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On the Failure of Scientific Prophecy

06 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by Alan Smithee in Atheism and Agnosticism, Buddhism, Christianity, History, justice, Language, Literature, Metaphor, News, Politics, Prophecy, Religion, Texts, Uncategorized

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Arthur C. Clarke, Failure, Prophecy, science, science fiction, Technology, The Sentinel

Continuing an earlier discussion of the cultural and religious hopes placed on technologies, a few thoughts inspired by a recent re-reading of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1983 short-story collection The Sentinel, which contains stories written from 1946 to 1979:

Outside of the clear and simple pleasure of watching a master doing what he does best (and my criticisms here aside, Clarke was a master of hard science fiction, undoubtedly one of the all-time greats), what strikes the reader (at least this reader) about this early collection is Clarke’s persistent tendency to overestimate both the significance of new technological developments and the pace of scientific advancement.  Even the simplest developments hold the power to alter the world fundamentally, and almost always for the better.

To take but a single example, in the gripping and disquieting story ‘Rescue Party’, the development of the helicopter brings about the end of almost all the great cities, which seems laughable decades later (indeed, when faced daily with the average automobile driver’s lack of skill and discretion, the thought of the helicopter as ‘universal transportation’ is enough to cause nightmares). Since the story was written in 1946, urbanisation has continued apace and more and more rural land is dedicated to massive farming and ranching operations built on the model of heavy industry, with all of the environmental and social costs that this threatens. Far from the rural idyll that the helicopter brings to the Earth in ‘Rescue Party’, the helicopter remains of limited use and did little or nothing to curb the explosive growth of the cities which began with the Industrial Revolution and has continued with only a few and rather minor counter-trends, and these are confined largely to the Anglo-European world and the wealthier of its colonies.

Viewed from the vantage point of Clarke’s eternal post-World War II optimism, the future for scientific development is bright.  Clarke simply assumes for the sake of these stories that the exploration of space would continue and that progress towards the planets was inevitable.  It would also be accomplished by very little conflict and even less bloodshed.  The solar system was as ripe for exploration and colonisation as the New World was centuries earlier.  On this point, for all of his vision, Clarke was perpetually blinded by his British colonial ideologies, whether he was aware of them or not.  This is crystal clear in the story ‘Songs of the Distant Earth’ (and to a lesser extent ‘Breaking Strain’), which re-enacts the British encounter with the South Pacific in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and which subtly but unmistakably reinforces the myth of history as progress.

This, it turns out, is a symptom of a larger problem with the stories in The Sentinal.  At the same time that he is making huge, counter-intuitive leaps about the effects of new technologies, Clarke’s view of culture and history is strangely anaemic.  This particular blindness, in which Clarke is by no means alone among science-fiction writers, is coupled with a curious lack of imagination in the cultural and social sphere.  For he is unable to imagine a world that is fundamentally different from our own, or at least the world as Clake saw it from the former British colony of Sri Lanka, where he spent much of his life.  The Sentinel‘s stories exist in a future that looks a good like the present.  The sense of cultural, political, and economic inertia present in these stories is stunning. Clarke imagines little political upheaval and fails to anticipate developments such as the end of the Soviet Union only two decades after the last story here was written.

Clarke’s tendency towards prophetic hyperbole is thus rooted in his failure to understand that technology is at least partially cultural. Clarke’s failure, then, beside his blind belief in the inherent value of technological development, is his inability (or his simple refusal) to understand that technology, quite removed from its scientific side, is also immersed in human culture, which influences and even determines its use and reception.  Given that the Clarke who wrote The Sentinel – and Clarke was a complex, sometimes contradictory man wrote or co-wrote literally hundreds of books and stories which do not add up to a fully coherent ideology of philosophy of history – can not imagine a world without the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, consumer capitalism, and an independent mass media, his view of technology was similarly limited.

He also imagines that governments will continue to fund science for the sake of science, though he does realise that at least some of the motivation behind the golden age of space exploration was political and military.  This prediction, which is never made explicit but is present in each and every story in the collection, has also failed to materialise, largely given the limited resources governments now give to pure science and the ever more persistent demand that science and technological development serve some kind of purpose – usually economic – rather than serving the interests of disinterested knowledge.  Clarke fails to anticipate the cultural and economic forces that have brought space exploration to a near standstill or limited it to uninspiring and wasteful projects like the International Space Station. According to the timeline Clarke imagines in 2001, and in the story ‘The Sentinel’, which provided the kernel of the larger novel, there was to be permanent bases on the moon in place by the mid 1990s.  Instead, the Apollo programme has been relegated to a footnote in Cold War history ripe for re-appropriation in popular culture texts like Michael Bay’s jingoistic, neo-fascist film Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

Clarke on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Given Clarke’s often dismissive attitude towards organised religion – see Childhood’s End and The Fountains of Paradise for examples – his failure to acknowledge the failures of scientific prophecy is all the more striking. It also highlights the similarities between placing one’s hopes in the next step in scientific development and placing one’s hopes in the great coming of a saviour figure – as in Christianity, messianic Judaism, some forms of Buddhism, and countless other traditions – who will interrupt the course of history and bring about a new and better world.  Over the course of The Sentinel, Clarke simply ignores the marginal predictive value of his persistent overestimation of the power and significance of incremental scientific developments.  When one prophecy fails, he simply moves on to another tale of the partial redemption of the world by a new technology while never addressing the previous failure (it is worth noting that he did get some things – many things, in fact – right, including his invention of the concept of the geosynchronous communications satellite).

By simply ignoring the failures of his prophetic imagination, Clarke reminds me irresistibly of those Christians who have been convinced that the apocalypse was just around the corner (just as the gospels claim that Jesus promised some two millennia ago), despite the fact that this prophecy has been failing over and over again for centuries.  The fact that technology has failed time and again to live up to its promises, like so many religious prophecies, that it has failed to bring about greater social and economic equity, something we were promised would happen with the arrival of the printing press, the steam engine, the railroad, electricity, the telegraph, photography, the cinema radio, television, the personal computer, and, most recently, the Internet (or Web 2.0, which was to save us – again – from the inequities of the earlier technologies), is in itself interesting.

What is more interesting, at least in the context of religious prophecy, is how immune this belief in technological salvation is to historical realities and the complexity of human culture.  This points to a persistence of belief that is structurally very similar to the continued rationalisations of failed religious prophecy.  Even if Hal Lindsey’s identification of events in the 1970s and 1980s with the events of the Book of Revelation failed to accurately predict the beginnings of the end of times, this does not stop millions of people from believing precisely the same thing about more recent world events.

This is not a coincidence, of course, given how the structures of the Christian narrative of history persist and are transformed in the narratives of modernity, particularly in secular eschatologies like those of classical Marxism, the National Socialists, and all of those people that believe that technology is going to save us.  The real question I have here is how to begin to think more rationally about the true capabilities of science and technology, especially when the potential of both is limited so clearly and so persistently by economics and politics.  If someone like Arthur C. Clarke can get things so clearly wrong, why do we persist in waiting for the next technology, the one that is going to save us? Why do we continue on as if this were an inevitable fact?  I think some of this might be because most people, like Clarke, and unable to imagine a world that is truly, fundamentally different from our own.

In practical, this-worldly terms, if we are waiting for the arrival of that magical machine that will save us from all of our follies (many of them, of course, technological, like the internal-combustion engine) without coupling this with a serious and sustained effort to change the cultures that surround this anticipation and make it bear the burden of a dark and difficult future, we would be just as well to be waiting for Jesus (or Maitreya, the Buddha of the future in many schools of Mahayana Buddhist thought), who is coming along soon.

Any day now …

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Cinema as Exorcism (five): Perfume: The Story of a Murderer as the Enlightenment’s Dark Magic

25 Thursday Mar 2010

Posted by Eric Repphun in Angels, Death, Exorcism, Film, Language, Literature, Metaphor, Reference, Religion, Texts

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Enlightenment, exorcism, Patrick Suskind, Perfume, Tom Tykwer

And that is precisely what the metropolitan denizen teaches himself to do: he lives, not in the real world, but in a shadow world projected around him at every moment by means of paper and celluloid and adroitly manipulated lights: a world in which he is insulated by glass, cellophane, pliofilm from the mortifications of living.  In short, a world of professional illusionists and their credulous victims.

Lewis Mumford [1]

Continuing on with the ongoing Cinema as Exorcism series (more here, here, here, and here), with a look at the dynamics of modernity and magic in a (very slightly) older film, Tom Tykwer’s 2006 Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.  The film does not so much as exorcise as bring to the surface the dark, magical underbelly of the Enlightenment, the inadmissable but undeniable presence of enchantments in the form of forms of logic that exist underneath, behind, and all around conventional calculations of value, exchange and utility.  These enchantments, these dark magics, are represented as a profound source of threat.  Such enchantments must be understood as a potent and potential source of danger, something the sociologist Max Weber, the father of the theory of rationalisation, or as he also called it, ‘the disenchantment of the world’, recognised in his own lifetime in the volatile atmosphere of German society at the end of the First World War.

International poster for Tom Tykwer's Perfume

Tykwer’s Perfume is based on the German-language novel of the same name by Patrick Süskind.  Süskind’s novel, his first, has been highly influential and wildly popular since its publication in 1985 and is widely considered as part of the always de facto canon of magical realism.  The film seems at first to be an absolute departure for Tykwer, who is perhaps best known for his two related fairly tales about the transcendent, even supernatural power of love, Lola rennt (Run, Lola, Run, 1998) and Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (The Princess and the Warrior, 2000).  The brilliance of these two collaborations with the actress Franka Potenta aside, Tykwer’s best film is likely Heaven (2002), a near mystical, quasi-Christian take on the redemptive power of love, written by Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz for a planned trilogy of Kieslowski-directed films, offered to Tykwer after Kieslowski’s death in 1996.  Against the studied Romanticism of his other works, Perfume is violent, confrontational, even disturbing.  It is a rich and finely textured allegory that seeks to examine from within the hidden, dark enchantments of modernity.  The narrative undermines any easy account of modern history as the triumphant march out of darkness and into the light of perennial truth.  The film is not strictly about modernity as such, it focuses its metaphoric gaze on Enlightenment rationalism, a crucial element in the development of the forms of modern self-understanding embodied in evolutionary narratives. Perfume represents nothing less than a fictional account of that which is unthought, forgotten or simply ignored by modern narratives of progress and by unilinear theories of rationalisation.

The narrative itself is deceptively simple: Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan in eighteenth-century France, gifted, like Palahniuk’s Rant Casey, with a supernaturally keen sense of smell, discovers upon reaching maturity that he has no scent of his own, which renders him unlovable and even sub-human.  After years of toil as a near slave in a leather tannery, he trains as a perfumer and learns the technological mastery of the world of scent.  Yearning to be loved as others are loved, he comes rationally, even scientifically, to a way to enchant the world into loving him.  He creates, from the scents of virgin girls he has murdered, a perfume so sublimely beautiful that it holds the power to enchant the whole world into loving him.  Upon succeeding, he discovers that his triumph is hollow and commits a strangely beatific act of suicide.  Metaphorically, Grenouille, the titular murderer, is an abominable outgrowth of the rationalising tendencies of modern thought, a monster whose dark magic reaches its full potential only when it is augmented by his technical training and the growing body of scientific knowledge that characterised the age in which he lived.  In Enlightenment France, Grenouille is seen as an abomination; indeed, the people who encounter Grenouille and his crimes simply cannot grasp his motives or come to grips with his very existence.  However, the film presents Grenouille not so much as an anomaly but as a fully explicable and natural outgrowth of rationalisation.

