Review of Wole Soyinka's "Ake: The Years of Childhood"

Wole Soyinka, the first African to ever be awarded the Noble Prize in Literature, grew up in Nigeria in the fifties, when both his native country and much of the rest of Africa was still roiling under imperial European rule. To no one’s surprise, this results in a memoir that very much reads as if the writer is being torn between two priorities, two sets of values, two worlds. Soyinka’s “Ake: The Years of Childhood,” which cover his earliest memories up through approximately age eleven, is no different: he grew up in a world of ancestral religious, social, and cultural practices that mostly coincided easily with, but occasionally butted heads, with the imperial English culture with which it had to share its lebensraum. 

This volume of Soyinka’s memoirs (there are several more by now: see below) is bound up mostly with his domestic life, though later there are memorable recollections of an emerging political consciousness which I’ll mention later. His father (“Essay”) is a local schoolmaster; his mother (“Wild Christian”), the very embodiment of a free spirit who occasionally takes in boarders to their house. Because the memoir uses the limited perspective of a very young boy in a mostly domestic environment, the voice can have the naiveté of a boy this age; however it never has the provincialism that you would expect to accompany that innocence. From the very first episodes of the story, we are able to envision him as a vibrant, curious, enthusiastic, and very precocious little boy. 

Though he is stuck at home, the family’s recent acquisition of a new television set gives Wole an initial way of understanding the complex political world around him. He heard of Hitler faintly and vaguely knew that he was an important figure. Later in “Ake,” Soyinka begins to track the actions of a group called the Egba Women’s Union which fights against excessive taxation. Wild Christian becomes prominent in the Union and begins a series of talks with the Alake of Egbaland, a native administrator.

Soyinka’s recollections of his early childhood resemble the kind of person I have seen him to be in interviews – joyous, thoughtful, intellectually curious, and appreciative. He displays the kind of wonderment and delight that we can only hope to have in fully grown adults. From the first chapter which describes the beautiful geography around Ake to the tumultuous politics of colonial Nigeria, the reader walks away from this memoir feeling that he has inhabited the shoes of a child who is bigger than the land that contains him, but at the same time will grow up to write its stories and tell its histories like none of his contemporaries have. Oh, and the language. The language! I will not quote anything directly, but suffice is to say that’s simply magisterial. 

To compliment this volume, readers might also be interested in “Isara: A Voyage Around Essay” (1989) which deals with the years directly before the ones in “Ake,” “Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years” (1994) which discusses tracks Soyinka’s life after “Ake” through the time of his arrest and two-year imprisonment, “The Man Died: Prison Notes” (1972) detailing those two horrific years, and most recently “You Must Set Forth at Dawn” (2006), about his experiences from young manhood until publication.

Review of David Bohm's "On Dialogue"

David Bohm, the author of “On Dialogue,” was apparently recognized as one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the twentieth century. Despite my background in physics, I’d never heard of his contributions to the field, and I’d certainly never heard of his contributions to other fields, including … well, whatever you could call this book. Is it philosophy? Communications? I know it’s not an attempt at literary theory, but some of it seems to resemble it. It fancies itself a visionary way of reimagining and reawakening the power of human communication, but much of it sounds like New Age occultism – spooky and obscurantist, weird and much of it frankly unfounded.

Bohm thinks that following his recommendations will result in a kind of enhanced, unbiased conversation (which he insists on calling “dialogue”) between people that will help foster a common sense of humanity, and that our dialogue with one another has been irrevocably tainted by personal ambition and unexamined prejudices. Because we have these presuppositions, we can only engage in “conversations” (which is somehow very different from dialogue, which is the idealized type of human interaction). How conversation is different from dialogue is never really discussed. The way we can reestablish this most meaningful type of human connection is by letting go of these ambitions and prejudices.

He says that dialogue should ideally begin with no set purpose, no leader, and no hidden assumptions or opinions which will only serve to make you defensive during the course of the dialogue. Now, gentle reader, there is a difference between suspending opinions which might be culturally or religiously biased, which is something I would completely understand doing to open a dialogue fully up, and what Bohm is asking us to do in this book. He seems to want us to sit and listen to absolutely anyone say anything they sincerely believe. But the problem with sincerity is this: it and four dollars will buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. 

