and his Oxford education, where he lamented the absence of aristocrats vs. the state- scholarship students like himself and Pat, VSN's drive to succeed at the master's game made him a frank, yet brusque, critic of nearly everyone around him, no matter where he found himself writing, probing, and goading. This quality, as French tells us right away, comes from a Trinidadian "picong" attitude: "where the boundary between good and bad taste is deliberately blurred, and the listener sent reeling." (xi) Many fell for Sir Vidua's conversational bait over six decades. "As an accidental, occidental Indian from 'the most amusing island that ever dotted a sea,' Vidia felt included and excluded," and not only in India. (223)

He did his own including and excluding. "Vidia had a view of the world that he would do anything to maintain, just as he would sacrifice anything or anybody that stood in the way of his central purpose, to be 'the writer.'" (359) French judges that VSN could not countenance Pat as his equal. She, congenitally doomed it seems to play the "great man's wife," was cast aside by VSN as he pursued, on and off interspersed with Pat for many years, the Anglo-Argentinian Margaret Gooding. One of VSN's friends reported that his apparently captivating mistress appeared to have but fifty words in her spoken vocabulary; she does not come across, at least in English, as striking anyone of French's informants as scintillating or smart.

Documenting Naipaul's infidelity and his power over wife and lover, French through extraordinary tact paraphrases VSN's correspondence with both women. Reviewers have been aroused by the hints that French only alludes to (Margaret's literal "phallic worship" seems about it, that and his physical brutality towards her as emotionally against Pat) of sexually charged tension exploited by VSN. He's a ladies' man, despite his boorishness.

Pat reverenced her husband. I found his biographer's considerable discretion equally intriguing. As with the intelligent, isolated Pat's lonely diary and notes to her husband, these indirectly phrased letters to Margaret (who left her husband and her three children behind to be the on- off trophy VSN paraded globally) support VSN's own egotism. He moved between the two paramours; other times he lived alone. As he reduces it, he ruined Pat: "I was liberated. She was destroyed. It was inevitable." (qtd. 313)

His income under a new publisher (and endless lectures, conference invitations, and commissions for articles?) increased sevenfold after "A Bend in the River." By the '80s, he represented the frustrations of "corrected leftists," those who turned to VSN to argue why the Third World remained mired in post- colonial corruption. His judgments in "Among the Believers" appear prescient after 9/11, but when they appeared, he was derided as an Orientalist or apologist. Derek Wolcott, Edward Said, and activists who opposed his disillusion found themselves his targets. They fought back. VSN accepted Hanif Kureishi; he did not support Rushdie against the fatwa, "an extreme form of literary criticism." (qtd. 434) The title of this biography comes from the first sentence of "Bend." "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." (qtd. 386) VSN determined to be "the" writer of the harsh, globalizing, mediated, diasporic decade.

By the end of it, he earned a knighthood. He took the tube to the ceremony. VSN did not mellow, but he did express an admiration of what modernity allowed people such as himself: the pursuit of happiness that traditional mores and creeds did not allow many adherents. His own pursuits, typically, dominated his mature years. Pat died of cancer; French describes movingly their final weeks together. The day after her cremation, Nadira (a younger Pakistani Muslim journalist he had met while working on "Beyond Belief," a sequel to his earlier visits among the non-Arab Islamic world) moved in to VSN's house. Margaret learned of her ex-lover's marriage, two months later, in the newspaper; Pat had found out about-- in similarly roundabout fashion-- her husband's dalliances with prostitutes decades earlier only in a 1994 interview with The New Yorker.

After Pat's death, VSN found few with whom to mourn, perhaps understandably. His lifelong expectation of fealty, his shunning of friends, and his use or abuse of human sources may have helped him with his considerable gifts of extracting the essentials for his own journalism and travel narratives, but they did not win him many confidantes. French enlivens the discussion near the end, with a deeper look into how VSN composed his second Indian study, "A Million Mutinies," and a later Caribbean collection, "A Way of the World." These begin to prove why VSN attained his renown for careful explication; apparently he could usually put down verbatim, without notes on the scene, what he had heard each day from his discussions and observations.

A minor shortcoming of an otherwise impressive account: French tends to skimp on delving into the works themselves, especially earlier ones. He often cites critical blurbs, and summarizes a book's contents, but he tends to quote sparingly. This does quicken the pace. However, if lacking knowledge of the novels and essays first- hand, a reader may wonder why there's briefer coverage of most primary texts. On the other hand, this is not a "critical biography," so this emphasis, given French's need to interpret massive amounts of material (he acknowledges half a million words from interviews transcribed), may be understandable.

