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Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Ivan Doig - Winter Brothers: A season at the edge of America

James Gilchrist Swan was a remarkable individual. Born in 1818 he spend most of his life in the Pacific North West, now part of Washington state in the US. Having travelled widely before arrival there, he took on a number of roles for the US government and other interests, becoming an Indian Agent, a temporary representative of a railroad company, and other such frontier roles. He was also a collector for the Smithsonian Institute, buying Native American art and tools for their collections. In addition Swan was a politician, a hunter, a painter and above all a writer. Today he would likely be called an anthropologist (indeed that is how he is described in his current, all to brief, Wikipedia entry).

Swan lived among the Makah tribal group for many years, learning their language and customs, and documenting almost every aspect of their lives - from religious beliefs and mythology, to fishing practices and art. His book on the Makah was eventually published by the Smithsonian and remains an important account of their history and culture. But Swan was also a prolific writer in two other regards - his letters to all and sundry, and his diaries, which he kept for decades. These he filled daily recording in detail his life, work and internal thoughts.

Ivan Doig's Winter Brothers is Doig's study of these diaries, written while spending a winter season in the North West, visiting places and sites related to Swan's life. Doig is a magnificent writer, his own personal history, and the travelogue, expertly intertwined with extracts from Swan's diaries. At times this can be a little hard to follow as the reader has only italics to separate contemporary from historic. But it is worth pushing through as both illuminate each other.

Doig is a great novelist and biographer. But it is Swan that shines through the book, his love for life and people is wonderful. His respect for the Native Americans and their way of life, even if he is driven to distraction by some individuals, seems remarkable for the time. The closeness of his life with them, and the documentation of their culture is made with scientific rigour, but also honesty.

But the diaries are also very touching. Swan's struggles with alcohol, his love for food and the way that life, death and love affect him through decades are moving. Doig's interaction with these aspects, as well as the insights he brings from his own youth in Montana make this a remarkable work.

On finishing I noticed that my copy of the book has the name and number of a hotel scribbled on the inside back cover. This hotel, it turns out, is on one of the many islands in the Salish Sea, a place that Swan explored in detail and the location of his last, expedition. One of the previous owners was clearly enjoying the insight into the area offered by Doig's book while visiting the region. I can't imagine a better introduction to the place, it's people and history.

Sunday, November 17, 2024

Hal Draper - Socialism from Below

The US Marxist Hal Draper is perhaps best remembered for his monumental, multivolume study of the revolutionary thought of Karl Marx. But socialists usually first encounter him in a less grandious way by reading his well known pamphlet The Two Souls of Socialism. That pamphlet, and the work is was originally based on, where an attempt by Draper to grapple with the "crisis" of socialism in the period after World War Two. Then, Stalinism was triumphant, poisoning the very idea of Communism by become stipping it of any sense of revolution from below. As Draper explains:

The crisis of socialism and socialist ideas today, brought about by the aftermath of the Second World War and the rise of Stalinism against the background of the decay of world capitalism, has pinpointed one fact without possibility of dispute: The basic question for socialists is precisely this one of the conception of socialism.

Socialism from Below is a collection of Draper's essays (together with one criticial essay) that explore these crucial concepts. The first essay is the aforementioned Two Souls, which serves as a jumping off point for the discussion, even though most of the other essays have no direct connection in terms of publications. The opening essays explore the arguments of several US thinkers against socialism as a emancipatory mass strategy. These criticisms come in a variety of forms, but the dominant ones for Draper writing in the 1960s were "state control" of the means of production and managerialism. He writes of the US socialist and academic, Maynard C. Krueger that he "equates tendencies toward socialism with any tendency toward increased state controls". Draper's criticisms of these arguments are important because they have their parallels with arguments today, though modern readers will rarely have heard of some of those he is critiquing.

