The Ancient Garden

It’s long been a commonplace of Marxist literary theory to argue that “the difference between science and art” is that “science gives us conceptual knowledge of a situation; art gives us the experience of that situation” and, like most commonplaces, this one manages to be both deeply inadequate and disorienting as well as pointing in the direction of something useful and true.

I’ve had a surfeit of “the experience of that situation” recently, working my through Hwang Sok-Yong’s brilliant and moving novel The Ancient Garden. There’s nothing quite like weeping through your tea breaks to mark you out as the office oddball, but I can’t imagine the reader who could get through this story and remain unmoved. The resilience of realism’s strategies is worth noting: a fairly conventional device of splitting the plot-, narrative- and story-time via letters and recollection in not-quite-tranquility by characters ‘sadder but wiser’ manages to evoke both the scale, tragedy and grandeur of the Gwangju massacre – and the struggles which shaped the ‘386’ generation more widely – and offer us an insight into the human impact and complexity of those times and their legacy now.

Experience becomes an issue in other ways as well. For any socialist in one of the oppressor countries there’s bound to be a healthy discomfort from time to time as we ponder the experiential gulf between our own lives and those of others. I don’t mean a political point by this; the idea that things being worse elsewhere means we should ignore injustice here is never one I’ve understood, and I’ve no patience with calls to substitute solidarity with gratitude. My point is a vaguer one, about feelings: impossible sometimes to talk about starvation and torture and war when it’s so distant, so foreign from the life world we can draw on for comparison.

Hwang’s novel gives us a sense of that world, but he also captures something of the imaginative and emotional demands of what movements fight for. The non-argument that ideas and theory and articulate visions mar fiction they appear in (the show don’t tell carry-on) is too lame to waste time with here; what The Ancient Garden illuminates is how often everyday life is used as an ideological stand-in for alternatives to politics in art. Food, family, sexual love, nature, beauty, idleness: it’s impossible to imagine a vision of the good life which doesn’t treasure these things, yet far too many celebrations of what we might have now turn into implicit arguments against wider transformation. Hwang is alive to that tension and draws from it to give his novel its charge.



All of this, of course, is a roundabout and no doubt overblown and agonized way of trying to communicate how much I loved this work, how much it moved me, and how important it felt, how vital a record, a testament, and a call to continue. Although she doesn’t at first seem like she’ll be the hero or the model of resilience, it’s the voice of the character Han Yoon Hee which stays in my mind:

There will be endless debates and numerous arguments that will always need to begin from square one; compromises that no one’s happy with will be made, and after a long wait will come some slight progress, which will most likely be distorted after a while. All there can be is a partnership or an election. It will be impossible to figure out how the threads got entangled, so you will be lucky to find the one you just missed. And everyone will resemble everyone else while holding onto the end of that one thread and arguing over it, never again able to go back to the starting point. While trying to destroy the system, they will form another system in order to destroy it. No one can remain a warrior forever. Even the revolutionary committee goes home after a day’s work. At home, the wife takes care of the kids and complains that his paycheck is late again and nags that he is never home and whines that there is no more money. Again and again, they eat and drink and fight and have sex and go to work and begin debating again. In between the land he had left and the sky and the far future there is an infinite black hole with its mouth wide open. A revolution? That is a frozen scintillation. If you are not banished like Oh Hyun Woo or murdered by bullets in front of a barricade like his brothers, you will have to live an exhausting life as an activist who has to commute to work. Still, even if that is the case, how beautiful a revolution is. Even if it makes your mouth dry, even if you end up quivering with disillusionment, it still electrifies you and reminds you that you are alive.


Sources

That long quote is from pp. 366-7 of Jay Oh’s translation of The Ancient Garden (Basingstoke: Picador, 2009).

The experience quote at the start of this post is from Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkley: UC Press, 1976), p. 18.

Japan in the Supermarket of the Kiwi Psyche

Not available online, alas (and that’s a real alas, for real reasons, not just vanity) but some of you might be interested in my essay "Japan in the Supermarket of the Kiwi Psyche" in the latest Journal of New Zealand Literature (27: 2009) on the cultural politics of treatments of Japan in contemporary New Zealand literature.