French concludes with VSN's marriage to Nadira. He bows out gracefully with a final word, "Enough." But then, typically, he adds his last footnote: "For the moment." It's perhaps a telling sign that French adapts, often, a detachment towards Pat, Margaret, and VSN that reflects his subject's own distance from the contradictions his selfishness creates. This may heighten the verisimilitude for some readers; it may irritate others. So persists his admirable, if also unsettling, diligence in an engrossing perspective on a life that surprised me in its awkwardness, secrecy, bluster, and, despite or because of it all, a wry-- if ultimately too bitter-- honesty. The cover photo by "jumped-up" (VSN's put-down) Lord Snowden shows a playful figure, pulling himself up by the untied shoelace. His shoe, for this frugal man, reveals on its sole a worn-away hole.

(Posted yesterday to Amazon US. Cross-posted to my daily-ish blog, "Blogtrotter.")

Slavoj Zizek's "Violence": Book Review.

2008-12-04T17:32:00.000-08:00

This "Big Ideas/Small Books" offering may repeat much of this Slovene philosopher's earlier critiques. As it's the first work I've read by him, I depend on others to verify this. It certainly tackles big ideas in this brief paperback, but its portability and relative concision may recommend it to those who, like me, had heard of this provocateur but hesitated to enter his dense, diffuse, albeit often entertaining debates.

Zizek's relevant: "The same philanthropists who give millions for AIDS or education in tolerance have ruined the lives of thousands through financial speculation and thus created the conditions for the rise of the very intolerance that is being fought." (37) He compares their guise as "liberal communists" (think Bill Gates or George Soros) to a dirty postcard that shows, if moved slightly, "the obscene figure" who's "at work beneath" the news of debt cancellation or the eradication of an epidemic. Global capitalists need to generate enormous wealth before they can distribute it to others. King Leopold and Andrew Carnegie-- and I might add the Bonos and Brangelinas, perhaps (oddly, Zizek does not name such celebrity counterparts, whom free trade's promoter Thomas Friedman labelled "super-empowered individuals" outside the nation-state or the "electronic herd" of corporate dominance)-- have more in common with today's Davos jetsetters and Hollywood trendsetters than we might have suspected.

On the surface, the "liberal communist" ten-point plan on pg. 18 sounds great; the "RED" campaign for Africa or wearing pink ribbons for breast cancer research or the Google slogan "do no evil" match these goals. So, what's Zizek's gripe with doing good while making a profit? Capitalism must thrive. This creates injustice.

The balance of wealth redistribution by dot.commers and rock stars may be cloaked in humanitarian liberties, but "it allows the capitalism system to postpone its crisis." No Marxist, but schooled as a former Yugoslav subject and ex-Party member/dissident, Zizek notes that while such liberal largess avoids "the destructive logic of resentment and enforced statist distribution of wealth which can only end in generalised misery," it also sidesteps the evils of concentrated affluence and power that keep the rich doling out handouts to the dependent poor.

As a Lacanian, what irritates Zizek? The gap between reality and the Real, the "inexorable 'abstract,' spectral logic of capital that determines what goes on in social reality." (13) An economist may report how an impoverished Third World nation keeps "financially sound" even as the poverty's apparent to any observer.

How do such criticisms of "liberal communism" fit into the book's larger subject of violence? It's a loose tailoring. Thematic stitches may not always be visible. He begins with defining three types of violence. First, there's subjective violence: the kind we can identify "performed by a clearly identifiable agent." (1) Behind this lurks a "symbolic" violence within language. It repeats the role that social domination plays in our habitual speech. For instance, "gold" when named as such means "we violently extract a metal from its natural texture, investing it with our dreams of wealth, power, spiritual purity, and so on, which have nothing to do with the immediate reality of gold." (61)

Third comes "systemic" violence, the "often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems." (2) The book in "six sideways glances" sidles around its impacts, allowing us to more dispassionately dissect the forms of violence, under critical control even as we peer towards its fearful emanations. The first section investigates the "trap" of "liberal communism" that I have already opened. The second looks into alienation as a solution rather than a problem to the Western need to assert "the right not to be harassed," to keep one's distance from others who may threaten us by their demands to be recognized and respected. (41) This chapter's more difficult, but the gist of it-- which I verified when I studied this very passage today on a crowded subway with my iPod plugged in-- asserts the advantage of European civilization: "the alienation of social life." (59) Rather than a failure, this opening up of a private zone in public allows us to obey rules mechanically, while insuring a proxemic space around us that preserves our inner world. This encourages peaceful coexistence in a multicultural realm.