The film features an extensive voice-over from an anonymous and wryly amused narrator (the great John Hurt), who sets the scene of Grenouille’s birth at the heart of Europe:

In eighteenth-century France, there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and notorious personages of his time.  His name was Jean-Baptiste Grenouille and, if his name has been forgotten today, it is for the sole reason that his entire ambition was restricted to a domain that leaves no trace in history: to the fleeting realm of scent … In the period of which we speak there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women.  Naturally, the stench was foulest in Paris, for Paris was the largest city in Europe.  And nowhere in Paris was that stench more profoundly repugnant than in the city’s fish market.  It was here, then, on the most putrid spot in the whole kingdom that Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was born on the 17th of July, 1738. [2]

From his earliest days, his knowledge of this hidden world sets him apart from the other children in the foetid, overcrowded orphanage where he is raised by the coldly rational Madame Gaillard, who treats Grenouille, and all the other children, as nothing more than sources of income.  Grenouille, with his supernatural sense of smell, has access to levels of the world that other people do not.  The film casts Grenouille’s extraordinary ability in terms of language:

By the age of five, Jean-Baptiste still could not talk, but he had been born with a talent that made him unique among mankind.  It was not that the other children hated him.  They felt unnerved by him.  Increasingly, he became aware that his phenomenal sense of smell was a gift that had been given to him and him alone.  When Jean-Baptiste did finally learn to speak, he soon found that everyday language proved inadequate for all the olfactory experiences accumulating within himself.

First edition cover of Suskind's Perfume

Grenouille lives, then, outside of the world of conventional language, though he does so because of his gifts, not because of his own will.  He survives the orphanage and years as an abused tannery apprentice and grows into a gaunt, silent and scarred young man.  Confronted for the first time with the wider world of Paris (outside of the orphanage and the tannery) and the staggering wealth of scents the city has to offer, Grenouille begins his own version of the task of world mastery that is taking place at the same time in salons, laboratories and lecture halls in other, more privileged parts of the city.  Tykwer only rarely shows this world.  Grenouille serves as the primary guide within the structure of the film itself, forcing the viewer to contemplate the world largely from his perspective.  Part of this identification comes through Tykwer’s attempts to emulate the world of scent in a visual medium.  He does this with jump cuts and vivid close-up shots of the things that Grenouille is able to smell, images which both focus attention on their particularity and isolate them from their context.  As Grenouille enters Paris, the camera dissects the city into discrete, disconnected images, breaking the world down to its constituent elements – powdered wigs, cracking oysters, fabric, bread, mud, sewage, high-born women in carriages, horses.  Confronting the confusion and majesty of Paris with a growing hunger, Grenouille seeks understanding and order by breaking things apart, by removing them from the totality of smells and reifying each of these elements in the desire of possession and mastery.

This is true of people as well as inanimate objects and animals.  On this first visit to the city, when the film implicitly connects Grenouille to the emerging project of modern science and its hunger for new knowledge, Grenouille also commits his first murder.  Visually, the film depicts Grenouille’s fragmentation of the world, and by implication that of emerging modern science, as an act of violence and dismemberment.  The camera and the editing break down Grenouille’s victims long before he does, reducing them to fleeting glimpses of a naked shoulder, a vein pulsing on a slender throat, red hair flowing in the wind.  Grenouille catches the intoxicating smell of a redheaded young woman carrying plums and follows her into a dark courtyard where he, perhaps unintentionally, kills her.  Intentional or not, Grenouille doesn’t appear to care that she is dead, only that her unique smell is dissipating rapidly as her body cools.  He drinks up her scent as it fades, stripping her naked and exploring her body with his nose.  He cups his hands to hold onto her scent, but he cannot posses it and it fades, igniting within him to fierce desire to permanently possess scent.

It is telling to note one of the narrative’s harshest criticisms of modernity comes across in the fact that Grenouille must enter mainstream society to fully exploit his perverse need for world mastery, not shy away from it; Grenouille must embrace the emerging bourgeois world to fully realise his aims.  Shortly after his first murder, Grenouille insinuates himself into the laboratory of faded perfumer Giuseppe Baldini by sheer persistence and demands that Baldini teach him: ‘I have to learn how to keep smell!’  Because of his gifted nose, Grenouille’s facility with perfume is nothing short of magical.  Testing a perfume that Grenouille improvises for him, Baldini is transported to an enchanted garden, where a buxom young woman whispers, ‘I love you’ into his enraptured ear.  In the novel, Süskind explicitly makes this connection: ‘It was not a scent that made things smell better, not some sachet, not some toiletry.  It was something completely new, capable of creating a new world, a magical, rich world’. [3]

Grenouille, who is often treated as little more than human capital, comes to work as an apprentice for Baldini.  Working late in the basement laboratory, Baldini imparts a piece of perfumer’s lore to his new apprentice:

Baldini: Now, pay careful attention to what I tell you.  Just like a musical chord, a perfume chord contains four essences, notes carefully selected for their harmonic affinity.  Each perfume contains three chords: the head, the heart and the base, necessitating twelve notes in all … Mind you, the ancient Egyptians believed that one can only create a truly original perfume by adding an extra note, one final essence that will bring out and dominate the others.  Legend has it that an amphora was once found in a pharaoh’s tomb and when it was opened a perfume was released after all those thousands of years, a perfume of such subtle beauty and yet such power that for one single moment every person on Earth believed they were in paradise.  Twelve essences could be identified, but the thirteenth, the vital one, could never be determined.

Grenouille: Why not?

Baldini: Why not?  What do you mean, why not?  Because it’s a legend, numbskull.

Grenouille: What’s a legend?

Baldini: Never mind.

It says a great deal about the film’s take on modernity and positivistic science that Grenouille confuses this legend with historical fact and later turns to this story for a model when he begins his murderous final act of creation.  It likewise says a good deal that it is this mistake that allows him to be so successful when creating his masterpiece, a perfume containing the scents of thirteen virgins.  Grenouille is either not aware of or simply ignores the implicit distinction in Baldini’s story between the technical accuracy of the perfumer’s art and the Egyptian story, which is clearly not to be taken as the same level of truth.  Grenouille has no need for modern epistemological distinction.  Nonetheless, with this syncretism of scientific and mythological ways of knowing, Grenouille is able to replicate the story of the legend, even though it was probably never true in the first place.  If we are to pause here briefly to consider Grenouille’s metaphoric role in European modernity, it is worth suggesting that he is not unlike the alchemist in his application of rational methods for supernatural aims.  Alchemy perhaps played a greater role in the history of modern science than the subtraction stories are willing to admit, as Louis Dupré notes:

Too often the cosmology of the early modern age continues to be viewed as a prehistory of the scientific revolution, as if there had been nothing between the Aristotelian picture and the mechanistic one.  Such a view overlooks a prolonged attempt to understand the universe through chemistry rather than through the laws of mechanics.  Until the end of the seventeenth century alchemy developed side by side with mechanical physics as an alternative science. [4]

To continue the metaphor, in much the same way that Grenouille is a forgotten product of rationalisation, alchemy is part of the unthought and often ignored inheritances in positivist science.  For Baldini, Grenouille’s abilities are uncanny, even worrisome, something he is willing to overlook with the floods of money coming into his shop as customers arrive in droves to buy Grenouille’s creations.  For Baldini, his new apprentice’s strangeness is defused somewhat when Grenouille learns the techniques and the operational language of perfuming, bringing his knowledge and his skill under the comforting umbrella of known registers of utilitarian language.  Süskind notes this connection explicitly in the novel: ‘The more Grenouille mastered the tricks and tools of the trade, the better he was able to express himself in conventional language of perfumery – and the less his master feared and suspected him’. [5] If Baldini feels more at ease the more that Grenouille learns, he is being greatly deceived.  Grenouille, under the respectable language of the perfumer, is growing ever more powerful, ever closer to the realisation of his dream to capture scent.  In an intriguing parallel with the novels of Chuck Palahniuk  operational language becomes a shield for Grenouille’s uncanny abilities and his unsettling aims.

Trading the formulas for one hundred new perfumes for his freedom, Grenouille departs for a journeyman’s post in the Provençal town of Grasse, which Baldini calls ‘the Rome of scents, the promised land of perfume’.  On the way, he is distracted for no less than seven years, living a base, animalistic existence hidden away in a cave in the mountains, revelling in the cold, clean, scentless air but equally horrified to discover that he has no scent of his own, that he is, as others have long suspected, something less than fully human.  The narrator tells of the new desire this opens up within Grenouille’s heart:

For the first time in his life, Grenouille realized that he had no smell of his own.  He realized that all his life, he’d been a nobody to everyone.  What he now felt was the fear of his own oblivion.  It was as though he did not exist.  By the first light of next morning, Grenouille had a new plan; he must continue his journey to Grasse.  There he would teach the world not only that he existed, that he was someone, but that he was exceptional.

Arriving finally in Grasse, Grenouille takes a post as a journeyman perfumer and expands his repertoire beyond what Baldini was able to teach him.  He also continues his experiments in his free time, first trying to capture the scent of a reluctant living prostitute then resorting to simply killing women so he will have bodies to experiment with.  Grenouille’s experimentation is relentless, passionless and rigorously scientific.  After several failed attempts, he finally strikes upon a complex method involving cold enfleurage, digestion, lavage, and distillation that renders the scent of the woman into a single tiny flask.  Having robbed these women forcibly of their essence, Grenouille leaves a series of corpses, stripped naked and shorn, for the people and authorities of Grasse to find.  In Grenouille’s reign of terror, undertaken in the interests of world mastery and in the selfish needs of Grenouille to perfect himself, the narrative finds its metaphorical centre.

Grenouille’s application of the scientific method in the interests of possessing ‘all the smells in the world’ is what allows his magic, and his perversion, to fully flower.  Without the equipment and techniques of the perfumer, Grenouille would be condemned to the fleeting sensations of the scent of the living, accessible to him only via his gifts.  Wendy Faris underlines Grenouille’s conjunction of magic and science, which, as we have seen, also manifests itself in the discourses of reenchantment: ‘Grenouille’s perfuming abilities resemble those of an experimental chemist of genius, so that in addition to the magical powers of its narrative mode, the novel also takes on a quasi-scientific aura, intimately connected to the concrete worlds of natural and constructed chemical compounds’. [6] Grenouille’s perfuming skills bring the reification of the individual inherent in disenchantment and the rise of modern capitalism sharply into focus; the women Grenouille harvests are human capital, literally liquid assets in his quest to manufacture an identity for himself and in his relentless pursuit of the sublime beauty of his thirteen-note masterpiece.  In an extended sequence, Tykwer underlines this connection visually.  Tykwer intercuts sensuous images of Grenouille’s flasks, bottles, and experimentation with blackly comical images of the discovery of the bodies of the murdered women, drawing an explicit visual parallel between the act of manufacture and the act of destruction.

In Grasse, Grenouille meets his only formidable opponent, the wealthy merchant Antoine Richis, whose sublimely beautiful daughter, Laura, Grenouille needs as the thirteenth and crowning note of his perfume.  Richis is a deeply rational and practical man, like Grenouille a child of the Enlightenment.  The two are opposites and antagonists; however, they also represent the two sides of the dialectic of enchantment and Enlightenment.  When the town council meets to try to decide what to do about the murders, Richis calls for a rational approach to the seemingly irrational horror in their midst:

We have to put ourselves inside the mind of this man.  Each of his victims had an especial beauty.  We know he doesn’t want their virginity so it seems to me it’s their beauty itself that he wants, almost as if he’s trying to gather something.  His ambitions are those of a collector … Whatever it is, I fear he won’t stop killing until his collection is complete.

For Richis, who suspects early on that Laura is a necessary part of Grenouille’s collection, Grenouille’s threat is greater than mere murder; the killings are inexplicable, unreasonable even in the deranged logic of murder.  Grenouille attacks conventional structures of knowledge and value by not sexually violating his victims and by following an inexplicable but undeniable logic of his very own.  His violation of his victims is symbolic at the same time it is literal, an act of extreme violence, especially considering Baldini’s assertion, which Grenouille takes to heart, that ‘the soul of beings is their scent’.  Richis is blinded by his understanding of modernity, which only allows him to understand Grenouille by one standard of truth and logic.  The town council refuses to listen to Richis’ sobering and rational call, opting instead to fall back on the divine language of the Catholic Church, which Richis, as an Enlightened man, is visibly sceptical of.  Tykwer stages here a very brief debate between science and religion:

Judge: This man is a demon, a phantom who cannot be fought by human means.  Now, I insist that we call upon our bishop to excommunicate him.

Richis:  What good would that do?

Judge: Have you no faith at all in the power our Holy Mother Church?

