Is Kathleen Winter's "Annabel" a Canadian novel?

I’m not sure if any other readers of Annabel have grown frustrated with the discussions televised in the second and third days of Canada Reads, around two weeks ago. Judges could simply not get over the issue of the pregnancy featuring in the novel. I don’t care if what I am saying here is a spoiler, because even if the episode of the pregnancy was meant to remain a secret, the judges have done a great job at making it known to the entire world. So now, we can talk about it without fear of disappointing other readers.

Motto:

“To what strange end hath some strange god made fair

The double blossom of two fruitless flowers?”

(Swinburne, Hermaphroditus)

When I was about thirty or so pages into Annabel I made a note on my bookmark to check if there were any allusions in the novel to Plato’s myth of the androgyne. With a hermaphrodite as the protagonist, the novel had presented itself as a likely contender to the reference.

So when I came upon the ‘pregnancy moment’ I knew I’d found what I’d been waiting for.

Wayne, the character in question, the novel’s protagonist, is discovered to have impregnated himself (unknowingly) due to a natural – says the author – disposition of hermaphrodite bodies to perform sexual functions of both male and female organs.

Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium, says this:

“The two parts of man (the Androgyne), each desiring his other half, came together and throwing their arms around one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one; they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect because they did not like to do anything apart.”

Wayne is found to be in a state of constant self-embracement. He behaves equally as a man and as a woman. He has the feelings of both, the physical attributes of both, the desires of both. Even the way he satisfies himself sexually, his idea of orgasm, is ambiguous. What’s more, he reaches a stage where the tension of his singularity is so great he takes no care of his external appearance – something that other characters notice. I found this to be Plato’s Symposium almost to the letter.

As a consequence, I was not at all concerned with the medical possibility of the act of pregnancy in a hermaphrodite body. There was no way I was going to trivialise the beauty of this book by checking out if such self-impregnations were possible. Well, the judges in Canada Reads thought it was worth their salt to play the role of fact-checkers. And what a show they made when they discovered ‘the medical truth.’

Canada Reads, Day 3
Source: CBC

Now, when it’s well known that Annabel is not the winning book, I can reflect on something that became apparent to me as soon as the debates were over. This time, I can say it with confidence: the judges were right to think that Annabel was not a Canadian book. That’s because the scope of the novel and its narrative force go well beyond the geographical limitations of a given country. I am not a Canadian, but I don’t think Annabel was written with Canada in mind. I may seem wrong, since so many places (even the imaginary ones) are so Canadian in nature, but the book certainly doesn’t present itself that way. Catherine Winter has aimed a lot farther and a lot deeper. And in order to arrive at this destination, she employed, at so many levels, this universal myth of the double, the doppelganger, the Janus Bifrons, the facts of coincidentia oppositorum, the internal conflict that transgresses issues of gender, sex, race or any other issues capable of generating binary oppositions. In other words, Annabel is not Canadian because it is too hermaphrodite, too unstable, too risky to pin to a single space or a single idea.

Annabel is a book freed of the strictures of geography, and yet a book in which geography features prominently, blending in with the characters, growing to overwhelm the human.

Unhinged characters

All people in Annabel are soft. They are not people of flesh and bone. They are people of words. So that even the harshest of them, the most brutal or unfair, is laid on the page with a light touch, similar to that of watercolour. There’s really something about the way these characters settle on the page that creates, in my mind, the whole mood of the narrative: a mood in which life is not fought-for but negotiated, and where sentiments are turned on the proper side the way you turn a pillow on the cool side on a hot summer day when your bed is soaked in perspiration.

These people are never complete. They have unresolved issues that loom large after they’ve had their narrative turn, or when they’ve disappeared from sight: like Treadway on his last tracking season, after which he comes resolved to avenge his son; or like Thomasina, who returns to her errand life in search for the best places on Earth; or like Jacinta, who drifts into madness, where all things oscillate between dream and reality. Because of this indecisiveness, no characterisation is ever complete. In almost every chapter there’s a new reason to rest on these characters’ physical appearances, or to delve into their anything-but-static psyches, as if we were seeing them for the first time.

