Helen Tyson

Critical Quarterly

‘Notebook Literature’: Virginia Woolf and Marion Milner

No abstract is available for this article.

Issue Information

Matthew Taunton

Editorial

Notes on contributors

Rick de Villiers

Poetic Licentiousness and the Destitutions of High Culture

Aleksandra Violana

A Surface Reading of Vladimir Nabokov

Daniel Cook

Mrs Gulliver's Travels: Minor‐Character Elaboration in Theory and Practice

Oxmardyke is named for a now defunct Yorkshire rail crossing. In 2017, sound recordist Chris Watson set up microphones alongside the tracks of the Hull Line, initially to record a freight train. But Watson soon began making multiple recordings from around the site over several weeks. The late Philip Jeck, turntablist, composer, and artist, would twist these recordings into Oxmardyke during the final couple months of his life, dying in March 2022. Ranging for eerie to abrasive, melancholy to crushing, Jeck has morphed Watson's purposeful recordings of trains, bridges, and water into an array of cavernous and reverberating pieces which swallow up the landscape, railway, and cars alike. The resulting record is one about crossings, not only Oxmardyke crossing itself but also the crossing of Watson and Jeck, natural and industrial, high and low fidelities, signal and noise. Oxmardyke is a complex and intense sonic space, a testament to both of its creators' mastery, and, ultimately, a beautiful record about the forgotten places where nature and culture meet. Bird song serves as a recurring motif, scattered across the album's nine tracks. Its deployment on the opener, 'Oxmardyke', is illustrative of the record's preoccupation with nature and society in dialogue, conflict, and collapse. A twittering bubbles across the stereo field, a mostly unaltered version of Watson's recording, before an alarm of some kind begins to beep, oscillating between notes, breaking the pastoral spell. First a car, then a train whoosh by. A thin and highly treated drone emerges beneath the bird song and trains, a sound not clearly assignable to the orders of vehicles, alarms, birds, and wind. This track and the penultimate 'Salt End' let Watson's recordings breathe and come to the forefront. Yet, Jeck's wiry undergrowth of clearly treated sound refuses a naturalisation of the scene. Unlike some of the work from Natasha Barrett's (also excellent) recent album of electronically altered field recordings, Reconfiguring the Landscape (2023), we can never be wholly 'immersed' in the location of Oxmardyke in the sense that the landscape of sounds can be picked out and spatialised. This disconnect, felt strongly on the dark and rumbling 'Barn' and 'Drum', complicates the narrative of environmental exploitation that the album seems to open up before us: the cars and trains drowning out the birds, society/humans/capital churning up the landscape, dark satanic mills, and so forth. There is, of course, a very real sense of anthropogenic environmental collapse, as when the metallic high-pitched ringing on 'Coop', a sound situated all too perfectly in the centre of the aural space, masks the soundscape of bird calls captured in dispersed stereo. But this binary of artificial/natural breaks down aurally as the track progresses. String-like swells rise, creeping in sinisterly; the birds drop out. When they re-emerge, the calls are as centred as the ringing sound from the track's opening, losing their illusion of naturalness and the immediacy of their previous audio spatialisation. Perspective, or loss thereof, is for acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer a key distinction between high-fidelity (hi-fi) and low-fidelity (lo-fi) soundscapes. Schafer almost entirely equates the former with 'natural' environments – forests, the countryside, etc. – whilst the latter is ubiquitous with industry, cities, cars, and other vehicles. His distinction proves illuminating when listening to Oxmardyke. For Schafer, a hi-fi soundscape, possessing a 'favourable signal-to-noise ratio', is 'one in which discrete sounds can be heard clearly because of the low ambient noise level' and 'there is perspective-foreground and background …', whilst in a lo-fi soundscape 'individual acoustic signals are obscured in an overdense population of sounds'.1 'Coop' initially seems to make this distinction, with the hi-fi, clearly spatialised recordings of Watson smothered by Jeck's crackling lo-fi orchestra, but the return of the bird song at the track's end problematises the division, the sound resting between the immediate and the manipulated, the natural and the technological, human and non-human. This in-between quality, the uneasy and intense encounter of cars, muffled voices, and trains with plants, birds, and the elements pervade the record. It becomes most explicit on 'Bridge', where the sound of running water flows into the tidal rushes of cars. This shimmering bed is cut across or bridged by the thunderous clunking of the bridge itself, the joints shuddering under the weight of what crosses it. These thuds speak to Michel Serres's important point that signal arises out of noise through an essentially exclusionary process (i.e. this part of the soundscape is meaningless noise – we will ignore it; this part is meaningful noise – we will decode it): as the bridge cuts across the cars and water, it divides, marks, renders audible the divide which it also bridges. In fact, this process affected this review. As I walked through Norwich listening to the opening track, I realised I was filtering out the actual bird song around me to make the recorded bird song meaningful. Schafer's 'favourable signal-to-noise ratio' of the natural world was always predicated on a gate box, on Schafer allowing only certain sounds to cross into the realm of meaning. He does acknowledge, however, in his book The Tuning of the World (1977), the influence of fusing electronic with natural sounds in his own compositions and that 'The polynoise of the sea resembles the white noise of the laboratory'.2 Such a sentence might sum up numerous albums from Jeck's career, most notably his 1999 masterpiece Surf and its monstrous opener, 'Demolition'. Oxmardyke is also at this crossing of white noise and polynoise, the point at which human structures flow into natural ones and vice versa, our impact on our environment, its impact on us. It prods at what we choose to cut out, the spaces of crossing which we ignore, or pass over as non-places, recasting Oxmardyke as a crossing of crossings, the place where nature and society dissolve into each other. Given the bleak outlook of our current ecological crisis (citation surely unnecessary), tracks like 'Bridge', 'Coop', and the closing 'Spurn' at times inspire dread. The latter in particular, consisting of pummelling water submerging the listener and the death knell of a single bird croaking faintly in the left channel, presages a future already written in the present interactions between petrol capitalism and the earth. Yet, there are lighter moments, such as the four-to-the-floor woozy groove of 'Beetroot Train' and the second on 'Ah' when a waterfowl honks much closer to the microphone than all its comrades. What's more, despite the association between Jeck and so-called 'hauntology', none of that genre-not-genre's usual uncanny nostalgia (think The Caretaker or Jeck's own Vinyl Coda (2000–2001)) creeps into Oxmardyke. Whilst Jeck was apparently inspired 'the ancient history of the area from 6th century Anglo-Saxon times to the Knights Templar',3 and this does come through in earthy churnings of 'Drum', the record feels surprisingly present and urgent. Perhaps, this is Watson's recordings, which so brilliantly capture the location that Jeck never entirely allows us to be present in. It is the crossing between these two composers, their complimentary and contrasting aesthetics, which allow Oxmardyke to shine as a knot of many crossings, a record, a farewell (to Jeck and to the now defunct Oxmardyke gate box), and an ecological warning. Adam Maric-Cleaver is a PhD candidate at the University of East Anglia. His research is on the influence of telecommunications on politics and aesthetics of 1960s literature, with an emphasis on noise, faults, and glitches.

