Perfection and Pity: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

Human history is full of examples of our desire to be perfect, to create, to enjoy, to exploit what we believe is perfection. In the “Western” arts, this is a well-known leitmotif: from the statues of Greek gods to fictional depictions of beauty, from Bach’s music to Leonardo Da Vinci’s paintings. Of course, morality, religion, societal mores, human relations all enter into the discussion of perfection and beauty. Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (Vintage, 2009, pp. 389) adds to these considerations also feelings, especially the feeling of pity, the pity that pervades the reader for the protagonist, Snowman (Jimmy).

As in most speculative fiction, this novel, too, hinges on the events that precede and follow an apocalyptic event. The life of the characters in the pre-cataclysmic event is already far from perfect: specifically, the protagonist in his youth is basically a lonely boy looking for some kind of affection from his parents whose (pre-)occupations do not include him. Later on, he is enrolls in less prestigious art school for those young people who do not cut it in the sciences. Since he is “good with words”, he finds a job as an advertising copy writer. His friendship with Crake goes back to their youth, when they as little boys watch porn movies, play chess and computer games, and generally shun the rest of the children around them. This friendship brings him a more remunerative job, as Crake is the mind behind a very special project. This project aims to create a different (more perfect) human beings, starting with reorganizing the prepared embryo cells, so parents can choose a being who does not get sick, who has perfect physique, who does not crave sex, who is a vegetarian, etc. The private company already houses a group of the new perfect beings (physically beautiful) who are intellectually not ready to fend for themselves. So they have a teacher, Oryx, a woman who is the image of love for Snowman/Jimmy, but who is also loved by Crake. To prepare the possible embryos, a new sex pill is created which is tested all over the world without approval of any agency (in fact, there is no mention of any government or regulating agency in the book). This pill turns out to be the spark of the apocalypse, as it makes the users bleed to death. In the aftermath of a general almost complete excruciatingly painful human extinction, Jimmy takes over the care of the group of the perfect but ignorant human beings. This is the nutshell of the novel, as usual, it is impossible to do justice in this short paragraph to the complexities of it.

Although there is the usual note saying that the book is a work of fiction, to remind the reader that this may not be completely true, Atwood begins her narration by quoting from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. This quote ends by expressing the idea that “my principal design was to inform you, and not to amuse you”. In other words, by creating a fictional world, Atwood intends to inform us of what exactly is going on around us in this present point of history. My mention of pity at the beginning of this review points to the fact that each element of the novel, each move that Snowman/Jimmy makes, has equivalents in our present. And pity stems from the fact that neither we nor the protagonist can really do anything about the things that we know are done wrong. Jimmy/Snowman cannot fight against the system that separates people into have and have-nots (both economically and intellectually) – does this sound familiar? In the novel, private companies have all the power to do as they please – does this sound familiar? Even individuals act totally unscrupulously in the novel – does this sound familiar? especially as regards children bought from poor families and used in child porn films. What is there for the protagonist to do? How can he act against forces that are so entrenched in his environment but act within the confines of his world and try to survive by himself? The readers can only feel pity for him, as they also feel pity for themselves, for the pitiful world we live in, for all the injustices that are perpetrated by individuals and companies. The world has recently been through the Covid pandemic – what have we learned from it? Now there are wars, military conflicts, hate is compounded on top of hate ad infinitum. Atwood’s novel ends with the possibility that Snowman/Jimmy is not the only “normal” human alive in his world. Should we think of that possibility for us? And what happens when perfection – our version of what it should be – does not pan out to be really perfect? Must perfection and pity coexist?

More than ‘two solitudes’, or Cree (Canadian) and (Italian) Canadian fiction*

What adventures can a protagonist, self-identifying as a Cree, experience in the territory belonging to the Dakehl nation in Northern British Columbia as a school principal in the 2000s? Darrel J. McLeod’s character in A Season in Chezgh’un (Douglas&McIntyre 2013, pp. 320) undergoes a gamut of feelings, and a variety of expected and also unforeseen events. Although a fictional character, James not only gives the reader a really interesting and engaging look at the life stories of one of the First Nations people, but also provides numerous examples of emotions and events that closely resemble those of the characters in immigrant/Italian Canadian fiction.

James’s life story gives us examples of the atrocious history of abuse, maltreatment, neglect, discrimination of all First Nations peoples. Having experienced some of these, having lived without his father and with his alcoholic mother, having been caught in the web of sibling suicides and addiction, and suffering from sexual abuse by his white brother-in-law, James is, however, able to leave his Cree birthplace, study at the university, travel, enjoy varied cuisine, fashion, and music, live with his lover in a Vancouver apartment. All these experiences, however, not only make him insecure, but also extremely unhappy and he never feels that he belongs. He is aware of these negative pressures that his environment as well as himself put on him. And yet he does not give up: he compares himself to the sockeye salmon who leave fresh water to migrate great distances in the sea and then come back to their spawning grounds and die there. (p. 18) As an educator, he applies for, and receives, the position of a principal at a Dakehl school. His expectations (also muffled by his welcoming committee) soon make him realize that if he wants a real school, he has to build it himself. He is not undaunted as he joggles his ideas between the local/provincial school administrators and the elders of the community. He is truly happy when he sits at the shore of the lake and observes the wild life there or when he shares food with the Dakehl community, or when he participates in a ceremony with the tribe in a Mayan village. He is able to hire new, young staff, he promotes the cooperation with and experiential learning for the children and adults in his community. He observes the internal squabbles and the disagreements between and among the different tribes and is able to walk this tightrope with success, without making too strong enemies. His most successful projects are having the youth like the school, attend it and participate in all the activities, as well as having the elders take literacy classes that lead to participation in their political struggles. His feelings of being different in any and all circumstances are heightened because of his belonging to the gay community, with the concomitant fear of an HIV infection. He finds release from stress in sex. When he is offered to come and play the piano at the white neighbours, his answer illustrates not only his complex of inferiority but also his desperate need to be approved by others (p. 69):

“That’s generous, Louise. thank you.” James answered earnestly, although he knew he could never take her up on her offer. In addition to his shyness, his pride wouldn’t allow him to accept what felt like charity – the benevolence of someone in a position of privilege and wealth bestowed upon a lesser being. And then there was the optics of it all, if he were to be seen as being too cozy with the local gentrified white folks, what would the Native people he was working with think of him?

The novel concludes with James accepting another job and going to another post in Salmon Arm. On his way he swerves his car to avoid a beaver who nevertheless is injured; while James muses on the importance of this animal for his people, the animal jumps up and claws his thigh. The fact that beaver is also a national emblem of Canada, and this emblem injures him, is a clear metaphor for the impossibility for James to live in peace with his environment.

There is a metafictional element in A season in Chezgh’un when James reads Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel by Marie-Claire Blais (the use of the word “season” in Mcleod’s title is interesting). James notices that the novel “recounts a story of poverty and oppression in rural Quebec, and it comes as close as any mainstream piece of literature has to capturing the reality that James, his siblings and cousins grew up in.” (p. 31) Besides mixing reality and fiction, this metafictional detail in McLeod’s writing gives away one of the most troublesome perspectives that Canadian fiction can have for an author that does not deem himself to be a Canadian. The desire to become an author of “mainstream” fiction is great. In Native authors’ case, though, this is a struggle which they wrestle with more than any other “ethnic” Canadian author, since they do not identify with Canadian culture, whereas the “immigrant” authors have to.