As with Draper's other writing, one of the things that shines through is his deep knowledge of the lives and work of Marx and Engels. In his discussion of Karl Marx and Simon Bolivar, for instance, he explores precisely how Marx and Engels understood Bolivar through a discussion of them writing a encyclopedic entry on the South American radical. He notes that unlike many radicals of the time, and indeed of today, Marx and Engels did not accept Bolivar's strategy, or the vision of some who supported him at the time and later, that the masses had to fight for a dictatorship that could then gradually introduce democracy at some later point, when the masses "were ready". As Draper says, "[Marx] does not accept the rationalisations for dictatorship" and continues:

There seems to be a contradiction: if there is no way for people to become 'ready' for democracy except by fighting for democracy, then it follows they must begin fighting for it before they are certified to be 'ready.' And in historical fact, this is the only way in which democracy has advanced in the world. The continuous solution to the contradiction lies in the process of revolution itself. This is a dialectic which will always be jeered at by those mentalities which know how to celebrate revoluitonary struggles only after they have been straijacketed by a new oppressive establishment.

If Draper here draws on lessons from the 19th century about revolution and the fight for liberation. Modern readers can draw on Draper's lessons from the struggles he was involved in. These include the radical years in the 1960s at Berkeley in California, when Draper was part of student struggles for democracy and against corporate influence on campus. Draper has written elsewhere of these in detail. But what again shines through is his commitment to struggle from below, and a sharp analysis of the limits of movements that do not put their trust in the masses.

A later essay explores the role of trade unions. This was an educational for socialists that Draper spoke at, to encourage a non-sectarian approach to trade union work, inspired by his idea of socialism from below. In it he explores what a trade union is, its limits and its potential and encourages the idea that socialists would be active within such a body. While socialists in Britain today might be frustrated by our union leaders, Draper has to engage with a much more right-wing, corporate trade union burearcacy. Nonetheless he does not right off these unions. I do think that here he gets it slightly wrong however. For Draper the union leaders are figures who can be pulled by mass action from below. He argues, "One function of the union leadership is to provide the organisational leadership of our class." [Draper's emphasis]. This, I think, is mistaken. It is better to understand the TU leaders, as Tony Cliff did, as a class of themselves, positioned between the workers and the bosses, and pulled by their own interests. Cliff's analysis arose out of his understanding of the economic seperation of the TU bureacrats from the shop-floor.

Draper's position muddies his understanding of the role of revolutionaries within the trade unions. It is, he writes, "their specialfunction to organise that other pressure against the leadership". The idea of "disciplining" the trade union leaders by rank and file feels like a self-limiter on the movement itself. Surely the idea is that revolutionaries should be developing rank and file leaders to provide an alternative source of power to the trade union bureacrats. Consequently in this essay I wasn't convinced of Draper's criticisms of Rosa Luxemburg and the German Spartakist League towards the Revolutionary Shop Stewards during the German Revolution. Draper seems to think that Luxemburg should have abandoned the Spartakists for the RSS which seems to ignore the very constraained position her and Liebknecht found themselves in as counter-revolution raised its head.

Draper can be forgiven these errors in my opinion, because they do stem from having the right original position - the belief that workers action is key to their self emancipation. Indeed, the collection of essays in Socialist from Below, is a detailed reminder of what is lacking on the US left in general. Draper himself is a brilliant writer and polemist. His essays are barbed and full of humour, as his essay Vladimir Ilyich Jefferson and Thomas Lenin brilliantly demonstrates.

But, as the world faces Trump's second rise, and the US left lacks a serious revolutionary organisation. New generations ought to dig out Hal Draper's work. This collection is expensive and academic, and the editor ought to have put more notes to give context to the articles (such as dates!) and so on. But there's a lot here the left desperately need to relearn. As Draper points out, "Marxism, as the theory and practice of the proletarian revolution, therefore also had to be the theory and practice of the self-emancipation of the proletariat. Its essential orginality flows from this source."

