William V. Harris
Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity
Harvard University Press, 2009
332 Pages
£36.95
ISBN 978-0674032972

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Since its publication in 1951, E.R. Dodds’s essay on “Dream-Pattern and Culture-Pattern” in The Greeks and the Irrational has become the standard text on dreams in the Greco-Roman world. In his forthcoming book Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity, William V. Harris updates the account with contemporary scientific methods and anthropological evidence, without specifically challenging or developing Dodds’s paradigm. The book is intended for professional classicists, and will be of great use in its field; even for those with small Latin and less Greek, Harris lucidly explicates the successive interpretations which ancient minds placed on a particular and forceful type of human experience.

Dodds, writing 50 years after Freud, took the psychoanalytic paradigm as a given; another half-century along, there is no such simple ruling theory. Harris’s introduction tackles the Herculean labor of sorting through a tremendous quantity of neurological and psychological research into sleep and dreams. With access to such a wealth of clinical approaches, what emerges is both compelling and frustratingly devoid of closure. In the end, the review of science has rather little to offer for Harris’s argument. Experiments have allowed scientists greater insight into how the brain works during sleep, but leave unanswered the central questions about dreams that concerned the ancients, and still concern us today: why do we dream? what do dreams mean? how should we respond to our dreams?

The world of dreams operates by its own logic and within its own limitations, distinct from those of waking life. As Dodds wrote in the first sentence of his essay, “Man shares with a few others of the higher mammals the curious privilege of citizenship in two worlds.” Dodds hypothesized that these limitations were not constant across peoples or historical epochs—that is, the ancients did not dream as we do. By this he meant that the essential structure of a dream conforms to patterns of belief intimately bound up with the culture of the dreamer. Not only the specific symbols, but the nature of the dream itself, follows a traditional pattern.

Harris follows Dodds in asserting that not only ways of describing dreams, but the actual experience of dreaming, has changed substantially over the past 2,500 years. For the Greeks and Romans, the study of dreams hovered somewhere between the realms of science, medicine, religion, and literature. The evidence that Harris assembles is necessarily diverse, ranging from proto-philosophical texts to inscriptions and lyric poems, from Italy to Asia Minor, and from the 8th century BC to the death of Saint Augustine in AD 430. Organizing the mass of ancient evidence, Harris arrives at a new distinction between what he terms epiphany and episode dreams. He proposes that in the classical world a particular type of dream-description, now nearly extinct, was in fact very common: an authority figure, often a god or a ghost, visited the sleeper and made a significant pronouncement.

The literary prototype of the epiphanic dream occurs in the second book of the Iliad, where Zeus sends a dream to Agamemnon, commander of the Hellenic forces, in order to trick him into launching an attack that he is destined to lose. The dream takes on the form of Nestor, wisest and most respected of the Greek elders, and addresses the sleeping Agamemnon:

You sleep, son of battle-minded Atreus, tamer of horses.
A man that is a counselor must not sleep the whole night through,
One to whom an army has been entrusted, and on whom rest so many cares.
But now quickly heed me, for I am a messenger to you from Zeus,
Who, far away though he is, cares for you greatly and pities you.
He wants you to arm the long-haired Achaeans with all speed,
Since now you may take the broad-wayed city of the Trojans.

(Iliad 2.24-30)

In this passage, Homer treats what is seen as if it were objective fact: the dream (oneiros in Greek) exists independently in space and time. It departs from Olympus, travels down through the ether to the bedside of Agamemnon, and takes up its stand at his head. When it has delivered its message the dream departs, leaving Agamemnon to ponder its import. Throughout the scene Agamemnon remains completely passive—in fact, he knows that he is asleep, since the dream tells him so immediately upon arrival.

The epiphanic mode of describing dreams could be viewed as nothing more than a narrative topos, a useful device to impart knowledge or motivate action. Yet this literary phenomenon apparently coexisted with its counterpart in the popular imagination as well. Records from the temple of Asclepius at Epidauros report that hundreds of worshippers slept in the shrine and were visited in dreams by the healing god, who spoke to them and sometimes even cured their maladies. Nor was this type of dream-description exclusive to the pagan tradition: in the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Paul is said to have dreamed that a foreign man, whom he took to be a divine representative, told him to sail to Macedonia and preach to the people there.

Such clear and objective epiphanies bear little resemblance to our own dream experience. By contrast, most dreams in modern times are described as a sequence of events, what Harris calls an episode, an altogether more amorphous phenomenon. The gradual disappearance of the epiphany dream, Harris suggests, was part of the widespread secularization of European thought that occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries. As anthropological evidence supporting his conclusion, he points out that in cultures not functioning on the European intellectual model—Haiti, Mayan Mexico, and Zululand—the epiphany dream lingers on. He convincingly demonstrates that outside the secular Western world men and women still occasionally dream that they are visited by the gods.