Adam Maric‐Cleaver

Crossing of Crossings: Oxmardyke by Chris Watson and Philip Jeck

Ben Philipps

That Funny Money‐Man: A Hundred Years of Harmonium

'Entitled', in the sense currently on everyone's lips ('believing oneself to be inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment'1), is an adjective. A phrase such as 'a group of older, rather entitled, people', for example, makes this unmistakable both by placing it in front of the noun and by treating it as gradable (i.e. if you can be said to be 'rather' entitled, or 'very' entitled, or 'less' entitled than someone else, then 'entitled' is definitely an adjective).2 So it is interesting to find that the OED mostly presents the word not as an adjective at all, but as a form of the verb 'to entitle'. For example, I may be 'entitled to compensation', or I may read a periodical 'entitled Critical Quarterly', and in usages of this kind, the active verb is not far away: my circumstances entitle me to the compensation; Cox and Dyson founded a magazine and entitled it Critical Quarterly. When the word works in this verb-like fashion, it is formally incomplete until it arrives at its complement: the volume is entitled … what? the claimant is entitled … what to? The pure adjective, on the contrary, makes it possible to say that someone is entitled tout court. In thus marginalising the word's adjectival potential, the OED is doing no more than reflecting its material. The verb can be traced back into Middle English and beyond; the adjective, with one or two technical exceptions, is not attested until the mid-twentieth century. Even now that it is fashionable, it is far from dominant. For instance, a recent searchable one-month run of The Times yields 50 occurrences of the word 'entitled', of which 31 are part of the phrase 'entitled to', 13 are synonymous with 'named', and only 6 are examples of the adjective.3 It is, you could say, a niche meaning; it remains to be seen whether it will establish itself or start to sound dated. The niche seems to have been originally carved out by a specific incident. The OED's first citations, for the relevant sense of both 'entitled' and 'entitlement', are taken from the writings of the child psychologist Robert Coles, who in the 1960s and 1970s published Children of Crisis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning survey of the social and psychological condition of the USA's children.4 He described the experience of childhood in various social groups and in the final volume turned his attention to the offspring of the rich. He insisted on the diversity of this class: like any other cross-section of kids, they displayed unpredictably varying values, characters and degrees of happiness and unhappiness. All the same, he identified a particular mindset which they seemed to him to share, and his chosen term for this was 'entitlement'.5 It came out of a conversation with a lawyer in New Orleans, who was reflecting on his daughter's confidence that she would be in the Mardi Gras parade; his influence and connections in the city meant that she was, so to speak, entitled to expect a role in the celebrations. He remarked that this particular entitlement was only one instance of a more general acquired attitude: she was, and knew she was, similarly entitled to possessions, comfort, vacations, educational opportunities, and so on. This anecdote is exemplary from our point of view because it shows the adjective hatching out from the verb: the daughter's circumstances entitle her to such an assortment of things that one stops listing them and starts to think of her as simply an entitled person. Coles recognised the word because, as it happened, it was part of the vocabulary of the psychiatry in which he had been trained. The phrase 'narcissistic entitlement' was already in use to denote a kind of maladjustment in which a person's ability to form relationships is blocked by an anxious need for personal pre-eminence, unique consideration, the biggest share of whatever's going. To be sure, this condition is neither inevitable in well-off families nor peculiar to them; nevertheless, children brought up in luxury are the more susceptible to it (poverty breeds other kinds of narcissism). So the wealthy father's accidental echo of the psychiatric category pointed interestingly to the ways in which material inequality can have emotional as well as socio-economic consequences. In other words, the term was interdisciplinary from the start. To call someone 'entitled' is to characterise them; it denotes a personality type, an individual who feels entitled to special treatment. This feeling becomes an object of clinical concern to the extent that it is irrational: it is when the subject has no such entitlement in reality that their belief in it constitutes a mental disorder. But it is central to Coles's argument that the 'entitled' children he studied are not deluded. At one point he mentions a boy whose father and grandfather are eminent lawyers and who is going to be a lawyer too. The child says, not that he 'wants to be' a lawyer, but that he 'will be' (58); he takes it for granted that on his path through Harvard into the legal profession, all the gates will open for him. This assumption may be annoying, but it is not pathological: they will. Thus the psychological force of 'entitled' is complicated by the fact that it has a sociological meaning too. The word inhabits two semantic fields at once. They act as if they're going to be tops in everything, and they're pleased as can be with themselves, because there is nothing they can't do, and there's nothing they can't get, and there's nothing they can't win …. They're not spoiled one bit, but oh, they have a high opinion of themselves! (64) The word's journey from that rather subtle introduction in the 1970s to its currency today is not easy to trace. The OED assigns it to North America, where over the last decades of the twentieth century, it seems to have passed by degrees from technical category to colloquialism, as psychological terms sometimes do ('passive-aggressive', 'OCD'). In Britain, however, its adoption was both more belated and more rapid. To take another hint from archived newspapers, the Daily Mirror affords no examples of the adjective earlier than about 2020; until then, the paper used 'entitled' only in its participial form. But in the sample month which I invoked earlier (September–October 2023), there are about a hundred occurrences, of which over forty are in the new sense. Most of these are instances of popular usage in that either they appear in readers' comments, or else they are quoted from remarks made by members of the public in stories that have evidently been collected from social media. At least in this semi-public sphere, then, 'entitled' is something we have taken quite suddenly to calling one another. What has most obviously got lost in this haste is Coles's avoidance of judgement. The word has shed its ambivalence and become uniformly, even furiously, pejorative. Googling 'entitled person' summons up a range of indignant 'how-to' guides – how to spot entitled people, what makes them so nasty, how to handle them, whether to try and confront them with the truth about themselves. The word taps into a rather horrifying online reservoir of resentment. Accordingly, if speakers want to refuse the negative judgement, they have to refuse the word too: 'It's not "entitled" to ask for the bare minimum'; or 'we're entitled for suggesting it should be different … I don't think so'; or 'It seems a bit entitled of her tbh' – in this last example not one but three ameliorating formulas ('seems', 'a bit', 'tbh') speak an uneasy feeling that the adjective itself is unacceptably hostile.6 The same animus is vividly illustrated by a Guardian leader about the House of Lords: the Prime Minister, it declares, should stop the award of peerages and 'drive a stake through the system's entitled heart'.7 Here, the allusive placing of the epithet makes it into a synonym for 'evil'. You might expect that to moralise the word in this way would also desocialise it – that as it focussed on an objectionable individual, it would lose its general reference to wealth and class. And certainly one reason the word became so widespread so fast is that it attached itself to a kind of personal presumptuousness for which British culture already had a disapproving place. 'A bride-to-be has been branded "entitled" after asking her brother to contribute to her wedding fund and refusing to accept his £5000 gift'.8 Brother and sister presumably belong to much the same social stratum; the adjective applies purely to the sister's character. But even a locution of this kind has its class overtones. The allegation is not after all simply that the bride-to-be is self-centred or grasping but that she demands things from the people around her as if she possessed some kind of recognised superiority. A few years ago one might have said, 'who does she think she is – Lady Muck?' In that expression, personal disapproval is already channelling a kind of anti-elitism, and this has arguably been amplified by the advent of 'entitled'. Its take-off in Britain coincided roughly with the fall of Boris Johnson, and when people call him 'entitled', which they often do, they are pointing both at his shameless behaviour and at his conspicuously privileged education, with the loose implication that the one is caused by the other. Moral condemnation is not separated from class hostility; they work together within the word. This figure migrates easily from the politics of class to those of gender – in Johnson's own case, certainly, but also, for example, in the incident after the Women's World Cup Final in August 2023, when the President of the Spanish Football Federation, Luis Rubiales, gave the captain of the winning team an unexpected, unwanted, and highly public kiss on the lips. Although his behaviour was idiosyncratic to the point of weirdness, it prompted a social media denunciation of 'entitled' men which aligned it with general structures of sexual inequality. The discourse shuttled between individual blame and systemic critique: the 'entitled' action was attributed to the ambient patriarchy which entitled Rubiales to perpetrate it, but the universalising explanation did not afford him any mitigation. He was uniquely guilty as well as culturally representative. Thus, the new power of the word to express personal dislike does not diminish its capacity for social analysis: in fact, its special power may exactly be that it allows the dislike to borrow the authority of the analysis. Police chief: Crime is being driven by an entitled generation that has never been told 'no' – and who instead take pride in not respecting others. (9.10.23) The logic of this reversal can be found not only in use but also in the interior of the word itself. Its adjectival life is never completely autonomous: even when it is operating as a simple insult, it is shadowed by the question of what the entitled person is entitled to and what authority has conferred their entitlement upon them. In short, calling someone entitled is quite close to talking about their rights, and this implication is relevant, to put it mildly, to the discourse of a ruling party which has encroached upon a significant range of them – for example the right to the vote, to asylum, to movement between countries, to free assembly, to the organised withdrawal of labour, to judicial review, to dental care. That illiberal programme runs the more smoothly if an unreflective verbal convention routinely represents entitlement as an inherently bad thing. Most parents probably don't want, and in any case can't afford, to bring up 'entitled' children. But that is not quite the same thing as bringing up children to claim the freedoms to which they are entitled. That is to say, the pejorative force of the word does not after all make it a progressive expression, only a populist one. Peter Womack is emeritus professor of literature and drama at the University of East Anglia; his books include the New Critical Idiom volume on Dialogue (2011).

