On Ralph Miliband

During a recent televised debate, the five candidates for the leadership of the Labour Party were asked to name their “Labour political heroes”. Diane Abbott and Andy Burnham both chose John Smith, Tony Blair’s predecessor as party leader. Ed Balls’s implausible choice was Blair, and Ed Miliband chose the architect of Labour’s first election landslide, Clement Attlee. But by far the most interesting nomination was David Miliband’s: his Labour hero, he said, is Anthony Crosland, the author of The Future of Socialism (1956) and the leading theoretician of postwar social democracy.

You can read the rest of my profile of the late Ralph Miliband here.

August 30, 2010 | 7:30 pm
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by Jonathan Derbyshire
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Interviews

I’ve done a number of interviews with writers for the New Statesman over the past year or so. Here are links to some of them.

August 7, 2010 | 2:58 pm
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Telling the story of Scotland

Interviewed after the publication in 2006 of his previous novel The Testament of Gideon Mack, which was built around the confessions of an unbelieving son of the manse, James Robertson promised that his next work of fiction would be something “big, sprawling [and] panoramic” - nothing less, in fact, than a history of the “political, social and cultural changes that have occurred in Scotland from 1945 to 1999″ (in other words, events from the end of the Second World War up to the establishment of the Scottish Parliament).

You can read the rest of my review of James Robertson’s splendid new novel And the Land Lay Still in the current issue of the New Statesman.

August 7, 2010 | 2:40 pm
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On Tom McCarthy

This review of Tom McCarthy’s new novel C appears in the latest issue of the Literary Review. (See also Stuart Evers’s interview with McCarthy in the current edition of the New Statesman.)

Interviewed in 2007 shortly before the publication of his second novel, Men In Space, Tom McCarthy declared that he was not ‘really interested in the kind of realism which is all about the feelings and emotions of a person. My characters or personages are negotiating and being shunted around a set of grids that are bigger than them and their feelings.’

In Men in Space, the grid around which McCarthy moves his ‘personages’ (a more appropriate term, surely, than ‘characters’, given his professed lack of interest in interiority) is historical: the novel, with its cast of artists and students, secret policemen and minor Bulgarian crooks trafficking in fake Byzantine icons, is set in Prague, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His first work of fiction, Remainder, had a much narrower focus, but a similarly implacable logic. After emerging from the coma that followed a sketchily described accident involving ‘something falling from the sky’, the (unnamed) narrator proceeds maniacally to re-create unconnected fragments of his past, engaging a firm of ‘re-enactors’ to help him.

McCarthy’s latest novel, C, is as obsessively and elaborately patterned as Remainder was, though what the author calls its ‘repetitions’ are executed on a much broader canvas. Indeed, C has the appearance (though only the appearance) of a Bildungsroman. Arranged in four parts of roughly equal length, it begins with the birth, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the protagonist Serge Carrefax, his head enveloped in a silky amniotic caul, and moves from his childhood in an English country house, via a Mitteleuropean sanatorium (where he is treated for ‘chronic intestinal problems’ caused by ‘morbid matter’) and the Western Front, to the druggy bohemia of early 1920s London and finally to post-independence Egypt.

The section set in London after the end of the Great War, when Serge enrols at the Architectural Association (he is an indifferent student, incapable of executing his sketches in anything other than plan view), contains some of the most straightforwardly descriptive prose in C. It’s all chorus girls and cocaine, and much of it wouldn’t be out of place in an altogether more familiar kind of historical novel – the kind of novel, in fact, that McCarthy isn’t remotely interested in writing (though this portion of the book shows that he’s perfectly capable of doing so). For, as Zadie Smith has argued in a much-discussed essay on Remainder, McCarthy’s fictional practice amounts to a ‘strong refusal’ of what she calls ‘lyrical realism’ – the sort of decorous, well-wrought narrative enlivened by strenuous noticing or description that tends to win literary prizes these days.

One of the things Smith detected in Remainder was the way it frequently ironised its refusal of the principles of conventional storytelling, joking at its own expense. The same is true of C. It’s hard, for example, not to read a passage in the First World War section of the novel as a sly commentary on its own procedures. By this time, Serge is flying missions over the Western Front as an ‘observer’, taking photographs of artillery emplacements behind the German lines. After one sortie, he is asked by the recording officer for his ‘flight narrative’. His reply is perfunctory in the extreme: ‘We went up; we saw stuff; it was good.’

