Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University and author of many books, most notably A People’s History of the United States, died on 27 January of this year. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1922, the son of two immigrant factory workers, he worked at a naval shipyard and served as a bombardier during World War II before embarking upon a career in academia. An activist and sometime playwright, his interpretation of U.S. history emphasised the agency of ordinary people at the expense of political, commercial, and military elites, aiming to overturn what he perceived as the unremitting narrative of American greatness presented in the country’s textbooks. His approach proved wildly successful. Published in 1980, A People’s History sold more than a million copies and became a standard text for left-leaning American activists looking for a usable past to inform their present-day struggles.

Professor Zinn was himself a committed activist and his historical interpretation was a function of his engagement with contemporary political contentions. That engagement was deep and sustained. In 1963 he lost his job at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, as a consequence of his involvement with the civil rights movement. And during the Vietnam War he called for civil disobedience. “Thousands of us were arrested for disturbing the peace”, he observed. “We were really arrested because we were disturbing the war.” He drew on his experience of civil rights activism to highlight the importance of persistence in the pursuit of social justice and of keeping faith in the possibility of fundamental societal change. Fittingly, he cut short his final class in order to join a picket line, encouraging his students to join him.

Mention of A People’s History’s appearance in the 1997 blockbuster Good Will Hunting has been a ubiquitous, wearying fixture in Zinn’s obituaries, but it is illustrative of the broader purchase that the book has had amongst a popular readership. Few historians have garnered such an extensive audience beyond the academy. Few have held such celebrity cachet. And few have had their position as an historian so contested. In the wake of his death there has been some controversy over just this issue: could Professor Zinn properly be named an historian? Conservative critics were understandably perturbed by Zinn’s rejection of the moral superiority of the United States and his seeming dedication to pull apart the fabric of the nation’s political narrative. Jingoism and militarism, Zinn argued, were the inevitable corollaries of nationalism, evidenced, in his view, by the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Zinn sought to debunk national heroes such as Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, and denounced American territorial expansion in the 19th century as little more than a glorified land grab.

In short, his historical interpretation was a function of his political convictions rather than the other way around. The people were inherently progressive, and if reaction prevailed this could only mean that the popular will had been subverted by perfidious elites. That this jarred with right-wing sensibilities is obvious, yet Zinn was hardly a darling of the left. In one of the more notable critiques of Zinn’s work, Michael Kazin criticised him for not asking “the biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S. history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?” Rather than historicising the left’s struggles with capital, authority, and power, Zinn offered no more than a “Manichean fable…gilded with virtuous intentions”. And if Kazin is right—if the American left does really understand itself in terms of such an uncompromising binary of good and evil—it is no wonder that it struggles to effect change in the world.

The go-to term for those looking to defend Zinn’s reputation at the hands of his critics (and there are many) is “polemicist”. The charge that Zinn had little interest in producing an objective portrait of the past is acknowledged, but blunted by the counter-assertion that he was merely offering a corrective to a dominant, even hegemonic, interpretation of the American past. Moreover, his defenders point to his broader intent: he sought to inspire protest and discontent in a world still marked by injustice. To this end, Zinn promoted a pragmatic and sober approach to political organisation, preaching patience and perseverance as favourable alternatives to zeal and enthusiasm. In this endeavour he undoubtedly achieved some success. As a further defence, Zinn’s sympathisers contend that all historical interpretations are conditioned by their political context. Professor Zinn wanted to challenge the hegemony of an equally narrow, jaundiced, America-as-beacon-of-liberty presentation of the past.

In 2010, writing history from the bottom up is hardly news, but this was not the case in the late 1970s. By challenging curricula on this score, Zinn’s long-term significance is secure. Yet the fact that he aimed for neither objectivity nor neutrality does nothing to suggest we ought to take him seriously as an historian. The question can be fairly asked: do the conscious, deliberate omissions in his account of American history—modern conservatism, for instance, or the popular anti-Catholicism of the middle decades of the 19th century—fatally undermine his claim to be read as an historian?

Certainly, A People’s History evinced a willingness to favour a unitary narrative over complexity and nuance in the interest of prosecuting a present-minded political case, but perhaps more damning is the thin sense of the people themselves that emerges from his work. This shortcoming is intimately connected with Zinn’s idiosyncratic conception of power and its distribution in the American republic. On the one hand, his oppositional, totalising, elites-versus-people model compelled him to emphasise the fundamental goodness of the American people and their ability to improve their world. Abolitionists, opponents of American aggression in the Philippines, civil rights activists, and the (sometimes violent) protesters of the Vietnam War: these are Zinn’s heroes, offering the hope of substantive, progressive change to the American body politic. As historian Christopher Phelps writes, these are the people who acted “as if change is possible in the face of decidedly unfavorable odds”, and in doing so, reshaped the historical trajectory of the United States. “The People”, the great unwashed masses, understanding perfectly their own interests, wield power.