Peter Womack

Entitled

Julia Dallaway

The Art of Precarity

Colin MacCabe

Unfinished interview with Terence Davies

Seth Mehl

White

Critical QuarterlyEarly View Editorial Distant Voices/Still Lives Colin MacCabe, Corresponding Author Colin MacCabe [email protected] PittsburghSearch for more papers by this author Colin MacCabe, Corresponding Author Colin MacCabe [email protected] PittsburghSearch for more papers by this author First published: 07 March 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12776Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Editorial: Distant Voices/Still Lives

Critical QuarterlyVolume 66, Issue 1 p. 102-107 Review Article The Challenge of Ambivalence: Hitchens on Orwell Roseanna Webster, Corresponding Author Roseanna Webster [email protected] School of History, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK Correspondence Roseanna Webster, School of History, University of St Andrews, UK. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Roseanna Webster, Corresponding Author Roseanna Webster [email protected] School of History, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK Correspondence Roseanna Webster, School of History, University of St Andrews, UK. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 05 March 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12773Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume66, Issue1Special Issue: Distant Voices, Still LivesApril 2024Pages 102-107 RelatedInformation

Roseanna Webster

The Challenge of Ambivalence: Hitchens on Orwell

Critical QuarterlyVolume 66, Issue 1 p. 90-95 Review Article The Real Age of Newspapers: Hitch, the Vanity Fair Years Stephen Smith, Corresponding Author Stephen Smith [email protected] School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom Correspondence Stephen Smith, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Stephen Smith, Corresponding Author Stephen Smith [email protected] School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom Correspondence Stephen Smith, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 25 February 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12774Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume66, Issue1Special Issue: Distant Voices, Still LivesApril 2024Pages 90-95 RelatedInformation

Stephen Smith

The Real Age of Newspapers: Hitch, the Vanity Fair Years

Critical QuarterlyVolume 66, Issue 1 p. 85-89 Review Article On the 'Hitchslap' Yohann Koshy, Corresponding Author Yohann Koshy [email protected] Correspondence Yohann Koshy, 140 Olney Road, London SE17 3HR, UK. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Yohann Koshy, Corresponding Author Yohann Koshy [email protected] Correspondence Yohann Koshy, 140 Olney Road, London SE17 3HR, UK. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 25 February 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12769Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume66, Issue1Special Issue: Distant Voices, Still LivesApril 2024Pages 85-89 RelatedInformation

Yohann Koshy

On the ‘Hitchslap’

Critical QuarterlyVolume 66, Issue 1 p. 96-101 Review Article 'Too Straight' for Fiction: Christopher Hitchens and No One Left to Lie To Ash Caton, Ash CatonSearch for more papers by this author Ash Caton, Ash CatonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 February 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12770Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume66, Issue1Special Issue: Distant Voices, Still LivesApril 2024Pages 96-101 RelatedInformation

Ash Caton

‘Too Straight’ for Fiction: Christopher Hitchens and No One Left to Lie To

Kathryn Allan

Inclusive

Critical QuarterlyEarly View Review Article Living in a World of Pain Jake Williams, Corresponding Author Jake Williams [email protected] Search for more papers by this author Jake Williams, Corresponding Author Jake Williams [email protected] Search for more papers by this author First published: 21 February 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12771Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Jake Williams

Living in a World of Pain

Terence Davies

John Taylor Bills of Mortality: Poems by Terence Davies

Critical QuarterlyEarly View Poetry Waiting for the rainbow—Poems by Terence Davies John Taylor, Corresponding Author John Taylor [email protected] United Kingdom Correspondence John Taylor, United Kingdom Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author John Taylor, Corresponding Author John Taylor [email protected] United Kingdom Correspondence John Taylor, United Kingdom Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 07 February 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12765Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Waiting for the rainbow—Poems by Terence Davies

