Pages

Thursday 27 January 2022

Some Books About… WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE


WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 
? 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616




To read every book written about William Shakespeare would require several lifetimes.  No writer, and certainly no British writer, has generated more supplementary literature than Shakespeare and his work have generated in the four centuries since his death.  And nor does the flood of BardLit –– or, if you prefer, WillWrite –– appear to be in danger of slowing to a trickle any time soon.  Many new books are published about Shakespeare every year, written in English and a variety of other languages, as scholars, cultural critics and even novelists discover new parallels between his plays (particularly the tragedies and histories) and what occurs on a daily basis in our increasingly mad (and maddening) post-9/11 world.  

I would not presume to suggest that the books discussed below are the 'best' books ever published about Shakespeare and his work.  They are merely a sampling of those which have proven useful to me in my ongoing quest to come to terms with this most challenging and elusive of literary geniuses.  

 


Riverside Books USA, 1999

 

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) by HAROLD BLOOM

'The plays,' states Harold Bloom in his introduction to this hefty and consistently thought-provoking study of them, 'remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually.  They abide beyond the end of the mind's reach; we cannot catch up to them.  Shakespeare will go on explaining us because, in part, he invented us, which is the central argument of this book.'  

It's a fascinating argument and a convincing one, presented by a prominent North American academic who was at the forefront of the study of literature in his native land from 1959 until his death half a century later.  But Bloom's fellow scholars are not his target audience.  Rather, his book is aimed at what he calls 'common readers and theatergoers' who, he hopes, will come to share his belief that is in the works of Shakespeare that we as a species first discovered what it really means to describe ourselves as 'human.'  He seeks to rescue 'Sweet Master Will' from the post-modern deconstructionists and give him back to the people –– or the groundlings to borrow a theatrical term –– for whom his works were, of course, originally written not for the sake of 'Art' or 'cultural significance' but for the more pressing reasons of earning a living and making the theatre company he co-owned a financially viable enterprise.  Shakespeare's purpose, Bloom seeks to remind us, was not to educate and elucidate but, first and foremost, to entertain and, by entertaining, to prosper in what was arguably the most exciting and competitive theatrical environment the Western world has ever seen. 

He analyses the events and themes of each play in scrupulous detail, expending the most ink on Hamlet (49 pages, as might be expected given its central position in the canon of Western literature) and the least on The Merry Wives of Windsor (4 pages) which he describes, not without justification, as a 'weak play' and a contender, along with The Two Gentleman of Verona, for the dubious honour of being 'Shakespeare's slightest comedy.'  But even here he offers intriguing insights into what may have been Shakespeare's reasons for writing a play that appears to deliberately humiliate one of his most popular characters, the rambunctious n'er-do-well Sir John Falstaff.  (He even refers to the humiliated Falstaff as 'pseudo-Falstaff' to differentiate him from the 'authentic Falstaff' who features in and, for as long as he's onstage, dominates parts one and two of Henry IV.)  He concludes that Shakespeare's decision to present Falstaff flummoxed by love and taken short by scheming women was his way of '…warding off personal horror' by making him the symbol of –– if not the scapegoat for –– his own romantic rejections and subsequent descents into depression.  Discounting the apocryphal tale which suggests the play was allegedly produced at the request of Elizabeth I who requested a work featuring 'Falstaff in love,' it is an interesting theory and one worth bearing in mind while reading what has been a little read work seldom staged since its 1597 (or 1598) premiere.

This is not to suggest that every theory that Bloom offers should be unquestioningly accepted because he taught at Yale, NYU and Harvard.  This a very personal book, possibly the most personal of the many he wrote about Shakespeare (his final book about the Bard, published a few months before his death, was Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind) and, as such, is a subjective expression of his particular likes, dislikes and occasional self-indulgences.  (He freely states as much in his introduction.)  His essay on Timon of Athens (which he places under the heading of 'Tragic Epilogues') –– another knotty and seldom performed work very likely to have been co-written with Thomas Middleton –– contains a few pronouncements I find it difficult to accept, including but not limited to the unverifiable statement that the playwright '…experienced a personal revulsion at what he was finishing, and turned away from it to do some play doctoring upon what became Pericles.'  Bloom seems baffled, even slightly insulted, by Timon's unrelenting misanthropy, describing the play as '…an amazing torso, powerfully expressionistic' that Shakespeare –– '…a great self critic' –– dismissed as being '…largely unworthy of him.'
  