Wole Talabi - Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon

Wole Talabi is a well known Nigerian author, but this is their first foray into fantasy. Set in a universe where the spirit and human worlds coexist side-by-side, Shigidi is a low ranking nightmare god, who as with other Nigerian gods suffers from a lack of faith. Worshipers are few and far between. The Christian and Muslim faiths have hoovered up their followers, and with the loss of followers comes a consequent loss of power.

The idea that gods are only as powerful as the number of worshippers they have is an old trope in fantasy. My first recollection of it was in Terry Pratchett's Small Gods. The idea likely predates that. But its a neat idea and in the hands of Wole Talabi it becomes a mechanism to discuss power, colonialism and the modern world. Instead of religion, the gods organise through corporations. The boards of these argue about advertising campaigns designed to drum up new followers. The Nigerian patheon of gods, organised through the Orisha Spirit Company, has just come out of a relatively unsuccesful attempt to increase income by funding films in Nollywood.

More problematically for Shigidi, is that he is in love and is on the run. He's falled for the succubus Nneoma, and together they've fled his corporation. Going freelance enables them to live off the spirits of humans that they steal - requiring Nneoma to seduce them with her beauty, and then steal their spirit at the point of orgasm. But it also leaves them with some serious obligations that they finally have a chance to break free of when they are offered a deal: steal a powerful artifact from the heavily magically guarded British Museum, and bring it to the Nigerian Embassy, and they'll both be free of debt, obligations and much more powerful than they can hope for.

The book is pitched as a love story, as Shigidi falls for Nneoma, and she struggles with her own past, her issues preventing her committing to Shigidi. The book opens as she finally does so, as the two escape in a London Black cab through London spirit world. The book then jumps back in time multiple times to give the reader the full back story.

As I said. An intriguing idea, and interesting for the way it brings in serious issues that are being discussed today, namely why all that stuff is in the British Museum anyway. Unfortunately the book is weakened because of its emphasis on sex and violence. There are several long fight scenes and a variety of sex scenes (as well as the violence of Nneoma's stealing spirits from humans who can't escape). These undermine the more intriguing and subtle story of colonialism and post-colonial rule. The metaphor of decling religious power due to the rise of Western ideas and religions gets lost. In fact the best bit, when Shigidi is in the British Museum trying to steal the artifact is disappointinly short. But it offers some moments:

The gallery walls were painfully white and sterile, arrayed with an assortment of colorful masks, cloths, pottery, weapons and all manner of items displayed atop plinths in transparent cases. Some of the items were works of art. Others he recognised as totems of gods, deities and spirit entities from his and other spirit companies he had worked with in the past, now all displayed - hung, bound, or in locked glass boxes like prisoners. He stared, shocked.

Some of the items Shigidi remembers from his life when the Nigerian gods were all powerful. That they were stolen and hidden in the Museum, filled "him with heat at what the sight before him represented". It was he thinks, "a certain kind of savagery to keep these once purposeful items for no other purpose than display, as trophies in memorian of a colonizer's self-given right to take."

It's a powerful moment - fantasy becoming real. But I felt that these bits were lost in the fights, chases and the sex.

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon benefits from a brilliant world construction. It needed a bit more depth to fully explore it. I hope that there are sequels as I'd really like to see what Wole Talabi does next with these characters and ideas.

Monday, November 11, 2024

Chantal Lyons - Groundbreakers: The return of Britain's wild boar

Until I picked up Chantal Lyons' Groundbreakers I had no idea that there were parts of the British Isles that had hundreds of wild boar. Native to Asia, Europe and North Africa wild boar are a significant part of European cultural identity. Think of the boar hunts in medieval romances and the boar on various regal coats of arms. But boar disappeared from many parts of their "natural" habitat, and entirely vanished from Britain as the woodland that they live in was cut back and they were hunted down. Now, the boar are back. In the Forest of Dean where Lyons studies boar there have been perhaps 800 individual boar, though numbers have decreased due to hunting and control by poachers and authorities in recent years.

