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David J. Nightingale is a fine art and commercial photographer and post-production instructor.

A great Victorian art critic, arbiter of the nation’s taste, suddenly turns his intellect and wits on the orthodoxies of the day — in this case, the revered science of political economy. In a series of four articles published in a popular, widely read periodical the critic condemns the very epistemological basis of classical economics. It is, he says, “the most cretinous, speechless, paralysing plague that has yet touched the brains of mankind”. His once docile, admiring and thoroughly middle-class audience is horrified. He is, in his own words, “reprobated in a violent manner”. He is denounced in the press variously as “crazy and ignorant”, “a womanish man, who has run foul of a scientific truth”, “a mere baby”, “a mad governess”, and so forth. But the man does not relent. He spends a good part of the rest of his life lecturing and writing on society and economy. He stubbornly describes his economic writings as “probably the best I shall ever write”. That, in short, is the story of John Ruskin’s foolhardy foray into social criticism. The four articles, a call to infuse economics with affection and morality, were published in the Cornhill magazine as Unto this Last, from August to November of 1860. In time, more sympathetic ears would transform his words into action: his message would inspire Octavia Hill, Gandhi, and scores of other acolytes.

Like his contemporary, Charles Dickens, Ruskin was a restless visionary ill at ease with the blind confidence and complacency of his times. Many in the press yoked them together in vituperative attacks: “the gospel of John Ruskin and of Charles Dickens” was “sentimentalism that paralysed the soul”. Ruskin endorsed Dickens in Unto this Last: “The essential value and truth of Dickens’s writings have been unwisely lost sight of by many thoughtful persons… He is entirely right in his main drift and purpose in every book he has written; and all of them… should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions”. Like many others, such as George Holyoake, F. D. Maurice and Frederic Harrison, they saw through the comfortable mid-Victorian equipoise and acutely felt the pain and suffering of the ordinary worker. We have seen similar misguided confidence in our time: at the turn of the last millennium it seemed that the world had seen the end of contentions, the end of ideology, the very “end of history”. Even now, Steven Pinker would have us rejoice in the long-term decline of violence. Yet after the events of the first decade of this millennium, and the continuing crises of our present decade, we would be foolish to forget what Ruskin and Dickens came to realise: that we cannot rest idle, content with the achievements of so-called civilization, and that we should always strain to hear the needy cries of our fellow men.

In a time of Occupy Wall Street, of justified rage at obscene bankers’ bonuses, of fiery scepticism about the workings of capitalism, Ruskin deserves to be heard once more. Infused with a wrenching sense of moral outrage, the searching questions, childlike proddings and terrible anger of Unto this Last are the very exemplar of attitudes that we need to spur reform of our fallen world. Ruskin felt no shame in being scorned, savaged and ridiculed, because his cause was just and right; and neither should we, in our pursuit of justice and rightness. Ruskin reminds us all of our essential humanity. What matters are not inviolable, supposedly scientific laws and mechanical workings, it is the “Soul … an unknown quantity [which] enters all the political economist’s equations, without his knowledge, and falsifies every one of his results”. A boss or CEO is the “governor of the men employed by him … invested with a distinctly paternal authority and responsibility”. Political economy is not about the individual accumulation of wealth: “it is impossible to conclude, of any given mass of acquired wealth, merely by the fact of its existence, whether it signifies good or evil to the nation in the midst of which it exists”. The workings of our economy should teach nations and their people “to desire and labour for the things which lead to life … to scorn and destroy the things that lead to destruction”. Ultimately,

THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.

The words of the Master ring out as if they had been written just yesterday.

Daryl Lim is studying history at St Hilda’s College.

The Maccabees
Given to the Wild
Fiction, January 2012

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With typical hyperbole, the NME last month described Given to the Wild by The Maccabees as “the first classic album of 2012”. “By casting themselves to the flames”, the magazine’s reviewer wrote, the band “have forged an identity more purely them than ever”. Another review for The Fly magazine talked about the record’s “sweeping stamp of maturity” and “affective emotion”.

This is not the place to draw attention to the preponderance of tautology and confused writing in the British music press. However, it might be worth considering exactly what The Maccabees’ supposed mature classicism amounts to. Indeed, if Given to the Wild is truly a definitive summary of British alternative rock music in 2012, then we should be able to use it to compile a list of the genre’s key tenets.

With this thought in mind, The Oxonian Review has examined the album, and is able to identify the following Five Pillars of 2012 British Indie:

1) Vocal affectation. Something strange has happened to the voices of the nation’s youth. Maccabees frontman Orlando Weeks yelps lyrics rather than sings them, as though drawing attention to the “idiosyncrasy” we all know is a clear sign that we are in the presence of Serious Pop Music. Perhaps this is what The Fly means by “affective emotion”. It’s a sort of meta-singing, an emotional emotion, an attempt to transcend the art of song by focusing solely on the human voice as an instrument of exquisite affectation. In case you weren’t aware already, Given to the Wild is a high-concept project.

2) Camouflaged poshness. The second point is closely related to the first. Privately-educated upper-middle-class people from London like The Maccabees have probably always talked in braying, nasal tones. But to enter the elite of 2012 British Indie, Given to the Wild suggests, we must combine a pedigree of indoctrinated R.P. grandiloquence with gestures at gritty cockney bathos. The result is a vocal delivery and overall aesthetic that conjures images of Kate Middleton doing a Jamie Oliver impersonation. The Maccabees like cricket and rugby rather than football, but their clever balance of exaggerated parochialism and urban pluck helps to paper over such privileged credentials.