Did he?  That's a lot of information to infer from a five act drama created in either 1604 or 1605 by a writer who sometimes worked with collaborators (as he did here with Middleton and again with George Wilkins on Pericles, for example) and whose motivations and thought processes remain completely mysterious to us, even when the person doing the inferring happens to be one of the world's leading literary scholars.  But this is a minor quibble and in no way indicative of the value of the book as a whole.  It remains a useful and stimulating text even as it challenges your assumptions about your favourite plays and what you think, or like to think, you understand about them.  Bloom is to be applauded for reminding us that these astonishing dramas were the product of Shakespeare's uncanny ability to portray humanity in all its forms, be they high-born, low-born or somewhere in-between.

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer.  Its author HAROLD BLOOM died on 14 October 2019 at the age of eighty-nine.



Vintage/Random House UK, 1996

 

Shakespeare (1970) by ANTHONY BURGESS 

Like Harold Bloom, English novelist and critic Anthony Burgess was an unabashed and self-confessed Bardolator –– a Shakespeare fan (or should that be fanatic?) who recognised in the plays and poems a melding of literature and human consciousness which has yet to be equalled and is unlikely to be surpassed.  This slim volume, originally written to accompany a glossy photographic study of Shakespeare's life, followed the 1964 publication of Nothing Like The Sun –– a brilliantly inventive novel subtitled A Story of Shakespeare's Love-Life as notable for its exuberant wordplay as for the refreshingly honest irreverence it displays toward its subject –– and an unproduced 1968 screenplay that Burgess wrote for a proposed big budget Hollywood musical provisionally titled Will! or The Bawdy Bard.  The film was permanently shelved in 1970 but Burgess, never one to waste an idea when he could recycle it, revisited the experience of writing its script in his 1984 novel Enderby's Dark Lady, final volume of a tetraology concerning his poetic alter-ego Francis Xavier Enderby whose picaresque adventures could be said to have something of a Shakespearean bent to them.

Burgess brings many of the same qualities that make Nothing Like The Sun such a delight to read to this biography, his primary aim being similar to that of Harold Bloom –– to accord this most human of writers his humanity by depicting him as a living imperfect man and not as the literary demi-god or fossilized relic of a bygone age the hagiographers and some of the more extreme cultural theorists seem determined to portray him as.  'What I claim here,' Burgess explains in his introduction, 'is the right of every Shakespeare-lover who has ever lived to paint his own portrait of the man.  One is short of the right paints and brushes and knows one is going to end up with a botched and inadequate picture, but here I have real pictures to help me out.  Or, to put it another way, my task is to help the pictures.'  

Be that as it may, the text is entertainingly readable without the accompanying illustrations, none of which are included in the 1996 Random House paperback edition or subsequent reprints of the book.  And Burgess's elegantly constructed prose doesn't suffer in the slightest from this lack of visual addenda.  He has a novelist's observant eye for the inclusion of character revealing detail (and the artful exclusion of what could easily prove to be distracting irrelevancies) and a rare skill for recreating the atmosphere of sixteenth and seventeeth century England in language that's never anything less than arresting in addition to being ferociously intelligent.  There are, of course, many other short biographies of Shakespeare available –– including a more recent and just as worthy one by Anglo-American travel writer and journalist Bill Bryson published in 2007 as part of the HarperCollins 'Eminent Lives' series –– but Burgess's biography remains one of the cleverest and, to my mind, most sympathetic portraits of Shakespeare ever published.

Shakespeare may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer, as may the 1964 novel Nothing Like The Sun which was last reprinted in 2013.

 

Jonathon Cape UK, 2004

 

Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) by STEPHEN GREENBLATT

As should be evident by now, much of what's written about Shakespeare and his working methods is based upon little more than speculation if not outright guesswork.  This is an understandable necessity when so little is known about his day to day life that scholar and layperson alike have no choice but to turn to the plays themselves to discover who he was and what made him such a unique, time-defying genius.  Why did the possibly Catholic son of a glover and wool merchant turned usurer from provincial Warwickshire, a young husband and father with no more than a grammar school education, set off to London to become an actor and playwright in the toughest, most fiercely competitive theatrical marketplace in what was then the civilized world?  How did he come to take on and so quickly outwrite the 'University Wits' –– a group which included writers as gifted as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Lodge, John Lyly and Thomas Nashe to name just a few –– to become the leading dramatist not only of the Elizabethan age but of every age that succeeded it? 

