WHAT THE DOMINANT historicist/contextualist paradigm needs to make it more truly political, North argues, is to incorporate more criticism; doing that, he claims, would involve a greater engagement with aesthetics.
Surprising, no? At first blush, it looks like North wants a rewind to the 1950s.
Not really, though. As an academic discourse, North writes, criticism was "defined precisely by the strength and directness of its connection to the world outside the academy" (5). He associates it with "public intellectuals." He does not provide much in the way of specific examples, unfortunately, but I am guessing he means figures who wrote about literature (a) for non-specialist audiences and (b) with a view towards changing how people thought and what people did about questions of the day: Coleridge and T. S. Eliot from the right, say, Matthew Arnold and Lionel Trilling from the center, George Orwell and Dwight MacDonald from the left. (For contemporary figures, maybe Rebecca Solnit? Mark Greif?)
Neither does he means by "aesthetics" what one might immediately assumes he means. The historicist/contextualist paradigm has been pretty rough on aesthetics, seeing it (following Bourdieu and Raymond Williams) as a covertly ideological instrument. North does not disagree, but he sees that critique as really addressing only the "idealist" aesthetics derived from Kant that saw art as disinterested, autotelic, transcendent, and such. The aesthetics he would champion would be a "materialist" aesthetics, part of an "aesthetic education."
Here, too, some specific examples would have been welcome. I kept thinking he was going to bring up Schiller on the topic of aesthetic education, or Jacques Rancière as an example of materialist aesthetic thought, but no. The focus is strictly Anglo-American throughout, unfortunately. For my money, Rancière is exactly what North seems to be hoping for. But that's just my guess.
I think North is right that the discipline is looking for ways to step out of the historicist/contextualist paradigm--his longest chapter is full of examples of scholars pushing the envelope a bit (I certainly concur in his high opinion of D. A. Miller's book on Austen)--but, true to his premise, he does not expect the paradigm to shift until the neoliberal order cracks up (192-93). So, the paradigm may be with us for a while.
Wednesday, May 16, 2018
Tuesday, May 15, 2018
Joseph North, _Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History_, part one
NORTH POSES AN interesting question: how is it that in the last three decades, with neoliberalism ascendant (with Thatcher and Reagan) and then regnant (ever after) in society at large, a leftist, progressive methodology predominated in academic literary studies, to the near-exclusion of any rivals? Even if we acknowledge that we need a suppler, more complex sense of how culture reflects material reality than the old base-superstucture model, even if we do not expect some exact mirroring to be going on, how did this oasis of leftism survive surrounded by conservative sand dunes?
The leftist, progressive methodology North has in mind is basically what we in the USA call New Historicism, but we might call it cultural studies. Its mission is to produce cultural analysis, with particular attention to the tactics of power, to marginalized or excluded voices, to the deconstruction of dominant ideologies. He argues that from the mid- to late-eighties on, there has been little disagreement that this is the appropriate way to conduct literary studies, that this is the kind of endeavor the profession rewards.
It has prospered in the face of neoliberalism's triumph, he argues, because it is not really all that leftist or progressive after all.
It thinks of itself that way, certainly, has convinced itself of its own counter-hegemonic bona fides, but North dissents. What he calls "the historicist/contextualist paradigm" is a solution to "the problem faced by scholars who, for complex reasons, explicitly disavow themselves of any commitment to the idea of academic work as radical political praxis, but who nevertheless want to try to get ahead in a discipline where grappling with live, as opposed to merely analytic, political questions, and thus the making of political claims for one's own work, has become a necessary requirement for advancement."
A rhetoric of this kind, which by turns avowed and disavowed intentions that could be described, or critiqued, as "political," must have seemed appealing to many in the academy who were nominally on the left but whose material interests, and associated real commitments, in fact lay with the newly net-liberalized institutions that seemed to promise to support them. (93)
Sophisticated cultural analysis looks radical, sounds radical, but does not ruffle any actual material-interest feathers.