Yet despite the power that inheres in the people, the American republic looks as it does. We can dispute the 2000 Presidential electoral returns, but 50 million people still voted for George W. Bush. Only the smallest fraction  will be corrupting, decadent millionaires set on frustrating the progressive evolution of American history. And perhaps we can assume that some had their vote “bought” under any reasonable understanding of that term, but surely this could only represent a minute number. But the majority are not, and did not. Bush was elected—twice—and it is dismissive and condescending to assume that “the people” got their own minds wrong somewhere along the line. Kazin’s point about the people accepting the legitimacy of the capitalist republic can be taken further: the people have actively colluded in building that republic, and they have done so in light of a rational assessment of their own interests. Professor Zinn pronounces upon the morality of this, and of course that is a proper subject for debate, but he does little or nothing to lay bare the power structures of the American state, family, or workplace. For this his work suffers.

In an interview conducted near the end of his life, Howard Zinn said, “The really critical way in which people are deceived by history is not the lies that are told, but that things are omitted”. By this standard, Zinn deceived his readers. But perhaps the application of this standard is too harsh. A People’s History was almost certainly meant to be read alongside the conventional accounts it sought to challenge. Ultimately, we can accept this partial defence but still find his interpretation dissatisfactory. Perhaps we expect more nuance and more honesty from historians of the left: they are supposed to speak truth to power. When they replicate the modes of narrators of the right, constructing noble lies to live by, we are disappointed.

David Sim is reading for a DPhil in History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Photograph © Penguin Books Ltd.

Michael Slater
Charles Dickens
Yale University Press, 2009
696 Pages
£25
ISBN 978-0300112078

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I desire no better for my fame when my personal dustyness shall be past the controul [sic] of my love of order, than such a biographer and such a Critic.
—Charles Dickens to John Forster, 1848.

Charles Dickens always found it hard to keep himself out of his fiction. He composed himself in prose right to the end, writing his will “in his favourite blue ink on a sheet of letter paper”, like one of his novels. Apart from the management of his estate, Dickens’s will, which he knew would be published after his death, perpetuated one of his great themes by attempting to manage the way in which he would enter the memory of his public: “in plain English letters”, as he put it. Dickens’s obsession with order manifests equally in his “nervous habit of placing chairs and tables in precisely the right position before he could get down to a day’s work” and in his compulsive desire to direct the public’s opinion of him. He asked that no public memorial be created in his honour, but it is likely that this was due as much to modesty as to distress at the thought that he wouldn’t be able to oversee every detail. He wanted, in his will, to have the last word on his own life.

His critics have felt this to be so since the beginning. In 1840 for example Thomas Hood wrote in the Athenaeum that “no writer’s personal character seems more identified with his writings than that of Boz.” This sensation saturates the novels and journalism, detected by Hood long before any of the details of “Boz’s” life that we now consider pivotal—the time in Warren’s Blacking, the death of Mary Hogarth, his parents’ imprisonment for debt—were known. A tone of confession, an invitation to intimacy, always comprised a key component of Dickens’s art.

And this, of course, makes Dickens an irresistible subject for biography. Michael Slater’s scrupulous new life of Dickens is maybe the ultimate amplification of Hood’s hunch that to know more of Dickens “the man” is to supply yourself with the best possible key to understanding the things that he wrote. When Slater insists upon Dickens’s attentiveness to “the literal truth underlying his emblematic art”, he is vindicating his own biographical practices by association. The care Slater takes in this task of unpacking and comparing Dickens’s writings of all kinds, and the comprehensiveness with which he executes it, are staggering.

Slater has picked his moment correctly, too. For the first time, Dickens’s letters and his journalism are all available in the Pilgrim scholarly edition, new resources that Slater puts to excellent use. He has marshaled an immense quantity of information resulting in minutely detailed pictures of the development of Dickens’s works.

