The Economist - Obituary

The death—or reinvention—of the French intellectual [YHIBLOG]

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 16:03:16 -0700

Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-1950. By Agnès Poirier. Henry Holt; 352 pages; $30. Bloomsbury Publishing; £25.

The End of the French Intellectual: From Zola to Houllebecq. By Shlomo Sand. Verso; 304 pages; $29.95 and £20.

FOR aspiring and often penniless intellectuals, the Café de Flore on the left bank in Paris, with its Art Deco interior and bow-tied waiters, was once, recounts Agnès Poirier, “a university”.

“Conversations were not loud; the air was serious, books stood between glasses, and the lighting was decidedly dim…Men wore corduroy jackets, turtlenecks, dirty trench coats, their hair a little too long, while women wore no make-up. Nobody was dressed fashionably, but everyone had style.”

“Left Bank”—Ms Poirier’s delightful account of the writers, artists and painters who shared beds, cigarettes and column inches on a few streets in the 1940s—returns frequently to the Café de Flore. Simone de Beauvoir used it as her letter-box, its warmth a reprieve from the unheated hotel room she lived in on the nearby rue de Seine. She and Jean-Paul Sartre (pictured), plus their coterie of anti-bourgeois writers and muses, wrote and smoked at its tables, a short step from Sartre’s little apartment on the rue Bonaparte. Manuscripts were edited there, and a radical philosophy born. It was, in short, the epicentre of French intellectual life.

Today, the Café de Flore sits next to a Louis Vuitton store. Outside on the boulevard Saint-Germain on a warm spring morning, a valet-parking attendant polishes a black Mercedes. A couple of retired American tourists eat Caesar salads in silence. Russian teenagers pose for selfies in the sun, then run off without ordering. The waiters, like well-trained extras, shrug.

The Café de Flore still trades on its literary heritage. It runs an annual book prize. The carte is designed to resemble the austere cream book covers used by Gallimard, which published Sartre, de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. But these days the signature apéritif is a glass of champagne with caviar. The only writers who frequent the place, says the day manager, tend to be celebrities with deep pockets. Is it just too pricey for aspiring artists? “Probably.”

Of course, many great cities have seen their former bohemian quarters transformed by inflated property prices and consumerism. Upcoming writers in the French language today are more likely to be found in edgier parts of the city, or in Brazzaville or Dakar, than among the antiques and luxury brands of the left bank. Still, the Café de Flore serves as a metaphor for a recurring concern: the alleged evanescence of the French intellectual.

The latest to turn this topic over is Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian. His book, “The End of the French Intellectual”, begins in nostalgia. Mr Sand confesses to a bygone “idealisation of Parisian intellectuals”, the “heroes” of a youth spent as a doctoral student in the city in the 1970s. Those who now pass for French public intellectuals, he argues, are a pale version of the likes of Emile Zola, André Gide, Camus, Sartre and Michel Foucault. The current cast comprises a second-tier type of on-screen personality, of a sort that Pierre Bourdieu, one of the old school, has described as “fast thinkers who offer cultural ‘fast food’.”

Having dismissed such writers, Mr Sand devotes a lot of space to them. He is particularly exercised by Éric Zemmour, a reactionary essayist, and Alain Finkielkraut, a formerly left-wing philosopher turned critic of multiculturalism. More interesting is the historical context Mr Sand gives to the role of the French public intellectual, the man of letters who is at once literary and engagé. Yet a convincing explanation for this figure’s decline, previously chronicled by historians such as Tony Judt and Sudhir Hazareesingh, is elusive.

One factor may be that in recent decades French thinking has become too introspective, in parallel with society. Parochialism has tended to prevail over universalist ambition. Another, says Gaspard Koenig, a liberal thinker, is that “academia in France has largely closed itself off from public debate,” as it has elsewhere. The public intellectual, at once producer of serious research and participant in a wider conversation, is increasingly a rarity. A further reason may have less to do with impoverished output than outsiders’ expectations. Some of the latest ground-breaking work in France is emerging not in philosophy but in fields English-language publishers watch less closely, such as economics.