Richis: This is not a matter of faith.  There’s a murderer out there and we must catch him by using our God-given wits.

Judge: I say until we submit to Mother Church, these killings will not cease.

Tykwer plays the following scenes as a perverse comedy and a mockery of both the council and the Church to even slow Grenouille down.  The bishop stands up in his cathedral in front of the town and declares Grenouille’s excommunication with all the vigour the corpulent churchman can muster.  The scene is intercut with Grenouille, not in the least bothered by his communication, if he is even aware of it, deliberately mixing his perfume from his twelve tiny flasks of oil, awaiting its crowning thirteenth note in the scent of Laura Richis, which he soon has, despite Richis’ best efforts to thwart him using clever ruses that are no match for Grenouille’s supernatural abilities.  Grenouille is caught the next morning as he finishes his perfume over an open flame and is taken back to Grasse for interrogation and execution.  As Grenouille is tortured, Richis strives in vain to understand his reasoning.  Their meeting is a clash of different epistemologies in which there is no exchange or dialogue between sides.  The Janus face of Enlightenment rationalism is here brought into sharp focus as is becomes clear that both men are equally rational, equally methodical.  The divide between the two remains nonetheless absolute, their positions utterly irreconcilable by any common discourse, what Jean-François Lyotard calls a differend:

Richis: Why did you kill my daughter?  Why?

Grenouille: I needed her.

Richis: Why did you kill my daughter?

Grenouille: I just needed her.

Grenouille is sentenced to a horrific death in the public square.  Dressed in blue velvet finery, Grenouille is led to his punishment in front of the entire town.  He, through his dark magic, retains the position of power.  During the scenes on the platform, Tykwer accentuates the strange and monstrous aspect of Grenouille by placing him dead centre in the frame.  A rare composition in contemporary cinema, such an image has an intensely alienating effect (see Figure 1).  With a light application of his perfume, Grenouille faces the crowds with equanimity and a wry smile.  The executioner is the first to fall under the spell of Grenouille’s perfume, shouting, ‘This man is innocent!’ Spreading the scent with a wave of his handkerchief, the crowd takes up this call.  The bishop falls to his knees, declaring, enraptured, ‘This is no man, this is an angel’.  Even Richis, the last to fall under the spell, lays down his sword and asks for Grenouille’s forgiveness as the crowd degenerates into a massive and undifferentiated orgy.  Soon everyone is naked, or near to it.  The coupling is indiscriminate, men with women, women with women, old with young, bishops with prostitutes.  Grenouille has brought about with his technique and his magic a perverse flowering of communitas.  In his final appearances he possesses a power and an authority, however artificially generated, to control the desires and actions of all those around him.  The ambivalent relationship of modernity to enchantment is embodied in these simple narrative and visual moments; unable to stop Grenouille’s killing spree nor understand his motives, the secular and ecclesiastic authorities of the day end their relationship with Grenouille by falling under his spell, by embracing against their will everything they claim to be against.

Figure 1:

Figure 1: Grenouille on the platform in Grasse.

As Grenouille stands on the scaffolding, all of the forces of early modern French society are unable to do anything but fall under the enchantment of his mastery, born half from his inexplicable sense of smell and half from rational techniques.  What Grenouille represents is the forgotten magic that underlies modernity, the hidden agency of ancient, animalistic elements buried within the structure of European modernity, forgotten but always present.  Grenouille, however, feels no satisfaction as he stands above the crowd, a master of the world.  Grenouille is, if anything, both disgusted and regretful.  In one of the few moments in which Tykwer allows Grenouille some remorse, some ordinary humanity (something Süskind never does in the novel), watching the sea of naked townspeople, Grenouille has flashbacks to his first killing, the girl with the basket of plums.  As the whole of the city writhes naked at his feet, caught up in his manufactured reenchantment, the film re-enacts the scene of the murder but shows the plum girl reacting to Grenouille very differently as he approaches her openly.  She welcomes him, embraces him, kisses him, returns his singular affection.  Grenouille imagines the scene as it could have gone if he were fully human.  Grenouille weeps at the thought of her dead, at the thought of the lost opportunity for a living exchange with a living woman rather than his one-sided violation.

Instead of facing up to Grenouille and what he represents, the people of Grasse look away and arrest another man, Grenouille’s former employer, who is hanged for Grenouille’s crimes, thus balancing the scales of justice and the demand for an exchange for the murdered girls in terms that they are able to understand.  The march of order and history has been restored and Grenouille, forgotten in the emerging triumphalist narratives of modernity, is left out of the history books:

The people of Grasse awoke to a terrible hangover.  For many of them, the experience was so ghastly, so completely inexplicable and incompatible with their morals that they literally erased it from their memories.  The town council was in session by the afternoon and an order was passed to the police lieutenant to immediately begin fresh investigations into the murders.  The following day, Dominique Druer was arrested, since it was in his backyard that the clothes and hair of all the victims had been found.  After fourteen hours of torture, Druer confessed to everything.  With that, the case was closed.

That Grenouille is forgotten only further underlines his historical power, in that he works in a threatening symbolic register and cannot be captured in language. His regret, and the ever-present narrator, follow him back to Paris:

By then, Grenouille was already halfway back to Paris.  He still had enough perfume left to enslave the whole world if he so chose.  He could walk to Versailles and have the king kiss his feet.  He could write the Pope a perfumed letter and reveal himself as the new messiah.  He could do all this and more if he wanted to.  He possessed a power stronger than the power of money, or terror, or death; the invincible power to command the love of mankind.  There was only one thing the perfume could not do.  It could not turn him into a person who could love and be loved like everyone else.  So, to hell with it, he thought.  To hell with the world, with the perfume, with himself.  On the twenty-fifth of June, 1766, around eleven o’clock at night, Grenouille entered the city through the Porte d’Orléans and like a sleepwalker, his olfactory memories drew him back to the place where he was born.

Grenouille, still dressed in his finery, sees a group of ragged, dirty people huddled around a fire.  He upends the bottle of perfume on his head, drawing the attention of the gathered crowd as he is suffused with a warm glowing light.  Two women approach him and cry, ‘An angel’ and, ‘I love you’.  The crowd falls upon him and literally devours him.  There is nothing but a pile of clothes left, and these are stolen by a group of poor children.  Jean-Baptiste Grenouille fades into the mists of history, the dark side of Enlightenment and modern science forgotten save for the fragments of finery he briefly wore as the master of the world.  Reenchantment is necessarily, as we have argued in conceptual terms, a fleeting, ephemeral, if forever renewed phenomenon not unlike Grenouille and the scraps of his enchantment he leaves behind after his death.

These final images are deeply ambiguous, if not deeply perverse.  The narrator finishes his tale in a matter of fact manner: ‘Within no time, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille had disappeared from the face of the Earth.  When they had finished, they felt a virginal glow of happiness.  For the first time in their lives, they believed they done something purely out of love’.  It is possible to read this final scene in a number of ways.  That Grenouille is identified on at least two occasions as an angel, as a figure from traditional Christian cosmology, is highly significant if we return our attention to the concept of religious modernity.  In this context, it is possible to interpret the deeply ambivalent ending of Perfume in a different way.  What Grenouille, as an angel, represents is the destructive, monstrous aspects of the religious productions of modernity, a murderous hybrid of the religious, the magical and the scientific.  This fusion of differing epistemologies can take violent forms, exemplified today in various forms of religious fundamentalism.  Similarly, as Faris notes:

In magical realist texts irruptions of magic sometimes constitute the surfacing of buried religious traditions, which speak independently of particular themes and styles.  In Perfume, for example, the magical quality of Grenouille’s perfuming abilities transmits a trace of pre-Enlightenment belief in magical powers of enchantment, which operates within the satiric narrative that condemns the beginnings of the scientific age and its culmination in Nazi experimental atrocities, and yet it is not entirely defined by it. [7]

It is more than this, however.  Grenouille is not a trace or a survival, he is a production of modernity and the processes of rationalisation.  Jean-Baptiste’s Christian name implicates him both as a significant religious figure and also the one who comes before something greater, in this case both the French Revolution and modernity as a whole.  In Perfume, it is a magically endowed, coldly rational and utterly vicious killer of virgins who prepares the way for the modern era, which, the story suggests, is forever haunted by the dark enchantments that lie forgotten in its history by those things it produces and then seeks to forget.


[1] Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961), 546.

[2] Perfume, DVD. All quotations and screen captures are the work of the author.

[3] Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, trans. by J. E. Woods (New York: Penguin, 1987), 90.

[4] Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 52.

[5] Süskind, Perfume, 96.

[6] Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville, AB: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 74.

[7] Faris, Ordinary, 70.

George Orwell Was (Mostly) Right: Newspeak Today

05 Friday Feb 2010

Posted by Alan Smithee in Ethics, Language, Literature, Living, Metaphor, Politics, Reference, Rhetoric, Texts, Violence

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Apple, Barack Obaom, George Orwell, IPad, Nineteen Eighty-Four

First British edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

In his visionary 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the science fiction pioneer George Orwell lays out a vision of a terrifying dystopian future where everything, even thought, ispoliced and monitored by Big Brother, an oppressive and virtually omniscient government.  The diegetic world of the novel is dominated by Newspeak, a new propaganda language in which everything has at least two meanings and which uses language to obscure rather that communicate meaning and truth.  Living in a world increasingly dominated by meaningless Managmentspeak – ‘going forward’, ‘learning outcomes’, ‘consultation’, etc., etc. – and by an equally meaningless and equally damaging antinomian Therapyspeak – ‘bipolar disorder’, ‘happiness’, ‘ Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’, ‘life goals’, etc., etc. – it is very difficult to escape the impression that Orwell’s future is closer to the reality that we are facing than most people would like to believe.

A few examples of very real Newspeak from contemporary history: 1) An American president dedicated to continuing the aggressive, imperialistic campaigns against the Middle East launched by his much-hated predecessor is given the world’s highest honour for peace.

2) A new piece of technology that is simply a new way of doing the same old tasks is marketed and received as both a magical and a revolutionary device – the image below is from the official Apple website.  The special irony (and equating pure functionality with enchantment is indeed a fine irony) here is that Apple made a famed advertisement that aired in 1984 which claimed that arrival of the personal computer would be the reason that ‘1984 won’t be like Nineteen eighty-Four‘ (the ad is available here).  Anyone who says that the world is fully disenchanted world has obviously never really looked at contemporary advertising practices, which enchant the world for the mercenary aim of profit.

I’d be happy to have any other examples of Newspeak from out there if you know of any …

War is Peace

Functionality is Magic, or Consumption is Rebellion

Cinema as Exorcism (three): 2012 and the Persistence of the Apocalyptic Imagination

19 Thursday Nov 2009

Posted by Eric Repphun in Biblical Studies, Continental Philosophy, Eschatology, Film, Language, Literature, Metaphor, Texts, Theory

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

2012, Apocalypse, Catholicism, Frank Kermode, Michel Foucault, Roland Emmerich

It is not expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.

Frank Kermode

And now for the next instalment of the ongoing if irregular series on cinema and/as exorcism (and further proof that I am incapable of writing anything of reasonable length, even on a weblog) …

A Promotional Image from the film 2012

Roland Emmerich’s newest disaster film 2012, is many things.  Taken as a simple story, it tells the tale of what might happen if the disaster of 2012, the one predicted by the Mayan calendar, brings about the end of the world, an end that comes through the massive shifting of the earth’s crust, which is somehow related to the alignment of the planets.  As a piece of storytelling, it is monumentally stupid and filled to the brim with plot holes large enough to sail an ark through (if you don’t believe me, re-read that last sentence).  It is also lazily written, bafflingly paced, and at least half an hour too long.  It is a dramatic and narrative sinkhole where a number of decent actors – Danny Glover, Amanda Peet, John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Thandie Newton (here saddled with a naff, unconvincing American accent) – go to die for more than two hours in dark rooms all over the world.  There is also no denying that it is a visual feast, a thrilling compilation of some of the very best large-scale CGI ever rendered.  As a spectacular piece of moderately entertaining cinema, it goes one more step towards proving Guy Debord’s theory that spectacle is becoming all, that the spectacle will soon be, if it is not already, the sole remaining element in contemporary culture.  It also offered this viewer the guilty pleasure of watching Los Angeles and Las Vegas, two of the worst cities on earth, crumble to dust.

