Manuel Valls and the Weapons of Mass Distraction

I am an idiot for writing this post.  I write nothing for months, and there are several hundred political issues more important and more pressing and a similar number of literary topics that are more interesting and I'm writing about Manuel Valls, the Minister of the Interior here in France banning a comedy show.

Dieudonné M'bala M'bala (Dieudo to his fans, of whom I am not one) is, in my considered opinion, based on a number of minutes watching him on Youtube, an idiot, an antisemite, a conspiracy theorist, and less funny than Chubby Brown.  I've had many bitter personal arguments about his views and those of some of his friends- alcohol fuelled table and door slamming arguments.  If you tell me the man is a pig I will not contradict you. 

It had not occured to me that these were reasons for denying him the right to speak.  I did not know this meant he wasn't to be allowed to earn his living.  Not here, not in France, which, particularly in the last few years, has been much more protective of free speech and plurality of opinion than USA and UK.

This afternoon a court in Nantes, where Dieudonné's show was to take place, allowed it.  Within two hours the Conseil d'Etat (the highest court in these matters) in Paris- some 250 miles away- had banned it, without giving Dieudonné's lawyer a chance to plead his case.  Clearly the courts can work fast for you, if you're the Minister of the Interior. 

What is particularly sickening is to watch Valls appearing en boucle on the news channels claiming this is a victory for the Republic and its values, especially 'la fraternité'.  In case anyone has forgotten Valls's real opinion of fraternity the clip below will remind them.

So congrats Manuel- you forced me into defending the egregious Dieudonné when both you and I have much better things to do.  You should have kept your big fat gob shut.  If you'd let Diedonné open his we could have judged him for ourselves.  Now we have to support him.  You're as big a pig and as big an idiot as he is.

Get a load of her

Lettre de George Sand à Alfred de Musset

Racey George

Racey George

I read this for the first time yesterday.  It may be apocryphal.  I hope to goodness it isn't.  You should read alternate lines.

Je suis très émue de vous dire que j'ai
bien compris l'autre soir que vous aviez
toujours une envie folle de me faire
danser. Je garde le souvenir de votre
baiser et je voudrais bien que ce soit
là une preuve que je puisse être aimée
par vous. Je suis prête à vous montrer mon
affection toute désintéressée et sans cal-
cul, et si vous voulez me voir aussi
vous dévoiler sans artifice mon âme
toute nue, venez me faire une visite.
Nous causerons en amis, franchement.
Je vous prouverai que je suis la femme
sincère, capable de vous offrir l'affection
la plus profonde comme la plus étroite
en amitié, en un mot la meilleure preuve
dont vous puissiez rêver, puisque votre
âme est libre. Pensez que la solitude où j'ha-
bite est bien longue, bien dure et souvent
difficile. Ainsi en y songeant j'ai l'âme
grosse. Accourrez donc vite et venez me la
faire oublier par l'amour où je veux me
mettre.

 

Could our own dear George Eliot have written something similar?  I fear not, though she probably would not have written 'La Petite Fadette' either. 

 

 

'How to Read Literature' by Terry Eagleton

 

A few weeks ago I took a swipe, more or less for no reason, on those dedicated professional educators who enable and facilitate student access to those parts of the curriculum centred around the acquisition of literacy skills in language, together with the necessary skill sets required to access, respond to and enjoy literature.

English teachers, in other words.  And yes, many of them do write like that. Some of them even talk like that.  In public.  As the late, truly great, Tom Sharpe once wrote, ‘There’s nothing like calling a spade an earth-inverting horticultural implement.’

I suggested that too much teaching and commentary relies on attempts to interpret the psychology of characters, ‘I think Darcy’s a bit of a snob at first, but he’s probably just shy’ or ‘Nostromo’s hot Italian blood leads him to steal the silver’.

So I was pleased to see Terry Eagleton make the same point in his new book How to Read Literature

Some of the time it is hard to distinguish what literary critics say about poems and novels from talk about real life. There is no great crime in that. These days, however, this can be true for rather too much of the time. The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the 'literariness' of the work- the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.  Literary works are pieces of rhetoric as well as reports.  They demand a particularly vigilant kind of reading, one which is alert to tone, mood, pace, genre, texture, rhythm, narrative structure, punctuation, ambiguity- in fact everything that comes under the heading of 'form'.

And then, of course, I became anxious. What if this wasn't a case of great minds thinking alike, what if this was a case of my thinking having been so formatted by the Oxford traditions that I thought what Eagleton thought by some kind of mind control. I go to his lectures thirty years ago- the lectures that became Literary Theory and I become so encultured that thoughts I believed to be independent are merely running along tracks laid down in the English Faculty.

Maybe not. Because Eagleton's solution is not 'Read more Saussure' but close reading.

Admittedly How to Read Literature is intended mainly for beginners but Eagleton hopes 'it will also prove useful to those already engaged in literary studies, or those who simply enjoy reading poems, plays and novels in their spare time'. It's probably important for beginners to learn how to do close reading- if only because it produces undergraduate essays faster than reading literary criticism, but Eagleton (un?)intentionally reveals the limitations of such an approach when he subjects Baa Baa Black Sheep to seven pages of analysis (most of which I skipped so I can't tell you exactly what he learned from this nursery rhyme)

iDombeyGTA5pad

We need something more to allow us to talk and interpret GTA V and Dombey and Son.  Because Eagleton’s purpose in writing the book- he feels that certain types of reading are under threat- is valid.  I’d just like to observe that this is not exactly due to modern time constraints.  Dombey is about 800 pages long, which I guess will take most readers between 15 and 40 hours .  I’ve already spent 30 hours on GTA V and I’m about 40% of the way through.  Google suggests that the average teenager spends 30 hours a week online.  We have the time to read.  And it's not the concentration that's lacking;  most videogamers, me included, could tell stories about staying up till 3 a.m on a game.  Dickens has never kept me up till 3 a.m though and it's very rare that Stephen King will.  I think the answer lies in the 'interactivity' of the web and videogames and this I shall return to in a subsequent post