Part Three confronts the eruption of violence, with the protests over the Danish caricatures of Muhammed and 2005's French banlieu riots. The urge to tear down not the enemy's camp, but to burn one's own Parisian neighborhood (even a mosque), Zizek explains as a need for those demeaned to be noticed as citizens. This outburst also shows the impotence of such violence. True fundamentalists, such as Tibetan Buddhists or the Amish, he reminds us, foster indifference rather than insecurity towards the mores of non-believers. Those insecure, such as the Muslim mobs in Pakistan, only betray their desperate fragility, their own projected inferiority. Those complaining about Euro-American dominance, Zizek insists, nevertheless define their opposition as aligned against its hegemony. (Porto Alegre fails to oust Davos: the neo-liberals have no genuine alternative vision in a late-capitalist empire, either.) Religious fundamentalists who have gained the spotlight, he adds, situate themselves in the true source of challenge today: religion supplants science as "one of the possible places from which one can deploy critical doubts about today's society." (82) Science now solves our problems; religion stirs them up?

This chapter could have discussed further the limits of politically-correct "rules" when refusing to treat the uncomfortable truths it will not report for fear of inciting intolerance. Also, the vexed problems of massive immigration into the First World deserve more than an apercu or two. Still, Zizek provokes thought. He prefers to wander into (however astute or quirky) analogies to chocolate laxatives or Wagner.

In the fourth section, liberalism and fundamentalism both get castigated. Zizek reminds us that the European tradition always has mocked the divine; he finds such treatment "unimaginable in an Islamic culture." (106) I suppose so from the well-known, recent evidence, but still I wondered if this was too broad a statement for the past fourteen centuries? He points out an often overlooked abuse of rhetoric: discussing the hyperbolic equivalence of Israeli policies towards Palestinians with the Nazis "strangely contradicts Holocaust denial" preached by many in the Arab and Muslim worlds. (110)

He also reminds us of the fate of those who dare to speak out against liberal pieties; Oriana Fallaci's fall from leftist grace comes from her daring "to take the multiculturalist subservient 'respect' for the Muslim Other seriously." She incites contempt for exposing the "assymetry" of allowing Eurabia to colonize the continent, while Europe constantly retreats, apologizes, and urges only more "respect" for a regressive, intolerant barbarism. She failed to perceive how "fake" Western tolerance can be; it's "a sign of hidden and patronising racism." (114-15) Again, Zizek tends to raise many topics deserving more than a paragraph or two, but that's the tendency of his methods: to stir up our reactions.

This section's also digressive, but the whole book's so. It's like hearing a fascinating but erratic professor. Zizek has elsewhere belittled teaching; he's a professor who does not have to enter the classroom except when he wants, if at all. Yet, you get the sense of his restless range. I highlight what intrigued me; you may find an entirely different set of references that may rouse your enthusiasm. The book's full of detours, sideways glances, and momentary asides.

Israel & Palestine kindle more sparks. Zizek's at his best when urging a non-statist, truly sacred space for Jerusalem. He wonders at the U.S., the most religious of advanced nations, allying so strangely with the most atheist land (70% in some Israeli polls) which exists on the nature of its religious foundations! If Israel had been created two centuries ago, it'd have shared the roots of most "founder states;" its sin appears to be for the left that it was created after such imperial campaigns were delegitimized.

Skirting back to tolerance, Zizek as an atheist encourages us to remember how Europe's contribution to progress rests in its freedom not to believe. Blasphemy only works in a religious space. If we give in to all those who protest, we risk strengthening the pact between fundamentalists and the PC-left: "a society immobilised by the concern for not hurting the other, no matter how cruel and superstitious this other is and in which individuals are engaged in regular rituals of 'witnessing' their victimisation." (130) Botox injectors get equated with those forced to endure clitoridectomies by a too-capacious liberal tolerance granting a dimwitted approval to even oppressive cultures.

Instead, Zizek rallies for the courage to condemn religion if it indeed is truly entangled with hatred. We must fight religion if at its core we find violence. Apologists keep assuring us that we can rescue the truth of genuine faith from savage hijackers. Zizek inverts the game. Hack down the roots of violence. He dismisses cloaking its motives as if in a misused "authentic core" of a noble religion. The truest pacifists, he asserts, are those who lack belief. He wishes to advance atheism as a truly disinterested method to attain peace-- free of the Big Other of Marxism, monotheism, or consumerism, for that soul-dispiriting matter.