Silky people, their actions - blobs of aquatint. That’s how I like to think about them. They never just speak. They speak while performing little domestic actions or paying tribute to little domestic memories, as if life on Earth were the only source of action. Jacinta and Thomasina talk to each other “as they spread jam on toast thinly, the way they both liked it.” Of her life in the city prior to the marriage, Jacinta remembers with striking accuracy “the pigeons who lived in the O of Browning’s department store.” That’s how the lives of these characters unfold: with exactitude; with the dot on the ‘i’ and the cross on the ‘t’; with details squeezed out of the diachronic nightmare of life.

While reading Annabel, one very often gets this feeling that one is midwifing a world into being. Somehow like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo, perhaps: a world that doesn’t explode into life, but develops slowly, through little additions, through little events that take place in an almost natural course of events. This is a world that’s constantly assessed but never invented.

Larger than life

But the novel, a text of in-betweens and dualities, is not only given to these engagements with the little world of domesticity. The other side of things is one that envelops the narrative in a gigantic, mythical veil; in a trans-human blanket.

When the unprecedented fact of a hermaphrodite child occurs to Jacinta, she asks Thomasina (the only other person who knows the secret):

‘’Will other people love it?’

‘That baby is all right the way it is. There’s enough room in this world.’

This is how Thomasina saw it, and it was what Jacinta needed to hear.”

Here, the world is weighed and found capacious. But it is not made into a capacious thing. It is merely assumed to be so. Because, as via the Platonic myth, the world, in its mythical (Labradorian?) age, used to be large enough to contain the third sex: the androgyne.

The world is large enough for all the people who inhabit the world of fictional Croydon Harbour to become palpable. People of flesh and bone, laid on the page with gentle touches, but who perceive geography on a verge between the grandiose and the sublime.

“They didn’t call this place the big land for nothing. It was big in a way that people who came in either respected and followed or disdained at their peril. You could live like a king in Labrador if you knew how to be subservient to the land, and if you did not know how, you would die like a fool, and many had done.”

This is the logic that affects Treadway directly, and the other characters in oblique but not unrelated ways.

Atmosphere

I could go on forever quoting this book. Catherine Winter provides metaphors so evocative they stay with the reader for long, long time. This is, by and large, a book of atmosphere. Its weight and appeal rest in the weight and appeal of its luxuriant descriptions. In this atmosphere, the characters live as if in a warm, comfortable amniotic liquid, refusing to be born: refusing, in other words, to be part of this world, in which us, the readers, reside. 

The colourful city of St John's, the opposite of fictional Croydon Harbour,
a place Kathleen Winter knows by heart.
Source: www.stjohns.ca

Like Macondo (I just can’t help treading this bridge!), the world of Annabel is a self-sufficient world, a world that could live without our reading it. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear someone saying that reading through this novel feels like violating the heavy secrets that make the atmosphere of the novel so dense.
But once you’ve started reading, secrets or no secrets, there’s no way you can stop, unless you find a goddamn good excuse. More importantly, this is not a book to skim through. There are surprises at every corner, beautiful things at every turn of the story. You can’t take a vacation without being burdened by the thought that you have missed a lot by not reading every sentence.

Labradorian winter
Source: www.perceptivetravel.com

This is the kind of reading after which you need a rest. Its imagery and metaphors come in such poetic avalanches, you need to remind yourself of how prosaic the real world actually is.

On J.K. Rowling and the fans who take no prisoners

A few days ago I passed on a piece of news that had taken center-stage as an indication of the power of fans. The issue involved writing superstar J.K. Rowling, who had been asked (would “demanded” or “requested” be better words?) by Lynn Shepherd to stop writing. If not for a nobler reason, at least in order to give some space to the debutantes and the not-so-lucky.

"@white0gargoyle:What storm! "@JimMurrayAuthor:Crime author reaps whirlwind after urging JK Rowling to stop writing http://t.co/ACNdcxO3xL""

— Francisc Nona (@ferinona) March 2, 2014

One thinks about this and somewhere, in the deep recesses of one’s hopeful mind, the torturing thought appears to make sense. It’s not unlike asking a billionaire to stop making so much money, lest poor startups are left with mere bones to chew on. (Not to mention the really poor, who don’t even have a business to complain about!)