This is not to say that epiphanies are the only type of dream that we know of from antiquity. As Harris acknowledges, religious and secular explanations for the content of dreams existed side by side. The historian Herodotus commented that dreams often arise from the experiences of the previous day; and Plato noted that some dreams seem to articulate forbidden wishes. Or, to take another passage from the Iliad, Homer describes the final, climactic confrontation between the Trojan hero Hector and the Greek hero Achilles in terms that resonate with our own experience:

And as in a dream a man cannot grasp one who flees before him –
The one cannot flee, nor the other lay hands on him – so Achilles
Could not overtake Hector in his fleetness, nor Hector escape.

(Iliad 22.199-201)

Many more examples could be drawn from Harris’s work. Almost without exception, these examples demonstrate that Harris aims to be encyclopedic rather than discursive or deeply analytical. This is in some respects a pity. There are, of course, benefits to this degree of scholarly discipline, but there is a considerable price to be paid. For instance, the nature of his wide-ranging inquiry necessitates that some examples of dream, especially literary ones, are given shorter shrift than they deserve. A list of sources is invaluable, but we also need, from someone of Harris’s learning and intellect, some fresh stabs at larger conclusions.

Claire Catenaccio is an MPhil student in Classics at Christ Church, Oxford.

Aravind Adiga
Between the Assassinations
Atlantic Books, 2009
352 Pages
£9.75
ISBN 978-1848871212

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A bomb explodes in a classroom in India. Fed up with years of taunts, an angry half-caste boy tries to blow up his school and kill his teacher—but the ignition chokes, and the bomb fails. This story of failed murder is part of Aravind Adiga’s newest book, Between the Assassinations, the title of which refers to two successful ones: those of India’s sixth and seventh Prime Ministers, Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv. The assassinations of the Gandhis were acts of vengeance by peripheral figures who had suffered and felt wronged. In 1984, Indira was shot by two of her Sikh bodyguards in response to the Indian army’s desecration of Sikhism’s holiest temple. In 1991, Rajiv was bombed by a female member of the Tamil Tigers for atrocities committed by Indian peacekeeping forces against Sri Lankan Tamils. The Gandhis were killed by fellow Indians—religion against religion, culture defying culture.

Beyond the title, Adiga never refers to the Gandhis, for he is not interested in Indian high politics. In this collection of short stories, he is far more concerned with the assassin than with the assassinated. Adiga channels the anger of the assassin, writing with his violent impetus and sense of injustice. This is not to say that Adiga vindicates murder, but rather that he understands it as an extreme act, an intensification of the impulses felt by the aggrieved on a daily basis; in particular cases, those impulses have just cause. While the Gandhi murders are large signposts in history, the desperation that led the guards to open fire and the woman to detonate a bomb exists on a smaller scale in people’s everyday lives. It is this “infernal history” that occupies Adiga–the subterranean anger and frustration that, in his view, defines the Indian everytown’s daily life.

Adiga’s Man Booker prize-winning novel, The White Tiger, tells the story of Balram Halwai, a sardonic driver who smashes his boss’s skull with a bottle, steals his money and identity, and later sets up shop as an entrepreneur in digital Bangalore. But this occurs only after much provocation. Halwai’s revenge is the desperate assassination of a fellow countryman and oppressor. It is a revolt of class and caste, and it is retribution for a lifetime of wrongs. The righteous anger of the Gandhis’ political assassins finds parallel in Halwai’s frightening, yet not entirely incomprehensible, rage. Between the Assassinations, too, is a history of anger. It is a group portrait of the inhabitants of Kittur, a fictional town in the state of Karnataka. Written before The White Tiger, it is in many ways its prototype. It has no towering assassin like Halwai and no grand consummation of revenge. Rather, it is a history of small people and small, everyday brutalities, of grinding, impotent rage and ultimate futility. A history, Adiga suggests, that is closer to the condition of India. As one of his characters says, “the problem is here”, “there is a beast inside us”.

Kittur should be a multiethnic, multi-religious, and multicultural paradise, yet it is crippled by caste segregation, religious prejudice, and petty strife. The stories centre upon the anger of the marginalised, all of whom follow the same trajectory. First, they become aware of a certain wrong, then they internalise anger, make a futile attempt to alter the circumstances, and ultimately recognise their failure. It is a system, and a life, that continues unchanged. A half-caste boy unsuccessfully explodes a bomb in his school; an earnest journalist goes insane when he discovers his newspaper is corrupt; a Muslim factory owner attempts to fight an elaborate system of kickbacks, only to fail. The key moment in Between the Assassinations is that of failure, for it is inevitable—and failure fuels rage, in a cycle that circumscribes a world where history repeats itself.