‘Observing’, then, has become incidental for Serge (as it is, indeed, for McCarthy). The flights above the trenches in an RE8 bi-plane are occasions for a kind of technological epiphany in which Serge indulges obsessions that he has nurtured since childhood. (Early in the novel, his father Simeon, an inventor and pioneer of radio and telegraphy, delivers an impassioned sermon on the ‘love of technology’ that binds him and his children.) Flying as part of a formation, each plane ‘marking out its assigned grid square’, Serge ‘feels an almost sacred tingling, as though he himself had become godlike, elevated by machinery and signal code to a higher post within the overall structure of things’.

This passage is both characteristic and uncharacteristic: characteristic in its preoccupation with grids, signals and codes; but uncharacteristic in its suggestion of a sort of mechanised or technological transcendence. McCarthy has said that his novels are in fact about ‘failed transcendence’, about the ways in which the ‘world disappoints us by making promises which it doesn’t then fulfill’. In Remainder, the motif of that failed transcendence is surplus matter that eludes the attempts of the re-enactors to control it; in Men in Space, it is a facsimile of a painting of a medieval saint, where instead of God being depicted in a circle around the saint’s head, the head is enclosed in an ellipse or cosmic void. Here, the recurrent motif is radio static – the novel hums with electrical interference and the white noise of botched or blocked signals.

Near the end of the book, Serge falls ill on a trip down the Nile. He has the impression of ‘being held in a machine, but … one whose operator has abandoned it … leaving its motions to repeat without a reason for doing so anymore’. He could almost be describing the experience of reading the novel in which he appears.

August 7, 2010 | 2:36 pm
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by Jonathan Derbyshire
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Recent work

Here are links to some of my most recent pieces in the New Statesman:

  • An interview with Philip Pullman.
  • A piece about the philosophy behind the 2010 general election campaign.
  • A review of Jonathan Coe’s novel The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.
  • An interview with David Remnick.
  • A brief note on L T Hobhouse.
  • A profile of and interview with Rowan Williams.
July 25, 2010 | 8:32 pm
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Who was Jacques Derrida?

This review of David Mikics’s Who Was Jacques Derrida? appeared in the February edition of the Literary Review.

WHO WAS JACQUES DERRIDA: AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY

David Mikics

Yale University Press, £25

Review by Jonathan Derbyshire

The American philosopher Stanley Cavell once observed drily that the reputation of his French counterpart Jacques Derrida deserved a ‘finer fate than its detractors wish[ed] for it, if not perhaps the finality that its admirers … traded on.’ That it was Derrida’s fate (in the English-speaking world at least) to be both unfairly maligned and lavishly overpraised was demonstrated when he died in 2004. Under the headline ‘Abstruse Theorist Dies at 74′, the New York Times described Derrida in its obituary as the ‘father of deconstruction’, a theory that, it alleged, ‘asserted that all writing was full confusion and contradiction’ – not least Derrida’s own, which was ‘turgid and baffling’, and peppered with ‘enigmatic pronouncements’ such as ‘Oh my friends, there is no friend …’ (a pronouncement in fact attributed by Diogenes Laertius to Aristotle – as the paper’s obituarist would have known had he bothered to read the book by Derrida in which that phrase recurs).

Derrida’s acolytes responded swiftly. A letter signed by students and faculty of the University of California at Irvine, where Derrida taught between 1987 and 2003, expressed ‘outrage’ at the New York Times obituary, charging it with ’shabbily misrepresent[ing] the life and achievements of a great thinker’ (not to mention a ‘courteous human being’). They didn’t, however, go so far as to explain in what Derrida’s intellectual achievements actually consisted, preferring instead to advise the Times’s writer to read his CV, which listed honorary degrees awarded by universities on several continents, as well as the Legion d’honneur. ‘We regret,’ the letter concluded, ‘that the New York Times was willing to publish an obituary that feels like an insult when people around the world are mourning one of the greatest thinkers of our time.’

This unedifying exchange is probably best read as a late skirmish in the ‘culture wars’, fought on American university campuses throughout the 1980s and ’90s over the future of the humanities in general, and the study of literature in particular. If David Mikics is right, those battles are at an end, and the ‘theory camp’, to which Derrida was co-opted by his supporters in the US, has prevailed. It is probably a propitious time, therefore, to attempt a more dispassionate assessment of Derrida’s legacy and to show, as Mikics puts it in the coda to this book, that he was ‘neither so brilliantly right nor so brilliantly wrong as his enthusiasts and critics respectively claimed.’