An International Poster for 2012

All aesthetic matters aside, as a cultural document and as a virtual catalogue of Orientalist stereotypes, the film is almost perversely fascinating.  We get the wise old Tibetan lama telling his student that the end of things is not all that bad, and then he surprises us all by producing the keys to an old pickup so the apprentice can escape.  Good ol’ lama!  So clever he is, just like those Mayans, who had it all figured out way before we, with all our fancy science, ever did!  We see the devout – and vaguely feminine – but still stridently technological modern Indian man who dies with a crushing dignity with his family in his arms, his saviours from America having failed to pick him up on their way to the secret giant arcs built in the Chinese hinterlands.  At the very end of the film, we are left with the image of the earth’s survivors – mostly wealthy, white, powerful Europeans, of course – sailing in giant arks towards Africa, where, given how profoundly dull all of these people are, will probably build strip malls and Red Lobster franchises.  Due to the massive geological upheavals, there is a new mountain range in the south of the African continent, to which our heroes are heading.  In a final Orientalist master-stroke, this mountain range, before any of the Europeans ever see it, has already been given a European name.

One of the reasons 2012 is so fascinating, and ultimately so worrying, is that how we imagine our end is an important element of who we are as a culture, as the literary theorist Frank Kermode reminds us in his classic study, The Sense of an Ending (1967). Kermode argues compellingly that every human culture needs visions of the end of things and that they are a necessary element in how we seek to find and maintain narratives that make the world coherent and thus liveable.  Kermode writes,

[C]risis, however facile the conception, is inescapably a central element in our endeavours towards making sense of the world.  It seems to be a condition attaching to the exercise of thinking about the future that one should assume one’s own time to stand in an extraordinary relationship to it.  The time in not free, it is the slave of a mythical end.  We think of our own crisis as pre-eminent, more worrying, more interesting than other crises.[1]

We in the twenty-first century have a number of crises to choose from, from climate change to overpopulation to the very real possibility of a global conflict over dwindling resources, a number of which are poised to, perhaps inevitably, lead to the end of life as we know it.  The seemingly endless cinematic drive to show us just how these ends might be met is in itself very interesting, as is the fact that such representations appear more frequently as the threat of real-world destruction grows more prominent.  No wonder we have Emmerich, who threatens us with the end of the world not only in 2012 but also in Independence Day (1996), his dismal New York-set English-language remake of Godzilla (1998), and The Day after Tomorrow (2004), to serenade us as we march towards the end that people for all time have thought lies just around the next corner.

On top of all this, in important ways, 2012 offers a fascinating case study of the depths in which modern, even ostensibly secular cultures remain indebted to the Bible, and to its vision of the end of days.  One of the biblical traditions’ greatest legacies, still readily accessible through such works as 2012, is that it has solidified and given form to that apocalyptic imagination that we still seems to haunt us.  Literature, in the form of the modern novel, from which the narrative feature film is a direct descendant, has taken over from the biblical imagination to some degree, but many if not all of the images of the end that we see today (at least in the European and American contexts) are deeply rooted in the Bible’s vision of apocalypse.  There is even an interesting and even necessary historical linkage between the two.  Kermode notes that there is a crucial point of historical contact between the decline of Christianity’s earthly authority in modernity and the rise of the novel: ‘It is worth remembering that the rise of what we call literary fiction happened at a time when the revealed, authenticated account of the beginning was losing its authority’.[2] Fiction, then, is crucial to our own self-understanding as modern people living in modern cultures.  Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, his maddening account of the rise of the modern subject, in fact establishes the absolute importance of literary language for modernity:

It may be said in a sense that ‘literature’, as it was constituted and so designated on the threshold of the modern age, manifests, at a time when it was least expected, the reappearance of the living being of language … literature achieved autonomous existence, and separated itself from all other language with a deep scission, only by forming a sort of ‘counter-discourse’, and by finding its way back from the representative or signifying function of language to this raw being that had been forgotten since the sixteenth century … Through literature, the being of language shines once more on the frontiers of Western culture – and at its centre – for it is what has been most foreign to that culture since the sixteenth century; but it has also, since this same century, been at the very centre of what Western culture has overlain.  This is why literature is appearing more and more as that which much be thought; but equally, and for the same reason, as that which can never, in any circumstance, be thought in accordance with a theory of signification.[3]

Literary fiction then becomes an important site for examining the complexities of the relationship between modernity and the religious, the ways in which modernity both receives and mutates the different elements of its religious inheritance.  However, precisely describing any relationship between the religious and the literary is a difficult task, as Franco Moretti acknowledges:

Virtually all book historians agree that the publication of fiction developed, throughout Western Europe, at the expense of devotion.  This said, one major question must still be answered:  did the novel replace devotional literature because it was a fundamentally secular form – or because it was a religion under a new guise?  If the former, we have a genuine opposition, and the novel opens a truly new phase of European culture; if the latter, we have a case of historical transformism, where the novel supports the long duration of symbolic conventions.[4]

An International Poster for 2012

To a scholar of religion, two sequences in 2012 are of particular interest: in one, we see on television a mass of people being crushed by a massive stone statue of Jesus as Rio de Jeneiro’s O Cristo Redentor tumbles to the ground, broken from its hillside eyrie by an earthquake; in the second, we get to see St Peter’s Basilica – which for some reason is given the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – collapse and crush thousands of people gathered in the Vatican City for desperate prayer.  In a nice, subtle touch (and this in a film where subtlety is the enemy), the first cracks in the dome of St Peter’s separate God’s finger from Adam’s, pointing to depths that this film doesn’t even begin to address.

Even in this deadly, apocalyptic mayhem – in which the audience is treated with almost perverse regularity to the sight of thousands upon thousands of little digital people falling into massive rents in the Earth’s crust, being crushed by falling cars and buildings, drowned, impaled, etc., etc. – not one of the characters, not even Lama Profundity, stops to ask any of the questions that I imagine most people would be asking in such a situation: What is humanity?  What is civilisation?  Can people make sense of a world in which they are separated from their traditions and their hopes, as the crack in Michelangelo’s fresco seems to imply?  Do we in some sense deserve this sort of treatment?  Can there be any meaning in any of this?

In 2012, do the people either in front of the camera or behind it ever wonder about any of these things?  No, they do not.  What is perhaps the most singular disturbing thing about 2012 is just how banal and superficial it makes the literal end of the world.  It offers no existential or religious insights, and does not even consider the idea that such events could lead to a real crisis of meaning.  It doesn’t even seem to give the people who survive it any pause for thought.  The world ends because it ends, because it is necessary to the spectacle of the thing.  Despite its lame, ultimately callow conclusions – that humanity must work together to survive, that the home is love, not location – 2012 is perhaps the single most nihilistic film in recent memory.  It is enough to make one nostalgic for the cinematic world of even a decade ago, when in October 1999 David Fincher was able to offer an honest, challenging look at nihilism in his visionary take on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club.  In this sense, the quiet, gradual end of things that appears in Douglas Coupland’s new novel Generation A is far more chilling and far more plausible than the one so vividly visualised by Emmerich and his cohorts.

2012 does nothing to exorcise the demons of the apocalypse that seem to still posses us all.  Its vision of the end of things is both utterly implausible and repellently appropriate for the times.  The world may indeed come to an end someday, it tells us, but it really won’t matter all that much.  By stripping the end of the world of its weight and by refusing to consider its meaning, the film (and so many others like it) give us new spectres to fear in the long moments when we’re alone and afraid in the dark.  What is gives us most of all is the fear that indifference is the new fall-back response, even to our own ignominious finale.

When this world ends, the film suggests (though I am sure it doesn’t intend to), no one in their right mind is going to miss it.


[1] Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 94.

[2] Kermode, Ending, 67.

[3] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, translator unknown (London: Routledge Classics, 1966), 48-49.

[4] Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London:Verso, 1998),  169, note 30.


Dysenchanted Worlds: Rationalisation, Dystopia, and Therapy Culture in Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit

25 Friday Sep 2009

Posted by Eric Repphun in Death, History, Language, Literature, Living, Religion, Rhetoric, Texts

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Children of Men, commodification, disenchantment, dystopia, Georges Bataille, Henning Mankell, Jean Baudrillard, Kurt Wallander, Logan's Run, Max Weber, Never Let Me Go, New Age, Ninni Holmqvist, PBRF, rationalisation, Sweden

Proving that we here in the Dunedin School are interested in books other than the Bible, we turn our attention in quite another direction and continue our ongoing discussion of rationalisation – or disenchantment – and human society (see more on this here, here, here, here, and here).

Whoever pushes rationality forward also restores new strength to the opposite power, mysticism and folly of all kinds.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Right now, no-one else is doing fictional social commentary about the continuing process of rationalisation quite as well as Scandinavians.  From Jens Lien’s lithe, brilliant 2006 Norwegian film The Bothersome Man, which envisions the afterlife as a sterile, highly controlled modern city, to Let the Right One In, which unearths an unspeakable, timeless evil living on the perfectly planned streets of Stockholm (or perhaps this evil is created by or drawn to the city because of its inhuman perfection), there is a whole host of powerful narratives emerging from the northern reaches of Europe, narratives which seriously question the social costs of quantification and reduction of all things, human life included, to exchangeable commodities.n59473

To these more fanciful works, we need to add the growing numbers of excellent Swedish crime fiction, a list which must include Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (along with the two other titles in his Millennium Trilogy), which puts a very human face on the immense suffering and violence that goes on, unnoticed and unremarked, in the interstices of rationalised societies.  The gold standard here is probably set by Henning Mankell’s brilliant Kurt Wallander detective novels, which are so popular in Germany that Mankell outsells J.K. Rowling.  Over the course of nine novels, Wallander, a kind of dishevelled, stoic, and utterly baffled Everyman, fights a losing battle against a tide of violence and senseless crime in what should, by all accounts, be an earthly paradise of social planning, a triumph of the welfare state.  The Wallander novels are shot through with a crawling sense of dread that is shocking not because it is so out of place in the quiet towns of southernmost Sweden, but because it quickly becomes so natural,  because it feels so familiar.  Mankell turns what could be boilerplate police procedurals into both a highly-nuanced character study and a far-ranging, even courageous theodicy that could only have emerged out of one of the most secular nations on earth.  The Wallander novels amount cumulatively to a systematic interrogation of the failures of the welfare state and a deconstruction of the social engineering promises that were made so easily, and with remarkably little foresight, in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.  (Incidentally, for the uninitiated, the suburb English-language BBC production Wallander, with a doughy and heartbreakingly human Kenneth Branagh as Wallander is a great point of entrée into Mankell’s world; for those of you who still read books,  I’ll recommend 1995’s Sidetracked as a personal favourite among the novels).

To this illustrious list we should now add Ninni Holmqvist’s compelling and unjustly overlooked first novel The Unit (2006), an examination of the failures of the present through the classical allegorical strategy of the dystopia.  The story is told by Dorrit Weger, a fifty-year-old woman who, as the novel opens, has been moved to something called ‘the Unit’, about which the reader knows nothing.  As the story unfolds through Holmqvist’s quiet, precise, understated prose, we learn only gradually what the Unit is and why Dorrit finds herself there.  In the future Sweden in which the novel is set – and its exact timeframe is ambiguous, though it is not too far in the future – anyone who has reached the end of their usefulness to society is taken to the Unit, where they are used for medical experiments and as living organ banks, forced to donate their organs one by one until they donate a vital organ, say the heart or the lungs.  ‘Final donation’ is in fact the Unit’s callous euphemism for death.  Dispensable Elsa, in an attempt to be light-hearted about her fate, jokes with her friend Dorrit, ‘We’re like free-range pigs or hens.  The only difference is that the pigs and hens are – hopefully – hopefully ignorant of anything but the present’.[1]

TheUnit - Ninni Holmqvist

This is no prison camp, however, at least not in the traditional sense and this, for some reason, just makes the fate of Dorrit and her fellow ‘dispensables’ all the more repellent.  The Unit is an immaculately constructed alternative world with no view of the outside.  It is a prison, without question, but it is a comfortable prison.  There are shops, gardens, healthy restaurants, and plenty of amusements.  Everything is clean, rational, and as humane as such a thing could possibly be.  The dispensables, within the confines of their role as human capital, are treated with respect and encouraged to pursue their own interests and look after their own (decidedly relative) wellbeing.  Neither is the selection of people for the Unit random or unexpected; the selection criteria are highly rational, highly quantified, and systematised to remove those all-too-human elements of chance and luck.  Anyone who does not work in a vital field – teaching, nursing, etc. – and who remains childless is destined for a one-way trip to the Unit when they reach a certain age.  For women, the cut-off age is fifty, while for men it is sixty.  Even this has a rational justification; male sexual function has a slightly longer life-span than female, thus men retain their usefulness for longer.