3) Pastiche and formal repetitiveness. In the eyes of the NME, Given to the Wild represents “a brave sci-fi dawn”. However, without wishing to pour scorn on this succinct conflation of several different clichés, I would like to urge that scepticism be applied to hopes of a Maccabees-led futurist insurgency. Sadly I could detect no real signs of innovation within the formal confines of the album, only composite pastiches of the last thirty years of alternative rock music, though there were occasional attempts to depart from post-Libertines conservatism into the territory of hipster dilletantism. This may have been “the Wild” referred to in the title.

4) The persistence of the guitar band mythos. To give credit where credit is due, at times during the course of the album it seemed as though that The Maccabees were trying to do something genuinely progressive. However, there will inevitably be something self-defeating about attempting to move on from a culture of guitar-band commercialism when you are still being packaged and sold as an orthodox guitar band on a Universal Music Group subsidiary label. As far as making an avant-garde statement goes, I felt the band were severely hampered in this respect.

5) The lack of political engagement/any discernible worldview whatsoever. Opinion varies widely on the desirability or otherwise of political art. But surely everyone would agree that some sort of ethos or attitude to life on the part of the artist is an important part of aesthetic experience, especially in an “independent” art form with a proud heritage of counter-cultural dissent. Does Given to the Wild come with a discernible philosophy attached? Or even a thought or two about something or other? A band with a name as richly allusive as The Maccabees seems to promise a re-engagement with vital issues like religion, politics, and cultural history. However, a quick glance at Wikipedia undermines hopes of uncovering a Maccabees worldview: “The band came up with the name by flicking through the Bible and picking out a random word”. Somewhere in this metaphor of meaninglessness is the Fifth Pillar of British Indie in 2012.

Alex Niven is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. Alex is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Geoffrey Hill
Clavics
Enitharmon Press, 2011
40 pages
£12.00
ISBN 978-1907587115

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Given Geoffrey Hill’s current reputation as a “difficult” poet, it’s easy to forget how reader-friendly, lucid, and accommodating he could once be. Here are two stanzas from the opening of Hill’s book-length poem The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983), written in memory of the French poet killed in World War I:

Crack of a starting-pistol. Jean Jaurés

Dies in a wine-puddle. Who or what stares

Through the café window crêped in powder smoke?

The bill for the new farce reads Sleepers Awake.
…

Did Péguy kill Juarés? Did he incite

The assassin? Must men stand by what they write

As by their camp-beds or their weaponry

Or shell-shocked comrades while they saga and cry?

And here is the first stanza of Hill’s most recent book-length poem, Clavics (2011), written, a helpful dust-jacket blurb informs us, in memory of “William Lawes the Royalist musician, killed at the battle of Chester”:

Bring torch for Cabbalah brand new treatise

Numerology also makes much sense,

O, Astrea

Watch us conform

To the immense

Lore, hypertense

Attaching to the swarm-

Ing mass the dense fluctuations of the material

Out from which I shall be lucky to twitch

Creative fire.

See where who goes?

Astrea, bitch!—

Suffices what she does

Returning rich

To the low threshold of contemplation

Her servile master subsisting on scraps

Keeping station

As one pursuing ethics perhaps.

Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not. I really can’t say, and I bet you can’t either. The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy began (literally) with a bang, but it also did an admirable job of filling readers in on relevant historical and biographical details without making them feel that they were being lectured, and without resorting to footnotes. Faced with an opening stanza like the one above, readers of Clavics can only hold on for dear life and hope things get clearer as they go along.

And at first it seems there’s reason to hope things might: “Clavics”, according to the mock definition that Hill provides from the “Oxford English Dictionary, 2012,” is “[t]he science or alchemy of keys”, and the poet and critic Ernest Hilbert has suggested that, taken together, the two stanzas of each section (the form of the second stanza in each case is modelled on George Herbert’s “Easter Wings”) are meant to resemble a key, or perhaps a key and keyhole. Perhaps, as door after door is opened, it will become increasingly clear what Hill is talking about. Certainly the second part of Section One is a model of clarity, if only compared to what came before:

Intensive prayer ís intensive care

Herbert says. I take it stress marks

Convey less care than flair

Shewing the works

As here

But if

Distressed attire

Be mere affect of clef

Dump my clavic books in the mire

And yes bid me strut myself off a cliff

One recognises the characteristics of Hill’s late style—the defensive attempt to disarm the reader and critic by defying them, the allusions that are so prevalent as to resemble a nervous tic, and an honest attempt to rehabilitate or redeem the sloganeering of contemporary language. George Herbert’s marvellous sonnet “Prayer” compares its subject to everything under the sun—and beyond the stars—so why not “intensive care”? There’s a formidable intelligence and powerful personality on display in this stanza, and had the poem continued on like this, it might have been worth the effort.

But the bulk of Clavics turns out to be extraordinarily difficult, almost impossible, to parse, and all too many passages that do yield up paraphrasable sense read like implausible headlines or mnemonic devices, as though they had been composed according to an Old-Norse verse form after one too many quaffs of mead: “Erasmus, in Praise of Folly: / Grand antidote no substitute for bling”; “Richard Dadd dab hand at Prize Depiction”; “Straw men in flagrante folk-upbraided”. It’s not that one can’t identify some of the themes to which Hill has dealt with so often throughout his career, particularly the relation between political power (violence) and art. The problem, rather, is that what he says about these topics here so often verges on gibberish.

