Paul Handley
The King Never Smiles:  A Biography of Thailand’s Bhumibol Adulyadej
Yale University Press, 2006
512 pages
ISBN 0300106823

In June 2006, the 60th anniversary of King Bhumibol’s coronation brought royals from around the world to celebrate in Bangkok. While Thailand is famous for its deference to its own royalty, it was Bhutan’s Crown Prince Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck who unexpectedly stole the show. Adoring fans—most of them female—tracked his every move, smitten by his charisma and boyish good looks. Oxford-educated, and with a Buddhist kingdom of his own, Jigme became Thailand’s adopted ‘Prince Charming.’ Enquiries from Thai tourists eager to visit Bhutan have reportedly skyrocketed. Such was the love affair that when Jigme returned to Bangkok in November 2006, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Rangsit University.

Soon after, in December 2006, Jigme’s father, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, abdicated. The timing of this transition came as a surprise—the handover was originally planned for 2008. ‘Prince Charming’ became the King of Bhutan. It is no light burden: he has the task of leading his country from absolute monarchy to a constitutional system with a democratically elected parliament. The Thai press has fulsomely welcomed his accession to the Bhutanese throne. In their collective view, a moral, handsome and, fundamentally, desirable Prince has become King. Effusive praise for this peaceful and effective transition has filtered down to the Thai public.  Succession is on many of their minds, too.

Every monarchy inevitably confronts the issue of succession at the end of a long reign.  Just as Britain’s Prince Charles has waited in his mother’s shadow, Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej has been on the throne for so many decades that speculation about the monarchy’s future has fermented for far longer than usual.  In this time, Thai Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, a middle-aged military-man with a reputation for haughtiness and womanising, has largely failed to endear himself to his subjects. His image is not helped by the forces that hide the role of the palace in elite life.  The politics of monarchy in Thailand are secretive and, at times, tinged with violence, providing a stark contrast to the smiling, happy-go-lucky image that Thailand tries to present to the world.

That image of Southeast Asia’s ‘Land of Smiles’ was most recently tested in September 2006 when a group of generals staged an overnight coup.  Every observer wanted to know: would this ‘intervention’ mark a return to the bad old days of cyclical coups and counter-coups?  Thailand has experienced seventeen coups since the Second World War and before 2006 the last was in 1992.  Since the late 1990s, many had assumed that everything (the constitution, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law) had been settled once and for all.  The feeling, then, was that the soldiers were back in the barracks for good and that Bhumibol had finally helped install sustainable democratic traditions.  That consensus was wrong.

Anybody hoping to confirm just how wrong that consensus had become must read Paul Handley’s The King Never Smiles.  It traces the life of Thailand’s King in an unprecedented and critical attempt to understand the political and social role of the monarchy.  At the same time, it shines light on the dark spaces surrounding the Thai royalist and politico-military elite.  This is uncertain and potentially dangerous terrain.  Yale University Press and Handley himself have been subjected to great pressure to stop the publication.  They have not buckled to royalist intimidation, or the palace’s public relations machine. The worldwide study of democratic transitions, and elite military interventions, is much better for it. Thankfully, careful image management does not always triumph.

Other efforts to manage perceptions of Thailand have been more successful. In the days following the coup, the junta’s public relations efforts went global. Through these efforts, and a sympathetic worldwide audience, there was hardly a moment when Thailand’s carefully cultivated image of tranquillity and hospitality was questioned. The coup was widely acclaimed as a bloodless intervention to remove the divisive Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. The generals seized full control and Thaksin, the three-times elected telecommunications tycoon cum maverick Prime Minister, was stranded at the United Nations in New York. Grumbles from some Western governments, and consternation from a handful of academic doubters, did nothing to tarnish the coup-makers’ positive glow. Pictures of dazzled tourists posing in front of tanks, alongside smiling soldiers, graced the pages of newspapers around the world.

Many in Thailand and elsewhere, in fact, breathed a sigh of relief after months of unremitting tension.  The world was relieved by Thailand’s civilised coup; what else could be expected from a land of smiling people? We were told that there was no bloodshed —just a handful of arrests and no real reason to get concerned. The generals went on television and proclaimed that it was business as usual. They smiled and posed for pictures. The King, a man who has learned a thing or two about coups during his 60-year reign, was also snapped consulting with the coup-makers. Many took this as a sign that the King endorsed his generals and their well-timed intervention.

The generals cancelled the elections that were scheduled for October and Thaksin was forced to decamp to London’s poshest neighbourhoods. Many Thais cheered his ousting, particularly in Bangkok.  The urban middle-class had grown weary of what they saw as the immorality, corruption and violence of his ‘regime.’ Under Thaksin there were many problems including nefarious commercial dealings, accusations of corruption and megalomania, and the bloody 2003 ‘War on Drugs.’ Nonetheless, criticisms of Thaksin failed to dent his unprecedented electoral success and his political opponents were so neutered that they were forced to boycott the most recent election.  The problems of Thaksin’s rule were no worse than those that many critics attribute to, say, Tony Blair or George W. Bush. So the question remains, why was it Thaksinm who suffered the indignity of a coup while abroad, speaking at the United Nations?

When the tanks rolled into Bangkok none of his wealth, connections or status could save Thaksin’s mandate to rule. Six months on, the coup-makers and the government they installed are well entrenched.  Worries, however, remain about their future intentions and about their ability to effectively manage the country and its troubles. The simmering Muslim insurgency in Thailand’s southernmost border provinces and a stagnating economy remain major concerns. In response, the generals, and especially junta-installed Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont, talk of ‘sufficiency economy.’ This vague conception of simplicity and sustainability is muddied by its own self-satisfaction and ambiguity.  It is, most importantly, the brainchild of King Bhumibol and his advisors.  Inside the Kingdom, its tenets are above reproach

During Thailand’s financial crisis in the late 1990s, Bhumibol used his personal cachet and finely honed image as national saviour to promote his own vision of national social and economic development. Sometimes called ‘the new theory,’ it is built around a conception of rustic self-sufficiency: ‘enough to live on and enough to eat.’ Oddly, its proponents use the same language that has made Bhutan’s ‘Gross National Happiness’ a famous countercultural exoticism. Anybody who has recently passed through Bangkok will see the immediate disjuncture between modern Thailand and this royal ideology. As one illustration, the newest mega-mall, the ostentatious £230 million Siam Paragon in central Bangkok, is even built on land leased from the Crown Property Bureau. Regardless of the many contradictions, before the coup the theory of ‘sufficiency economy’ was of largely academic interest. It was rhetorically significant but lacked any serious grounding in government policy.  Now with a royally-aligned, palace-supported military leadership in charge, the implementation of the King’s economic ideas has full government backing.

One reason there is little public criticism of the King’s theory is because questioning the King, or anybody aligned with the monarchy is not merely dangerous but illegal in Thailand. Foreigners are not immune to charges of lèse majesté. A Frenchman was arrested in 1995 in a bizarre confrontation on a Thai Airways flight when he was accused of making a derogatory comment about a Thai princess. In two very different incidents, a spat in 2002 saw two prominent Far Eastern Economic Review journalists accused of lèse majesté and in 2007 a Swiss man was arrested and threatened with 75 years in jail for allegedly defacing images of the King. When foreigners are not involved, charges of being ‘against the King’ are often deployed to silence opponents in political disputes. Former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his sparring partner, media entrepreneur Sondhi Limthongkul, both used this tactic during their 2005-2006 showdowns over the country’s political future.  Neither side could claim the full endorsement of the King: the resulting stalemate was only broken by the coup.

Such restrictions on public commentary are especially relevant to my discussion because the recent book by veteran journalist, Paul Handley, directly confronts the Thai use of lèse majesté. Handley’s tome is banned in Thailand and the Yale University Press website advertising its publication has been intermittently blocked in the Kingdom. Observers widely agree that by writing this unauthorised biography of Bhumibol, Handley may never be allowed back to Thailand.

Handley’s The King Never Smiles is one of the very rare books about Southeast Asia that has actually motivated a wide-ranging discussion, particularly outside Thailand.  Months after its first release, the book continues to be reviewed and debated. Curiously, there are many who claim to have not read the book but yet still feel aggrieved by its publication. Those who dismiss the book tend to do so on the grounds that it is virulently anti-monarchy or, even more simplistically, anti-Thai. Handley’s book is, on the contrary, simply the best introduction for anybody hoping to understand the ongoing tensions racking the Thai body politic. It is the story of the royal network—what political scientist Duncan McCargo has recently dubbed ‘network monarchy’—and the ongoing cultivation of the throne’s matrix of power.

It is obviously a controversial and complex story.  Handley begins by noting that Bhumibol is the only King to have ever been born in the United States.  Raised mainly outside Thailand, he was educated in Europe as the second son of Prince Mahidol Adulyadej. Bhumibol’s older brother, Ananda Mahidol, was made a boy-King in 1935 but, even before he was formally crowned, was found shot dead in mysterious circumstances in 1946. The details of that death remain hazy. Handley explains the various theories and concludes that any of the remaining evidence is inadequate proof. A hasty cover-up ensured that few, if any, real answers may ever emerge. Handley writes that in the immediate aftermath, Bhumibol, ‘the bright, often smiling and joking prince…[was] named king of a country in which he had spent less than 5 of his 18 years.’ According to Handley, the new King ‘would almost never be seen smiling in public again.’

Bhumibol assumed a weakened throne during a time of dictators, geo-political intrigue and, of course, sporadic military coups. Handley argues that ‘ever since the day his brother mysteriously died, he seemed never to be seen smiling, instead displaying an apparent penitential pleasurelessness in the trappings and burdens of the throne.’ In Handley’s account, we learn a great deal about the triumphs and tribulations of this enigmatic and private man, struggling with the public machinations of over 60 years as King. In his analysis Handley is often forced to rely on rumours to support his points, a product of circumstance rather than choice. Such is the tight control exercised by the Palace that most information about the dynamics of palace power can be conveniently dismissed as mere ‘rumour.’

In Thailand the whispered rumours are many but they are not the full story of Bhumibol or his reign. Handley’s account offers an unusually nuanced interpretation of a tightly controlled political machine. According to Handley, when he became King, ‘Bhumibol left behind his European-bred modernist persona to guide his kingdom in the millennium-old tradition of the dhammaraja, the selfless king who rules by the Buddhist code of dhamma.’ Drawing on the legitimacy of old royal patterns, Bhumibol has been cultivated as a figure of adoration. And adored he is. For many months every year, towns and cities across Thailand are festooned with banners, lights and installations marking the King’s achievements and royal milestones. Handley gives a good example of this cult of Bhumibol. He writes that ‘when in December 1997 the palace revealed that the king had set a world record for university degrees, afterward Kasetsart University tossed off all restraint and awarded him ten honorary doctorates at once.’

While Bhumibol has amassed honours at home and abroad, his son and heir, Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, has not always matched popular expectations of royal stock. Handley argues that from very early on ‘Bhumibol certainly understood that Vajiralongkorn was a problem.’ It is with the prince that the monarchy’s future is most tested.  His sister, the popular and well-loved Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, would be many Thais’ first choice but, over the years, her elevation ahead of Vajiralonkorn has remained problematic. According to Handley, ‘Bhumibol’s most fundamental failing is the Achilles’ heel of every monarchy; he has been unable to guarantee an orderly succession to a wise, selfless, and munificent king like himself.’