Considering that Bohm is a scientist and is ostensibly on the hunt for something resembling truth about the physical world, this is somewhat disheartening to read. Do I need to suspend my judgments about the absurdity of Holocaust denial when I speak to someone who actually denies historical reality? Or fail to adduce the evidence that the Earth is roughly spherical to a flat Earther while engaged in a conversation with one? For someone who thinks that the scientific endeavor is something other than an utterly futile one, how can someone genuinely think these things? To request that we listen to varying opinions, measure their respective amounts of evidence, and adopt the one that has the most explanatory power all the while maintaining a cool head about those who have very different ideas from our own is a very good idea. Actually engaging people with ridiculous, patently false ideas is another. Not only is it silly, but it’s dangerous. There are some people who should be disabused of their false ideas. In fact, if that’s not the main point of dialogue, it should be one of its major reasons for existing. To say that dialogue shouldn’t be used for the purpose of convincing people of things we know to be true is detrimental to the idea of any kind of human interaction, especially if you believe that some things are true and some things aren’t.

This is mostly a collection of ad hoc work, with only a couple of pieces having been previously published elsewhere. Most of what I spoke about above is found in the first piece, “On Dialogue.” The subsequent pieces serve to expound upon the first in minor, tangential ways, and none of them seemed as egregious as what was set forward in the first piece. If this is the kind of uncritical work that Bohm is known for, I think I can safely bypass his other stuff and regard him for what he is: a physicist who should stick to doing what he knows best.

Review of Edward J. Larson's "Summer for the Gods"

The Scope Trial (occasionally referred to with both contempt and fondness as “The Monkey Trial”) has a life of its own, and much of that life has little or nothing to do with what actually occurred in Dayton, Tennessee during the summer of 1925 when William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow met to defend the merits of the case. Lawrence and Lee’s 1955 play “Inherit the Wind” and the film based off it five years later form much of the basis for popular (but ultimately false) ideas about the trial. And of course it doesn’t help matters that the topics of science and religious have been held to be, at least in the popular imagination, mortal enemies. 

In “Summer for the Gods,” Edward J, Larson retells the story of the trial stripped of all the mythology, without compromising readability or interest for the layperson. Larson is both a law and history professor, so he’s in a unique position to clarify the historical content and the legal matters. He does a stupendous job of doing both. 

Not that the idea of media sensationalism is anything new, but one of the things I liked most about this book was that it shows exactly how the trial was, in many ways, a Potemkin village. As soon as the Butler Act (the statute which prevented the teaching of evolutionary theory in science classrooms in the state of Tennessee) was passed, the newly founded ACLU offered to defend anyone prosecuted by the state for breaking the law. Their plan – for the case to work its way up through the courts and eventually find itself in the Supreme Court docket – didn’t go exactly as planned.

The trial ended up bringing names that spelled the worst kind of boosterism for the beleaguered small-town residents of Dayton who had probably never seen the likes of the media circus they witnessed for those several days – two of the country’s best-known attorneys, Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan heading up the prosecution. Darrow was fresh out of defending accused murders Leopold and Loeb, whose trial had only a year before also been breathlessly called in the media “the trial of the century”; Bryan was a decade out of his two-year stint as Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, from which he resigned due to the international buildup of the First World War. He was a staunch progressive – back when “progressive” meant, among other things, supporting prohibition and belief in Biblical literalism. How times change.

The issues on the table? Well, they weren’t anything resembling what recent similar cases – say Dover v. Kitzmiller – argued. Bryan’s legal arguments really had very little to do with the merits of science or evolutionary theory. Instead, he argued on majoritarian grounds that if a state law is passed, it was obviously the will of the people and, having gained the appropriate number of votes in the legislature and being signed by the governor, it was constitutionally legitimate. It was much more of a states’ rights, or even a people’s rights, approach than the imagined epic battle between science and religion. The lynchpin of the defense was to get Bryan to testify and ultimately push him into a corner about the proclaimed literal truth of Genesis. A little spoiler alert: despite Darrow’s attempt to utterly embarrass and confound Bryan by getting him on the witness stand and grilling him on the timeline of the events in Old Testament (probably the most historically accurate part of the trial that people would remember) the trial ends in a way that most people who don’t know much about it wouldn’t anticipate. The presiding judge dismisses Bryan’s testimony as irrelevant, and Scopes loses. And since the Bryan’s purpose isn’t to shame Scopes or even make him a personal target, he magnanimously offered to pay the $100 fine for Scope’s conviction, which never had to be paid anyway, since the fine was overturned by a higher court. 