Groundbreakers is Lyons' celebration of the boar. It is simultaneously a study of the boar, their nature, and their place in the environment. But the book is also a look at how humans relate to wildlife in general, and boar in particular. How these animals are perceived, and how that perception changes. But the boar's return is not, in itself natural. As Lyon writes:

Their rise has been abetted by our own environmental damage, because an organism is more likely to become destructive – and therefore invasive – in a foreign ecosystem if we have erased the native species that might otherwise have stopped it gaining a foothold.

In other words, the boar have been returned to a place that is not the one they used to occupy. It is one transformed in time and space. Indeed the boar themselves are different, some of them carrying the genes that result from their breeding with domestic pigs.

The comeback of wild boar in mainland Europe has been blamed largely on the decline in human hunters and bountiful food in the form of maize and other crops. With their undiscerning diet, their large litters and their sheer adaptability, wild boar are evolved to catapult themselves towards the slightest opportunity.

The return of the boar, some released deliberately by animal liberation campaigners, others released by hunters and still more escaping from domestic confines, has led to an interest in their role within the wider ecology, and a discussion about their potential as part of wider rewilding efforts. Rewilding is often simply understood as the release of animals and plants into areas that have been denuded by human induced change. A return to a past nature. It is, in my opinion, a environmental that is much more complex - not least because it rewilding enthusiasts often hope for a return to an imaginary past, neglecting to understand the role of human influence on nature. As I noted in my recent review of Sophie Yeo's recent book Nature's Ghosts, there is no natural world. Rewilding must take account of the complex interactions between animals, environment and humans.

Lyons' book supports this. She explores the way that boar change the environment, shaping aspects of the Forest of Dean, digging, turning and breaking ground in ways that have important impacts on flora and fauna. These are fascinating chapters, exploring as they do the way that boar fit into an ecosystem, changing it and being changed by it in turn. The experience of boar in the Forest of Dean is, Lyons says, the "biggest unintentional field experiment in Britain’s nascent rewilding history."

Wherever boar root through the earth, we’re told, we’ll see volcanic eruptions of green growth, and all manner of other life will swarm and flock. Which does happen. Sometimes... But while the time that the boar has been gone is, in ecological terms, just an eye-blink, we have still forced much change on our landscapes in the interim. We can’t be certain of what would happen if boar were allowed to return to the entire country and in significant numbers.

But Lyons' book is perhaps most remarkable in her study of the effect of boar on humans. Some people living in areas where the boar have returned are excited; celebrating them, enjoying them, photographing and sharing their pictures. Others are scared and threatened. Lyons is certainly in the first category. Her excitement for these giant creatures shines through the pages, and we're drawn into her adventures. But Lyons is not the sort of author who only looks for positive reinforcement for her own opinions. She travels with people who hunt the boar, trying to understand their perspective, and finding some real insights. She also talks to those terrified of the animals.

Some of them are fearful for their personal safety, though there are scarce any examples of injury from boar in Britain. Some fearful for their animals, or personal property, though again few examples. Some are caught up in tabloid fearmongering, or simply don't like the animals.

Boar might number a few thousand in Britain. But there are an estimated ten million across mainland Europe and this makes for an interesting comparison. Why are the experiences and attitude to boar to wildly (!) different in Britain and Europe?

Here Lyons examines the different approaches to nature. One expert in the Spanish state, hired to monitor the boar living in the rural-urban interfaces in Barcelona argues that ‘The wild boar is not a problem... The problem is caused by people’s lack of experience with wildlife.’ It is certainly a good point. The fear of the unknown, hyped up by click-bait newspaper headline writers, is certainly a factor. But perhaps more deeply Lyons argues that the way that nature is approach in Britain arises out of a particular separation between nature and human. As Lyons says:

I fear that the sole use of farmed animals is helping to reinforce the mindset that ‘human’ and ‘nature’ are, and should always be, separate realms. We have erected fences and other hard barriers to keep nature (including people) in or out. Yet so many wild lives depend on the ability to move through landscapes, to take part in ecological cycles of disturbance, rest and renewal. We’ve forgotten this. And just as we deny the movement of individual animals and of species by creating artificial boundaries, so we deny ourselves permission to belong to the rest of the world. We absorb our fences into our minds.
Maybe that’s a core part of why rewilding raises hackles. If your thoughts are constructed using the nature versus human binary, then rewilding can only mean wildlife, and never wildlife and people.