These are just some of the many intriguing questions that Stephen Greenblatt, a Professor at Harvard University and one of the most renowned Shakespeare scholars of the modern era, asks and tries to answer in Will In The World.  He does this by relating the few verifiable facts about his subject's life to his work and showing how the two mutually interacted with and influenced each other.  His strategy, according to a 2013 interview posted on his website, is to '…combine a responsible research of these documentary traces and weighing what they mean with a conjuring act, with the possibility of actually bringing his person much more into focus, but not only into focus but into life, a life he had in his world.  Because the book is written with the presumption that Shakespeare, first of all, was born with an immense innate talent… and that he also did a lot of hard work, including reading books and studying, and working on his iambic pentameter.  But something about the way he was living in the world, something about his responsiveness to what was around him, made an enormous difference, so what I tried to do is simply to throw windows open and see what was outside the room that he was working in, and what he descended to when he descended onto the street.'  

Greenblatt brings both erudition and compassion to his task, offering us a new way of seeing and understanding Shakespeare's life in the very different world he inhabited between his arrival in London in 1587 and his death –– from a fever allegedly induced by consuming too much pickled herring and rhenish wine in the company of his old friend Ben Jonson and fellow Warwickshire poet Michael Drayton –– in the spring of 1616.  Like the Bloom and Burgess works discussed above, this book is an attempt to humanize the most god-like of writers by taking us deeply into the world that inspired his lifelong love of words and fired what was obviously a profoundly expansive imagination.  The research, as you would expect of any self-respecting scholar, is impeccable and the book reveals a Shakespeare who, despite his seemingly effortless ability to express human experience in the highest poetic terms, still feels like one of us –– a man who understood the vicissitudes of life, who suffered losses and setbacks, who had one foot planted in the world of the aristocrats and the other firmly planted in the grimy world of Southwark with its brothels, skittle parlours, bear-baiting rings and playhouses but nevertheless chose to abandon both worlds to return to Stratford-on-Avon to live out the rest of his life as a rusticated land-owning gentleman.  None of these experiences occurred in isolation and Greenblatt does a superb job of linking them, showing us that the phenomenon we know as 'William Shakespeare' was as much the product of upbringing, environment and social networking as it was of his unprecedented skill as a dramatist.

Will In The World may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer.  Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, the latest BardLit book by STEPHEN GREENBLATT, was published by The Bodley Head on 8 June 2018 and remains widely available in both print and digital editions.



Cambridge University Press UK, 2009

 

The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 (Fourth Edition 2009) by ANDREW GURR

'Hamlet, like any other Shakespeare nobleman, wore his hat indoorsThe unbonneted Hamlet familiar to modern audiences is a creation of the indoor theatre and fourth-wall staging, where every scene is in a room unless it is specified otherwise, and where everyone goes hatless accordingly.  Hamlet in 1601 walked under the sky in an open amphitheatre, on a platform that felt out-of-doors in comparison with modern theatres but indifferently represented indoors or out to the Elizabethans.'  

So begins Andrew Gurr's masterly and deservedly valued forty year study of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Carolinian theatre –– an industry dominated by the plays of William Shakespeare despite the fact that he probably didn't arrive in London until 1587, seventeen years after the city's first theatres were established, didn't have his first play performed there until 1592 (or thereabouts) and left the city for good in 1616, a few months prior to his death and twenty-six years before the Puritans closed the theatres not, as has generally been assumed, for religious reasons but as a means of maintaining public order.  While Shakespeare cannot be said to have invented the conventions of the English stage, it was his work, more than that of his contemporaries or any of his theatrical descendants, that stretched and tested those conventions in ways that still resonate with and continue to delight theatregoers today.

It can be easy to overlook the fact that Shakespeare was first and foremost a working playwright, someone who earned his living by composing verse dramas performed by actors in London playhouses and, after 1599, in one particular playhouse called The Globe that he co-owned with other members of the Chamberlain's Men, the London-based acting company (and favourite of Queen Elizabeth I of England and her successor King James I of Great Britain) for whom he wrote exclusively if not always alone.  This book examines the nuts and bolts aspects of Shakespeare's profession in fascinating but always accessible detail, providing the reader with one of the clearest pictures available not just of the theatres and the men who built, managed and acted in them, but also of the customs, mores and social attitudes of those who would pay a penny to the wherryman to be rowed across the Thames each week in order to attend performances and partake of the many other pleasures, illicit and otherwise, that the Bankside area had to offer.  