Section five's for me less engrossing. Yet, it has its moments. It covers "tolerance as an ideological category." Zizek observes how the price of living in the free West means that we may suffer violence, torn from our cultural roots so as to survive in our multicultural West. Within this milieu, the greatest art endures after it has been wrenched-- as with Homer or Shakespeare-- from its original context.

Society pretends to allow us free choice, but we have no option, usually, but to profess love for our parents or our flag. We're caught in a paradox of acting as if what's prescribed is preferred, as if we had some say in the choice. Juxtapositions float by: a TV show "Nip/Tuck" and the ground-floor vs. first-floor labelling of buildings in the U.S. vs. abroad; "The Birds" and the shot of the plane hitting the Twin Tower; Bukharin & Stalin compared to the hapless heroines of Lars von Trier's film trilogy. This portion left me somewhat at sea, but I kept paddling along.

In the last section, "Divine Violence," G.K. Chesterton provides unexpected evidence for what Zizek proposes as a truly mature acceptance that there's no larger supernatural rationale for our fate. Catastrophes occur, but God's gone. He wonders if the Incarnation and Crucifixion represent a God who's abandoned the transcendental to be truly and ultimately human. There's no Ascension, no Easter in Zizek's theology, therefore. God's demolition of the protector, and His assumption of the mortal, stands for our own existential plight. There remains, nonetheless, Judgment Day. But, it's delayed by the leftists. They promise that the "banks of rage" pent-up by so much injustice will bailout the oppressed. But, like the French or Soviet revolutions, the day of reckoning, and of utopian payback, gets postponed endlessly.

The epilogue reviews the main points. Three lessons earn summation: 1) When we shout down violence outright as "bad," we participate in mystifying its less visible social forms. Our capitalist system furthers the violence that erupts, by the inherent unfairness of the economic rules we all must agree to play by. 2) Real violence can evade those who try to act out their outrage. Twice Brecht's motto echoes: "What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?" 3) Subjective and systemic violence intertwine. Acts can be violent or not depending on context. I doubt if his immediate comparison to the Higgs field of quantum physics would be one that anyone else would supply for clarification! Still, Zizek stays on track: "the first gesture to provoke a change in the system is to withdraw activity, to do nothing." (214)

What is there to be done? For one distrustful of Marx, of the state, of Kapital, not to mention God? Zizek concludes: "The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to 'be active', to 'participate', to mask the nothingness of what goes on." The true challenge? To step back. Abstaining from the political game, refusing to shop to stimulate the economy that has tottered because of our overspending-- I wonder what effect our concerted effort not to fuel capitalism, vote for oligarchies, or buy into credulity might achieve? Zizek's discussion may not provide any answers, but his typically barbed appeals may cause us to reorient ourselves away from the structures imposed on us that appear like natural facts.

(Cross-posted, as a longer review, here, Blogtrotter, and Amazon US today.)

Anthony McIntyre's "Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism"

2008-11-16T10:14:00.000-08:00

Anthony McIntyre's "Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism."

(I'm posting this here as a forum for my longer book reviews, beyond the scope of my daily blog, "Blogtrotter," or the Amazon entries I regularly write. I may use NTLATBR as a medium for in-depth analyses of worthwhile titles that merit detailed study.)

Anthony McIntyre’s “Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism”: Book Review.

As an ex-IRA "blanketman," already imprisoned in his teens, interned for 17 years at Long Kesh, Anthony McIntyre knows his subject by having lived most of his life as a volunteer. After prison, he earned a Ph.D. in political science at Queen's. This Belfast native collects various articles and interviews from the past decade or so that list the deathbed rattles and defiant ralliery of Sinn Féin, the IRA, and the stalemated peace process after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The chicanery with which this deal was finagled to a rank-and-file previously misled about the continuation of their armed struggle led to McIntyre's break with the "Republican Movement" at least as constituted under the control of Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, and their devoted cadre.

Becoming a leading voice for those who disagreed, not for a return to the "physical-force tradition" but a renewal of the ideals which the IRA he and others joined had abandoned, Dr McIntyre combines two rarely encountered areas of expertise. As an insider, he betters the academics and reporters in relating the perspective of an Irish republican who's proven his credibility on the blanket. As a commentator, he's able to silence the "militant Republicans of the verbal type" eager to perch on barstools or boast to the naive their exploits, fueled with Dutch courage.