If you’ve got a university connection this might work, otherwise it’s off to the library.



[O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us! I’ve never had “salty milk” ice cream but, if Rakuten is to be believed, it’s an NZ thing…]

Demonstration Culture!

Over Easter I was lucky enough to be able to go to Marxism 2010 in Melbourne, a worthwhile event in all sorts of ways (my particular highlight, among plenty of rewarding sessions, was being able to listen to Trevor Ngwane, veteran South African anti-privatisation campaigner).

As part of the conference I spoke on some of the inspration and lessons of Korea’s Candelight Movement from 2008. The talk and discussion went fairly well, I think, and, when there’s time, I’ll try and write it all up as a post.



In the meantime I want to offer you a heartening quote I uncovered – as with so much else of value on Korea, from the Hankyoreh - during preparing for my talk. The background is appalling – a plan by the thugs in the GNP to remove the right of free assembly – but the admission itself is fabulous. Here’s ex-Prime Minister Han:

“The government intends to counter illegal strikes and violent demonstrations that could have negative effects on the nation’s economy. To reach the level of an advanced nation, it is necessary to correct the backwardness of our demonstration culture.”



A demonstration culture….what wouldn’t we all give to have one of those?

Right-wing fantasies aside, though, this is of course on a different order to preferring kimchi to marmite, sensible as that preference may be. A demonstration culture is built out of what EP Thompson calls the “moral culture” of the working class; it’s forged by organization, politics, ideas, traditions. Time for the rest of us to get busy.

Chaplin's Modernist Realism

Brecht was convinced that if we were to read a fine novel and then learn later that it had been written by Lenin, our opinion of both the book and the Bolshevik would suffer. Being able to form a set of rounded characters or turn a shapely sentence aren’t, it seems, part of the skill set you demand from a revolutionary theorist and working-class leader.

It hasn’t dented my opinion of him, but discovering Charles Chaplin’s My Autobiography has been as creatively destructive an experience as the one Brecht imagined for himself. Chaplin is, of course, one of the great Modernists. His autobiography, though - a story of one man’s journey from ‘small garret’ to end up ‘sadder but wiser’ in a Swiss palace - is a triumph of a particular type of English-language Realism. Where else has this kind of double generic life been going on? What moonlighting might yet be uncovered? Did Lukacs have a similar text hidden away, History and the Stream of Class Consciousness?

All of the outrage and indignation you’d expect from the creator of The Great Dictator is here (interesting, too, his observation that he could never have made that film had he known the full extent and horrors of Nazism’s anti-Semitic outrages):

I found poverty neither attractive nor edifying. It taught me nothing but a distortion of values, an over-rating of the virtues and graces of the so-called better classes.

Wealth and celebrity, on the contrary, taught me to view the world in proper perspective, to discover that men of eminence, when I came close to them, were as deficient in their way as the rest of us.



Chaplin achieves this ‘proper perspective’ with the help of baroque vocabulary (“the ‘he man’ atmosphere of the studio would have been almost intolerable but for the pulchritudinous influence”) and high-energy ‘literary’ touches (“to gauge the morals of our family by commonplace standards would be as erroneous as putting a thermometer in boiling water.”). He even manages to come up with a quick guide to character along the way: you can always tell someone’s worth by what kind of an Oscar Wilde they turn out like. One theatrical entrepreneur “looked like a coarse edition of Oscar Wilde.” No trusting him then. Emil Ludwig, on the other hand, “looked like a refined Oscar Wilde.”

It may be that my shock at all this richly totalising detail and perspective has been conditioned by the last century’s wars of position around realism and modernism. This is how Michael Denning argues it:

The two leading transnational aesthetic terms – realism and modernism – were so embedded in the cultural Cold War that they became mere honorifics, with little actual meaning. In the communist world, favoured writers were proclaimed realists; in the capitalist world, they were deemed modernists. The discoveries that apparent modernists were actually realist – think of the cases of Brecht and Picasso – and the reverse claim that classic social realists were actually modernists (as in contemporary reinterpretations of Lu Xun) have regularly been part of the ideological battle conducted through these terms.