With chapters covering original staging practices, the personnel structures of the city's many professional acting companies, descriptions of styles of acting, the history of playhouse construction, the use of props and costumes and audience behaviour it is an indispensable guide to the very different (and sometimes dangerous due to the unpredictable presence of the plague which could break out again at any moment) theatregoing experience of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.  Nor is its focus exclusively confined to Shakespeare.  The plays of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, George Chapman and even lesser known playwrights like Richard Brome (who was Jonson's servant and probably his protègé) are also discussed, making this an invaluable single volume reference for anyone eager to move beyond the texts themselves to understand how they were staged, performed and received by Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences who demanded that plays not only be gripping and action-packed but that each performance should conclude with all the players once again taking the stage to dance a boisterous jig together. 

The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer. 



Penguin Books UK, 2008

 

The Lodger: Shakespeare On Silver Street (2007) by CHARLES NICHOLL

A new style of Shakespeare biography has emerged in recent years in which the idea of examining his life in toto has been substituted for the examination of one particular period or aspect of it.  The Lodger is one such book and, I believe, a book that's destined to be regarded as a classic of Shakespeare scholarship by future generations.  Written by Charles Nicholl, a first-rate literary detective whose 1992 book about Christopher Marlowe remains the best examination of that poet's mysterious and probably royally sanctioned death, it focuses on the time Shakespeare spent as the tenant of the Mountjoys, a French 'tire-making' family who had emigrated to England, along with many of their Huguenot brethren, to escape religious persecution following the bloody St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572.  


The Mountjoys settled on Silver Street in the Cripplegate district of London and it was here, probably some time in 1603, that they rented a room in their combined house and shop to a thirty-nine year old actor/playwright from the provinces whose most recent offering Measure for Measure had been another popular success.  Why did Shakespeare choose to rent a room from them, a family of 'strangers' as foreigners, be they French or Dutch or anything else, were disparagingly labelled at the time?  (Then as now, immigrants were scorned by the majority of the populace, who blamed them for everything from higher food prices to ruining English trade to intentionally spreading the plague.  Stupidity, it seems, is a timeless human attribute.)  This was hardly the norm in Jacobean London, even though many of Shakespeare's fellow playwrights –– including Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene and Ben Jonson –– were in the habit of taking lodgings close to London's theatre district where they could work in peace without necessarily placing themselves in the 'thick of the action' so to speak.  

Christopher Mountjoy, Shakespeare's landlord and the family patriarch, was a successful if parsimonious and somewhat belligerent figure, a hardheaded businessman whose skill at manufacturing 'tires' –– the common name for 'head attires' which were elaborate headpieces worn as fashion accessories by any woman who could afford one (including prostitutes) that often featured in paintings of the time –– was consistent enough to see him prosper and earn regular commissions from theatrical costumiers along with many high profile members of the aristocracy.  

But Shakespeare, it seems, was more than just the upstairs lodger of Mountjoy and his wife (and chief salesperson) Marie.  He also took a hand in persuading their apprentice, a man named Stephen Belott, to marry their daughter Mary in 1604 –– an involvement that would see him called to testify in court on the couple's behalf in May 1612 following Christopher Mountjoy's failure to pay the dowry of £60 they had been promised eight years earlier.  'It was,' Nicholl informs us, 'a family dispute: trivial, pecuniary, faintly sordid –– standard fare at the Court of Requests, whose function was broadly equivalent to the Small Claims Courts of today.'  Why was Shakespeare called in as a witness?  And what drove him to take on the unlikely role of matchmaker in the first place?

These are just some of the questions Nicholl confronts in this exhaustively researched and brilliantly written book, offering us a view of Shakespeare's life and the Jacobean world in general –– its culture, its fashion industry, its xenophobia, its fascinations with adultery and both the commercial and non-commercial forms of sex –– that ranks among the most vivid and engaging I have ever read.  Part biography and part mystery story, it presents us with an image of Shakespeare that, while not exactly at odds with other, more traditional representations of the playwright's life and legacy, comes much closer to revealing him as the flesh and blood human being he was than those more scholarly studies generally succeed in doing.  It's a rivetting investigation of an infrequently examined period of his life that, as one reviewer put it, 'Throws a new light on the man who was both a universal genius and just like us.'

The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer. 