For the many critics who have regarded Hill’s work since The Triumph of Love (1998) as a descent into grouchy obscurantism, Clavics will read like one more stage in a great poet’s decline. My own baffled incomprehension when faced with the work at hand is a slightly different case. While I’ve found none of Hill’s later works easy, I do think that a reasonably open-minded reader (particularly one sympathetic to high modernist literature) can find much value in them. The critical consensus has rightly regarded Speech! Speech! (2000) as Hill’s most rebarbative and difficult work up until this point, but even in that book, there are passages of great descriptive beauty as well as a spiky rhetorical power:

Reformation woodcuts enscrolled such things

between the lips of magistrates, prophets,

and visionary infants. To me it sounds

like communications breakdown, somebody

promoting his (say her) fanatical

expressionless self-creation on a stuck track.

Our show-host has died many times; the words

of welcome dismiss us.

Anomie is as good a word as any;

so pick any; who on earth will protest?

Whatever is said now I shall believe it

of the unnamed god.

The idea of playing this kind of clenched, fragmentary utterance across an intricate metrical and visual pattern, as Hill has done in Clavics, is an intriguing one. But as much as it pains me to say it, this new work does not contain one successful passage of the same length as the above. Now and then pieces bob up, like flotsam from a wreck, that recall Hill at his best:

Listen to and make music while you can

Pray Mater ora Filium

Cry Spem in Alium

God is made man

Choric

Lyric

Heaven Receives

Impartially these tributes

Creation call it that believes

Even to blasphemy in our ranged throats

On every page there are lines that crackle with intelligence : “Untenable still the timeless values”; “Virtues by will / Without them let us call plunder plenty”; “But one / Candle lit on / The well-iced birthday slab, so be my guest.” However, Clavics is a mistake that few poets now living would have the talent to make, but it is no less a mistake for that.

I can’t help thinking that this new poem is intended to express its own impossibility. Hill seems to be saying: Look, I have taken as my poem’s ostensible subject a musician; I have written said poem in a tightly rhymed form that is also a visual emblem; I have alluded to George Herbert, who was both a gifted musician and the English poet who married form to content more perfectly than any other. Further, I have cast my poem in 32 sections, 32 being the number of paths of wisdom in the Cabbala, as well as being one shy of the Christologically significant 33. None of that will help, though, since I, the poet, am writing in an age of “anarchical plutocracy” (to use William Morris’s term), when language has become so cheapened by politicians and the media that one can scarcely use it honestly without endless qualifications and self-recriminations. If parody and self-parody become indistinguishable, and I end up writing lines that are at once bad poetry and bad ad copy, so be it. Ich kann nicht anders.

The haunting dust-jacket photo for Clavics depicts a barn owl returning to its nest with wings spread wide, a living mouse dangling from its beak. The owl seems to wear a pleased expression on its face. The image would have been an apt emblem for nearly any of Hill’s previous works, obsessed as they have been with power, bloodshed, and sacrifice. Given the owl’s association with learning and scholarship, though, I wonder if the image doesn’t also serve as a warning to the hapless reader. As the book proceeded and my bafflement increased, I increasingly identified with the mouse’s predicament borne up to its dark end.

Bill Coyle is the author of the poetry collection The God of This World to His Prophet (2006) and recipient of a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (2010).

Suzanne Mettler
The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies are Undermining American Democracy
University of Chicago Press, 2011
176 pages
£9.50
ISBN 978-0226521657

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The Submerged State: Atlantis? No, a slim and highly readable volume in which Suzanne Mettler describes how certain public policies have become highly resistant to reform and damaging to American democracy. By “submerged state” Mettler means a set of indirect government subsidies and benefits whose size and beneficiaries, indeed whose very existence, is largely invisible to the public. Some types of governmental intervention are highly visible: most citizens are aware that they exist and know something about what they are, how they work, and who benefits from them, for instance, the veterans’ benefits offered by the G.I. Bill. Others are more “submerged”: hidden, either because they are channelled through private delivery organizations or because they come to citizens in the form of indirect subsidies and tax rebates rather than through direct governmental spending. Hence such policies are typically misunderstood and ignored by citizens but defended tenaciously by the private lobbying groups whose interests they serve. These features of the submerged state reduce citizens’ trust in government and inculcate passivity and resentment. They reduce citizens’ ability to form meaningful opinions about acts of governance or to engage in advocacy, thereby damaging the vibrancy of American democracy. Mettler’s concise book examines three parts of the American submerged state—subsidised bank-based student lending, private healthcare, and tax expenditures—and details the Obama administration’s efforts to reform them. It is not a pretty picture. Her assessment is that Obama has successfully eliminated submerged policies only in the field of student lending, and that in other areas he has perpetuated or even expanded the submerged state.

Opinion polling demonstrates that citizens are largely unaware of the existence of the submerged state; consequently they do not give government due credit for its intervention or hold it to account in an informed way. Mettler cites an alarming 2008 poll in which respondents were asked whether they had “ever used a government social program”, and then whether they had used any of a specified list of individual programmes. Clear majorities of the beneficiaries of submerged social policies—including tax deferred savings, lifetime learning tax credits, student loans, and child care tax credits—claimed that they had never used a “government social program”. Certainly this result may in part reflect the wording of the question and a familiar anti-government cultural trope, but Mettler’s analysis points to deep-seated and systematic misperceptions on the part of submerged state beneficiaries (although what the 25% of food stamp recipients who also reported they had “never used a government social program” were thinking is anyone’s guess).

