By Laura Smith

 

When Breath Becomes Air is a memoir written by Paul Kalanithi and published in January 2016. Educated in English literature, human biology, philosophy and medicine, specializing in neurosurgery, Kalanithi writes that he was always interested in learning about the “life of the mind” and particularly, what makes for a meaningful life – he rejected the personal pursuit of one’s own happiness as this end. The question of a meaningful life becomes all the more urgent, when, from the first page of the book’s forward – and the inside of the book’s jacket – the reader already finds out that the author of this book has died – in March 2015 – during the process of writing, and at the age of just 37. Diagnosed with advanced lung cancer in 2013, Kalanithi explains that this devastating news forced him to prioritize his personal values in the face of his immediately palpable finiteness. In this challenging situation, Kalanithi turned immediately to literature; finding solace in the language of poetry and philosophy, and pursuing the drive to write; in his youth, Kalanithi believed he would someday become a writer. Lucy Kalanithi brought the manuscript to publication this January after her husband’s death. She has written a beautiful epilogue to the book.

Kalanithi’s book is a weave of the personal ambition to cultivate a meaningful existence and to attain excellence in his chosen profession; a career that he saw as a “calling” rather than a “job” (69). Kalanithi writes that he “ha[d] started in this career [neurosurgery] to pursue death” (81): to understand its intersections with life and meaning. After completing a Master’s degree at Stanford in English literature, under the tutelage of renowned philosopher Richard Rorty, Kalanithi struggled between continuing on this path of literature and philosophy and the pull he felt to gain a deeper understanding of the life of the mind through practice (40). Kalanithi writes that he, “studied literature and philosophy to understand what makes life meaningful [and] studied neuroscience […] to understand how the brain could give rise to an organism capable of finding meaning in the world” (35). Before finding an answer in neuroscience, Kalanithi wondered: “where [do] biology, morality, literature, and philosophy intersect?” (41)

Interwoven in childhood stories and early adulthood experience are the tough choices that arise from negotiating the relationship between doctor, patient and families and how these relations changed with the shifting of his own identity from doctor to patient himself. Kalanithi explains that, more than the highly demanding technical skills of striving for perfection in the operating room, the task of the neurosurgeon is also that of crucially assisting patients and their families with existential questions. As a doctor, Kalanithi explains that: “when there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool” (87). The importance of language as both a mediator of communication and yet, always already bound to a certain failure (a limitation) – as Alberto Manguel, describes in his recent book, Curiosity – is the thread that runs throughout Kalanithi’s book: striving for communication and meaning-making, alongside the humility of one’s own limitations.

Struggling with the difficult choices of prolonged suffering versus shortened lives with his patients, Kalanithi explains that sometimes he found himself working as “death’s ambassador” (87). In his description of working in the constant presence of death, Kalanithi displays his own affinity for language as he describes this experience as, at times, “palpable” like a “humid muggy day” wherein he felt “trapped in an endless jungle summer” (78). With an interest in life’s larger philosophical questions, Kalanithi did not turn away from death in his profession or personal life, as it became clear that his own time was shortened. In discussing his experience of time in illness, Kalanithi notes the paradoxes of wanting to hurriedly achieve all that one had hoped to in a life-time, and the reality of not having the energy to do so. The image he elucidates is that of a hare, he writes: “it is a tired hare now who races” (196). The mental image of this emerges in the reader’s mind as an illustration found in children’s books – eliciting, perhaps, familiarity and comfort – and yet, he who races forward is confined to slowness and bodily decay, complicating the innocent allusion to the tortoise and the hare.

In Lucy and Paul Kalanithi’s decision to have a child after his diagnosis – a little girl named Cady, to whom the book is lovingly dedicated – it was ultimately a decision to not let the fear of potential suffering define their lives. In an interview with CBC radio host, Shad Kabango, Lucy Kalanithi explains her late husband’s reaction to her worry that having a child might “make dying that much more difficult”: Lucy explains that Paul Kalanithi responded: “but wouldn’t it be great if it did?”, indicating that life, for Kalanithi, was about leaning into experience rather than avoiding suffering (February 2016). In his 2014 essay published in The New York Times, Kalanithi turns to Samuel Beckett and finds strength to continue in the writer’s words: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”.