Although a comparison between Native-Canadian and ethnic-Canadian writing requires a full treatment, I will concentrate here only on points of convergence between themes and tropes common to the Cree-Canadian and Italian-Canadian prose (the Cree-Canadian is represented by only one novel, though). Therefore there is no discussion of differences in topics such as sexual abuse of young children (in the Natives’ cases but not mentioned in the Italian Canadian case, although rape is present), or the abuse lived through in residential schools suffered by the Natives (Italians in Canadian schools, just like any other “ethic” pupils received other types of discrimination in schools). The following common themes in stand out:

1. grappling with history: protagonists both Cree and Italian struggle to come to terms with the fact that they “lost” or are in fact losing the cultural certainties (language, beliefs, ancestors’ way of life, naming practices, etc.) which their ancestors had held for millennia.
2. impossibility to belong to any group, “mainstream” or indeed to one’s own: blatant and covert discrimination makes this even more profound.
3. intense desire to belong to the mainstream group, to be accepted and included, even though this desire clashes with the innermost feelings of the individual.
4. ancient belief systems shattered, i.e. in the case of the First Nations the perpetrators are the Catholic nuns and priests, in the case of Italians, it is also the Catholic priests who do not allow or do not understand certain pre-Christian beliefs to be practiced.
5. comparison with nature: James compares himself with the sockeye salmon, the trope in the Italian Canadian culture of the immigrant generations was the fig tree: it can survive in Canada, but it has to be bent out of shape and protected, covered in the winter.

In conclusion, A season in Chezgh’un underscores the necessity to go beyond the received truths about an individual’s life and their history. This is the lesson also from (Italian) Canadian fiction. And as we are now (2024) at the cusp of an unprecedented general cultural upheaval – the use of AI becoming so much more than simple aid to human life – what can the slash between pre-history and modernity teach us about the division between modernity (humanity, anthropocene) and bio-techno-world? If these processes can indeed be compared, humanity does not have much to rely on for support from the past. The two solitudes, representing Canadians and Natives/immigrants are truly becoming many solitudes.

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*To be consistent, I should have written Molisan Canadian or Calabrian Canadian fiction to make it clear that the authors of Italian origin (or their ancestors) come from different parts of Italy, just like First Nations peoples come form different regions, and therefore have different cultures and languages. The Italian Canadian prose fiction which I base my comments on include Frank Paci’s Black Madonna, Nino Ricci’s Lives of the Saints, In a Glass House, Where she has gone. Poetry requires another post, but one can start here: https://www.tlnoriginals.com/title-item/invisible-voices/.

Mozart’s secrets

What new information can be gathered from yet another biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that has not been said in the hundreds (some say more than two thousand) of this musician’s life stories? I am not an expert on Mozart, but some facts are relatively known by all those interested in music. Paul Johnson’s Mozart. A Life (Viking, 2013, pp. 164) is not an academic biography (the author does not cite where his quotations from others come from), nor a biography written for composers by a composer (like the Beethoven’s biography discussed in my post below (Beethoven’s tears). The book is a quick read, written by an obvious aficionado. There is an Epilogue/Appendix by Daniel Johnson entitled “Mozart in London” dealing with Mozart’s visit to that town; this appendix is more a panegyric to London than anything else. The book closes with a short section on Further Reading followed by an Index. My comments are based on what I knew about Mozart’s life and those I found in Johnson’s book.

Mozart and languages

It is part of Mozart’s lore that when he and his sister Nannerl were young, they invented a secret language. It would be interesting to find out what the form of this language was and whether they kept the knowledge of it. Johnson mentions that Mozart probably learnt how to read music notes before knowing how to read words. Not only that, but his facility with learning languages is also brought up: “His father taught him Latin without difficulty. But English he picked up for himself, and the following year he mastered a good deal of Italian. Years after, he is recorded as speaking English fluently and with a good accent.” (p. 14; source of information not indicated). The biography does not go deeper into this topic. One can surmise that as regards Latin, it was the language of the Catholic mass, and as regards Italian, it was the language of the opera, so Mozart had to be in contact with these languages weekly, if not daily. It would be an interesting research to delve into the process of learning languages in Mozart’s time, and especially by him.

Gaieties of life or complexity of character?

Johnson frequently underlines the fact that Mozart’s character leaned greatly towards cheerfulness. “The great thing about Mozart, one reason why people liked him so much, was that he added hugely to the gaieties of life. Gay himself by nature, he saw no reason why people should not enjoy a little innocent pleasure, or not-so-innocent pleasure, for that matter.” (p. 61) Dances, jokes, double-entendres, musical jokes, billiards, all contributed to this enjoyment of life.  He loved to dance, and he composed many dance pieces (minuets, gavottes, country dances, waltzes and others), and music for ballet. Family and friends gatherings offered the occasions for not only playing music, trying his new compositions, and discussing them, but also for exchanging new jokes and basically having fun. Mozart’s membership in the Freemasons is well known. It is less discussed (one example may be from the Catholic side https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/mozart-masonry-and-catholicism) how this membership, whose purpose is very far from having fun, added to the complexity of Mozart’s character, since gaiety and Masonry have very different rules and may have clashed in the composer’s mind. Add to this Mozart’s faith and his relationship to the Catholic church. Clearly, he was able to incorporate all this in his music, even though his joy, Catholicism and Freemasonry may have clashed, or maybe just because of this clash he was able to create such musical masterpieces.

Offending the ear

In a letter to his father, Mozart writes about the parts in his The Abduction from the Seraglio. There is an interesting thought which Johnson does not dwell on:

… passions, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of disgust, and as music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear, but must please the listener, or in other words must never cease to be music… (pp. 84-85)

So many questions come to mind stemming from this sentence: What is disgust? How is it expressed in music? What does ‘offending the ear’ mean? Why does Mozart want to please the listener? Is it the composer’s duty to please the listener? Do we have here Mozart’s definition of music as something that does not offend the ear and pleases the listener? Is this definition applicable only to compositions written in the classical style or can/should it be generalized? This Mozart’s opinion perhaps explains why his compositions have been called ‘elegant’ (I don’t remember by whom).

Creating musical problems

Johnson writes, on p. 95, “Because of his early training and exceptional musical intelligence, Mozart found most things easy and loved creating problems for himself and so, invariably, for singers and players. As his letters to his father show again and again, he knew exactly when he made his work hard to play and harder still to get exactly right. It is not true to say that he invented hard passages entirely for their own sake – that would have been perverse and unmusical – but to get an effect, he was ready to make the orchestra “sweat,” as he put it, and the singers to give their utmost.”