Admirably given his doctoral competence, McIntyre never lapses into jargon (although "etiology" escaped onto his keyboard once). He avoids sounding sanctimonious or overbearing. He, as with his model Orwell, manages to keep the human dimension within his sustained criticism of the IRA leadership that, for 320 pages, motivates his setting down-- with as much proof as can be summoned against an organization committed to double speak and clandestine councils-- the reasons why one can be principled, yet oppose the GFA packaged as "the peace process." Furthermore, he relates details to us in a calm, wry manner so that any newcomer can clearly understand the participants who support or oppose this intricate strategy.

It's a testament to his evenhandedness that one of the best moments comes when he's interviewing the chief of the reorganized Police Service of Northern Ireland (formerly the RUC), Hugh Orde. "It was the most I had ever talked in a police station," he admits. (282) While his sympathies remain throughout with the peaceful dissidents, he includes fair treatment of those later incarcerated from the splinter groups determined to fight for the cause abandoned-- with considerable cynicism, spin, and rhetorical acrobatics-- by the IRA leadership and Sinn Féin negotiators. Attention to the Loyalist perspective might have been welcome, but this anthology's already large enough. Counterparts to McIntyre or Ed Moloney's "A Secret History of the IRA" exist from the Unionist viewpoint. As the subtitle indicates, McIntyre's not providing a history of the past forty or hundred years in the North. He's analyzing the RM endgame itself, as a former player privy to many of the moves.

The book's organized into thirteen chapters. Each offers a few articles around a theme. I found the organization sensible, and there's an internal coherence that carries you from one topic to the next gradually, if subtly. An introduction by Moloney, whose own views have been met with the same outrage accorded McIntyre's among the party faithful, but with equal recognition of insight by those less aligned, provides background on the policy shifts. A glossary clues you in to who's Ronnie Flanagan or what's the IMC.

This will be a long review, as the ones so far I've seen have not dealt with the contents in depth. They've focused more on the controversy of the author and his thesis. What's missing from such terse attention? The flair with which McIntyre conveys his passion-- and his sobriety. There's little autobiography, but he's dealing with a shadowy, fatal, yet publicized and romanticized cause to which he gave his youth, and much of his adulthood. Half of his life's in the H-Blocks. He leaves to find himself facing a different IRA on the outside than the one he'd sworn to defend decades before. From the mid-1990s on-- along with like-minded volunteers, their families, friends, and comrades-- he's left to flounder while the party leaders posed for the cameras, accepted the acclaim, and betrayed the footsoldiers, those living and dead, those who had starved themselves rather than accept branding as common criminals.

One does not have to accept their methods of the proxy bomb, the guerrilla attack, or the torture of innocents to accept what McIntyre and those whose stories he tells believed in: a united Ireland that through their guns would be gained. They gave up their lives in total or a portion for such an ideal. This vision dimmed under the glare of their commanders who proclaimed a treaty that echoed that compromise which they had rejected in 1975. That was thousands of killings earlier. The confusion and outrage of those left fooled again becomes a human call for justice and truth.

Chapter 1 laments the GFA. McIntyre in 1999 conjures up the tale of the pickpocket who robs his prey while unctously soothing his victim: "your personal security is brilliant." SF strips their communal base of its pride while telling its gulled voters how they were "the most politicised people in Europe." (10) In Chapter 2, the ghosts of the Republican Dead return to haunt those investigating in 2004 the 1987 pre-emptive attack by the British upon an IRA mission at Loughall. This is one episode that may elude those less knowledgeable about such incidents. I'd have liked more attention to the moral conundrum underlying the Loughall inquiry. The larger question of how ethical should the state be in eliminating or sparing those who seek its overthrow, however, remains sadly all too contemporary.

Poignantly, McIntyre confronts this problem personally. With his toddler daughter, he visits Bobby Sands' grave, only to hear the girl chortle; thus in a small way's fulfilled Sands' prediction that the revenge of the Irish would be the laughter of their children. In this 2004 entry, "Padraig Paisley," this sometimes reticent reporter offers one of his most powerful admissions of the cost of the long war upon those who had invested their lives towards a different ending than the one now on offer from their former commanders. In Long Kesh, they followed a leader who turned on them once they were freed. "Were I to have suggested a course of action during my H-Block days that would lead republicanism to where it is today I would have found myself residing in a loyalist wing." (40)

The space given as Chapter 3 to the hazily explained 2002 mishap of the Colombia Three surprised me, but this episode foreshadows later IRA-SF debacles in the Northern Bank Robbery and the fatal stabbing of Robert McCartney. It remains a muddled area; the murky accounts at the time show the difficulty in separating dirty deeds by the IRA's left hand from SF's right hand. When Adams is charged by Congressman Henry Hyde to "'appear and help us determine what the Sinn Fein leadership knew about the IRA activities with the FARC narco-terrorists in Colombia and when did Sinn Fein learn of them', it was clear that the knotted tie of the IRA was being moved uncomfortably close to the party windpipe." (50) The ten years of witnessing the RM's downhill slide proves grimly amusing, tracked from higher up this slippery slope.

