Austen, Hating the Odyssey, Rooney and politics, Explaining Howl, Becoming Christian, Gilgamesh, Naipaul, Bradstreet, Shakespeare and maths, Panpyschism

The Irregular Review of Reviews, vol. XVIII

As well as the usual links and brief commentary, there’s a personal essay about my time in politics in this edition of The Irregular Review of Reviews, in the section about Sally Rooney. That’s not the usual format for this digest, but this is an irregular feature and I promise not to do it again…

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A whole new way to read Austen?

If you are interested in narrative and Austen’s development of Free Indirect Style, you simple have to read this PhD thesis by Hatsuyo Shimazaki. I will be writing about it at length soon. I am astonished it hasn’t been more revolutionary to Austen studies and narrative studies.

My daughter hates the Odyssey

I was noodling around, trying to find out about Adam Smith’s reading habits (there’s a passage in The Theory of Moral Sentiments which reads like something out of a novel, so now I am on the hunt; yes, his favourite novel was Gulliver’s Travels (excellent taste), but he is channeling something else here, it’s quite striking), and I pulled up Shannon Chamberlain’s thesis about literary influence upon Smith’s philosophy. This is, to me, and I’m sure to plenty of you, exciting stuff. So I went searching to find out more about Chamberlain. And guess what. She’s right here on Substack!

The Professor Is Out is where Shannon Chamberlain writes. I especially enjoyed this essay about her daughter reading (and hating) the Odyssey very much.

Being a mother, maybe just being a parent, is a constant state of suspension, and your own wonder at your tortured ambiguity. You try to stand in a solid place while being tugged between wanting your baby to stay a baby and wanting her to grow up and gain the independence that Telemachus craves. You want to be the teenage hero who is slaying the giant or the invaders in your home. In your mind, you’re still that guy. (And it’s always a guy.) But you’re also a woman, and a mother, and you realize that this rebellion is part of the natural order of things. From the moment your child is born, you’re figuring out how to let go of her. The nurses take her away for her first bath. You hand her over to her grandparents for an evening, for this is their right. One day she comes home from preschool and says, “I don’t like the clothes you pick out for me. I want to choose my own from now on.” Then, in a cruel twist, you despair of her independence when she insists that you sit with her as she dons the new ones. You feel personally insulted when this little copy of you doesn’t like the same books you liked. Wonder. Miracle. Despair. Hope.

My daughter doesn’t like The Odyssey. Okay. What she does like, though, is the Demeter and Persephone story.

I am, to put it mildly, obsessed by the idea that literature is all about quests and enjoyed her reading of the Demeter myth as a quest. I loved this myth when I was about eight. We acted it out and the whole thing is perhaps more clear in my mind than anything else from that time. I am pleased to report that my own children do indeed love The Odyssey, helped by an audiobook called Odysseus. The Greatest Hero of Them All. When I tentatively suggested that Odysseus might be a complicated man, maybe something of a liar, they rounded on me. HE’S THE GREATEST HERO OF THEM ALL. Good for them. He is.

This line was the most heartbreaking from Shannon’s essay, but maybe the most important thing a parent can know?

To get Persephone back, she has to give her up, at least a little.

Let’s hope she starts blogging about Adam Smith also…

Rooney and politics

For nearly two years, around 2012, the time of Osborne’s “pasty tax”, I worked for an MP. Liz Truss was a backbencher when I went to work for her and a junior education minister when I left. I fulfilled a mixed role: researcher, administrator, manager. I wrote briefings, replied to letters, tried to get Liz to do her paperwork. Once I carried her shoes to a train station. Another time I went looking for white spirit when she was travelling to work with paint all over her arms.

I spent a few months trying to get a parliamentary job. Law school had been a bad fit, and legal blogging was interesting but limited. Parliament fascinated me. It was, in many ways, a rich and interesting two years. In the mornings, I read Mises and histories of the House of Lords. I read a biography of Salisbury and books of Austrian economics. Weekends I watched economics lectures.

I went to events and talks. I read the pamphlets. I lived in a haze of news and blogs. I was finally around people for whom my Margaret Thatcher obsession was, almost, normal. It was no longer so unusual to discuss political diaries.

Parliament was something romantic in my imagination. I loved being there. I loved giving tours to notable constituents (all too small a part of the job, alas) and talking to them about the history of Westminster Hall, the old House of Commons before the fire, Charles the Martyr.