This book is at times a difficult read, it is also a joyful and humorous read. Most of all it is a confronting read that puts into stark light the values that we choose to live by every day and the hope we might find in the words: I’ll go on. It reminds the reader of the changing and malleable roles in life, and that indeed, as John Irving wrote in The World According to Garp: “we are all terminal cases”. The beauty of the book resides both in its hope, interwoven with despair, and the intersections between and across philosophy, literature, and the human sciences – Kalanithi describes with care the beautiful organ of the human brain and the confrontation between doctor and cadaver. The many questions that arise from this book include: what makes life worth living? what makes for a meaningful life? how might one pursue one’s own values in the face of one’s limited time? And how to balance a life of reflecting on these questions, with a life of practical living? These questions of course reflect the current debates on ‘dying well’, having a say in one’s own death, and maintaining dignity in these highly personal choices. The experience of navigating life and death as Kalanithi describes it – his experience – remains imprinted as a ghostly companion in the mind of the reader.

By Jan Baetens

On: Marjorie Perloff, Edge of Irony. Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016

This book, this truly great book, should be read without further delay by all those who feel concerned by the idea –past, present and future– of Europe.  At first sight, it is only a book on a rather overlooked form of Modernism; that is, the Austrian Modernism of the post-World War I period (Modernism, as we know, is more commonly studied in other linguistic and geographical areas, and Austrian Modernism remains strongly associated with pre-World War I culture). Moreover, the Modernism in question is only rarely seen as the sparring partner of the more fashionable avant-garde: the authors studied in this book are not Kafka but, in this order, Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Paul Celan and Ludwig Wittgenstein; that is, authors whose writing style is – rightly or not – less often considered traditional than avant-garde. At second sight however, it becomes clear that Perloff’s study of Austrian Modernism is much more than an attempt to fill in an (important) gap of our knowledge of Modernism. It addresses a crucial redefinition of Modernism itself, which cannot be separated from a certain idea of Europe, in this case the multilingual and multicultural Austro-German Empire shattered by the war.

What then, is Modernism in a county that, literally overnight, was born; a state with a suddenly oversized capital (Vienna), a tiny country  left over after the breakup of an immense Empire, a supposedly monolingual and no less supposedly mono-cultural  entity that could not really be the home for its numerous ‘new outsiders’? For many citizens of the former Austro-German Empire, many of them Jewish (but the category of Jewish covers a wide range of positions and situations), were no longer accepted as ‘real’ Austrians. To Marjorie Perloff, the Modernism developed by these great outsiders can be approached by the two terms that form the title of this book. ‘Edge’, to start with, refers to the necessarily external point of view of the outsider, both the one living in the periphery of power and excluded from it. ‘Irony’, second, designates the refusal of closure. This irony, however, is never a triumphant one: it is less the desire to enlarge one’s life with some supplementary identity positions as the struggle against the streamlining and monopolizing pressure of the center. In that sense, the ‘edge of irony’ is fraught with incurable nostalgia: it is the melancholy that comes with the consciousness of a lost paradise, that of the no longer existing imagined community, whose reconstruction is no longer judged possible, hence the reluctance to radical politics in the work of these progressive writers and their focus on ethical practice rather than ethical theories.

What all this has to do with Europe is clear. It is Europe’s multiculturalism and multilingualism that actually engendered this form of Modernism –very different from the Modernisms that developed in the Soviet Union or in North-America. And it is today’s Europe that helps us understand why American or Soviet visions of Modernisms –not to speak of the contemporary vision of ‘global Modernism’– are too homogeneous and linear to be capable of disclosing the many internal tensions and contributions of Austrian Modernism, perhaps the most European of all Modernisms.

As demonstrated by the corpus studied in this book, there is also something deeply nostalgic and melancholic in Edge of Irony. Not only because the book is written by an author of the edge (Marjorie Perloff was born in Vienna and her family was brutally hit by the dismantling of the Empire) with an exceptional sense of irony (each of the chapters offers a dramatically rich rereading of authors we thought we knew, but whose work is here radically reframed). But also because one feels that by choosing a set of writers whose work covers the whole gamut of the genre system (journalism, theater, novel, memoir, essay, philosophy, poetry), while charting all the possible relationships one can have with one’s ‘mother’ tongue (sometimes one’s ‘first’  language”, sometimes an adopted language,  sometimes written against other languages, sometimes  a language rediscovered in or through  exile, but never a language that is self-evident or natural), Perloff has tried to reproduce the very structure of the culture whose vanishing she deeply mourns. At the same time, her great sense of irony prevents her from all attempts to ‘close’ the works and authors she is reading. From that point of view as well, this book should be compulsory reading, and not just in Europe.

By Jan Baetens

Contrary to film or sports, for instance, literature is a part of culture in which there are still heated debates on what is “good” and what is “bad”. One may prefer Messi to Ronaldo, even after the Panama Papers, but nobody will deny that both are great players. One may like Ed Wood and dislike Hitchcock, but the merits of both directors will never be put on the same level. In literature, however, things are less clear. There exists of course a canon, but most readers, even professional readers, agree on the fact that this canon is often horribly boring and not really worth reading. On the other hand, many books that are avidly read will not really be defended by those who read them, as if they were ashamed of enjoying “silly” books or authors.