I can see what he means--but hasn't some of this work (in critical race theory or queer theory, for instance) actually made a difference? Surely it has.
Still, he has a point, I think. So what would genuinely radical work in literary studies look like? North has thought about that, too.
The leftist, progressive methodology North has in mind is basically what we in the USA call New Historicism, but we might call it cultural studies. Its mission is to produce cultural analysis, with particular attention to the tactics of power, to marginalized or excluded voices, to the deconstruction of dominant ideologies. He argues that from the mid- to late-eighties on, there has been little disagreement that this is the appropriate way to conduct literary studies, that this is the kind of endeavor the profession rewards.
It has prospered in the face of neoliberalism's triumph, he argues, because it is not really all that leftist or progressive after all.
It thinks of itself that way, certainly, has convinced itself of its own counter-hegemonic bona fides, but North dissents. What he calls "the historicist/contextualist paradigm" is a solution to "the problem faced by scholars who, for complex reasons, explicitly disavow themselves of any commitment to the idea of academic work as radical political praxis, but who nevertheless want to try to get ahead in a discipline where grappling with live, as opposed to merely analytic, political questions, and thus the making of political claims for one's own work, has become a necessary requirement for advancement."
A rhetoric of this kind, which by turns avowed and disavowed intentions that could be described, or critiqued, as "political," must have seemed appealing to many in the academy who were nominally on the left but whose material interests, and associated real commitments, in fact lay with the newly net-liberalized institutions that seemed to promise to support them. (93)
Sophisticated cultural analysis looks radical, sounds radical, but does not ruffle any actual material-interest feathers.
I can see what he means--but hasn't some of this work (in critical race theory or queer theory, for instance) actually made a difference? Surely it has.
Still, he has a point, I think. So what would genuinely radical work in literary studies look like? North has thought about that, too.
James Shapiro, _The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606_
MY TAKE ON this turned out to be the inside-out version of my take on its predecessor, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. The premise of 1599--excavate the archives on a particularly critical year for Shakespeare, use the findings to piece out the biographical record--did not sound all that promising to me, and I would have skipped the book had not a trusted Shakespearean colleague tipped me to it. Reading it, I was amazed. It rivaled Ellmann on Joyce for giving one a sense of the living, working writer, an accomplishment I would not have thought even remotely possible for a figure as long gone as Shakespeare.
So, I picked up The Year of Lear in high anticipation. Same method, somewhat higher stakes: change of monarch, Gunpowder Plot, Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra. Somehow, it did not work as well, for me. Shapiro certainly has his customary smart, well-grounded things to say about all the items on the above list. But Shakespeare the writer and theater man does not pop into relief with quite the same vividness.
I happen to be in the middle of Joseph North's Literary Criticism: A Political History, which argues that historicist/contextualist scholarship has dominated Anglo-American literary studies for something like two or three decades now, and I found myself wondering how, or whether, The Year of Lear fits into that particular context.
It's certainly a fine-grained account of how the historical moment in which Shakespeare wrote shaped what he wrote. It's certainly about power, resistance, ideology, and discourse...I mean, the Gunpowder Plot, come on, can you get nearer the heart of power, resistance, ideology, and power than that? But Foucault, Jameson, even Greenblatt seem far, far away as we read this (well, not recent Greenblatt, perhaps).
Is it just that Shapiro is not writing for academic peers here, but for that ever-sought, ever-elusive intelligent general reader? The book definitely engages with topics of high interest in recent Shakespeare scholarship (Catholicism, for instance), it certainly shows mastery of that scholarship, but it seems to locate itself on some quite different map.
So, I picked up The Year of Lear in high anticipation. Same method, somewhat higher stakes: change of monarch, Gunpowder Plot, Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra. Somehow, it did not work as well, for me. Shapiro certainly has his customary smart, well-grounded things to say about all the items on the above list. But Shakespeare the writer and theater man does not pop into relief with quite the same vividness.