But I was also around a lot of ideologues. I was learning a lot and changing my mind a lot (and believed plenty of contradictory half-thought-out things) and I was an ideologue too. Before I got the job with Liz, I nearly, oh so nearly, became a party speechwriter, which I thought was my dream role. As I was leaving Westminster, I made a half-hearted effort to get a job in HQ.

But love had died between me and politics. I didn’t get the job and had hardly tried. I went off to do other things.

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These days, I almost never read the news. My wife could hardly believe it when I hadn’t heard of Sara Sharif recently. The day I woke up to the radio alarm and heard Liz’s voice was the last day I ever tuned into the Today programme. A decade of reading newspapers and periodicals left me feeling like I’d read it all before. On and on the cycle goes.

And far from being an ideologue, I am a pragmatist. If I still have politics, they are “progress studies”, “get stuff done” politics. Britain has a shortage of energy infrastructure. It takes years just to do the paperwork to build a small road. No new reservoirs have been built in my lifetime. A significant proportion of school children do not meet the government’s basic standards for numeracy and literacy.

The answers to these problems (and there are many more: we are the only major European country where cities the size of Leeds have no tram; Birmingham is meant to be our second city, but post-war socialists intentionally restricted its growth and it never recovered and now parts of it are poorer than countries in Eastern Europe) are not ideological. There is a road the Tories promised to make into a dual carriageway when they were first elected in 2010. Fifteen years later nothing has happened.

Ideology cannot fix these problems. What I now find so baffling and pointless about politics is that the people whose opinion matters not at all are the most inflamed. Political culture is dominated by strong feelings and meanwhile we are producing more pages of documentation than the combined works of Proust and Tolstoy to build a small tunnel across the Thames.

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In Parliament, most of what I did was drudgery. Letters to ministers about the road that needs expanding. Letters to constituents about the latest policy proposal. Referrals to government departments. Booking meetings to discuss progress on upgrading the train line.

Most people don’t care about this. People care very much about having political opinions, gathering up facts to support their opinions, sharing and debating their opinions. There is a great satisfaction in naming a hypocrite and no-one cares if the hypocrite is right or wrong, so long as they are named.

But it is the drudgery that matters. What very, very little difference I made to anything was far greater than all the protests and slogans and Twitter fights. The real work of getting things done is boring, slow, dispassionate, and often irritating. It involves taking the train to Norfolk, coordinating stakeholders, making careful notes that you circulate promptly, and so on.

Meanwhile, outside, it is a new day and there is a new protest.

What reading the news ought to teach us is that our own opinions matter much, much less than we think. It seems to teach us the opposite.

All of this is why I came to care about pragmatism (an ideology in itself) far more than my other beliefs. I still have many beliefs, I just don’t get excited about them. We know, like actually know, that raising corporation tax and employers National Insurance results in fewer jobs being created. But ideology can find many routes around the truth. So we raise those taxes. And then we swap opinions about the resulting slowdown in wage growth and job creation. We know that stamp duty is a hugely distorting tax, making the housing market work much less efficiently. But ideology requires that we keep it.

To solve these problems—that is, to find ways of keeping the revenue and not destroying the jobs or distorting the housing market—requires pragmatism. Solutions are hard to find, and harder to pass into law. It takes years of policy work, article writing, meetings, speeches—hours and hours across networks of people. Ideology dissipates into work.

At the time I worked in Parliament, I saw this horribly demonstrated every time there was a mass shooting in the US. Every time, Obama gave a speech about gun control. And every time that resulted in more guns sold. This is an uncomfortable fact for both sides, but ideology finds many routes around the truth. So we can blame the NRA, the Second Amendment, gun culture in certain states, and so on. Probably all of these things deserve all the blame they are given.

Still, the man who wanted fewer guns kept giving speeches which he knew would increase gun sales. Everyone would then argue about their opinions. That came to represent politics to me.

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I thought of all of this when I read a recent piece about Sally Rooney and sex.

A similar idea is given voice in Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) when Simon tells Eileen what he experiences when they have sex: “It’s something that I’m doing to you, for my own reasons. And maybe you get some kind of innocent physical pleasure out of it, I hope you do, but for me it’s different.” Eileen agrees with him and draws out his thinking: “You have this primal desire to subjugate and possess me,” she says. “It’s very masculine, I think it’s sexy.” Additionally, she finds “his paternalistic beliefs about women charming.” By the end of the novel, Eileen (an editor at a literary magazine) has abandoned her progressive politics, having concluded that what really counts in life is loving Simon and bearing him a child. The professional life she imagined for herself melts into air. She has become the perfect tradwife she described to Simon during their phone sex early in the novel.

