Times Literary Review - Pagola`s JESUS
1
Russian Literature Mikhail Bulgakov THE FATAL EGGS Translated by Roger Cockrell 146pp. Oneworld. Paperback, £7.99. 978 1 84749 184 8 M ikhail Bulgakov’s satirical fantasy The Fatal Eggs appeared in 1925 as one of five fables in a slim volume aptly titled Diabo- liad. It was the last prose fiction Bulgakov would publish in his lifetime. Although partly inspired by the work of H. G. Wells (espe- cially The Island of Dr Moreau and The Food of the Gods, as Roger Cockrell suggests in his introduction), The Fatal Eggs is infused with a pace and energy peculiar to Moscow in the fervid mid 1920s, when Lenin’s New Eco- nomic Policy temporarily twinned socialist utopianism with capitalist restructuring. An eccentric zoologist called Professor Persikov discovers a “ray of life” by inadvertently focus- ing artificial light. This ray stimulates organ- isms to reproduce and grow at vastly acceler- ated rates. As Persikov’s discovery coincides with a chicken plague that is devastating the Soviet Union’s poultry, the government trans- fers his radiation chambers to a farm near Smo- lensk to incubate a new generation of super- chickens. Tragically, the chicken eggs for the farm are accidentally switched with reptile eggs destined for the Professor’s zoological laboratory. The Smolensk hatchlings emerge as bloodthirsty snakes and lizards which grow to dinosaur size, overwhelm the local popula- tion, and march inexorably on Moscow. Even Fatum, the ominously named Soviet bureau- crat who requisitions the ray, is powerless to avert the pending catastrophe. Cockrell’s self-effacing, fluent prose restores the elegant irony of the original, while rising to the challenge of Bulgakov’s occasionally abstruse medical lexicon (from dissected frogs to pelvic kidneys). Cockrell boldly resists the literality that marred Carl Proffer’s earlier translation, describing Per- sikov’s oddly shaped head – “pestle-like” in the original (an image more meaningful for readers schooled in Russian folklore) – as “bald and elongated like a tortoise’s”. This comparison reinforces one of the story’s abid- ing in-jokes: the Professor’s resemblance to his research material. The comical professor is chief clown, chief villain, and chief victim of the piece, while his contempt for his stu- dents’ political radicalism rehearses the theme of Bulgakov’s next full-length satire, Heart of a Dog: the split between intellectu- als and Soviet society. He fails most students for not knowing the difference between frogs and amphibians, wearily asking each candi- date, “You are a Marxist, I suppose?”. This attractive edition includes explanatory notes and a biographical essay. Muireann Maguire History Glyn Prysor CITIZEN SAILORS The Royal Navy in the Second World War 552pp. Viking. £25. 978 0 670 91854 6 G lyn Prysor thinks that the naval history of the Second World War focuses too much on the epic battles and decisions of great commanders. Warships, Prysor reminds us, were not simply machines; they were fighting teams composed of men bound by a common experience and fate. Prysor aims to capture the human experi- ence of naval warfare. Drawing on the letters, diaries and memoirs of the men and women who fought in the Royal Navy, he skilfully weaves together a coherent “people’s history of the sailor’s war” that pushes the strategic and political narrative into the background. This approach renders even familiar episodes such as the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck or the destruction of the Arctic con- voy PQ17 in a fresh and compelling way. For sailors, the terrifying experience of combat was relatively rare; the tedious routine of operating a cramped warship on long voy- ages was the norm. Mental breakdown, breaches of discipline and the corrosive effect of fear were as dangerous to the fleet as guns, bombs and torpedoes of the enemy. Despite the “dilution” of its long-service pro- fessionals with thousands of wartime volun- teers and conscripts, the Navy sustained the morale of its sailors and “fighting efficiency” of its ships throughout the war. Prysor is at his best when he explains how the Navy achieved this feat. Recruits internal- ized the Navy’s honour code through the initi- ation process. Pragmatic rather than strict dis- cipline also played a role, and the Royal Navy convened considerably fewer court mar- tials than the other two services. The Admi- ralty encouraged recruits to regard them- selves as “citizen sailors” fighting on behalf of the “national community”. As many of the letters and diaries by sailors quoted by Prysor show, the inculcation of fighting efficiency did not extinguish a sense of common human- ity, even with the enemy. As one sailor wrote about the Bismarck’s survivors: “The foe is beaten and hearts go out in succour to them that are in the water”. Joseph Maiolo Psychoanalysis Veronika Fuechtner BERLIN PSYCHOANALYTIC Psychoanalysis and culture in Weimar Republic Germany and beyond 256pp. University of California Press. $49.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £34.95. 