Perhaps, then, Chaplin’s Autobiography shows the realism in his modernism, and the modernist possibilities bursting out of his realism, and we can enlist him as an example of what John Roberts has identified as “modernist realism” or the interrupted conversation between the two:

At the depth of this dolorous period, Mother began to develop migraine headaches and was forced to give up her needlework, and for days was obliged to lie in a dark room with tea-leaf bandages over her eyes. Picasso had a blue period. We had a grey one, in which we lived on parochial charity, soup tickets and relief parcels.

Works Cited

Michael Denning, “The Novelists’ International” in Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 705.

Save the Whales

“A government which can’t defend its flag at sea has lost its sovereignty!”

Something felt wrong last Friday. I’ve started some temping work in the centre of Wellington and, in my lunch breaks, take the chance to enjoy the warm early-autumn weather by walking over to parliament grounds.

Normally it’s a quiet spot but, last Friday, there was a small crowd listening to a man dressed all in black, flanked by two imposing New Zealand flags, as he delivered a speech on New Zealand’s loss of national sovereignty (the line above I took as a note during this speech). Turns out I’d spotted Captain Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd, addressing an anti-whaling gathering.

There is a worrying undercurrent of anti-Asian racism that permeates Sea Shepherd’s publicity and arguments. Most people, rightly, oppose whaling: the Sea Shepherd campaign connects this genuine environmental concern to much older, and dangerous, currents in Australian and New Zealand politics: nationalism, especially ‘left’ nationalism, and the racism that accompanies it. Facing an environmental challenge like the slaughter of endangered whales, we start to see a choice between an internationalist approach, stressing the potential for a politics which can unite, and a nationalism which turns genuine concerns into props for reactionary and toxic ideas. Greens Senator Bob Brown – with his talk of “our” whales, as if New Zealand and Australia ‘owned’ these creatures – and his anti-immigrant comments, re-enforces a long tradition of anti-Asian racism in this part of the world.



Sea Shepherd has chosen to draw on imagery from the Pacific War, modeling its campaign logo on “the legendary Flying Tigers who fought the Japanese Imperial Forces in China” and taking their name – Operation Waltzing Matilda – from “the unofficial national anthem of Australia.” If this media campaign is merely opportunistic and naïve then it is, at best, dangerous and regrettable. If, however, it’s conscious evocation then Sea Shepherd’s rhetoric is far more sinister. Nationalist mythology to the contrary, the Pacific War, in the words of activist historian Tom O’Lincoln, “was a ruthless power struggle between rival empires.” The death and suffering Australia and New Zealand helped bring to the Asian world – culminating, of course, in horrific and criminal atrocities in Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki – are a warning to ordinary people the world over, not part of a tradition to be embraced. Since the war anti-Asian racism has appeared time and again in Australian and New Zealand life – with violent and dangerous consequences. In toying with this rhetoric Sea Shepherd takes up a dishonourable heritage.

We’ve always despised them – now we must smash them!



“We in Australia confidently approach our task. We stand ready, with freedom in our hearts…we shall throw the Japanese back where they belong.”

“Throw the Jap back where he belongs”

“There is only victory or defeat for the whales, and we do not intend to see the whales defeated, nor do we intend to let the murdering barbarian butchers win.” [Emphasis mine].



The first two quotes are from Australian government posters produced during World War Two; the second from a Sea Shepherd leaflet distributed on Friday.

The echoes are so obvious, the de-humanising provocation so blatant. The ‘murdering barbarian butchers’ of today are the ‘Japs’ of sixty years ago, the victims of racist attacks and outrages of the recent past, the ‘foreigners’ hated by racists in a settler colony founded on dispossession and dislocation and determined to forget its own foreignness. It’s the language of racism, of poisonous nationalism and, if it came from a neo-Nazi, it would be denounced as such.

And yet, lunch time last Friday, a crowd of good-natured environmentalists, respectable figures – including Green MPs – and campaigners heard it all without so much as a murmur.

It’s not only in the ocean that Sea Shepherd are playing a dangerous game.