These failures fuel the resentment of the lower classes. Cooks, drivers, nannies, gardeners, servants: the vox populi of Adiga’s subterranean history. “We’re just trash to them”, says George D’Souza, the mosquito-man, gardener, and driver to a rich Kittur Catholic woman. But abuse begets abuse, and in a manner reminiscent of Balram Halwai, George slowly takes over his mistress’s household, making her utterly dependent on him. Along his upward path, he destroys his fellow servants and replaces them with himself and his sister. George considers himself vindicated, because as Heathcliff declares in Wuthering Heights: “The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him, they crush those beneath them.” Unlike Halwai, who finally kills his master, George falters. He is thrown out and ends the story where he began: on top of a rubble heap. From the top down, the corrupt system pulverises individuals; each portrait reveals a deep soul-sickness that evokes Indians between the assassinations and, by extension, Indians today. “Thousands were cursing corruption” but “not one fellow had found a way to slay the demon”. Kittur is a place populated by aware, cynical, and ultimately ineffective individuals—a city that, indeed, stands for a country.

The White Tiger, which has been called a satirical tour-de-force, first exposed us to Adiga’s particular sensibility. The author has always acknowledged that he has an axe to grind: to shed a harsh light on the injustices of modern India. This critique figures prominently in Between the Assassinations, where injustice, rage, and impotence are rolled together in the collective damnation of a society. Yet as a literary exercise, it largely fails. We are never allowed to forget that Adiga was once a journalist, and continues to see with a journalist’s eye. Between the Assassinations features a detached narrator, who tells a story that is as chronically humourless as it is unremittingly dark. The White Tiger escapes this bleakness through the momentum and honesty of Halwai’s singular voice, which mitigates the horror with mordant wit,. The monstrous characters that move across The White Tiger’s Dickensian cityscape seem even cruder in the prototype. Halwai himself is a grotesque; his evils are exaggerated and his revenge extreme. Yet because we know the history of his life and the brutalities heaped upon him and his family, it is quite easy to have sympathy for this devil. The people in Between the Assassinations, however, are caricatures without distinctive voices, and as a result, the collection reads as a series of journalistic profiles rather than a literary endeavour. These fissures become especially apparent in the short story form: Adiga needs the length of the novel to sustain his devastating critiques and un-literary style. At times his tales edge toward epiphanic moments à la Dubliners, but while Joyce’s stories represent massive internal movement contained within physical stasis, Adiga’s begin and end in the same place, circumstantially and psychologically.

The assassinations, so close together, of mother and son, capture the uneasy sensation of beginning and ending in the same place, of a repeating infernal history. Concentrating on a time when assassins are fellow countrymen and civil strife endemic, Adiga points to a society whose problems are internal and explodes the notion that the single most important event in the history of modern India is colonialism. Colonialism merely exploited characteristics that were already present, what Adiga calls the “native-born thugs: Betrayal, Bungling, and Backstabbing”. The West barely figures in his work, for Indian in-fighting and self-thwarting is the greatest ongoing battle.

In such a world, there is no place for the white-hot anger of revenge. The assassins who killed the Gandhis either died in the act or were executed. Balram Halwai flees with another identity. But the characters in Between the Assassinations are granted neither the finality of the assassin nor the freedom of a new life. Their discontent is a low-grade fever that burns both intractable and impotent. To know the world is unfair and to do nothing, this is the Indian problem. As Halwai himself would say, “what a fucking joke”.

Lakshmi Krishnan is reading for a DPhil in English at New College, Oxford.

Michael Signer
Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from its Worst Enemies
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
272 Pages
£15.99
ISBN 978-0230606241

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Champions of democracy have long been haunted by the spectre of a demagogue lying in wait. Fear of this nemesis has produced some creative solutions. The ancient Athenians, after enduring the rise and fall of the brutal demagogue Cleon, resolved to end the prospect of tyranny once and for all. Citizens were required to take an oath:

I shall kill by word and deed, by vote and with my own hand, if I can, anyone who subverts the democracy of Athens…and whoever tries to become a tyrant or helps to install one. And if anyone else kills such a person I will regard him as blameless before the gods and demons as having killed an enemy of the Athenian people.

A bold effort—but there must be a better way. Yet attempts at democracy have repeatedly fallen victim to those men who, as Alexander Hamilton lamented, “have overturned the liberty of republics…commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.”

The Greek historian Polybius explained that democracy can disintegrate into tyranny just as rust dissolves metal—through internal, organic decay. Demagogues destroy democracy from within through skillful deception: by fashioning themselves as leaders of the people, their charisma propels them to political power, only to use the levers of government to establish autocratic rule. Disguised as mere populists, by the time their true ambitions are revealed, it’s too late.

Polybius believed continual struggle was inevitable—history overwhelmed those who dared to defy its eternal logic. Societies followed a “cycle of constitutional regimes” in which government by the people alternated with “government of violence and the strong hand”. In that cycle, demagogues turned the wheel. But Michael Signer believes the wheel can be slowed—and, ultimately, stopped. In other words, the demagogue may be doomed. For Signer, the endgame of history (and, therefore, a central goal of American foreign policy) must be to accelerate “the ultimate resolution of the cycle of regimes”.