978 0 520 25837 2 N ow that the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) has returned to Berlin (holding its annual conference there in 2007), Berlin Psychoanalytic could be seen as a timely attempt to bring the city back from the analytic wilderness where it has been languish- ing since the Second World War. However, Veronika Fuechtner gives neither the city of Berlin, nor its most famous psychoanalysts, much space here, which is curious in a work that tries to establish the city as the site of a specific set of psychoanalytically informed clinical and cultural practices. Major theorists like Karl Abraham and Melanie Klein, whose formative years were spent in Berlin, hardly feature. The book is structured, instead, around lesser-known cultural figures, who, while spreading the cause, pulled a still embry- onic psychoanalysis into strange shapes. It is sobering and instructive to read of the wide- spread influence of Georg Groddeck, for example, whose early ideas about the “It” almost certainly influenced Freud’s theoriz- ing of the id, but who went on to develop a theory of the Christian unconscious in which women and Jews are the villains. That Freud tried to keep such “wild analysts” within his circle is astonishing; a marker of how far he was prepared to go to gain acceptance for his fledgling therapeutic method. The author’s intent, “to escape the teleol- ogy of fascism”, is also problematic. Pursu- ing the past of Weimar Berlin without an eye to its future creates aporias in the historical analysis, which seems afraid of following up its own discoveries. As a result, the eugenic and racial theories developed by Hermann von Keyserling and Groddeck come to seem like curios which were somehow attached to, but not necessarily an integral part of psycho- analytic theory. As a genealogy of psychoa- nalysis, however, the book is valuable too. It reminds us of the possible links current psy- cho-analytic theory and practice have per- haps suppressed in their attempts to disavow some of the more uncomfortable truths of their Berlin-based pasts. Other almost for- gotten aspects of early psychoanalytic prac- tice also emerge. Writers like Alfred Döblin and Arnold Zweig envisioned a socially responsive psychoanalysis and developed theories which linked society to the individ- ual, so that one needed to change the one to cure the other. Fuechtner’s book brings these revolutionary figures back into discourse. Aruna Wittmann Religion José Antonio Pagola JESUS An historical approximation Translated by Margaret Wilde 560pp. Convivium Press. $49.99. 978 1 934996 09 6 J esus: An historical approximation is a work of careful scholarship that packs a powerful punch. José Antonio Pagola, a Span- ish Catholic priest, is particularly good at depicting the society in which Jesus lived, showing how it was a time of growing inequality. Herod Antipas’s building of the grand cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias sucked more and more resources from the impover- ished surrounding villages, of which Naza- reth was one. From this close-knit village life, Jesus emerges as a sort of prophet. Like John the Baptist, he proclaimed the nearness and challenge of God’s rule; but unlike John, saw this as a rule of divine compassion rather than wrath. “God’s greatest joy is to share life with the poor and contemptible, the unde- sirable and sinner”, Pagola interprets Jesus as saying. But this is a dangerous message which brings him into conflict with the Tem- ple upper class and, fatally, with the Roman authorities. The man from Nazareth becomes another troublemaker strung up on a cross. Through careful footnotes and appendices, factual uncertainties and differing scholarly views are honestly acknowledged. But Pagola writes with passion and commitment. When his book was published in Spanish four years ago, it became a bestseller, attract- ing the commendation of his local bishop. But then another bishop, the Bishop of Tara- zona, in north-east Spain, announced that “the Jesus of Pagola is not the Jesus of the faith of the Church”, and the Spanish Bishops’ Conference censored the work. Not for the first time, this Jesus “come in the flesh” seemed hard to take, but perhaps what disturbed the bishops more was Pagola’s indiscreet reminder of the warnings Jesus gave against “hierarchy”, and that his follow- ers should be simply “brothers and sisters” – “no one above the others – no one lording it over the others – no rank, no class”. With Pagola’s case now passed to the Vatican, the author’s point that the teaching of Jesus “has a subversive edge that challenges conven- tional religion” may once again be proved all too true. Peter Cornwell Literary Criticism Howard Marchitello THE MACHINE IN THE TEXT Science and literature in the age of Shakespeare and Galileo 256pp. Oxford University Press. £55 (US $99). 978 0 19 960805 8 H oward Marchitello wants to persuade his readers that Hamlet is a machine. Hamlet is a machine too, as are the letters Hamlet writes, as is the play, “The Mouse- trap”, in Hamlet. That Galileo’s telescope is a machine doesn’t need much argument, but his letter on sunspots, according to Marchitello’s definition of the term, is also a machine. Tycho Brahe’s observatory, John Evelyn’s garden, Francis Bacon’s contributions to the Gray’s Inn revels – all machines. Even John Donne’s pockmarked body emerges, in Marchitello’s reading, as a “mechanism”. These “machines” are sets of phenomena that “serve the production of certain forms of knowledge and certain types of experience” – a conception that, for Marchitello, will enable us to read scientific texts “on the same play- ing field” as literary texts. This is a timely idea, expounded with precision. Drawing on a range of philosophers and theorists from Pliny to