Being one of the many whose sole knowledge of the Scopes Trial was based mostly on the play and what was casually bandied about in high school science books, I appreciated Larson’s approach, as full of it is of equanimity and balance. Larson says a few things that make it rather obvious where he falls in the “debate” insofar as there is one (and among professional biologists, there really isn’t): he can look down condescendingly on Bryan on the witness stand trying to defend his ultra-literal view of Genesis, but those of us who credit science where it is due have a hard time not having a little fun at Bryan’s expense. Go read, then watch “Inherit The Wind.” Then as a good counterbalance, and some reliable history, read this. It’s one of the best books on science and religion I’ve had the pleasure of reading in a while.

Review of Jeffrey Burton Russell's "Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World"

To be frank, I haven’t read any of the previous three of Jeffery Burton Russell’s books which together comprise a “history of the Devil” from antiquity through the twentieth century. I started at the end, because the only other volume I own, the third in the series, is packed away in a box somewhere and it didn’t have the chance to catch my eye. The reason why series like these attract me so much is beyond me – maybe I’m just drawn to big, unwieldy reading projects. However, judging from the last volume alone, this seems to be at a superficial treatment, with little to offer someone already interested in the history of religious ideas.

This volume picks up with the beginning of the Reformation, whose emphasis on sola fide revitalized older medieval ideas of diabology. Some interesting, and scary, fragments of Martin Luther’s life are retold, including the tidbit that one of his most important biographers, Heiko Oberman, described Luther’s whole existence as a “war with Satan.” He also uses this section of the book to look at the diabology of John Calvin and sixteenth-century mystic-contemplatives St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. 

With the appearance of the Enlightenment, increasing popularity of empiricism, rationalism, and use of the scientific method, people started to take diabology – or at least the possible existence of the Devil – much less seriously (which is hardly a surprise). In this section of the book, Chapter III, the reader gets a plodding, thirty page-long piece of exegesis on Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” which while it is a poem largely about the Devil, seems to consist of too much summary and too much ham-handed literary analysis. Its appearance is abrupt and completely out of place in an otherwise smooth (at least until that this point) history of ideas. 

When Russell begins to talk about the Enlightenment and some of its most prominent thinkers, he weirdly and biliously starts tossing around pejoratives, like “propagandist.” He doesn’t seem to except the modern biological consensus position on evolution, stating “new reflections on randomness and time suggest that even in billions of years the information of intelligent life by random processes is virtually impossible,” though he intelligently stops short of trying to argue that a supernaturally intelligent being is responsible for the diversity of life on Earth (p. 151). 

He has a particular dislike for Hume, especially his argument against miracles, which Russell again endlessly belabors, attempts to rebut, and fails. He hilariously claims that de Sade is the “logical conclusion of atheism” – an interesting admission concerning an author whose work perhaps more than any other in the eighteenth century confirms the existence of evil in the world. He reads de Sade as an inveterate misanthrope and sexual deviant (which is much too easy) instead of as an ironist who is actually trying to make cogent points about the very real existence of good and evil in society. None of this bodes well for his reading of Goethe’s “Faust” – which is much shorter than his reading of Milton, though just as uninteresting. 

The overall tone of this book comes across as a later-day apology for religious ideas which don’t really jibe with modernity, which probably explains his hostility to several facets of it. Russell’s obvious trouble reconciling himself to commonly accepted scientific positions (like evolution), the long, meandering renditions of literary works (of which I only mentioned two, but there are several more of less important writers), and his obvious disdain for the Enlightenment make for a perfect storm which make this book both sad and funny to read. Russell’s specialization is the medieval time period, so maybe I just caught him trying to tie up loose ends in a historical period with which he has little familiarity. This can be forgiven. As soon as third volume finds its way out of a box and onto a bookshelf, I might pick it up.

Review of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis' "Dom Casmurro"

“Dom Casmurro” is one of those books that, if you had the good fortune of given a solid Brazilian education in the humanities, you would be quite familiar with. In fact, de Assis is still regularly assigned in literature classes there, and is regarded as one of the greatest writers working in the Portuguese language in the nineteenth century. It’s one of those serendipities of history that we Anglophones don’t know him better; as many commentaries on the novel all too enthusiastically point out, he displays some unusual parallels to writers whose names are more familiar to our ears, namely Flaubert, Balzac, and Zola. 