Take, for example, his focused inspection of Dickens’s composition of Chapter 13 of Martin Chuzzlewit over a few weeks in May, 1843. To begin with, Slater carefully situates his account of this creative spurt amid several months worth of circumstantial details, presenting a dense list of complementary and proposed writings awe-inspiring in its sheer bibliographical thoroughness. In the eight weeks before he begins Chapter 13, Dickens reads a report on “Children’s Employment”, contemplates writing a pamphlet on this issue in a letter to Sydney Smith, rejects the idea four days later, proposing to instead write on the subject at the end of the year (foreshadowing, Slater parenthetically notes, his later interest in Christmas as a setting for social commentary and hortatory tracts). Finally, he opts to treat it in Chuzzlewit, writing of city merchants as “slobbering, bow-paunched, overfed, apoplectic, snorting cattle” and exhorting them to go to “the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man’s neglect”. Slater continues in this rigorous vein for quite some time, finally getting to June a full four paragraphs later.

The interweaving of Dickens’s life and his writing is so compelling as to make rhetorical embroidery beside the point—no finesse is needed. It is in breathless moments like the one cited above that the biography feels most true to Dickens’s own life. “How strange it is”, Dickens remarked, “to be never at rest.” The ferocity of Dickens’s energy and momentum is often astonishing; at its best, Slater’s management of the data of Dickens’s life partakes of a similar energy.

Indeed, it is only when Slater tries to guide the reader too assiduously that he falters. Slater’s own voice most commonly turns up in adverbial insertions that instruct the reader how to take a given fact. That we don’t know precisely when in 1852 Dickens decided he wanted two narrative voices in Bleak House is not simply a missing bit of detail, it is an enticement: we don’t “have no clue”, we “tantalisingly…have no clue”.  More substantial commentary tends to be given in parentheses, visually and syntactically separating it from the progress of the main body of the text. When, for instance, Slater repeats Forster’s claim that Dickens took “all the world into his confidence”, he adds that he may have been “(rather overstating his case)”.

In tone this is equal parts comic aside and shy suggestion. At times, too, Slater employs Dickens’s own turns of phrase for colour. That Dickens called his attacks on dysfunctional public institutions “sledge-hammer blows” is repeated half a dozen times. After a certain point, it becomes unclear whether it is Dickens who used phrasing in this recursive way or whether it is Slater himself channeling his subject’s voice.

In general, however, Slater’s reservedness probably reflects his desire to get out of the way of his materials. And indeed the data, under Slater’s sure hand, do stand up for themselves. Unlike Peter Ackroyd, Dickens’s last major biographer, Slater does not wish to conjure up Dickens. Instead, his more modest goal is to present as accurately as possible what we know. The drive to embellish that characterizes Ackroyd’s work is, for Slater, misguided, especially considering the masses of letters, manuscripts, and ephemera that form his most effective building materials. Slater’s Dickens rebuts Lytton Strachey’s famous claim that the history of the Victorian period cannot be written since we know too much about it. On the contrary, Slater makes us feel that we know just enough. For those of us who are excited by the neat arrangement and careful tabulation of gargantuan quantities of detail, Slater’s Dickens is indispensable.

Matt Kerr is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at Somerville College, Oxford.

Michael Haneke
The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band)
Filmladen, 2009
144 minutes

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A few years ago in an interview, filmmaker Michael Haneke used the phrase “emotional glaciation” to describe the particular froideur that characterizes his Brechtian style—long takes, detached perspectives, little resolution, and the dearth of pleasure we equate with the slam-dunk glee of a blockbuster film. Despite his efforts to dispel this easy tag, the term has been associated with his films ever since.

Haneke’s latest effort, the recent Cannes Palm d’Or winner The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band) is no exception. Shot in razor-sharp black and white and composed in static frames and austere compositions, the film employs his signature restraint to portray the calcifying moral values of a small village in Germany. Not long ago, the filmmaking world was compelled to undergo a re-examination of auteur-filmmaking in the nearly simultaneous loss of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, a quandary now compounded by the recent passing of another canonical filmmaker, Eric Rohmer. Haneke’s The White Ribbon may be the most assured answer to the gap left in the wake of their absence.

At first glance, the film’s concerns seem culturally specific, perhaps even parochial. A period piece set in the years just before World War I, The White Ribbon painstakingly depicts particular aspects of “German-ness”. Indeed, the film comes down to the precision of its regional detail—in a casting search that spanned Europe, there were allegedly no fewer than 7,000 auditions for the role of just a handful of children. The result is a story told as much by the striking physiognomy of hard, Lutheran visages as by the terse, wooden dialogue.

In this sense, The White Ribbon is a bracing look at the morals of the old country. The film portrays a community still caught in the throes of feudal hierarchies, severe patriarchy (one character warns, “Women. Don’t take them too seriously.”), and brusque, matter-of-fact judgments (another exclaims, “My God, why don’t you just die?”). It is a world of unambiguous values, where rationality, rule, and law are the prevailing orders and Kant’s categorical imperative is taken to its dogmatic extremities.