Such an ‘orderly succession’ has occurred in Bhutan and Handley does not discount that it will eventually happen in Thailand. Handley concludes that for its very survival, ‘ultimately, members of the royal family will have to make use of one of the monarchy’s greatest unspoken prerogatives: the alchemic ability and right to remake itself before others do it.’ In this context, can Vajiralongkorn reform perceptions of his character and behaviour? Could he be made over in the model of Bhutan’s ‘Prince Charming’?  Handley shows that remaking the monarchy is the only way that the institution has survived since the founding of the Chakri dynasty in 1782. Through countless political ructions, not to mention the overthrow of absolute monarchy in 1932, the Thai royal family has not only survived—it has prospered.  That Handley’s contribution is the first independent book about the man at the heart of this modern story of royal power and success is remarkable.  Under such difficult circumstances, and with imperfect access, it is hardly surprising that the The King Never Smiles has some flaws or that it has weathered much criticism.  Nonetheless, for many people it is a confronting and difficult book. Many are seemingly unwilling to approach it with an open mind, read the book thoroughly and digest its analysis. To some, its uncensored version of events and personalities bears little relationship to the royal biography with which they are familiar.

But the numerous reviews of this wide-ranging biography are generally very positive. The most critical review, by Hong Kong based anthropologist Grant Evans, drew a reply from Handley himself. Handley retaliated that Evans’s review was ‘strikingly similar to the Thai palace and government’s official view of my book, designed to convince people to dismiss it without reading it.’ Other reviewers—anthropologist Andrew Walker, political scientist Duncan McCargo, author Ian Buruma and prolific Bangkok-based pundit Chris Baker—have given the book strong, positive reviews.  Duncan McCargo’s effort for New Left Review puts it best when he describes the book and its credible, Thai-speaking author as ‘the worst nightmare of the guardians of the Chakri dynasty.’ McCargo argues that from the palace’s perspective ‘Handley’s moves to undermine decades of propaganda and mystique surrounding the royal institution border on sacrilege.’

The great strength of The King Never Smiles is that Handley is not blind to the robust network of people around Bhumibol who have developed his public persona and shielded him from criticism.  What should already be clear is that this book should be read by anybody serious about studying democratic transitions and, in particular, the way that Thailand has struggled to reconcile ancient and modern institutions. In this context, those who continue to ignore the political role of Thailand’s King, and his backers, are naïve and short-sighted. That Bhumibol supported the coup to thwart Thaksin’s parallel power structure is, in the judgement of the best informed observers, beyond doubt. But many questions remain about the potential of any future sovereign to assert a similarly strong political role. Handley’s story of royalty in Thailand does not echo the Bhutanese Himalayan fairytale. Instead, The King Never Smiles provides unprecedented access to the hard fought battles that have come and gone in Bangkok’s sweltering heat.

Thailand now drifts along without even an emerging democratic tradition. Recent events show that the King and his generals are more than willing to displace elected representatives at their whim. Will Bhumibol’s legacy be the renewed assertion of royal prerogatives and extra-democratic intervention? As a strong and much loved monarch, Bhumibol has managed the potential fallout from this ongoing political role by drawing on reservoirs of popular goodwill and patience. Future Kings (or Queens) may not be so indulged. And, most importantly, there is no guarantee that Bhumibol has arranged ‘an orderly succession to a wise, selfless, and munificent king like himself.’ Bhutan provides the contrast. As Jigme’s sun rises in the high Himalaya, Bhumibol’s shadow only gets longer in Thailand. His long and fruitful reign is coming to an end; but in these, its final years, it has become a reign of uncertainty.  For the moment, the people of the ‘Land of Smiles’ find themselves staring at new and unwanted strife.

Nicholas Farrelly is an MPhil student in development studies at Balliol College, Oxford, and an editor of The Oxonian Review of Books.  He is co-founder of the New Mandala website, a daily source of information on Southeast Asian affairs.

John English
Citizen of the World. The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Volume One, 1919-1968
Knopf Canada, 2006
567 pages
ISBN  0676975216

Ramsay Cook
The Teeth of Time. Remembering Pierre Elliott Trudeau
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006.
224 pages
ISBN 0773531491

Pierre Trudeau’s death in 2000 provoked some extraordinary scenes. Fidel Castro dusted down a handsome suit for the funeral mass, Trudeau’s eldest son Justin bid his father a startling Caesarean adieu (‘Friends, Romans, countrymen!’) and the UN Security Council adjourned in mourning.

Perhaps the most memorable response however was that of a random woman interviewed in Toronto as she stopped to sign a book of condolence. With the modesty of somebody who looked like she had never been ambushed by a slobbering cable journalist before, this gorgeous blonde of a certain age shyly recalled how Pierre Trudeau changed her life at the height of the Vietnamese Boat People catastrophe. Crying softly while looking at her shoes, she said:

I was sitting in a little Salvation Army church in eastern Europe when the minister said that our Prime Minister in Canada was allowing the Vietnamese people in….because we had so much to offer them… and they had been turned away by the States. And I thought that’s it. I have to go home and I decided that nursing would be my profession. I was so moved by him many miles away …

Readers who suspect a certain mawkishness here are invited to watch the clip for themselves on the CBC website. This nurse’s reaction serves as a nice synecdoche for a career so evocatively explored by John English and Richard Cook. She captured Trudeau’s fondness for a certain kind of gesture-politics that so often doubled as a well-placed knee to the groin of the Greatest Generation on his southern flank. In her grief, she exemplified his extraordinary rapport with women, ranging from the downright classy (Kim Cattrall) to more flighty specimens like his wife Margaret Sinclair. Indeed, this tribute was by no means an unworthy example of what John Henry Newman, Trudeau’s most ethereal mentor, had in mind when he appropriated the motto cor ad cor loquitur for his cardinalational seal. In doing so, Newman affirmed his belief in those rare moments in modern life when a public man finds his private following, when, quite literally, heart speaks to heart. English’s model biography and Cook’s elegiac reflection on forty years of friendship with Trudeau provide some clue as to why our nurse was not alone in her grief.

Second only to Laurier and King in impact, Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s (1919-2000) sixteen-year premiership between 1968-79 and 1980-84 remains deeply controversial. For some, he is the architect of modern Canadian political identity, one rooted in his Charter of Rights and Freedoms, his multicultural domestic policies and his stern insistence that Quebec’s rightful place was as part of a federal Canadian union based on individual rights and legal equality between the French and English languages. To his Quebecois detractors, he was simply a vendu, a local version of the self-hating Jew, the federal bully who locked Quebec out of the key constitutional negotiations in 1981, the spoilt brat son of a millionaire who mocked Quebec’s distinct kind of joual French, the fanatical opponent of even the most minimal concession to Quebec’s cultural distinctness who was rewarded with the 1995 referendum that brought Canada within a hair’s breadth of formal disintegration.

In Citizen of the World, English shows however that Trudeau’s emergence as the most formidable federalist politician within post-war Quebec was a close run thing, itself the product of an astonishing feat of personal and intellectual transformation in the aftermath of 1945. For up to this point, Trudeau was actually a rather nasty Quebec nationalist, a hopeless mama’s boy, an admirer of Pétain’s Vichy prone to casual anti-Semitism and an enthusiastic student of some of the most lethal race theorists of that era. English’s elegant analysis of his development describes the manner in which this unusually intense young man began the process of thinking his way out of the nationalist axioms he absorbed during his formative years.

Between his graduation magna cum laude from the Brébuef Jesuits in the late 1930s and his quixotic decision to run for the federal Parliament as one of Mike Pearson’s Liberals in 1965, Trudeau read and Trudeau travelled. He learned his federalism at Harold Laski’s famous LSE seminars in 1947 before completing his anti-fascist education at the École Normale Supérieur in Paris and at Harvard (where he took classes with Heinrich Brüning, Germany’s last Kanzler before Hitler.) Afterwards, he kicked the chauvinistic dust of Duplessis’ Quebec from his heels on a solitary world tour. He prayed with Taoist monks at dusk in the ancient Chinese city of Hangzhou and threw snowballs at Lenin’s statue in Red Square. Canadian embassies dreaded his arrival whilst women of various descriptions apparently swooned when he turned on the cosmopolitan charm.

When he returned to 1950s Quebec, Trudeau elaborated a critique of political nationalism that ultimately catapulted him to the premiership in 1968. Ironies abound in his intellectual development however, ironies which English and Cook track thoughtfully. He derided Quebec nationalism as economically illiterate, culturally insecure and politically illiberal. His antidote to this local nationalism was not however a rejection of nationalist categories tout court, rather their application to the larger Canadian polity. Quebec nationalism could only be meaningfully defanged if French-Canadians learned to think of Canada itself as the locus of their loyalty. Therefore, Canada had to be big and Canada had to be brash. Trudeau the taunter of ‘the nationalist brood’ in Quebec became Trudeau the noisy Canadian nationalist on the world stage. His initial strategy in the Cold War was to pinch his nose and yawn. Chancellor Schmidt and President Reagan were incensed by his primma donna performances at consecutive NATO summits, especially his decision in the early 1970s to drastically reduce Canadian troops on garrison duty in Germany and to terminate Canada’s dual-key nuclear partnership with the US.

He brought thousands of miles of the Arctic Circle under Canadian sovereignty and extended diplomatic recognition to communist China before Nixon’s famous conclave with the psychopathic Chairman in 1972. After the Korean airline disaster in 1983, he mounted a vainglorious campaign for an end to the zero-sum rhetoric and for East-West détente. His last year in office was thus stylish, provocative and wholly irrelevant, his nuclear warnings as magnificent and ephemeral as Demosthenes’ orations before the empty sea. (Trudeau’s labours here were not entirely without recompense. At his last conference with President Reagan he was rewarded with one of Ron’s more imperishable insights on the dialectics of the Middle East. ‘Look Pierre,’ he said, ‘we’re a God-fearing people, the Jews are a God-fearing people, and the Arabs are a God fearing people. Why can’t we all just get together and fight the Communists?’)

In his elegant memoir of their intellectual friendship over forty years, historian Ramsay Cook explains that Trudeau unexpectedly ran for federal office in 1965 after nearly thirty year’s study of Quebec politics when he concluded that Quebec’s new liberalism after Duplessis was itself chauvinistic. His analysis here was momentous for the future development of Canada and is in many ways his most enduring intellectual insight. Those social liberals who were also out and out Quebec nationalists in search of a sovereign Laurentie were one thing. He worried more intensely about the less strident liberals who lacked the self-confidence or the local insight to challenge separatist arguments on their merits. His falling out with the federal New Democratic Party, which might have been a natural political home for him in other circumstances, followed the socialists’ acceptance of the Quebec nationalist definition of Canada as deux nations and their fateful argument that social justice necessitated some kind of national recognition for the province.