This I think is a particular problem in Britain. While it isn't restricted to Britain, there has been a particularly intense experiment with neoliberal nature by successive governments in the UK that has placed prices on nature and commodified the landscape. Lyons quotes Virginia Thomas of the University of Exeter who says "rewilding in England has itself been domesticated; it sacrifices some of its ambitions for ecological restoration in order to retain more human control."

Rewilding has become trapped by an approach to nature marked by the idea that prioritising capital accumulation is the only way for society to function. Nature is simply another aspect to this. This is not to say that neoliberalism hasn't also affected France, Spain or Italy. But to argue that so called Natural Capital approaches haven't gone as far. That won't last.

Thus the rewilding conundrum cannot be answered simply. It is not enough, as Lyons book explains, to simply restore an individual animal or plant to an area. Boar on their own won't halt Britain's biodiversity crisis. On the other-hand, rewilding as an approach that ignores humanity and our own position within ecological systems, is also doomed. The people who quietly shoot boar, or try to restrict them to certain fields and woodlands, are making the same mistake from the other direction.

The only solution can be a transformative approach to humanity's relationship to nature, one that recognises the complexity of nature's interactions and the place of boar (or beaver or any other animal) within that. And whose introduction involves a transformation of our own understanding of nature as well as our understanding of particular species. Such a revolutionary rewilding would be something else indeed.

Groundbreakers reminds us of what we stand to lose. Its not simply that we might not see boar, and their litters, living in the Forest of Dean, but that we might lose it all. Chantal Lyons' celebration of boar, and her thoughts on the meaning of rewilding make for a lovely and stimulating read. As such Groundbreakers is a book for our times.

Sunday, November 10, 2024

Lee Child - Die Trying

This, the second Jack Reacher novel, follow a pattern that I suspect will become common place in the series. Jack Reacher randomly finds himself in a violent and unusual situation, which requires him to use his skills to violently escape. In his way will be a succession of dangerous enemies and their less than able henchmen. At various times Reacher will utilise his military knowledge, brawn and brains to defeat these enemies, while the reader gets to learn about a variety of military hardware.

It's all, remarkably satisfying, and Die Trying is perhaps apposite this week, given that its "bad guys" are far-right, Nazi, American militas living in the backwoods of Montana. Reacher finds himself kidnapped alongside a young woman, who turns out to be with the FBI and an important target for the Nazis. The Nazis aim to use her in their elaborate, and completely unfeasible plan to secede from the United States, and build a new country on the lines of the US constituion as they interpret it. It's all very Make America Great again.

Luckily Reacher is no proto-Trumper and he blows up, machine guns, and fights his way back to a vision of liberal America that never really existed either. Along the way he has sex after burying the crucifed corpse of someone who defied the milita - which proves that it takes all sorts really. It also has the least exciting cross-America road trip in literarture. Die Trying's a classic thriller packed full of silliness and escapism - perhaps not as polished as the first one. But that doesn't really matter.

Related Reviews

Child - Killing Floor

Sunday, November 03, 2024

Rhian E. Jones - Rebecca's Country

The "Rebecca Riots" were one of the most striking examples of rural rebellion during the 19th century. Today they are mostly remembered, when they are remembered at all, for being against tollbooths and involving men dressed in female attire. But they were much more than this, they were a mass uprising against the way capitalism was destroying communal relations, and transforming traditional Welsh life to maximise profits for landowners, and diminishing the lives of the lower classes.