Interestingly, Beethoven, too, was prone to compose hard sections and pieces, and he too, was not worried about how the members of the orchestra felt about it (he sent them home to practice!). My interest here stems from the fact that the idea of “difficulty” underpins the manner in which geniuses operate – i.e., they cause their aims to converge at any cost. But there are different levels of difficulty and different types of it. Each pianist has to decide how to approach the difficulties, for ex., found in he sonata K457. From a general perspective, the modern age shuns difficulties, learners are forced to “have fun” learning.

In conclusion, this biography opened up more questions and more topics to delve into, rather than providing answer and solutions to existing queries. It does, moreover, ask us to think slightly differently not about Mozart himself, but about the closest people to him, for ex., we should consider whether his father was really such a monster as he usually is portrayed, or whether Constance was really such a bad housewife as has been written about her. All in all, whether you love Mozart’s music, or not, this biography will not change your mind about this genial composer.

NPL 2: V. S. Naipaul

This is the second in the ongoing series of reviews of books by authors who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. V. S. Naipaul won the prize in 2001.

I have read three books by this author: one written and published before he received the prize and two published after the event.

A Bend in the River (New York, The Modern Library, 1997, first published in 1979) shows the author’s mastery in weaving together colonialism, race, imagination, religion, slavery, individual psychology, social dilemmas, as well as cultural transformations in migration situations. At the outset, the narrator, Salim, lives on the east coast of Africa, and being a descendant of Indian migrants, lives a particularly troublesome interior life. His loyalty is not certain: he is not wholly “African”, and he is not wholly “Indian”, and yet he is both. The colonial and internecine wars and battles force him to move and set up a shop in the central part of Africa, in a town at a bend of a river: it is a commercial site, where goods from afar travel deep into the bush and are exchanged together with opinions, traditions, biases, food, insecurities and hates. He is alone and he is lonely; the town offers only superficial connections and relationships. Through Salim we meet a number of fascinating characters, such as the marchande Zabeth, the Belgian priest, his ex-servant, and others; but the bond between them and Salim is tenuous. The first person narrative allows Naipaul to delve deep into the soul of a man who is experiencing transformations in all aspects of life around him: the rulers are no longer white, the President is becoming an autocrat, the local tribes use violence to deliver their wants and needs, everyone tries to make the best of a shaky situation. Everything is up for grabs: history, education, new Africa, values, civilization, ambition. Whereas Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart illustrate the dismantling of the local African culture from the point of view of one village dweller, A Bend in the River elaborates on the dismantling adding the cultural and religious layer of Indian Muslims living in Africa. This is a profoundly pessimistic novel, because at the end, it seems that despite the battles, the deaths, the victims and heroes, people are unable to create more positive and joyful lives. In the words of one character (Indar), if you travel back to the same place (in this case the east coast of Africa) often, “You stop grieving the past. You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn’t exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground. This is the way we have to learn how to live now. The past is here.” (p. 167) Salim’s stance is interesting, objective, but not really useful: “In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.” (118). If it is the case that the past (and therefore all the culture, religion, traditions it carries with it) does not exist, and no new culture, traditions, religions are created, the result is living in a limbo of insubstantial connections to tangible remnants of a past life. The book can therefore be read metaphorically – beyond the troublesome situation of migrants living on a foreign soil – as a warning about humanity’s inability to create new inclusive culture, traditions, religions.

Magic Seeds (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, the illustration above shows part of the jacket) continues the theme of an Indian born in Africa, studying in London. But this time this Indian travels to Germany and then to India to become – cajoled by his sister – a revolutionary fighter for one of the guerrilla groups in India. He abandons his wife in Africa after 20 years of marriage. Although the reasons for Willie’s joining a terrorist group are murky, Naipaul the omniscient narrator throws us crumbs of possible causes for becoming a guerrilla fighter: a cuckolding wife, weakness of mid-life, revenge oneself on the world, seeking a kind of asceticism or sainthood. The theme of slavery appears again, but this time as a historical force which debases people to such an extent that they do not think for themselves, and the void is being filled by guerrilla fighters. “The old lords oppressed and humiliated and injured for centuries. No one touched them. Now they’ve gone away. … They’ve left these wretched people as their monument.” (p. 43) Willie is left to his own devices in the guerrilla group, which, by some unforeseen circumstances, is the enemy of the one he really wanted to join. It is significant that he does not try to cross over to the enlightened group which does not believe in violence to achieve their goal of freeing people from a life of wretchedness. No amount of boredom, starvation, deprivation makes him try to leave; in fact, he thinks “I must give no sign to these people that I am not absolutely with them.” (p. 52). The group he joined makes the villagers kill the richest person of the village. He thinks of one group of village people as “survivors”: “Perhaps this exposure to human nullity will do me good, will make me see more clearly.” (p. 68). After incredible vicissitudes, he is arrested and then freed thanks to a lawyer-acquaintance of his from his life in London. He starts a new life in London, learning to write for an architectural journal. The last quarter of the book deals with the story of marriage infidelities of both the lawyer and his wife (with whom also Willie has sex). This is also a sadly pessimistic novel, and can be described as a metaphor for the individual’s search of the meaning of life. This search is boring, tragically twisted, leads to the individual’s learning about himself, but really to no purpose. The words of the title are inscrutable, since they refer to something received by an egg-seller in a village market “who exchanges everything for a handful of magic seeds” (p. 242). This book was disappointing after the mastery of A Bend in the River.

A Writer’s People (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2007) is not, according to Naipaul, literary criticism or biography. “I wish only, and in a personal way, to set out the writing to which I was exposed during my career. I say writing, but I mean specifically vision, a way of seeing and feeling.” (p. 41). It is unclear why a writer would write such a book, unless he wanted to re-affirm for himself certain ways of seeing and feeling. There is no doubt that Naipaul’s “people” are varied, from colonial or post-colonial and other situations, and some well-known. However, the book describes, in an interesting way, the present way of being for a writer. First, an European writer: by 1930, (after Balzac, Tolstoy, Dickens) “little about these great European societies had been left unsaid. The societies themselves had been diminished for various reasons – war, revolution; and the world around these once unchallenged societies had grown steadily larger. A society’s unspoken theme is always itself; it has an idea where it stands in the world. A diminished society couldn’t be written about in the old way, of social comment.” (p. 62) Therefore, writers have to find another perspective, such as fairly-tale or romance. Among the colonial and post-colonial authors (Naipaul’s father plays a prominent role) who caught the eye (and perspective and feeling) of Naipaul are Gandhi and Nehru (autobiographies). A different way of looking is an elaboration on history, to which Naipaul reserves many pages. Specifically, Flaubert’s elaboration of the mercenaries’ war in Carthage after 241 BC, based on Polybius’s account. Naipaul parallels the descriptions of mercenaries given by Polybius with the treatment Flaubert gives them in Salambo.and prefers the ancient Greek historian’s version. It is shorter, “drier, but profounder…more full of true concern” (p. 135). Naipaul touches also upon the difficulties of reading literature. From the perspective of a young man born in Trinidad, living in “the half-world in the privacy of an extended family” (53), clearly, reading about the court of Luis XIV was like reading a fairy-tale. “What was a court? What were the courtiers? What was an aristocrat? I had to make them up in my mind, though for the most part I left them as words. … I lived in a cloud of not-knowing.” (54) “But the writers I couldn’t read were also partly to blame. …[Graham Greene in The Quiet American] hadn’t made his subject clear, He had assumed that his world was the only one that mattered.” (54) Naipaul praises Maupassant because he made his far-off world complete and accessible, even universal (54).