Critical QuarterlyEarly View Original Article Producing Terence Davies—A short memoir Colin MacCabe, Corresponding Author Colin MacCabe [email protected] University of Pittsburgh Correspondence Colin MacCabe, University of Pittsburgh. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Colin MacCabe, Corresponding Author Colin MacCabe [email protected] University of Pittsburgh Correspondence Colin MacCabe, University of Pittsburgh. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 02 February 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12763Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Producing Terence Davies—A short memoir

Critical QuarterlyEarly View Original Article Aphorism as Narrative Method: Assessing John Berger's G. Peter Huhne, Corresponding Author Peter Huhne [email protected] Independent Scholar, New York, USA Correspondence Peter Huhne Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Peter Huhne, Corresponding Author Peter Huhne [email protected] Independent Scholar, New York, USA Correspondence Peter Huhne Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 30 January 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12767Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Peter Huhne

Aphorism as Narrative Method: Assessing John Berger's G.

Critical QuarterlyEarly View Original Article Atheism in the Grand Scheme of Things Bruce Robbins, Corresponding Author Bruce Robbins [email protected] Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, 1150 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, New York, USA, 10027Search for more papers by this author Bruce Robbins, Corresponding Author Bruce Robbins [email protected] Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, 1150 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, New York, USA, 10027Search for more papers by this author First published: 29 January 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12759Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Bruce Robbins

Atheism in the Grand Scheme of Things

Juliette Bretan

T.S. Eliot, Post‐War Geopolitics and ‘Eastern Europe’

Although almost nobody has been prosecuted for witchcraft since the eighteenth century, people are often accused of it today if we can believe Daniel Barenboim, John Bercow, Jair Bolsonaro, Novak Djokovic, Paul Gambaccini, Boris Johnson, Benjamin Netanyahu, Luis Rubiales, Alex Salmond, Donald Trump, Jacob Zuma or the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford.1 Over the last three or four years, all these people have complained (or the complaint has been made on their behalf) that they are the victims of a ‘witch hunt’. What do they mean by it? One thing they mean, clearly, is that they are innocent of whatever it is they are being accused of. In England, witchcraft ceased to be a crime in 1735 because by then there was an emergent consensus, at least among the parliamentary class, that it does not really exist. After that date, alleged witches might still be prosecuted, but only for fraud.2 Within this consensus, calling my accusers ‘witch hunters’ implies that they cannot possibly be right because my alleged crime is illusory. The tactical usefulness of the term is therefore obvious: it saves going into a lot of tiresome and perhaps contestable detail. Considered as a simple defensive move, however, it pays for its logical conclusiveness by its lack of referential force. If it is indeed universally acknowledged that witchcraft is non-existent, then for just that reason counter-accusations of witch hunting are universally understood to be metaphorical. So the bare naming is not enough: I must also convince my audience that the metaphor is applicable and appropriate. To see how that is done, we need to consider the other half of the phrase. As far as I can tell, nobody talked about witch hunting until long after it had stopped happening. The expression appears very rarely before the nineteenth century, and when it does, it means something else. For example, a religious tract of 1618 denounced ‘witch hunters’, and a sermon published in 1657 was severe on ‘witch-hunting Atheists’, but a quick inspection of the contexts makes it clear that both these writers were referring to people who seek out witches not in order to punish them but in order to commission them to cast spells.3 The fact that the expression was intelligible in that sense suggests that in seventeenth-century English the meaning it has today is not merely unattested but impossible: ‘witch hunters’ could hardly be applied to the witch's persecutors if it was already understood to denote her clients. It is striking, then, that academic studies now routinely use it to refer to the former. Even historians who are careful to define and subdivide the term ‘witch’ in the light of early modern usage nevertheless deploy the modern concept of a witch hunt without introduction or qualification.4 It seems that although the expression was unknown to the hunters themselves, its meaning is obvious to everyone now. In other words, the semantic content of ‘witch hunt’ includes not only the phenomenon but also a historically distinct attitude towards it: a retrospective viewpoint is built into the word. This viewpoint is moreover a superior one: by giving the practice a name it did not give itself, we imply that we understand the witch hunters as they could not understand themselves. To themselves, they may have appeared as concerned parents or ministers of religion or officers of the law, but to us they are hunters—an instance of the most primitive and animalistic phase of human society. This sharp dichotomy between the description and what it describes is a trace of the cultural moment which arguably launched the term beyond historiography and into the general Anglo-American language: the moment above all of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which was first performed in 1953 and is still quite often invoked when a modern (political) ‘witch hunt’ is in question. Miller after all was using the historical remoteness of seventeenth-century Massachusetts as a polemical device. The audience were invited not only to watch the behaviour of a long-expired theocracy, but also, at the same time, to read it as a characterisation of present-day anti-Communist hysteria. This encounter of ancient and modern is at its most pointed in The Crucible, but the same conjunction features in several almost contemporary texts: witch hunting is combined with romantic comedy in Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not For Burning (1948); belief in demonic possession is psychologised in Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudoun (1952, dramatised as The Devils by John Whiting in 1960); in William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954) the choirboys turn into ‘hunters’ and eventually perpetrate a panic-stricken and murderous exorcism. No great critical ingenuity is needed to understand this cluster of witch-hunting narratives. All produced within a few years of the revelation of the death camps in 1945, they are haunted by the image of terrifying reversion to a dark age of irrational fear and hatred. Conversely, their authorial ideology is the secular progressivism of the post-war UN: human rights, enlightened pragmatism, the elimination of atavistic nationalism. ‘Witch hunting’ in this context is not just a code word for McCarthyism: it is a metonym for all that we hope, not quite confidently, to have consigned to the superstitious past. At any time since the 