Except we’re not talking about making money here – in spite of the frighteningly big cheques Rowling is cashing in. No, it’s not about money. It’s about writing. What bothered the author of the anti-Rowling tirade (subsequently turned, of course, into kind apologies) was the extent to which the mother of Harry Potter has been monopolizing printed space. And that’s exactly where it doesn’t quite make sense to complain. Why? Because there’s no such thing as monopoly in the world of authors. Yes, yes, I know. I know about those who sell millions of copies, I know about the Dan Browns, the Stephen Kings, and the Dean Koontz’s of the writerly world who seem to have taken book selling to fictional dimensions. But they are far from monopolizing literature. With or without them, literature is doing just as fine. There are still Noble prizes to be won, the Booker grows in prestige every year, and even if we don’t think much of these distinctions, the success of the famous doesn’t stop cohorts of (often bad, often good) self-published authors to rise to internet fame like mushrooms after a good summer rain.

Lynn Shepherd
via www.lynn-shepherd.com

J.K. Rowling
via mayhementertainment411

  

Let’s think about it. Monopoly means the power of one. It’s dictatorship, tyranny, bad stuff. In a monopoly situation all alternatives are paralyzed. Is that what’s happening around the J.R. Rowling industry? Has she killed all possibilities? Are there no other writers publishing and making a lot of money? Are there no fans of other authors who hate Rowling just as much but who would give their lives (metaphorically, of course) to the cause of their own idols? If the answer to any of the above is ‘no,’ we can safely rule out the possibility of monopoly.

One can’t accuse J.K. Rowling of running a monopoly (which she isn’t properly running, since it’s mostly done by her vehement readers) in Rowling Land. Neither can one accuse Dan Brown or Stephen King of the same, when it all takes place in Brown Land or King Land. What these things I call lands have in common is their isolation. They are exclusive territories, with fans who throw their own tantrums, and with readers who have their own tendencies towards xenophobia. But they don’t spill out. Not so much as to worry anybody who is concerned by the fate of literature. They are mostly confined to their reading pleasures and to the circles of aficionados they are affiliated to. They don’t bother the reading time of those who want to read Dickens or who think that Dickens is the only one worth one’s attention. The latter, as we can see, aren’t any better than the former, since what they’re advocating is an equally exclusivist approach to whatever is the object of reading.

My point is this: reading is free. One cannot be persuaded to read what one doesn’t like, which is not unlike saying the opposite: that one always reads what one likes best. Whatever makes them happy!

And so, one’s audience must not be taken to be the only audience there is. Because it’s not. I, personally, haven’t read any of J.R. Rowlings’ books. I didn’t do it because of some literary purism. I simply never had time to approach them. The same way I’ve never had time to finish Anna Karenina. So I am not part of the Rowling audience. But there are many, very many, who do belong in the class of Harry Potter readers. Why should I stumble upon them? Why should I be frightened by them? Why should I be worried? It’s likely we’re never going to cross paths. At the end of the day, we have our own preferences and our own reading schedules, which may or may not collide. If they do, we can talk; if they don’t, we don’t even have to pretend we’ve never heard of each other.

The other side

On the other hand, though, let’s take a look at the opponent as well. It’s only fair to say that, if the argument from the freedom of expression is brought about, then her point should be examined at least with some attention. I would, if I were one of her critics, try to think positively about something that appears in eminently negative lights. What I have in mind is a blog post by Chuck Wendig the other day, who, on a completely different topic, was encouraging people in general (not necessarily the class of readers) to think before judging. That would involve, in his words, thinking in terms such as the following:

“Assume that people who are outraged are sincere and earnest. You don’t have to think they’re right, mind you — nor do you need to appease and placate just because it’s outrage. But assume it’s real. Assume it comes from a place of hurt and not that it’s manufactured just for drama’s sake. Sure, sometimes it is. But you don’t know that and it’s very hard to tell unless you really know the heart of a person — how do you know that they’re just stirring shit because they like the smell and not because they’re actually upset? You don’t. Everyone should approach each other like they’re coming at common ground from different ends, not that they’re trying to burn the crops and salt the earth.”

Take a positive twist on your darkest thoughts – this is Wendig’s point. That, to the headless fury of offended fans, doesn’t quite occur as a possibility. Not very often. But to think in response to this Rowling tornado, let’s admit it: the critic was using a tool widely used since reading has become professional and (more recently) interactive. And that tool is called criticism. Just like the fans who exploded against her, maybe all this was her having a word to say about something she didn’t like. Somehow she chose to focus on the wrong thing. Had she stopped at a more specific issue, she would have generated one of those gentle debates that animate fan groups around the world: things to do with character construction, style – you know, the usual stuff of writing.