Trudeau’s argument that liberalism was too easily mesmerised by nationalistic tantrums, no matter how feeble the arguments advanced or how momentous the consequences of the concession sought, might usefully be pondered by any number of political constituencies in contemporary debates. His insistence that nationalistic arguments were frequently just fig leaves for old-fashioned power-grabs and the grossest kind of ethnic calculation applies as elegantly to 1960s Quebec nationalism as it does to events today. Tariq Ali, after all, sees a noble nationalistic struggle in the activities of the suicide fanatics who blew up Iraq’s Askariya shrine. Naomi Klein once lamely backed Moqtada al-Sadr as Iraq’s next national leader, while most brazenly of all, Edward Herman, éminence grise to Noam Chomsky, saw Milosevic as the real victim in the Balkans nightmare, head of a nationalist people’s democracy struggling in a NATO half-nelson.

In the great Victorian debate that he knew well between John Stuart Mill and Lord Acton, Trudeau emphatically sided with Acton. Nationalism was not the logical telos of organised liberalism (Trudeau’s understanding of Mill’s argument), it was, rather, its nemesis. Cook’s moving book noted how

Acton replied that national homogeneity threatened freedom rather than nurtured it; multinational states, where groups counterbalanced each other, were far more likely to respect and promote both individual freedom and cultural pluralism.’ Trudeau predicted the chaos in the modern Balkans and was deeply troubled by the catastrophe that was post-colonial Africa throughout his career. There can be few more compelling or more appalling vindications of Trudeau’s general insight than the images inseparable from a roll call beginning with Imin and Taylor and ending with Mugabe and Hassan al-Bashir.

If Trudeau performed a spectacular pirouette so far as French-Canadian nationalism was concerned, one aspect of his life that remained constant throughout was his intense Catholic spirituality. English ’s insightful and humane interrogation of Trudeau’s Catholicism demonstrated its absolute centrality to his evolving moral and political maturation. The nature of this relationship between his soul and his scholarship will undoubtedly occupy specialists for the next few years. For all of his breathless womanising and bohemian instincts, Trudeau remained a life-long disciple of a peculiar, élite strand within post-1945 Catholic ethics, the so-called Personalist school of Emmanuel Mounier. Broadly, this school sought political equality by synthesising the economic insights of the communist avante garde with a post-Tridentine Catholic spirituality that emphasised the dignity of the individual as rooted in natural law.

The great irony of this attempt to domesticate atheistic communism was, of course, the fact that Catholicism played a major, if not actually decisive role in destroying it in the end. (Its overly long obituary was, after all, delivered in the mellifluous vowels of a Polish Catholic who had made common cause with Reagan and Gorbachev.) Drawing on a private devotion to the idea of Christ’s incarnation rather than His atonement, Trudeau the Personalist developed a theory of justice that put the individual at the heart of ethics and this in turn provided the basis for his increasingly vehement critique of collectivist political structures that undermined individual liberty at home. In the heady atmosphere of the post-war French Left Bank, not unlike his other mentor Cardinal Newman in a bygone era, Trudeau grounded his liberalism in religion, becoming in a sense a Catholic individualist, or a papal Calvinist.

The major reforms he authorised in the Canadian Criminal Code in 1967, decriminalising homosexual acts between consenting adults as well as liberalising divorce and abortion laws, were oddly enough products of a Catholic approach to rights. That modern Catholicism has had its own emphatically liberal strands has been somewhat obscured by its obsession since 1789 with maintaining its political status and policing sexual mores. Occasionally however, liberalism and Catholicism have fused in certain respects. Chateaubriand’s critique of political tyranny was based on Catholic ideas about natural rights, as were the arguments against civil discrimination advanced by the artist James Barry at the time of the UK Act of Union in 1801.

At the death of Karol Wojtyla, the twentieth century’s very own Hildebrand, Eric Hobsbawn quite correctly lamented the passing of the last major world-historical critic of robber baron capitalism and its concomitant ‘culture of death.’ Similarly, William Brennan, America’s most dynamic Supreme Court justice after 1937, based his passionate defence of Roe on an analysis of the natural rights of the sovereign individual that clearly derived from his own Irish Catholicism. (Some bishops, obviously unamused by this lamb’s venture into the realm of jurisprudential paradox, retaliated by denying him the sacraments). As far as the death penalty was concerned, Brennan and Wojtyla proved that there was more to Catholic moral philosophy than the grim logic of the Old Testament’s lex talionis. Trudeau’s social conscience and his critique of what he called ‘non-democratised global capital’ makes perfect sense in this intellectual context and interested parties can expect to read much more about this aspect of his life now that English has so deftly opened up his private papers.

There is, however, a supreme irony in Trudeau’s understanding of rights, in that it was essentially American. Ramsay Cook recalled that Trudeau was deeply agitated by the racial violence that was consuming American cities from the first few months of his premiership. He doubted America’s capacity to weather these deep generational cleavages, especially in the context of its ruinous military commitment in Indochina. And yet, for all his important criticisms of post-war American society, Trudeau’s premiership was in many ways a billet doux to a classic kind of American constitutionalism. The heart of his political legacy is the Charter of Rights that he attached to the patriated British North America Act in 1982, thereby entrenching key individual rights against both the federal and provincial governments and which empowered courts to void violative acts of parliament.

In a country with a strong attachment to the English idea of parliamentary sovereignty, Trudeau’s Charter was as epochal a constitutional innovation as Blair’s Human Rights Act or his proposed creation of a UK Supreme Court. Even though he risked what one provincial premier termed ‘the break-up of the country’ in his campaign to entrench official bilingualism in the Constitution, Trudeau was simultaneously oddly ambivalent about US-style judicial assertion, especially the inevitable encroachment by courts in the Charter-era on areas traditionally deemed ‘political.’ His acidulated attack in retirement on the Supreme Court’s Patriation Reference verdict in 1981, a decision that forced him back into negotiations with the provinces and ruined his plans for a stringent national bill of rights, was a critique of ‘judicial activism’ that might have been written by the cranky ghost of Felix Frankfurter.

It has been nearly forty years since the American political scientist Harry Eckstein showed how Catholic and democratic institutions deeply influence each other in organised polities. He argued then that the more authoritarian of the two institutions would tend to ‘infect’ the more open one. In this vein, Trudeau’s individualistic instincts led him to Personalism, but his Catholicism also left its mark on his democratic outlook.This is one way of explaining the unmistakably authoritarian instincts in Trudeau’s intellect. He was, after all, the first Prime Minister to invoke the antique War Measures Act in peacetime, the statute he used against Quebecois terrorists who kidnapped a British diplomat and murdered a provincial minister in 1970. He taunted his critics for the rest of his premiership on this point and never seems to have doubted the propriety of using draconian legislation against a relatively small, if still lethal terrorist vanguard.

His wife recalled how an implacable bitterness seem to come over him the night the RCMP informed him of M. Laporte’s murder. Crying at the side of their bed, he warned her that he would sacrifice her and their children rather than capitulate to terrorist blackmail. (The FLQ dynamos who decided to test the mettle of what they saw as an inexperienced, rose wearing invertebrate forgot that Trudeau had preached violent revolution during his own adolescence. English reminds us that he knew the drill.)  If Trudeau’s rationale for détente was essentially the same as Dr Kissinger’s, then so was his contempt for Soviet pro-democracy dissidents who got in the way of an East-West deal. His cynical cackling in old age about the time the Burmese junta jovially regaled him at dinner with their tactics for dealing with domestic dissidents was only heartless when one understands that Trudeau told this story after Tiananmen Square. His flashy official trip to Castro’s Cuba in 1976 was a diplomat’s version of ‘up-yours’ aimed at a pushy US State Department, though he had the good grace to admit when he got home that ‘El Maximo’ had taken him to the cleaners over Angola. When the scale of Castro’s lies about his Angolan meddling was revealed, he promptly cancelled the lavish bilateral trade deal signed in Havana. Dust in the eye, as Newman might have said.

Pierre Trudeau’s premiership was, in many ways, an essay in failure. The 1995 referendum in Quebec constituted a bleak return on his passionate nationalist critiques. Trudeau himself admitted in 1982 that his vision of a stringent Charter was ruined by the non-obstante clause that allowed the provinces to override some rights in certain circumstances. He also failed to understand that the hag-ridden Soviet Union needed a push rather than the qualified embrace he essayed in 1984. Even his Catholic faith disintegrated in the end as the pitiless deity that carried off his father when he was still a boy returned in 1998 to take his youngest son in a hiking accident. The dreamy Personalist became an inconsolable Job, rattling around his lonely art-deco mansion in Montreal, a broken elite of one so poignantly depicted by Cook.

And yet, the stunning national reaction to his death in 2000 suggested that in some odd way, Trudeau had changed everything about modern Canada during his career. He exposed the autism that lurks at the heart of certain kinds of liberalism when confronted with malevolent movements that masquerade as victims of a wicked world. He beat Quebec nationalism in a referendum on separation in 1980, thereby changing Anglo-Canadians understanding of the country through bilingualism and deranging the separatist movement for another decade. Though at his finest during the crazy days of MAD, stagflation and Mrs Thatcher’s handbags, Trudeau’s legacy still calls out to our addled world, one tormented by the hysteria and cruelty that are the inevitable freight of political nationalism, Benedict Anderson’s complacent characterisations notwithstanding. To this extent, in the words of an English poet who would almost certainly have loathed the entire Trudeau brand, one might argue that he somehow managed, …to prove/ our almost- instinct almost true/ What will survive of us is love.

John-Paul McCarthy, a DPhil student in history at Exeter College, Oxford, is currently writing about Gladstone’s intellectual life.

Gore Vidal
Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir
Little, Brown, 2006
288 pages
ISBN 0316027278

The first thing that will catch the eye of most readers who pick up Gore Vidal’s Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir is the striking jacket photo of the author himself.  Here we see the 82-year- old Vidal in black and white, his face still handsome, with eyes that express a mixture of experience and intelligence.  If it seems strange to open a review by pondering the image on the book, rather than what lies inside it, then it has to be remembered that image has always been integral to Gore Vidal’s place in the pantheon of great American literary celebrities.

Of course, to be a celebrity is, by definition, to have an image in public consciousness.  But Vidal, like any brilliant stylist, exerts a scrupulous control over his self-presentation whether in print or photo.  At times this self-presentation can seem a bit recherché: any author who surmises his own life as ‘a banquet of sex, wealth and beauty’ might stand justly accused of being a little too conscious of image.

In interview, too, Vidal has a gift for the grandiose.  With a keen sense of irony, he famously remarked that ‘there is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.’  Consequently, charges of vanity, narcissism and egotism abound in the context of both Gore Vidal as a man and his literary work, which is so inextricable from his glamorous life amongst the great and the good of Anglo-American and European high society.   As his celebrated earlier memoir, Palimpsest (1995), records, Vidal’s birth into America’s political and social elite might have helped with the glitz, but the grist of his literary mill has been a sprawling historical, political, and cultural knowledge, unflinching humanity in the face of American political ignobility and sheer hard literary graft.

From the publication of Williwaw (1946) at the age of just twenty-one followed by the infamous tale of homosexuality, The City and the Pillar (1948), to his imaginings of political life, ancient and modern, (Julian (1964), Creation (1981), the 1987 Narratives of Empire series) alongside a prodigious amount of journalistic, essayistic and critical writings, screenplay writing, acting, and political participation, then if ever the title Renaissance Man were to be applied, Vidal would be the ideal candidate.