I happen to be in the middle of Joseph North's Literary Criticism: A Political History, which argues that historicist/contextualist scholarship has dominated Anglo-American literary studies for something like two or three decades now, and I found myself wondering how, or whether, The Year of Lear fits into that particular context.
It's certainly a fine-grained account of how the historical moment in which Shakespeare wrote shaped what he wrote. It's certainly about power, resistance, ideology, and discourse...I mean, the Gunpowder Plot, come on, can you get nearer the heart of power, resistance, ideology, and power than that? But Foucault, Jameson, even Greenblatt seem far, far away as we read this (well, not recent Greenblatt, perhaps).
Is it just that Shapiro is not writing for academic peers here, but for that ever-sought, ever-elusive intelligent general reader? The book definitely engages with topics of high interest in recent Shakespeare scholarship (Catholicism, for instance), it certainly shows mastery of that scholarship, but it seems to locate itself on some quite different map.
Monday, May 14, 2018
Charlotte Brontë, _Villette_
ABOUT A YEAR ago I decided that it was wrong of me to have taught Jane Eyre several times without ever having read any of C.B.'s other novels, so I started this one.
Volume I was promising. Lucy Snowe (origins left unspecified) describes visiting the home of her godmother, Mrs. Bretton. Lucy seems a bit smitten with Mrs. Bretton's son, Graham, but before anything develops on that front she is off across the Channel to the city of Villette (a city much like Brussels) to teach English at a girls' boarding school. As we did with Jane, we see Lucy having to rely on her own wits and strength as she learns to manage the challenges of a new situation and the new people--some friendly, others not so--with whom she lives and works. One of the nicer ones is a young English doctor, known as Dr. John.
At the end of Volume I, Lucy faints, When she revives, in Volume II, she mysteriously finds herself among the furniture of her godmother. Turns out Mrs. Bretton has relocated to Villette. Hmm, bit contrived, but okay. Then it turns out that Dr. John is Graham. Whoa. Moreover, Lucy knew this the whole time but did not let us in on it.
I stopped reading at that point.
Not that I resolved never to finish the book. I picked it up again a few weeks ago and finished it. But I was just...dismayed. Lucy, Lucy! Why did you not tell us Dr. John was Graham as soon as you knew?
My dismay I attributed to the contrast with Jane Eyre. Jane sometimes can keep mum with the other characters in her novel--though her best moments are when she gives them a good clean blast of honesty--but she never conceals anything from us. We--that is, "reader"--are her best friend, her confidante, and we are regularly apostrophized, often at particularly intense moments. She tells us everything. Everything! How can we not love her?
Lucy tells us nothing. What became of your parents, Lucy? How did you get that gig in Belgium? How do you actually feel about Graham/Dr. John? About his entanglements with the spoiled rotten Ginevra Fanshawe, or the admirable but fragile-seeming Polly Bassompierre? About your teaching colleague Paul Emmanuel, about his being a devout Catholic, about his complicated circumstances? Are you even going to tell us whether he made it back from the Caribbean? (She is not.)
Jane is an open book, Lucy a locked box--harder to love, but eventually I did: tender here, flinty there, proud, principled, resilient, smart. But likes to keep her secrets.
And that scene where she walks around the night-time festival tripping on opium--best thing in all Brontë, to my mind.
Volume I was promising. Lucy Snowe (origins left unspecified) describes visiting the home of her godmother, Mrs. Bretton. Lucy seems a bit smitten with Mrs. Bretton's son, Graham, but before anything develops on that front she is off across the Channel to the city of Villette (a city much like Brussels) to teach English at a girls' boarding school. As we did with Jane, we see Lucy having to rely on her own wits and strength as she learns to manage the challenges of a new situation and the new people--some friendly, others not so--with whom she lives and works. One of the nicer ones is a young English doctor, known as Dr. John.