That such clarification is still required is largely a function of the way Derrida’s work was received in Britain and the US in the 1970s – through university departments of literature rather than philosophy. Mikics, himself a professor of English at an American university (though a philosophically literate one), doesn’t examine that reception in detail (a task already successfully carried out in any case by Francois Cusset, in his book French Theory). Instead, he takes it for granted that Derrida’s thought was significantly distorted in its transmission across the Atlantic, and sets about restoring it to its proper context, tracing the doctrines that came to be associated with ‘deconstruction’ back to a fateful intellectual choice he made as a student of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in the early 1950s.

Mikics’s original and illuminating suggestion is that everything in Derrida’s mature thinking is to be understood in the light of his youthful preference for the work of the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, over the then-fashionable existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Husserl appealed to Derrida, Mikics argues, because he argued against the ‘entwining of psychology and philosophy’. Mikics is referring here to Husserl’s arguments against ‘psychologism’, the view that the laws of logic, for example, are psychological laws. But for Husserl, logic is a ‘normative’ discipline – that is, it lays down how we ought to think, rather than describing, as psychology does, how we, as a matter of fact, do think.

Derrida’s subsequent and notorious claims about the impossibility of ’self-presence’ and the rest of it begin to look rather different, and much less threatening, when considered in this light. And if saving Derrida from his foes (not to mention his more excitable allies) means domesticating his ideas somewhat, then that seems a small price to pay.

Mikics doesn’t stop with the claim about psychology and philosophy, however. He goes on to argue that Husserl, who conceived of philosophy along Platonic lines as a kind of ideal super-science, provided the ‘original stimulus’ for what he calls Derrida’s ’scepticism’, by which he means the view that ‘we live in a fundamentally written and therefore phantom-like world, one that denies us the reality we seek.’ This latter being Mikics’s gloss on Derrida’s even more notorious assertion that there is ‘nothing outside the text’.

The rest of Derrida’s career, Mikics’ argues, is to be understood as an attempt to break free from the ‘airless paradox’ generated by the conflict between ‘metaphysics’ and ’scepticism’. Everything in this book turns on the plausibility of that narrative framework. However, there are other possibilities that Mikics does not take into account – for instance, that Derrida’s pronouncements on ‘undecidability’ and the free ‘play’ of meaning, far from tending to a classical form of scepticism might in fact part of an attempt, in the spirit of Wittgenstein, simply to account for the ways in which language actually works. But that is a tale for another day.

March 7, 2010 | 4:29 pm
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by Jonathan Derbyshire
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Disgrace

This review of Steve Jacobs’ cinematic adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace appeared in the December-January edition of the Literary Review.

CRIMES OF THE PAST

Disgrace

Dir Steve Jacobs

(120 mins Australia/South Africa 2008)

J M Coetzee’s 1999 Booker Prize-winning novel takes its title from not one, but two instances of disgrace. In the first, David Lurie, a 52-year-old ‘adjunct professor of communications’ at a university in Cape Town (before the ‘great rationalization’ of higher education that followed the end of apartheid, he’d been a professor of modern languages), is sacked and his pension taken away after it emerges that he has slept with a female student. In the second, Lurie’s daughter Lucy is raped by three black men who break into her ramshackle clapboard house in the Eastern Cape, to which Lurie himself has retreated following his sacking. The rapists douse Lurie in methylated spirits and he suffers disfiguring burns.

Lurie’s atonement for his disgrace takes the form of a kind of self-abasement: he volunteers at a clinic run by Lucy’s friend Bev Shaw, helping to end the lives of abandoned and unwanted dogs. And, as if to announce a definitive end to his career as a sexual ‘adventurer’ (he is a veteran of two marriages and hundreds of casual liaisons), he also sleeps with Bev, a plain, dumpy woman to whom he isn’t remotely attracted.

Lucy, meanwhile, has no sins to atone for – at least, no sins that are solely hers. Yet she chooses, as her father puts it, to try to ‘expiate the crimes of the past’ – those of white South Africa, in other words – by ‘suffering in the present’. She refuses to report the rape to the police, and instead seeks the protection of a black man named Petrus, who had previously worked for her, but to whom she now resolves to sign over her land in return for security against the intruders (one of whom, a disturbed boy named Pollux, turns out to be related to Petrus). This, Lurie says, is a ‘humiliation’, but it is one his daughter is prepared to accept. It will mean living ‘like a dog’, he objects. ‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘like a dog.’