The Unit is many things: it is a moving study of the intense and genuine friendships that quickly develop within the pressure cooker atmosphere of the Unit among people who know they have, at most, a few years left to live; when Dorrit meets Johannes and falls in love, it is a refreshing (and refreshingly frank) study of a sexual relationship between two characters past middle age, a time of life that most popular fiction, Harold and Maude notwithstanding, renders oddly asensual; and, in the end, it is simply heartbreaking, especially when Dorrit reminisces about her simple life outside the Unit and about her dog Jock, who she was forced to leave with friends when she taken to away.

In the final analysis, what The Unit, with its focus on the usefulness or utility of human beings, is criticising is rationalisation, the increasing dominance of instrumental reason, and how this effects people living in rationalised societies.  What matters in a rationalised or disenchanted system is what works, not what has meaning.  Only that which conforms to a narrowly-defined idea of function has proper, demonstrable value.  Those in Holmqvist’s dystopian future who find themselves in the Unit fall outside the brutal calculus of value that equates usefulness with the biological necessity of reproduction.  The world that supports the Unit is thus in this sense a subsistence economy that places the highest interest in its own survival.  Holmqvist makes it apparent that members of the Unit have internalised this value system, as we see Dorrit fretting, even after being labelled as dispensable, about being ‘unusable’ as a medical commodity within the Unit itself.  She also spends much of her time – tellingly, she follows standard week-day working hours even while inside the Unit – writing a novel about a mother who gives birth to a deformed baby, in which she muses, ‘The question was: Is this mother to be regarded as a parent in the practical, concrete meaning of the word?  Is she to be regarded as needed?  The question was: Is a person needed if she gives birth to a child that will never be able to bond with her, and will never be able to make any kind of contribution?’[2]

Rationalisation, first theorised by the sociologist Max Weber in early years of the twentieth century, has arguably held up better than its contemporary, the secularisation thesis.  There are a number of sociologists, theorists (including yours truly), and philosophers who have done some very interesting work within a Weberian framework, working with what Weber famously called ‘the disenchantment of the world’.  One of the more prominent of these thinkers is Georges Bataille, who captures the long and ultimately indeterminate struggle between instrumental and values-based rationalities when he writes of ‘the poverty of utility’.  Bataille’s related concepts of accursed share and sovereignty have strong resonances with both Weber’s disenchantment and Jean Baudrillard’s concept of symbolic exchange.  Bataille’s concept of the sovereign is also related, not coincidentally, with his challenging theory of religion, which in turn owes a good deal to Weber’s narrative of rationalisation and its identification of religious and economic history.[3] Echoing Jean Baudrillard’s concept of ‘symbolic exchange’, which celebrates the extra-economic and extra-instrumental use of goods, Bataille writes critically of the ‘servile man’, who ‘averts his eyes from that which is not useful, which serves no purpose’.[4] He opposes the servile to the sovereign: ‘The sovereign I speak of has little to do with the sovereign of States, as international law defines it.  I speak in general of an aspect that is opposed to the servile and the subordinate’.[5] The sovereign, then, stands apart from and opposed to the closed system of political economy, as does symbolic exchange; indeed, Bataille champions the ‘opposition to the mercantile spirit, to haggling and self-interested calculation’ that is embodied in true exchange.[6] In the world of The Unit, human beings are understood only in relationship to their use value and are thus granted different levels of exchange value in a brutal, mercenary logic where a single older woman is worth demonstrably, quantifiably less than a young single mother of young boys.  There is a good deal that this kind of instrumentalisation misses, of course, and Weber, when formulating his theory of rationalisation, noted that disenchantment carries with it necessarily a dehumanising element.  When Dorrit finds out her sister had been in the same Unit and had died a few years previously, she rages against the narrowness of this calculus of value: ‘But what about me?  Perhaps I needed my sister, why doesn’t anyone think about things like that?’[7]

Though exploitative medical practices and the disposal of the aged are classic themes in dystopian fiction, from Michael Bay’s patently awful film The Island to the classic (both in novel and film form) Logan’s Run, to Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (soon to be released as a film), The Unit is still compelling, neccessary reading, due in no small part to the fact that it is far more grounded in the realities of the disenchanted, rationalised world than many of these other texts. After all, what makes any dystopia work is that it is believable.  This is why Alfonso Cuaron’s film Children of Men is so striking, so haunting: it is chillingly plausible; its account of the future is so convincing as to seem almost inevitable.  What makes Holmqvist’s nightmare so recognisably grounded in our reality is that she draws out the connections between rationalisation and commodification, which are inextricably linked in consumer capitalism.  Dorrit tells a friend:

I used to believe that my life belonged to me … Something that was entirely at my disposal, something no one else had any claim on, or the right to have an opinion on.  But I’ve changed my mind.  I don’t own my life at all, it’s other people who own it … Those who have the power, I suppose … The state or industry or capitalism.  Or the mass media.  Or all four.  Or are industry and capitalism the same thing?  Anyway: those who safeguard growth and democracy and welfare, they’re the ones who own my life.  They own everybody’s life.  And life is capital.  A capital that is to be divided fairly among the people in a way that promotes reproduction and growth, welfare and democracy.  I am only a steward, taking care of my vital organs.[8]

As a condemnation of an increasingly rationalised world where everything and, more importantly, everyone, can become a unit of economic value, The Unit is a very fine novel and a nice bit of social criticism.  However, there is something going on further in the depths of the text that should be immensely troubling to anyone invested in the idea of therapy.  That the usual therapies of our world go on unhindered with the Unit, that Doritt regularly visits a psychologist, or that art therapy is available to the doomed residents, suggests something deeply subversive; that the whole therapeutic ethos that dominates contemporary European cultures, with its rhetoric of healing, wholeness, mind-body unity, self-awareness, and self-fulfilment and its social structure of support groups, twelve-step programs, talk therapy, is nothing more than an integral part of the rationalised and rationalising apparatus that prepares and maintains human capital.  That very few of the people who work at the Unit (though they live outside of it) have any intimation of the sheer hypocrisy of the whole enterprise is telling of the perverse coexistence of the recognisable world of therapy and the utterly ruthless logic of exploitation and violence that exists behind the whole edifice of the Unit.  Slavoj Žižek gets at this point in his contributions to the recent The Monstrosity of Christ:

Spiritual mediation, in its abstraction from institutionalised religion, appears today as the zero-level undistorted core of religion: the complex institutional and dogmatic edifice which sustains every particular religion is dismissed as a contingent secondary coating of this core.  The reason for this shift of accent from religious institutions to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism.[9]

This paints the whole of The Unit in a new light and draws out the fact that the novel voices a criticism of the whole edifice of contemporary spiritual/therapeutic culture, most visible in the New Age movement, which often calls for a reversal of disenchantment and the creation of a ‘reenchanted’ world (and here Thomas Moore’s best-selling book The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life is but one example).  Viewing it from the angle set out by Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, what is going on in the development of the whole therapeutic ethos is in reality very different.  In important ways that go largely unspoken, the world of universal individual achievement, the world where we can go to a yoga class or purchase ancient Mayan herbs to mediate the effects of a stressful life, is a world not unlike that of the Unit, and we, as its residents, are not unlike the human capital that is corralled there to serve a purpose and then to be discarded when our usefulness is finished.  All of this raises a series or vital, necessary question: Is therapy really just another management technique and, worse, one that many people gladly submit themselves to?  Are we concerned with all of this healing and wholeness because it allows us to more effective employees, voters, and consumers?  Is all of this a symptom of the commodification of the human subject?  Is the New Age, rather than a new era of freedom and respect for the individual, in reality an ideal embodiment of disenchantment and a pathway to an even more dysenchanted world?

Sheer pointlessness is a deeply subversive affair.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory


Brief excursus on rationalisation and the contemporary university: That this poverty of utility has permeated the contemporary academy to an unprecedented degree goes perhaps without saying.  That the value of university research and teaching is now primarily filtered though economic concerns is immediately obvious to anyone working within the Performance Based Research Funding (PBRF) system in New Zealand, a system which imposes an inappropriate and ultimately harmful standard of ‘excellence’ and ‘performance’ drawn from the business world and situated within a narrowly-prescribed system of valuation.  Education is not a product, nor is it a service and to treat it as such has serious detrimental consequences, such as the need to court and treat students as customers.  On the reverse side of the coin, we find significant numbers of students who are unwilling or simply unable to make the intellectual leap to find the value in studying something that will not help them find a job or in studying for a purpose other than gathering marks towards a degree.  The great tragedy here when thinking about the value of the study of religion, or any of the Humanities for that matter, is that, in spending time and energy attempting to prove their worth in the narrow strictures of utilitarian and economic value, scholars are distracted from doing work that is truly valuable (Mark Bauerlein has an excellent piece on this in the Chronicle of Higher Education).  Perhaps all of this ultimately breaks down to a question of belief; either one believes that the pursuit of knowledge is valuable in its own right, or one does not.  This may be one of those things about which one must square one’s shoulders and declare, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other’.

As the Unit’s librarian Kjell tells Dorrit early on in her stay, ‘there are so many intellectuals here.  People who read books … People who read books tend to be dispensable.  Extremely’.[10] That the Unit is also home to a number of artists and writers should perhaps come as no surprise, for the arts, like the pursuit of knowledge, are formally – and often economically – useless.  That these things make life worth living is, of course, of no consequence.


[1] Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit, translated by Marlaine Delargy (New York: Other Press, 2006), 52.

[2] Holmqvist, Unit, 93.

[3] See Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 35-42 and 90.

[4] Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 2, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 15. Emphasis in original.

[5] Bataille, Accursed II, 197.

[6] Bataille, Accursed II, 42.

[7] Holmqvist, Unit, 136.

[8] Holmqvist, Unit, 103.

[9] Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, edited by Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 28.

[10] Holmqvist, Unit, 48.

Call and Response (One): Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow

14 Monday Sep 2009

Posted by Eric Repphun in Death, History, Literature, Politics, Postcolonialism, Religion, Texts, Theory, Violence

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Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, Christianity, colonialism, Mary Doria Russell, missionaries, Pornography, science fiction, theodicy

In what will hopefully become a recurring feature here at The Dunedin School, we are proud to present the opening of an ongoing dialogue about a single text.  For our inaugural Call and Response, we have chosen Mary Doria Russell’s 1996 science fiction novel The Sparrow as our object of discussion.  Set in the mid-twenty-first century, The Sparrow recounts the fate of an interstellar mission, led by the Society of Jesus, to a distant planet known as Rakhat.  Though thematically a sci-fi novel that explores the classic trope of ‘first contact’, The Sparrow unfolds almost like a detective story, slowly peeling away the layers of rumour and hearsay to arrive, finally, at the horrific truth of why the Jesuit Emilio Sandoz was the only member of his expedition to survive and make the return journey to Earth.  WARNING: these posts will contain very significant plot spoilers, so if you’re interested in reading the book (as you should be), read it first, then come back here and see what other readers have made of it.  The Dunedin School believes firmly that the analysis of books should never be allowed to impinge on the pure, elemental pleasure of reading them.2882-1

Before her deserved success as a novelist, Russell, a convert to Judaism, worked in the academy in the fields of physical and cultural anthropology.  Incidentally, as an academic, one of the pleasures of reading The Sparrow comes from watching Russell struggling to break out of the formal strictures of academic writing – in her Acknowledgements, she admits to feeling uneasy ‘without footnotes and a huge bibliography’[1] – and stretch her legs into prose fiction.  To her credit, Russell is largely successfully, though, on an aesthetic front, the novel is at times something of a mixed bag.  Some of the dialogue she concocts between her characters, especially when expressing deep, even mawkish affection, is stilted or even flat-out clumsy, due, perhaps, to years spent observing people with a detached intellectual eye (one of the perils of working in the human sciences).  Structurally and allegorically, however, Russell rarely puts a foot wrong and the novel’s intricate structure, without which it would lose a good deal of its power, never falters.