The left should take note. One of the corollaries of Mettler’s book is that the existence of the submerged state acts as a systematic barrier to proper recognition of government intervention. The right has most assiduously promoted tax breaks and private delivery mechanisms that veil government intervention. Perhaps unintentionally, Mettler’s term for such policies, “the submerged state”, sounds exactly the note of chilly state conspiracy that supporters of the right fear. Mettler shows how Republican politicians, along with increasing numbers of Democratic accomplices, have expanded the submerged state because it gives the appearance of privatization and governmental spending restraint, when in reality it represents vast outlays by government in subsidy payments and lost tax revenues. Such outlays are far greater than for many visible social policies, and since the submerged state is hidden from view, politicians have a great deal more knowledge of its true cost than their ordinary supporters do. Mettler’s book is chiefly about the strains this knowledge gap places on democracy, but there is at least an implicit invitation to ponder the partisan paradox presented by the right’s embrace of the sneaky submerged state.

In his A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (2009) Brian Balogh argued that progressives should embrace the hidden state because Americans demand it. Mettler’s book provides several reasons to question Balogh’s judgement. The idea of a limited government is an American cultural touchstone, but tax breaks, tax expenditures, and corporate and individual subsidies involve billions of dollars worth of taxpayer money and require substantial governmental involvement in, for instance, the markets for healthcare and higher education loans. Moreover many submerged policies disproportionately benefit the rich. In a series of fascinating experiments Mettler conducted, subjects were asked whether they favoured or opposed various submerged policies. Initially, large majorities favoured the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction, a tax break for mortgage costs. But when some participants were given information about the unequal distribution of HMID benefits, opinion in this group became strongly opposed. Citizens are largely unaware that the submerged state fosters inequality; if they were to be provided with this information they would not give it their support.

Interestingly, for a third group of participants who were given only a perfunctory summary of the policy and no information about the distribution of benefits, opinion became even more favourable toward the HMID and other regressive policies than for the control group who were given no information at all. The basic information treatment was intended to mimic statements that politicians routinely offer about the policies of the submerged state. As Mettler points out, the type and amount of information conveyed is of critical importance. Since the basic information was couched in terms of broad groups with a positive image, such as homeowners or workers saving for retirement, it naturally provoked a positive response from the participants. Only high levels of information encourage citizens to hold the government to account for submerged state policies. At this point and at others the reader is struck by the scope of Mettler’s demands for submerged state reform, and her book may well leave many with doubts about its practicability. The administration of a 1000-person telephone survey by scholars is one thing; transplanting the high information treatment to the real world of spending cuts and Fox News is quite another. Mettler’s assessment of Obama’s attempts to reform the submerged state shows that reformers face an uphill struggle. During the battle for healthcare reform, for instance, reformers were able to pass legislation only with a relatively high degree of cooperation from powerful vested interests, and the reform itself amounted to a reorganization of existing submerged policies rather than their elimination.

The Submerged State is a call for change and not just a scholarly volume. Mettler argues that in order to move toward a “more visible and vibrant democracy”, the role of vested interests should be reconfigured, political communication should reveal to the public what is at stake, and policies and their delivery should be redesigned to make governance more visible to citizens. It is a laudable laundry list and Mettler’s book makes a highly persuasive case for change—the submerged state is largely economically regressive, detrimental to citizens’ knowledge and agency, and often expensive. For instance, by switching from subsidised bank-based lending to direct public lending in the market for student loans the Obama administration saved $43 billion. Unhelpfully, from the perspective of opponents like Mettler, the policies of the submerged state are sometimes both desired and worthy of desire. People are often irrational and have poor self control. They want to lose weight but do not stop eating pudding, or they want a comfortable pension but do not take the right steps to save for retirement. Behavioural economists advise that gently nudging people to make the right choices through tax breaks and other hidden mechanisms can have various positive outcomes. The submerged state helps to increase consumption, boost job creation, encourage home buying, and stimulate the economy. Mettler’s point, in essence, is that pudding, pensions, and prosperity may sometimes be fostered or improved by the submerged state, but that democratic engagement, participation, and accountability are damaged, and these must take precedence.

Whether the reader accepts Mettler’s trade-off will depend in part on whether their conception of democracy is primarily concerned with participation or with the selection of leaders. Even if Mettler’s trade-off and participatory vision of democracy are accepted, her prescriptions are a hard recessionary sell. Progressives may worry about the imposition of Mettler’s post-materialist prescriptions on the average working American. Such handwringing is misplaced. Mettler demonstrates convincingly that the submerged state perpetuates economic inequality as well as confusion, ignorance, and apathy. The average citizen would benefit greatly if, as far as possible, Mettler’s prescriptions for the reduction of the submerged state were to be effected.

Ursula Hackett is reading for a DPhil in Politics and International Relations at Harris Manchester College, Oxford.

Jeffrey Eugenides
The Marriage Plot
Fourth Estate, 2011
416 pages.
£20.00
ISBN 978-0007441297

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Jeffrey Eugenides’s previous work hasn’t exactly shied away from bookishness. His 2002 novel, Middlesex, for instance, mentions French philosopher Michel Foucault on its first page. But The Marriage Plot, his latest, takes this tendency to an extreme. “To start with,” it begins, “look at all the books.” The books in question are the personal library of one Madeleine Hanna, at this point about to graduate from Brown University. The library includes “the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father” and “the first edition of [John Updike's] Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honours thesis on the marriage plot.” This is a kind of prospectus for the novel: the next 400 pages will display the mores of the upper classes and the “international theme” (hence the James), that genre of modern American fiction we might term the white male novelist’s guide to sex (hence the Updike), and a rather by-the-numbers metatextuality (hence the appearance of the honours thesis and the title a hundred words in).