Fans have been adapting Shepherd's post,

making it into attacks against her own books.

The author of this video went on to post a similar 1-star review

on her Amazon account, just to make the point clearer.

But what if Shepherd is onto something? At the end of the day, frankly speaking, yes: J.R. Rowling is getting more primetime than many other authors. And yes, any article published in a newspaper, a magazine, or a blog takes up print territory to the detriment of all the other articles which could have appeared in the same space. So her calculations are not so darn far-fetched as to completely exclude the point she’s trying to make. Mathematically speaking, she’s right. She’s also right statistically, and for the same reasons: the more attention is paid to a writer, the more he or she gains in the fans department; and the more they do so, the more likely it becomes for their names to appear at the top of all lists of preferences. Poor unknowns, they can only contemplate the rise to power of others, while their own work remains hidden in the clutter of anonymity.

There’s no real monopoly. Not in literature

It looks like I’m returning to the same point over and over again: Lynn Shepherd got the wrong footing on the problem by asking that Rowling stop writing to give the world a better chance. Because – I’m saying it again, I don’t know why – there is no monopoly. Or if there is, it is something way out of a writer’s control. If we look at the list of bestselling authors assembled by Wikipedia, Shakespeare and Agatha Christie are the heads of the entire tribe of writers, with sales between 2 and 4 billion units. I don’t know about Christie, who seems to have grown on the hype of popular culture in the 1970s and ‘80s; but Shakespeare? Poor man would be gob smacked to see the extent to which his celebrity has taken his plays and poetry.

William Shakespeare
via Wikipedia

Agatha Christie
via www.nofemininonegocios.com

What’s more important, though, Shakespeare had no contribution to the spreading of his fame, which started taking off for real only in the late seventeenth century, when he’d been mere shiny bones for about three quarters of a century. His VIP status proves once again that ceasing to write (and to live altogether, for that matter) is no guarantee that fame will plummet.

Who’s the exclusivist?

It’s not clear if Rowling has retaliated. It would have been hardly necessary, since her fans have taken the issue into their able hands and manufactured enough damage to go with the campaign.

You can’t mess with a Lamborghini of contemporary literature and expect to get away with it. That’s a simple lesson many should learn right now, before they put their minds to doing something similar. A lesson Lynn Shepherd was very much aware of (see the first paragraph of her article). But if we look at things from a certain perspective it’s not even hard to see that the one who’s attempting a monopoly is not Rowling, but Shepherd herself. How else could one interpret words such as these:

“By all means keep writing for kids, or for your personal pleasure – I would never deny anyone that – but when it comes to the adult market you’ve had your turn.”

When you want to shut a door so as to keep someone out, whoever that someone may be, you’re sending bad vibes around yourself. And then wait till the passionate ones react…

A New York Story

This is primarily a review of Lynne Sagalyn's 2001 book, Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon. The book is a magnificent display of thorough research, deep thinking, and professional handling of everything that makes the history of what the author calls “an internationally recognized symbol of urban redemption”. What she means by this phrase is the radical transformation of one of New York’s most iconic places: the Times Square in the title.

Lynne Sagalyn begins her book with a description of the gloom and privation that characterized the area up until the 1970s, when Times Square was known primarily for its criminal life: a red-lantern district where prostitution had replaced love and pickpocketing had taken over all economic enterprises.

(c) The Telegraph, UK

Sagalyn loves contrasts. She loves, for instance, to see how New York comes out glorious from this dark history of its depressive state preceding the Hercules Parade of 1997, when the then mayor Rudolph Giuliani (yet unacquainted with the 9/11 disaster) used a media event (the launch, accompanied by a lavish parade on West 42^nd Street, of Disney’s Hercules) to promote the city as a major point of attraction.

The book never ceases marveling at these transformations. Early on, the author asks:

"How did the icon of sleaze and pornography transmute back into the popular entertainment and glitzy commercialism? What is it about the character of the transformation of place that derivatively wiped away New York’s image as a “big, bad city” and, in the process, put a shine on city life in general?"

The rest of the book sets out to answer these questions, by examining a large number of media accounts, from late-nineteenth century to the late twentieth, to compare them with the glory and decadence promised by the Big Apple right before the fall of the Twin Towers.