The narrative of The Sparrow, Russell’s first novel, is in itself fairly simple.  The novel’s structure is considerably more complex; Russell weaves the story of the mission to Rakhat into the story of what happens to Sandoz when he comes back to Earth and faces a Jesuit commission who want to know why the mission ended so disastrously.  Not only are the rest of the tight-knit crew of Jesuits, scientists, and friends killed on Rakhat, but the mission’s presence caused the deaths of a number of sentient natives, including at least one child who had been close to the Jesuits.  Sandoz’s superiors also want to know why Sandoz was discovered after years of silence working as a prostitute on Rakhat.  Finally, they want to know what happened to his hands, which have been mutilated by an operation that removed the flesh and muscles from his palms, leaving him with unnaturally long, skeletal fingers that hang from his arms with a certain perverse grace.  For much of its considerable length, The Sparrow operates on an exquisite slow burn that comes to a boil in the final pages, in a series of emotionally potent revelations that reveal the deeply unsettling truth of what happened to Sandoz and his crew, a fate that has a good deal to tell us about colonialism, faith, and Christianity.

Reading the novel allegorically, and science fiction is, as Peter Nicholls has noted, ‘the great modern literature of metaphor’,[2] what The Sparrow is ‘really about’ is European colonialism and the inevitable if unconscious harm that it caused on Earth.  It is also no less concerned with grappling honestly with the role of Christian missionaries in the history of colonialism.  The novel begins with a very brief Prologue that draws a parallel between the expedition to Rakhat and to the earliest days of European colonialism, in which the then newly-founded Society of Jesus played an important part.  The opening words of the novel are telling: ‘It was predictable, in hindsight’.[3] Rakhat civilisation seems eerily familiar, even though it is literal light-years from Earth.  It is a tribute to Russell’s intricate and tightly-controlled structure that the similarities become more apparent the more the expedition – and in turn, the reader – learns about the different peoples of Rakhat.

Though it is obvious from the first that the gentle, forest-dwelling Runa, the first alien group that Sandoz’s party encounters, are involved in certain economic activities, the extent of capitalism – or something that looks very much like modern European capitalism – on Rakhat only becomes clear in the closing chapters.  The Runa, the reader slowly learns, are the majority population of Rakhat but are under the control of a cultivated species called the Jana’ata, who dwell in cities with a rich, complex culture.  It is, in fact, the Jana’ata’s songs, broadcast on radio signals that are picked up by powerful radio telescopes on Earth, that first draw the Jesuits to Rakhat.  For all their aesthetic development, the minority Jana’ata rule the Runa with a shocking degree of coercion and violence.  The Runa are treated as little more than sympathetic (if intelligent) cattle, despite the fact that they are the engines that make the Jana’ata economy run.  The Runa’s reproduction is strictly controlled, to the extent that the Jana’ata even breed the Runa selectively in order to make them more useful as traders and gatherers.  As readers, once the humans are discovered by the Jana’ata, our guide into the world of the dominant species is one Supaari VaGayjur, who is a wealthy merchant and trader of scent.  As we move from the forests of the Runa into the cities, the allegorical identity with the Jana’ata and European colonialism come into sharp, surprising focus.  Reading all of this as an allegory, it is difficult not to see the echoes of scientific Enlightenment culture in Russell’s descriptions: ‘But Jana’ata life was never simple and rarely straightforward.  Deep in the Jana’ata soul there was an almost unshakeable convictions that things must be controlled, thought out, done correctly, that there was very little margin for error in life.  Tradition was safety; change was danger’.[4] Though hyperbolically amplified in the novel’s allegorical structure, there are also recognisable parallels between the Runa and the economic underclasses which form the majority population of contemporary human life on Earth.

It is to Russell’s credit that she doesn’t condemn the Jana’ata outright and explores the fictional society on its own terms, something which allows her to make some pointed social criticisms.  She has Sandoz compare the Jana’ata to human civilisation:

I am not defending them.  I am trying to explain to you what happened and why.  But it is their society, and the pay their own price for their way of life … There are no beggars on Rakhat.  There is no unemployment.  There is no overcrowding.  No starvation.  No environmental degradation.  There is no genetic disease.  The elderly do not suffer decline.  Those with terminal illnesses do not linger.  They pay a terrible price for this system, but we too pay, Felipe, and the coin we use is the suffering of children.  How many kids starved to death this afternoon, while we sat here?  Just because the corpses aren’t eaten doesn’t make our species any more moral![5]

What is perhaps most intriguing about The Sparrow is that the story of Sandoz – and it really is his story– underlines the problematic connections of Christianity and European expansion during the colonial period.  The whole of the colonial project – and thus all of the destruction it caused – would likely have been simply impossible without the funding, the manpower, and the inherently legitimising power of the Christian churches, who were in this period fighting on all fronts (including the colonial) to gain (or re-gain in the Catholic Church’s case) power in European society.  The churches, then, are doubtless complicit in the seemingly endless negative consequences that have grown out of the colonial period.

Granted, within the larger cultural and economic movement of colonialism, some of the missionaries, Jesuits and others, who travelled out from Europe in this period were first-rate scholars who added considerably to what was known about Asian cultures in Europe, and did so in an honest, sympathetic, and largely non-violent manner.  The Lutheran Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682-1719), the first Protestant missionary in India, is a good example of this kind of more ethical missionary; however, he was, sadly, very much in the minority.  We can see this tension in the New Zealand context in that there were missionaries involved on both sides of the controversy that surrounded the signing of the still-contentious Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.  There were missionaries working on the side of the colonisers who pressured Maori leaders to sign the document; however, there were also those who worked on the side of the Maori and encouraged resistance against the Treaty, which some suspected –with good reason, it turned out – was designed only to give the growing British rule over New Zealand the air of local legitimacy.  Russell, through her fictional construct of spaceflight and alien civilisation, asks a compelling question: Can the drive to better the world ad majorem Dei gloriam, no matter how legitimate, ever be separated out from the evils of the colonial enterprise?  She also asks, balancing the scales; what price should these missionaries be forced to pay for their complicity?

In the novel, Sandoz comes to pay a great, almost unimaginable price, one that is tied up wholly with his identity as a Jesuit, a priest, and a Christian.  Throughout the novel, Russell takes considerable pains to create in Sandoz a central protagonist who is complex and conflicted but in many ways admirable.  Sandoz comes from a poor background and becomes both a Jesuit and an accomplished linguist, all the while trying to work out the realities of his own Christianity.  When the Aricebo radio telescope in his native Puerto Rico first intercepts the first faint radio transmissions of the Jana’ata songs, Sandoz is instrumental in getting the Jesuit mission off the ground.  Sandoz’s motives are profoundly religious – he feels he is being called by God travel to Rakhat – at the same time they are academic and intellectual – as a linguist, he wants to learn more about the songs and those who sang them.  On Earth, Sandoz is a tireless champion of the underprivileged and a dedicated worker in the service of the poor the world over.  His intentions for the interstellar mission, for the most part, are admirable.   For Sandoz, Rakhat is the site for a profound religious awakening, a flowering of the faith that has always troubled him.  Landing on Rakhat and for the first time opening the hatch of their landing craft, Sandoz finds himself suffused with the sort of transformative experience of the presence of his God that he has long admired in others.  In the Prologue, Russell writes of the intentions behind the expedition: ‘The Jesuit scientists went to learn, not to proselytize.  They went so that they might come to know and love God’s other children.  They went for the reason Jesuits have always gone to the farthest frontiers of human exploration.  They went for ad majorem Dei gloriam: for the greater glory of God.  They meant no harm’.[6] Sandoz means no harm, but he nonetheless causes a great deal of it.  He also comes in for more than his share of harm as things, after a long, idyllic interlude on Rakhat spent with the Runa, go very wrong very quickly.  His friends dead, Sandoz returns after a solitary journey across space a pariah, an enigma with mutilated hands.  He arrives home to a world where he is known as a prostitute and a man connected with a number of deaths.  He arrives home to find the Society deeply immersed in the massive controversy the mission has caused.russell

As we learn towards the end of the novel, Sandoz is not a coldblooded killer or a willing merchant of the flesh but is more than anything the victim of profound cultural misunderstandings.  In their desire to help the Runa, Sandoz and their crew fundamentally alter a social structure they did not understand until it was far too late for them to reverse the changes they had made in their ignorance.  The deaths on Rakhat are the direct result of the violation of the carefully maintained social order.  The minority Jana’ata, who are always in fear of a Runa uprising, cannot tolerate this intrusion and respond with violence.  Sandoz is eventually taken by Suppari to a compound in the city.  It is here that his hands are mutilated in an operation that is designed to make his hands look like the weeping branches of a willow-like tree.  A similar operation causes the death of the only other surviving Jesuit in the interest of pure aesthetics and a desire among the Jana’ata to appear prosperous enough not to need something so mundanely useful as hands.

At the nadir of his suffering, alone and profoundly wounded with this alien stigmata, Sandoz is sold by Suppari to what he fist thinks is a sort of zoo.  Upon meeting his purchaser, the poet who composed the lovely songs which drew him across the void of space, Sandoz experiences a moment of clarity that justifies in his mind all of the suffering he has endured:

And then, suddenly, everything made sense to him, and the joy of that moment took his breath away.  He had been brought here, step by step, to meet this man: Hlavin Kitheri, a poet – perhaps even a prophet – who of all his kind might know the God whom Emilio Sandoz served.  It was a moment of redemption so profound he almost wept, ashamed that his faith had been so badly eroded by the inchoate fear and the isolation … This is why I am alive, he told himself, and he thanked God with all his soul for allowing him to be here at this moment, to understand all of this at last.[7]

At this very moment of spiritual realisation, Russell brings everything crashing down on Sandoz; the author of the songs has not bought a display animal, but an unwilling prostitute.  That the poet Kitheri himself is the one who first violates Sandoz reveals a design in nature quite different to the one that Sandoz had seen with such joy only seconds before.

Russell gives the reader the irony and the horror of this moment without flinching, taking Sandoz’s suffering and humiliation about as far as it could go: ‘Kitheri, Reshtar of Galatna Palace, the greatest poet of his age, who had ennobled the despised, exalted the ordinary, immortalized the fleeting, a singularity whose artistry was first concentrated and then released, magnified, by the incomparable and unprecedented, inhaled deeply.  We shall sing of this for generations, he thought’.[8] New songs are written about the repeated rape of Sandoz, who reveals to his interrogators much later that the songs of the Jana’ata are nothing more than simple (if beautiful) pornography.  That Sandoz has struggled successfully until this point in his life with his vow of celibacy adds a final and very severe insult to his forced prostitution.  Sandoz is able later to frame his own understanding on very Nietzschean terms, telling his interrogators, ‘Not comedy.  Not tragedy … Perhaps farce’?[9] However, this doesn’t soften the blow of what happens to him on Rakhat, about which he says simply: ‘I laid down all my defences.  I had nothing between me and what happened but the love of God.  And I was raped.  I was naked before God and I was raped’.[10] Tying the title of the book back the Matthew 10:29 (‘Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing about it’) brings out the force of Sandoz’s continual suffering, as his God knows about his suffering but chooses to ignore it in silence.  In this, there is an almost Job-like character to Sandoz’s story.