The novel commences in 1982, and its first section is dedicated to Madeleine’s undergraduate infatuation with structuralist theory, with Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, and with one Leonard Bankhead, a manic-depressive polymath who bears an uncanny resemblance to Eugenides’s friend, the late David Foster Wallace. Their relationship, which reaches an early crisis in an argument over Barthes’s analysis of the phrase “I love you”, comes to overshadow her graduation. Throughout the novel characters will confuse their grad school problems with their personal and romantic ones. This is a source of comedy throughout:

Though auditing a class at the Sorbonne taught by Luce Irigiray and titled The Mother-Daughter Relationship: The Darkest of Dark Continents, Claire had followed maternal example by setting out guest towels.

And yet such allusiveness is not exactly, or not solely, a joke. The novel is marked by a continued process of reference to other texts; in some places the injunction to “look at all the books” is nine-tenths of the information we need to decipher the plot.

When Leonard’s rival Mitchell Grammaticus first appears, he is reciting a prayer, which the narrator notes the reader may be familiar with from J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. Throughout the novel characters are introduced with paperbacks in hand, from cameos like the “girl with stiff pink hair…smoking a clove cigarette and reading Invisible Cities” to plot-determining episodes like the following: “One Sunday morning, before winter break, Abby’s boyfriend, Whitney, materialized at their kitchen table, reading something called Of Grammatology.” Some characters seem to be the result of central casting: the reader can predict the exact dimensions of one of Eugenides’s caricatures from the fact she’s introduced reading New French Feminisms. This last episode takes place in Paris, in one of two sections following Mitchell around Europe and Asia as he thinks about Madeleine and whether to enter divinity school. Inevitably, we’re given the list of books he packs, “a cache that included The Imitation of Christ, The Confessions of St. Augustine, Saint Teresa’s Interior Castle”, amongst others; and yet the book which has the greatest effect on him is Something Beautiful for God, an illustrated introduction to Mother Teresa. In the second of these sections Mitchell establishes himself as a volunteer at Teresa’s Home for Dying Destitutes, Calcutta. His attempts at theology and charity are the only point at which a character’s aspirations move beyond marriage or further education.

Meanwhile, Madeleine and Leonard are residing at the latter’s postgraduate placement, a laboratory near Cape Cod, trying to deal with the effects of Leonard’s illness on their relationship. It’s here, 150 pages into the novel, that Leonard starts to diverge from his model, to develop as a character in his own right. Unfortunately, he is a profoundly unpleasant one. A charitable interpretation is that Eugenides intended a sympathetic portrait of a remarkable intelligence in thrall to illness; what emerges, however, is a rather dated version of the trope of the mentally ill person as arch-manipulator. Leonard calculates that proposing marriage to Madeleine is “the solution to all his problems, romantic, financial, and strategic”. Their marriage is, unsurprisingly, ill-fated; their honeymoon, disintegrative. Leonard will disappear in Monte Carlo and reappear with no memory of his missing days, having been seen, meanwhile, in a brothel; this follows a scene in Nice which is, in Eugenides’s description, only a couple of face-saving clauses from a portrayal of marital rape.

G.K. Chesterton once commented on the unfriendly caricature of Leigh Hunt in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Dickens, says Chesterton, might not have been suggesting “suppose Hunt had been a rascal”; rather, he was fancying, “suppose a rascal had behaved like Hunt”. Eugenides denies vigorously that he ever meant to base Leonard upon Wallace, despite the biographical correspondences and highly specific details like Leonard’s absurd dependence on chewing tobacco to mitigate the side effects of his medication. Ultimately, what prompted Eugenides to incorporate his friend in such a fashion is probably beyond the realm of criticism. Yet it’s been an unavoidable feature of the novel’s reception. At any rate, perhaps ultimately this disproportion is engendered by weaknesses in the novel itself: Leonard Bankhead’s resemblance to a particular person is so pronounced, so hard to avoid, because a lot of the time Madeleine Hanna resembles no one at all.

Eugenides has always written about female experience, but in both his previous novels, narrative and form have worked together to acknowledge the problems inherent in doing so. For one thing, in both The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, life as a woman ends during adolescence: in the latter by gender-reassignment surgery; in the former, more straightforwardly, in the manner of the title. And in both books the stance of the narrator—the confused outsider’s viewpoint in Suicides, the adult Cal’s ironic detachment in Middlesex—acknowledges the problem implicit in a male author’s attempt to dramatise female experience. The privileged-youths-consider-grad-school milieu of The Marriage Plot doesn’t seem a great distance from adolescence per se: at one point in the first part Madeleine is “furious at everyone and everything, at her mother…at Leonard for not calling, at the weather for being cold, and at college for ending.” But the over-the-shoulder narration leads to difficulties. At times it’s hard not to see the middle-aged, goateed author on the jacket photo ventriloquising Madeleine: when, for example, Madeleine looks back on her romantic career as an undergraduate, comprising three monogamous relationships and an abortive one-night stand, and sees herself “broken by love, by empty promiscuity, by self-doubt”. Or the above-mentioned scene in Nice, in which Madeline “knew that she shouldn’t let Leonard have sex with her after the way he’d treated her all evening. At the same time, she felt so sad and unwanted that it came as a huge relief to be touched…But she couldn’t say no.” Madeleine is more a passive agent of male desires and ideas than an actor in her own plot. In a book where at least one character is explicitly mocked for an interest in the current state of feminism, the total effect is more than a little queasy.