Signer’s book charts the course of demagoguery through portraits of villains and heroes—tyrants, both powerful and petty, and the political philosophers who struggled to out-think them. He’s most interested in how the world’s oldest democracy has fared, starting in 1786, when farmer-demagogue Daniel Shays led a 9,000-strong militia in an insurgency against New England elites. The uprising prompted George Washington to wonder whether founding a republic rested on “too good an opinion of human nature”. But in the end, the insurrectionists were apprehended in time for the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

Other potential American demagogues also turned out to be false alarms. For example, populist military hero Andrew Jackson’s rise to the presidency in 1828 led Senator Henry Clay to predict his country would “march in the fatal road which has conducted every other republic to ruin.” A century later, when Governor (and later Senator) Huey Long turned Louisiana into a state of virtual one-man rule, directly commanding the state militia and even instituting martial law, his own brother likened him to the infamous Roman emperor Nero. Newsweek featured Long in a cover story titled “Demagogues”. Long’s bid to unseat Franklin Roosevelt in the 1936 election was cut short by an assassin’s bullet. Without endorsing the murder, Signer tempts us to see it as a re-enactment of the Athenian oath.

What accounts for the durability of American democracy in the face of demagoguery? Signer points to the strong “constitutional conscience” of the American people—a “conscience” distinct from the Constitution itself. As political scientist Robert Dahl has explained:

To assume that this country has remained a democracy because of its Constitution seems to me an obvious reversal of the relation; it is much more plausible to suppose that the Constitution has remained because our society is essentially democratic.

Dahl and Signer are describing a society in which people “adopt anti-authoritarian values within their hearts”, infusing both their culture and their government. Individuals can exercise those values by “taking responsibility” for their democracy and “short-circuiting” demagogues on the rise.

Signer draws on a rich intellectual tradition to develop this argument. Jefferson thought republicanism was found “in the spirit of the people”. Alexis de Tocqueville believed that democracy depended on “the whole moral and intellectual state of a people”. Hannah Arendt argued that a democratic constitution rested on the political culture of citizens committed to fulfilling their civic responsibilities.

However, the very strength and vitality of the constitutional conscience in America (and in other established democracies) can lead those raised in that tradition to forget the arduous, gradual struggle required to develop an “anti-authoritarian” culture. “There is nothing harder”, Tocqueville wrote, “than the apprenticeship of freedom.” Signer argues that the United States must devote more attention to cultivating constitutional consciousness when promoting democracy abroad. Insufficient attention to such cultivation proved dangerous in the occupation of Iraq, contributing to the rise of the violent demagogue Muqtada al-Sadr.

Signer calls on the new US administration to resist “democracy fatigue” and “reclaim” the central role that democracy promotion has held in American foreign relations since (and arguably even before) Woodrow Wilson. Instead of democracy “installation” on the Iraq model (he somehow neglects Afghanistan), Signer proposes to undermine demagogues through a new policy of “constitutionalism”. This approach would shift the focus from the often-hollow trappings of elections (which can produce “illiberal democracies”, in Fareed Zakaria’s phrase), to the patient cultivation of democratic values within civil society—more akin to what Signer calls “weeding and tending”.

But as Michael Mandelbaum has noted about many proposals to “promote” democracy, Signer repeatedly relies upon “a particular kind of verb which denotes the earnest intention to act without conveying any particular action.” It’s ultimately unclear how to effectively transmit a “constitutional conscience” from one society to another. His most concrete prescription is to increase funding for the National Endowment for Democracy, an organization established under Ronald Reagan (and championed by George W. Bush) to help build institutions and support civil society in fledgling democracies. Can history be transcended by budgetary adjustment? We are left only vaguely hopeful.

Signer, a political theorist by training, placed second in the lieutenant governor race in last week’s Virginia Democratic primary. Although Signer was not victorious himself, his approach to democracy promotion is already winning adherents in the Obama administration. Anne-Marie Slaughter, the US Department of State’s policy planning director, has provided Demagogue with a book-jacket endorsement. President Obama seemed to agree with Signer’s aversion to democracy installation in his 4 June speech in Cairo, stating: “No system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.”

Signer has been rightly praised for reminding us that just when we think liberal democracy is on an inevitable march, demagogues can swipe the rug out from beneath its feet. But he actually betrays as much confidence in history’s “ultimate resolution” as Francis Fukuyama did after the Cold War, while offering few new ideas for advancing democracy’s triumph. Arguably, in his belief that democracy will prevail without military might, he is even more confident than the neoconservatives he pillories.

Confidence in democracy promotion may still hold steady in American foreign policy. But it calls for tremendous patience, and in the meantime, the waiting requires what can only be called a measure of faith. However, that is a faith President Obama seems prepared to accept. As he warned today’s tyrants in his inaugural address: “Know that you are on the wrong side of history.” Let’s hope they’re not just on the underside of history’s wheel.