The conclusion? A Bend in the River is truly magnificent, and the part of Magic Seeds which deals with Willie’s life of a terrorist is likewise fascinatingly written. Naipaul’s literary world is, however, peopled by lonely men who take up occupations (trader, guerrilla fighter in these two cases) seemingly without thinking, and who don’t find even a smidgen of joy in any activity they are engaged in.

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NPL 1: Jose’ Saramago

This is a new series, entitled NPL (Nobel Prize for Literature), in which books of those authors who won the Nobel prize in literature are reviewed. An attempt is made not to spoil the reading for those who intend to delve into these books.

The first in this series is the review of Jose’ Saramago’s The Lives of Things (translated by Giovanni Pontiero, London: Verso, 2013) and Death with Interruptions (translated by Margaret Jull Costa, New York: Harcourt, 2008). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.

Content

Saramago’s strengths are both in content and in style, as both of these are interesting, fresh, and highly entertaining. To be more precise, for example, the story entitled “The chair” describes the form and substance of chairs, but it is specifically about a chair that stopped doing what it ought to, and is collapsing, together with the person sitting on it. Besides dealing with the possible reasons for the chair’s demise, and the consequences of the fall of the person sitting on it as it buckles, this short story is above all a brilliant metaphor for writing: authors have to depict/photograph in words elusive actions and unknown quirky characters in fieri, i.e as these are imagined, and we, the readers, have the chance to follow the linguistic descriptions of these actions and characters and engage with them in our minds. If the depiction is felicitous, then happiness reigns, and this is the case with Saramago’s writing, because reading it brings joy, thoughts, and chuckles. The content of three stories in the collection deals with the reaction of a character (male) to unpredictable (and therefore difficult) circumstances the setting of which is usually some type of bureaucratic state attempting a type of control: “Embargo” (lack of fuel), “Reflux” (moving the human remains from one cemetery to another), “Things” (things acting in strange ways). The last two contain very different contents: the lyrical story “Centaur” imagines the life of a centaur who has lived for millennia and has been attempting to find the place of his origins, and “Revenge” looks at sex from two perspectives.

In the novel Death with Interruptions death is the main character both acting and being acted upon.The author analyzes the consequences of the fact that in one country no one dies. He skillfully, ironically and profoundly narrates the need for death (and therefore the utter dismay when no one dies) on the part of ecclesiastical authorities, funeral homes, and medical profession, as well as some common people. As death returns (with conditions), one person, a musician, does not come under her authority. The novel ends with a lyrical possibility that even death could fall prey to if not love, at least feelings of tenderness. Memorable are the pages that discuss the philosophical musings (by some characters) on death, tackling questions such as “Is there one Death (of the universe) or many deaths (of humans, animals, plants, etc.)?”, or “Is death more powerful than god?”. Although the movement Humanity + has been pursuing the possibility of humans not needing to die, or at least living for a very long time, it bases its futuristic predictions on human biology and the possibility of connection between biology and technology. Saramago’s death is very different. It simply is, and although he describes her at first according to the usual European iconography as a skeleton with a scythe dressed in a long cape, she possesses the ability to transform herself. There are two ironic views which are followed in parallel in the novel: on the one hand, there is the fact that humans live with the thought of death, but not really thinking deeply of the time when death comes to them, and on the other, so much of what humans do is dependent on death. Life without death is really unthinkable, but it is also uncomfortable. We are trapped in this tug-of-war, but it si also what makes us human.

Style

Saramago’s linguistic expression is noteworthy. I would love to be able to read him in the original Portuguese. Especially in the novel, his syntactic constructions can be compared, as a complete opposite, to the style of Ernest Hemingway, but not in the vein of Henry James. Reading his sentences leaves the reader almost breathless, and yet wanting to read on. But reading his sentences is not like reading stream of consciousness, it is more like catching up with the developing asides which lead to other ideas but the thematic centre of the sentence is still discernible. Furthermore, now and then the author shows his self-awareness as writer answering questions that careful readers ask as they read, and his comments are witty. Two quotations precede the beginning of the novel. The first one is from the Book of Predictions: “We will know less and less what it means to be human”. The second one is from Wittgenstein: “If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields.” Both obviously refer to language, and Saramago’s writing shows he thought about linguistic expression in depth.

In conclusion, these two books brought me full joy, entertainment, and inspirational ideas which I will treasure for a long time.

Cuore: segno, sentimento, organo

Il quarantesimo volumetto della collana Superfluo indispensabile della casa editrice Fefe’, intitolato Cuore storia, metafore, immagini e palpiti di Claudia Pancino (2020, pp. 209), offre un viaggio sorprendente e significativo attraverso la storia e i vari ambiti temporali, psicologici, fisiologici, metaforici, simbolici in cui si trova la parola “cuore”.

Il libro, corredato di numerose illustrazioni di cuore, è diviso in 3 capitoli e chiude con “Testimonianze e documenti” (cioè, con degli esempi concreti di descrizioni tratte da pubblicazioni che includono gli ambiti presi in esame nel libro).

Nella Premessa, l’autrice si sofferma sul fatto che il significato del “cuore” è stato prima quello ideale legato all'amore, anche se si sapeva già nell’antichità che il cuore è il fonte della vita. Dunque, l’espressione “essere senza cuore” non significa essere morto, ma non poter amare. La premessa introduce le 3 domande a cui il libro vuole dare delle riposte concrete:

1. Cosa unisce le diverse rappresentazioni contemporanee del cuore?
2. Qual è la loro storia?
3. Cosa le unisce all’organo pompante?

Capitolo I, intitolato “Cuore: parola, organo, simbolo”, presenta la visione del cuore sia come l’immagine (un simbolo) che come l’organo stesso. Le rappresentazioni visive di tutt’e due questi significati hanno una storia complessa. Per esempio, le testimonianze grafiche antiche sono ambigue o non esistenti fino al XIII secolo, ma abbiamo una data precisa da cui parte il significato del simbolo “cuoricino” (oggi universale) come “I love”, cioè il 1977. Per quanto riguarda la rappresentazione visiva dell’organo, si parte dal mondo vegetale (Giovan Battista della Porta che trova strette relazioni tra la pianta somigliante al cuore e le proprietà terapeutiche di questa pianta). Poi, le testimonianze visive accettate come possibilmente cuoriformi passano dall’elefante di Pindal, agli arazzi, alle illuminazioni nei manoscritti, alla Cappella degli Scrovegni di Giotto (dove la Carità offre a Dio un cuore con la punta rivolta all’insù che riprende la descrizione del cuore fatta da Galeno), ecc. Tutte queste rappresentazioni hanno un legame con l’organo pulsante che però indica sentimenti, anche se non è chiaro quali sono i sentimenti che si trovano in questa sede, anche perché la simbologia non sembra essere universale. Per i Sumeri, il cuore significa compassione anche vulnerabile (il fegato è la sede dei sentimenti), per gli antichi Egizi il cuore è il centro delle attività intellettuali, per gli antichi Greci il fegato e i polmoni sono dotati di spiritualità superiore. Nella Bibbia, il cuore abbraccia sia le forme della vita intellettiva che quella delle emozioni, e nel Nuovo testamento il cuore diventa la radice dell’atteggiamento religioso e morale, cioè la natura interiore dell’uomo. Gli Aztechi offrivano il cuore del nemico agli dei (cannibalismo cardiaco azteco). I cuori mangiati sono presenti in letteratura (per es., nelle fiabe e nei racconti folclorici, Boccaccio, Calvino).