The situation is schizophrenic, but also complex. It is too easy for instance to frame it in terms of cultural snootiness (on the side of those sophisticated but “camp” readers who are proud of reading bad literature, while never trying to make a case for it as “good” literature) or inferiority (on the side of the many unsophisticated readers who are not always proud of what they actually like to read). Above all, the situation is sad, for it maintains social and ideological barriers that eventually harm both reading and writing.

One of the problems of “bad” reading is not only the persistent hatred that it provokes, not to speak of the psychological damage done to those who cannot love it as they would like, but also the negative effects in the long run on writing and literary culture in general. Just as some forms of “illegal”, that is illegally copied literature (see the recent essay by David S. Roh on this topic and my review on Leonardo[1]) can have tremendously positive effects on the creativity of a given community, “bad” reading should be considered a basic condition of literary invention. However, in order to make this point, one needs examples to demonstrate how this works in practice.

Here is where Robert Walser comes in. An important and even avant-garde Swiss author of the first half of the 20^th Century, Walser was fond of “bad” literature, more particularly of cheap French romance novels of the twenties, infamous examples of what is called in French “industrial literature” (the term goes back to the 19^th Century but it clearly anticipates Adorno’s distaste of the culture industry). Badly written, badly printed, totally ignored by serious readers, worse than all that one could imagine in all possible senses of the words, these books, actually more brochures than books which were sold in newsstands, not in bookshops, were read by audiences “good” readers have always been happy to mock (one of Walser’s examples is a novel by Sim – pseudonym of Georges Simenon –, Le Semeur de larmes, 1928).

 

While working as a journalist, Walser happened to review once in a while this kind of “bad” literature, and the way he did so offers an amazing demonstration of what one can actually do with this allegedly inferior literature. For reviewing meant rewriting, not just paraphrasing or summarizing and judging. Walser reinvents completely new stories, which often go totally against the grain of the original works, and this rewriting offers the possibility to deploy a stylistic firework that clearly demonstrates the springboard function of both the reading and the review. Yet what Walser is about is not to “save” the worthless books he is not supposed to read as a serious author, but to demonstrate how literary creativity works and how it can make use of any material whatsoever.

So please read the short essay by Marion Graf on Walser as a romance-reader, and try to do yourself with your bad readings what can be discovered in the examples in the second half of the book, a brief anthology of Walser’s creative reviews. It’s a small and inexpensive book, so you can keep it away from the eyes of those who want you to read Middlemarch or the complete works of Milton.

---

Marion Graf. Robert Walser. Lecteur de petits romans sentimentaux français. Editions Zoé : Carouge-Genève, 2015.

[1] http://leonardo.info/reviews/apr2016/roh-baetens.php

By Jan Baetens

The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries

Eds Kate Oakley and Justin O’Connor

New York: Routledge, 2015, 575 p.

ISBN-13: 978-0415706209

Hardback, $142.55

There are many reasons to consider this book, for now alas only available in a hardback, library-only version, the most important publication in cultural studies of the year 2015. True, the scope of this collection is not cultural studies, but at the same time it makes very clear how much the current reflection to the cultural industries owes to existing work in cultural studies as well as political economy – the former having a strong focus on issues of representation, popular culture, and minorities, the latter being centered on the role of media and communication systems in the organization of capitalist systems. In all recent scholarship on cultural studies, the gradual merger with political economy has become more or less self-evident, which can only be seen as a wise and sound evolution.

The same can also be said of the increasing proximity, if not merger of the fields of cultural studies and cultural industries. The best available handbook at the time being, David Hesmondalgh’s The Cultural Industries (3 successive editions since 2002) is very clear in this regard, and here as well this is an evolution that can only be welcomed. There is, however, an ongoing mix-up of the notions of “cultural” and “creative” as far as the “industries” are concerned. Besides the many qualities of the separate contributions in this incredibly rich and very up to date overview, Oakley and O’Connor’s book also proves invaluable in demonstrating the necessity to avoid any confusion between creative industries on the one hand and cultural industries on the other hand.

Not an easy task, given the profound vagueness of both terms (“culture” is everything, and who doesn’t want to be “creative”?). Yet the difference between both types of industries can be neatly explained in two ways. It is first of all internal: creative industries have as their target the production of ideas, techniques, goods and services, that can be legally protected as “intellectual properties”, which is not necessarily the case in the cultural industries. But it is also, if one can say so, external: the goal of a creative industry is to make money (and the authors of this book are clever enough to stress that there is nothing wrong with this), whereas the basic horizon of a cultural industry is not automatically such (many cultural industries try for instance to “produce culture” rather than to make profit in the first place).