Decommissioning magnifies the microcosm of the Colombian misadventure for global inspection. Not as a symbol, but as fact: giving up IRA arms dumps means the conflict's truly ended. 2001: As the leaders, pushed back from their goal of a unified Ireland into capitulation keep retreating and calling it progress, "they are moved muttering from one slain sacred cow to defend another before it too is slaughtered." (64) 2002: Those like him who complain will incur blame for raising their heads out of the trenches, where "they would immediately draw the attention and surveillance of thought traffic control and the fire of the verbal snipers, their weapons loaded with vitriol, eager to impose silence and prevent republicanism from becoming more democratic." (71)

Long before 2003, McIntyre's disgusted at "organised lying by organised liars. Half a century from now pilgrims, patriots, and prevaricators will flock to the graves of the Provisional Republican leadership to be greeted by an inscription meticulously inscribed into a headstone: 'Here they are-- lying still'." (78)

Cemeteries in West Belfast already fill with those who went to their graves believing in a patriotism that their leaders had, in secret, already abandoned. McIntyre has both outgrown his youthful enthusiasm and managed to nourish his righteous ideals. These matured, I would suggest, from the Fenian slogans of his teenaged years into a humanist skepticism towards totalitarianism in any form, however benignly promoted or however applauded by the chattering classes. He resists the cult of personality that has eclipsed the democratic socialist Republic of 1916.

Chapter 5, most notably with a twenty-page 2006 interview with fellow ex-blanketman Richard O'Rawe, delves into the difficult matter of how much Adams knew when in charge of part of the IRA contingent in the H-Blocks during the second hunger strike that left ten men dead in 1981. O'Rawe's "Blanketmen" book's claims are balanced by outside sources which both men carefully cite in their cautious yet charged dialogue. They explore O'Rawe's argument that Adams deliberately withheld information to advance SF electoral fortunes, rather than intervene with proposals relayed from British negotiators that could have ended the strike, thereby saving the last six men from self-starvation.

A quarter-century later, McInytre speaks at Bundoran to those who shared the years on the dirty protest. Addressing those who now oppose his own dissidence, he manages to affirm his own position while remaining respectful to his detractors. He defends O'Rawe, and reminds his comrades that the rumor-mongering against O'Rawe (and himself by extension) does the 1981 commemoration no credit. He paraphrases the press who lambasted the SF rally (with blankets sold to marchers) to commemorate the ten men dead "as resembling a Friar Tuck convention more than the austere era of the Blanket protest and hunger strikes. The contrast between the easy corpulence of today and the hard emaciation of twenty-five years ago was no more stark than it was on the Falls Road at that political rally. In a sense the imagery mirrored perfectly the ethical decay that has come to beset republicanism. The screws at least gave out the blankets for free." (115)

Suppressing Dissent, as Chapter 6, continues in similar tone. McIntyre allows us to hear more stories from those who speak out against party lines, and in West Belfast, who suffer for their rebellion. Brendan Shannon, "Shando," sticks to his guns as a proponent of the armed struggle. While McIntyre regards him as a cautionary tale of the true believer left stranded, he treats him with dignity and in 2003 tells his story honestly. In 1995, Shando explains to McIntyre: "I did not leave the Provos because they gave up the war. I left because they gave up republicanism." (139)

One who did not survive in early 2005 after standing up against the system, Robert McCartney, merits Chapter 7. His murder, along with the Northern Bank and Colombia 3 incidents, further tarnished an already dulled Sinn Féin. McIntyre and his wife ran the e-zine "The Blanket" 2001-08. They refused to back down to SF militia. They were harassed, raided, and intimidated. Most of the entries in this book originated with their grassroots Net campaigns on behalf of their cowed neighbors and harangued colleagues. They display to future historians and activists the birth of Web networks married to practical solutions. This harnessed solidarity for concrete gains rather than arcane monographs on republican community organizing.