A polyphonic non fiction account

You get easily lost in the wealth of reproductions, mostly photograph, taken at various moments in the Square’s anything-but-linear history. There are so many of them, that the exposure to the very idea of transformation takes on extraordinary nuances.

The book opens a multitude of doors to a multitude of perspectives. It is not only an account of New York and its troubled past. It is also a history of architecture, of urban planning, of social movements, of financial manipulations and of political investments. It is, to a considerable extent, a history of America. The author is intent on clearing this history of all the myths that have accompanied the rise of the middle class away from the slummy Times Square of the mid-20^th century to the fiscal, mass media and entertainment hub of the early 21^st, when Ernst & Young, Bertelsmann, Viacom, Condé Nast, Disney, Warner Brothers, Sony came to dominate Manhattan’s cityscape.

Condé Nast Building in Times Square. (c) travellingboard.net

The transformations of the 42^nd Street are, in fact, marked by contradictions rather than a smooth, irreversible evolution. At almost every step, Sagalyn reminds the reader of all the protests, the resistance, the nostalgic refusal to alter, which have accompanied the metamorphoses of this New York landmark.

(c) Vintage 42nd Street

The author asks questions that veer into philosophical reflection, but which are utterly relevant to the assessment of any urban development plan ever undertaken in any other parts of the world. The claims of the volume are, thus, universal to a great extent.

“How can the unique history of a place be capitalized upon to make distinct places? What are the associations that give identity to a place and bind people to its legacy, its memories, even in the midst of decay? To phrase it another way, to what extent can city planning rewrite a place’s legacy? The answer is firmly embedded in the Times Square saga – not a lot and only at great political cost.”

The book follows the rise and fall of Times Square, from the turn of the 20^th century, when the New Amsterdam was constructed along with an impressive number of 85 other theatres, which made the Square the centre of the Theatre District. This is the time (1927) when the dazzling display of extravagant lights advertising for Time Square’s explosive entertainment industry made Will Irvin, quoted in the book, to say:

“Mildly insane by day, the square goes divinely mad by night.”

All this changed in the 1930s, when tastes for public entertainment shifted from theatre to motion pictures.

“Movies merged extraordinarily well with the nation’s demographics because they occupied an economic niche between audiences for whom theatre was too expensive, vaudeville too crude, and nickelodeons too dark, dirty, and cheap.”

What had brought the glory of the Square in the first decades of the 20^th century ended up turning it into a garish, sordid, indecent, and unsafe location, where cheapness of entertainment converted into trademark, and where, as it quickly became apparent, old entertainment could not keep up with the pace of progress.

The book often turns to very plastic, rhetorically rich, stylistically abundant treatments of the places that it sets out to describe. When the decline of the 42^nd Street comes up, for instance, one can almost feel Sagalyn’s aesthetic pleasure in the admiration of the sordid:

“The slide downhill  from grinders to burlesque to grit to commercialism to honky-tonk debauchery to sex on the hoof to a marketplace for pornography is a story in itself, a moving montage of cultural images, societal mores, and sexual boundaries.”

It’s fragments like the one just quoted that make the reader commit to this monumental book, whose snippets of eloquence run along with sustained close readings of straightforward historical documents and unappealing development plans and blueprints meant solely for the eye of the professional architect.

The time frame comprised between the 1930s and the 1980s is described, with quick flair, as a period of continuous regress:

“By 1980, when the city and state started to formulate plans for West 42^nd Street, the tally of years added up to more spent down-at-the-heels than in commercial glory.”

That should be enough to describe Times Square’s pre-planning period. But the author doesn’t leave it at that. The book allows her long digressions into the economic and political aspects that moved the former Theatre District back to its glory and beyond. And most importantly, it allows her to highlight the contradictions that characterize not just the reconfiguration of Times Square, but that of any place, anywhere in the world.

Sex and the City

The book, indeed, asks general questions, based on philosophies of space and place, but does so by constantly referencing back to its prime target: the history of New York as seen from Times Square and its iconic 42^nd Street.