This is wrong. It’s not wrong as a matter of interpretation (though it is that). The facts are wrong. This is not what is written in the novel. This is what the reviewer has found in the novel. Politics has interceded. Ideology has found a route around the facts. As BDM said to me, Eileen does not abandon her progressive politics by getting married, she has no professional life she imagines for herself, she’s at a dead end job.

Rooney’s novels are especially prone to this sort of political capture. Ideology gets in everywhere. So many people talk about her as the voice of their generation, and then they feel upset, betrayed, or let down when one of her novels doesn’t fit their politics. So many people write about her in these blunt terms. She never said she was the voice of a generation. We did. She never said she was politically ideological. We did.

Instead, she’s pragmatic. She sees the ways people are living (lonely, violent sex, difficulties of defining romantic relationships, over political, ambivalent about screen) and she writes novels that look up-close about how those lives might change. In my essay about discourse fiction, I wrote,

The plot of Beautiful World involves the characters becoming less obsessed with email opinion swapping and slowly realising that the “beautiful world” they constantly lament in their American-obsessed progressive political discussions is right in front of them. They stop sending each other opinions about the culture wars and instead they get married, have children: they find love and religion. Their emails begin as discourse rants and end as serious discussions of what makes a good life, more like an Iris Murdoch novel than something Lauren Oyler would write.

Rooney is not moving her characters away from one politics to another. Instead, they get less political and live their lives a bit more. The irony of people not being able to see this!

Explaining Howl

Have you ever wondered why there is no mention of the Prince before the end of the movie of Howl’s Moving Castle? Translation problems are the answer! There are some other inadequacies too. I have been wanting to see this on the big screen for a while and now I really want to see a subtitled version.

I have not, for example, forgiven the scene in the dub in which Sophie is walking out of the valley her home is in, after having hitched a ride on a hay cart. In the dub, the farmer tells her that there's nothing but witches and wizards out there, and then says to someone else on the farm 'She said she was going to see her sister'. Given that Sophie's actively running away from home, this doesn't make much sense. In the Japanese, the line is something to the effect of 'She says her younger sister's a witch in the next valley over'. In one stroke, this explains why Sophie is going to see her, why she isn't afraid of the witches and wizards out there, and that Sophie is actually trying to do something about her situation; it also tells you, if you've read the book, that Martha still does exist, even if she doesn't turn up. This is the sort of thing that makes me want to hit dub translators over the head with a mallet.

In addition, at the end of the movie there is a Missing Prince who appears, confusing many people in the audience who had not expected it due to his existence not previously having been mentioned. In the dub, his existence has indeed not previously been mentioned. In the subtitled translation, it is mentioned once, as is the fact that he has gone missing. In the actual Japanese, I counted discussion of it six times, including a mention that his vanishing had caused the war.

Could I become a Christian in a year?

I am a great admirer of Lamorna Ash’s writing, and I am looking forward to her new book.

For my perpetual Christian road-trip – beginning in the last months of 2022 and ending in early 2024 – I purchased a 21 year-old Toyota Corollaand stocked the glove box with second-hand CDs. I filled up my calendar with Christian retreats, church visits and stays in the houses of Christian strangers all across the highways and byways of the UK – Cornwall, Sussex, Kent, Hertfordshire, Birmingham, north Wales, Norfolk, Sheffield, Halifax, Durham, the Inner Hebrides – seeking out every kind of Christian, from Catholics to Orthodox Christians: Quakers, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, high to low Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, self-professed mystics, focusing on my generation specifically, those in their 20s and 30s, the youngest set of adults in Britain.

Very quickly, I discovered the two young comedians were not outliers when it comes to my generation’s relationship to faith in Britain. Not only did I meet a host of people in their 20s and 30s who have converted to some form of Christianity, but I also detected a marked attitudinal shift in how my peers talk about religion compared with the generations that came before us.

And here is an interview with Diarmaid MacCulloch in the Guardian.

It is interesting to discover that despite all this history, he still maintains a close involvement with his local parish church in Jericho, where he plays the organ most Sundays and takes morning prayer one day each week.

