The ghosts of American soldiers

I am a firm believer in the capacity of literature to enable and ennoble human being, and also to accommodate complexities that other kinds of discourse don’t or won’t make room for. So, alarmed by the spectre of soldiers counselled into resilient optimism, I am reassured by the spate of poetry produced by US soldiers active in the middle east across the last decade. The AFR today has a review by New Yorker Courtney Cook of Brian Turner’s collections Here, Bullet (2005) and Phantom Noise (2010) that concludes thus: “Turner shows us soldiers who are invincible and wounded, a nation noble and culpable, and a war by turns necessary and abominable. He brings us closer to our own phantom guilt and speaks the words that we both do and do not want to hear.” Far more than fixed smiles and trauma resistance, such ambivalent writings are to me indicative of humanity flourishing in the most inhospitable of soils. Here is Turner’s poem “Ashbah”:

The ghosts of American soldiers
wander the streets of Balad by night,

unsure of their way home, exhausted,
the desert wind blowing trash
down the narrow alleys as a voice

sounds from the minaret, a soulful call
reminding them how alone they are,

how lost. And the Iraqi dead,
they watch in silence from rooftops
as date palms line the shore in silhouette,

leaning toward Mecca when the dawn wind blows.

Mor(e)on happiness

The latest Harper's has an interesting article about psychology and the happiness industry.  When Freud visited the US in 1909, he came “to the land of unbridled optimism to inform its inhabitants that a fragile equipoise between repression and abandon was the best they could hope for,” writes psychologist Gary Greenburg in ‘The War on Unhappiness.’ A century after Freud's visit, Greenburg attends a psych conference at which Freud's pessimism is laughed out the door by a new breed of evidence-based happiness gurus who are contributing to a state-endorsed project of human flourishing, starting with trauma-resistant soldiers. Maybe it’s not as alarming as Greenburg makes it sound, but there is much to be wary of in the notion of happiness as a means, rather than an indicator, of flourishing. Not unlike the craze for laughter yoga, which attempts to harness the medicinal effects of laughter without recourse to jokes. 

What's more encouraging is this article from the NY Times suggesting that happiness in African Americans has measurably improved with the gradual (if stunted) improvement in social equality and civil rights over the past five decades.  Happiness flowing in this direction seems more plausible than the tautological ‘winners are winners’ philosophy of the state-supported gurus.

Are you from the past?

I am always uncomfortable with historical fiction, only slightly less so with historical film, but I've never really put my finger on why. Jonathan Dee, reviewing Tom McCarthy's Man Booker short-listed C, has done it for me:

"A novel is a document of consciousness, and since consciousness today is not precisely what is was when Woolf wrote, or Flaubert or Cervantes, the search for a form that reflects faithfully what it means to be alive in one's own time - for 'realism,' if you're willing to define it as broadly as that - must constantly refresh its own terms. In this light, the historical novel would seem to offer if not a false testimony exactly, then at best a kind of gloss on existing testimony. The effort to credibly reanimate a time, a way of being, that one never knew: even at its most technically successful, what is that effort drawing upon other than research - in other words, the historical novelist's experience of reading other people's writing?"

I concur.

Happiness is...

... reading Pride and Prejudice, which I've just done for the squillionth time. What sprang out at me this time was how much of the book is about happiness. The word ‘happiness’ appears 74 times and the word 'happy’ 84 times in the book. We tend to think that Jane Austen's all about social mores or moralities, and the correction of behaviour through painful experience, but I wonder if she sees these simply as structures put in place to secure or guarantee individual happiness. Charlotte Lucas sacrifices happiness in order to obtain the socially valuable goods of household and status. Elizabeth on the other hand rejects the same offer of social stability in favor of personal happiness and is ultimately rewarded. Her resolve to act in a manner that will constitute her own happiness without reference to Lady Catherine's strict preservation of the distinctions of rank makes her an appealing heroine and ultimately delivers Mr Darcy into her hands.  In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor's constant caution is a means of guarding her personal happiness, rather than simply of obeying social codes, and Marianne provides an example of the pain that ensues when codes are flouted and happiness is squandered on undeserving objects. 

Vale Frank Kermode

This is a belated note on the death of influential English critic Frank Kermode.  I've always enjoyed his writing. He was one of those old school critics who really loved literature and though at times he was at odds with the broad trends of post-modern criticism, by saying what he really thought, he reached a stature where he could say what he really thought and people listened.  He was also one of the founders of the London Review of Books, which has been printing not a few obituaries since his death some weeks ago. Here's a nice one.