The most globally influential French work in recent years has been Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century”. Indeed, Mr Piketty, who both challenges economic theory and advised a Socialist candidate, Benoît Hamon, in last year’s presidential election, may be the closest the country now has to a public intellectual. His book was a worldwide bestseller. Yet it took over a year for an English-language publisher to put out the latest work by Jean Tirole, another French economist and Nobel-prizewinner. Based at the Toulouse School of Economics, far from Paris, Mr Tirole also reflects the more disparate geography of French intellectual life today.

Back at the Café de Flore, as dusk falls, the clientele shifts. Off go the tourists with their backpacks and bottles of water. In steps a woman in a black shift dress, who sits down to read Le Monde at a corner table. Later, a well-known and politically active investment banker takes a seat on the terrace. Fragments of intense conversation hang, along with cigarette smoke, in the air.

The Flore is not Paris, and Paris is not France. But the moment the locals recolonise the café at night is a reminder that this neighbourhood remains home to much of the capital’s elite—a group that continues to shape the country’s intellectual mood. The waifs and radicals may be gone, but the atmosphere in the Flore and beyond is more highbrow than the doomsayers imply. Attendance rose this year at the annual Paris book fair. Regional literary festivals are thriving. Philosophy is still a compulsory part of the school curriculum.

And last year the French elected a president who has a degree in philosophy and can cite Molière by heart. France may have lost its great intellectuals, but it has certainly not lost its intellectualism.

Books and arts

Apr 28th 2018

YHIBLOG

How Marvel’s superhero films exploit the genre’s limitations [YHIBLOG]

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 16:03:11 -0700

EARLY in “Avengers: Infinity War”, one of the heroes stares almost directly into the camera and declares, “Look, it’s not overselling it to say that the fate of the universe is at stake.” Ostensibly he is cajoling another movie-star hero, Robert Downey junior’s Iron Man, to come with him. But the real audience for this moment of winking self-awareness is on the other side of the screen. It is a wry acknowledgment of the dramatic limitations of a genre that Disney dominates as utterly as the most fearsome comic-book villain. Naturally the fate of the universe is at stake. Equally, though, the fate of the Universe—the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)—is not.

Superhero flicks are unavoidably formulaic. The heroes are difficult to kill not because of their superpowers, but because they serve a higher power, an industrial blockbuster economy. The superstars each get their screen time, in a loose correlation to their importance to fans. Their defeats are ephemeral, even when they die (or appear to). They are part of the ineluctable journey to a climactic battle, which in turn points the way towards more films.

Given these constraints, “Infinity War”, the 19th film in the MCU, is a remarkable achievement. It manages to weave together several action storylines, each carried by a subset of familiar heroes. Together, on Earth and other distant planets, they seek to thwart a villain’s Malthusian quest to wipe out half the population of the universe. Despite the grave nature of this mission, “Infinity War” is also one of the funniest MCU sagas. Some main characters perish, and most others are frequently at risk of doing so, but the heroes never stop making fun of each other, their adversaries and the carnage around them.

And it works. The filmmakers—Kevin Feige, the maestro of Marvel Studios, Anthony and Joe Russo, the directors, and Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the writers—have worked out that it is much more enjoyable and sensible to call attention to the rules of their play-universe than to pretend that they do not exist. One-line quips and witty repartee would be dangerously distracting in actual mortal combat, but everyone knows most of the combat is not mortal, even by the absurd standards of action films. That is why one character muses aloud about whether the death of another is real “this time”. During another sequence Spider-Man asks, “Why does somebody always have to die in this scenario?” Even a hero’s last gasp is played for laughs.

These gags work because the audience is in on the joke. They know the rules of the MCU, and the stakes, before they walk into the cinema, suspending disbelief of their own accord. To pretend otherwise would be an insult, and set the film up to fail. A rival comic-book series, the DC Entertainment Universe, has taken itself more seriously, with much poorer results. “Justice League”, DC’s own superhero-ensemble movie, earned about as much at the North American box office ($229m) as “Infinity War” is projected to take in its first weekend alone.