In these final revelations, The Sparrow sounds a note very much like that of Arthur C. Clarke’s classic 1956 Hugo Award-winning short story, ‘The Star’, in which a group of scientists discover that the brightly-flaring star that features in the biblical narratives of Jesus’ birth was in reality a supernova that laid to waste an interstellar civilisation that far outstripped anything that humanity has managed to achieve.  The narrator of ‘The Star’, a Jesuit priest and scientist not unlike The Sparrow’s Sandoz, finishes his story with a plea that mixes the joy of discovery with a lament that such discovery has little enough to say to the age-old problem of evil: ‘There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last.  Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?’[11] In The Sparrow, the question of theodicy, as indicated in the opening sentence, should be reframed to include humanity’s persistent inability to learn from its mistakes.

As a firm believer in the openness of the text, I have no problems with the fact that The Sparrow contains within it a number of possible reading; however, the question I wish to put to my fellows here at the School is this: is The Sparrow an apology for or a condemnation of the missionary impulse in Christianity and, just as importantly, in European modernity?  Is it both?  Is it neither?  Does anyone, no matter what their crimes or their intentions, deserve to suffer as Emilio Sandoz suffers, both physically and spiritually?


[1] Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (London: Black Swan, 1996). 505.

[2] Peter Nicholls, ‘The Monsters and the Critics’, in P. Nicholls (ed.), Explorations of the Marvelous (London: Fontana, 1978: pp. 170-196): 180.

[3] Russell, Sparrow, 9.

[4] Russell, Sparrow, 423.

[5] Russell, Sparrow, 471.

[6] Russell, Sparrow, 10.

[7] Russell, Sparrow, 485-486.

[8] Russell, Sparrow, 488.

[9] Russell, Sparrow, 478.

[10] Russell, Sparrow, 490.

[11] The full text of the ‘The Star’ is legally available online at http://lucis.net/stuff/clarke/star_clarke.html.

On Official Acceptance …

08 Tuesday Sep 2009

Posted by Alan Smithee in Dunedin School, Ethics, Literature, Rhetoric

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Ingratitude, James Agee, University of Otago, Walker Evans

On the occasion of The Dunedin School being linked to from our departmental website, a few relevant thoughts from the American journalist and novelist James Agee (who was also, incidentally, one of the finest and most intuitive film critics to ever practice the art).

In his stunning, brilliant, maddening book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a collaboration with the photographer Walker Evans, which was begun in 1936 as a reporting project on sharecroppers in the American South during the Great Depression, but which Agee could not finish until 1941, Agee wrote of his struggle to form the book into something both powerful and palatable:

As a matter of fact, nothing I might write could make any difference whatever.  It would only be a ‘book’ at the best.  If it were a safely dangerous one it would be ‘scientific’ or ‘political’ or ‘revolutionary’.  If it were dangerous enough to be of any remote use to the human race it merely be ‘frivolous’ or ‘pathological’ and that would be the end of that.  Wiser and more capable men than I shall ever be have put their findings before you, findings so rich and so full of anger, serenity, murder, healing truth, and love that it seems incredible the world were not destroyed in the instant, but you are too much for them: the weak in courage are strong in cunning; and one by one, you have absorbed and have captured and dishonoured, and have distilled of your believers the most ruinous of all your poisons … Every fury on earth has been absorbed in time, as art, or as religion, or as authority in one form or another.  The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike it to do fury honour.  Swift, Blake, Beethoven, Christ, Joyce, Kafka, name me a one who has not been thus castrated.  Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again, and is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas (pp. 12-15).

I’ve no desire to put any of here in the same category as Agee, though he did struggle intellectually and existentially with religion for the whole of his tragically short life (he died at 45 of a broken heart), but these words are quoted here to mislead those who will be mislead by them.  They mean, not what the reader may care to think they mean, but what they say …

(if you’re confused, track down of copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and read the note on page xiii).

The Role of the Reader in ‘Tristram Shandy’

07 Monday Sep 2009

Posted by Deane in Literature, Reception

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Laurence Sterne, reader response, Tristram Shandy

“Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all; – so no author who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good-breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself. For my own part, I am eternally paying him complements of this kind, and do all that lies in my power to keep his imagination as busy as my own.”

(Laurence Sterne, Introduction to Vol 2, Chapter 11, The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman)

So, back in 1759, Sterne was already well aware of the competing roles of the reader and the writer within any good work of literature.

Caprica, Douglas Coupland, and the Problem of Immortality

26 Wednesday Aug 2009

Posted by Eric Repphun in Language, Literature, Metaphor, Religion, Television, Texts, Theory

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Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, death, Douglas Coupland, immortality, Peter Berger

The rebooted television series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) was, in this reporter’s opinion, one of the finest serial narratives in the history of the medium (though the Baltimore-set crime drama The Wire, which ran at pretty much the same time, is arguably just as good). It is science fiction, certainly, but as an allegory, the whole series can be read as a long, eliptical meditation about religion and its role in contemporary society.  Battlestar told the story of the conflict between a far-flung human civilisation called the Twelve Colonies of Kobol and a race of genocidal, fundamentalist robots known as ‘Cylons’.  The Cylons, originally created by Colonial scientists to serve as slave labour in the Colonies, eventually launch a devastating war of rebellion and revenge on the Colonies.  The series follows a handful of human survivors as they flee across the galaxy, pursued by the beings that their parents had created.  Though Battlestar ended its run early this year, a new series, Caprica (the name of one of a Colonial homeworld), which will begin its run in 2010, explores the human world of the Colonies at the time of the creation of the original Cylons.  While it toys with familiar science-fiction and horror themes about the creation of life and the terrible responsibility that this act brings with it, there is something that is even more intriguing about the excellent feature-length pilot episode that was released recently on DVD.  While Battlestar Galactica had a good deal to say about religion, and particularly about the ways in which we in the West view Islam, Caprica adds an interesting dimension to the series’ commentary on religion.

Alessandra Toreson as Zoe in Caprica

Caprica: Alessandra Torresani as Zoe

In the Caprica pilot, we learn that the fundamental motivation for the development of the original Cylons was a fear of death and the refusal to accept the death of a loved one.  Daniel Graystone, the man most responsible for the creation of the Cylon technology, is driven by a disquieting mixture of greed, ambition, and grief.  Graystone is, in grand Battlestar tradition, is a deeply flawed and compellingly human character.  There is an interesting and troubling parallel between the way Graystone approaches his research and the way that he treats his human daughter that speaks volumes about the ambivalent place that science occupies in the universe of Battlestar and Caprica.  Early in the pilot, Graystone’s precocious teenage daughter Zoe is killed in a human bombing executed by a member of an underground monotheistic sect (the Colonists are polytheists).  Zoe, a secret member of the same sect, has created an effective and sentient virtual copy of herself that Graystone discovers only after her death.  He forcefully appropriates the virtual Zoe and uses her as the basis for the first working Cylon model.  The pilot ends with a truly chilling image of a hulking metal Cylon Centurion, developed for military use, pleading for help in a halting, adolescent girl’s voice.  Though there are real questions as to Graystone’s ultimate motives, it is obvious that he is deeply affected by Zoe’s death and his initial trials with the virtual Zoe and the Cylon bodies are motivated by a desire to undo her death, to deny the basic fact of mortality.  Graystone is suspect in that he is overly ambitious and unscrupulous, but also because he is a deeply rational man unable to face this one troubling aspect of reality.  His attempts to counter death with technology will end, we know before he begins, is the Cylon-led genocide that almost wipes out the human race only a few decades later.

Though this requires a good deal more study before it is anything more than simple conjecture, it seems that the fear of immortality is an increasingly common theme in contemporary genre fiction.  To cite a not insignificant example, in the Harry Potter books, the main villain, Lord Voldemort, is driven largely by a quest for immortality, or by a fear of death.  Likewise, in the lamentable Star Wars prequels, we learn that the motivation driving Anakin Skywalker, who eventually is transformed into über-villain Darth Vader, is again both the fear of death and the refusal to accept that everything must die.  There is something interesting here for the study of religion in that there are deep connections between ideas of mortality and life after death and the Judeo-Christian religious milieu that these texts have grown out of.  If we are to believe Peter Berger’s classic 1969 study, The Sacred Canopy, religion, at least as he conceived it from a largely Eurocentric and Christian-centred perspective, is tied fundamentally to the spectre of death.  Berger writes of the importance of death in religion, which he sees as a social phenomenon which creates a sort of ‘canopy’ of explanations and motivations that helps people make sense of their world:

Its legitimating power, however, has another important dimension – the integration into a comprehensive nomos of precisely those marginal situations in which the reality of everyday life is put in question …The confrontation with death (be it actually witnessing the death of other or anticipating one’s own death in the imagination) constitutes what is probably the most important marginal situation.  Death radically challenges all socially objectivated definitions of reality – of the world, of others, and of self.  Death radically puts into question the taken-for-granted, ‘business as usual’ attitude in which one exists in everyday life … Insofar as the knowledge of death cannot be avoided in any society, legitimations of the reality of the social world in the face of death are decisive requirements in any society.  The importance of religion in such legitimations is obvious.  Religion, then, maintains the socially defined reality by legitimating marginal situations in terms of an all-encompassing sacred reality.[1]

He concludes, a few pages later:

The world of sacred order, by virtue of being an ongoing human production, is ongoingly confronted with the disordering forces of human existence in time.  The precariousness of every such world is revealed each time men forget or doubt the reality-denying dreams of ‘madness’, and most importantly, each time they consciously encounter death.  Every human society is, in the last resort, man banded together in the face of death.  The power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death, or more accurately, as they walk, inevitably, toward it.[2]

Though many scholars have challenged Berger’s ideas (including Berger himself, who came in later decades to disagree with many of his own conclusions), The Sacred Canopy is deservedly a classic in the field.  We have reasons to take him and these ideas seriously.  Though we may be suspect of how reductive his thesis is, there can be little denying that religion and death are in many ways intertwined, especially in the Abrahamic monotheisms.

What does this emerging fear not of mortality but of immortality tell us about the state of religion in the Western world?  It seems odd in an environment that is undergoing something of a religious revival (to use a horribly loose and loaded phrase) that the drive for immortality plays such a destructive role in a number of prominent texts.  If there is indeed a growing suspicion with those who strive for immortality, would this mean that there is also a growing suspicion of a certain kind of religious thought and practice – perhaps reflecting the fact that the writings of some militants from various traditions have given immortality (and its dozens of willing virgin girls or its empty planets to inhabit with one’s innumerable wives) have given the afterlife a bad name?  Or would this mean that contemporary religion is becoming more and more oriented towards this world rather than any other.  Though both of these possibilities likely get to the truth of the matter in different ways, it is the latter suggestion that seems to be more compelling, because there is something profoundly this-worldly about much of modern Western religious practice and its sacralisation (perhaps even divinisation) of the self.  The relentless drive for ‘self-improvement’ or ‘self-realisation’ that is part and parcel of so much of contemporary religious thought and practice, is necessarily a this-worldly matter.  This is an interesting development in that it represents something of a return to the prehistoric religious world that early sociologists like Emile Durkheim and Max Weber described (or, depending on how sympathetic we are to their work, created), which was largely focused on mundane, this-worldly concerns.