This is a pivotal exchange in the novel. And it is central to Steve Jacobs’s cinematic adaptation of Disgrace as well. Like Coetzee’s book, the film is structured around Lurie’s humiliation and Lucy’s rape. Lurie’s appearance before a university tribunal, following a sexual harassment complaint from his ‘coloured’ student lover Melanie Isaacs, is played, in both novel and film, as a kind of Stalinist show trial. But where, in the book, Lurie meets his accusers with a cold defiance, and an austere, nearly analytical defence of his ‘serv[ice] of Eros’, in Jacobs’s film, John Malkovich turns defiance into foppish disdain, playing the disgraced professor as a kind of lisping, smirking Casanova (which, incidentally, is how he is described in an anonymous note that is shoved under his office door, warning him that his ‘days are over’).

Indeed, it’s as if Malkovich approached the part as a reprise of his role as the arch-seducer the Vicomte de Valmont, in Stephen Frears’s 1988 film Dangerous Liaisons. He turns what the narrator in the novel calls the ‘light’ and intermittent ‘shudder of voluptuousness’ into a sort of permanent, low-level priapic charge, and the result is nothing so much as a form of debilitating camp or kitsch. And that’s part of the problem with Jacobs’s version of Disgrace, which is based on a screenplay by Anna-Maria Monticelli: it breaks the connection established in the book between Lurie’s disgrace and Lucy’s.

When depicting the encounter between Lurie and his young lover, Coetzee takes care to show Melanie completely still, frozen almost, as the older man toils above her, as if to suggest that his latest conquest (the word is apt) is almost a rape, and one for which his daughter’s later violation will be awful revenge. Coetzee wants the reader to see South African history as something ineluctable that neither father nor daughter can escape (indeed, Disgrace is a distinctively and grimly deterministic novel). But this context is fatally attenuated in the film: Lurie’s dalliance and eventual defenestration from the university seem like a giant non sequitur or MacGuffin, a mere erotic psychodrama whose wider significance is smoothed away.

But the biggest difficulty that Jacobs and Monticelli face is that Disgrace is not a straightforwardly realist novel, and so won’t yield many of its treasures to the screen. It operates, as Coetzee once said of his own practice as a novelist, ‘in terms of its own procedures’. It is preoccupied, in other words, with its own linguistic textures – these themselves becoming one of the novel’s principal themes. And telling the story from Lurie’s point of view is essential to this. We view his relationship with Petrus through the lens of his scepticism about the ability of the English language to tell the truth of South African history. ‘Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mould of English, Petrus’s story would come out arthritic, bygone.’ But without Lurie’s preoccupation with this withering of the tongue, all one is left with is the story of a satyr or sexual freebooter exiled from the city and condemned to a life on the unforgiving high veld. And it’s not enough.

March 7, 2010 | 4:22 pm
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by Jonathan Derbyshire
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Bits and pieces

The following articles appeared in the New Statesman over the past couple of months:

A contribution to the NS’s dissection of the decade in culture.

A piece about modernism and the black American diaspora.

A profile of Iain Duncan Smith in the NS’s special Tories issue.

March 7, 2010 | 4:14 pm
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The Orwell diaries

This review of the new edition of George Orwell’s diaries, edited by Peter Davison, appears in the current issue of the Literary Review.

Diaries
By George Orwell
(Edited by Peter Davison)
(Harvill Secker 520pp £20)

When he reviewed Nineteen Eighty-Four for the New Statesman, V S Pritchett identified among the sources of George Orwell’s ‘material’ not just the depredations of Stalinist terror, but also the ‘seediness of London in the worst days of the war’ – the ‘pockets of 19th-century life in decaying England, the bad flats, bad food, the whining streak of domestic sluttishness which have sickened English satirists since Smollett’.

In fact, as these newly published Diaries remind us, Orwell’s fascination with the grime and filth of English life long pre-dated the privations of wartime. Peter Davison’s scrupulously edited and handsomely produced edition, which covers an eighteen-year period ending in 1949, just before Orwell’s death from tuberculosis in January 1950, opens with a ‘Hop-Picking Diary’, which records three months the author spent living as a tramp and itinerant hop-picker in the late summer and autumn of 1931. This journal annotates, with an almost lyrical relish, the ‘warm, faecal stink’ of the workhouse and sundry other discomforts of life on the road – the near-sleepless nights spent in Trafalgar Square or in wet grass by the side of the Maidstone Road, the terrible food. (There is some overlap here, not only with Down and Out in Paris and London but also with one of Orwell’s earliest published pieces, ‘The Spike’, written earlier in 1931 under his real name, Eric Blair.)