Oxford University Press UK, 2001

 

The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2001) by MICHAEL DOBSON and STANLEY WELLS [editors]

If I had to select one book about Shakespeare to take with me to a desert island then this fine Oxford Companion would undoubtedly be it.  While numerous general reference guides about the playwright and his work have been published over the years (some more diligently researched than others), none that I've used has come close to achieving what this book achieves in its 541 closely spaced pages.  It offers the reader Shakespeare in his entirety –– his past and present selves as playwright, poet, impresario, theatre owner and family man, drawing on what in 2001 was the latest scholarship to present him in all aspects of his life and as the enduring central figure of what remains a vitally important literary and cultural legacy.  (An updated edition of the book, containing more than 80 new entries, was published in 2016 and is obviously the edition to seek out by anybody wishing to consult or purchase a copy.) 
 
The Companion is a compendium of facts both vital and trivial, a pleasing combination of scholarly data and knowledge for its own sake that never fails to delight even as it informs and elucidates.  If you have a burning desire to know who Samuel Gilburne was then all you have to do is turn to page 164 to learn that he was a member of the King's Men named in the actor list of the 1623 Folio.  If you want to know what role inns played in the development of Elizabethan theatre, the answer is waiting for you in a pithy entry appearing on page 213.  One of my favourite entries is the one about dogs written by Anne Button, who tells us that they '…are given names in Shakespeare more often than any other kind of animal in the playsThe principal dog brought onto the stage is Crab in The Two Gentleman of Verona, though the dog in "Pyramus and Thisbe" in A Midsummer Night's Dream might also have been a real animal in Shakespeare's day.'  

The book also features dedicated entries for every play and poem, accompanied by usefully condensed synopses, notes on sources and texts, artistic features, critical and stage histories plus film and television adaptations, if any.  These entries, like those concerning Shakespeare's fellow writers and business associates, serve as excellent starting points for further investigation, containing precisely the right amount of information in what is seldom longer than four single spaced, double columned pages.  Just as helpful are the dozens of maps and black and white photographs the book contains, all of which shed further light on Shakespeare's parallel lives as son, husband, poet and playwright and his ongoing after-life as the most persistently revered cultural icon in the Western world.  It makes the ideal reference guide for anybody interested in Shakespeare who is unable or unwilling to commit to one of the more scholarly studies of his life and career that can sometimes be daunting in terms of length and a bit of a linguistic slog for the inquisitive but time poor non-specialist.  

But why believe me when you can have the quality of this volume confirmed by no less a personage than Dame Judi Dench, who played Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's acclaimed 1960 RSC production of Romeo and Juliet and called the book 'A wonderful treasure house of information and insight.'  Ne'er a truer word was't spoke, fair lady.  Hie thee, gentle reader, and seek'st thou thine own copy forthwith. 

The updated edition of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, containing more than 80 new entries, was published in 2016 and may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer.  (It has a different cover to the original 2001 edition displayed above which is shown below to eliminate confusion.)


Oxford University Press UK, 2016



Use the link below to visit OpenSourceShakespeare, a self-proclaimed 'Experiment in Literary Technology' offering free digital editions of every play and poem written by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE plus a handy search engine which allows visitors to search each play and poem via '…the exact spelling of a word, the first part of a word form or any other part of a word form.'  


http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/concordance/

 

Digital versions of the plays and poems are also available from Project Gutenberg and other free book sharing sites.

 

You might also enjoy:

 
Some Books About… ANTHONY BURGESS

 
Some Books About… JOSEPH CONRAD

 
Some Books About… FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN

 

Thursday 20 January 2022

The Write Advice 161: JENNIFER EGAN

 
…I rarely write about an event that I've experienced.  For example, when I was working on my novel The Keep, which involves a prison writing class, I considered actually trying to teach in a prison.  And I thought, No, because that'll actually make it harder for me to write about it.  But the places are important.  If there's some kind of memory element to the place, that always helps.  Not nostalgia per se, but the intensification that can come along with memory, the way it sifts through impressions and leaves you with what is most arresting.
 