Rhian E. Jones' important new account of the Rebecca riots fills a gap in recent studies of the period. Few recent books have covered Rebecca and this work has benefited from contemporary approaches to class and gender. This means that Jones' tells the history of this struggle in a fresh way to a new audience, and takes up issues that have often been ignored about the struggle itself.

The Rebecca movement was initially aimed at tollbooths. But it arose out of the appalling conditions that working people experienced in 1843. Low wages, low crop prices, high rents and unsympathetic landowners contributed to a massive crisis among ordinary people. The toll booths were a symptom of this, as their owners sought to raise cash ostensibly to pay for road repairs, but actually for pure profit. Hundreds of tolls were imposed, and farmers found themselves paying multiple times on a single journey, essentially being taxed for trying to do their work. Conditions were awful, as Jones says, some houses "built of mud or stone with thatched roofs, had minimal furnishing, often a single room with one or no windows, packed-earth floors and bedding of straw mattresses and homemade blankets".

The rebellion against the tollbooths encapsulated the anger at these conditions. But the tollbooths represented something much more - the literal commodification of the Welsh landscape. It was this that meant the rebellion went much further than an outpouring of anger at the tollbooths, and spilled into a generalised revolutionary movement.

In 1843 the rising was so great that it drove the landowners away from their country estates, saw thousands of troops billeted in the countryside, and pitched battles between protesters, their supporters and the authorities. One contemporary report said, that Wales was experiencing "a formidable insurrection, overawing the law, invading the most sacred rights of property and person, issuing its behests with despotic effrontery, and enforcing them by the detestable agents of terror, incendiarism and bloodshed."

The destruction of tollbooths was a key part of the rebellion. Jones unpicks what took place, which tended to follow a known pattern. At night, a group of dozens of people, led by a figure on horseback would arrive at a tollbooth. Many of the leading figures, and certainly the "leader" on the horse would be dressed up, often in female clothing, and usually addressed as Rebecca. The protesters would expel anyone living in the toll houses, allowing them to escape safely and usually remove their belongings. Then the booth and its gate would be destroyed. The destruction seems to have had an air of ritual to it. Buildings were systematically destroyed, brick by brick. Gates would be sawn into pieces. Fire would consume the rest. Almost as if the protesters were erasing the building from memory, rather than just destroying it.

The protesters would act quickly and were frequently supported by many onlookers. One thing that struck me was the similarities with the arson and rick-burning that characterised the Captain Swing movement just over a decade before. That too was enormously popular and attacks were often communal events, with local people supporting and watching in great numbers. Rebecca and Swing were both characterised by the mass support, if not complete participation, of the greater part of the labouring rural poor. They were both rebellions that went beyond mere economic demands.

Jones shows how this went further. The mass attack on the Carmarthen Workhouse was in part a rage at the authorities' approach to poverty. But it was also driven by a punishing approach to women who had had children out of marriage, including as a result of rape or abandonment by wealthy men. One of the great successes of Rebecca was a change in the law around the support for women in this situation. But Rebecca also took direct action on this. I was inspired to read how Rebecca protests on occasion confronted men who had abandoned women and their children, demanding financial restitution and support. On another occasion Rebecca rioters installed a poor family in more suitable accommodation, somewhere they were still living many decades later.

One of the things about Jones' book is that it covers womens participation in the movement. Because male rioters dressing in women's clothes was a key part of the rebellion's most public expressions, histories have often focused on male participation. But in fact, as Jones' shows, women were central to the protests, to supporting them, and to the wider discontent. Frances Evans, who was charged as a result of her leading role in the attack on the Carmarthen Workhouse, was accused of "having incited and led the mob... urged on the rabble to proceed upstairs, and otherwise grossly misconducted herself."

