four futures (peter frase)

Four futures is a brief work of political futurology which offers four potential visions of the future: communist/ socialist/ rentist/ exterminist. The latter is the most terrifying and most akin to the current situation. Frase argues that as automated work replaces human work, the need for a low-skilled ‘working class’ population diminishes. They then become a burden, meaning that the cleanest solution for those who possess wealth/ power is to remove them from the social fabric. In a sense this was the Cummings/ Johnson line at the start of the current crisis. This is the books most dystopian vision. At another extreme, Frase suggests that the introduction of universal income could lead to a more egalitarian society where poverty is eliminated. Intriguingly, this is another idea which is receiving far more attention in the wake of the pandemic. The book is readable, thought-provoking, peppered with astute references from science fiction and other futurologists. Nevertheless, at its conclusion, it’s clear that no-one really has the faintest idea how the world is going to pan out as we head towards the middle of the century; something that the 99.9% of the world who hadn’t anticipated the startling arrival of a pandemic for Christmas are now more than aware of. 

ps. I wrote the above words about three weeks ago. The argument that in certain cultures (notably UK&USA) the pandemic was viewed with a certain amount of sanguine disinterest at the start, and there was an inherently fascist notion underpinning that attitude, feels even more convincing today than it did three weeks ago. In the USA figures of authority in the bio-poliitcal establishment have openly come out and stated that those who are not of economic value are disposable. If it was not apparent that Covid-19 is something that has caught the governments of these countries completely by surprise, one might have been forgiven for believing in a conspiracy theory that tallies with Frame’s exterminist vision. The pandemic urges our societies to recalibrate notions of social value. Perhaps the more effective south-east Asian response is connected to a sense that the old still retain ‘value’, even if that value cannot be measured in bland economic terms. 

a journal of a plague year (defoe)

Whilst reading Journal of a Plague Year it struck me that the narrator seemed almost preternaturally relaxed about the whole affair. Yes, people were falling down dead in the street, yes, society was on the brink of collapse, but all the same, our unflappable narrator calmly guides us through the terrible year of 1665. Which is a great consolation, in the year 2020, that reassurance that there is a normality on the other side, not so far away, we will be able to return to doing those social things which we as a species tend to enjoy, unless you’re a Schopenhauer or a Saint Simon Stylites. The novel, (for that is what it is), includes typical Defoe-ian digressions, individual tales and anecdotes tucked away, unusual personalities who the narrator comes across in his wanderings around the city, in spite of the peril. There’s also a highly contemporary fascination with figures, with frequent tallies posted of how the plague affected the different London boroughs. For Londoners there’s the ghoulish fascination of locating where in the city the plague pits were dug and the descriptions of the circumstances of the burials of the sick are some of the most harrowing elements of the book, something our generation had never known the like of, until now. The tone of the book, it struck me, was remarkably similar to that of Robinson Crusoe, a laconic way of dealing with fate, making the best of things. Something which once upon a time we might have called inherently British. There’s no wailing or gnashing of teeth. The retrospective perspective consoles: the narrator lived this time, and got through to the other side and we shall too, god willing. (It is in times of plague that the instinct to believe in god seems most acute, for who else is it who should decide who lives and who dies, if not god?). 

So there was something reassuring about reading this novel, not least in the last thirty pages, as the plague recedes and people start to go about their business again. Until I clocked the publication date. 1722. Some sixty years after the events being recounted. As though someone was writing about 2020 in 2080. My stupidity immediately struck me; I know that Defoe is an 18th century writer. Yet, in the reading, I never once doubted that the narrator was Defoe himself. Because, and this is self-evident, this is what I wished to believe. I wanted that confident, fearless voice to be completely authentic. It was my consolation. 