Bruno Latour, unusually sharp-eyed readings make neat matches between hetero- geneous writings: Galileo’s letters, Shake- speare’s plays, T. S. Eliot’s criticism, Tony Blair’s speeches. Marchitello uses the fea- tures of “the machine” to bring out particular similarities among such different texts. Perhaps the biggest risk in this kind of study, whose stated purpose is to apply a new definition to its various subjects, is that it can be accused of merely shuffling terminology, rather than genuinely enlarging critical under- standing. A reading of the scene in The Winter’s Tale in which Perdita says “That art itself is nature”, alongside the section of Elysium Britannicum in which John Evelyn declares that “Nature has already bin (as we may truly say) so Artificiall”, sets up an intriguing chiasmus. Unfortunately, the argu- ment does not illuminate these texts or their contexts so much as build towards a declara- tion that may seem, by this stage, disappoint- ingly predictable: “it is nature itself that has become the machine”. Daisy Hildyard Peter Brown GEOFFREY CHAUCER Authors in context 256pp. Oxford University Press. Paperback, £8.99 (US $13.95). 978 0 19 280429 7 G eoffrey Chaucer’s grandfather was a London wine merchant. In 1374 the King granted him a pitcher of wine a day for his duties as a civil servant, and twenty years later that amount was increased to a tun (around 954 litres) of wine a year. The popu- lar presentation of Chaucer has long tended to make “the father of English poetry” an ambassador for booze and bawdiness, and to reduce The Canterbury Tales to a pub gag. Peter Brown’s expansive, fleet-footed sur- vey of Chaucer’s life and work attempts to broaden this view – taking him out of the tavern and back into his social, political and literary context. The student seeking histori- cal background will find here a comprehen- sive and concise account of the seminal polit- ical events of the fourteenth century and a pleasingly forensic description of the Black Death and its symptoms (“blotchy discolora- tion of skin caused by subcutaneous hemor- rhages; blistering; and discharges of blood in the urine and faeces”.) Harder to accept, however, are the book’s claims that these events significantly inform Chaucer’s poetry. In his discussion of the Peasants’ Revolt, Brown finds too much sig- nificance in Chaucer’s casual use of “cherle” (peasant) in The Canterbury Tales – a term prevalent since pre-Conquest and hardly topi- cally loaded. As Brown himself suggests in his helpful chapter on the fourteenth- century literary scene, Chaucer cannot be seen as a radical writer when compared with his canoni- cal peers such as William Langland and John Gower, whose Vox clamantis bemoaned the Peasants’ Revolt in extensive detail. Chaucer was content to avoid such social commentary, leaving his work untouched by the temporary accidents of history. It is for this reason that Chaucer remains better read than his contem- poraries. With this in mind, the continuing contextualization of Chaucer (Marion Turner’s Chaucerian Conflict being another recent case in point) may fill an academic requirement, but it runs the risk of overlook- ing the poetry for the bigger historical picture. Joseph Charlton Natural Science Ragnar Stefánsson ADVANCES IN EARTHQUAKE PREDICTION Research and risk mitigation 300pp. Springer. ¤89. 978 3 540 47569 9 W hether the ability to predict earth- quakes will ever be attained depends largely on how it is defined. A modest level of prediction is already confidently practised: we can assert, for instance, that there will be more earthquakes of magnitude greater than 6 in Indonesia in this century and none in the UK. Of course the hope is for something that will allow populations in seismic areas to make an orderly escape or correctly decide not to. In 1975, a successful prediction based on all manner of precursors, including a 1,000-year-old record and unusual animal behaviour, saved an estimated 100,000 lives in Haicheng. But a year later and only 400 km away at least 240,000 people died in Tang- shan. Here too there were plenty of precur- sors but no warning was issued. Earlier this year six Italian scientists and an official were charged with multiple manslaughter because the advice they gave during the seismic runup to a magnitude 6.3 earthquake near L’Aquila in 2009, which killed more than 300 people, was “negligent”. Advances in Earthquake Prediction by Ragnar Stefánsson is rightly subtitled “research and risk mitigation”. The research he reviews is that of a multinational project directed specifically at understanding potent- ial pre-earthquake processes which ran from 1986 to 1988 in the South Iceland Seismic Zone. This has been followed by much addi- tional fieldwork and modelling, including intensive study of the crustal deformation pre- ceding two earthquakes of magnitude 6.6 that struck the Zone in June 2000. Risk mitigation occupies two chapters the content of which boils down to the science of improved under- standing and monitoring, and the art of issu- ing useful advice. (The role of corruption and incompetence in legislation and building is ignored.) In 1999, the International Association of Volcanologists told its members that, during volcanic crises, it was essential for scientists to speak with a single voice as any public bick- ering would generate distrust. I suspect that all trust in science goes when scientists are seen to sing from the same press release. But Stefánsson avoids such simplifying assump- tions and statistical generalizations, and pre- fers to speak of warnings rather than predic- tion. That’s how the Earth seems to work. Claudio Vita-Finzi Biography Yaël Tamar Lewin NIGHT’S DANCER The Life of Janet Collins 361pp. Wesleyan University Press. $37; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £19.99. 