A note on sources

All quotations taken without a link are from the Sea Shepherd leaflet “Defending Whales”, which I took from their stall on parliament grounds 19/03/2010.

By far the best introduction to anti-Japanese racism in Australia is, sadly, not available online. It is Phil Griffiths, ‘Australian Perceptions of Japan: the History of a Racist Phobia’, Socialist Review (Melbourne), no. 3, 1991, although I've provided a link to a summary of it above.

The Japanese side to the whaling debate would require a post of its own: David McNeill’s reportage on the state’s persecution of Greenpeace activists in Japan is very useful, and his commentary has been a consistent model of a non-racist, internationalist anti-whaling stance.

Rockabilly, Sexuality, Imperialism

Wanda Jackson was one of my favourite musical discoveries in 2009. She’s spent most of her career as a country singer, but the album I found, Wanda Jackson: Queen of Rockabilly, (only Y200 at BookOff Kichijoji) is full of early rock’n’roll of a kind so powerful it makes Elvis seem tame.

When you remember that Jackson was only 20 or even younger when she recorded most of these songs their fierceness and independence seems all the more extraordinary.

Jackson’s most striking song - too raunchy to get national play time in the US - is “Fujiyama Mama”, as wild an artistic celebration of female assertiveness and sexuality as you’re likely to hear. (It was Annisteen Allen who in 1955 first recorded the song, but Jackson’s version is much more explicitly sexual and direct and, presumably, given its white singer and intended white audience in segregation-era America, would have been all the more unsettling).



Amidst all the ultra-conservative reaction of the United States of the 1950s, this song’s outrageousness is like something from a past we never had:

Cause I'm a Fujiyama Mama and I'm just about to blow my top!
And when I start erupting there ain’t nobody gonna make me stop!

That initial celebratory shock has to give way, though, to a sense of horror as Jackson’s metaphor becomes clear:

I've been to Nagasaki, Hiroshima too!
The things I did to them baby, I can do to you!



But temptations to put this down to contradictory consciousness or the attitudes of a different era should be avoided. Best to listen to the music and take this lurid mixture of sexual frankness and revelling in violence and destruction quite literally.

For an imperialist power at the height of its reach and confidence there’s an obvious libidinal investment in its power and potential for destructiveness. What we forget - in the era of the crisis of US imperialism - is how explicit this all could once have been. Jackson’s forthright assertiveness meant she could never fit the images and sounds of appropriate feminity for the home market, but isn’t her performance here just amplifying all that sexualisation of violence and power which is so much a part of US imperial fantasy: those paintings of women on WWII warplanes, the naming of missiles and bombs, the kitsch salacious wholesomeness of shows to entertain the troops? In this context, comparing wiping out hundreds of thousands of lives to having an orgasm makes perfect sense.



The tension here is that Wanda Jackson was singing from a marginal, oppressed location within that social relation: it would have been, from her position as a woman in a reactionary and misogynist society, almost impossible to live the kind of sexual and personal autonomy her music espouses. Jackson’s rockabilly scandalises and unsettles the very imperialist ideology it advocates.

Japanese listeners were alive to those tensions, and “Fujiyama Mama” was a big hit there in 1958 (Tamaki Sawa even released a Japanese-language version). Jackson and others claim, with a fair bit of between-the-lines racist wink-nudgery about those naïve Asians, that the song was a hit because its fans couldn’t have understood it. Again, surely it’s best to take things literally: the Japanese understood this song all too well, and understood the world order being arranged around them. As John Dower shows in his important history Embracing Defeat, there was a complex process of both sexualisation and de-humanisation at work in US representations of the Japanese through the first part of the US occupation.

Japanese listeners may well have been - to use a strangely appropriate metaphor for the era of 45s - turning the tables on their occupier. In embracing so fervently a song which expressed the attitudes of their conquerors too honestly to make it a hit at ‘home’, their appreciation for the Queen of Rockabilly may have, for the briefest of moments, exposed the ruling ideology all too clearly.

Either way, it’s a deeply unnerving song from a powerfully talented performer.

International Women's Day