The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries is therefore a publication that can be cited as a model to all modern cultural studies research. It offers a broad synthesis, not only of the various cultural industries that exist today, but also – and more importantly – of the various theoretical and disciplinary frames essential for a correct understanding of what is happening in this field. In addition, and this is no less crucial, it also makes a strong plea for the cultural specificity of these industries, always in danger of being absorbed by the economically more interesting branch of the creative industries.

(Another reason to recommend the reading of this book is the strong presence of the work by our former MA student Christiaan De Beukelaer, currently teaching at Melbourne University whose publications are mentioned no less than 6 times in the general introduction.)

 

By Jan Baetens

On: Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Debord, le naufrageur (Paris, Flammarion: 2015)

The founding father of situationism, a highly politicized neo-avant-garde movement that is said to have played a decisive role in the May 68 turmoil (see the database “Situationist International Online:  http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/) and author of the influential essay The Society of the Spectacle (various editions online, see for instance: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4 ), Guy-Ernest Debord is considered one of the most important French thinkers of the second half of the 20^th Century. One can guess students know him best from one of the most radical May 68 graffiti: “Ne travaillez jamais” or “Never work”, a principle Debord has held during all his life, for it was always others –family, friends, sponsors– who helped him make his living. The mysteries that surround Debord are numerous: first there is the enigma of the societal impact of his work, hardly known till the publication of his major work in 1967 and certainly much less noticed in that period than that of most other left-wing philosophers and activists; second, there is also the puzzle of his life, which has been the subject of intense efforts of mythification and self-mythification.

It does not come as a surprise that the most recent biography of Debord is written by Jean-Marie Apostolidès, professor emeritus of Stanford University. A specialist of French literature, drama, and cultural theory and history, Apostolidès had already widely published on Debord and situationism, both in fiction and nonfiction (for an example of the former, see for instance his play Il faut construire l’hacienda, 2006, which reconstructs the amazing encounter between Ivan Chtcheglov, a fellow situationist, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, former prime minister of Canada –and father of the current prime minister of the country, see: http://www.lesimpressionsnouvelles.com/catalogue/hacienda/). Moreover, his work as cultural historian had made Apostolidès very sensitive to some of the basic aspects of Debord’s key influence on society, such as for instance the shift from a patriarchal society to an anti-patriarchal society and the consequences of that shift for social structures either based on or rebuking authority. In his reading of Debord’s life, Apostolidès ceaselessly stresses a decisive paradox in this regard: the very authoritarian character and behavior of the man (but according to the author: the Peter Pan like capricious and megalomaniac child that Debord has always remained).

The current publication of nearly 600 pages is not only the revised and expanded version of previous, shorter biographical and fictional essays, it is also a critical return on the figure of Debord. The focus of the book is less on the literary and cinematographic work of the author than on his life, meticulously described but also systematically interpreted in light of certain childhood and adolescent traumas (absence of the father, overprotection by competing women, conflict with the stepfather and lasting influence of lost and self-constructed identities). The resulting portrait is devastating, at least from a biographical point of view. Apostolidès does not deny at all the literary and intellectual qualities of his model, but his judgment of the man –crudely egoistic, constantly manipulative–  is extremely negative. In that sense, this fascinating biography only increases the mystery of Debord’s publications, whose style and content leave no one indifferent.

By Heidi Peeters

One of Cultural Studies more interesting scholars is Andrew Ross. Besides being an activist, being infamously involved in the Sokal affair (physicist Alan Sokal managed to get a nonsensical article published in the journal with Ross on the editorial board), and being brave enough to ethnographically immerse himself in the life of “Celebration, Florida”, a constructed town by the Disney corporation (as an alternative form of post-Sokal sabbatical reorientation), he also wrote quite a famous book on the conditions of labor in the new neoliberal climate: Nice Work If You Can Get It.