978 0 8195 7114 4 B orn in 1917, Janet Collins, America’s first African American classical dancer of note, received her early dance training when her seamstress mother traded dressmak- ing for tuition. Most dance schools operated a whites-only policy, and when Collins audi- tioned for the Ballets Russes in 1932, Léo- nide Massine offered the fifteen-year-old a job, but warned her she would have to “white-up”. She declined. Lester Horton, with one of the few integrated companies, gave her small parts, and Collins found more work in musicals and acrobatics before join- ing Katherine Dunham’s company, where she had access to teachers such as the Chris- tiansen brothers and William Dollar, as well as, later on, Mia Slavenska and Adolph Bolm. Despite this patchy background, Col- lins developed a formidable technique. With rare openings for dancers of colour, in 1947 Collins herself choreographed an evening of contemporary dance solos, which she performed for the rest of her dancing life. A Broadway show, Out of This World, brought her to wider attention, and in 1951 the Metropolitan Opera hired her as its first Afri- can American company member, four years before Marion Anderson’s more famous breaching of the colour bar. Here she received the sort of recognition not usually meted out to dancers in opera ballets. But that was the high point. Unremarked on by Yaël Tamar Lewin, Collins was already forty-four at this stage, old age in dance terms; furthermore, she could not tour with the Met to the segregated South. In 1954 she retired, becoming a teacher and then an oblate in the Benedictine order. Much of Collins’s career is lost in the gaps of performance history, and Lewin has done wonders to restore to the record the work of this pioneering woman, as well as printing Collins’s forty-odd pages of reminiscences for the first time. Neither Lewin nor Collins are stylists – Collins is flowery but vague, Lewin’s prose plods rather than dances – but Night’s Dancer is a fine contribution both to dance history and the history of segregation in the United States. Judith Flanders Food Studies Adam Gopnik THE TABLE COMES FIRST Family, France, and the meaning of food 304pp. Quercus. £18.99. 978 1 84916 286 9 A dam Gopnik lived in France for five years before returning to New York in 2000 with his family. This experience led to his interest in food as a subject, and The Table Comes First cleverly yokes together several of the food pieces he wrote for the New Yorker – on the creation of taste, on arguments about meat-eating and vegetarianism, on wine – with a cunning narrative strategy that allows his recycled journalism to be displayed as fresh goods. He employs a framing device of fictional emails to Elizabeth Pennell (1855–36), an until recently neglected Amer- ican who lived in London for most of her life, and who made her mark as a biographer, art critic, cyclist, travel writer and collector of cookery books. Pennell, he writes, “was the first to see the cookbook as a literary form”. Gopnik opens the book with a real letter written on May 24, 1942, from a young member of the French Resistance to his parents on the day he knew he was going to be shot by the Nazis. The quotation ends: “Questions of food, you see, have taken on a great importance”. Gopnik then brings up the case of Robert Courtine (1910–98), who, writ- ing for Le Monde until 1993, was probably the most eminent French food critic after the Second World War, but was a virulent anti- Semite and collaborator. Pennell’s relevance is amplified by Gopnik’s discovery that, on her return to Philadelphia in 1904 (where Gop- nik was born fifty-two years later to a Russian Jewish family), she wrote a book damning the presence there of too many Russian Jews. When he is writing about food itself, Gopnik is fairly convincing. Though he has a taste for cooked carrots I find hard to share, his digression detailing his own hypothetical last supper is amusing; and when he consid- ers “mouth taste”, how fashion affects taste, and “the carnivorousness of our animal natures” he shows he is not afraid of philo- sophical argument. His erudition and curios- ity are evident throughout. You have to relish the musico-anthropological approach that says rice pudding “is the drone sound of the table” – a reference to Keith Richards’s description of his own “drone-tuning, a folk tuning – that one steady note, the G, buzzing in the background even as the rest of the chords mark the changes”. Food studies is a new academic subject and there are few precedents for a book such as this, which “isn’t meant to be a scholarly history of the subject”, yet wants to be authori- tative. It was probably a poor choice not to include an index or apparatus, as these might have helped Gopnik do his homework more thoroughly. Early on, he asks “Who invented the restaurant? How did it begin?”, but relies on a discredited source (Rebecca Spang’s The Invention of the Restaurant, 2000) for his answer. What difference does this make? Many pages of Gopnik’s first chapter are factu- ally wrong, which may matter little except to serious scholars. But it means that his com- manding tone of voice, unmodulated by the addition of a little humility, is unjustified. Paul Levy in brief in brief “Honeyflowers and Honeysuckers, South Africa” by Marianne North (1830–90); from The Smallest Kingdom by Mike Fraser and Liz Fraser (220pp. Kew Publishing. £28. 978 1 84246 389 5)