(c) mardecortesbaja.com

It’s interesting, for instance, to follow the fate of the sex industry at its peak, in a passage that preserves the concreteness of historical accounts, but without divorcing the taste for the out-of-ordinary:

“In 1970 the pornography business in midtown Manhattan had just begun to locate its best customers – the vast population of office workers proximate to West 42^nd Street, who on either side of the journey home were within striking distance of Times Square. The people count was higher than that of Rockefeller Center, by a great deal: 49,000 persons entered 42^nd Street between Sixth Avenue and Eighth Avenue during the morning rush hours, compared with about 12,000 at Rockefeller Center.”

And a few lines farther down, another count takes front stage, the count of financial returns:

“Well positioned, erotica could afford to pay high rents, rents sometimes as much as twice the front-foot rate prevailing for an ordinary store on West 42^nd Street. Operating on a 24-hour basis, the theatres and especially the peep shows generated heavy gross revenues; for instance, in 1978, when they studies the scene, CUNY researchers estimated that the weekly gross of peep shows ranged from $74,000 and $106,000 or roughly $5 million a year.”

Statistics and financial details of this kind help the book breathe in the air of academic examination. Consider only the 70 pages of endnotes and 26 pages of bibliography, and you get my point. Thorough investigation of primary sources and detailed analysis of relevant literature (whether journalistic, architectural, sociological etc.) makes this, I believe, a source worth taking into account by readers interested in the history of New York, and of the United States at large. One would be quick to single out, for instance, the treatment of the so-called LUTS (Light Unit Times Square), the system of measurement of light brightness invented specifically for Times Square; or the fascinating journey from architectural modelling to physical construction. These topics, as well as others, like the politics of zoning, with its “premium on pragmatism,” the tribulations of urban planning, as illustrated by the rebirth of the New Amsterdam, or the constant fight for preservation, create an atmosphere of intense scrutiny.

The New Amsterdam (c) Inpark Magazine - News

Add to this the fact that the book was published in the same year as the other crucial moment in the history of Manhattan: the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. A reminder, perhaps, of the glory that preceded the fall of the Twin Towers, but also of the troublesome past which makes New York one of the most interesting places on Earth.

Post Scriptum

Times Square Roulette reminded me of the video I watched earlier this year: a recorded visual history of the metamorphoses of the streets of New York:

NYC Streets Metamorphosis from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

And to show that New York is far from complete, it may be worth thinking of the multitudes of representations it has been made the subject of. Here's an example of a dystopian New York, constructed on the basis of fictional accounts, taken primarily from literature and film. A fiction of a fiction, as I like to think:

A map of a dystopian Manhattan (c) The Grid

News or theories? Books or parties?

So (to start with a conclusion), news have been circling the world that Alain de Botton and his equally famous peers have generated what they seem to have thought to be a wonderful idea: not a book, but an online newspaper. Kind of. An online news agency run by philosophers! They call it, significantly, The Philosophers' Mail. And it looks like this:

I don't want to be wrong on this one. The idea is not bad at all. Quite original, in fact (if we pretend eighteenth-century newspapers never existed). What is bad, though, at least at this point in time, is the approach. Some of the pieces I've gone through (say, about an hour ago) are a very scary hybrid of news and silly commentary. To be more precise, I don't quite see the philosophical turn.
There's good intention, though. Capitalizing on the general taste for celebrity gossip, sex stories, tragedies under magnifying glasses and so on, the mailmen who promise to steer the wheel of this new and hopeful venue write with the intention to sound different. Well, they do.
Let's pretend we don't mind that one of the longest articles so far, dedicated to Harry Styles, who (see blow) poses as one of the settlers of this journalist-philosophical colony, turns away from gossip columns and veers into the lane of opinion. A tricky lane, we might add.Where, as expected, things get "philosophical":

We shouldn't be so hard on ourselves. Day-dreaming is a remarkable achievement. The inventor of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, made an instructive observation about babies and daydreams. Imagine a baby who wakes in the middle of the night. The mother isn't there and it starts crying. It's going to take a few minutes before the mother can come along and see what's the matter. In those few minutes, the baby is alone with its distress. To an adult, it wouldn't seem a long time, but to an infant it could be devastating. In a healthy scenario, the baby is able to imagine the mother being there even when she isn't; the baby fantasises that it's not alone, that things are better than they are. And that can be enough to hold things together for a while. Fantasy comes to the rescue when there aren't better options..