The ‘Hop-Picking Diary’ also contains a vivid parade of Rabelaisian grotesques: an elderly, deaf tramp who ‘looked just like a drawing by George Belcher’; a coster and his wife who ‘tack a “fucking” on to every noun’; and a ‘little Liverpool Jew of eighteen, a thorough guttersnipe’, whom Orwell is unable to persuade to wash ‘more of himself than his nose and a small circle round it’. (Orwell’s anti-Semitism may have been, as his biographer Bernard Crick put it, ‘mild and conventional’, and something he’d shed by the 1940s, but it is no less shocking for that.)

Pritchett said that Orwell’s peregrinations were his way of ‘going native in his own country’, though there is a moment here when Orwell recalls allowing his affected cockney accent to slip in order to cadge bigger rations from a stranger who sympathised with what appeared to be his catastrophic loss of social status. And there is certainly more of the anthropologist or ethnologist than the native in ‘The Road to Wigan Pier Diary’ of 1936, on which Orwell based the celebrated book of the same name.

This diary, which traces Orwell’s journeys throughout the north of England, from Liverpool, via Wigan and Manchester, across the Pennines to Barnsley and Sheffield, has the same colloquial plainness and exactness of description as the earlier account – not to mention the same preoccupation with dirt and squalor. Hanley and Burslem in the Potteries are ‘about the most dreadful places’ he has ever seen; in Wigan, the landscape is a ‘frightful’ one of slagheaps and ‘belching chimneys’. In one powerfully concentrated vignette, Orwell describes seeing a young woman in a ‘horrible squalid side-alley’, poking a stick up a drainpipe. The young woman’s expression, Orwell reports, was ‘as desolate as I have ever seen’.

Davison notes that this description was used, only lightly elaborated, in the eventual book. And indeed, this section of the diaries is notable for the intrusion of the kind of writerly memoranda absent from earlier entries: at Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, for instance, Orwell is struck by the noise made by blocks of ice floating on the water, and makes a note to ‘use in novel some time and to have an empty Craven A packet bobbing up and down among the ice’.

But the most significant difference between the diaries of 1931 and those of 1936 is the emergence of a voice that is recognisably Orwell’s – and this has much to do with the solidifying of his political convictions. Orwell’s prose develops a polemical edge, deployed as often against what had become his own side, the political left, as it is against the horrors of unemployment and the complacencies of the class system. In Wigan, he is dismayed to hear a trade union leader speak ‘using all the padding and clichés of the Socialist orator’, and records with dismay the opinions he overhears in a pub, which, with one or two exceptions, are all ‘pro-German’.

It is interesting that those uttering such sentiments are not the suavely defeatist intellectuals who are the targets of Orwell’s most famous political essays of the 1940s; rather, they are commercial travellers and market gardeners. By the time we reach the centrepiece of this volume, however, ‘The War-Time Diaries’ of 1940–2, Orwell is eviscerating, with equal and characteristic vigour, both the ideological contortions of Communists forced to justify the Nazi–Soviet pact and the casual ‘treacherousness of the British ruling class’. ‘Everywhere,’ he writes in July 1940, ‘a feeling of something near despair among thinking people because of the failure to act and the continuance of dead minds and pro-Fascists in positions of command.’

This is the ‘power of facing unpleasant facts’ for which Orwell was posthumously celebrated – not least by Pritchett. And it persists right up to the end. In the final entry, made in April 1949, by which time he was stricken by TB, Orwell calmly enumerates the fixtures and fittings in his room at University College Hospital. The fee was fifteen guineas a week, but did not ‘include telephone or wireless’. There the diary ends.

November 8, 2009 | 3:02 pm
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by Jonathan Derbyshire
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The politics of imperfection

Over the past couple of years, David Cameron’s Tories have sailed under a flag of convenience marked “progressive conservatism”. For most commentators, the important question has been just how “progressive” this new ideological confection is. Many on the left have taken it for granted that talk of Cameronian “progress” is just that - talk - and that the Conservatives’ commitment to, in their leader’s own words, the “progressive end of making British poverty history” is entirely rhetorical. On the right, the intellectual outriders of Cameronism have laboured strenuously to establish its “progressive” bona fides.

Read the rest of my essay on the meaning of conservatism in the New Statesman.

October 17, 2009 | 5:07 pm
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by Jonathan Derbyshire
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