The End of The Last of Us

It's traditional to start blogposts about videogames with a 'spoiler alert'.  If you're reading this and you don't want to know about the end of 'The Last of Us' then you should probably look away now.  There's a particularly fine piece on Thomas Kinkade a little lower down if you like.  Better still, open the Writing tab above and read some short stories and extracts of my work.

joel-ellie-truck.jpg

 The Last of Us was published recently by Naughty Dog and is one of the best videogames I've played in a long time.  It's set 20 years after a plague has killed most US citizens and turned a good  proportion of the rest into something resembling zombies.  The uninfected survivors are divided into a military government, cannibals, guerrillas and a very few civilians.  This scenario sets up the gameplay, which is as gory as one could hope and rather more difficult than in many similar productions.  I died a lot. 

You play a smuggler, Joel, and your cargo is a girl, Ellie.  The story insists that she is 14 years old, though her height suggests she can't be more than 12 (maybe they're not so well nourished in post-Apocalypsia)   Zombie bites are invariably fatal but Ellie has somehow survived one and you have to take her from one side of USA to the other on behalf of the guerrillas. Once there, you are told, they have the medical facilites to make a vaccine from her antibodies.

This quest takes a year in game time and it took me about twenty hours in real time. What sets the game apart from other games is the relationship that develops between Ellie and Joel, which is narrated in cutscenes (cinematic sequences in which the player does not control the character's movements)   A demonstration is outside the scope of a blogpost so I shall simply assert that The Last of Us is much better in this respect than World War Z  (the film, I didn't read the book) or The Walking Dead  (both the television programme and the graphic novel, I have not played the game) or The Road  (the Cormac McCarthy book, I didn't see the film)

At the end of the game it turns out that the guerrillas plan to kill Ellie and harvest her brain in their search for the vaccine.  When he finds out Joel fights his way through them and saves her when she is already etherised upon a table.  The game requires him to kill at least one of the surgeons to do so.  I killed all three and  I used a flamethrower because I was furious with them.  Joel carries Ellie out of the building and drives to safety.  The final scenes show Ellie examining her bite and Joel promising her that the guerrillas had given up looking for the vaccine.

It may be that Ellie had started to turn into a zombie.  On my television her bite looked worse than it had before- but my television is cathodic and not suited to HD games.  I am probably wrong- the internet commenters do not seem to have noticed.

http://thelastofus.eu.playstation.com/en_GB/lastofus

What I found astonishing however is that almost universally they think Joel should have given up Ellie so as to (possibly) save mankind.  John Stuart Mill might have agreed but it seems to me that giving up a child to vivisectionists is not the action of a dramatic hero.  This is even more the case in narrative terms as Ellie can be considered as Joel's adoptive daughter by the end of the game.  Off the top of my head I can only think of one 'give up the kid to save the world' story where this is considered the right thing to do- and I'm not the first person to point out that if that story ends on Good Friday rather than Easter Sunday then its meaning is entirely different.  Agamemnon does not get praised for sacrificing Iphigenia.

A sort of folk utilitarianism is the dominant ethic of our time.  'The greatest good of the greatest many' is cynically or thoughtlessly used to justify any monstrosity.  Many of the attacks on Joel- and on the writer for forcing the player to kill 'doctors' to progress in the game- were of this simple arithmetical type.  I was more interested by a different thread of comments.  Many said that Ellie would work out that Joel had lied to her and that their relationship would be destroyed by this deceit.  I do not think this reflects a touching suspension of disbelief past the end of the narrative.  I think it is a reflection of a style of literature teaching that is vastly overused in Anglo-Saxon schools.  I will characterise it (only a little unfairly) as the 'Pretend you are Romeo and write a letter to Friar Lawrence explaining why you committed suicide' theory of literature teaching.  Character and motivation are the only things of interest, and narrative is merely a device to reveal them.  The demands and structures of the story are thought to be too difficult and so teaching about narrative becomes primarily an examination of the psychology of the protagonists.  Film and television programme makers often mock this, especially in films about making films.  But even in The Sopranos Chrissy Molitsanti the up and coming gangster asks 'What's my motivation?' and 'When is my story-arc?' before going out to do his mob work.

For the last few years the scriptwriters' names have been creeping up the order of the credits at the end of a videogame, as their importance to the game increases.  Only a few years ago the plot chiefly existed to put the player character in a situation he would have to fight his way out of.  The cutscenes could be (and often were) extremely well done but they were little more than a peg for the action sequences.  If it is the case that videogamers are starting to use the literary critical techniques they have been taught to analyse games this is a positive sign.  It shows that videogames have gone past the point where the mechanics of play which depend on hand-eye co-ordination are the overwhelming features of interest.  Now character is also a feature.  The next challenge is to make 'character' and 'narrative' playable parts of the game.  There have already been attempts to do so by, for instance, letting players chose what to say to non-playable characters from a short onscreen menu, or by providing different endings to the narrative, and these have met with some success.  It is easy to imagine this trend continuing as games become more sophisticated and move away more from cinematic (and to a much lesser degree novelistic) narrative techniques to develop new ways to tell stories.

We are going to need new ways to talk about them too.  The 'Pretend you are the serpent in Paradise Lost and write a letter to God explaining why you decided to tempt Eve' school of lit-crit isn't going to be able to cope.