-
Upload
convivium-press -
Category
Documents
-
view
83 -
download
0
Transcript of Times Literary Review - Pagola`s JESUS
Russian LiteratureMikhail Bulgakov
THE FATAL EGGSTranslated by Roger Cockrell
146pp. Oneworld. Paperback, £7.99.978 1 84749 184 8
Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical fantasy TheFatal Eggs appeared in 1925 as one of
five fables in a slim volume aptly titledDiabo-liad. It was the last prose fiction Bulgakovwould publish in his lifetime. Although partlyinspired by the work of H. G. Wells (espe-cially The Island of Dr Moreau and The Foodof the Gods, as Roger Cockrell suggests in hisintroduction), The Fatal Eggs is infused with apace and energy peculiar to Moscow in thefervid mid 1920s, when Lenin’s New Eco-nomic Policy temporarily twinned socialistutopianism with capitalist restructuring. Aneccentric zoologist called Professor Persikovdiscovers a “ray of life” by inadvertently focus-ing artificial light. This ray stimulates organ-isms to reproduce and grow at vastly acceler-ated rates. As Persikov’s discovery coincideswith a chicken plague that is devastating theSoviet Union’s poultry, the government trans-fers his radiation chambers to a farm near Smo-lensk to incubate a new generation of super-chickens. Tragically, the chicken eggs for thefarm are accidentally switched with reptileeggs destined for the Professor’s zoologicallaboratory. The Smolensk hatchlings emergeas bloodthirsty snakes and lizards which growto dinosaur size, overwhelm the local popula-tion, and march inexorably on Moscow. EvenFatum, the ominously named Soviet bureau-crat who requisitions the ray, is powerless toavert the pending catastrophe.Cockrell’s self-effacing, fluent prose
restores the elegant irony of the original,while rising to the challenge of Bulgakov’soccasionally abstruse medical lexicon (fromdissected frogs to pelvic kidneys). Cockrellboldly resists the literality that marred CarlProffer’s earlier translation, describing Per-sikov’s oddly shaped head – “pestle-like” inthe original (an image more meaningful forreaders schooled in Russian folklore) – as“bald and elongated like a tortoise’s”. Thiscomparison reinforces one of the story’s abid-ing in-jokes: the Professor’s resemblance tohis research material. The comical professoris chief clown, chief villain, and chief victimof the piece, while his contempt for his stu-dents’ political radicalism rehearses thetheme of Bulgakov’s next full-length satire,Heart of a Dog: the split between intellectu-als and Soviet society. He fails most studentsfor not knowing the difference between frogsand amphibians, wearily asking each candi-date, “You are a Marxist, I suppose?”. Thisattractive edition includes explanatory notesand a biographical essay.
Muireann Maguire
HistoryGlyn Prysor
CITIZEN SAILORSThe Royal Navy in the Second World War
552pp. Viking. £25.978 0 670 91854 6
Glyn Prysor thinks that the naval historyof the Second World War focuses too
much on the epic battles and decisions ofgreat commanders. Warships, Prysor remindsus, were not simply machines; they werefighting teams composed of men bound by acommon experience and fate.Prysor aims to capture the human experi-
ence of naval warfare. Drawing on the letters,diaries and memoirs of the men and womenwho fought in the Royal Navy, he skilfullyweaves together a coherent “people’s historyof the sailor’s war” that pushes the strategicand political narrative into the background.This approach renders even familiar episodessuch as the sinking of the German battleshipBismarck or the destruction of the Arctic con-voy PQ17 in a fresh and compelling way. Forsailors, the terrifying experience of combatwas relatively rare; the tedious routine ofoperating a cramped warship on long voy-ages was the norm. Mental breakdown,breaches of discipline and the corrosiveeffect of fear were as dangerous to the fleet asguns, bombs and torpedoes of the enemy.Despite the “dilution” of its long-service pro-fessionals with thousands of wartime volun-teers and conscripts, the Navy sustained themorale of its sailors and “fighting efficiency”of its ships throughout the war.Prysor is at his best when he explains how
the Navy achieved this feat. Recruits internal-ized the Navy’s honour code through the initi-ation process. Pragmatic rather than strict dis-cipline also played a role, and the RoyalNavy convened considerably fewer court mar-tials than the other two services. The Admi-ralty encouraged recruits to regard them-selves as “citizen sailors” fighting on behalfof the “national community”. As many of theletters and diaries by sailors quoted by Prysorshow, the inculcation of fighting efficiencydid not extinguish a sense of common human-ity, even with the enemy. As one sailor wrote
about the Bismarck’s survivors: “The foe isbeaten and hearts go out in succour to themthat are in the water”.
Joseph Maiolo
PsychoanalysisVeronika Fuechtner
BERLIN PSYCHOANALYTICPsychoanalysis and culture in Weimar
Republic Germany and beyond256pp. University of California Press. $49.95;distributed in the UK by Wiley. £34.95.