By contrast, MCU’s embrace of the genre’s limitations helps stave off fatigue. That most MCU enthusiasts will be excited to see “Infinity War” is a coup in itself. It is less a work of art than of commerce, but it proves there is artistry in the post-modern trick of making a superhero film fly.

Books and arts

Apr 28th 2018

YHIBLOG

When weapons can think for themselves [YHIBLOG]

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 16:03:10 -0700

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War. By Paul Scharre. W.W. Norton & Company; 448 pages; $27.95.

ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) is on the march, for good and ill. The AI that makes possible self-driving cars and diagnoses diseases more accurately than doctors will save lives. The AI that does jobs better than workers may be a more mixed blessing. But AI that might give machines—“killer robots”—the responsibility for deciding how wars are fought, and who gets killed, is a science-fiction nightmare. Paul Scharre, a former army ranger, explores this dystopian prospect in “Army of None”.

Mr Scharre interviews the engineers building autonomous weapons and the strategists preparing for their arrival. He sees first-hand what to expect from these technologies, such as swarms of small, low-cost drones locked in aerial combat, manoeuvring with superhuman co-ordination. The speed of these developments, he finds, both excites and disturbs the military establishment. The generals know they are entering an era in which algorithms will determine success on the battlefield, and humans may be unable to keep up with the pace of combat.

A key distinction, Mr Scharre says, is between new weapons that are equipped with fairly “narrow” autonomy, and will carry out a specific task more effectively than humans, such as an anti-ship missile that has been programmed to select its targets; and future systems (perhaps 20 years away) endowed with “general” AI. Weapons with narrow autonomy that are able to activate themselves—for example to respond to a cyber-attack at the speed of light—will pose some risks of escalation. But when combined with human-controlled systems, as in a squadron of drones orchestrated by a manned aircraft, they may improve precision and situational awareness, and be capable of better split-second analysis than people, who are prone to fear, rage and exhaustion.

Fully autonomous weapons which can plan, solve problems and extrapolate from experience are something else; they will need a human only to order the start of a mission (maybe not even that). Here Mr Scharre thinks the dangers and moral issues are so profound that it is in humanity’s interest to seek ways of controlling the technology. Unlike campaigners against “killer robots”, he does not believe they can simply be banned. Instead, he argues for ensuring a minimum degree of human involvement in their operation and compliance with international law.

That sounds comforting. But arms-control agreements work only when there is reliable verification. The essence of autonomy, writes Mr Scharre, is software rather than hardware, making transparency very difficult. Liberal democracies may insist on “meaningful” human oversight, but will every country be as fastidious? And given the ubiquity of AI, what use might terrorists, devoid of compunction, make of it?

Books and arts

Apr 28th 2018

YHIBLOG

The ban on split infinitives is an idea whose time never came [YHIBLOG]

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 16:03:10 -0700

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW was once so angry with a subeditor that he complained to the newspaper. “I ask you, sir,” Shaw wrote, “to put this man out.” The cause of his fury? The editor had insisted on “correcting” split infinitives. “Set him adrift and try an intelligent Newfoundland dog in his place,” Shaw fulminated, “without interfering with his perfect freedom of choice between ‘to suddenly go’, ‘to go suddenly’ and ‘suddenly to go’.”

This spring a new edition of The Economist’s style guide is published*. Many of its changes are of a kind only a copy-editor would notice; but on an issue that has set teeth grinding for centuries, it marks a sea-change that Shaw would have appreciated. It says infinitives may be split.

Those who believe the split infinitive is a grammatical crime will see yet more evidence that standards are in a death spiral. Those who have never seen anything wrong with it will be chagrined that we ever forbade it. The second lot have the better argument. The new guide says that sometimes splitting the infinitive is the best, or even only, option.