Robert Nelson is an MPhil candidate in International Relations at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

Cormac Ó Gráda
Famine: A Short History
Princeton University Press, 2009
344 Pages
£16.95
ISBN 978-0691122373

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In the 20th century alone, an estimated 70 million people perished from famine. To name a few of the most disastrous incidents: during World War II, the Bengal Famine claimed 8 million lives; in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, famine took over 30 million lives; and in the mid-1980s, famines in Ethiopia threatened over 8 million people with starvation.

While famine has commonly been attributed to bad harvests, recent scholarship has shifted focus from natural disasters to government failures. Cormac O’Grada’s new book, Famine: A Short History, is no exception. A professor of economics at University College Dublin, O’Grada examines the complex relationship between famine, politics, and public action. Famine’s strength derives from O’Grada’s mining of the historical record, using extensive empirical data to explore the causes and consequences of this fatal phenomenon. Ultimately, O’Grada boldly claims that the “onward march of accountable government will rid the world’s last vulnerable regions of the scourge of famine.” The book, however, grazes the surface of various complex and unresolved policy debates about the end of famine without exploring these issues in depth. Fair enough, for a general history of famine, but this passing investigation makes his bold claim seem somewhat over-optimistic and specious.

The direct relationship to death is what distinguishes famine from chronic malnutrition, in which lack of food adversely affects people’s health but does not directly lead to fatality. Accordingly, O’Grada defines famine as “a shortage of food or purchasing power that leads directly to excess mortality from starvation or hunger-induced diseases.” He goes on to explore the history of thought behind what causes such dire food scarcity. As O’Grada notes, Thomas Malthus was one of the most recognized figures to theorize on this subject. Famously, in 1798, he grimly hypothesized that the world’s population would grow too large for the earth’s productive capacity and that absolute food shortages would cause famine: “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” This was, perhaps, a plausible claim at the time. But Malthus failed to foresee the technological advances that would ultimately enhance the earth’s productive potential.

Echoing the evidence presented by other scholars of famine, O’Grada posits that in the modern era, famine is no longer the result of absolute shortages of food. In absolute terms, worldwide food production is enough to feed the world’s population. And presumably, advances in communication and transportation technologies should aid in getting food wherever it is needed. So why does famine persist?

Borrowing from Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, O’Grada argues that famine is a social phenomenon. For Sen, famine marks “the inability of large groups of people to establish command over food in the society in which they live.” Even if the proximate cause of a local food shortage is natural disaster or a bad harvest, the extent to which human life is affected by such shocks depends on the way that society is organized. This line of reasoning holds true for recent disasters: Hurricane Katrina, for instance, could have been less devastating if the government had been more organized, or more concerned.

Until relatively recently, the most aid that famine victims could hope for was local relief, either from the public or private sector. As O’Grada demonstrates, elites have long accepted moral obligations to relieve the worst effects of famine. In ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, the wealthy would often intervene to prevent food crises from becoming famines. But there are limits to private citizen action. As O’Grada puts it, “Private charity may do much to alleviate individual suffering, but the relief of hundreds for an indefinite period comes only within the means of governments.”

Sen argues that only democratic governments are consistently moved to prevent major disasters affecting the populace. Yet, despite agreeing with Sen’s argument, O’Grada fails to explore its implications for famine management in non-democratic or weak states.
In doing so, O’Grada sidesteps the vital and highly contentious debates over the meaning of “accountable governance” as applied to both sovereign nations and international organisations. If all national governments were somehow organized so as to be accountable to their citizens, then famine might be a rarity. However, accountable governance across all states is a reality yet to be realised. The crucial point here is that the end of famine, in the near future, has to do with responsive international governance and its tenuous and complicated relationship with issues of national sovereignty and development.

Mobilising international efforts to address famine is at times a Sisyphean exercise. How can we get the global public invested and interested in famine? The mechanism of primary importance, within democratic states, is the media. In a democracy, a free press with transparent lines of communication should spread both information and criticism. Governments failing to avert excess mortality, due to famine, would be penalized by their citizenry. However, as O’Grada points out, while this may be the case domestically within democratic governments, the extent to which the international press can garner the same effect on famines occurring on foreign territory is questionable. In his words, “the attention span of the international media—and their readership—is too fleeting to monitor famines from start to finish.” NGOs working to prevent famine have to mobilize the concern of an international public—and this often requires the use of devastating images that only become available after a major problem has begun.

O’Grada cautions us that overemphasis on the existence of corrupt governments, and their role in allowing famines to persist, allows the international community to justify their inaction. There are some donors, however, who have chosen to deal with what they see as corruption in other ways. In February 2009, for example, donors informed President Kibaki of Kenya that they would not channel food aid through the government until the issues of corruption and mismanagement in his administration had been addressed. Rather, the donors insisted upon channeling aid through the World Food Programme. This response raises two questions. First, are donors in a position to judge the level of corruption in a foreign government? After all, what qualifies as corrupt in one country may be a standard transaction in another. Second, to whom are international NGOs accountable?