1950s, then, to say that I am the victim of a witch hunt is to lay claim to what might be called the cognitive high ground. It puts my accusers in a place which is darker, less civilised and more naive than the place from which I am observing them. The force of such positioning draws of course on shared assumptions—not on the best historical scholarship necessarily, but rather on what everyone knows about witch hunts. This knowledge includes three intertwined but separable strands which seem to me to connect with current political usage. The first strand is the idea, strongly implied by the metaphor of a ‘hunt’, that the prosecution of witches was an irregular collective activity rather than a proper judicial process. Fry's play, for example, gives the impression that its offstage witch hunters form a deluded crowd, in contrast with their intended victim, who is a witty, self-aware individual character. The process in The Crucible is more orderly than that, but more than once in the course of the play, Salem's descent into hysteria and delusion is marked by a coup de théâtre in which articulated argument gives way to the choric outbursts of the girls. The individual voice is drowned out by the cries of the group. In scenes like this, ‘witch hunt’ signifies something close to ‘lynch mob’: a bad community is shown turning on a single victim, who therefore attracts sympathetic identification. This narrative has been vividly exploited in recent politics: for example, both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have faced accusations which emerged from institutionally complex processes—parliamentary committees, departmental enquiries, panels of investigation and the like—and have used this to suggest that they are being personally hunted down by a self-appointed confederacy. In this sense ‘it is a witch hunt’ means that a particular human being is being pursued by an inhuman pack. The individual, like John Proctor or Golding's Simon, is aware of the truth, while the pack, over-excited, egging one another on, know not what they do. Secondly, if witches do not really exist, it readily follows that one must look elsewhere for the real cause of witch hunting. Historians have variously attributed it to institutional misogyny, or communal tensions, or the upheavals of the Reformation.5 The process that destroys the hero of The Devils is a mixture of sexual hysteria and political opportunism. In The Crucible almost all the characters engaged in the prosecutions have ulterior motives: Abigail is after power and revenge, Putnam is increasing his landholdings, Danforth is defending the authority of his court, and so on. Writers in this moment of post-war enlightenment are not much concerned to imagine a genuine belief in witchcraft itself: the allegation is always a cover, whether cunning or unconscious, for something else. This implication of duplicity carries into political usage. When the Labour left protests that the leadership's interpretation of party membership rules amounts to a right-wing witch hunt, or the Estonian Prime Minister dismisses attacks on her business connections as ‘a witch-hunt by the opposition’, the import of the term is that the other side's insistence on legality is a fake, and that they are using the ostensible issue to further an undeclared agenda.6 Thirdly, it is widely believed that those accused of witchcraft were invariably found guilty. One of the things everyone knows about witch hunts is that suspects were thrown into water. If they floated, it was attributed to diabolic agency and they were executed; if on the other hand they sank, then they drowned. There is not much historical truth in this story, and if it carries conviction none the less, it is because of its perfect Catch-22 structure; everyone recognises the black humour of the inescapably closing trap. The same feeling feeds the dramatic power of The Crucible: the court in the play interprets every protestation of innocence as a sign of obduracy in sin, so the only way the accused can defend themselves is by confessing their guilt. Thus when, for example, Zac Goldsmith joined many other Conservative MPs in applying the term ‘witch hunt’ to the Commitee of Privileges investigation of Boris Johnson, he specifically meant that ‘there was only ever going to be one outcome’.7 To complain that I am the victim of a witch hunt, then, is to go well beyond the mere contention that the accusations against me are false. I am also saying that my accusers are a mob, that they are acting in bad faith, and that they are overriding the elementary principles of justice. And I am saying these things all the more persuasively because I am not advancing them as formal allegations; rather, they attach themselves to my adversaries on the basis that everybody knows what a witch hunt is. It is interesting in a way that all three strands are historically inaccurate. For most of the early modern period, it seems, witch trials were conducted by individual judges in accordance with official procedures, accusations were brought by people who genuinely believed that witches could and did pose a danger to the community, the water test was dismissed by many authorities as an ignorant superstition, and persons accused of witchcraft were quite often acquitted.8 None of these qualifications alters the fact that over the relevant centuries thousands of people were cruelly killed for a crime of which they cannot possibly have been guilty. But they do between them suggest that ‘witch hunt’, as a contemporary term of political abuse, is rooted in a caricature of the practice to which it alludes. This is not surprising: it is as a caricature that the expression is effective. One further divergence from the historical record gives us a sidelight on the uses of the caricature. In the early modern period, most of the people who were executed as witches were women, and most of the women were poor, old, alone or otherwise socially marginal. Sometimes men were condemned, and sometimes people, of either sex, from higher social strata; but on the whole the typical victim of a witch hunt was female and unprivileged. It is therefore startling to return to my opening list of the contemporary public figures who have complained of being the target of a witch hunt and note that every one of them is a man in a position of institutional eminence. I could have included another, yet more extreme instance of this reversal: in March 2023, the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, was questioned by a US Senate Committee about his company's tenacious resistance to unionisation, and he was defended by a Republican member of the committee who described the hearings as a witch hunt. In this case, then, the role of victimised old woman was played by one the most powerful business executives in the world. What that irony suggests is that the opportunity to accuse one's accusers of witch hunting has itself become a prerogative of power. The counter-allegations I have traced (that the supposed offence is illusory; that the attempt to bring it to book is an effect of mob psychology; that the accusers are concealing their true motives; that they are violating the basic principles of justice) boil down, in this newly brutal context, to a single, simpler statement: rabble like you have no right to question the conduct of a person like me. Peter Womack is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Drama at the University of East Anglia; his books include the New Critical Idiom volume on Dialogue (2011).