La storia ideologica del cuore sottolinea l’incessante ricerca di paragoni tra il cuore (nel duplice significato di sentimenti e di organo) e oggetti materiali o meccanismi, specificamente,  il cuore come un orologio, o il fatto che  i musicisti legano la velocità/la lentezza delle pulsazioni alle cadenze musicali. Solo con l’invenzione dello stetoscopio (19mo secolo) si riesce a sentire il vero rumore del cuore, sebbene il ticchettio cardiaco di tipo meccanico continui a sentirsi nelle canzoni. Il cuore umano nel pensiero medico presenta 3 fasi di conoscenze: 1. Dalle origini remote al Rinascimento, 2. Dal Rinascimento al 1967 (il primo trapianto del cuore), 3. Dal 1967 ad oggi.

Nel Capitolo II (“Cuori trafitti e cuori scambiati”) viene illustrata la storia del ruolo del cuore nelle estasi cardiache, nel misticismo cattolico, nelle devozioni al Sacro Cuore di Gesù, negli ex-voto, e nel desiderio/nella necessità di seppellire il cuore dopo la more in un luogo diverso da quello del resto del corpo. Il cuore, come oggetto di intensa devozione cattolica al Sacro Cuore di Gesù, ottiene anche una funzione politica, unendo la pietà religiosa a uffici militari, politici, sociali sia in Francia che in Italia, in Germania, in Austria.

Il Capitolo III (“Storia del cuore nelle immagini”) ripercorre l’immagine del cuore sia come simbolo di sentimenti che come l’organo nelle rappresentazioni visive. Ci sono i cuori cortesi, i cuori anatomici non medici, i cuori amorosi e i cuoricini. Ci sono anche i cuori infranti e cardiopatie. La più antica immagine del cuore amoroso è del 1275 (nel manoscritto del Roman de la Poire, in cui la dama dona il suo cuore a Dolcesguardo, ma il cuore qui è ancora capovolto). L’autrice si sofferma sul fatto che il cuore non è rappresentato prima del XIII secolo; le ipotesi di questa nascita tardiva puntano sulla sacralità o sulla bruttezza dell’oggetto. Nel medioevo la rappresentazione simbolica include foglie (lilla`, edera, da cui il cuoricino) pigne (a volte rovesciate). Le illustrazioni “sentimentali” sono diverse da quelle mediche, ma spesso tra di loro esiste il corto circuito. In particolare, negli anni 2000 il cuore anatomico esce dal contesto medico/religioso per diventare un simbolo (su T-shirt, nelle sculture, ecc.). In altre parole, c’è una tensione tra il cuoricino e il cuore anatomico per quanto riguarda l’espressione visiva che da metaforica (vaga) vuol diventare realistica (essenza delle cose). La rivoluzione “emotica” riguarda l’uso del cuoricino in rete che fa parte del mutamento della comunicazione che privilegia i pittogrammi in moltissime funzioni comunicative mediate dalla rete. L’autrice nota che non è possibile sapere come saranno comunicati gli affetti: “in quali modi la generazione digitale sarà capace di comunicare senza l’ausilio della rete?” (p. 117).   Inoltre, il cuore come sentimento e come organo si stanno avvicinando nel pensiero medico: sono venute a gala le corrispondenze tra il cuore metaforico/emotivo e il cuore pompante perché il cuore biologico è sensibile al sistema emotivo. In questo capitolo vengono menzionati anche i cuori letterari, soprattutto di Conrad e di Bulgakov.

Nella sezione “Testimonianze e documenti” vengono pubblicati brevi brani dei seguenti autori: Giovan Battista della Porta, Andrea Vesalio, Renato G. Mazzolini, William Harvey, Johann Jacob Scheuchzer, Noel Chomel, Denis Diderot, Michael Bulgakov, Mathias Malzieu, Vittorio Zucconi, Christian Barnard, Katy Couprie, Marco Politi, Gianfranco Ravasi, Savvas Savvopoulos, Sandeep Jauhar, e un articolo senza autore del National Geographic.

Cosa si può dire di un trattato sul cuore che presenta questo argomento con sapiente emozione? L’autrice ha risposto a tutt’e tre i quesiti che si era posta in un modo esaustivo, intelligente e soprattutto pieno di spunti per una riflessione che spesso manca quando si parla del cuore. Da un lato, il libro sottolinea la dicotomia cuore-mente (ricordare e rammentare), da cui partono i concetti che separano, invece di unire, questi due aspetti dell’essere umano. La tensione tra la scienza e l’immaginario è partita lasciandoli divisi, ma sembra che la scienza cominci ad avvicinarsi al cuore nel suo valore sentimentale perché gli affetti hanno un effetto sul corpo fisico e vice versa. E` istruttivo sapere che se San Valentino viene festeggiato ormai ovunque, la giornata dedicata al cuore (World Heart Day) non ha questa risonanza; ma forse il futuro avvicinerà questi due significati del cuore anche nell’immaginario popolare. Dall’altro lato, prendere in esame il cuore come uno dei simboli più ovvi del nuovo modo di comunicare per immagini faciliterà la risposta a molte incognite per quanto riguarda l’evolversi dei modi di comunicazione in rete. La questione della superiorità dell’arte figurativa su quella verbale (sostenuta anche da Leonardo da Vinci) deve ancora essere approfondita.

In conclusione, come sempre, è molto difficile in una recensione dare un’idea soddisfacente di tutti gli aspetti di un libro, soprattutto quando questo è pieno di informazioni fertili per allargare l’orizzonte dei lettori.    

Oltre “il fenomeno Camilleri”

Nella cultura letteraria italiana, periodicamente capita “il caso”, detto anche “l’autentico caso”, o, più recentemente, “il fenomeno”. Si tratta di un avvenimento condizionato dal profitto e limitato nella sua durata temporale, eppure con strascichi culturali imprevedibili e duraturi. Il “caso letterario” nasce quasi di botto, senza preavviso, e può essere definito come la salita nella popolarità di uno scrittore anche alle prime armi che riesce a diventare popolare (spesso senza l’aiuto dei critici accademici), vende moltissimi libri (e così solleva dai debiti la fortunata casa editrice), appare come ospite in moltissimi programmi televisivi, e, se ha carisma, diventa il beniamino dei mass media. Tutto questo offre delle  condizioni perfette per dare sfogo a schieramenti di parte, a polemiche anche spietate, e a esternazioni inaspettate.