Jones' gives a great sense of the political breadth of Rebecca's revolutionary movement:

The targets of Rebecca were evolving to encompass more than tollgates. They now included the enclosure system: near Ammanford, a newly built wall that cut off a section of formerly common land to form a private field... was torn down and the field thrown back open to public use. Meanwhile a vicar at Penbryn received a threatening letter for having forced local Nonconformists to donate to the cost of a Church school.

The Viscount Melbourne wrote to the Queen, fearing a "general rising against property". Ruling class fears of revolution ran through their response to Rebecca. As a result military violence was common place and the stationing of thousands of troops held hold down south-west Wales. There was a general concern anyway that the British working class was on the move. Fear of Chartism had the government on edge already.

But Jones also picks apart the internal debates that helped undermined Rebecca, and how these were reflected in the wider movement. Leading Chartists, themselves riven by debates about violence, were often contemptuous of Rebecca, not least because they saw it as a cross-class movement that involved both workers and their farmer bosses. There was some truth to this. Farmers in fact did pay people to destroy the tollbooths. But ordinary people don't simply take to arson and destruction because they are paid too. There has to be a level of general discontent within society to make it worthwhile, and, as the support and sympathy for the Rebecca makes clear, this certainly existed in southern Wales in 1843.

The movement was broken by a combination of heavy repression and internal division. But, it is important to point out, it was remarkably successful. Jones notes that many of Rebecca's demands were won, toll houses disappeared, roads improved and there were changes made to support those in poverty. Many of those captured and imprisoned by the authorities were let off, either by symapthetic jurors or by the authorities who were fearful of making martyrs.

Jones concludes that Rebecca's real legacy however, was to inspire others - even today. As she says:

The original Rebecca movement was composed of ordinary men and women who, finding their circumstances intolerable, used what they had to hand - from petticoats to petitions, and fom mass meeetings to sledgehammers - to challenge and change their world. The extent of their success is perhaps less important than the fact they made the attempt.

This new history of Rebecca fills an important gap in the history of rural radicalism. Written by a socialist it addresses key questions about class, gender and social movements that remain important today. It will teach new generations about our history of struggle, and reminds us all that the modern countryside is the consequence of violent class struggle.

Related Reviews

Williams - The Rebecca Riots
Jones - Before Rebecca
Dunbabin - Rural Discontent in Nineteenth Century Britain
Boyce - Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens
Griffin & McDonagh - Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500

Saturday, November 02, 2024

James M. Cain - Mildred Pierce

This 1941 novel by James M. Cain is not one of his best known, though it was made into a film starring Joan Crawford as the eponymous Mildred Pierce. That film, apparently, gave the story an upbeat ending. This is remarkable, because the novel is certainly not upbeat, and instead describes a life of bittersweet travails. The Hayes Code had a lot wrong with it.

Mildred Pierce is a middle class housewife, one of thousands brought low by the Great Depression. Her husband brings her lower, leaving her in the early pages of the book for his mistress. Pierce is left alone with two daughters, and finds her only hope of employment in menial jobs that she thinks are beneath her.

Its a powerful start. Cain takes as his subject a woman undone by economic circumstance and her husband's misogyny. His subject is not the usual one in novels about the era - working class victims are better heroes of novels than the aspiring middle class. Above all else this is a novel about class. Mildred Pierce uses her contacts, her business acumen and her good looks to drive a project forward. She wants to rebuild her position in order to ensure her eldest daughter Vera loves her, and respects her.

Vera is the villain of the book. Her greed, her snobbery, her love of money and fame, and her ability to use others goes unnoticed by Mildred. Her mother can only see good, not the double crossing. As Mildred's success grows, she is once again brought low. But this time it's not capitalism, but her need to buy Vera's love. It means, really, that there cannot be a happy ending. The two main women characters' are so flawed as to be unable to find a mutual way out. But it is Mildred who is left to pick up the pieces.