978 0 520 25837 2
Now that the International PsychoanalyticAssociation (IPA) has returned to Berlin
(holding its annual conference there in 2007),Berlin Psychoanalytic could be seen as atimely attempt to bring the city back from theanalytic wilderness where it has been languish-ing since the Second World War. However,Veronika Fuechtner gives neither the city ofBerlin, nor its most famous psychoanalysts,much space here, which is curious in a workthat tries to establish the city as the site of aspecific set of psychoanalytically informedclinical and cultural practices. Major theoristslike Karl Abraham and Melanie Klein, whoseformative years were spent in Berlin, hardlyfeature. The book is structured, instead,around lesser-known cultural figures, who,while spreading the cause, pulled a still embry-onic psychoanalysis into strange shapes. It issobering and instructive to read of the wide-spread influence of Georg Groddeck, forexample, whose early ideas about the “It”almost certainly influenced Freud’s theoriz-ing of the id, but who went on to develop atheory of the Christian unconscious in whichwomen and Jews are the villains. That Freudtried to keep such “wild analysts” within hiscircle is astonishing; a marker of how far hewas prepared to go to gain acceptance for hisfledgling therapeutic method.The author’s intent, “to escape the teleol-
ogy of fascism”, is also problematic. Pursu-ing the past of Weimar Berlin without an eyeto its future creates aporias in the historicalanalysis, which seems afraid of following upits own discoveries. As a result, the eugenicand racial theories developed by Hermann
von Keyserling and Groddeck come to seemlike curios which were somehow attached to,but not necessarily an integral part of psycho-analytic theory. As a genealogy of psychoa-nalysis, however, the book is valuable too. Itreminds us of the possible links current psy-cho-analytic theory and practice have per-haps suppressed in their attempts to disavowsome of the more uncomfortable truths oftheir Berlin-based pasts. Other almost for-gotten aspects of early psychoanalytic prac-tice also emerge. Writers like Alfred Döblinand Arnold Zweig envisioned a sociallyresponsive psychoanalysis and developedtheories which linked society to the individ-ual, so that one needed to change the one tocure the other. Fuechtner’s book brings theserevolutionary figures back into discourse.
Aruna Wittmann
ReligionJosé Antonio Pagola
JESUSAn historical approximationTranslated by Margaret Wilde560pp. Convivium Press. $49.99.
978 1 934996 09 6
Jesus: An historical approximation is awork of careful scholarship that packs a
powerful punch. José Antonio Pagola, a Span-ish Catholic priest, is particularly good atdepicting the society in which Jesus lived,showing how it was a time of growinginequality. Herod Antipas’s building of thegrand cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias suckedmore and more resources from the impover-ished surrounding villages, of which Naza-reth was one. From this close-knit villagelife, Jesus emerges as a sort of prophet. LikeJohn the Baptist, he proclaimed the nearnessand challenge of God’s rule; but unlike John,saw this as a rule of divine compassion ratherthan wrath. “God’s greatest joy is to sharelife with the poor and contemptible, the unde-sirable and sinner”, Pagola interprets Jesusas saying. But this is a dangerous messagewhich brings him into conflict with the Tem-ple upper class and, fatally, with the Romanauthorities. The man from Nazareth becomesanother troublemaker strung up on a cross.Through careful footnotes and appendices,
factual uncertainties and differing scholarlyviews are honestly acknowledged. ButPagola writes with passion and commitment.When his book was published in Spanishfour years ago, it became a bestseller, attract-ing the commendation of his local bishop.But then another bishop, the Bishop of Tara-zona, in north-east Spain, announced that“the Jesus of Pagola is not the Jesus of thefaith of the Church”, and the SpanishBishops’ Conference censored the work. Notfor the first time, this Jesus “come in theflesh” seemed hard to take, but perhaps whatdisturbed the bishops more was Pagola’sindiscreet reminder of the warnings Jesusgave against “hierarchy”, and that his follow-ers should be simply “brothers and sisters” –“no one above the others – no one lording itover the others – no rank, no class”. WithPagola’s case now passed to the Vatican, theauthor’s point that the teaching of Jesus “hasa subversive edge that challenges conven-tional religion” may once again be proved alltoo true.
Peter Cornwell
Literary CriticismHoward Marchitello
THE MACHINE IN THE TEXTScience and literature in the age of
Shakespeare and Galileo256pp. Oxford University Press. £55 (US $99).
978 0 19 960805 8
Howard Marchitello wants to persuade hisreaders that Hamlet is a machine.
Hamlet is a machine too, as are the lettersHamlet writes, as is the play, “The Mouse-trap”, in Hamlet. That Galileo’s telescope is amachine doesn’t need much argument, but hisletter on sunspots, according to Marchitello’sdefinition of the term, is also a machine.Tycho Brahe’s observatory, John Evelyn’sgarden, Francis Bacon’s contributions to theGray’s Inn revels – all machines. Even JohnDonne’s pockmarked body emerges, inMarchitello’s reading, as a “mechanism”.These “machines” are sets of phenomena
that “serve the production of certain forms ofknowledge and certain types of experience” –a conception that, for Marchitello, will enableus to read scientific texts “on the same play-ing field” as literary texts. This is a timelyidea, expounded with precision. Drawing ona range of philosophers and theorists fromPliny to Bruno Latour, unusually sharp-eyedreadings make neat matches between hetero-geneous writings: Galileo’s letters, Shake-speare’s plays, T. S. Eliot’s criticism, TonyBlair’s speeches. Marchitello uses the fea-tures of “the machine” to bring out particularsimilarities among such different texts.Perhaps the biggest risk in this kind of
study, whose stated purpose is to apply a newdefinition to its various subjects, is that it canbe accused of merely shuffling terminology,rather than genuinely enlarging critical under-standing. A reading of the scene in TheWinter’s Tale in which Perdita says “That artitself is nature”, alongside the section ofElysium Britannicum in which John Evelyndeclares that “Nature has already bin (as wemay truly say) so Artificiall”, sets up anintriguing chiasmus. Unfortunately, the argu-ment does not illuminate these texts or theircontexts so much as build towards a declara-tion that may seem, by this stage, disappoint-ingly predictable: “it is nature itself that hasbecome the machine”.