            Uno dei personaggi emblematici di questo intreccio tra popolarità e macchinazioni mediatiche è senza dubbio Andrea Camilleri (1925-2019).  Non c’è bisogno qui di percorrere la sua carriera di regista e di scrittore. Basti dire che la sua opera letteraria spazia vari generi, diversi stili e lingue: di sicuro, i più conosciuti sono i gialli, inoltre, ci sono i romanzi storici, saggi di storia e di letteratura, i romanzi poetici (la trilogia delle metamorfosi), e altri.  Le trasposizioni dei gialli a sceneggiati TV hanno raggiunto altissimo numero di spettatori, per di più, non sono le uniche trasposizioni delle sue opere letterarie (se veda la più completa miniera di informazioni sullo scrittore e sule sue attività offerta da Camilleri Fans Club sul sito http://www.vigata.org/).

            Chi guarda il fenomeno Camilleri da una certa distanza si può rendere conto del fatto che questo scrittore ha portato tre valori significativi alla cultura italiana contemporanea:

1. Soprattutto i suoi gialli hanno (ri)avvicinato moltissimi italiani alla lettura. Ci sono varie testimonianze di questa magnifica funzione dello scrittore agrigentino sia nei programmi televisivi che sui social media. Nel paese che non vanta l’assiduità alla lettura come una delle caratteristiche culturali, questo fatto è notevolissimo.

2. Le opere di Camilleri hanno offerto una rivalutazione dei dialetti italiani, in specie del siciliano. Nel momento in cui la letteratura italiana stava perdendo il sostegno della lingua letteraria, era inevitabile che uno scrittore di un certo retroscena sociologico guardasse all’indietro e usasse gli attrezzi linguistici a lui cari, che si sarebbero rivelati cari anche alla maggioranza dei lettori non siciliani e non accademici. Sulla lingua di Camilleri esistono molti interventi, e, come capita sempre con un “fenomeno”, i detrattori e i lodatori propongono i fatti che comprovano le loro posizioni. L’analisi di Luigi Matt  descrive in profondità  le posizioni opposte (“Lingua e stile nella narrativa camilleriana” https://www.camillerindex.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Quaderni-camilleriani-12.pdf#page=41 )

3. Il terzo pregio di Camilleri è stato quello di costringere gli Italiani a guardarsi dentro di sé e intorno a sé con più attenzione per capire chi sono, quali caratteristiche dimostrano, come si comportano, come parlano. È noto che Camilleri stesso ripeteva che vorrebbe che i suoi lettori ridessero di meno e pensassero di più. Questo desiderio non è stato accolto dai detrattori dello scrittore perché continuano a ripetere: ma i Siciliani non sono cosi, nessuno parla come i personaggi dei romanzi, la Sicilia descritta è superficiale, folkloristica, sorpassata (si veda Francesco Merlo, Roberto Cotroneo, Giulio Ferroni, ecc.). Le analisi dei detrattori non fanno progredire la conversazione oltre queste generalizzazioni. È più che evidente che ai detrattori dello scrittore agrigentino non piace come scrive e cosa scrive, e allora le loro conclusioni continuano a separare la cultura “alta” da quella “bassa”, mettendo le opere di Camilleri nel mucchio basso perché contiene cliché ormai sorpassati, esagerando la dualità della cultura italiana. Camilleri si è difeso dicendo che è ‘un artigiano della scrittura’, ma l’ironia sottile del suo atteggiamento non sfugge ai membri del Camilleri Fans club, che lo chiamano, con affetto, “il Sommo”. Che la popolarità sia alla base dei giudizi così polari non c’è dubbio (si veda a questo proposito il mio articolo intitolato (“I test della (im)popolarità`: il fenomeno Camilleri sulla rivista Quaderni d’italianistica https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/qua/article/view/9344/6297 )[i].

Sarà troppo presto per tirare le somme dell’importanza o meno di Camilleri per la cultura italiana, ma due sono i fenomeni che ci costringono a fare delle considerazioni preliminari: da un lato, c’è la scomparsa di Camilleri nel 2019, e, dall’altro lato, la pandemia del covid-19. La morte di uno scrittore segna la fine del suo lavoro, ma non la fine dei convegni accademici virtuali, delle relazioni ufficiali pubblicate e non, dei raduni virtuali che hanno come scopo la discussione dei temi, dei personaggi, della lingua nelle opere letterarie. Questo è vero anche per Camilleri, e la prova sta nelle iniziative che sono elencate sia sul sito vigata.org, che sui vari social network. La pandemia, pero`, ha fermato l’aspetto sociale, il passaparola di presenza, perché tutto avviene ora nel mondo virtuale. Questo fatto rende la conoscenza delle tendenze sociali profonde molto difficile e lascia spazio ai vari specialisti di comunicazione di massa di promuovere, forzare, originare le tendenze.  

È indubbio che Camilleri ha guardato all’indietro, perché apparteneva alla generazione che ha vissuto la seconda guerra mondiale (è stato chiamato anche “il nonno”), ha visto il susseguirsi dei governi, ha imparato le nuove tecnologie che però non sono protagoniste dei suoi romanzi. Comunque, la pandemia ci induce a guardare in avanti. In questo senso, le opere di Camilleri sono una testimonianza del tempo immaginario che fu, piena di lingue particolari, di ironia, di tristezza, di amore, di odio, di leggerezza e di profondità, e di umorismo: la testimonianza è viva finche` ha lettori. Questo è vero per tutti gli scrittori che pubblicano opere letterarie. La pandemia sta rafforzando però quell’aspetto della tecnologia che non si basa sulla scrittura: i vari programmi (Zoom, Team, ecc.) fanno dell’oralità la regina.

Cosa ne è rimasto della auto-definizione degli Italiani? Nunzio La Fauci suggerisce che Camilleri sia “una nobile varietà dell’arcitaliano” (https://www.doppiozero.com/materiali/andrea-camilleri-un-arcitaliano?fbclid=IwAR1WFPyjY8y4hXRpmWu1g3KaCZTc4u5go9IiDJY0SzQ1ekToQAHoczHm76o). Ma ha ancora senso cercare una definizione di “Italiani/Italiane”? La pandemia sta sgretolando il senso di appartenenza a una nazione (a meno che non sia forzato per motivi economici – si veda il piano europeo di sussidi agli stati), e sta chiudendo gli individui in un guscio ancora più piccolo di un paese. Nel periodo di transizione tra l’Italia folkloristica che cerca di diventare qualcosa d’altro e l’Italia sotto pressioni multinazionali capitalistiche, la fragilità dell’individuo ne fa una vittima facile. La consapevolezza della fragilità, e le sue possibili  soluzioni, staranno soprattutto nella rilettura di autori italiani, incluso Camilleri. 

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[i] È d’obbligo menzionare che i diversi livelli di popolarità esistono in Italia e anche fuori dall’Italia. Ci sono paesi che hanno dimostrato l’interesse abbastanza profondo nelle opere di Camilleri: basti notare addirittura versioni diverse di più traduttori (tedeschi, francesi, spagnoli). Dall’altro lato, le opere di Camilleri non sono attecchite sul suolo nordamericano, nonostante le rispettose e rispettabili traduzioni di Stephen Sartarelli.  Ma questo è un argomento a parte.