Near to the novel’s conclusion, Madeleine’s and Leonard’s first fight—over Barthes’s celebrated definition of “I love you” as an empty utterance that “once the first avowal has been made…has no meaning whatsoever”—resurfaces in the language of the romance novel:

Madeleine said nothing because she didn’t know what to say. Even “I love you” seemed inadequate. She’d said this to Leonard so many times in situations like this that she was worried it was losing its power.

It is this banality which constitutes the novel’s singular truth: that things, books, and relationships we’ve intellectually idealised can turn out to be empty when it comes to the real world. Mitchell, in India, finds that he cannot adjust to the life of charity he has imagined as the day-to-day effort of cleaning the sick and dying proves too much for him. And once Leonard has left Madeleine, and Mitchell has reappeared, the marriage plot we’ve been enveloped in all along is invoked once again only to be quietly discarded. Mitchell rather breathlessly telegraphs the entire action of the novel:

From the books you read for your thesis…was there any novel where the heroine gets married to the wrong guy and then realizes it, and then the other suitor shows up, some guy who’s always been in love with her, and then they get together, but finally the second suitor realizes that the last thing the woman needs is to get married again, that she’s got more important things to do with her life…do you think that would be good, as an ending?

But this suggestion that Madeleine might go on to do “more important things” takes place on the last page of the book. Eugenides finds himself stuck: what a Madeleine Hanna might accomplish on her own terms, under her own agency, is beyond the scope of the marriage plot, or at least of The Marriage Plot.

Tom West is reading for an MSt in English Literature at Regent’s Park College, Oxford.

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Soft drinks and cola are ubiquitous in the neighborhood, with many residents drinking at least two cups per day.

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Maputo, Mozambique: Mafalala Bairro is one of about 50 slum suburbs that radiate outward from the bustling concrete downtown of Mozambique’s capital city. Mafalala is Maputo’s oldest informal settlement. To meander along its narrow pathways is to trace the footsteps of numerous national heroes. An incubator of the struggle for independence that is often compared to South Africa’s Soweto, Mafalala consists of labyrinthine alleyways that once surged with anti-colonial resistance. Prior to the end of Portuguese rule, bold poets Noémia de Sousa and José Craveirinha met clandestinely in Mafalala’s haphazard zinc shelters. The neighborhood was also home to Mozambique’s first two presidents, revolutionary fighters Samora Machel and Joaquim Chissano.

A century before Mozambique’s independence, migrants from northern Mozambique and the Comoros Islands introduced rituals called nifalala—meaning “music and dance”—to Mafalala, and the neighborhood never again knew silence. Today, women swathed in capulana cloths and bearing white mussiro-painted faces rehearse Tufo-style routines; teenagers carefully study Azagaia’s socially conscious rap songs blaring from shop speakers; the soulful melodies of Bryan Adams and Phil Collins waft without irony from yards where women pin up laundry; and electric bass vibrates through the walls of Lima’s Bar, where men unwind after the day’s toils.

In Mafalala, the main thoroughfare bursts alive early each morning as women and men set off for ganho-ganho, or grinding itineraries of labor, in the ever-expanding informal economy. Lighthearted chatter in the marketplace and neighbourly drop-ins throughout the afternoon hardly betray the many daily challenges that wear heavily on cheery demeanours. Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in the world, where half of the population falls below the poverty line even in urban areas. The vast majority of Mafalala possesses little sanitation, basic electricity, and few social services. During the rainy season, flooding causes pit latrines to overflow, contaminating the streets as waste flows to open sewers.

Most pressingly, Maputo has the highest cost of living in the country. In September 2010, a price spike in bread was compounded with the elevated cost of fuel and public transport fares. Riots ignited in the avenues along Mafalala’s perimeter, leading to ten deaths and hundreds of injuries after police intervention. Very few of the neighborhood’s impoverished residents have access to land plots, therefore the majority of their income is spent on food purchases. Preparing street food and setting up bancas, or foodstands, have become common ways to supplement incomes. Yet, the rise in food price continues to compromise poor urban dwellers’ ability to purchase quality foods for healthy eating. Growing dependence on cheap alcohol, fried foods, and new processed snacks manufactured in Mozambique exacerbates malnutrition, which paradoxically manifests as both hunger and rising obesity.

While Mozambique remains a predominantly rural country, its urban centres are rapidly expanding, as is the case across Southern Africa. 70% of all urban residents in the region currently reside in informal housing, and Southern Africa will be nearly 75% urbanized by 2050. The ongoing urbanization of poverty necessitates increased attention to the vulnerabilities that urban life brings. Uncertainty regarding the day’s wages and obstacles to adequate nutrition characterize the everyday reality of Maputo’s urban poor.

Nonetheless, vibrant colours, ardent rhythms, and a profound sense of hope permeate the people who call this neighborhood home.

Poet José Craveirinha once wrote of Mafalala:
Só tambor ecoando como a canção da força e da vida

Só tambor noite e dia

dia e noite só tambor

até à consumação da grande festa do batuque!

Oh velho Deus dos homens

deixa-me ser tambor

só tambor!

Only drum echoing the song of strength and life
Only drum night and day
Day and night only drum
Until the consummation of the great dancing feast!
Oh old God of men
Let me be a drum
Only drum!

Serena Stein is an anthropologist and aspiring photographer. She is completing her MPhil in International Development at St Antony’s College, Oxford. In 2011, Serena spent several months living in Maputo, Mozambique where she joined a Tufo dance troupe in Mafalala while researching urban food consumption, prices, and vulnerability. Serena founded Oxford’s Food Security Forum in 2010.