This also raises a further question: if this is truly is what is happening out there in world beyond the ivory tower where we in the Dunedin School find ourselves working (though it is in reality not a tower of any sort but a clapped-out two-story house built in the 1920s and later converted into offices with little care or subtlety), what might be driving this change?  Turning again to fictional narrative to approach this question, the Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, in his brilliant 1993 novel, Life After God, speculates on the reasons that his characters are unable or unwilling to think about another world:

Ours was a life lived in paradise and thus it rendered any discussion of transcendental ideas pointless.  Politics, we supposed, existed elsewhere in a televised non-paradise; death was something similar to recycling.  Life was charmed but without politics or religion.  It was the life of the children of the children of pioneers – life after God – a life of earthy salvation on the edge of heaven.  Perhaps this is the finest thing to which we may aspire, the life of peace, the blurring between dream life and real life – and yet I find myself speaking these words with a sense of doubt.  I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line.  I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched.  And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God.  But then I remind myself we are living creatures – we have religious impulses – we must – and yet into what cracks do these impulses flow in a world without religion?  It is something I think about every day.  Sometimes I think it is the only thing worth thinking about.[3]

In line with the tendency observable in Caprica, Coupland tells us elsewhere that embracing mortality is one of the crucial steps in developing a deeper understanding of the world.  In his Polaroids from the Dead, a collection of essays and journalistic writings, Coupland tells a parabolic story about an ‘enchanted city,’ a city charmed but without rain, and a visit paid to it by a skeleton.  The story is a scathing condemnation of contemporary culture, and particularly its ignorance of the possibility of an afterlife and a purpose to the enigmatic figure of death.  Here Coupland compares the enchanted city, which is in reality a highly disenchanted place, with the genuine enchantment that the interloping skeleton, as both a metaphor for the hidden and as the literal presence of the dead, brings with him.  The skeleton tells the city’s people, who plead for help in making it rain:

‘It is simple … While you live in mortal splendour – with glass elevators and grapes in December – the price you pay for your comfort is a collapsed vision of heaven – the loss of the ability to see pictures in your heads of an afterlife.  You pray for rain, but you also are praying for pictures in your heads that will renew your faith in an afterlife … I am the skeleton that lies deep within each and every one of you.  I am the skeleton just underneath your lips, your eyeballs, your flesh – the skeleton that silently carries both your heart and your mind’.[4]

Quite contrary to Berger’s concept of the ‘sacred canopy’, in which religion plays a role in protecting people from death, Caprica, along with the work of Coupland (and doubtless many others),  suggests that embracing mortality and the spectre of death may in fact be a characteristic religious gesture of our times.


[1] Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Press,1969): 42-44.

[2] Berger, Canopy, 51.

[3] Douglas Coupland, Life After God (New York: Pocket Books, 1994): 273-274.

[4] Douglas Coupland, Polaroids from the Dead (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996): 59-60.  It is worth noting that the vision of the dancing skeleton reappears in somewhat modified from in Coupland’s 2004 novel, Eleanor Rigby (London: Fourth Estate) in the form of a visionary story about a forsaken community of farmers on a vast prairie who face conflicting information from above. Images of bones and intimations of mortality play an important part in the slowly unfolding story of the farmers. See Coupland, Eleanor, 91-92, 98-99, 102, 159-166, and 248.

What do you do with Rehoboam?

17 Monday Aug 2009

Posted by Deane in Hebrew Bible, History, Literature

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alice in Wonderland, Israel, Jeroboam, Philip Davies, Rehoboam, Roland Boer, Tim Burton, Tweedledee, Tweedledum

Tweedledum and Tweedledee, played by Matt Lucas in Tim Burton's 2010 film, Alice in Wonderland

Tweedledum and Tweedledee, played by Matt Lucas in Tim Burton's 2010 film, Alice in Wonderland

More precisely, Roland asks, “What in hell do you do with him?”

Philip Davies has an idea.

Davies, who concludes that there is a whole lot more fiction than history in the Hebrew Bible, poses the following rhetorical question about Rehoboam and Jeroboam, the legendary first kings of the divided monarchies of Israel and Judah:

“Are Rehoboam and Jeroboam more like Tweedledum and Tweedledee?”

(‘Biblical Israel in the Ninth Century?’ Proceedings of the British Academy 143 (2007): 49-56, 54)

So you can do something with Rehoboam and Jeroboam. One option is to treat them as uncanny twins from the fairy-tale realm of Wonderland, aka Biblical Israel.

Alice, played by Mia Wasikowska

The Vampire and/as Modernity: Let the Right One In and the Rationalised City

11 Tuesday Aug 2009

Posted by Eric Repphun in Film, History, Language, Literature, Living, Metaphor, Politics, Queer, Spectrality, Television, Texts, Violence

≈ 6 Comments

200px-Dracula1st

Cover of the First Edition

Like that other great creation of modern horror, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster – who appears in a new guise every few years, recently and memorably in the revamped Battlestar Galactica – the vampire is an enduring and ever-flexible framework on which to hang any number of metaphors.  In the most popular iteration of the contemporary boom in vampire film and fiction, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series brings this metaphoric structure back to the psychological/sexual terrain first explored by Bram Stoker in the original 1897 novel Dracula.   For Meyer, the vampire legend is a template with which to draw a clunky, simplistic allegory about sexual abstinence, one which draws heavily if implicitly on Meyer’s Mormonism.  Why the Twilight books are so popular is a mystery to me – and I suspect to anyone who is not a teenaged girl (though I must admit to only having read the first novel; I did try to read the second novel – for professional, academic reasons, of course – but stopped dead after the very first scene, caught on the simple fact that the two lead characters are completely unlikable).  Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that the novels capture something that strikes a chord for many readers, though again they are mostly teenaged girls.

This is supported by the fact that the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer covered very similar territory with considerably more depth and subtlety almost a decade before Meyer began her saga.  Both series turn on a romance between a vampire and a young human girl, toying with images of the monstrous and with conventional notions of the perverse.  In the end, however, both are rather tame in light of a superior example of the vampire/human romance, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2004 Swedish novel Låt Den Rätte Komma In (translated into English variably as Let the Right One In or Let Me In).  While there is a good deal that could be said about the borderline-sexual friendship between Oscar, a young outcast, and Eli, a vampire who moves in next to Oscar in a block of council flats in the Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg, Lindquist’s novel is perhaps even more interesting in its employment of the vampire mythos to deconstruct and challenge contemporary suburban living.  In this, he turns the vampire story into an interrogation of modern alienation, coming out the other side with a pointed social criticism that is far more subversive and far more convincing than anything Twilight has to offer.

While there are any number of texts that seek to expose the dark underbelly of the respectable surface of suburbia – and here we need only think of David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet or Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road – Lindqvist’s novel suggests something rather different, something rather more disturbing: that the rationalised post-War suburb is itself a manifestation of evil (or the metaphysical Other), or is at least a willing participant in it.  The novel is a catalogue of suburban problems, from drug abuse to broken families, from individual alienation to the kind of quiet, almost casual violence that occasionally erupts at places like Columbine High School (and Littleton, Colorado bears no small resemblance to Blackeberg).  When Eli, among the most tragic figures in the long history of fictional vampires, moves to Blackeberg, she finds the perfect place to live the sort of closed-off, impermanent life that her vampirism forces her to live.  In Oscar, a sad, quiet boy who is mercilessly bullied at school, she finds a perfect companion, one who is perfectly and disturbingly willing to commit violence.  While Tomas Alfredson’s remarkable 2008 film adaptation of Låt Den Rätte Komma In, which was shot largely on location in Blackeberg (indeed, it opens with a stunning night-time image of the suburb’s only subway station), captures some of this, the novel brings this theme to the forefront.  The novel – and to be fair, the film – has a remarkable sense of place, capturing something of the inherent disconnect of people living in new, purpose-built, rationalised cities.  The novel opens with a telling section titled ‘The Location’ in which the omniscient third-person narrator tells the reader about the short history of Blackeberg, which was built as a whole in the 1950s:

It was not a place that developed organically, of course.  Here everything was carefully planned from the outset.  And people moved into what had been built for them.  Earth-coloured concrete buildings, scattered about the green fields …

It is big.  It is new.  It is modern.

But that wasn’t the way it was.

They came on the subway.  Or in cars, moving vans.  One by one.  Filtered into the finished apartments with their things.  Sorted their possession into measured cubbies and shelves, placed the furniture in formation on the cork floor.  Bought new things to fill the gaps …

A good place.  That’s what people said to each other over the kitchen table a month or so after they had moved in.

‘It’s a good place we’ve come to’.

Only one thing was missing.  A past …

You were beyond the grasp of the mysteries of the past; there wasn’t even a church.  Nine thousand inhabitants and no church.

That tells you something about the modernity of the place, its rationality.  It tells you something of how free they were from the ghosts of history and of terror.

It explains in part how unprepared they were.[1]

For Lindqvist, place is defined by history and by those who have passed through it.  This comes across clearly in a passage when Oscar, walking out in the forest towards a sledding hill one night, passes by a deserted and much older house:  ‘He reached the place where the path started to bear down strongly towards Kvarnviken Bay, and climbed onto his Snow racer.  The ghost house was a black wall next to the hill, a reprimand: You are not allowed to be here in the dark.  This is our place now.  If you want to play here, you’ll have to play with us’.[2] The whole of Blackeberg is, in a sense, a ghost house, a place empty of its own history but still in the grip of the past and its shadows.  In the 1980s, when the story is set, Blackeberg has seen only a few decades of human habitation and thus has very little memory; however, this doesn’t shield the suburb and its residents from what has come before.  The paired remarks, ‘But that wasn’t the way it was’ and ‘It explains in part how unprepared they were’, are both foreshadows of the dark story to come.  These interlocutions can also be read as a deliberate challenge to what it means to be big, new, and modern.  Into this modern place, which has no regard for the metaphysical, Lindqvist invites the tragic figure of Eli, who undermines all of this, suggesting that there is no way of escaping the legacy of the past, that modernity, despite its pretences to having done away with the superstitions and unreason, is in fact infected with metaphysical, unexplainable evil.  Eli embodies this unreason, the unthought (to borrow a word from Michel Foucault) of the modern city as Oscar gradually comes to realise that there is something profoundly different about his new friend.  He thinks: ‘She was scary … there was something in her, something that was … Pure Horror.  Everything you were supposed to watch out for.  Heights, fire, shards of glass, snakes.  Everything his mum tried so hard to keep him safe from’.[3] Lindqvist’s modernity offers Oscar no refuge for these things.  That very few people in the novel can ever bring themselves to believe that Eli is a figure of mythical, supernatural violence merely underlines this.  That Oscar, a product of the modern family structure and a resident of the modern city, is at least as disturbing a character as Eli further hammers this home; the rationalised city, and by extension modernity itself, will never be free of the dark shadows of history.  In fact, the well-lit rooms and public spaces of Blackeberg might just need these shadows.

A conversation between two of the town’s drunks, heartbreakingly realised figures of both despair and ragged humanity who become major players in the story, adds another dimension to this critique.  Lacke tells his friend:

I don’t want to be here anymore …

Here, the whole shebang.  Blackeberg.  Everything.  These buildings, the walking paths, the spaces, people, everything is just … like a single big damn sickness, see?  Something went wrong.  They thought all this out, planned it to be … perfect, you know. And in some damn wrinkle it went wrong, instead.  Some shit.

Like … I can’t explain it … like they had some idea about the angles, or fucking whatever, the angles of the buildings, in their relation to each other, you know.  So it would be harmonious or something.  And then they made a mistake in their measurements, their triangulation, whatever the hell they call it, so that it was all a little off from the start and it went downhill from there.  So you walk here with all these buildings and you just feel that … no.  No, no, no.  You shouldn’t be here.  This place is all wrong, you know?

Except it isn’t the angles, it’s something else, something that just … like a disease that’s in the … walls and I … don’t want any part of it any more.[4]

Blackeberg, Sweden

Blackeberg, Sweden

For Lacke, the evil that Eli brings (she kills two of Lacke’s closest friends) is a function of the place itself, not an incidental or outside force.  He assigns to urban planning an agency to create mood, atmosphere, and event that is perhaps exceeds even what the most altruistic of urban planners imagine is possible.  Indeed, in beginning with a description of the suburb, the novel offers us a sense that Eli is drawn to the place, called somehow by its wrongness.

This speaks to the inevitable dark side of Michel de Certeau’s comment (see The Unofficial City), that haunted places are the only places where people can live.  If places aren’t haunted by their own history, then they produce or attract their own kinds of haunting.  Låt Den Rätte Komma In tells us that Eli will always live next door and suggests that we as moderns are perfectly willing to open the off-white security doors of our flats and invite her inside.

Maybe this isn’t even a choice; maybe she’s here already.

Leandersson as Eli in Låt Den Rätte Komma In (2008)

Lina Leandersson as Eli in Låt Den Rätte Komma In (2008)


[1] John Ajvide Lindqvist, Låt Den Rätte Komma In, trans. Ebba Segerberg (London: Quercus, 2007): 1-2.

[2] Lindqvist, Komma In, 243.  Emphasis in original.

[3] Lindqvist, Komma In, 242.

[4] Lindqvist, Komma In, 363.  Emphasis and ellipses in original.

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