Superficial wounds that run deep

CUL, Mac Pro, OS X, 10.6.8, Phase One P40, Capture One 7.1, Profoto Strobes, Schneider 80mm LS /f2.8, ColorChecker

Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle (Random House, 2008) is a fast-moving, smooth-reading, deceptively happy-ending narration. Taking cues from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, medieval Italian, Japanese, and Icelandic  tales of love, Davidson spins a post-modern tale set in unspecified contemporary North American city, interweaving episodes of gothic and romance literature with present-day scientific knowledge about the effects of burns, schizophrenia, as well as background histories of the major characters.

The novel offers numerous thematic elements whose prominence clearly emerges from the narration: everlasting true love even beyond the unexpected and bitter end, search for encyclopedic knowledge, life with cocaine and morphine dependency (the “snake”), artistic raptures, questions about actions and their earthly and after-life consequences, metempsychosis, need for continuity of human affairs through talismans and special objects. All of these add something particular to the plot.  Having grown up with drug-addicted foster parents, taking advantage of the library to quench his thirst for knowledge, and, later, on account of his good looks and lack of other skills, becoming a porn actor and director: all of these suddenly turn inconsequential thanks to one fateful Good Friday when he is about thirty years old (obvious echoes of Dante). He has a near-fatal car accident in which he is horribly burned (the gory details are spelled out in full) and deprived of his work tool, so to speak. Ending up in a hospital, he contemplates committing suicide as soon as he is released: his disfigurement, his lack of sexual organ, the loss of his livelihood and his film company mean that there is nothing left for him to do but end it all. The narration follows him in his hospital bed; he is taken care of conscientious doctors and nurses, and one uninvited character, Marianne Engel, the anchor which steadies the path of the narration.  She claims to have met the protagonist before (about 700 years before) and to have loved him then. At that time she worked in the Engelthal monastery as a scribe; he was a condottiero brought to the sisters since he was horribly burned. Marianne cures him now as she did then, and she keeps being in love with him through the centuries and now. At the hospital, Marianne’s tales of medieval romantic love, her artistic energy, kind disposition, nutritious food, make him abandon his desire to die. Once he is discharged, she takes him into her gothic-looking house, keeps taking care of him, and secures his future. She sculpts for a living: her grotesque stone sculptures resemble the strange medieval decorations on churches: gargoyles. She also starts to sculpt the protagonist.  Her artistic pursuit is spurred on by three special characters from her medieval life who assure her that she only has 27 more “hearts” to sculpt and then her last heart is to be given to her true love and let free. Having finished these “hearts”, she walks off into the sea never to be found again. Our protagonist passes his life writing his story.

The word “inferno” conjures images of raging fire burning the damned who deserve to be punished, because, in the Catholic tradition, they transgressed specific interdictions and rules.  Our nameless protagonist is not a believer and therefore he does not explain his predicament as a just retribution for his previous drug-filled debauched life.  In the novel, the role of Dante’s voyage through hell is only superficial: the protagonist has entered a hellish type of life, and he tries to understand it.  He too has a Virgil: it is Marianne who leads him – through narration of love stories –  to forget about his disfigured existence. There is no Beatrice, though, to lead him to God. Our protagonist lives his new post-burned life simply as a spectator:  unlike Dante who cries and is moved by the fate of the damned, he is not stirred by what happens around him, he does not seem to feel any gratitude to Marianne, or in fact even love. He is simply with her.              His pre-accident life was full of sex but devoid of love, full of drugs and alcohol but no moral signposts, no ethical concerns, no real friends, no real parents. He did not have healthy feelings of self-love or self-worth, but he demonstrated lots of vanity. The novel is a loud yearning cry for something to hold on to, something that would explain the consequences of one’s actions much like the deserved punishments of the damned in Dante’s Inferno. Alighieri’s epic poem, for a non-believer like the protagonist, is simply an imaginative tale, full of gory details; the connection between the literary work and the society that created it and the human stories underpinned by biblical teachings, philosophical works, scientific observations is totally lost. This is perhaps the significance of The Gargoyle: the protagonist’s cynical attitude of detached observer allows him the only activity that has a semblance of pleasure, that of reading anything and everything. However, this does not make him a wise man.

Every author inevitably toys with his/her readers. It is disconcerting, however, when the protagonist/author is cynically flippant about his readers, as is the case in The Gargoyle. This talking down to the reader happens also at special moments in the story, and it completely destroys the rich imagery that the reader was about to construct. Here are two examples:

“I have no idea whether beginning with my accident was the best decision, as I’ve never written a book before. Truth be told, I started with the crash because I wanted to catch your interest and drag you into the story.  You’re still reading, so it seems to have worked”. (p. 5)

In the middle of a long list of food items, he says “…guglielmo marconi (just checking to see if you’re still reading)” (p. 167.)

This meta-narrative ploy is not new, moreover, it too accentuates the novel’s postmodern construction.

In conclusion, the muddle created by juxtaposing  the past and the present, religious and secular images, imaginative tales and scientific descriptions of medical conditions perfectly illustrates the post-modern emptiness which underlies the result of the attitude “anything goes”. However, the nihilistic condition seems to drain out the protagonist  completely, and he stands out as a disfigured empty shell whose only real companion is a dog and whose only activity is writing. The sole effigies with a “heart” remain the heavy stone gargoyles, creations of an exalted artist.

*The top-right illustration comes from the 1487 edition of the  Commedia; printer: Boninus de Boninis (https://www.frizzifrizzi.it/2017/11/10/tesori-darchivio-alcune-le-prime-edizioni-illustrate-della-divina-commedia-state-digitalizzate/).

Captain Fantastic

This is a great movie: from the gut reaction of shedding some tears to laughing out loud, it has us also wonder about some basic questions of parenting. Above all, this little jewel underscores the generally well-observed fact which almost no one adheres to: do not make value judgements about people and their actions, since you don’t know the whole truth. In the case of Ben, the truth is that he  made his 6 children live in the forests of the US Pacific Northwest because he wanted his wife to get better by attempting to make her lose the chains of mental illness, not because he was some type of freaky hippie.