Daisy Hildyard
Peter BrownGEOFFREY CHAUCER
Authors in context256pp. Oxford University Press. Paperback,
£8.99 (US $13.95).978 0 19 280429 7
Geoffrey Chaucer’s grandfather was aLondon wine merchant. In 1374 the
King granted him a pitcher of wine a day forhis duties as a civil servant, and twenty yearslater that amount was increased to a tun(around 954 litres) of wine a year. The popu-lar presentation of Chaucer has long tendedto make “the father of English poetry” anambassador for booze and bawdiness, and toreduce The Canterbury Tales to a pub gag.Peter Brown’s expansive, fleet-footed sur-
vey of Chaucer’s life and work attempts tobroaden this view – taking him out of thetavern and back into his social, political andliterary context. The student seeking histori-
cal background will find here a comprehen-sive and concise account of the seminal polit-ical events of the fourteenth century and apleasingly forensic description of the BlackDeath and its symptoms (“blotchy discolora-tion of skin caused by subcutaneous hemor-rhages; blistering; and discharges of blood inthe urine and faeces”.)Harder to accept, however, are the book’s
claims that these events significantly informChaucer’s poetry. In his discussion of thePeasants’ Revolt, Brown finds too much sig-nificance in Chaucer’s casual use of “cherle”(peasant) in The Canterbury Tales – a termprevalent since pre-Conquest and hardly topi-cally loaded. As Brown himself suggests inhis helpful chapter on the fourteenth- centuryliterary scene, Chaucer cannot be seen as aradical writer when compared with his canoni-cal peers such as William Langland and JohnGower, whose Vox clamantis bemoaned thePeasants’ Revolt in extensive detail. Chaucerwas content to avoid such social commentary,leaving his work untouched by the temporaryaccidents of history. It is for this reason thatChaucer remains better read than his contem-poraries. With this in mind, the continuingcontextualization of Chaucer (MarionTurner’s Chaucerian Conflict being anotherrecent case in point) may fill an academicrequirement, but it runs the risk of overlook-ing the poetry for the bigger historical picture.
Joseph Charlton
Natural ScienceRagnar Stefánsson
ADVANCES IN EARTHQUAKEPREDICTION
Research and risk mitigation300pp. Springer. ¤89.978 3 540 47569 9
Whether the ability to predict earth-quakes will ever be attained depends
largely on how it is defined. A modest levelof prediction is already confidently practised:we can assert, for instance, that there will bemore earthquakes of magnitude greater than6 in Indonesia in this century and none in theUK. Of course the hope is for something thatwill allow populations in seismic areas tomake an orderly escape or correctly decidenot to. In 1975, a successful prediction basedon all manner of precursors, including a1,000-year-old record and unusual animalbehaviour, saved an estimated 100,000 livesin Haicheng. But a year later and only 400km away at least 240,000 people died in Tang-shan. Here too there were plenty of precur-sors but no warning was issued. Earlier thisyear six Italian scientists and an official werecharged with multiple manslaughter becausethe advice they gave during the seismic runupto a magnitude 6.3 earthquake near L’Aquilain 2009, which killed more than 300 people,was “negligent”.Advances in Earthquake Prediction by
Ragnar Stefánsson is rightly subtitled“research and risk mitigation”. The researchhe reviews is that of a multinational projectdirected specifically at understanding potent-ial pre-earthquake processes which ran from1986 to 1988 in the South Iceland SeismicZone. This has been followed by much addi-tional fieldwork and modelling, includingintensive study of the crustal deformation pre-ceding two earthquakes of magnitude 6.6 that
struck the Zone in June 2000. Risk mitigationoccupies two chapters the content of whichboils down to the science of improved under-standing and monitoring, and the art of issu-ing useful advice. (The role of corruption andincompetence in legislation and building isignored.)In 1999, the International Association of
Volcanologists told its members that, duringvolcanic crises, it was essential for scientiststo speak with a single voice as any public bick-ering would generate distrust. I suspect thatall trust in science goes when scientists areseen to sing from the same press release. ButStefánsson avoids such simplifying assump-tions and statistical generalizations, and pre-fers to speak of warnings rather than predic-tion. That’s how the Earth seems to work.
Claudio Vita-Finzi
BiographyYaël Tamar LewinNIGHT’S DANCERThe Life of Janet Collins
361pp. Wesleyan University Press. $37;distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £19.99.