On the surface, it’s a simple enough love story between Bento, a young boy whose mother has ambitions of him becoming a seminarian and his beloved Capitu. Bento actually goes to the seminary for a short time and meets and befriends a fellow seminarian named Escobar. There is a possibility that Escobar also loves Capitu, but de Assis leaves this wonderfully ambiguous. Flaubert, however, never played with the unreliable narrator to the extent that de Assis does in this novel. Because of the open ambiguity of Escobar’s feelings, Bento and his ravenous jealousy are left to narrate the novel as they will – and it does seem that his jealousy becomes a character all its own. It shapes the entire world of Escobar’s intentions, all the while never leaving Capitu the time to shape her own or explain her actions. Does Bento have reason to feel this jealousy, or is it all just a figment of his own imagination? 

These questions, which would otherwise form a good denouement for the action, are never resolved. You’re left in the position that Bento is, examining the minute details of his relationship for signs of Capitu’s infidelity. It’s difficult to tell whether someone like Ford Madox Ford knew of de Assis’ work , but if he did I wouldn’t be the least surprised. The similarities with “The Good Soldier” (which postdates this novel by fifteen years) are uncanny: the use of the unreliable narrator in the examination of a love triangle (or is it even a triangle at all?) is extraordinarily riveting and effective. For those weaned on the European canon and interested in branching out and finding new writers whose names might not be as well-recognized in the English-speaking world, you could do a lot worse than Machado de Assis.

Review of Eric A. Havelock's "The Muse Learns to Write"

About 28 centuries ago, one of the most importance occurrences in what would eventually become Europe took place: the sudden evolution of the Phoenician syllabary into the full Greek alphabet we know today. Before this time, absolutely all information had to be transmitted orally: from contracts between parties to how to become a Greek citizen to knowledge of everything from your complex family genealogy to how to engage on the battlefield. Two scholars, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, together proposed an idea which would have allowed all pre-literate poets (like Homer) to improvise their poetry; it also gives a cohesive set of explanations concerning why Homeric poetry looks the way it does. Their thesis, later picked up by the likes of Walter Ong and Eric Havelock, is called the Parry-Lord thesis. “The Muse Learns to Write” is Havelock’s last major work and mostly a book-length meditation on the Parry-Lord thesis. It is also a summa which tries to recapitulate an entire career’s worth of ideas while tying up loose ends. Because of this, its length – under 130 pages – it seem like a short, precursory introduction into the idea of orality. It is far more complex than its length would initially lead you to assume.

Havelock, for many years a Sterling Professor of the classics at Yale, is interested not so much in the shape of Homeric poetry, but rather the forms that occurred in human consciousness that were caused by the shift from orality to literacy. Also, how does this important transition inflict itself also upon the texts themselves, deforming or reshaping their meaning and content? 

Some questions are so important that they may be almost counted to be scandalous: “One of the difficulties of thinking about language is that you have to use language to think about it. A linguistic act has to be directed upon itself. Once written down, the act could be visualized and this visual this could be separated from the act of speaking and laid out in a kind of visual map. But what was the nature and significance of the speaking act itself? What has been its role in man’s history?” (Havelock, 34). According to Havelock, not even the emergence of Greek philosophy escaped the influence of the orality-literacy transition. He cites the unique character of Plato, whose denunciation of poetry as a form of rhetorical decadence marks a sharp break from his own written prose (a prose which, should be noted, is highly indicative of his own background as a dramatist). Since so much of philosophy was born of Plato’s dramatic dialogues involving Socrates, we have to ask ourselves whether even the most basic presuppositions of philosophy – ideas of freedom, individuality, and what it means to know could not have gone untransformed by the orality-literacy transition. 

Havelock goes on to present both a general and specific theory of Greek orality, as well as looking at the work of people whose work is closely related to his own, like Marshall McLuhan and Harold McInnis. For a one-stop précis of Havelock’s work, this is a wonderful place to start. As I said above, this is a summa, so it touches on many ideas, especially the ones on the orality-literacy break, which is most fully set forward in his earlier and more scholarly book “Preface to Plato” (1963).

Book Haul #14

Opus Pistorum, Henry Miller
Voss, Patrick White
Three Plays, Eugene O'Neill
Omeros, Derek Walcott
The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, Sir Philip Sydney
The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
Black Boy, Richard Wright
Almanac of the Dead: A Novel, Leslie Marmon Silko
Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo
Operation Shylock, Philip Roth
Isara, Wole Soyinka
Lanark, Alasdair Gray
The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, Robert Nozick
Literature and Western Man, J. B. Priestley