Something which tells us as much about the process of reading as it does anything else. (It makes me think about the gospels for example.) Journal of a Plague Year is a masterly work of recreation, of pseudo-documentary writing, very much of a piece with Robinson Crusoe. Yet whether it has anything to teach us about how to manage the anxiety of living through plague is doubtful. I can imagine my niece’s grandchild wanting to write about the great confinement of 2020 and talking to her grandmother about it, and there will be value in those memories, and they might make for a great book, but time will have lent its balm to the actual events, because time ameliorates like nothing else can. 

drive your plough over the bones of the dead (olga tokarczuk, tr. antonia lloyd-jones)

Tokarczuk’s novel has a strain running through it which feels completely of-the-moment. The revenge of nature. In a quiet corner of Poland, near the Czech border, a small community is afflicted by a series of murders. The narrator, Janina, a woman who wears her eccentricity firmly on her sleeve, claims that the victims, all of them male hunters, have been killed by deer, who are seeking vengeance for the killing of the hunters. Janina is a wonderfully idiosyncratic soul, who could be a visionary or could be a nutcase. Her justified anger at the whole process of hunting, something she sees as murder, is complemented by a fervent belief in astrology. In her earlier life she has been a structural engineer who helped build a bridge in Syria. Tokarczuk’s text is as playful as her narrator. It takes great pleasure in Janina’s digressions and flights of fancy. It is peopled by eccentrics and oddballs, (including one character who in the english translation is named Oddball) and a Blake translating policeman. The novel is composed of 17 chapters which narrate a story which takes place over the course of a year. It is, in effect, a murder mystery, however the strongest underlying theme is the tension between humans and nature, a theme that seems more and more urgent with every passing day. 

le brio (w&d yvan attal, w. noé debré, yaël langmann)

Introductory note. This was the last film I saw before the great confinement began. It has now been over two weeks since the cinemas were shut. Cinema is a strange beast. The value of theatre as a social tool is self-evident. The day the theatres reopen people will be on their feet applauding no matter the show. The actors will applaud the audience and the audience will applaud the actors and this is exactly as it should be. There’s a tradition of thousands of years of culture which will be being upheld, a tradition which has vanquished plagues, fires, puritans and dictatorships. Cinema is a more private experience. It always feels off-key to me when people applaud a film. No matter how moving or significant the film, it should be greeted with a murmur of appreciation, the contemplation of the credits, the shared sense of having participated in an experience which borders on the religious. Ever since I first started attending the cinema to watch films I have always felt as though the cinema is a second home. There are few places I would rather be if the world were to come to an abrupt end. Perhaps if this goes on much longer we should break into Cinemateca and live there, projecting films through the darkness. Perhaps this is the key to the religious beauty of cinema: the way in which it uses light to transform our darkness. It also explains why television will always be its poor cousin, no matter what they tell you nowadays. On the bad days, and there will be bad days in all of this, I sometimes wonder if Le Brio might not be the last film I ever see in a cinema. Fortunately the good days do battle with the bad ones, and I conclude there will be more moments of sheer luminescence to come. I also give thanks to the brothers Lumière and those others who helped to construct one of the great wonders of the modern age. 

+++

There’s something slightly uncomfortable about Yvan Attal’s modern day Pygmalion narrative. On the one hand the message is clearly supposed to be a positive one for French second gen immigrants. You can make it to the upper echelons of society if that’s your ultimate intention. On the other it postulates that you’re going to need the dedicated help of a self-confessed anarcho-racist to get there. Auteuil plays the loose cannon, Mazard, a brilliant law professor who cites Nietzsche and Baudelaire in his classes, and has a fierce libertarian streak. In his mind it’s fair game to insult minorities, presumably on the basis that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Camélia Jordana’s Neïla is the winsome young student lawyer who he is designated to give a course of intensive teaching, in order to get him off the hook of a racist attack he made against her which has been uploaded to Facebook. 

The film opens with a brilliant sequence where Neïla rushes across Paris, late, to arrive at the Uni. She walks into a vast, 21st C lecture hall, with hundreds of students hunched over their laptops as Auteuil’s professor speaks to them using a microphone. The scene feels like an embodiment of Western European modernity, where lawyers are mass-produced, where the sheer scale of life means even education is dehumanised. However, thereafter, the film slips towards both cliche and a more ambiguous (and less ambitious) mode. The Pygmalion story contains a twist, in that Neïla ultimately, follows her own path, rather than that dictated by her guru, but it feels as though the film is wary of damaging the feelings of Auteuil’s Mazard, eeking out a happy ending which never feels deserved. Attal seems to pull his punches as the film drifts towards a feel good conclusion. It feels like a film which isn’t entirely sure how it wants to situate itself within the context of an evolving modern France.