The tale is all the more astonishing because Vidal’s prodigious output did not interfere in any way with his existence as a brilliant social entity who seems to have known everyone of any significance from birth.  If the reader were to explicate all the name dropping that permeates Point to Point Navigation it would surely comprise a book in itself.  A few brief examples:

I used to chat with Prince Philip of Hesse, the only person I ever knew who knew Hitler. … I must get dressed for lunch with Crown Princess Chumbhot. … It was a small lift lined with mirrors.  Halfway down it stopped to admit another passenger. … Our eyes met in mutual shock: it was Jackie Kennedy Onassis.

Furthermore, the inside-flap of Point to Point Navigation provides yet another striking image: a fresco where all the painted heads have been replaced by photos of the myriad characters that surface in the narrative of this book: Jackie Onassis, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bette Davis, John F. Kennedy and Greta Garbo being a mere smattering of the powerful figures Vidal counted as friends and acquaintances.

The lack of humility in this panorama of glitz—perhaps unsurprisingly—irritates some critics. When reviewing Point to Point Navigation under the title ‘Too Much Gore,’ Allen Barra writes that ‘the personal note in Vidal’s work, whether he was ostensibly writing about politics, literature, aviation, or anything else, was never “occasional.” The “geography” of his own life has been virtually his only subject’.

This seems to miss the point.  The world of Vidal’s fiction has always attempted to marry the delineation of character, the depiction of society and le mot juste.  In this memoir, as in his essays, style is (almost) all.  And since Vidal is so stylish a writer and this text is a memoir, to beat up the author for too much self suggests that Point to Point Navigation is nothing more than an ego trip. Thus, Barra glosses over its many subtleties and varieties.

An attentive reader of Montaigne’s essays, Vidal understands all too well the many ways in which authors can confront memory and the self in writing.  In Palimpsest he asserted that ‘a memoir is how one remembers one’s own life.’  In this respect it is fitting that, of the few famous people Vidal mentions he failed to meet, Vladimir Nabokov was one such luminary.  In his great text Speak Memory (1951), Nabokov writes of ‘depopulating bit by bit our own past.’  In one sense, this is exactly what Vidal is doing.  But his depopulating manifests itself in glamorous, comic, tragic and formally interesting ways.

The memoir itself is structured through the interspersing of past and present, rather than chronologically.  Indeed, even if there were nothing more than socialising with the crème de la crème in Point to Point Navigation, Vidal is such an accomplished raconteur that the reader can take genuine pleasure in the finely sketched world of political power and celebrity glamour in which he is ensconced when not writing and researching in Italy.  He writes that:

Although I have never enjoyed large parties, when Howard arrived in Rome we went to quite a few, largely to see the interiors of a number of palaces. … Grace [Kelly] and I chatted about distant romantic Hollywood.

Distant glamour notwithstanding, it would be a grave mistake to reduce Point to Point Navigation to a catalogue of opulent party-going.  The tonal range of the memoir is infinitely more varied than that.  The title of the memoir, for example, is a case in point.  On one level it refers to the process of ‘charting’ life but it also pertains to a particularly dangerous process of navigation, without the aid of a compass, which Vidal carried out while serving on a freight ship during World War Two.  Aside from Vidal’s life in the War and his political apprenticeship, there are passages of superlative poignancy, as exemplified in his depiction of the death of Howard Auster, the author’s partner of 53 years.  Vidal writes of how:

Leto shouted ‘Mr Auster has stopped breathing!’ … He was still in the armchair, facing the window … Montaigne requires that I describe more how he looked—rather than how I felt.  The eyes were open and very clear.  I’d forgotten what a beautiful grey they were—illness and medicine had regularly glazed them over; now they were bright and attentive and he was watching me, consciously, through long lashes.  Lungs, heart may have stopped but the optic nerves were still sending messages to a brain which, those who should know tell us, does not immediately shut down.  So we stared at each other at the end.

This gradual falling away of those who comprise the centre and periphery of Vidal’s life is the recurring theme of Point to Point Navigation. Yet, without a compass or the familiar points that constitute his life as ‘most of my contemporaries are vanishing,’ Vidal remains perspicacious and stylish.  For all the poignancy involved in assessing one’s life as it ‘goes out’—as his hero Montaigne puts it—he is rational: but he is a stylish rationalist.  Thus, when he examines ‘a new cancer on my forearm, all the while waiting for diabetes to do its gaudy final thing,’ we are reminded of Montaigne, who is quoted slightly earlier, asserting that death is simply ‘part of life.’  As Point to Point Navigation conveys, it has been quite a life for Gore Vidal.  It would be gratifying to read more from him and one can only hope his prognostication that this will be his final memoir is wrong.  But if Point to Point Navigation wereVidal’s ‘final thing,’ the emotional poise and the variety of its recollections alongside the dignity of the life it presents go a long way to proving that underpinning all Vidal’s style is an ocean of substance.

Andrew Hay is a DPhil student in English literature at Balliol College, Oxford. He works on issues of modernity in literary Modernism, and ideas of postmodern phenomenal and aesthetic experience.

Alice Munro
The View from Castle Rock
Chatto & Windus, 2006
349 pages
ISBN 978-0701179892

For over half a century Alice Munro has been writing sane, patient stories about unpredictable Canadian women whose convention-fenced rural lives are full of open gateways through which immeasurable horrors enter while impatient, anarchic imaginations rush out.  Her name is often paired with that of her far showier compatriot Margaret Atwood, who stages dramatic feats in the sky while Munro walks firmly over the same tract of earth peering under stones. Critical studies and biographies of Munro are already accumulating. Laudatory review snippets spill over to the inside covers of her books: ‘genius… miraculous… Mansfield… Chekhov… Joyce.’  Jonathan Franzen’s introduction to her superb 2004 collection Runaway proselytised fiercely, as if calling worshippers to a new religion.

While all this noisy admiration was happening, Munro travelled to the Scottish lowlands, boarded a shoppers’ bus to dreary Ettrick and rooted about in the rain for the graves of her ancestors.  This is the valley from which her family emigrated, having first looked out from Castle Rock in Edinburgh and (with the help of a little brandy) mistaken Fife for the New World that would become ‘home.’  Ettrick is also the starting point for Munro’s latest collection, in which she imagines the lives of her forbears and places stories from her own life in relation to them.  The pioneer families send out feelers to the future; Munro follows her roots back into the past.  It is intensely personal, and it feels like a slow, rich summing up.

The View from Castle Rock begins and ends in graveyards.  Some of the characters in these stories feel dubious about the significance of these places.  To them, it doesn’t always seem worth travelling miles ‘to say goodbye to a stone.’ But to Munro, it is worth crossing continents to do so.  The epilogue finds her trampling around amid rampant poison ivy on a little patch of wild land between a golf course and a string of new houses, looking in vain for the grave of her great-great-grandfather.  No sign.  But ‘I could pursue this,’ she says, ‘It’s what people do’: ‘we can’t resist this rifling around in the past, sifting the untrustworthy evidence [...] insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life.’

When life is at risk, this urge to join up with the past is at its most urgent.  In the last story of the sequence Munro fills in the time left to her before an operation by investigating crypts in ancient cemeteries.  More trampling — and some visits to her college library which (perversely) won’t let her take out books because she did not graduate.  The irony is potent, as one of the great Canadian writers of the twentieth century borrows her husband’s library ticket and evades suspicious librarians to go ‘poking about’ in the stacks, passing herself off as a grey-haired amateur genealogist.

The View from Castle Rock is the result of much rifling, trampling, poking, but it refuses to be straightforward investigative family history.  Letters, journals and epitaphs are the starting points from which fiction takes off—what Munro calls ‘a curious re-creation of lives.’  The ancestral imaginings of the first section (wryly entitled ‘No Advantages’ after an eighteenth-century account of Ettrick that describes the parish as having just that, ‘no advantages’) are joined in a formally structured diptych with the personal fictions of the second half.  The stories are based on Munro’s own life but are, again, freely recast.  This generic cross-breeding (memoir, history, fiction) makes clear yet again why Munro has rarely needed to deviate from the short story: she can translate all other literary forms into her own.  The capacious genre she has invented and perfected for herself can be epic, lyric, tragic, novelistic—and many things at once. These genealogical-autobiographical stories pay more attention ‘to the truth of life than fiction usually does’ she says, ‘but not enough to swear on.’  Munro’s joyful assertion of her right to go on ‘making it up’ becomes a playful challenge.

The triumph of ‘making it up’ is the story that underlies all others in The View from Castle Rock.  The struggle for the right to invent, and to think for thinking’s sake, is carried on tenaciously beneath the struggle to clear land, build houses, and feed children.  It is a right not easily won: Munro’s story-tellers are forever embarrassing their relatives, holding forth while others cringe.  Her heroines are people who want to invent themselves and others but are told to be quiet and eat their dinner.  This has been going on throughout her fiction, and through four centuries of Laidlaw forbears: ‘Self-dramatisation got short shrift in our family,’ she remarks, referring back to the myth-makers and fabulists of Ettrick but recognising the same conflicts around her own kitchen table.  In the endless daily round of physical survival, moments of dreaming and lying under trees become acts of principled defiance.  Munro studies communities in which love of ‘Nature’ (a conspicuously romantic word) must be hidden, and in which imaginative intelligence is often put ‘in the same category as a lump or an extra thumb,’ classed as a disability that prevents one from getting things done.  Reading is held responsible not only for arrogance but for madness and delusion, as in the enormous, desolate story ‘A Wilderness Station’, which appeared in Open Secrets (1994) and demands to be read again alongside The View from Castle Rock.

This is why it is so moving to find Munro making excuses for her presence in the library. She is still fending off those who are suspicious of story-tellers, and she is still telling stories about those who have had to do the same.  When the desire to read, to learn and to imagine is accepted as natural, Alice Munro feels that something great has been achieved. While investigating the strange crypt spotted in a cemetery she calls on local people to ask what they know about it, and in the process she notices ‘something new.’ For once her desire for knowledge is not met with suspicion or contempt. No one suggests that they have better things to think about, ‘Real things, that is.  Real work.’  These are not literary people, or even ‘city people.’  One of them even turns out to have worked on the Laidlaw turkey farm.  They are, like Munro, descendents of the pioneers, and amid the demands of practical necessity they have found room in their lives for looking and wondering.

Munro is drawn to wonderers, but she is fair—and sometimes very funny—in her dealings with anti-wonderers too.  Exasperated by her family’s seemingly ascetic devotion to fact, Munro makes brilliantly ironic use of their surviving papers.  A journal composed on the crossing to Canada doggedly records every detail of the weather, while steering clear of those unwieldy human affairs that Munro delights to insert.  The journal-writer’s sister-in-law gives birth, but this does not seem to count for much: there having been a surgeon on board to attend her, ‘nothing happened,’ and so back to the weather.  It’s up to Munro to suggest that long-suffering Agnes has been hallucinating for days, feeling beaten by waves, drinking poison, or supporting a cow on her stomach.  But lest we think the journal-writer heartless, there is a suggestion that he longs to touch Agnes, and cannot bear to write about her.  Perhaps, then, it is tacit love, not indifference, that has edited her out of history.