The Writer's Library: The Authors You Love on the Books That Changed Their Lives (2020)
 
 
Use the link below to visit the website of North American novelist and journalist JENNIFER EGAN:
 
 

 
 
 
You might also enjoy:
 
 
 

Thursday 13 January 2022

Poet of the Month 074: TAEKO TOMIOKA

 

TAEKO TOMIOKA
1974 
 
 
 
 
 
GIRL FRIEND
 
 
 
A concubine next door
chants a sutra.
In early afternoon
I saw an animal like an ass
passing under the window.
I saw it through the interstice of the curtain.
There is a woman who comes to see me
always through the interstice of the curtain,
but she's not yet come today.
She promised to come
in a sort of Annamese kimono
made of crepe georgette
with a gait that brings men running.
As she hasn't come yet today
she may have died.
Previously
when I travelled with her
she yearned for an old woodcut
of Germany or somewhere
at an antique shop in the country.
At a country inn
I had a chance for the first time
to tear her hair
as thick as Brigitte Bardot's.
We two danced
the Viennese waltz
with crimson cheeks drawing near
as long as we wished.
Her transparent
optimistic poesy
some time dropped.
I wish to take that for tears.
She doesn't come today.
I pray
loudly though it's still mid-day
like the mistress next door.
She
hasn't promised not to come.
The one who goes,
O the one who has gone!
 
 
 
 
 
date unspecified
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Translated by
 
? TAEKO TOMIOKA 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Poet, novelist, dramatist and screenwriter Taeko Tomioka (I place her given name before her surname in the English style) was born in the southern Japanese city of Osaka on 28 July 1935.  Although her family had been relatively prosperous prior to her birth, this changed after her father, the owner of a foundry, abandoned herself and her mother to run off with another woman. 
 
 
Tomioka attended the Women's College in Osaka, where she majored in English literature and translated some of the work of Gertrude Stein into Japanese, after which she worked for a time as a high school teacher before leaving that profession in 1960 to move to Tokyo.  She had, by this time, already published her first prize-winning poetry collection, titled Henrei [Reward, 1958], following it one year later with a dramatic work titled Matsuri [Festival].  Monogatari no akuru hi [The Story of the Story], a second poetry collection, appeared in 1961.
 

Tomioka left Tokyo for New York in 1964, returning to Japan in 1966 after her lover left her for a younger woman just as her own mother had previously been abandoned by her father.  The following year saw the publication of a complete collection of her poetry, after which she authored the screenplay Shinju ten no Amijima [Double Suicide] for the director Shinoda Masahiro.  For the same director she wrote the screenplay Gonza The Spearman, another story based on a traditional Japanese puppet play which was released to great acclaim in 1985.
 
 
In 1969 Tomioka married, going on to publish her debut work of fiction Oka ni mukatte hito wa narabu [Facing The Hills They Stand] in 1971.  This was followed in 1974 by two more works of fiction Shokubutsu sai [Plants] and Meido no kazoku [Family in Hell], both of which won important literary prizes and consolidated her reputation as a feminist writer critical of traditional Japanese culture and the subservient role women are expected to play within it.  Hiberunia kiko [Journey to Ireland], appeared in 1997, with the book going on to win her the prestigious Noma Literary Prize.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
You might also enjoy:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Thursday 6 January 2022

THE DAY I STOPPED LAUGHING AT DONALD TRUMP

 
Photo credit: Source unspecified


 
The urge to laugh at whatever threatens or upsets us is a natural one for the majority of human beings.  It's a healthy way to display our contempt for the person or idea that's making us uncomfortable while denying that person or idea the ability to do so.  If we refuse to take X, Y or Z seriously, keep telling ourselves that he, she or it is intrinsically ridiculous and therefore poses no threat to our way of life or personal well-being, then logic suggests that we simultaneously rid ourselves of any need to fear it.
 
That, at least, is the theory.  In practice, however, the technique of humor-fueled denial doesn't always work.
 
In common with much of the non-American world, I found it hilarious that someone as consistently risible as Donald Trump planned to run for President back in 2016.  How could this orange-haired buffoon — a third-rate television celebrity whose greatest claim to fame prior to announcing his candidacy was hosting a reality show which made his weekly bleating of the words 'You're fired!' an internationally recognized catchphrase — have any chance of being elected leader of the planet's largest and, at that time, most powerful democracy?  It seemed not only hilarious but unthinkable, as did the election result which saw Trump catapulted into the White House despite the claims of many political analysts that such an outcome was 'impossible.'
 
'How the hell could he have won?' I often asked myself in the days following what, for me and millions of other people, was a deeply disturbing turn of events.  Even more disturbingly, how could he have been perceived by predominantly low income, rural-based voters as the candidate capable of making the United States 'great' again?  Were these people living in a bubble?  Did they not realize that Trump was a child of privilege whose wealth was largely inherited from his father, a New York City real estate developer?  Did they not see where and how he lived, how many oversized monuments he'd erected to himself merely to gratify his equally oversized ego?
 