The issue of NGO accountability is greatly contested within the development literature. Generally, international NGOs are not accountable to the people to whom they provide services, but rather to their donors, some who may know relatively little about effective program implementation within a developing country. If an international NGO fails to avert a famine, it rarely suffers any consequences.

Additionally, there is the issue of creating dependency. It has been argued, with some empirical evidence, that the influx of foreign food aid can hurt domestic markets by undercutting domestic producers and driving them out of business. O’Grada notes that the 1999 Food Aid Convention stipulates that food aid be “culturally acceptable” and, where possible, not interfere with indigenous food markets. But in situations that require immediate action and in which local governments, private producers, and NGOs have little in the way of effective communication or cooperation, this sort of stipulation is impractical. Furthermore, the line between non-interference in domestic markets and allowing people to starve is blurred, and erring on the side of caution to prevent deaths seems prudent. These issues are extremely difficult to address and thus make the international prevention of famine an arduous task.

Furthermore, the extent to which foreign governments forward their own agendas in offering food aid is a controversial issue. Without a comprehensive and legitimate system governing international famine prevention, foreign governments are also not held accountable for the ways in which they offer or fail to offer aid. O’Grada notes that foreign aid is rarely disinterested. He quotes US Senator Hubert Humphrey as saying “Food is power!” in reference to US foreign assistance. He further cites the 1974 example of the United States holding back aid to Bangladesh until it ceased exporting jute to Cuba. When American food arrived it was “too late for famine victims”.

The eventual elimination of famine is dependent on the continued economic and political development of impoverished nations. National governments, which can be held accountable by their constituents, have incentives to prevent such disasters. The problem for the time being, however, is how the international aid regime should address food crises. O’Grada’s book, while briefly laying out these issues, does little to help the reader puzzle through their complex implications. If international NGOs and foreign aid remain the major avenues for famine relief, we must recognise the inherently political nature of those organisations, their intentions, and their accountability. This accountability should not run from the NGO director to the foreign donor, as it currently does. Rather, donors and NGOs should be accountable to famine victims, the very people they are trying to help.

Amreeta Mathai is reading for an MPhil in Development Studies at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. She is a contributing editor of the Oxonian Review.

Matt Charman
The Observer
Directed by Richard Eyre
The National Theatre until July 8

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When seasoned election observer Fiona Russell (Anna Chancellor) encourages a man who has been savagely beaten for ferrying people to the polls to use a van to carry even greater numbers, her faith in the power of elections to achieve democracy seems callously short-sighted. The man’s mother, who has brought a bloodied rearview mirror to Russell and her team of international observers in the hopes that they will do something about the violence, is mortified at the suggestion; she literally cannot understand Russell, who assures her loudly and slowly in English that her son’s actions should make her proud.

This scene in Matt Charman’s new play The Observer throws the tensions surrounding the role of electoral observers into relief. As the title suggests, the play is primarily concerned with the electoral umpires responsible for determining whether the process of an election are sufficiently “free and fair” to consider the results valid. In the aforementioned scene, the woman’s unrealistic faith in the observers’ powers highlights the limited authority that they wield in a local context despite the possible significance of their findings. This dynamic underpins a central concern of the play, the dissonance between the observers’ idealized conception of elections and the imperfect manner in which they are inevitably executed.

The bureaucratic task of electoral monitoring might not seem to be the stuff of high drama. The observers are hardly dashing heroes, clothed, as they are, in uniforms of blue polo shirts and khaki pants, with officious laminated identity tags hung from their necks. The play reveals, however, that the observers are routinely placed in situations where they must make snap judgments based largely on their own intuition. This puts a strain on the team and calls into question their legitimacy when quick decisions are shown to have important consequences.

A strong ensemble cast under the direction of Richard Eyre ably explores the ways in which the observers and locals negotiate personal and professional objectives. In a tense face-off with an army general, Russell strives to get the incumbent to accept electoral defeat while the general seeks to define the terms of his concession. The shock that flits across the face of her interpreter highlights the extent to which she has brazenly taken on responsibility to engage him on matters beyond her remit.

Charman paints the work of the international electoral observer team as a highly subjective and immensely difficult task. The interpretative nature of the observers’ work is captured in a scene where Russell and her team of two argue over what to include in their report. Should they include reports that student opposition supporters were intimidated and forced to eat their placards? Was this shown to materially have affected the elections? Once one accepts that standards of fair elections are often set impossibly high, and that that impossibility often leads to a slackening of the criteria for assessment, such judgments are almost dangerously arbitrary.

The impartiality of Russell’s decisions is threatened, however, not by unrealistic monitoring criteria, but by her preferences for the opposition candidate. She puts more stock in the possibilities offered by a change in leadership than the prospect of continued rule under the ogre-ish autocrat who ruled the country before the onset of multiparty electoral competition. Motivated by these preferences, she convinces the electoral commission to allow her team to register more voters in between the first closely contested elections and the next round run-off.