He explains that fact in a few ways. “I like to do things that have been done over centuries by other people – and the practice of the liturgy is a very good example of that,” he says. “Because at morning and evening prayer, you have chunks of the Bible – some of which of course are utterly mad and disgraceful.”

And in the spirit of Philip Larkin, he has an abiding love of visiting ancient churches: “Once I am sure there’s nothing going on / I step inside, letting the door thud shut. / Another church: matting, seats, and stone, / And little books…”

Does he see the church as being in terminal decline? “Not terminal,” he says, “but I think we are seeing the end of the great phase of Christendom, starting with Constantine – and the Church of England’s problem is that it’s sort of a carapace of that.”

He sees his book as part of an effort to better understand that history in order to spark the conversations that make the institution more relevant to the present. In this sense, it feels like a kindred act to the movement to “decolonise” our stately home and museums.

Gilgamesh and death

Recently I recommended @Rachel to you. Her husband Boze is also writing at Biblioll College (you may know him from Twitter). This piece about reading the Epic of Gilgamesh is also a personal essay about death.

And yet, having said all that, I don’t think it’s the act of dying that truly scares us. I think it’s the fear of a wasted life.

Naipaul

This whole piece about knowing V.S. Naipaul is just excellent,

He wanted to be judged solely by ‘the work’, and in a sense he was. ‘Nasty man, great writer,’ they said at his funeral. Even when I fell out with Naipaul, I never fell out with the work. And even when he was monstrous, he was far more interesting than most. He taught me about Japanese painting and Chola bronzes, about the plants and trees in the garden in Wiltshire, which he had planted himself, and how to read history laterally, always making sure to judge a period or event in one part of the world against what was happening elsewhere. From reading the annotations in his books – the single note in blue ink at the back of Troyat’s biography of Pushkin: ‘Pushkin had read so much that he couldn’t see with his own eyes’ – I learnt to read with a pen in hand. Following his example, I began to use Garamond size sixteen when I worked, which only the house style of this magazine prevents you from seeing.

Anne Bradstreet

A lovely overview of the poet Anne Bradstreet from Brad Skow.

Anne Bradstreet was born in England, and raised near Old England’s Boston. In 1630, when she was eighteen, her family crossed the Atlantic on the Arbella, and helped John Winthrop found Puritan New England. There she would become America’s first great poet. Bear in mind the harsh conditions under which she worked. Only ten years had passed since the first Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth; this was frontier living. Bradstreet bore eight children, and wrote her poems in “a few hours snatched from sleep and other refreshment.” I cannot imagine.

Shakespeare and maths

When I’m visiting schools, I reveal how Shakespeare not only loved playing with numbers, but was also aware of some of the rapid advances in mathematics that were happening in his world. During Shakespeare’s lifetime, Galileo confirmed that the sun and not the earth was the centre of our universe, Mercator revolutionised the reliability of maps, music began to shift from modal to the modern major-minor form, length and weight measurements were standardised, clocks acquired an additional (minute) hand, and the English mathematician Thomas Harriot figured out how rainbows work. It was an astonishing period, when arts and sciences merged together, and it was not unusual for a leading figure such as Walter Raleigh to be an applied mathematician and a poet.

Everything is conscious?

I love Galen Strawson (he has a Substack Galen Strawson, writing at some possibly useful bits & pieces ) and I love interviews with Galen Strawson.

Now you've just triggered me, and I'm going to give you some quotations from some Nobel Prize winners for physics.

Okay, so first of all, Ernest Lawrence — you know, a famous guy — he says, I quote, “The mental and the material are two sides of the same thing.”

Louis de Broglie, you know, another Nobel Prize winner, says, “I regard consciousness and matter as different aspects of one thing.”

Max Planck: “Consciousness is fundamental in the matter derivative from consciousness.”

Okay. So, weirdly, it's the philosophers who've gone truly crazy, in my view, but physicists are not with them on that. I mean, some of them probably are, but they’re much more sensible.

Also this:

Russell is on the verge of it, though he's never going to say it outright…From his famous 1912 book, The Problems of Philosophy: “Commonsense leaves us completely in the dark as to the true intrinsic nature of physical objects, and if there were good reason to regard them as mental, we could not legitimately reject this opinion merely because it strikes as a strange the truth about physical objects must be strange.”

If you haven’t read The Problems of Philosophy it is a very good “common reader” book.