These chapters also reveal McIntyre's growth as a more generous participant in his changing Irish reality. He almost encourages a PSNI officer with "good luck" as the police try to find Bert's killers. As one with his ear to the ground, McIntyre knows at least one culprit even if he's not charged directly. "IRA culture was drawn on heavily both to inflict the crime and to cover it up," (173) even if hard proof dissolves into soft supposition and perhaps a bit of brass knuckles on any witnesses out of the dozens of people who saw the fatal assault-- unless they were all as they claimed in the pub's jakes. The party interferes, so no allegations of collusion between the supposedly rogue IRA operators and SF can be sustained in court.

This leads to frustration. How can you fight such an implacable PR machine? Others join in the protest, but against those who complain. They defend Adams and McGuinness. Why do McIntyre and his colleagues oppose what so many voted for, North and South? The Loyalist veto's consented to by SF. The IRA surrendered. The Crown rules as long as most Northerners agree to a British ruler. McIntyre counters that "the process subverts the peace." (168) Many who favor cessation of violence do not assent to the process, he argues. Their disagreement with the GFA, moreover, remains non-violent. Meanwhile, the IRA and SF subvert the community they claim to advance-- with thugs, censorship, and discrimination.

Informers, long the republican's bane, now turn into its own agents of destruction. Freddie Scappaticci, "Stakeknife," and Denis Donaldson gain infamy. McIntyre's clever. He asks nimbly what Donaldson as a British agent did that Martin McGuinness as a British minister at Stormont did not. Both "shaft Republicanism." Rumors persist, and seem to be hushed, about IRA spies even higher up than Donaldson. The author knows the pressures that burden those volunteers fresh out of prison, unable to cope. "The choice was simple: Grow old and grey with imprisoned comrades and wake up alone each morning to the sound of clanging grills or come to beside a partner and to the laughter of children." (191) While never excusing what Stakeknife or others did by betraying their cause, McIntyre as an ex-prisoner and as one who has worked with many others like himself captures what few other writers could have expressed about the personal torment that a few of his weaker colleagues endured for decades as they fought, plotted, and confided in comrades whom they would expose to their own compromise, or often worse, at the hands of death squads within the IRA as well as among the Loyalists and British forces-- whether vetted or below the radar.

McIntyre's also compassionate towards the reputation that shrouds their children and grandchildren; he implies how this character assassination may be the worst crime yet hatched by such informers. "Provisionalism is being haunted by a spooky spectre," he confides in 2005. "What blossomed in spring has now become autumn fruit, as poisonous as it is bountiful." (193)

With Chapter 9, Comrades appear. These too have been weighed down by compromises when they emerged from prison. The late Brendan Hughes in 2000 tells McIntyre: "We fought on and for what? What we rejected in 1975." (198) A leader of the H-Blocks during the strike, on release he found himself cheated by building crews in West Belfast where he worked; those who were his bosses justified their hypocrisy by their ties to the cosy SF leadership. Exposing this immorality, he found himself expelled by those whom he once had commanded and respected. He concludes how the "Republican leadership has always exploited our loyalty." (200)

In 2006, "Granny Josie" Gallagher remembers when she visited her three sons, all jailed at Long Kesh, over twenty-two years. Two were in the Marxist INLA. Thumbing a ride in the snow on the way back from her prison visit, the Sinn Féin transport van refused her a ride. If she was at the H-Blocks to see her third son, in the IRA, than she might have earned a ride. Such was the discrimination and pettiness even within the RM, as McIntyre rues now.

For Dissembling, Chapter 10, McIntyre introduces other critics of SF-IRA groupthink. In 1994, when the cease-fire was declared, McIntyre was with his comrade Tommy Gorman when Gorman called to agree with Bernadette McAliskey on BBC's "Talkback" with her comment that "the war is over and the good guys lost." (226) From that point on, they and others discussed in this chapter found themselves the targets of the SF-IRA disinformation operatives. Their names were discredited, their supposed links to the militants were publicized, and their credibility was attacked. What differs between the tactics of any faction who has gained power in a putsch? Perhaps the fact that the leaders had led on the followers for so long, so fatally, while dissembling.