Blind to the degree of her involvement, she defends her action in terms of a principled interest in enabling citizens to vote. This tension drives the plot as Russell struggles to deny the true implications of her action, evoking the travails of numerous other naïve protagonists such as Alden Pyle in The Quiet American. Chancellor gives a convincing portrayal of an emotionally inaccessible workaholic, self-righteously executing her office out of a blind faith in the power and importance of elections. To the extent that her breakdown in the second half becomes tiresomely weepy, it is a weakness of the plot, which, in a moralizing turn toward tragedy, overdoes her descent into dejection.

Placing the play in a “fictitious, Igbo-speaking, former colony in West Africa”, Charman runs the risk of distorting the intricacies of the continent. He skirts this danger with credibly complex characters, successfully avoiding the misrepresentations that could so easily riddle a play about conflict in Africa. A scene where Russell confronts the electoral commission to ask if she can help them register more voters could easily have become a cliché: the defender of democracy, facing off against lazy, self-interested African office-bearers. As the episode unfolds, however, our faith in her is undermined by her self-righteousness, even as she betrays her inferior knowledge of the country’s electoral law. In turn, we become more sympathetic to the commissioners as we realise their commitment to ensuring peace in their country.

Ultimately, the play offers a pessimistic view of elections and democratization, suggesting that a competitive struggle for the people’s vote is necessary but not sufficient to create a democratic system of government. The Observer reminds us of the human aspect of a subject often deadened by statistics, showing how a democratic procedure that has become routine in many developed countries can be a battleground in others.

Tumi Makgetla is reading for an MPhil Politics in Comparative Government at New College, Oxford. She is a contributing editor of the Oxonian Review.

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Last month, the newly elected poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy told an audience of schoolgirls in Manchester that the MP expenses scandal was “just too much of an open goal for me so I’ll wait for something a bit more subtle to write about.” But evidently, Duffy has decided that she won’t follow in Cristiano Ronaldo’s footsteps. This week, Duffy “leaps into [the] expenses row” with “Politics”, a poem published on the front page of the Guardian. She writes: “…How it takes the breath/away, the piss, makes of your kiss a dropped pound coin….” She could have been writing about the poet laureate post itself: predecessor Andrew Motion (that’s Sir Andrew now) said the job was “very, very damaging to my work” and left him with a five-year case of writer’s block. Does Duffy’s first foray—after her pledge to lay off the topic—suggest she’s suffering the same?

Got Milk? The term “writer’s block” was coined by the Austrian Jewish psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler, a Freud follower who fled from Hitler and set up shop in New York in the late 1930s. The condition was caused by “entrapment in rage over the milk-denying pre-Oedipal mother.” This week, the New Yorker’s Joan Acocella traces the treatment of writer’s block through the ages. Apparently, Prozac is a mixed bag: “some report that the drugs tend to eliminate their desire to write together with their regret over not doing so.”

Following Holden’s Path. As Acocella points out, not every writer who retreats from the literary stage is a “block” victim. JD Salinger hasn’t published a piece since 1965, but he says he is prolific in private. “I love to write and I assure you I write regularly”, Salinger said in 1980. “But I write for myself and I want to be left absolutely alone to do it.”

The end of Salinger’s masterpiece Catcher in the Rye finds protagonist Holden Caulfield in a rehab facility (”a sanatorium, where he has gone because of a fear that he has t.b., not a mental hospital”, as the New Yorker noted). Now, the New York Post reveals that Salinger “is holed up in a rehab facility” as well. The tabloid reported this week that Salinger “has to communicate in longhand because he has gone totally deaf.” The information comes from his longtime literary agent, Phyllis Westberg, who has filed an affidavit in the lawsuit to block an unauthorized Catcher sequel from being published. (The affidavit is posted online at TheSmokingGun.com.) Salinger won a court case in the 1980s to keep his private letters out of print, and the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog reports that in the current suit, “the Salinger camp might have a good leg to stand on” (as opposed to Salinger himself, who broke his hip last week).

The Talented Miss Highsmith. Speaking of reclusive American writers, crime novelist Patricia Highsmith “never became popular in the US“, Michael Dirda writes in the NYRB. At least, not until 1999, four years after her death, when Matt Damon and Jude Law starred in the film adaptation of Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Now, a re-release of her Ripley novels—all 1,520 pages packed into one boxed set—has brought Highsmith’s reputation to a posthumous peak. Oprah Winfrey is a fan: “If you have only one summer vacation, spend it with Tom Ripley“, according to the daytime TV diva’s O magazine. The New York Times calculates that, if Tom Ripley was 25 when Highsmith wrote her first installment in 1954, then “he celebrates his 80th birthday in 2009“. Dirda credits Highsmith for writing “perhaps…the first…novel about lesbians [that] ends happily“: The Price of Salt, which was published pseudonymously in 1952 (and, as Terry Castle speculates in Slate, which perhaps inspired the cross-country car-trip in Lolita). The English critic AN Wilson is a convert as well. As he writes:

[W]hen the dust has settled and when the chronicle of twentieth-century American literature comes to be written, history will place Highsmith at the top of the pyramid.