Munro’s career has been devoted to those times when ‘nothing happened,’ nothing except the raging, savage emotional adventures that make up people’s lives.  She attends to what is omitted from records and what is easily forgotten.  (‘I forgot Mr Mountjoy almost immediately,’ she says, at the end of a story which has slowly, elliptically remembered him.)  But there are many writers who specialise in ‘nothing happened,’ and what distinguishes Munro is the bizarre, unmediated relationship between the forgettable and the extraordinary.  There is no middle ground.  The humdrum jostles with the sensational, and Munro is as much a sensationalist as the Victorian gothic fantasists her heroines so like to read.  Not permitted to ‘draw attention’ to themselves in life, her people die spectacularly.  There are macabre accidents and theatrical suicides—in sawmills or under trains.  Houses are treacherous places where dressers fall on children and gas lamps explode.  There are senseless deaths and acts of wild justice: a violent father is electrocuted in a barn, not having put on the rubber boots that might have saved him.

This new collection, more than its predecessors, downplays the grotesque and is circumspect about sensations.  Grim fascination is permissible, but never theatre or sentiment. Everything is narrated evenly, calmly, in prose that is as resistant to metaphor as the Presbyterian preachers of Ettrick.  So while Munro is scathing about religious righteousness (her fiction warns very seriously against judgements and condescension), the religious culture of her ancestors has left its mark on her aesthetics.  Here, more than ever, she is a Protestant writer, respectful of plain style.  Her language is transparent like clear church windows.  Nothing is blurred or tendentious; there are no quick pleasures or rhetorical extras.

Munro demands patience and close attention.  It is hard work to keep up with all of her great-great uncles and friends of cousins (the family tree I was sketching went wrong at the fifth generation and I never quite regained my bearings).  None of these pieces, except the last, is as completely absorbing as Munro at her very best (the Juliet stories in 2004’s Runaway or ‘Carried Away’ in Open Secrets).  It is not always necessary to turn the page.  But to do so is to appreciate, with Munro, the grandeur of cumulative small acts, the routine cruelty of relationships, the wisdom earned by attending carefully to what is easily overlooked.  For all their suddenness and surprise these are slow-release stories that keep growing larger and larger long after you finish reading.  You turn around and there they are again, filling practical life with fantasies.

Alexandra Harris is a DPhil student at Christ Church, Oxford. She is writing about English art and literature of the 1930s and 1940s.

José Martî
Ismaelillo
Translated by Tyler Fisher
Wings Press, 2007
128 pages
ISBN 0916727424

As international interest turns to Cuba in the wake of Fidel Castro’s failing health, nineteenth-century revolutionary poet José Martí’s 1882 poem sequence Ismaelillo offers an increasingly relevant account of the search for a Cuban political and poetic identity.

Magdalen College doctoral student Tyler Fisher’s  new translation of Ismaelillo will be published by Wings Press this September. Fisher’s is the first complete English translation of Ismaelillo and offers a fresh rendering of some of the most powerful poetry in Latin American letters.  Composed for Martí’s infant son during the poet’s banishment from Cuba, Ismaelillo foreshadows the modernista movement in Spanish-American poetry and presents a poignant interplay of political and paternal emotion.  This bilingual edition from Wings Press will include his critical introduction and notes.

*

Valle lozano

Dígame mi labriego
¿Cómo es que ha andado
En esta noche lóbrega
Este hondo campo?
Dígame de qué flores
Untó el arado,
Que la tierra olorosa
Trasciende a nardos?
Dígame de qué ríos
Regó este prado,
Que era un valle muy negro
Y ora es lozano?

Otros, con dagas grandes
Mi pecho araron:
Pues ¿qué hierro es el tuyo
Que no hace daño?
Y esto dije – y el niño
Riendo me trajo
En sus dos manos blancas
Un beso casto.

Lush Valley

My peasant ploughman, tell me how,
How have you walked
Within the gloom of this dark night
Through this low field?
What flowers, tell me, did you use
To grease your plow
So that the pungent soil smells
Of lilies now?
And tell me from what streams you drew
To irrigate
This valley once so barren black
Yet verdant now?

When others with large dagger blades
My chest have gouged,
What iron then is this of yours
That makes no wound?
All this I asked the little lad,
Who laughing brought
To me within his two white hands
An unstained kiss.

*

Tyler Fisher is presently completing his dissertation on Spanish Counter-Reformation poetry. He is a past contributor to The Oxonian Review of Books and his work has appeared in The Lyric, The Formalist, and Bibliophilos.

John Iliffe
The African AIDS Epidemic: A History
James Currey, 2006
214 Pages
ISBN 0821416898

In 1981, doctors living in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles discovered a new fatal disease. Termed GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) by medical authorities, the disease—what we now know as AIDS—triggered a national panic. Fears of contamination led to gay men being evicted from jobs, houses and hospitals. Morticians refused to handle the bodies of people claimed by the mysterious new syndrome. Theories abounded as to the routes of transmission. One theory was the ‘fragile anus, rugged vagina’ hypothesis, which claimed that while gay men were at risk of contracting the disease, straights who stuck to ‘vanilla’ sex were safe.

Across the Atlantic, European doctors registered the new disease but with an additional risk group: members of the black elite who were wealthy enough to migrate to the metropoles for treatment. As AIDS-patients from Francophone Africa filled Parisian hospital beds, the ‘African connection’ was established. Stored African blood samples were tested by Western medical researchers, and one from a Congolese man taken in 1959   was seropositive, thus confirming that the virus was present in Africa before it arrived in the US and Europe.  Age-old notions about black sexual brutality were revived in the popular and academic presses, while African governments closed ranks against this latest affront by expelling foreign journalists and medical researchers using public hospitals as their research sites.

The fact that a ‘history’ of the African AIDS epidemic has now been written, and by a distinguished Professor of Modern History at Cambridge rather than an angry activist or doomsayer, is a testament to how times have changed. John Iliffe’s The African AIDS Epidemic: A History does not put forward any radical new notions about the disease. Rather, it offers us a measured synthesis of the growing literature that now exists on the African epidemic. A respected scholar of African history, Iliffe brings to bear his knowledge of the continent and its medical history in this trenchant appraisal of the social and political dimensions of the epidemic.

Despite its currency,  HIV remains much misunderstood, even by informed publics. There is lingering confusion, for example, about the differences between HIV (the virus) and AIDS (the syndrome that results from immunosuppression by HIV). Iliffe’s account should be required reading for anyone in need of a basic scientific overview. His description of the biological mechanisms of the virus—its branching into clades and subtypes, and the intricate ways in which antiretroviral agents stop the proliferation of the disease—is lucid and instructive. Iliffe’s explanation of the origins of the virus is equally cogent. The emergence of HIV was predicated on the improved mobility which resulted from colonial transport networks, the increasing globalisation of travel in the twentieth century, and, imperatively, the introduction of Western medical technology.  Hypodermic needles and blood transfusions, the very instruments responsible for the improvements in African health standards from the sixties to the eighties, have also been crucial vectors for HIV.

In what is perhaps the most widely-read tract written on the disease, AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag ends with a plea to cease framing AIDS within military metaphors: ‘The ill are neither unavoidable casualties nor the enemy.’ Iliffe complies with this request.  In his account of the methods and meanings of HIV’s transmission, he inevitably confronts issues of responsibility. But he avoids the moralistic and militaristic overtones of so many other accounts (Countdown to Doomsday, Combating AIDS, and When Plague Strikes are among the more revealing, older titles), which blame African sexual mores and governmental incompetence for the emergence of the pandemic.

In this regard, perhaps the real value of Iliffe’s account comes in the second half of his book. There, he chronicles the responses to AIDS by activists, African governments south of the Sahara, and by international organisations such as UNAIDS and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Iliffe also discusses the remarkable changes resulting from the development of HAART (Highly-Active Antiretroviral Therapy), previously termed ‘Lazarus drugs’ due to their ability to restore terminal AIDS sufferers to relative good health. One of the tragedies of AIDS, as Iliffe demonstrates, has been the situation in South Africa, where President Mbeki’s desire to hit back at perceived Western charges of African sexual savagery has led him to insist that poverty, rather than HIV, is the cause of AIDS.

But in his attempt, perhaps, to avoid polemics, Iliffe remains strangely silent about the patents processes that have protected the profits of pharmaceutical corporations at the expense of the lives of HIV-positive Africans. No mention is made of either TRIPS (the World Trade Organization laws on trade-related intellectual property), nor of the Doha Declaration (2001) which ensured that countries like India and Brazil could not export their generic antiretrovirals to poor African countries unable to manufacture their own or to bulk purchase the brand-name pharmaceuticals essential for the creation of their national treatment programmes.  Iliffe tiptoes around the real barriers to treatment access: political apathy combined with the enormous power of the pharmaceutical lobby.

It is an unfortunate oversight, for the book ends up glossing over some of the most influential and distressing issues about HIV. For one thing, it costs far less to produce antiretrovirals than the pharmaceutical industry would have us believe, and many of these are in fact formulated in university laboratories with tax-payer’s funding. The patents are then purchased by powerful companies, who hike up prices by over a hundred-fold.  Information about the true amounts spent on research and development is closely guarded by the pharmaceutical industry, but the fact that companies like Merck and Pfizer feature in the ‘Fortune 100’ every year bespeaks of astronomical profit-mongering.  And in cases where national health departments begin to consider the large-scale import of generics, such as in South Africa in 2001, companies like Glaxo and Roche quickly offer to slash the prices on brand-name antiretrovirals to avoid losing their patent monopolies. ‘Drug companies,’ as the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has written, ‘spend more on advertising and marketing than on research, more on research on lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost nothing on diseases that affect developing countries only.’ Iliffe fails to consider the historical influence of the pharmaceutical industry, and the ways in which economic structures have shaped AIDS mortality.

Iliffe does nonetheless offer a judicious account of the responses of citizens to the HIV pandemic.  He documents the various and colourful ways in which Africans have organized to halt needless and mounting deaths from AIDS, and argues that Western consumers must accelerate their actions to ensure more equitable access to essential medications. Thirteen million Africans have already died of AIDS, and we have only seen the end of the beginning of the epidemic. But although we are not yet able to cure or to vaccinate against AIDS, Iliffe notes, we are able to treat and to contain it. The African AIDS Epidemic ends on a note of cautious optimism. It might just be possible to imagine a world where the tide might be turning against the virus.

Rebecca Hodes is a DPhil student in history at Balliol College, Oxford. Her thesis is about the cultural aspects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa, with a particular focus on film.

Although Academy voters were reportedly dulled by 2006-07’s offerings, the popular press heralded this year’s Oscars as one of the most exciting and international yet.  Among the heavy-hitting categories (Best Actor and Actress, Best Supportings, Best Director, Best Picture)  a more diverse playing field was certainly evident if by diverse, that is, we mean either American-funded (but internationally cast) or British.