My fear in 2016 was that Trump's election slogan — 'Make America Great Again!' — would become the rallying cry of every gun-toting right-wing looney looking to justify their white supremacist, Christian fundamentalist, anti-inclusivist agenda.  Which specific period of American 'greatness,' I burned to ask his more rabid supporters, was Trump planning to restore?  The colonial period which saw rapacious white settlers steal land from First Nations people before, in many cases, consciously and methodically exterminating them?  The era which saw a coalition of southern states break away from the Union and go to war over their so-called 'God given right' to perpetuate the barbaric practice of slavery?  
 
Or was it the more recent Reagan years that Trump proposed to lead his country back to (he had, after all, shrewdly appropriated Reagan's 1980 election slogan for his own campaign), when greed was all but mandated by the government and low to middle income earners were abandoned by a Republican party more concerned with smoothing the way for major corporations to post record annual profits while offering significant tax cuts to the 1% of the US population who already owned and controlled 99% of the nation's wealth?
 
None of it made sense.  And when something makes no sense the first response of the human brain is to deny it by writing it off as absurd or, at best, comical.  Time, I told myself with a not altogether convincing smile, would show these deluded individuals that Trump was on nobody's side but his own.  The wool would not and could not remain pulled over everybody's eyes forever.  Sooner or later, the truth would emerge and send him scuttling back to Trump Tower where he belonged.
 
And then his Presidency began, with each day offering a new chapter in what quickly came to feel like some bizarre political farce.  He ranted daily via Twitter, eventually gaining somewhere in the region of 80 million followers.  He fired key staff on a semi-regular basis, sometimes for no better reason than that their consciences refused to allow them to accede to some of his wackier demands.  He told the media he'd be trying to date his own daughter if she wasn't his own daughter.  (That was a real rib-tickler, that was.)  He was assigned a nickname — 'The Donald' — in the hope of further diminishing his claims to any kind of political legitimacy while they lampooned him on South Park and made him the star of his own weekly animated show called Our Cartoon President in an effort to remind the country and the world that his antics were those of an ineffective, blustering, out-of-touch narcissist.  Here in Australia we had Planet America, our own
tongue-in-cheek analysis of the more nonsensical aspects of his administration and the compromised US political system that remains on air and popular to this day.  
 
But as time went on the jokes became less and less funny.  In early 2020 coronavirus tightened its grip on a scared and exhausted world and suddenly everything became less funny, not just in the United States but everywhere else on earth as well.  Trump's response to the pandemic was initially bewildering and then infuriating, with him characteristically taking every opportunity to lie to the American public about its severity while portraying himself as some kind of crisis-defying medical expert.  
 
In January he promised his fellow Americans that 'We have it totally under control.  It's one person coming in from China.  It's going to be fine.'  By March he was asking them to remain calm, declaring that the virus would '…go away' of its own accord despite a marked lack of evidence to support this outrageously unscientific claim, a claim he happily repeated at the end of April when the combined US death toll stood at close to 70,000 people.  By October, with the number of deaths now in excess of 210,000 people, he was still stating that his administration had done a '…phenomenal job' of confronting the virus and that it was '…going to disappear' before blaming China for its worldwide proliferation.  'They allowed this to happen,' he pontificated, directly contradicting a statement he'd made on January 24 in which he'd praised the Chinese government's handling of the crisis and personally thanked President Xi for his actions '…on behalf of the American people.'
 
It would have been hysterical if so many human beings hadn't been dropping like flies while he stood there like some excuse-spouting automaton, insisting there was no cause for alarm. 
 

Photo credit: Leah Millis/Reuters

 
As the 2020 election loomed into view his rhetoric began to change.  The focus shifted from issues like vaccination and keeping the schools open to criticizing the media and its understandably extensive coverage of the pandemic.  (More than 8 million Americans had tested positive to the virus by then while more than 220,000 had died after becoming infected with it.  What was the media supposed to do?  Ignore that?  File stories about bake sales or cuddly kittens being rescued from trees?)  Case numbers were rising, Trump insisted in a typically accusative tweet, only '…because we TEST, TEST, TEST.  A Fake News Media Conspiracy.  Many young people who heal very fast.  99.9%.  Corrupt Media conspiracy at all time high.  On November 4th, the topic will totally change. VOTE!
 