Speaking of AN Wilson and conversion, Wilson—once an avowed atheist and the author of God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization—is featured in the Wall Street Journal’s Houses of Worship column under the headline “Look Who’s a Believer Now“. He has recanted his recanting in a New Statesman essay.

Look Who’s Got “Major Backing” Now. We don’t mean to revive the debate over in-house favouritism in the nonfiction section of the New York Times Book Review. (Times in-house watchdog Byron Calame pointed out in 2005 that one-tenth of the nonfiction titles in the paper’s “100 Notable Books of the Year” were written by Times employees.) But we would like to shift the debate over to the fiction side. This past week, The Times published two positive reviews of Commencement—the fictional debut by NYT researcher J. Courtney Sullivan—within the span of two days! On 11 June, Janet Maslin called Commencement “one of the year’s most inviting summer novels“. On 12 June, Maria Russo joined the chorus: “Sullivan’s gifts are substantial“. (Russo, to her credit, did note that at times the novel is a tad “too earnest”.) And if that wasn’t enough, NYTimes.com featured a fawning Q&A with Sullivan last week. (The questions—”what are you working on?”; “what is a typical day in your writing life?”—aren’t exactly hard-hitting.) This is on top of Nicholas Kristof’s proclamation on The Times website in March that Commencement is a “terrific” book that marks “the launch of a literary career“. Sullivan once wrote a piece for The Times on Cara Birnbaum’s Universal Beauty, which she described as “a book…with major backing“. She might as well have been describing her own.

Kristof Strikes Back. Speaking of Nicholas Kristof, the Magdalen College alumnus might have thought that Commencement was “terrific”, but he doesn’t have kind words to say about Mahmood Mamdani’s Survivors and Strangers, which was reviewed by Marc Gustafson in the 11 May edition of ORB. (Incidentally, Mamdani doesn’t have kind words to say about Kristof either. Two years ago, Mamdani wrote in the London Review of Books that “Kristof’s columns…mirror the ideology of Arab supremacism in Sudan by demonising entire communities”.) This week, Kristof takes to the pages of the New York Review of Books and blasts “Mamdani’s error-filled polemic“. Kristof questions whether Mamdani even bothered to fact-check the book. For instance, where did Mamdani get the idea that Darfur was a member of the League of Nations? (It was not.) Mamdani acknowledges on the Social Science Research Council blog that he “reproduced [it] from a Communist Party publication“. Talk about being “caught red-handed“!

James Joyce, IRA? John Walsh (not anti-crime activist John Walsh of “America’s Most Wanted” fame but anti-Derek Walcott activist John Walsh of Padel-gate fame) reviews Ulysses and Us (see Scarlett Baron’s take-down in last week’s Oxonian Review) and concludes that author Declan Kiberd spends too much time trying to “infer [Irish] Republican sympathies” in Joyce’s masterpiece. The Irish Times (famous for its lack of Irish Republican sympathies—it called for the execution of the Easter Rising rebels in 1916) reviews Ulysses and Us and concludes that it is a “beautiful, joyful book about a beautiful, joyful book“. The Seattle-based Stranger reviews Ulysses (yes, it’s 87 years late—but the alternative weekly paper wasn’t around in 1922) and concludes that the book is “an act of terrorism against the English“. Meanwhile, Dedalus devotees from Hungary to Buffalo celebrate Bloomsday this Tuesday, 16 June, the 105th anniversary of the (fictional) events of Ulysses. (US troops stationed in Kyrgystan jumped the gun and kicked off their Bloomsday celebration last month.)

A Day in the Life of James Joyce. Dedalus’s creator would say that he had a “good day at the desk” if he had managed to eek out “three sentences”. (Of course, if Joyce maintained his rate of 12,931 words in a sentence, that might be a good day indeed.) Alexander Raban Waugh, the brother of Evelyn, could churn out 24,000 words a week if he was “popping some benzedrine“. And Joyce Carol Oates could write 40 pages a day at her peak, according to the New Yorker’s Louis Menand. In a survey of academic creative writing programmes, Menand classifies Oates as a “program product“—which is not quite accurate: she teaches in the creative writing faculty at Princeton but her own MA from the University of Wisconsin was in English. Menand explains that American universities began to grant degrees in creative writing after World War II to tap the flood of tuition assistance funds pouring out of Washington under the GI Bill. Even so, creative writing programs cost a pretty penny: the flagship Iowa Writers’ Workshop is $21,467 (£13,088) per year for out-of-state students. That’s nearly double the rate that non-EU students pay at Oxford, although it’s all for naught if the programmes are, as novelist Nelson Algren claimed, “worthless“.