Annabel S. Brett
Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law
Princeton University Press, 2011
242 pages.
£24.95
ISBN 978-0-691-14193-0

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“State” is an extraordinarily polysemous word. One of its myriad meanings is that of a nation or territory considered as a political community. The geographical boundaries of states have generally been determined by wars. The contours of political communities, on the other hand, have always been defined by the system of laws and rights established to preserve individual liberties. Natural law theorists erected this system almost half a millennium ago, in the wake of Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, and as a result of contemporary cosmopolitan ideals. The task they faced was enormous. On the one hand the exigencies of the time required them to resolve the tension between justifying colonial enterprises and defending notions of legitimate sovereignty or dominion of individual nation states. On the other, they were forced to forge a legal armour that would protect individuals’ universal rights without jeopardising states’ control over their subjects.

Ancient and modern historians, from Polybius to most recently Simon Jenkins with his A Short History of England, have long paid wars their well-deserved attention. Annabel Brett’s Changes of State, faithfully picking up from where her mentor Quentin Skinner had ended in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, looks at the debate that helped define political communities. The book is, therefore, “about the metaphysical boundaries of the city [or state], the ontological ground on which its structure of laws and rights is erected, and it is about the complex negotiation involved in maintaining those limits in the face of a human life that can be neither wholly naturalised nor wholly politicised.” Brett stops to consider chiefly the writings of Vitoria, Soto, Suarez, Grotius, and Hobbes without, however, neglecting those of other lesser known authors such as Case and Conan, turning what might have been a specialist monograph on a single concept into a magisterial survey of early modern natural law theory.

In the 16th century, states had to face the increasing problem of mendicancy and vagabondage whilst safeguarding the interests of their multicultural society. Natural law theorists thus began forming an intellectual membrane that retained some individuals, whilst forcing others out. This enterprise acts as the starting point of Brett’s discussion, which however fails to explore how, practically, this membrane exerted unwanted pressure on already strained international relations. The scope of her research is, in fact, limited to “academic or at least theoretical treatises…rather than on the myriad strategic deployments of natural law arguments and principles in the practical political conflicts of the period.” Thus the readers may not only fail to see how such discussions were borne out of contemporary problems, but how they helped resolve them. There is a sense in which, however, this is no great loss, as they are ushered into a war of words on the political nature of man.

In the 1550s, when the world was strongly dominated by Christian theology, discussions on sovereignty could easily be turned from the external to the internal sphere. Determinism, which is the doctrine that all actions and events are external to the will, and knowledge of God were clearly at odds with notions of free will and human agency. Hobbes’s conception of politics, as Brett rightly shows, provided in the 1650s the antidote to this philosophical impasse. “Political government is government by law, and law is not physical violence, but a verbal or written directive that is comprehensible by reason, and backed up by a system of rewards and punishments that apparently demand a nature that can freely respond to them.” Therefore free will and human agency were inextricable to man, which is by nature, in Aristotelian terms, a political animal.

The debate was manifestly indebted to the contemporary Aristotelian commentary tradition, thus Brett thankfully pays attention to a genre that has unduly suffered incredible neglect. She examines it however only under the lens of her current concerns, leaving us with a broken picture of the true impact of this tradition in early modern political discourse. Her attention is, in fact, chiefly aimed at the juridical language that helped define the legal space of human agency, a topic de rigueur for a proponent of the Cambridge School, a movement that places strong emphasis on the language in which debates were couched.

Some sections of Changes of State are a re-elaboration of Brett’s Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought, such as her discussion of natural liberty and its relationship to the individual as well as “the relationship of the state to its subjects as necessarily physically embodied beings”. In the 16th century, subjects were often thought of as elements of an abstract composite, the people. Questions about the limits of the obligations of individuals transiting between commonwealths brought to the fore the paradox that a non-physical body can have a spatial location. It similarly made notions of jurisdiction central to early modern natural law theorists, ultimately highlighting the fact that “locality or situation is an essential presupposition of the way they [Hobbes and others] think about sovereignty and subjection”.

In 500 years, not much may have changed. Like Soto, Vitoria, Grotious, and Hobbes, we question the bases of our multicultural societies. We enquire about our fundamental human rights. Are we all bound by natural law or is there a positive law between states? The recent and ongoing Arab Spring evokes questions not only about the nature of sovereignty. The massive surge in emigration that still results from it has forced us to examine the rights of individuals in foreign land and the legitimacy of political communities’ jurisdictions. In this context, Brett’s Changes of State is illuminating and could not appear more topical. The notion of state may have been blurred in recent times, partly as a result of globalization. But in the face of the European Union’s potential disintegration, we may have to redefine it again soon.

Nicolas Stone Villani is reading for a DPhil in History at St Hugh’s College, Oxford.

Review of the Year: 2011 in Film

Franchises dominated cinemas in 2011; Harry Potter, Pirates, Transformers, Kung Fu Panda, Twilight bestrode the year. This is perhaps unsurprising in times of economic turmoil. Sequels and reboots are viewed by studios as reliable box-office hits. However, one franchise reboot, rather than causing the critical and financial splash of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, X-Men: First Class or Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, passed almost unnoticed across the cinematic radar.

2011 saw the return of Conan the Barbarian with Jason Momoa filling the loincloth. However, the cinematic landscape appears to have changed in the 29 years since Arnie’s iconic turn as everyone’s favourite Cimmerian. His version took $100 million worldwide whereas the recent franchise reboot has taken a relatively poultry $21 million. Why such a vast discrepancy?