What do we have here? On the one hand, we seem to have de Botton's popular philosophy, which needs to be explained to all those who have never considered philosophy for fun (see the 'How To' series of books on his School of Life). On the other hand, we have Style's celebrity, whose boastfulness doesn't need to be explained at all.
Given the conditions, I propose to brainstorm on the following dilemma: Who's written the piece? Who done it?
One clue: Alain de Botton has just published a new book, called (surprised?) The News. A book properly marketed, like all the books bearing his name.

It all makes sense together, doesn't it?

"Philosophical" invisibilities

If we're ill at ease in finding an answer to these questions, there's an explanation for it. A lot of hiding is happening on this site. To start with, articles published in the Philosophers' Mail have no authors. They float about un-fathered, like the impudent musings of a collective noun that bites (or so it thinks) and then runs away when consequences threaten to steal the show. Readers are left to guess and possibly day-dream, as in the article cited above.
Most importantly, though, they don't like comments at the PM. Many will think this is to do with the terrible tendency of philosophers to ruminate on the essence of life while not exactly allowing life to be part of their gossip. The explanatory note (they knew it was going to be necessary!) makes an attempt at elucidating what many may have guessed from the beginning:

Which is correct, the picture we have of other people from our own experience or the far darker picture given to us by the Comments sections?

The conclusion displayed by the editorial board (or whoever has put this testimonial piece on the site) is unequivocal: they like the former option best.
Are they trying to give the site an empiricist spin (believe none but your "real world"!) or do they simply find feedback insulting? If the former: they might still gain some followers; if the latter: the venture is as good as dead while in the cradle.
But then there's another clue somewhere else on the site. It reads:

For too long, philosophers have been happy merely to be wise and right. This has offered them huge professional satisfaction but it has not influenced the course of society. The average work of philosophy currently reaches 300 people.

So that's the gist! Popularity. The Goddess of Mass Media. Even philosophers can be bent to its will, as successfully exemplified by de Botton himself, who has already reached fame and is comfortably bathing in its plenitude.

It's all there, in their eyes. The Almost-serious, the Cheeky, the Satisfied.

The site also hides its lack of originality behind a tongue-in-cheek imitation of the Daily Mail. I don't know how successful this will be, but at this stage one would easily mistake the one for the other. I know. I know they wanted it to look so. Alain de Botton said it to Huffington Post Lifestyle UK, just to make sure we all got it:

The challenge was rather than reinvent The Guardian, to try and reinvent The Daily Mail.

I know. I can see it. But still...
And speaking of the Daily Mail, there's probably good reason to reflect, under the auspices of one article published there, whether it isn't better to bathe in the sun of life rather than read Karl Marx at nauseam in the shadows of anonymity. Unrelated, but relevant.

Speaking of animals

The cover of the book I read
(US edition 2011)

A story about animals, about their flight away from human oppression – could only be allegorical, I think. Amos Oz did what he is best at: write an allegory, and write it as if the whole of his audience would become vegetarians afterwards. The likelihood of that is pretty high, considering the scope of the tale and the purpose of its telling.

Really, the feeling at the end of the book is that this is a text that fits perfectly this age – the age of militant activism, where we seem to speak more and more in words that persuade rather than in words that please. Not that this tiny book is not pleasing. Far from it. But the point is this: it reads like an attempt at indoctrination. The boy (Matti) and girl (Maya) who leave their village hoping to find the animals that had disappeared long time ago, meet Nehi the Mountain Demon – a former villager who had been bullied into leaving the village. In revenge, he took all the animals with him. The village became empty. Oz is great at evoking this: the idea of a village utterly silent in the absence of animals.

“No cow mooed, no donkey brayed, no bird chirped, no flock of wild geese crossed the empty sky, and the villagers barely spoke to each other beyond the essential things."

What seems to be the most painful aspect of this absence is the companionship of animals. What the humans in the village seem to crave the most is not the taste of animal meat, but their faithful, cheerful, friendly presence. One character builds a scarecrow he spends his day talking to. The scarecrow is a surrogate for the lost dog in whose company he used to live. Another character craves for the sound made by the woodworms which used to lull him into sleep every night. When the worms disappear, along with the other animals, he is struck by insomnia. Yet another character scatters around breadcrumbs, in the hope that, one day, some birds will come and enjoy the feast.