John Comly is the first known writer to issue a ban on the split, saying in 1803 that: “An adverb should not be placed between a verb of the infinitive mood and the preposition ‘to’ which governs it.” At the time this practice was not common, even though such splits had arisen in English almost as soon as “to” started appearing with infinitives. They crop up, for example, in “Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight” in the 14th century.

The split had declined in the early-modern period. Shakespeare split just one infinitive, the King James Bible none. Samuel Johnson wrote “Milton was too busy to much miss his wife”, but the usage really took off again in the 19th century. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope, Mark Twain, George Eliot, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling all split infinitives. Data from Google Books confirm a 19th-century surge in “to” followed by an adverb.

But Comly’s “rule” was out there, even as great writers ignored it. It made its way into other popular grammars of the 19th century until it became something every educated person thought they knew. Only in the early 20th century did the best grammarians begin fighting back. H.W. Fowler called it both a “fetish” and a “superstition” in his magisterial usage dictionary of 1926.

The persistence of the “rule” is the true curiosity. One explanation is that, like the dangling participle, the split infinitive has a catchy name, making the rule easy to pass on. Another is that it is easy to spot; noticing something between “to” and a verb is a gratifyingly simple task. A third is the shadow of classical languages. Infinitives are single words in Latin and Greek, so early-modern authors who were influenced by them may have unconsciously avoided splitting the two-word English counterpart. But “to” is not really part of the infinitive, much less an inseparable one. In I can come, “come” is an infinitive with no “to”. The split is thus not even a real phenomenon, much less one to shun.

Some writers, having abided by the rule for so long, will never manage to discard it. Fine. But the lazy remedy, merely to move a modifier one word left or right, is worse. Constantly to do this results in an odd, jarring rhythm. (Robert Burns wrote “to nobly stem tyrannic pride” because it has a pleasingly punchy beat to it.) And the “move it left or right” manoeuvre often means that the modifier ends up modifying the wrong thing, or creating an ambiguity. “She decided to gradually retire” is clear. But moving “gradually” left changes the meaning, while moving it right creates confusion: a gradual decision or a gradual retirement?

There are better ways to reword splits, and our style book recommends that since they annoy so many readers, where they can be avoided altogether, writers should do so. Sound advice, but it comes with two caveats. One is that we get almost as many letters about sentences tortured to avoid the split as we do about split infinitives themselves. The other is that writers should not make a habit of dodging the truth merely because it is unpopular among a dedicated minority of readers. There is nothing wrong with a split infinitive. It is time to utterly and decisively reject a rule that should never have been on the books in the first place.

^{*The Economist Style Guide. Public Affairs; 288 pages; $11.99. Profile Books; £9.99}

Books and arts

Apr 28th 2018

YHIBLOG

In times of crisis, writers turn to Homer [YHIBLOG]

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 16:03:05 -0700

Circe. By Madeline Miller. Little, Brown and Company; 400 pages; $27. Bloomsbury Publishing; £16.99.

ON THE face of it, the dominant literary forms of the modern age and the classical one—the novel and the epic poem—are almost opposites. Where epics deal in types, novels depict individuals; where epics deliver action, novels provide motives and psychology. Epics look outward, at the fate of nations and the sweep of history; novels delve into the fabric of everyday life. Novelists have long regarded these differences as enticing, turning to Homer for their plots, setting modern sensibilities loose in his world or applying its lessons to their own. Writers tend especially to enlist Homer at times of crisis or uncertainty. Times like now.

Homer’s “Odyssey” gave James Joyce a framework for “Ulysses”, the age-old solidity of the original anchoring the divagations of Leopold Bloom on a single day in early 20th-century Dublin. Two slaughters are part of the novel’s context: Troy and the first world war, which broke out just as Joyce began his book. Robert Graves used the “Odyssey” as a way of comprehending the wreckage of post-1945 Europe. In his novel “Homer’s Daughter”, he draws on an old idea that the epic’s real author was a woman to sketch the poet-princess Nausicaa, a female saviour for a world in which men have failed.