Witch Hunt

Critical QuarterlyVolume 66, Issue 1 p. 69-79 Original Article Dear Hitch Steve Wasserman, Corresponding Author Steve Wasserman [email protected] Search for more papers by this author Steve Wasserman, Corresponding Author Steve Wasserman [email protected] Search for more papers by this author First published: 20 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12757Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume66, Issue1Special Issue: Distant Voices, Still LivesApril 2024Pages 69-79 RelatedInformation

Steve Wasserman

Dear Hitch

Critical QuarterlyEarly View Original Article Christopher Hitchens and 'The Press as Opposition' JC Lee, Corresponding Author JC Lee [email protected] 2904 Stromberg St., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 15203 USASearch for more papers by this author JC Lee, Corresponding Author JC Lee [email protected] 2904 Stromberg St., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 15203 USASearch for more papers by this author First published: 18 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12760Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

JC Lee

Christopher Hitchens and ‘The Press as Opposition’

In 2010, when a book I'd written called How to Become a Scandal was going to press, my editor contacted Christopher to ask for a blurb. He sent back three choices, the first of which read, 'Laura Kipnis promised me a blowjob if I endorsed her latest triumph, which I hereby warmly and devotedly do.' I'm sure it says nothing good about me that I found this funny, especially since using it would have so perfectly – and devilishly – enacted the premise of the book. Though generally no prig, sadly my editor insisted we go with the more conventional third option (the second was a double entendre about a now mostly forgotten Republican senator caught in a clumsy men's room encounter). She did forward me their subsequent correspondence: 'Christopher – you are a scream!' she'd written back, to which he responded, 'Yeah? Well a lot depends on which one she picks.' I can be as humourless as the next leftwing feminist but for some reason Christopher's, what to call it – lasciviousness? antiquarianism? – amused more than offended me, though his public anti-abortion stance was noxious and, one suspects, hypocritical. Colour me surprised if that particular edict was upheld in practice. In any case, I never thought of him as someone you'd go to for instruction on feminism, and increasingly not on any political question, yet it was perplexingly hard to hold his bad politics against him. Mocking him on gender could even be fun, as at least there, unlike elsewhere, the positions seemed lightly held. When he published his notorious 'Why Women Aren't Funny' piece in Vanity Fair, I responded (I hope a teensy bit funnily) in Slate, where he also frequently wrote, that though it was a fascinating portrait of female nature and relations between the sexes, it was unclear to which decade it applied – it had the slightly musty air of 1960s-ish Kingsley Amis, wrapped in nostalgia 'for the merry days when sexual conquest required an arsenal of tactics deployed by bon-vivantish cads on girdled, girlish sexual holdouts. "Oh Mr. Hitchens!" you imagine one of the potential conquests squealing at an errant hand on nylon-clad knee.' My problem with Christopher, hardly mine alone, was (to state the obvious) simply that he was one of the more charming men on the planet and mixed with liquor, this is a dangerous combination. Like most people who knew him at all, a few of the drunkest nights of my life were spent in his company. Conversations were funny, flirtatious, frank. Yet the rightward turn and increasing political rigidity also made him seem ridiculous: eruditely shrill. Oh man, the rigidity. On one occasion, Christopher was speaking at Northwestern, outside Chicago, where I was teaching – I believe he was to talk on Kissinger, so it must have been before 9/11 and the endless chest-thumping about Islamofascism. The talk was arranged by one of his devoted local lieutenants, Danny Postal. I knew Danny slightly, in part because his uncle Bob Postal had been a charismatic Chicago area Adlerian psychotherapist whom my mother saw, and as a troubled teen I'd been shipped off to see him too, then forced to attend some sort of group therapy session for teens that he ran, where the group confronted you, viciously enumerating your flaws. Danny had barely known his uncle (who was estranged from his own family) but if you've cathected onto one Postal, you cathect onto them all. Anyway, Danny and Christopher were meeting for drinks (of course) before Christopher's talk. Christopher told Danny to invite me to join them which I obediently did. The talk was to start at 7:00. We were maybe fifteen minutes from campus. At 6:45 Christopher was ordering more drinks while Danny was feebly insisting that it was time to leave and Christopher was promising he would, after just one more. Danny, who'd no doubt sold his soul to campus powers to scrape up whatever astronomical fee Christopher had required, decided the best course was for him to get to campus to announce an unforeseen delay, as it was to be a packed auditorium type situation. I was left to ferry a worrisomely relaxed Hitchens to deliver his talk. Danny left, Christopher ordered another round of drinks, and I decided it wasn't my problem. The conversation veered, of course, to Bill Clinton, Christopher's then current hatred, and the Juanita Broaddrick rape charges against Bill Clinton (Broaddrick had given a number of different stories, including in sworn statements), a subject about which Christopher became, in a matter of seconds – when I mentioned Broaddrick's conflicting accounts – spitting mad. Like, livid. Clinton had raped Juanita Broaddrick and that was all you needed to know about Clinton – Christopher claimed to have hard evidence on this, but wouldn't reveal what it was. (He may have said he'd spoken to Broaddrick himself, I don't recall, just that he was mysterious about how he knew what he knew.) He was indignant that I would question any of it, and thus him. Clinton wasn't anybody's boy scout, and maybe he'd done everything he was accused of, though it was also clear that the people trying to leverage the sexual accusations against him were worse people than he was, and some of his accusers were happy to let themselves be pawns in the game of bringing down his presidency. I'd done some research myself on the American Spectator's 'Arkansas Project', funded by the horrid Richard Mellon Scaife, which led to the former-far-right lapdog David Brock digging up the Paula Jones story, and eventually to Clinton's impeachment. I always wondered what Christopher's response would have been to the chorus line of Clinton accusers (Paula Jones, Linda Tripp, Katherine Willey and Broaddrick herself) marshalled by the noted feminist Steve Bannon to show up at the 2016 Trump-Hillary Clinton debate as Donald Trump's guests. Because Trump was what – some friend to womankind? Perhaps it's easier to conclude with certainty, post #MeToo, that Clinton wasn't just a sexually compulsive good ole boy but a stone-cold rapist, but back then even many stalwart feminists were willing to regard Clinton's rovings as Hillary's problem, not ours, and certain of his accusers with scepticism. Christopher, on the other hand … Something about Bill Clinton's sex life seemed to derange him. He was off the rails on the subject, literally sputtering. I tried to put it to him that he seemed, well, overinvested. It seemed way too personal, somehow off. What was it about Bill Clinton that had this unhinging effect on him? (I was kind of drunk at that point myself.) I suppose I expected him to at least pretend to ponder the question, devote maybe a few seconds to a show of self-examination. Anyone would. Not him. He was barricaded against anything I could say, also against the 'what is this "about" for you' sort of conversation that drunk people are known to have, which is one of the fun things about drinking, Something obdurate and hardened switched on instead. Thinking was not what was taking place, just pre-rehearsed lines and a lot of outrage. I always wondered, in the usual armchair-psychoanalyst fashion, if at some level that was what deformed him politically: this rancidly psychosexual Clinton obsession. I knew there'd been a semblance of sexual overlap at Oxford – I happened to know it from the woman herself, who was and is, in fact, gay. She'd had (separate) one-off threesomes with both of them, though in an entirely unconsummated fashion (strip poker, a kiss …). According to her, Christopher later told a reporter for the UK Sunday Times that he'd shared a girlfriend with Clinton in college – this would be her – which way overstated what had actually taken place. When I later tried (and failed) to read No One Left to Lie to, his anti-Clinton screed, it reminded me of what had seemed so deranged and shrill that evening in Chicago. Of course, there'd be much more of that to come: the bellicose over-certainty about Iraq, the increasingly militaristic posturing – there was a comic rigidity about it. I'm thinking of what philosopher Henri Bergson wrote in his 1900 book on laughter about what turns people into comedic figures:2 being unaware of something automatic or mechanistic in your attitudes or actions, like Lucille Ball on the chocolate factory assembly line, turning into an automaton herself as the line keeps speeding up. Inflexibility is funny, though also a tragic waste of whatever's human in us. The human is elastic. I saw Christopher, shortly before his diagnosis, at a party in New York. He'd already been told by doctors that he had to stop smoking and said he was going cold turkey the next day, but was madly puffing away that evening, like a prisoner's last meal. He mentioned, melancholically, other renunciations he was being forced to accede to – he wanted to talk about my (some thought) pro-adultery book, Against Love, which someone had told him to read. He'd sent some young person out for a pint of scotch and a bottle of cough syrup that were handed over to him in a brown paper bag while we were talking – on the terrace – so he could smoke down his last pack. There was a sentence of Christopher's that I always remembered, from a review of something by Richard Yates. I wished I had written it. Regarding Yates: 'It's clear that he's no fan of this smug housing development or the new forms of capitalism on behalf of which its male inhabitants make their daily dash to the train.' It's a sentence I'm sure he gave little thought to, but I loved its man-of-the-world swoop – from a writer's oeuvre to the banalities of suburban marriage to the mode of production, crammed into an offhandedly elegant sentence. There were always things to admire in his sentences, even as his political instincts went to shit. There was even occasional good advice. He wrote, in Hitch 22, that if you hesitate about writing that well-wishing note to someone, just do it. I'd heard, by the time I was reading it, that he was sick and after getting to the end of that line immediately wrote him a note. Being me, I couldn't resist adding that I'd been appalled to read in the memoir that Michael Chertoff, the former Homeland Security Director, had performed his citizenship swearing in. Christopher had been palling around with some pretty crummy people after 9/11: Chertoff had figured in my scandal book, the one Christopher had blurbed, wearing a different hat, having relentlessly and mercilessly prosecuted the former judge Sol Wachtler, who'd gone nuts and stalked a former lover. Chertoff really was a creep, I said. Christopher wrote back, conceding that he hadn't been aware of that at the time, which seemed, for him, surprisingly conciliatory. Maybe he'd figured that me berating him about Chertoff was a bit of covert flirtation, which no doubt it was. Old habits die hard. Laura Kipnis is a critic and essayist. Her most recent book is Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis (Pantheon).