This is a powerful novel. But it's grim. One reads it hoping it will get better. But every success brings the seeds of failure for Mildred. It is, perhaps, a metaphor for the futility of real happiness under capitalism. Cain may not have had the politics of anti-capitalism. But he could see it around him. In Mildred Pierce he put it on the page.

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Michael Balter - The Goddess & the Bull: Çatalhöyük An Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilisation

Çatalhöyük is perhaps one of the most remarkable neolithic archaeological sites in the world. Situated in Anatolia, Turkey, it is one of the earliest "cities" known. First discovered by James Mellaart in the 1950s, it was partially excavated several times by him. and numerous artificats, human remains and art works were found. It has been further explored in the 1990s and through the 2000s. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most important places for understanding early human history.

Michael Balter's book is one of the few modern, and accessible, accounts of Çatalhöyük. It is simultaneously a book about the history of the site, as well as being an account of the history of the exploration of Çatalhöyük and also a social history of the modern dig. Balter was present for multiple digging seasons - initially because he was writing about Çatalhöyük as a journalist, and then to study the people and the dig itself. It makes for a remarkable account. As one of the archaeologists notes, if you want to understand what has been found, you also need to understand the person doing the dig.

The story starts in the 1950s with Mellaart's discovery of the site, and then his initial excavations. Mellaart looms large over Çatalhöyük, firstly as the finder and excavator, and then as a more controversial figure. Mellaart's own studies were rooted in the prevailing ideas of the time, and several were dated. His own excavations were less rigorous than contemporary digs, but they still yielded important information and insights. Mellaart became a world authority, skilful at public outreach that made him, and the site, famous. But Mellaart was also controversial. Permission for his archaeological exploration was abruptly withdrawn by the Turkish authorities and he was banned from the country after the scandal known as the Dorak affair. In this Mellaart was accused of smuggling treasurers out of the country. The book was published during Mellaart's lifetime, and finishes with him visiting the contemporary dig. But after his death a few years later, it became clear that he had engaged in forgery, blemishing his authority about the site.

Mellaart's legacy and work hung over the dig at the time of its reexcavation in the 1990s. This was led by a British archeologist Ian Hodder, a pioneer of what became known as post-processual archaeology. Balter's book explores the development of archaeological theory, showing how the 1960s led to the emergence of a "New Archaeology" that argued archaeology was primarily concerned with human cultural change. In constrast, Hodder and others argued in the 1980s onward, that what was needed was an approach that "would combine the New Archaeology's emphasis on studying the processes of social change with the concerns of an earlier generation of archaeologists such as V. Gordon Childe and Glyn Daniel, who had viewed archaeology primiarly 'as a historical discipline' and artifacts as 'expressions of culturally framed ideas.'"

This meant that for his excavation of Çatalhöyük, Hodder developed a radically different approach to excavation. He assembled a broad and large team of experts who could look at multiple different aspects of the site - from the remains of plants to the location of bodies - and offer insights. Digging the site must have been a heady experience at times, as the team of archaeologists bounced ideas off each other and explored different approaches. The new approachs to archaeology that emerged in the second half of the 20th century, were heavily influenced by radical movements - from Marxism to Feminism. It is interesting to see the importance of these approaches explored by Balter's book, and indeed how they actively shaped the work and interpretations of the archeaological workers.

What Balter does in this book then, is quite remarkable. His exploration of the history of Catalhöyük takes place on multiple levels. First their is his account of early human history - the ideas, activity and lives that made up the neolithic culture there. But through his discussion of these he also explores the nature of modern archaeology and its own shaping through contemporary culture. Finally, and inseparable from the previous two, he looks at the workers on the site. Exploring how their own lives, ideas and cultures shape their understanding of the neolithic.

Lacking an academic grounding in archaeology but an enthusiasm for the distant past, I was expecting to mostly enjoy the bits about ancient Catalhöyük society. I actually found myself fascinating by Michael Blater's exploration of archaeology itself, and the people who make and shape it. A recommended read.