In this particular village, the old ruse of religion is especially shown to be a case of errant dogmatism, as rigid ecclesiastical values draw strict lines between good and evil. In one of the most harrowing scenes, a father in priestly garb reprimands his young son, Martin, for indulging in his private, sensual whims. “For months I’ve tried to bring you closer to God and make you responsible human beings”, says the father, as he unequivocally damns the act as a type of disease. Meanwhile, Martin’s face grows red from restraint. One wonders when this repressed desire will explode.

This dogmatism culminates symbolically in the white bands the children are forced to wear as a reminder of their guilt. “As everyone knows, white is the colour of innocence”, the priest decrees. But in this world of black and white, where one is seen as depraved before innocent and where repentance is the perpetual goal, thwarted emotions and desires degenerate into strange behavior. Crimes begin to happen left and right—the doctor’s horse is tripped by a carefully planted wire in his front yard; a barn burns down mysteriously in the middle of the night; and Martin teeters on the perilous plank of a bridge, after which he confesses, “I gave God a chance to kill me but he doesn’t want me to die.” All the while, the children gather around in clone-like formations and watch the events with stony impassivity.

There are, as one would expect, a few figures who oppose the unbending strictures of the village. One comes in the painful guise of Karli, the village doctor’s mentally handicapped child. Due to his affliction, Karli cannot be made to follow the rule of reason or to repress his emotions. When he falls victim to one of the terrible crimes, he screams out in primal pain. The effect is searing, standing out as one of the film’s few moments of genuine emotional release.

In this scene, Karli represents the affective qualities so missing in the village’s moral code, what Nietzsche would call the “subtle, mad, divine” qualities which keep a society from calcification and degeneration. This affective quality is also preserved by the story’s two protagonists—Eva and the schoolteacher, whose budding romance, while awkward and stilted, stands as the sole testament to the vital, variable, and elusive necessity of human emotions. For, as Nietzsche said, “Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil.”

While the cultural specificity of the film can be rooted in a long tradition of German intellectual history, or what many have attempted to define as the “German character”, the story’s folk-tale framework, complete with a friendly, grandfatherly narrator, suggests its larger allegorical implications. One popular reading interprets it as a critique of the ideological excesses that could have given rise to fascism.

Yet, the complexity and scope of the narrative suggests that its focus lies beyond narrow cultural concerns. For what ultimately inspires these demons of doctrine is the rejection of the varieties and complexities of the human character. In this regard, The White Ribbon is finally a fable against the dangers of dogma—the dogma of religious extremism as well as the zealotry of capitalism. Considered in this light, one can see how The White Ribbon expands far beyond the parochial concerns of a specific cultural study or an easy allegory on the ills of nazism.

In the end, contrary to its critics’ claims, the film does not impart a sense of emotionless froideur, nor is it meant to be yet another brutally pessimistic view of human nature. In line with Haneke’s belief that such an experience can make an audience more sensitive, this modern masterpiece incites our sensibilities against the ills it portrays. Consequently, The White Ribbon exhibits one of Haneke’s most assured and striking uses of his austere style and critical eye.

Jane Han is reading for a DPhil in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art.

William A. Callahan
China: The Pessoptimist Nation
Oxford University Press, 2009
248 Pages
£25
ISBN 978-0199549955

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As portmanteaus go, “pessoptimist” is a simple one. In China: The Pessoptimist Nation, William A. Callahan’s latest analysis of modern China, the University of Manchester professor uses this amalgamation of pessimism and optimism to underscore “how Chinese identity emerges through the interplay of positive and negative feelings.” In charting these contemporary cultural trends, the book’s strength lies in its nuanced exploration of China’s continuing struggle to reconcile its “Century of National Humiliation” ethic with its desire to assume a place of greater prominence in the modern world.

The period in Chinese history from 1839 (the start of the First Opium War) to 1949 (the foundation of the People’s Republic of China) is commonly referred to in Chinese historical discourse as the “Century of National Humiliation”. During this time, China suffered severely at the hands of the imperial powers, with Britain, America, France, and Russia all occupying significant parts of its territory at different points. This 110-year period also saw China’s shock defeat by the Imperial Japanese Army in the First Sino-Japanese war (1894-95). This marked the start of major Japanese territorial expansion into parts of China’s traditional Asian empire, culminating in Japan’s full-scale invasion in the 1930s, which pushed as far as Nanking, the former capital of the Republic of China.