Laura Kipnis

Oh, Mr Hitchens!

Critical QuarterlyVolume 65, Issue 4 p. 3-11 Introduction Introduction: Peripheral Europes Benjamin Kohlmann, Corresponding Author Benjamin Kohlmann [email protected] Department of English and American Studies, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany Correspondence Benjamin Kohlmann, Department of English and American Studies, University of Regensburg, 93040 Regensburg, Germany. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorIvana Perica, Ivana Perica orcid.org/0000-0002-4556-3785 ZfL—Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin, GermanySearch for more papers by this author Benjamin Kohlmann, Corresponding Author Benjamin Kohlmann [email protected] Department of English and American Studies, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany Correspondence Benjamin Kohlmann, Department of English and American Studies, University of Regensburg, 93040 Regensburg, Germany. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorIvana Perica, Ivana Perica orcid.org/0000-0002-4556-3785 ZfL—Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin, GermanySearch for more papers by this author First published: 08 December 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12754Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume65, Issue4December 2023Pages 3-11 RelatedInformation

Benjamin Kohlmann

Ivana Perica

Introduction: Peripheral Europes

Critical QuarterlyVolume 65, Issue 4 p. 130-131 Notes on contributors Notes on contributors First published: 02 January 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12761Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume65, Issue4December 2023Pages 130-131 RelatedInformation