Then in November, with the US death toll steadily climbing toward 300,000, he was finally voted out of office, the unprecedented voter turn-out causing many a naïve soul to believe we wouldn't be forced to listen to any more of his evasive, divisive, self-aggrandizing bullshit. 
 
Sadly, this was never going to be the case.  On January 6th 2021 a group of right-wing, pro-Trump agitators and disaffected so-called 'ordinary citizens' — all of whom accepted his unproven claim that the election had been 'stolen' from him (the same unproven claim was made by his opponent Hillary Clinton following his 2016 victory) and he was still rightfully the President — forcibly entered the Capitol building in Washington DC with the intention of overthrowing the elected US Government.  And Trump, it soon emerged, had deliberately spurred this rabble on, telling his supporters at the rally which preceded what was now being described as 'a riot' that 'We fight like hell and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.' 
 
That was the day Donald Trump and everything he represents stopped being a joke to me and why he can never again be treated as an object of ridicule by anyone who cares about the future of democracy and, indeed, the future of life on this planet.  Trump hasn't been abandoned by his supporter base, which has expanded rather than contracted since the election of his ever more unpopular successor Joe Biden.  Banning him from Twitter hasn't silenced him and nor have any of the investigations into his actions undertaken by his fellow politicians or the lawsuits filed by individuals who were prevented from suing him while he occupied the Oval Office.  For some inexplicable reason he continues to symbolize the hope of change to millions of angry and alienated Americans, propping up the increasingly accepted myth that they're an ignored and marginalized 'white minority' within their own country despite the overwhelming amount of cultural, socio-political and economic evidence which confirms the opposite is true. 
 
Of course, the events of January 6th are currently being investigated by a 13 member US Congressional Committee but it remains highly unlikely that Trump will ever be prosecuted for his role in inciting what was tantamount to a coup planned and put into effect by him and his advisors for the specific purpose of illegally restoring him to power.  He'll get away with it — just as Richard Nixon got away with playing the leading role he played in the Watergate scandal — because, in the midst of new COVID-19 strains wreaking havoc on a broken health system and the ongoing polarization of US politics thanks to social media, the Democrats are reluctant to push for a conviction so as not to further weaken their own shaky grip on power.
 
It seems unnecessary to remind anyone that people also laughed at Hitler and his fellow dictator Benito Mussolini during their respective rises to power, confidently dismissing them as clowns or, at best, reactionary upstarts who would soon be shown the door.  Yet the similarities remain too numerous to ignore.  Like Hitler and Mussolini, Trump has grass roots support, the confidence of the business sector and plenty of money with which to fund his 2024 re-election campaign.  He's gradually winning the support of the more moderate members of his own party while voter apathy climbs to an all-time high as many Americans on both sides of politics yearn for the problems that are Donald Trump and the issue of rigged elections to somehow magically disappear, paving the way for him (or his hand-picked successor) to become their nation's forty-seventh President. 
 
A Trump (or Trump-sanctioned) victory in 2024 has disturbing implications not only for the United States but for every democratic government in the world, including ours here in Australia.  If a politician can knowingly and consistently break the law and get away with it — and, more significantly, be publicly seen to be getting away it by millions of their disgruntled and well-armed followers — then that has serious ramifications for everyone, particularly in terms of making politicians accountable for their statements and the actions, treasonous or otherwise, those statements may go on to inspire.  Democracy, as we've been reminded almost daily since the 2020 election, is an extremely fragile entity, maintained by the willingness of all parties who subscribe to its principles to accept 'the will of the people' as expressed in a federal ballot and abide by the result of that ballot and the rule of law.  Trump and his allies have knowingly conspired to destroy the faith that makes that people-powered system of government viable.  Thanks to him, the United States has become disunited and destabilized to an alarming degree and is now closer to the possibility of civil war than it has been at any time since 1861.
 
If you find any of that funny then I both envy you and pity you.  The storming of the Capitol building one year ago today was the beginning of what promises to be a long and bitter struggle to salvage not just the idea of democracy but its continuing existence in a world teetering on the brink of political, social and environmental collapse.  Donald Trump may be many things — a neo-fascist demagogue-in-the-making among them — but a clown is the one thing you can be certain he is not.  The job of a clown is to make us laugh.  Trump, on the other hand, sees it as his job to bring the country he led for four disastrous years to its knees while guaranteeing that ours becomes a more intolerant, violent and dangerous civilization in the process.

 
 
Photo credit: redbubble