One answer is Frank Sinatra.

In 1968, the big screen adaption of Roger Thorp’s novel The Detective saw Frank Sinatra cast in the lead. He delivered one of his finer acting performances, The Hollywood Reporter would comment: “Sinatra has honed his laconic, hip veneer to the point of maximum credibility.” When, in the 1980s, the idea of filming the sequel Nothing Lasts Forever was floated, the producers naturally approached Sinatra to reprise his role. His decision to turn them down, altered cinematic history and shaped our viewing in 2011.

As Nothing Lasts Forever was no longer viable as a sequel some alterations were needed. A wife rather than daughter provided the motivation for our eponymous detective to fly to Los Angeles. His name too had to be changed; Detective Joe Leland was replaced by John McClane. A role to be played by a young actor named Walter Bruce Willis. That’s right. Nothing Lasts Forever became Die Hard, one of 1988′s biggest hits. Through this film Director John McTiernan, composer Michael Kamen and second-choice actor Bruce Willis were to launch a new kind of action hero that would change cinema forever.

Superficially Die Hard bears all the hallmarks of the Arnie and Stallone films that had dominated the 1980s; Man in vest, with gun, background of fire, suitably macho title written in red. It is easy to see the audience they were pitching for. However, Die Hard is more than a two-dimensional cop thriller. McTiernan’s masterstroke was to make terrorist Hans Gruber, played perfectly by Alan Rickman, the protagonist. The best lines, suave gestures and stirring orchestral accompaniment go to Gruber. As a result, the audience end up rooting for the baddie and McClane is resigned to a more unimpressive supporting role. Willis doesn’t even get to wear shoes for the majority of the film. Composer Michael Kamen reinforced this image through a bold decision to give our “hero” no musical underscore at all. Silence only serves to highlight McClane’s paranoid babbling and sense of isolation. Yet, against all the odds, John McClane saves the day.

How though, is this late 80s film relevant to 2011 and Conan’s recent crushing at the box-office? Well, Die Hard was a highly successful and, more importantly, influential film. It took $140 million dollars worldwide and many subsequent films were described as “Die Hard on a …”. Insert “bus” for Speed, “island” for The Rock, a “ship” for Under Siege or even “house” for Home Alone. This became such a prevalent school of thought that Empire even ran a feature in the 90s discussing whether various films had “done a Die Hard”. McClane fed into the Reaganite “little man” politics of the day and became the new model for the hero and acted as a precursor to many of the most popular characters in cinema today.

Much like the plot of a movie, the lesser leading man has risen to triumph over the herculean heroes of the 1980s. Action movies were first to tumble. Unlikely protagonists such as computer hacker Thomas A. Anderson, aka Neo, from 1999′s The Matrix were now saving the world. During the Noughties Willis’ heirs became more numerous and appeared in a wider variety of films. Shaun of the Dead, The Constant Gardener and Casino Royale all have human, fallible leading men. 2011 has seen reappearances from the inept Captain Jack Sparrow, Po the Panda and Jonny English. All are logical extremes of this model. Even brand- new sub-genres such as the women-centric comedy have adopted the Beta male. In this summer’s top comedy Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig’s character chooses The IT Crowd’s Chris O’Dowd over Mad Men’s own John Hamm.

2011 seemed to see this phenomenon peak. In a year of franchises this is to be expected. If a sequel is to be successful then a narrative needs to reduce the protagonist from the status as hero at the end of the previous film to zero during the opening of the second instalment. This is a transition managed perfectly in Kung Fu Panda 2, a rare sequel better than the original, by introducing gun-powder as the foil to Po’s Kung Fu. This opens up a new story arc. If, because of financial constraints, studios are producing almost exclusively sequels are super-heroic origin stories then this beta-alpha narrative fits the bill for the majority of releases. Unfortunately for Mamoa, Conan does not fit this model. The grunting alpha-male lead is a thing of the past. Watch out for John Carpter of Mars to flop for similar reasons next year.

This has been a retro year, defined by the eighties, but this has nothing to do with androgynous leading men, synth-pop or big hair (although TinTin, Drive and Peter Sarsgaard’s ludicrous mop and moustache combination in The Green Lantern do fit these stereotypes eerily well). Hollywood’s reaction to the financial crisis, that many economists would claim had its roots in the deregulation of the stock-exchange, is to make movies that fit our favourite narrative, also a product of the eighties. The time of Sinatra is long past. But the time of Bruce Willis is still with us.

Sam Poppleton studies music at The Queen’s College.

1. “Citizen Philosophers: Teaching Justice in Brazil”, Boston Review: “Learning how to read and write and basic mathematics is useful,” one student said. “But why should I care about Plato’s concept of the soul?”

2. “Review, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg”, Rain Taxi: “Correspondence was her sustenance and a basic fact of life for her, kept up daily… The letters alight her myriad contradictions.”

3. “Transformation and Transcendence: the Power of Female Friendship”, The Rumpus: “They understood, together, as friends, and apart, as individuals in the world, the urgency of compassion, and that it often goes unnoticed but that this doesn’t make it any less important or vital or difficult to sustain and cultivate.”

4. “Reconsidering the Genius of Gertrude Stein”, New York Times: “Reading the word “rest” again and again creates a weird sensation. The story sort of stops, and a space opens up where you can disappear like Ida, or stop too. It provides a rest, as in music.”

5. “The Heart of Englishness?”, Times Literary Supplement: “The serene façade of a settled social order in which every man apparently knew his place concealed a riot of social mobility.”