At the end of Volume I, Lucy faints, When she revives, in Volume II, she mysteriously finds herself among the furniture of her godmother. Turns out Mrs. Bretton has relocated to Villette. Hmm, bit contrived, but okay. Then it turns out that Dr. John is Graham. Whoa. Moreover, Lucy knew this the whole time but did not let us in on it.
I stopped reading at that point.
Not that I resolved never to finish the book. I picked it up again a few weeks ago and finished it. But I was just...dismayed. Lucy, Lucy! Why did you not tell us Dr. John was Graham as soon as you knew?
My dismay I attributed to the contrast with Jane Eyre. Jane sometimes can keep mum with the other characters in her novel--though her best moments are when she gives them a good clean blast of honesty--but she never conceals anything from us. We--that is, "reader"--are her best friend, her confidante, and we are regularly apostrophized, often at particularly intense moments. She tells us everything. Everything! How can we not love her?
Lucy tells us nothing. What became of your parents, Lucy? How did you get that gig in Belgium? How do you actually feel about Graham/Dr. John? About his entanglements with the spoiled rotten Ginevra Fanshawe, or the admirable but fragile-seeming Polly Bassompierre? About your teaching colleague Paul Emmanuel, about his being a devout Catholic, about his complicated circumstances? Are you even going to tell us whether he made it back from the Caribbean? (She is not.)
Jane is an open book, Lucy a locked box--harder to love, but eventually I did: tender here, flinty there, proud, principled, resilient, smart. But likes to keep her secrets.
And that scene where she walks around the night-time festival tripping on opium--best thing in all Brontë, to my mind.
Sunday, May 13, 2018
Elvis Costello, _Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink_, part two
WHAT TURNED THE Jazzmaster-wielding nihilist on the cover of this volume to the bemused old pro with a vintage acoustic who graces its back? Costello seems inclined to date the shift to the repercussions of that drunken night in the Ohio Holiday Inn bar where he accosted Stephen Stills and slung around the n-word in reference to Ray Charles and James Brown.
The books lacks an index, and is only roughly in chronological order, so I'm going to tell you that the episode gets its own brief chapter, Chapter 21, "What Do I Have to Do to Make You Love Me?" (I think the title is quoting Elton John's "Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word," but I'm not positive.)
Let's take a moment to remember where Elvis Costello stood early in 1979. Armed Forces had just come out, his third brilliant album in a row. For just about everyone I knew who took music seriously, Costello was the songwriter. Bob Dylan and Lou Reed were still capable of gems like "Señor" and "Street Hassle," but their best work seemed to be behind them. Joni Mitchell was re-inventing herself as a jazzer. Having put out an album produced by, of all people, Phil Spector, Leonard Cohen seemed out of ideas. Bruce Springsteen, who had been the future of rock and roll for about five years at that point, seemed stuck in Spector-meets-S.E. Hinton pop operettas. When he moved to the short and punchy in The River, he actually seemed to be following Costello's lead, as did Neil Young in Rust Never Sleeps.
Meanwhile, even Costello's B-sides were staggering. I wouldn't have traded "Big Tears" or "Tiny Steps" for all of Darkness at the Edge of Town or Street Legal or Death of a Ladies' Man. Still wouldn't. I saw him in Chicago with the Attractions on that Armed Forces tour, maybe a month or some weeks before that Holiday Inn incident, and it still stands among the greatest shows I have ever seen. They were incandescent, a rock and roll tiger burning bright in the Aragon Ballroom.
Such is the context in which either Costello himself or his manager Jake Riviera (he doesn't remember which) says, "I think it's time for a motorcycle accident" (374). It's an apt allusion--at the apogee of the white-hot flight of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, and the 1966 tour, having discernibly shifted the whole culture, Dylan had to either stop and reset or implode. That accident, which could have killed him, saved his life and meant he could and did go on to do a lot of amazing work. The god-like phase, though, was over.
So with Costello: "that Ohio evening may well have saved my sorry life," he declares, by derailing him from his "ferocious pursuit of oblivion."