Indeed, the British film industry was one of the apparent winners of 2007.  Among its contenders were Notes on a Scandal, featuring a flint-faced, squinty-eyed, cackling Dame Judi, Helen Mirren as The Queen, and Venus, a sentimental yet agreeable film about lascivious, long-pensioned actor Peter O’Toole (sorry, played by Peter O’Toole) falling for the neck, breasts and, er, creative juices of a twenty-something chavette.  As the barely-aged muse, Jodie Whittaker holds her own in flat Mancunian monosyllables and miniskirts.  But there is something wonderful about seeing the eldest generation reclining not in Bournemouth but in Brixton, and as the octagenarian lothario, O’Toole glistens. With droll elocution and the bluest of eyes, he orates Hanif Kureishi’s witty script: upon being reprimanded for fantasising too salaciously, for instance, his character Maurice drawls, ‘There.  Now I’m reflecting upon the imminence of my own mortality.  Is that better?’

That said, none of these British films compares to the un-nominated Dogme 95-style  film Red Road.  Written and directed by the previously Oscar-winning director Andrea Arnold and shot at the eponymous Glaswegian tower block, Red Road has won the grand prize at eleven international film festivals.   But then, it has only had a partial release in America thus far, so perhaps Arnold is hoping it will be considered for next year’s Oscars.

Realistically, though, Red Road’s chances are slim: it has neither American production money behind it nor the likelihood of mainstream American cineplex release. This is no different than any other art house film, be it American or East Timorese, but it does point to the obvious: that the Oscars are in the “Big 6” categories, anyway a largely Hollywood affair.  Films like Pan’s Labyrinth, directed by Mexican Guillermo Del Toro, may have been nominated for cinematography, special effects and ‘Best Foreign Language Picture’, but these often serve as consolation-prize brackets for ‘Best Picture’-worthy films that fall outside of the wide-release mainstream–the Foreign Language winner, The Lives of Others, is an excellent example of this.  (Incidentally, Del Toro’s film did very well in the end, with Pan’s Labyrinth winning for best Cinematography, Make-Up and Art Direction and thus justly trumping Pirates of the Caribbean II, whose aesthetics this time more resembled the Disney ride that spawned it, and this without the rumored cameo by the borderline animatronic Keith Richards).

But for an event supposedly highlighting world cinema, the 79th Annual Academy awards still oozed Hollywood.  Without a big-name star or a US production company on board, it is difficult for a film to earn even a nomination, much less an award.  Oscar eligibility stipulates that a film must run for at least a week in a Los Angeles theatre and ‘be advertised and exploited during their Los Angeles run in a manner considered normal and customary to the industry.’  (It does not, as we have seen this year, mandate English-language.)  The Foreign Language, Short, Documentary and Animated Films, are exempted from the above requirements, but the high-profile categories are reserved primarily for stars and their vessels.  Fair play: it is, after all, a red carpet awards show dreamed up by and showcasing the best of L.A.

But it should come as no surprise, then, that an Oscar year deemed particularly ‘international’ and, indeed, ‘political’ demands a relative reading of such modifiers.  Although the Best Actress nominees included ‘internationals’ Penelope Cruz (for Volver), the Best Supporting Actress nominees included Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi (of Babel), and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu was nominated for Best Director (again Babel), the winners in the main categories were either US or UK actors and either US or US & UK productions (a coincidental inversion of this summer’s Cannes Festival, where Americans won nothing—blame The Da Vinci Code).   Politically, while Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth won a close race with My Country, My Country and Iraq in Fragments (both razor-sharp documentaries about modern life in Iraq), the Big 6 categories seemed more politically-themed than genuinely political, just as, in fact, they seemed more internationally-themed than genuinely international.

This, again, is not necessarily a bad thing.  The brilliant Forest Whitaker, for example, won Best Actor for playing an ominously jolly Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, and Clint Eastwood’s companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers (2006), the Japanese-language Letters from Iwo Jima, is moving, arresting, and sensitively scripted.   While both films convey an international message—in the former, the dangers of totalitarianism and gap-year, touristy naïveté; in the latter, the simple tragedy of war–their power derives from a historical- and character-based focus, chronicling a particular real-life moment and the charismatic, sometimes monstrous figure at its centre.  This is what Hollywood often excels at: nuanced characters and epic histories, not nuanced politics and epic insight.

When it attempts the latter, Hollywood spawns films like Blood Diamond, the earnest, unsubtly-named film about conflict diamonds that rightly earned Djimon Hounsou and Leonardo DiCaprio acting nods; and Babel, whose claims upon cultural and political division is similarly intimated in its towering title, and which collected seven Oscar nominations (but no awards).  These films treat their subjects with problematic glibness and excessive political correctness, and unlike Last King and Iwo Jima, moralise so aggressively that plot and character are soapboxed into irrelevance.

Both Hollywood to the hilt, the differences between Letters  from Iwo Jima, which was a very good film, and Babel, which was a mind-numbing pile of multicultural offal, perhaps deserve closer scrutiny.  In his commissioning of a Japanese-language script from Japanese scriptwriters to counterbalance the American perspective of Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood has produced a film that was well received by the Japanese film industry, despite a few reported inaccuracies.  The Yomiuri newspaper even went so far to claim that, ‘Today the person who had the power to tell us the Japanese experience during the war was Clint Eastwood, an American.’  But more importantly, it is a good film, a blistering depiction of an all-out massacre, and one that for the most part eschews stereotype and simplistic characterisation.

Straight-forwardly organised, Letters from Iwo Jima begins with the Japanese troops preparing for the defense of Iwo Jima’s black sands and culminates in an extended battle sequence that is tragic, conclusive, and viscerally, starkly filmed.  The titular letters home provide an uninventive but effective excuse for flashbacks into a few characters’ lives, a device that could easily slip into sentimentality and sometimes does, but more often merely provides a fascinating, fleeting glimpse into imperial Japan’s political climate.

The acting is uniformly strong.   As General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the officer commissioned to lead his vastly outnumbered, outgunned troops to certain death, Ken Watanabe endows his character with independence, shrewdness and geniality.  As Saigo, one of the few soldiers who survives (and, not coincidentally, one of the main characters), Japanese pop idol Kazunari Ninomiya is also convincing and provides much comic relief in a film that otherwise is unsurprisingly despairing.  Filmed partially in situ, the washed-out colour-filters evoke the bunkers’ gloom and the island’s flattening, blanching heat with cinematographic brilliance, and the landscape is stunningly desolate.

Ironically, Eastwood seems at the height of his directorial powers in a context that must have been very foreign to him.   Ultimately, it is a gripping film for all of the above components, but what is singularly impressive is that it doesn’t thump us over the head with the nobility of its balanced perspective.  By avoiding the temptation of ‘Japanese are humans too’ moralising, Letters from Iwo Jima presents the bloody defense of a strategic strip of sand as the context for compelling human drama.  In doing so produces a beautifully-shot, morally complex, cracking good war film that is internationally resonant and still pure Hollywood.

The sweeping ensemble-piece Babel, on the other hand, seems less a film than a contrivance.  Amores Perros director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (who are currently engaged in a very public debate as to who can claim more credit for this monumental waste of a popcorn tub) have created a movie that spans three continents, four languages, and many issues: terrorism, tourism, interracial misunderstanding, intercultural misunderstanding, interpersonal misunderstanding  —really, misunderstandings of any kind, piled on so fast and thick that the resulting miasma of solitude becomes tedious even before the opening credits.

While it attempts the political edginess of 2005’s Syriana, Babel’s plot is excruciatingly underdeveloped.  Here are the four strands: random A-listers Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett play an American couple on a tour-bus holiday in Morocco; Adriana Barraza plays the Mexican nanny who takes care of their strikingly Aryan children back in California; also in Morocco, a herdsman gives a gun to his shepherding two boys, which he’d gotten off of a Japanese trophy hunter; and in Japan, that trophy hunter struggles to understand the frustrations of his deaf-mute teenage daughter.

These stories are edited together jarringly and sometimes disjointedly so that, at least hypothetically, you have no sense of how they will interconnect, thus implying that actions can have wide-reaching, unintended consequences—the whole bird-crapping-in-jungle-causes-tornado-in-Torquay theory of international-relations causality.  Unfortunately, this theme has been done more convincingly and more pointedly before (in screenwriter Arriaga’s earlier, subtler film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, for example).

Moreover, the discontinuous narrative here seems like an editorial gimmick.The splicing of various stories and chronologies is neither a bad, nor an unusual, technique.  It can be used to remove an audience’s dependence on expectation and foreshadowing, to suggest an unpredictable narrative trajectory and to promote fresh, unpresumptuous, character-driven viewing, largely because the climax and resolution are often depicted at the outset.  In Iñárritu and Arriaga’s hands, unfortunately, what could be a subversive, suggestive inquiry becomes fatalistic and altogether too tidy, and the piecemeal editing simply serves to disguise a few melodramatic storylines and to add the illusion of depth where there is none.

What’s more, having messed up the puzzle, they then insist on solving it for you. Plot-twists are sign-posted more frequently than a roadside attraction on the Iowa plains.  As soon as the boys get the gun, you know that Cate Blanchett will be shot and that the boys will end up screwed.  As soon as García Bernal picks up the nanny and children, you know their cross-border trip is ill-fated.  And although the film dangles the alluring possibility that some of the disparate strands will not join up (thus keeping the screenplay messy and therefore lifelike), in the end Babel ties up as neatly as Julie Andrews’s brown-paper packages.  This makes for boring cinema, leaving the audience nothing left to guess and leaving the actors struggling to flesh out roles that leave little to interpretation.

Although it is clearly angling for the position of global commentator, Babel is actually just a movie about stupid people, doing stupid, oftentimes unrealistic things.   No matter how authentic the bigotry and ignorance of the average tour-bus crowd, I fail to believe that they would have left behind a dying woman because they wanted the air-conditioning switched back on.  García Bernal’s car chase is stupid, as is the nanny taking the children across the border and the herdsman giving the high-powered rifle to his young boys.  (And does no one have mobiles or satellite phones?  There’d be no film if so.)

Babel also occasionally promotes the stereotypes it presumably is aiming to offset.  Indeed, the Moroccan men are not terrorists—‘yup, the Americans got that one wrong’—but the character played by Gael García Bernal, whose talent is wasted in this film, doesn’t exactly disprove much about America’s ‘dangerous, irresponsible’ neighbour to the south.  And the improbabilities keep on coming: after the aggressive American border guards embark on a car chase after a drunken Mexican (García Bernal), the nanny (well-played by Adriana Barraza) and two children end up wandering lost through the arroyos of the Californian desert.   After the nanny leaves the children to go find help and the children —you guessed it—are gone when she returns, you start to hope that the lot of them get eaten by coyotes, thus at least adding a bit of migrácion tongue-in-cheek to a film otherwise devoid of irony.

It does, however, have steaming shovels of self-awareness and tailors the film to an audience of politically-correct moralisers.  The message is placed in the mouths of tousled blonde innocents, the cherubic film offspring of Cate and Brad: ‘…but why are they looking for us?  We didn’t do anything wrong.’  No, but your parents did, and so did the whole damn world.  Blanched colour filters here seem calculating: we’re supposed to feel relentlessly bleak.  This is ostensibly a movie about international responsibility: a Japanese man gives a gun to a Moroccan herdsman, a woman is shot, a boy is shot, a diplomatic incident is catalysed, a deaf-mute Tokyo girl who likes to go commando hits the club scene, a Mexican wedding ends in a deportation and everyone, generally, is meant to feel guilty about the state of the world and perhaps purified by their guilt.   It’s a movie that allows the armchair liberal to lean back and correct Pitt’s ugly American ignorance (‘but, man, of course he doesn’t have two wives: he’s Moroccan’) and to reflect sagely on the blinding inequalities of the world and the dazzling ignorance of his own kind. It’s manipulative, back-patting, and facile.