Official narratives portray these events as incursions into China’s sovereign territory and examples of unacceptable imperial aggression toward a peaceful China. And indeed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rightfully continues to trumpet China’s past suffering.

Yet, as Callahan points out, in trying to come to terms with its emerging superpower status, the CCP faces a problem: how to commemorate events in China’s history while simultaneously shaking off the country’s inferiority/victim complex. This is not an easy issue to resolve, of course, but Callahan documents some of the more salient examples of the state’s attempts to do so. The Communist Party’s system of national humiliation days, for example, attempts to contain Chinese nationalist feelings within set parameters, aiming to confine the commemoration of national humiliation to isolated moments in the year rather than allowing pessimistic feelings to grow unchecked amongst the citizenry.

Interestingly, China’s citizens have become increasingly adept at finding ways of expressing the national humiliation ethic outside of official channels. By interweaving nationalist symbols into everyday life, they undermine the CCP’s restrictive and controlled approach to national humiliation commemoration. Pessoptimist Nation’s dust jacket illustrates this phenomenon, displaying extracts from a set of playing cards with pictures of the ruins of Beijing’s Garden of Perfect Brilliance (also known as the Yuanmingyuan Park). Built as a network of grand imperial palaces for Qing dynasty emperors, much of the garden complex was burnt to the ground by British and French troops during the Second Opium War in 1860. Seen as the site of one of China’s greatest humiliations, the area is today, in Callahan’s words, a “national humiliation icon”, where the Chinese can walk amongst the ruins and visually relive the “Century of National Humiliation”. By putting these images of national humiliation on such common items as playing cards, the market has stepped outside the purview of the CCP to promote nationalist and patriotic feelings in a new and unofficial way.

Beyond issues of malingering cultural mores, Callahan treats another pressing subject: China’s attempt to change its world image through the use of soft power techniques. The nature of these techniques is aptly summarized by a young Beijing woman, mentioned in the first chapter, speaking on the subject of the Olympic Games: “For a lot of foreigners, the only image of China comes from old movies that make us look poor and pathetic…The Olympics will redefine the way people see us.” Beneath the subtext of sport, Beijing 2008 marked for the CCP the point of China’s full re-entry into the world community as a major power.

Accordingly, the government was heavily involved in the proceedings, with Zhang Yimou (the ceremony’s director) working within a set of strict political guidelines regarding the ceremony’s messages and themes. The long visual narration of China’s 5,000-year history, the perfectly synchronised drummers, and the controversial miming of “Ode to the Motherland” by a young girl (Lin Miaoke) all aimed to convey the integrity and subtle superiority of 21st-century China. The symbolic importance that the CCP placed on the world-televised opening ceremony was reflected in the regular attendance of Central Committee politicians at rehearsals, the hours of rehearsing by performers each day, and the incessant litany of changes made to the proceedings right down to the wire (Callahan cites the interesting example of the 2008 synchronised drummers suddenly being told to smile in the very final rehearsal to “take the edge off”).

Although the controversy over Lin Miaoke’s miming exposed the political nature of the Olympics, “Beijing 2008″ was decisively a Chinese success story. The world has not forgotten China’s rocky human rights record, but the Olympic Games showed a China celebrating its history rather than mourning it. These apparent shifts in Chinese identity are encouraging signs for the international community. But even so, Callahan wants us to remember that the CCP still largely controls the attitudes on display. To understand the nature of Chinese identity today, Callahan emphasises the “need to get out of Beijing more, to explore what the rest of China is thinking and feeling”. Perhaps only then can we really begin to understand the Dragon.

Matthew Wills is reading for a BA in History at Trinity College, Oxford.  He is a managing editor of the Oxonian Review.

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In order to commemorate this year’s Valentine’s Day festivities, we welcomed photographs from new and old contributors. They each submitted images of different interpretations and representations of love. This was their individual way of celebrating their love for the craft.

Uwe Ackermann is a physiologist who began to take his photography more seriously after he retired from the University of Oxford in 2007. Most of his previous academic career was spent in Toronto, Canada.

James Lyon is an art director/designer working in Oxford who has been taking photographs since the age of 5. He was born in Twickenham, travels extensively, though his heart is always in France.

Sarah Leyla Puello is reading for a DPhil in Modern Languages at Wolfson College, Oxford. She specialises in the representation of Buenos Aires and Paris in 20th-century French and Latin American poetry. Sarah is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Akshat Rathi is reading for an MSc in Organic Chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford. He is the assistant editor at the Oxonian Review.

Shaun Thein is a second-year medical student at Christ Church, Oxford. He has contributed his photography to the Oxonian Review since 2008.