So what if my career was rolled back off the launching pad? Life eventually became a lot more interesting due to this failure to get into some undeserved and potentially fatal orbit.
Fair enough--only I would say he was already in that orbit and fell out of it. Excellent as much of the later work is--I love The Juliet Letters, The Delivery Man, and Momofuku--I can't help feeling the first four albums are the heart of the legacy and that they will matter for as long as people care about the music produced in my lifetime.
Which is why I was a little stung by the remark about Almost Blue, the C&W covers album that told Costello's fans, "I'm not who you think I am." He writes: "I felt as if I'd slipped out of this tricky, bitter little songs that only appealed to a certain kind of creep" (431).
Ouch. Thanks, Declan. I hope I'm not the creep I was in 1979, but I'll always cherish This Year's Model.
The books lacks an index, and is only roughly in chronological order, so I'm going to tell you that the episode gets its own brief chapter, Chapter 21, "What Do I Have to Do to Make You Love Me?" (I think the title is quoting Elton John's "Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word," but I'm not positive.)
Let's take a moment to remember where Elvis Costello stood early in 1979. Armed Forces had just come out, his third brilliant album in a row. For just about everyone I knew who took music seriously, Costello was the songwriter. Bob Dylan and Lou Reed were still capable of gems like "Señor" and "Street Hassle," but their best work seemed to be behind them. Joni Mitchell was re-inventing herself as a jazzer. Having put out an album produced by, of all people, Phil Spector, Leonard Cohen seemed out of ideas. Bruce Springsteen, who had been the future of rock and roll for about five years at that point, seemed stuck in Spector-meets-S.E. Hinton pop operettas. When he moved to the short and punchy in The River, he actually seemed to be following Costello's lead, as did Neil Young in Rust Never Sleeps.
Meanwhile, even Costello's B-sides were staggering. I wouldn't have traded "Big Tears" or "Tiny Steps" for all of Darkness at the Edge of Town or Street Legal or Death of a Ladies' Man. Still wouldn't. I saw him in Chicago with the Attractions on that Armed Forces tour, maybe a month or some weeks before that Holiday Inn incident, and it still stands among the greatest shows I have ever seen. They were incandescent, a rock and roll tiger burning bright in the Aragon Ballroom.
Such is the context in which either Costello himself or his manager Jake Riviera (he doesn't remember which) says, "I think it's time for a motorcycle accident" (374). It's an apt allusion--at the apogee of the white-hot flight of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, and the 1966 tour, having discernibly shifted the whole culture, Dylan had to either stop and reset or implode. That accident, which could have killed him, saved his life and meant he could and did go on to do a lot of amazing work. The god-like phase, though, was over.
So with Costello: "that Ohio evening may well have saved my sorry life," he declares, by derailing him from his "ferocious pursuit of oblivion."
So what if my career was rolled back off the launching pad? Life eventually became a lot more interesting due to this failure to get into some undeserved and potentially fatal orbit.
Fair enough--only I would say he was already in that orbit and fell out of it. Excellent as much of the later work is--I love The Juliet Letters, The Delivery Man, and Momofuku--I can't help feeling the first four albums are the heart of the legacy and that they will matter for as long as people care about the music produced in my lifetime.
Which is why I was a little stung by the remark about Almost Blue, the C&W covers album that told Costello's fans, "I'm not who you think I am." He writes: "I felt as if I'd slipped out of this tricky, bitter little songs that only appealed to a certain kind of creep" (431).
Ouch. Thanks, Declan. I hope I'm not the creep I was in 1979, but I'll always cherish This Year's Model.