That’s Amos Oz – his storytelling talent. The idea he’s proposing for reflection is an old one: you only start appreciating something when it is no longer within your grasp. And he couriers this idea towards the readers in a pretty persuasive way.

But at the end of the novella we get to the point where the text reads like a handbook of proselytism. It’s really only two pages before the end of the book. Nehi, who has accommodated the two children in his utopian garden of paradise, tells them they should go back. They should return to their village, but do it as converts.

“Talk to them. And talk to the insulters and even the abusers and all the ones who take pleasure in other people’s misfortunes. Please, both of you, talk to anyone who will listen. Try to talk even to the ones who make fun of you and condemn you and mock you. Don’t let them get to you – just try to tell them over and over again.”

I’m not going into a close analysis here, but there are aspects that resemble the proselytizing discourse of a lot of texts written nowadays. From weight-loss to vegetarianism, from environmentalism to organic living. In all of these, and in many other instances, there’s this constant urge to “tell them over and over again.” Because this age of ours is an age where we need to persuade others that our way is the best one; and we need to persuade them not in a rhetorical sense, but in a political one.

What makes me think that this is political persuasion? The presence of a threat; not just a fear, a phobia, a sickness of the mind, but a threat that presents itself through its consequences. If the villagers don’t listen to the words of the two children – i.e. if they don’t agree to become animal-loving creatures – they will never see their animals again. If you don’t follow the path, you suffer – that’s the message of all forms of indoctrination. The promise is always hidden behind a threat, and you only rid yourself of a threat if you accept the conditions.

I’m not saying that Suddenlyin the Depths of the Forest is a bad book. I’m not saying it is an evil book. It is none of the above. But it is very much a book of this age. And books – we know – are very rarely timeless (as in not being anchored in the time and place in which they are created). It’s the virtue of Amos Oz’s, then, to have written a book that sounds so familiar – a book that makes an attempt at promoting values of love and friendship. That’s also one thing books do: they promote love and friendship; we are better after having read a book, aren't we?

So yes, love and friendship. Two values that we promote as fundamentally human. So human, they would match the discourse of SPCA, of any Green Party, of any Al Gore ecologism. Or maybe some other, longer-lasting discourses we are so familiar with that it only takes the flicker of a candle to recognize.

Here’s this, on the very last page:

“As Maya and Matti came out of the dark forest, hand in hand, and walked toward the lights of the village, Matti said to Maya, We have to tell Almon. We have to tell Emanuella. We have to tell Danir.
Maya said, Not just them, Matti. We’ll have to tell everyone. My mother. The old people. Your parents. And it won’t be easy for us.”

I read this and I’m thinking of the New Testament (Oz is a Jew, but discourses migrate with extravagant ease, don’t they?). The Bible says:

“If you come to me but will not leave your family, you cannot be my follower” (Luke: 14:26).

Interestingly enough, Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest is also a book about standing out (like the passage in Luke, which requires the followers to abandon their families, their communities) – a book about not following into the footprints of one’s parents, and about the pain one experiences when the crowd notices the drift. The villagers are mostly afraid of an imagined disease which they call ‘whoopitis.’ It is something that makes them whoop – i.e. turns them into something non-human, into animals of sorts.

Nehi sees this fear of isolation, of singularity, not only in humans, but in animals too:

“You edge a little bit away from the swarm just once or twice, and they won’t let you back in. Because you already have whoopitis.”

Whoopitis is the sign of one’s standing on the other side of the community – the sign of the revolutionary.

It’s exactly the revolutionary that needs proselytes, in order to acquire certitude that his/her path is not as crooked as it had been considered by the others. The proselyte is the revolutionary’s confirmation, the warrant of their argument. The number of followers makes one’s YouTube video acceptable. The number of ‘likes’ makes one a public voice. Without them, there would be only an ugly video, a repulsive blog post etc. And so, it makes sense to populate a little book about standing out with characters that strive to acquire followers – characters who, ultimately, strive to create ideologies of their own.

A tiny book of our big times, then. Worth reading, no doubt. Worth, also, thinking about – with the distance that it requires, with the distance that it creates. Because Oz too is a writer of his time, who militates for good causes – causes so good that they are almost impossible to be read critically.

N.B.: By ‘critical’ reading I don’t mean ‘counter’ reading, but the kind of reading that asks questions about the foundations of a text. And when it comes to foundations, no text is safe – no text should be safe.