The film isn’t entirely without merits: the panorama of the Atlas Mountains is stunning; it has one of the best clubbing-on-Ecstasy cams I’ve yet seen; and there was one incident of humour, when the deaf-mute schoolgirls banter (in sign-language) in the locker room after a volleyball match (‘She’s just premenstrual.’ ‘No, she’s horny.’ ‘Yeah? I’m going to fuck your dad to get rid of my mood.’).  The most intriguing and sustained role is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the most tangential, the least politicised, and necessarily the least scripted: as the deaf-mute Japanese schoolgirl Chieko, Rinko Kikuchi is brilliantly seething and emotive in a side-story that deserved a film to itself.

But at the end of the day, all of the components that make Letters from Iwo Jima an interesting, Oscar-worthy film—in-depth characters, authentic emotion, common humanity and a sense of grounded reality—are missing in Babel.  Babel has the ambition of an award-winning ‘international issue’ film without the filmic and political content.  What little message it has even seems internally inconsistent.  Babel’s tagline reads, ‘If you want to be understood…Listen,’ suggesting—as does its title—that it chronicles the dangers of cultural intolerance and promotes transcendent connection.  Yet in the end it endorses a deeply isolationist view of the world, suggesting that if lucky we might shelter in the family unit, and that intercultural communication is at best a futile dream.

All it all, with its tricksy editing and multinational settings, Babel seems like globalism lite, profundity-by-numbers, a cynical ploy for a few statuettes.  Despite the titular inference, the wedge driven between Babel’s inhabitants isn’t linguistic: it’s opportunistic.  Brokeback Mountain composer Gustavo Santaolalla won his second straight Oscar for scoring Babel, a film ‘that helped us understand better who we are and why and what we are here for,’ he said.  If we take him at his word, I understand myself to be an inchoate, reductive pile of bleakness and stereotypes that came to be for the sake of pretension, profit and award-pandering.  As its posters advertised, it was indeed this year’s Crash.  More’s the pity.

Kristin Anderson is a DPhil Candidate in English literature at Exeter College, Oxford. She is an editor of The Oxonian Review of Books.

Damien Hirst
In the darkest hour there may be light:
Works from Damien Hirst’s murderme collection
Serpentine Gallery, London
25 November 2006 – 28 January 2007

Although Damien Hirst and his every breath get miles of press in the British tabloid and other newspapers, critical appreciation of the work of Hirst and his generation has been scarce. This is particularly evident among post-YBA (Young British Artists), and artists in the other notable art worlds. New York, LA and Berlin—cities whose markets are sufficiently inflated to merit swathes of attention from not only their own but also foreign press—have dismissed British art in general with a slight sniff of disdain.

Eric C. Banks, writing in Artforum in January 2002, put his finger on the problem: ‘The notorious difficulty of writing about many of the Young British Artists has always been the Hobson’s choice of approaching them with sombre detachment and overshooting the runway or, alternatively, treating them on their own terms and never really going anywhere at all.’ This circularity has extended to next generation artists, British or otherwise, who seem loath to reference or engage in dialogue with their predecessors—not to mention with the surge of cash that has flooded the London art world, for better or for worse, since their coming.

From across the calming waters of the Atlantic Ocean, Thomas Crow, the British art historian now ensconced in the Getty’s cracked ivory towers, has made some lone, valiant attempts to tackle this conundrum. These have mostly taken the form of a Marxian analysis that foregrounds the evidence of social history within the work. In the case of Hirst alone, he has offered an awed take on his recent Mexican intervention.  In general, however, the non-YBA British art world largely hangs its head in horror at the thought of acknowledging the bastard breed.

In the darkest hour there may be light therefore offered an opportunity to take a deep breath and be drawn in. It included a number of seminal works from the YBA-era, alongside their 1980s New York predecessors Jeff Koons, Richard Prince and Haim Steinbach, as well as some predictably dismal tat from Banksy and his younger, and by the looks of it slightly lost, generation of British artists.

To quickly address the curating: since Hirst managed to catalyse the coming into being of the Young British Art world in the early 1990s, he has played a significant role in subsidising it, not to mention keeping Koons and a few secondary market dealers happy. His ‘murderme’ collection contains some fantastic work but, like most collections it contains some pretty dreadful efforts as well (such as Banksy: a more literal image-maker would be hard to find but, frankly, who would want to look?). The show was therefore a bit of a mess, not only in terms of quality but also with respect to its display. Items looked shoved into place with scant attention to size, scale, theme or attribute—but such sloppiness could have been exaggerated and thereby made more convincing, more satisfyingly, by making it less clear how exactly it is that Hirst differentiates between his obsessive collection of curiosities and art. Why not go for it and really clutter the Serpentine Gallery?

This style of curation is due, in part, to Hirst the phenomenon, as more than one newspaper reviewer pointed out: given his massive pulling power, the Serpentine needs the artist’s patronage more than he needs their floor space, and he can therefore curate as he sees fit. In fact, Hirst’s work in general, with its gleeful mass production and mass concatenation (think a thousand flies, a thousand spin paintings, a thousand years) could often do with a good edit. But perhaps  that is somehow the point: he, like Warhol, has the ability and the brazen gumption to churn out as much as he wants—although perhaps he isn’t as much of a whore as Andy: he never solicited portraits of the great dictators as the ultimate Pop vixen did of Farah Dibah and the Shah.

Hirst’s closest contemporaries, Angus Fairhurst and Sarah Lucas, with whom he collaborated most recently on the 2004 Tate show ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’, both come up trumps at the Serpentine—and another look at their work sheds a clearer light on the terms under which a critical engagement with the YBAs might be negotiated. Lucas’s Percival (2006) is a bronze replica of a tchotchke of a horse-drawn cart carrying a massive cement gherkin. Blown up to ten times its size, coloured in so that it looks exactly like its ceramic forebear, and plonked on the lawn in front of the gallery, Percy manages to be both hilarious and hardcore. Such a combination is present in all of Lucas’s best work; inside, her Sunday Sport collages, cigarette sculptures, and banged-up car with crude wanking arm mechanism offer a mini-retrospective of the artist.

Fairhurst’s gorillas also stand out. Pietà (1996), his photographic self-portrait, quotes the famous Michaelangelo painting in the Vatican (inter alia from the art historical canon). In this version, however, the artist, who takes on the role of Christ, is cradled by an empty gorilla suit, deftly conjuring pathos through a visual joke. Likewise his life-size sculpture of a bronze gorilla, A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling II (2003), who looks in front of him seemingly dumbfounded at his left arm, which appears to have dropped off.

Both Fairhurst and Lucas know how to deliver an uneasy punchline; Gavin Turk’s soiled sleeping bag minus tramp, installed unceremoniously on the Serpentine’s floor, also fits in this category. It is these artists’ adept manipulation of the joke that ought to prompt a critical appreciation of the poor little YBA paragons. The gags are subversive—it is high art lite—and as we all know, you make your victim laugh before you deliver the sucker punch… all the way to the bank if need be.

Emily Spears Meers is a writer, translator and equestrienne, and an MPhil student in international relations at Balliol College, Oxford.

Christopher J. Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe and Alexander Gourevitch (eds.)
Politics Without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations
Routledge, 2007
244 pages
ISBN 0415418070

These days, the foreign policies of Western powers might seem to an observer of the evening news to be almost schizophrenic. On the one hand, the rule of law and human rights for all are proclaimed as the essential foundations of a twenty first century international community. Long gone are the Cold War days of UN deadlock, and even NATO—that archetypal organisation of geo-political power politics—has re-invented itself as a guarantor of human security. But on the other hand, there have been a steady stream of military interventions by Western coalitions around the world, some with dubious grounding in international law (Iraq being the most notable).

These contradictions could, of course, be explained in terms of ‘might makes right.’ And yet there is much evidence to say that  Western  policy makers have attempted to pursue their interests through the framework of and by reference to the liberal interpretation of the values of ‘Western civilisation’. Robert Cooper, a key architect of the Blair doctrine of the ‘international community’ has perhaps summarised this schizophrenic state of Western identity most honestly in his notion of a new ‘liberal imperialism.’ It would be nice to have the same rules covering all states, Cooper laments, but as long as the social and political fabric of world affairs is so uneven as to disallow for one cut of the cloth, it is best to fashion world order from two different cloths: one, cut from the rule of consent and equality, the other, cut from the rule of dictation and (temporary) subordination. To complicate matters further, a sense of a ‘democratic deficit’ has also developed within the populations of the West with respect to the liberal inadequacies of many Western backed international institutions. There is, for instance, disillusionment over the voting mechanism for a European Constitution and the limited accountability of economic organisations such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization.

For some international relations scholars, such schizophrenia signals a transformation of traditional understandings of sovereignty and the nation-state. The editors of Politics Beyond Sovereignty, a collection of scholarly essays, fall squarely in this camp. But far from acquiescing to the transformation, they offer some theoretical resistance. Any abrogation of the principle of state sovereignty, they argue, is an abrogation of collective responsibility—and with that, of political agency itself. Far from obsolete or undesirable, the sovereign nation-state still  provides the  best, if  imperfect, framework for the organization of collective political life. Valorising an amorphous ‘international community’ serves only to dissolve political accountability.

The  volume makes several important contributions to existing political science research. For one thing, it affirms the ideological quality of sovereignty as a political concept. Contrary to the Anglo-American take on Weberian sociology, it is not a technical typology of governance but something that tied to political argument and contest. Moreover, the volume directly challenges the arrogance of some Western leaders that their new architectonic of global governance is beneficial to all. It does this by adeptly turning the question back on the questioners: what form of governance in the current world best guarantees accountability and responsibility of political action?

There is, however, a difficulty with the volume’s use of theory. While the editors draw on a number of different philosophical traditions, they fail to explain in detail the theory behind the ideas they discuss. This is important because the theoretical framework of the editors’ introduction is used heavily to structure the arguments of all the following chapters. Three sources inspire their thinking: Hegel, Marx and Weber. And their analysis offers a synthesis of the three’s understandings of agency and political authority.

It begins with Hegel’s fictional state, in which political authority represents the singular expression of a collective will. Looking outwards, the sovereign expresses this collective will as a ‘national spirit’ (often in competition with other nations). Yet it is only with a Marxist supplementation that the editors are able to make sense of this: it is through a division of the public and private in the modern capitalist state that the individual in civil society can be linked to the collective will. It is a convenient move, but Marx himself argued against the Hegelian ideal of singular authority. Sovereign authority was never unproblematic as Hegel presumed. For Marx, the public sphere was not the expression of a collective will, but rather of the particular collective will of private property owners—of the capitalist class. It was not that the representative depth and extent of modern civil society was imperfect, but that for systemic reasons it could never be the ‘universal’ sphere it professed to be.