Friday, May 11, 2018
Elvis Costello, _Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink_ (part one)
GIVEN HOW PROLIFIC a songwriter Elvis Costello is, I was not surprised that his memoir clocks in at 670 pages; given the astonishing verbal ingenuity of his lyrics, I was not surprised that he turns out to be an entertaining, resourceful writer. It did come as a surprise, though, that the memoir is as mild-mannered in tone as it is. Costello seems to be following the principle that if one has nothing nice to say about someone, one should say nothing at all. I began to wonder whether he says so little about Attractions bassist Bruce Thomas, short-lived fling Bebe Buell, and longtime partner Cait O'Riordan because a lot of what he felt like saying just wasn't that nice. And why is Greil Marcus simply "a professor" (338)?
The voice throughout is that of the genial host of Spectacle, the charming between-songs-storyteller of Costello's solo shows. Nothing wrong with that; it is just as well that Costello did not use his memoir, à la Keith Richards, to pay off old scores. The affability feels ironic, though, given that if one is sufficiently interested in Costello to pick up his book, one probably connected with the Elvis Costello of 1977-80--the spiky, illusionless slayer of scared cows that claimed his songwriting was motivated by revenge and guilt, slagged off Linda Ronstadt's earnest covers of some of his songs, and tongue-lashed Steve Stills and Bonnie Bramlett one boozy night in Ohio.
That's him on the cover of Unfaithful Music, in some hotel room scarcely big enough to hold the bed he sprawls, Jazzmaster guitar on his abdomen, swept-back hair, thick-rimmed glasses, and a stare that says, "go ahead, try to impress me."
Although he was not actually part of the punk scene--his music could be fast and hard, but had none of punk's primitive art brut quality--here in the USA we thought he was as punk as the Pistols or the Clash because he was as savage as they were about rock's dinosaurs, about the tawdry remnants of hippiedom, about the music business ("Radio Radio"), about fashionable bohemias ("I Don't Want to Go to Chelsea"), about looming dystopias ("Night Rally").
Or "Hand in Hand"--
No, don't ask me too apologize.
I won't ask you to forgive me.
If I'm gonna go down,
You're gonna come with me.
[...]
Don't you know I'm an animal?
Don't you know I can't stand up steady?
You can't show me any kind of hell
That I don't know already.
If Brian Jones had been capable of writing songs as beautiful, cold, and lethal as the aura Brian Jones projected, they would have been like "Hand in Hand." It's like a three-minute précis of Roeg and Cammel's Performance.
So what happened to that guy? Speculations in part two.
The voice throughout is that of the genial host of Spectacle, the charming between-songs-storyteller of Costello's solo shows. Nothing wrong with that; it is just as well that Costello did not use his memoir, à la Keith Richards, to pay off old scores. The affability feels ironic, though, given that if one is sufficiently interested in Costello to pick up his book, one probably connected with the Elvis Costello of 1977-80--the spiky, illusionless slayer of scared cows that claimed his songwriting was motivated by revenge and guilt, slagged off Linda Ronstadt's earnest covers of some of his songs, and tongue-lashed Steve Stills and Bonnie Bramlett one boozy night in Ohio.
That's him on the cover of Unfaithful Music, in some hotel room scarcely big enough to hold the bed he sprawls, Jazzmaster guitar on his abdomen, swept-back hair, thick-rimmed glasses, and a stare that says, "go ahead, try to impress me."
Although he was not actually part of the punk scene--his music could be fast and hard, but had none of punk's primitive art brut quality--here in the USA we thought he was as punk as the Pistols or the Clash because he was as savage as they were about rock's dinosaurs, about the tawdry remnants of hippiedom, about the music business ("Radio Radio"), about fashionable bohemias ("I Don't Want to Go to Chelsea"), about looming dystopias ("Night Rally").
Or "Hand in Hand"--
No, don't ask me too apologize.
I won't ask you to forgive me.
If I'm gonna go down,
You're gonna come with me.
[...]
Don't you know I'm an animal?
Don't you know I can't stand up steady?
You can't show me any kind of hell
That I don't know already.
If Brian Jones had been capable of writing songs as beautiful, cold, and lethal as the aura Brian Jones projected, they would have been like "Hand in Hand." It's like a three-minute précis of Roeg and Cammel's Performance.