One of the latest to turn to Homer is Madeline Miller, whose first book “The Song of Achilles”, published in 2011, whittled the “Iliad” into a gay love story narrated by Achilles’s paramour Patroclus. That book won the Orange Prize for fiction. Her new novel, “Circe”, views the “Odyssey” from the perspective of the goddess-witch upon whose enchanted island Odysseus stays for a year. In giving voice to one of Homer’s marginalised female characters she is emulating Margaret Atwood. In Ms Atwood’s novella “The Penelopiad” (recently reissued), Odysseus’s wife Penelope, now a shade in Hades, relates her life and his travels, revising his reputation.

Circe earns only a few dozen lines in the original Greek. The shape and structure of a novel allow Ms Miller to launch imaginative forays into the poem, adding flesh to the goddess’s bones. She depicts Circe as the nymph-child of the sun god Helios; then as she meets and falls in love with Odysseus; and after he abandons her. Ms Miller calls upon a lost, post-Homeric epic of uncertain authorship, the “Telegony”, for the material for her final act. Odysseus is dead and Circe, Penelope and their sons, Telegonus and Telemachus, seek to fashion a new world with its own notion of heroism, embracing mortality instead of reaching for divinity. “I thought once that gods are the opposite of death,” Circe says, “but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging.”

Among the pleasures in these adaptations is perceiving new facets in familiar tales. Amit Chaudhuri’s novel of 2015, “Odysseus Abroad”, refracts both the “Odyssey” and “Ulysses” in its portrayal of a Telemachus-figure, Ananda Sen, a Bengali poet, lost and lonely in the streets of London. The critic George Steiner saw the “Odyssey” as “the epic of the displaced person. The cities are down, and survivors wander the face of the earth as pirates or beggars.” Here Mr Chaudhuri imagines the great diasporas of the 20th century as a series of overlapping and interconnected Odysseys. The ordinariness of his tale and its unexceptional heroes—Ananda and his uncle Radhesh, an avatar for Odysseus—implies that, in the end, everyone is wandering and shipwrecked.

Exile, homesickness, lust, love: Homer’s preoccupations are the central themes of many, perhaps most lives as they are lived now. Another that modern authors have reworked is war. In his novel “Ransom” (2009), the Australian writer David Malouf focuses on a specific moment in the “Iliad”, rather than reaching beyond the text as Ms Miller does. He lingers on the climactic passages in which Achilles kills Hector, a Trojan prince, and Priam, the king, comes incognito to beg the Greek hero for the return of his son’s body. The sparse, deadpan prose imbues these scenes with extraordinary intensity.

Like “The Song of Achilles”, “Ransom” conveys how little war has changed at the level of the heart. It is easy to see reflections of contemporary wars in these pages, just as in the best novels that chronicle the modern conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan—such as “The Yellow Birds” by Kevin Powers and Roy Scranton’s “War Porn”—echoes of the “Iliad” abound.

Return to Troy

If novelists look to Homer for characters and scenes to inhabit, they also rely on him as a guide, and a means of importing the reach of epic to the circumspect form of the novel. His depth and stature invest their work with enargeia, a quality the British poet Alice Oswald translates as “bright unbearable reality”, a sense of collective and eternal significance beyond the merely transient. There is a moral dimension, too. As Adam Nicolson, another British author, says in his study of Homer, “The Mighty Dead”, his poems are about “the choices people must make when faced with the deepest challenges of their lives”. They present “an encyclopedia of moral choice”; a stable reference in a turning world.

There is an apparent paradox in the way Homer always feels timely and is therefore timeless. Writers and readers find in his epics whatever they are looking for, whether that is a lesson about the place of the individual in the chaos of war, or the perils of nostalgia, or the agony of unrequited love. Over the centuries his poems have become interwoven with all Western storytelling, not just those books that explicitly rework them. As the French author Raymond Queneau concisely put it: “Every great work of literature is either the ‘Iliad’ or the ‘Odyssey’.”

Books and arts

Apr 28th 2018

YHIBLOG