But to explain the present day dissolution of sovereignty, agency and collective will, the editors look to Weber’s notion of ‘disenchantment.’ Through this notion Weber passed judgement upon the ethical inadequacies of the instrumentalisation and rationalisation of modern bureaucratic rule wherein the ‘ends’ of political action were increasingly redefined solely in terms of the efficiency of the ‘means.’ There is, however, a discontinuity unrecognised by the editors. If somewhat sympathetic to Marx, Weber denied that modern bureaucratic rule and the rule of capital emerged from the same historical sources—or even from the same historical societies (Germany being the former and Britain the latter). The best that could be said, Weber believed, is that these phenomena shared ‘elective affinities,’ that is to say that their historical relationship was contingent rather than causal. Moreover, Weber denied Hegel’s claim that the collective will held any agency as an expressive thing in and of itself. Rather, it functioned only as an ideological smokescreen for particular individual ‘wills to power.’

The point is not that the editors of Politics Without Sovereignty must hold their sources of political theory in high fidelity. But as they themselves claim, the meaning of abstract concepts do not come alive so much through logical analysis but though contestation with other ideas. Furthermore these ideas, again as the editors note, are produced in the context of real historical processes. If this is the case, then there is much disagreement between Hegel, Marx and about the historical basis of modern sovereignty and the bearing of the social forces that accompanied its emergence. However one gets the sense that the volume by and large proceeds by judging current affairs against an abstract concept of sovereignty deemed in principle to be coherent and decontested. The result is question begging. By closing down the contested nature of theoretical constructions of sovereignty, we can risk limiting our understanding of the political possibilities implicated in current transformations of state sovereignty.

With this in mind, a caution seems required. Is it reasonable to make sense of and judge the present condition of developing or Third World states using a concept of sovereignty that was never experienced by their populations? Useful reference points here can be found in Christopher Bickerton and Philip Cunliffe’s respective chapters on state building and humanitarian intervention. Bickerton argues that the notion of the ‘failed state’ rests upon a re-conceptualisation of the sovereignty of non-Western states by reference to the potential threat they pose to the West. Policies of state building based on this conceptual model attempt to detach the process of re-constructing sovereignty from the collective will of the people that are to be governed by this new authority. Cunliffe compliments this position by arguing that any intervention designed to hand over the sovereignty of ‘failing states’ to a more ‘responsible’ international community robs the target population of the chance to determine for themselves the future form of their society. An international politics based on the sanctity of self-determination is preferable to intervention. For then, any oppressed group that organizes itself sufficiently to fight for its own ends would be able to force recognition of its demands at home and abroad.

And yet, in modern history, and certainly from slavery and colonialism onwards, Third World populations never worked with a political agency that was endogenously determined. No less than that paradigm of Third World independence—Haiti (the present fate of which Bickerton discusses lucidly) —enjoyed only twenty years of partial self-governance (much of which encompassed civil war) before being forced in 1825 to accept an onerous French indemnity for the loss of the colony. This effectively mortgaged the Haitian economy to French banks, and by the 1840s Haitian liberal elites were engaged in what would become known as ‘neo-colonialism’—colonialism by economic rather than politico-military means.

The point here is that in the context of the historical Third World, sovereignty, as defined by the editors, appears as purely an abstract category divorced from the historical experience of once-colonised populations. That these populations have often struggled for self-determination (through articulations that have often been more than simple duplicates of the apparently Western original) is not to be denied. What is to be questioned is the judging of such struggles against standards of sovereignty derived from Western experiences. This almost ideal-typical standpoint might even be said to veer towards an imperial decree on what is the ‘right’ kind of political agency. It ignores how political agency is differentially constituted according to history and geopolitics.

In the end, however, such criticisms serve only to underscore the greatest merit of the volume: its ability   to draw out the analytical and (especially) ethical implications of the schizophrenic nature of Western foreign policies in current world affairs. In short, the volume is an example of how one might intelligently  debate the seemingly endless irrationalities of international politics. In fact, Politics Without Sovereignty does more: it engenders a controversial debate on the possibilities for holding onto or reconstructing a meaningful politics at the global level. For this reason alone, the volume is essential reading for anyone concerned with international political authority and sovereignty.

Robbie Shilliam is Hedley Bull Junior Research Fellow in International Relations at Wadham College, Oxford.

Werner Herzog
Rescue Dawn
Gibralter Entertainment, 2006
126 minutes

The first picture in The Past From Above, a recent exhibition of aerial photographs at the British Museum depicting the world’s ancient monuments, shows the supposed birthplace of mankind, the ‘cradle of humanity’ in South Africa. The ground is parched, torn up with cracks and dotted only with small trees whipped with dust; there is nowhere to hide from the sun and any water must lie far beneath the earth. Nothing, it seems, was meant to live here. Yet, from this region humans emerged, and, as the exhibition illustrates, went on to carve ecstatic figures into this same ground, to dig holes in it big enough to hold entire churches, and to erect on it ziggurats, towers, and temples that still stand. That human life should find itself surrounded by a natural world that is so completely indifferent and even inhospitable to it, and that at the same time such a world should inspire humans to search relentlessly for meaning and to strive relentlessly for unthinkable achievement, is an irony that lies at the heart of the films of Werner Herzog.

Rescue Dawn, Herzog’s latest film and his largest project in years, illustrates Herzog’s lifelong fascination with, in the words of Conrad’s Marlowe, ‘all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.’ The film is a fictional reconstruction of Herzog’s earlier documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), which tells the story of a German American pilot’s escape from captivity through the jungle in Laos during the Vietnam War. In this story can be seen the central conceit of Herzog’s films: an encounter between an extraordinary human being and the wilderness. For Herzog, this seems to be the basic structure for all human life since the Fall of Man. The films are filled with characters who, beguiled by a vision or dream or captivated by an imagined possibility, set out to accomplish a feat that would charge their lives with significance.

In Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), one of Herzog’s most famous films, a sixteenth-century conquistador announces a rebellion against Philip II, King of Spain, and claims for himself the whole of South America, leading a doomed expedition down the Peruvian Amazon in search of El Dorado, a fictitious city of gold invented by the native inhabitants to trick explorers. When finally Aguirre asks ferociously, ‘Who else is with me?’, everyone else is either dead, shot with poison darts or swallowed by the jungle, and the makeshift raft is overrun with monkeys—the last and only subjects of an empire whose rise and fall took place in the confines of one man’s head. Other films depict, for example, a man orchestrating the hauling of a 340-tonne ship over a mountain to make possible a concert with the virtuoso tenor Caruso, an engineer setting out to build a ghostlike airship to fly just a few feet above the rainforest, and a group of astronauts travelling to colonise a blue planet in the Andromeda galaxy for fear of a catastrophe on earth. Their wild hope may be simply to survive, as in Rescue Dawn or Wings of Hope (2000), in which a woman describes walking through the Peruvian jungle for twelve days after a plane crash in which she was the only survivor.

As a filmmaker, Herzog is interested in addressing the extremes of experience, telling stories in which someone comes face to face with isolation, the threat of failure, or oblivion. Like Walter Benjamin’s storyteller, Herzog has ‘borrowed his authority from Death,’ that is, he has sought out instances in which an abyss opened up and he has gone to see what might be found there. In many cases, he has even wrested his authority from Death as one wrests a throne from a tyrannical king. Thus while cutting a film in Munich, Herzog heard on the radio that a volcano had a 100 percent chance of erupting in Guadaloupe and that one farmer who lived on the slope had refused to evacuate; that same afternoon, he and his cameraman flew to the site to shoot an interview with the farmer and the rest of the footage that became the film La Soufrière (1977). In the end, the volcano never erupted. ‘We treated it with great disrespect,’ Herzog said in an interview, ‘Jörg [the cameraman] and I walked all they way up to the crater and pissed in it. The matter of fear doesn’t come up. Nobody else could have made the film, and somebody had to. I suppose you will realise from this that in some way I must have resolved the death question.’

Herzog is very prolific—in forty-five years he has made over forty-five films—and this is due, in part, to a kind of restless turning-over of the mind that has evidently recognized itself in some far corner of the earth and its history. He has, in other words, a manifest knack for seizing upon stories that seem destined from the start to become films by Werner Herzog. His process is extremely professional and rapid: often he will write a screenplay in three days and complete an entire film in thirty, moving on immediately to the next project. Accordingly, many of his films have the quality of an étude composed when a faint melody floated suddenly into the ears, or of a sketch made of something seen out of a train window during a long ride. When asked whether his films consistently address certain themes, Herzog has answered, ‘Though I cannot be sure of this, I do know one thing. Let’s say you turn on the television and see ten seconds of a film. You would immediately know that this must be one of my films.’

Herzog’s work can be divided loosely into three categories: first, fictional dramas set in various historical periods and often in remote locations (Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo (1982), or 1984’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser); second, ‘documentaries’ that often relate an account of an extraordinary but unknown figure or story (Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), My Best Fiend (1999), or Grizzly Man in 2005); third, films that blur the previous categories by splicing together images both fictional and non-fictional, or by using voiceovers to present documentary footage in a fictional, narrative form (Fata Morgana (1971), Lessons of Darkness (1992), 2005’s The Wild Blue Yonder). These distinctions may be muddied even further when one considers that in the so-called documentaries, Herzog has shaped the material considerably more than is normally expected of a nonfiction filmmaker. Frequently, for instance, he invents and films dreams that are then attributed to the central character, as in the sequence in Little Dieter in which Dieter Dengler walks through an airfield surrounded by thousands of planes. Herzog calls this approach an attempt at presenting an ‘ecstatic truth,’ a truth beyond a collection of facts, which could only be achieved intuitively and metaphorically.

Herzog thus represents the rare case of a filmmaker who deals predominantly in metaphor, rather than in simile. In Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), for example, there is an extended sequence in which the characters are shown hunting rabbits on a country estate. In the context of plot, by placing the hunting scenes between scenes of dialogue and romantic intrigue, we take the hunting as a sort of reflective comment on the action: ‘The amorous pursuits of the people of various classes on this country estate are in some way like the activity of hunting rabbits.’ Herzog’s films, however, seem to represent a body of metaphors, in which the subject has been lost, hidden, or severed. They give the viewer only the second part of the structure. Thus, rather than declare ‘My love is a flower,’ Herzog’s films seem to say, ‘[Blank] is a procession up a mountain at the top of which Death is waiting,’ as in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, or ‘[Blank] is a town where the secret to creating a beautiful type of red glass has been lost,’ as in Heart of Glass (1976). The viewer feels profoundly that he or she has just come across a metaphor but finds it impossible to pin down what it was a metaphor for. Much of the power of the films is accordingly derived from the viewer’s sense of having encountered the absence of a closed circuit of meaning. Thus the films often feel not only like études, but additionally like preludes to works that were never made, like offhand gestures in the direction of a complete significance. In this way, Herzog’s use of metaphor is close to that of Kafka, in whose works the accounts of the protagonists are felt by the reader to be haunted by the open-ended mystery of the metaphor’s other half.

Rather than resembling a prophet, as he has often been called, Herzog brings to mind a traveller who, returning from a venture into a forgotten or forbidden country, presents us with a suitcase full of snapshots. These images remain with us, in the words of the poet Sandor Weores, ‘half-remembered now / and later, like a dream. / And with a taste of eternity / this side of the tomb.’

Alexander Nemser is an MPhil student in European literature at New College, Oxford. His poems have been published in The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times.