So what happened to that guy? Speculations in part two.
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
Riad Sattouf, The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984_, vol. 1
THIS IS THE only work by Sattouf I have seen; his jacket bio notes that he was a contributor to Charlie Hebdo, and I have no idea whether his work there was of the unbridled sort that publication was famous for. His line in this graphic memoir is fluid, clean, rubbery, and looks like it would easily lend itself to the more exaggerated kinds of satire, but his tone here is hardly that--what comes across most clearly is love for his family, even though the family's circumstances look difficult.
Sattouf's father is Syrian, his mother French; they met in France as students, and Sattouf was born there. His father, Abdel-Razak, with a Ph. D. in history, gets offered a position at Oxford, but the racism he encountered in France piques his Arab national feeling. Fascinated by Gaddafi, he brings his wife and toddler son to Libya--an experiment that does not pan out. They return to France, another child is born, then off to Syria.
The reunion in Syria with the father's family is bumpy. He has a running feud with his brother over how some property was managed in his absence, and the blonde Riad is called "Jew" by his cousins, who keep threatening him. Riad is afraid to go to school, expecting similar treatment from his schoolmates. Meanwhile, Abdel-Razak is getting a bit more nationalist and a bit more Muslim.
Volume 1 ends with a brief trip to France and an announcement that they are about to return to Syria.
Abdel-Razak dominates Volume 1. He's a complex character--affectionate, loyal, intelligent, passionate about what he believes in, not to mention a fun dad, but also emphatic about getting his own way, easily offended, blinkered in some ways. He's fascinating. Riad's mother--whose name I can't locate--is also intriguing. Also intelligent, but quiet, perhaps passive, apparently not putting up much resistance to Abdel-Razak's plans for the family, which sometimes seem misjudged.
The child's-eye view of Libyan and Syrian politics of the 1980s and of the differences between European and Arab societies is innocent in some ways, Riad tending to reflect his father's seemingly naïve enthusiasms, but at the same time Riad's sensitivity to the ominous is strong. "We...we're going back to Syria?" he asks in a tremulous speech balloon in the next-to-last panel; in the last, he trails his family, wide-eyed and anxiously sweating, as they board a jet.
Sattouf's father is Syrian, his mother French; they met in France as students, and Sattouf was born there. His father, Abdel-Razak, with a Ph. D. in history, gets offered a position at Oxford, but the racism he encountered in France piques his Arab national feeling. Fascinated by Gaddafi, he brings his wife and toddler son to Libya--an experiment that does not pan out. They return to France, another child is born, then off to Syria.
The reunion in Syria with the father's family is bumpy. He has a running feud with his brother over how some property was managed in his absence, and the blonde Riad is called "Jew" by his cousins, who keep threatening him. Riad is afraid to go to school, expecting similar treatment from his schoolmates. Meanwhile, Abdel-Razak is getting a bit more nationalist and a bit more Muslim.
Volume 1 ends with a brief trip to France and an announcement that they are about to return to Syria.
Abdel-Razak dominates Volume 1. He's a complex character--affectionate, loyal, intelligent, passionate about what he believes in, not to mention a fun dad, but also emphatic about getting his own way, easily offended, blinkered in some ways. He's fascinating. Riad's mother--whose name I can't locate--is also intriguing. Also intelligent, but quiet, perhaps passive, apparently not putting up much resistance to Abdel-Razak's plans for the family, which sometimes seem misjudged.
The child's-eye view of Libyan and Syrian politics of the 1980s and of the differences between European and Arab societies is innocent in some ways, Riad tending to reflect his father's seemingly naïve enthusiasms, but at the same time Riad's sensitivity to the ominous is strong. "We...we're going back to Syria?" he asks in a tremulous speech balloon in the next-to-last panel; in the last, he trails his family, wide-eyed and anxiously sweating, as they board a jet.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