In this book, Ross focuses, amongst others, on how cultural workers (artists, designers, writers, performers…) have been advertised by policy makers, city developers and the New Economy in general as the motor of a dynamic economic reform. Creativity is considered to be a renewable, sustainable and undertapped source of financial value: everyone has it and no large investments are needed to mine this intellectual gold. The mentality of struggling artists is hailed as the new model in neoliberal entrepreneurship: their ethos of self-discipline, their extreme flexibility, their sacrificial willingness to work long-hours for little pay with little overhead (working at home or in the nearest coffee shop), out of pure passion, the need for aesthetic recognition and the hope of climbing to the level of those rare creative stars in the feast-or-famine, winner-takes all economy. Their precarious, part-time, contractual state-of-insecurity is presented as meritocratic freedom, not in the least because self-promotion and the glorification of one’s lifestyle (on Instagram, blogs and facebook) has become part of the creative worker’s job – leisure is always also work. In this way, the perceived “luminosity” (to borrow Angela McRobbie’s term) of the cultural class is used as a force in the renewal of run-down city neighborhoods. With Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class) as the main theorist of and also the private consultant for attracting this rare breed of creative talent, cities become “hipsterized”: bikepaths are created, industrial warehouses get a cultural makeover, and an image of ethnic and sexual diversity is promoted within cultural city-renewal programs. The eventual result of all this luminosity is gentrification: poorer neighborhoods become fashionable and property value rises.

The problem for Ross is the precarious situation of the creative class. Even though they are presented as carefree, latte-drinking, quinoa-eating hipsters, driving around on their fixed-gear bikes and typing away at their apple netbooks, these precarious members of the creative class will not reap the fruit of their intellectual labor, nor will they benefit from the gentrification they bring about. The appeal of creative workers results in a boost of pop-up concept stores, hip eateries and coffee joints and eventually real-estate development projects, chasing away the original creatives who can no longer afford the rents.

Andrew Ross is of course not against creativity or against a creative economy. He nevertheless wants to warn policymakers not to focus blindly on the creation of jobs and growth and economic gain in the creative industries, but also to be aware of the job security and the work-life balance of these laborers, lest the ones who benefit from the policy are real-estate developers and big corporations. But, to quote Ross:

“So far, however, the kind of development  embraced by policymakers seems guaranteed merely to elevate this traditionally unstable work profile into an inspirational model for youth looking to make an adventure out of their entry into the contingent labor force. If the creative industries become the ones to follow, all kinds of jobs, in short, may well look more and more like musicians’ gigs: nice work if you can get it.”

---

Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life And Labor In Precarious Times, New York: New York University Press, 2009

By Jan Baetens

Recently there has been an impressive amount of publications in French on the cultural as well as the societal value of the humanities (Yves Citton) or, more specifically of literature (Tzvetan Todorov, Antoine Compagnon, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, among others). The new book by William Marx, a world-leading voice in the field of literary studies (see for instance his L’Adieu à la littérature, 2005), does just this and simultaneously brings forth something completely different, and that is one of the many reasons to read it urgently.

In La Haine de la littérature (The Hatred of Literature), Marx is not simply making a plea for the literary text by explaining the numerous benefits it can provide to personal and social development –these arguments pro domo have never convinced those who believe that human societies can do without literary creations and institutions–, he more radically tackles the various critiques that have been addressed since Plato (yes, nothing new under the sun) to all those involved in literature –writers, of course, but also readers, accused of idleness for instance or silly indulgence to as useless, if not dangerous, an activity as spending time with books about nothing.

One of the most surprising passages of the book, which can be found in the section on the alleged lack of social and societal relevance of literary texts, discusses the role of cultural studies in these debates. Marx’s position, which is a vibrant tribute to the British pioneers of the discipline, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, is all the more refreshing since it helps overcome one of the most deeply rooted prejudices against cultural studies. It has often been argued, indeed, that cultural studies has been the gravedigger, first of literary studies, second of literature tout court. The current competition between literary and cultural studies departments or the tricky ‘culturalization’ of the literary curriculum as a last lifeguard against the final disappearance of literary studies, may have become a reality of current academic life, but what Marx clearly demonstrates is how such a perception is due to a blatant betrayal of the ideas of Hoggart and Williams. Both Hoggart and Williams were very much in favor of literature and the inclusion of literary studies in the emerging paradigm of cultural studies, which would be crippled, they argued, by the abandon of the literary imagination as well as the literary canon. Marx also shows how this misreading came about: he rightly considers it the collateral damage of the hold-up on cultural studies by sociology and the social sciences in general. Incapable of making sense of the rebellious exceptionality of the literary text which they could not frame within their abstract generalizations, sociologists such as Bourdieu –but it would be unfair to put the blame just on him, in spite of the huge responsibility his way of thinking has had on the statistic streamlining and hence erasure of the literary text qua text– accelerated the move away from close reading and literary scholarship. It is now time to repair the damage and to start reading again. And cultural studies has to speak up for the key role it has always wanted to give to literature.

---

William Marx, La Haine de la littérature. Paris: Minuit, 2015. http://www.leseditionsdeminuit.fr/f/index.php?sp=liv&livre_id=3179