Here are three questions-considerations stemming from some scenes in the film which made an impact on me:

1. Is knowledge acquired from books such a bad thing?  Ben’s oldest son (Bo)  claims that he does not know anything that has not been written in a book:                                     I know nothing! I know nothing! I am a freak because of you! You made us            freaks!  And mom knew that! She understood! Unless it comes out of a fucking book, I don’t know anything about anything!                                                                                  This is interesting, since nowadays, teachers often say  that students don’t know anything because they do not read and therefore are not appropriately familiar with any topic.  Furthermore, Ben’s 4-year old daughter knows not only what the Bill of Rights is, but she can also quote the individual amendments. Ben’s sister’s children (boys over 10) do not know what the Bill is. One could ask what the utility of knowing the Bill of Rights is while living in the wilderness. Either everything written has a value no matter where one lives (and therefore one can actually think about many, many topics and put arguments together, making one’s own mind  naturally), or nothing has a value and therefore making one’s own mind does not come easily (and one is easily persuaded). The film clearly leans on the side of usefulness of books for the cognitive growth of children, especially as the father asks the children to talk about the ideas that the book evoke (not to describe the plot).
2. When will a “controlling” parent stop being such a parent? In the film, Leslie’s  father controls the way her body is to be disposed of,  even though it is contrary to her last wishes. What does it exactly mean when a parent/caregiver says to his/her child: “I am doing this for your own good”? Different parents have differing opinions of what this “good” means. The film attempts to give children the right to express their own “good”. In this meaning, the title of the film may be misleading.
3. Is spirituality always connected to giving/receiving gifts? Noam Chomsky is the spiritual godhead in the film and celebrating his “birthday” means Ben’s children get gifts. Gifts which are bought in the store; therefore, the film seems to be saying that even a “wild” education falls prey to  consumerism.                                                                                                                                                                                                          One of the most entertaining  lines of the film mentions Marxists, Trotskyit, Trotskyist, and Maoist almost all in one breath, the other reflects the mother’s desire to have her body cremated according to the Buddhist tradition and then flush the ashes down the toilet.  A number of American cultural traditions and problems are either made fun of or questioned (giving some wine to children, obesity, consumerism, hypocrisy, ostentation of wealth, etc.). It would be most instructive to hear what children and young adults think of the film.  All in all, since the idea to live in wilderness as a family was not really the initial push toward this type of unconventional education, it is difficult to make judgements about it. Suffice it to say that good parenting is never just parenting: it is also (maybe above all) the relationship between the parents. The dynamics may be unpredictable (one child or more? one parent or more? religious background or atheistic or agnostic? right-leaning or left-leaning politically? etc. etc.) but in conclusion, parenting is always unwitting experimentation.

McDonald’s, or the irrationality of rationality

For anyone interested in the intricacies of contemporary society from the perspective of such an ubiquitous  institution as the fast food outlet McDonald’s, George Ritzer’s The McDonaldization of Society (Pine Forge Press, 2000) is a must read. This is not a treatise against fast food outlets, nor is it a simple acceptance of them. The book  endeavours to account for the hold fast food outlets (and other institutions) have on society as well as provide possible ways out of this hold. The slender volume fulfills the former aim more successfully than the latter.

Ritzer suggests that there are four main dimensions which underpin McDonald’s business acumen: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control through nonhuman technology. Efficiency basically means “the optimum method for getting from one point to another” (p. 12). Calculability subsumes such notions as “the quantitative aspects of … portion size, cost… and services”, where “quantity has become equivalent to quality” (p. 12). Predictability is “the assurance that products and services will be the same over time and in all locales” for both clients and workers (p. 13).  Control through nonhuman technology includes, among others, quickly moving customer lines at the counter, limited menus, few options, uncomfortable seats, in addition to precise directives for the workers to behave and to accomplish their roles. The four dimensions then form what Ritzer termed McDonaldization, a process found in all human for-profit institutions. He gives specific examples as this process relates to universities, hospitals, sports and other recreational activities,

Clearly, and very generally, there are advantages and disadvantages to these four dimensions: advantages point to profit-making and customer satisfaction to a certain extent; disadvantages to workers’ and customers’ personal preferences, food safety and quality. Ritzer’s critique is based on the fact that it is impossible to go back to “the world, if it ever existed, of home-cooked meals, traditional restaurant dinners, high-quality foods, meals loaded with surprises, and restaurants run by chefs free to express their creativity.” (p. 18). For him, it is more valid to critically analyze McDonaldization from the perspective of the future. Although he admits that McDonaldization is both enabling and constraining, his stance in the book focuses on the constraints this type of business system bring to human society.

Ritzer uses Max Weber’s theory of rationalization, claiming that McDonaldization is an amplification and an extension of this theory. (p. 23) According to Weber, formal rationality is a process by which optimum means to a given end are shaped by rules, regulations, and larger social structures, often resulting in irrational outcomes (among the examples given are ClubMed and the Holocaust). The means constrain humans to act according to a predetermined set of procedures and allow for little or no choice. However, humans are rarely content with being constrained: they prefer to make their own choices, so the irrationality of rationality closes them in an iron cage of scientific management. Ritzer describes McDonaldization in detail as it is clearly followed in automotive assembly lines, Levittown type of construction, shopping centers, and McDonald’s. The bulk of the book is devoted to an exemplification and critique of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control through nonhuman technology., especially focusing on the following settings: higher education, entertainment industry (amusement parks, sport TV programs, etc.), health care, fast food industry, food industry. Chapter 7, “The Irrationality of Rationality”, evaluates the design flaws of rationality from the perspective of the loss of magic and mystery, inefficiency, illusion of good value at a good price, false friendliness, environmental hazards, homogeneization, dehumanization. The next chapter goes beyond present-day practices and looks toward the future by giving McDonaldization  “an inexorable quality, multiplying and extending continuously” (p. 146), from birth of an individual to death and beyond.  The last two chapters show the driving forces pushing McDonaldization along: “It pays, we value it, it fits” (p. 168) and a practical guide to dealing with this inexorable process, listing some of the suggestions for breaking the imposed “rules”, such as valuing quality (not quantity), B&Bs (rather than hotel chains), slow food, local produce and products, avoiding routines, do things for yourself, never buy artificial products, etc. In one of the last paragraphs, Ritzer justifies the writing of this book as follows:

      Although I have emphasized the irresistibility of McDonaldization throughout this       book, my fondest hope is that I am wrong. Indeed, a major motivation behind this book is to alert readers to the dangers of McDonaldization and to motivate them to act to stem its tide. I hope that people can resist McDonaldization and create instead a more reasonable, more human world. (p. 232)

In conclusion, Ritzer’s account and critique of McDonaldization point to the cage of every “modern” human being. His attempt to stem the tide of rationalization may work for a while, but then it is inevitable that profit wins over any other consideration. What is more disheartening is the fact that both McDonaldization (the irrationality of rationality) in conjunction with the absurd  rush for technological innovation at all cost deny a less forceful development of the future human being. The book evaluates the notions that many have had about the modern world, such as fear of unpredictability (and the concomitant drive to organization: ClubMed web site claims that it “organizes unforgettable events”), the burden is on the user (customers, patients, students do work formerly done by paid employees as part of efficiency). While Ritzer delves into activities and institutions such as home cooking, shopping, higher education, health care, entertainment (all-inclusive trips, TV programs, sports, political debates),  his analysis does not touch upon the workings of politics (exemplified by state/national governments – although he analyzes the irrational dealings of the tax offices), nor the advances in the military. It seems that governments and the military complex are either immune to McDonaldization and/or support it wholeheartedly for the citizens of the world. Another question which remains unanswered for me is this: Can search for a more equitable, peaceful and tranquil human life be McDonaldized? If the answer is yes, there is no escaping the rationality cage; if not, whose duty is to keep searching?