978 0 8195 7114 4
Born in 1917, Janet Collins, America’sfirst African American classical dancer
of note, received her early dance trainingwhen her seamstress mother traded dressmak-ing for tuition. Most dance schools operated awhites-only policy, and when Collins audi-tioned for the Ballets Russes in 1932, Léo-nide Massine offered the fifteen-year-old ajob, but warned her she would have to“white-up”. She declined. Lester Horton,with one of the few integrated companies,gave her small parts, and Collins found morework in musicals and acrobatics before join-ing Katherine Dunham’s company, whereshe had access to teachers such as the Chris-tiansen brothers and William Dollar, as wellas, later on, Mia Slavenska and AdolphBolm. Despite this patchy background, Col-lins developed a formidable technique.With rare openings for dancers of colour,
in 1947 Collins herself choreographed anevening of contemporary dance solos, whichshe performed for the rest of her dancing life.A Broadway show, Out of This World,brought her to wider attention, and in 1951 theMetropolitan Opera hired her as its first Afri-can American company member, four yearsbefore Marion Anderson’s more famousbreaching of the colour bar. Here she receivedthe sort of recognition not usually meted outto dancers in opera ballets. But that was thehigh point. Unremarked on by Yaël TamarLewin, Collins was already forty-four at thisstage, old age in dance terms; furthermore, shecould not tour with the Met to the segregatedSouth. In 1954 she retired, becoming a teacherand then an oblate in the Benedictine order.Much of Collins’s career is lost in the gaps
of performance history, and Lewin has donewonders to restore to the record the work ofthis pioneering woman, as well as printingCollins’s forty-odd pages of reminiscencesfor the first time. Neither Lewin nor Collinsare stylists – Collins is flowery but vague,Lewin’s prose plods rather than dances – butNight’s Dancer is a fine contribution both todance history and the history of segregationin the United States.
Judith Flanders
Food StudiesAdam Gopnik
THE TABLE COMES FIRSTFamily, France, and the meaning of food
304pp. Quercus. £18.99.978 1 84916 286 9
Adam Gopnik lived in France for fiveyears before returning to New York in
2000 with his family. This experience led tohis interest in food as a subject, and The TableComes First cleverly yokes together several ofthe food pieces he wrote for the New Yorker –on the creation of taste, on arguments aboutmeat-eating and vegetarianism, on wine –with a cunning narrative strategy that allowshis recycled journalism to be displayed asfresh goods. He employs a framing device offictional emails to Elizabeth Pennell(1855–36), an until recently neglected Amer-ican who lived in London for most of her life,and who made her mark as a biographer, artcritic, cyclist, travel writer and collector ofcookery books. Pennell, he writes, “was thefirst to see the cookbook as a literary form”.Gopnik opens the book with a real letter
written on May 24, 1942, from a youngmember of the French Resistance to hisparents on the day he knew he was going tobe shot by the Nazis. The quotation ends:“Questions of food, you see, have taken on agreat importance”. Gopnik then brings up thecase of Robert Courtine (1910–98), who, writ-ing for Le Monde until 1993, was probablythe most eminent French food critic after theSecond World War, but was a virulent anti-Semite and collaborator. Pennell’s relevanceis amplified by Gopnik’s discovery that, onher return to Philadelphia in 1904 (where Gop-nik was born fifty-two years later to a RussianJewish family), she wrote a book damning thepresence there of too many Russian Jews.When he is writing about food itself,
Gopnik is fairly convincing. Though he has ataste for cooked carrots I find hard to share,his digression detailing his own hypotheticallast supper is amusing; and when he consid-ers “mouth taste”, how fashion affects taste,and “the carnivorousness of our animalnatures” he shows he is not afraid of philo-sophical argument. His erudition and curios-ity are evident throughout. You have to relishthe musico-anthropological approach thatsays rice pudding “is the drone sound of thetable” – a reference to Keith Richards’sdescription of his own “drone-tuning, a folktuning – that one steady note, the G, buzzingin the background even as the rest of thechords mark the changes”.Food studies is a new academic subject and
there are few precedents for a book such asthis, which “isn’t meant to be a scholarlyhistory of the subject”, yet wants to be authori-tative. It was probably a poor choice not toinclude an index or apparatus, as these mighthave helped Gopnik do his homework morethoroughly. Early on, he asks “Who inventedthe restaurant? How did it begin?”, but relieson a discredited source (Rebecca Spang’s TheInvention of the Restaurant, 2000) for hisanswer. What difference does this make?Many pages of Gopnik’s first chapter are factu-ally wrong, which may matter little except toserious scholars. But it means that his com-manding tone of voice, unmodulated by theaddition of a little humility, is unjustified.
Paul Levy
in brief in brief
“Honeyflowers andHoneysuckers, SouthAfrica” byMarianneNorth (1830–90);fromThe Smallest Kingdom byMike Fraser andLiz Fraser
(220pp.KewPublishing. £28. 978 1 84246 389 5)