With the 2004 Northern Bank robbery in Chapter 11, there's not much point even pretending. "If, as has been widely alleged, the robbery is the work of the Provisional IRA's Army Council, then it is a matter of the rich robbing the rich." (254) Policing, in Chapter 12, finds SF in a quandary. Having lost the hearts and minds of those in projects such as Ballymurphy (where McIntyre had lived when writing these articles), the RM could not provide the protection the residents needed. Over nine months in 2006, 700 acts of violence or intimidation had occurred in his neighborhood. The collapse of the community, as former republican ideals to rally solidarity eroded under drugs, teen pregnancy, vandalism, and theft, showed another collapse of Irish idealism under British administration. The PSNI had first been castigated by republicans, and then clumsily courted, but this left the locals in an awkward situation of who to call on for help. The PSNI wearied, the IRA devolved into a gang, and with few arrests amidst the grim scenario, the costs of the long war's slide into a restless temper tantrum of dealing and dissing showed how hollow had been the claims of a peaceful Northern Irish settlement for so many in what had been Gerry Adams' heartland, his base for IRA action and a unified front pledging SF allegiance.

Strategic Failure, fittingly, concludes this book as Chapter 13. It includes the visit to Orde. What do republicans and dissidents do when the system's in place and the Loyalists remain in control with the consent of the nationalists, post-GFA? Learning to get along, in power or driven away from the dream of centuries of Irish men and women who fought and died for unification, republicans today may be the last of their line so bred to never give up the battle in every generation. Post 9/11, the lust for the brawl's faded. McIntyre's post-mortem for Moloney's 2003 castigation of the hypocrisy of the Adams-McGuinness leadership finds its eulogy repeated in his own compiled arguments here. "For those of us who sought a different and a better outcome-- more just, more egalitarian, more democratic, more honest-- read it and weep." (308)

One does wonder-- admittedly lacking the personal experience that informed the rationale of McIntyre after so much of his life fighting the British state-- if the author should finally blurt out what he locks inside. Why not, imprisoned for so long, as an ex-prisoner demonstrate your inner liberation? Why not embrace your local peeler?

Frequent criticism levelled at dissenters has been that in their refusal to change, they etch deeper the corrosive qualities of a toxic republicanism that will not glow much longer into our own century. McIntyre and his comrades debated against those who drowned them out in the mainstream media on TV most nights. They persisted despite direct and disguised attempts to shut them up. They refused to submit to those who had betrayed them; they turned away from those who beckoned them back to a useless fight. This collection offers carefully reasoned articles insisting that another form of purer republicanism still lingers that deserves resurrection. "The Blanket," as an aside, often featured spirited debate about this very issue, although the selection of more topical pieces by McIntyre may tilt his own anthology towards a clearer chronological, thematically cohesive presentation.

Perhaps, given the futility of the hardline remnant of compromised and infiltrated militants and the corruption of co-opted SF, any "third way" here appears a glimpse up a foggy cul-de-sac. McIntyre and Moloney convince you that the ground troops in the Fenian campaign have been betrayed, but like the Wild Geese, one now wonders what cause will answer their ambitions. Will those who visit the graves in fifty years look back on today's dissidents as students may skim the manifestoes from the ralliers for the restoration of Bonnie Prince Charlie or the Bourbon dynasty?

The failure of an alternative movement to counter the party machine resulted, eventually as this anthology tacitly documents, the folding up of "The Blanket" earlier this year. Its purpose appeared to have been finished; other community activists had taken up the watch, the governments had agencies in place, and the criminal activities that had replaced the RM with petty theft, drug running, and slum squalor appeared less the blame of the Brits and more the lassitude of post-GFA residents. The tricolor flutters and the strikers commemorated on murals still grace the closely packed streets, but one wonders if these depictions will in time fade into "tradition" as walls in other redoubts, those post-GFA Unionist enclaves. The whitewashing waits. McIntyre's anthology warns us of the impermanence of what once stood as an unshakeable foundation under any republican, dawn over a unified island.

(Posted to Blogtrotter. A shorter version will appear on Amazon in Britain and the U.S. Disclosure: I contributed to "The Blanket" throughout its run, 2001-08, and know Anthony, not as well as I wish, but blame a continent plus an ocean's distance for that! You can read him at the archived 2001-08 "Blanket" and current "The Pensive Quill" or via the bloglinks at the right of the "Blogtrotter" frame.)

L.A. Times sounds desperate

2008-08-08T15:32:00.000-07:00

As this is a real blog a-borning, not a spam one (I did not know such existed until Google flagged this as suspect.) The Book Review has been axed, the paper's reading my mind as it sends me a come-on renewal at a cheaper price locked in if I subscribe to pay on-line. It's hard. I've been a longtime suitor, an ardent swain, but I'm tempted by the Old Grey Lady's charms, her erudition, her pages spread open for book to drool over, and her considerable pedigree. New York, again, tramples L.A. flat.

This is a test

2008-07-23T20:32:00.000-07:00

Under construction, given the impending demise of my hometown's Sunday Book Review.