A few days after the massacre of civilians in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, the BBC was criticised by Jewish groups, Conservative newspapers, and a chorus of MPs, including the leaders of both main political parties, for not referring to the perpetrators as ‘terrorists’. It is surprising that the political nation should respond to a terrible atrocity by conducting an argument about the use of a word. And within that argument, it is perhaps even more surprising that anger should focus not, as usually happens, on something that was offensively said, but exactly on what was not said. The protestors had a specific, favoured term, and were outraged when they did not hear it. This suggests a sort of super-censorship, a regime which, not content with telling broadcasters what they mustn't say, seeks positively to dictate what they must say. Indeed, the point was pressed in just that form when Isaac Herzog, the Israeli President, told the world's press that they ‘must declare and call Hamas a terrorist organization without ifs and buts, without explanation’.1 On what basis does the head of a democratic state issue instructions to independent journalists about their detailed lexical choices? And why this particular word? Obviously the word itself is contested ground. In a despairing tour de force Alex P. Schmid, a leading academic in the field, compiled 250 different definitions of ‘terrorism’, the great majority of them formulated between 1970 and 2010.2 It is not surprising that such a heavily debated term should prove to be a flash point at a moment of crisis. On the other hand, it is puzzling that its use is so passionately required (or resisted) when there is such a spectacular lack of certainty about what it actually means. Its clarity seems to be of a different kind, a definiteness that is independent of definition. The people who use it, or who insist on its use, may not be sure of its meaning, but they know very well what they mean by using it. As Schmid notes at the head of his article, the British ambassador to the UN, speaking shortly after 9/11, brushed aside the whole business of defining one's terms: ‘What looks, smells and kills like terrorism is terrorism’.3 This is to ground the meaning of the word in a gut feeling; it expresses an encounter with the concept which is not intellectual and analytic, but sensory and immediate. It thus goes some way to explain the heat of the debate. The belief that this is the right word to use is visceral. Terrorism is a loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally. It's simply not the BBC's job to tell people who to support and who to condemn – who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.4 It is a coherent position, but the trouble with it is that it treats the word as if it were only emotive, and therefore fails to acknowledge that it does also, despite everything, have definite referential content. A glance at those 250 definitions is enough to see that, for all their differences, they converge on a substantive if approximate object. For example, the US State Department's working definition from 2006 is that terrorism is ‘premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents’.6 This formula does a good deal of work, distinguishing terrorist acts from spontaneous explosions of rage (‘premeditated’), from ordinary violent crimes (‘politically motivated’), from regular warfare (‘perpetrated against noncombatant targets’), and from the direct actions, however destructive, of recognised nation states (‘subnational groups or clandestine agents’). It is no doubt open to objections – that its terms need defining in their turn, or that there are crucial elements which it leaves out. But the lines it does draw seem to me to be broadly consensual: this is indeed, roughly, what most people take the word to mean. And it has the additional virtue – a striking one in the context – of being, in itself, nonjudgemental. It does not define terrorism as morally wrong, it merely attempts to say what it consists of. It therefore demonstrates that the word is not reducible to its pejorative function. It has a denotative dimension as well. At this point it is easy enough to appreciate the mutual exasperation of the disputants. The BBC sees the negative connotation of ‘terrorism’ rather than its referential meaning, and therefore hears the injunction to use the word as an attempt to subvert its own time-honoured impartiality. Its critics see the referential meaning rather than the connotation, so to them it seems that the BBC is perversely refusing to call something by its right name. The two sides cannot catch what each other is saying because they are standing, as it were, on different levels within the structure of the word. However, this symmetrical stand-off does not do justice to the way words mean. They are not arbitrary names (even derogatory ones); they have their own distinctive life in language, their etymons, collocations, and so on. In this case the formation is very simple: as OED puts it, it is ‘terror n. + -ist suffix’. The root noun has been explicitly present from the beginning (the first ‘terrorists’ were the exponents of the reign of terror in revolutionary France), and it was restored to prominence by George W. Bush's declaration of a ‘war on terror’ in 2001.7 The actual enemy in this war is of course not literally ‘terror’, but Islamist terrorists, and in particular Al-Qaeda, the organisation responsible for the 9/11 attacks. But the easy movement back and forth between ‘terror’, ‘terrorism’, and ‘terrorist’, widely copied in journalistic short cuts such as ‘terror attack’ or ‘antiterror laws’, has the subliminal effect of equating particular militant groups with fear itself. Any word with ‘terror’ in it does not merely point to the operational characteristics coolly enumerated by the State Department; it also says, ‘this is what we are terrified of’, even, implicitly, ‘this is everything we are terrified of’. This universalisation of the threat is then intensified by the suffix. ‘Terrorism’ has access, relatively speaking, to the sphere of reasonable discourse: for instance it denotes a strategy which a revolutionary organisation might intelligibly (if deplorably) decide to adopt. But ‘terrorists’, by analogy with, say, ‘nationalists’ or ‘pacifists’, sound like people who believe in terror. They may believe in other things too – a religious faith, a mission to combat oppression – but these motivations are rendered marginal by the morphology of the word. It is the terrorists' terrible actions that form the essence of who they are. In this light the opposition between referential and emotive, denotation and connotation, looks too abstract. The ‘subjective’ reaction suggested by the word ‘terrorist’ is not the ‘disapproval’ genteelly imagined by Simpson – it is, wholly explicitly, terror. And that emotion is not an adventitious response tacked on to a concept which could be adequately conveyed without it: the dynamics of the word carry it deep into the nomination of the object itself. Fear, the word tells us, is the whole point. There is not a zero-degree person first, and then a fearful shrinking from him second. There is an inherently fearful person; if it is a ‘loaded word’, the word and the load are one. What that means, among other things, is that a ‘terrorist’ must be someone other than the speaker. This is a quasi-grammatical rule, comically visible in a glitch (presumably it was a glitch, though hardly an innocent one) recently encountered on Instagram. A user discovered by a few substitution tests that if he put the Arabic expression ‘alhamdulillah’ into his bio, the ‘see translation’ feature rendered it, accurately enough, as ‘Praise be to God’, but that if the bio also included the word ‘Palestinian’, or a Palestinian flag, the auto-translation of ‘alhamdulillah’ turned into ‘Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom’.8 The effect was a weird moment of ventriloquism. The expression ‘Palestinian terrorists’ belongs to a speaker to whom the people it names are fundamentally alien, but then it has been mechanically imputed to a speaker who is in solidarity with them. The resulting incongruity makes the linguistic rule manifest: ‘terrorists’ must be them, and cannot be us. This brings us to the structural heart of the matter. To insist that the perpetrators of the atrocity be called terrorists signals a ban on all attempts to imagine what it would be like to identify with them, or to admire them, or to be them. They are not us, we have nothing in common with them, an unbridgeable gulf between our lives and theirs is built into the word by which they are to be known. The separation often takes legal forms: in many countries, designated terrorist organisations are proscribed in spite of a general principle of freedom of association, or individuals accused of terrorist offences are denied the usual rights of suspects – in short, ‘terrorist’ as a term in law denotes someone who is not recognised as a citizen in the normal sense. This legal force flows directly back into the argument around the word: one reason for making sure that certain people are called terrorists is that it entitles the state to take extrajudicial measures against them. For some right-wing politicians, indeed, the legal position is the beginning and end of the debate. The UK Secretary of State for Defence, Grant Shapps, attacking the BBC on the Today programme on 13 October, stressed that Hamas is listed as a terrorist organisation in Schedule 2 of the Terrorism Act 2000; he concluded from this fact that to call Hamas ‘terrorists’ is merely to comply with the law. But this line of argument is at once authoritarian and parochial, not only because the BBC's broadcasts extend well beyond the jurisdiction of the British Government, but also because an Act of Parliament, while it can direct the interpretation of a word by the courts, cannot legitimately claim the same influence over the general speech community. The question is not what the Secretary of State means by ‘terrorist’, but what the rest of us mean by it. And here I think the communal expulsion enacted by the word – the ineradicable message to the effect that terrorists are other – runs deeper than its legal application. One of the things that clearly distinguish terrorist acts, after all, is that they are the weapons of the powerless. Suicide bombings, IEDs, hostage-taking, hijackings and assassinations – no organisation would resort to these methods if it had any hope of inflicting real military or political defeat on its enemies. They are ways of denting or disrupting a status quo which is massively prevalent. Typically, the group that perpetrates these things is fighting not as it would choose but as it can. A terrorist, on this view, is a combatant starting from a position of overwhelming disadvantage. To say this is not an expression of sympathy: the reason for the disadvantage might be admirable (the ‘terrorists’ are fighting for the disenfranchised and downtrodden), but it might equally be despicable (the ‘terrorists’ espouse values which are so deranged that they cannot attract support by legitimate means). That is not the point. Rather, it is to register that ‘terrorist’, whatever its other complexities, is mostly a term applied by the strong, well-resourced and established to the weak, poor and marginal. That divisiveness is the reason why its use, however aggressively insisted upon, is unlikely to become consensual. Peter Womack is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Drama at the University of East Anglia; his books include the New Critical Idiom volume on Dialogue (2011).

Terrorist

Intellectual, not intelligence, was the headword in Raymond Williams's Keywords (1976, 1983).1 In the early twenty-first century, despite discussions of the rise of anti-intellectualism in the United States and in other places around the world, intelligence is the more complex and contested term. The meaning of the word intelligence has changed over the past six centuries in response to social, political, scientific and technological shifts. Since its introduction into English, intelligence has undergone a process of semantic broadening, becoming at once more generalised while also gaining specialised meanings in a variety of contexts from psychology and education to international security and computer science. The origins of the noun intelligence can be traced to French intelligence and Latin intellegentia. Its earliest sense in English, ‘Faculty of understanding; intellect’, dates to the late fourteenth century and remains active today. The synonym intellect, a borrowing from Latin intellectus, was also first attested in the late fourteenth century. According to the OED, intellect is defined as ‘That faculty, or sum of faculties, of the mind or soul by which a person knows and reasons; power of thought; understanding’, and it is often distinguished from sensation, imagination and will. In addition to denoting the mental faculty of an individual, intelligence also encompassed ‘The action or fact of mentally apprehending something; understanding, knowledge, comprehension (of something)’ from the mid-fifteenth century onwards. This expanded meaning enabled the word to describe the acquisition of knowledge across various fields of study, as well as the capacities of non-human entities. Already around the time of the word's borrowing into English in the late fourteenth century, intelligence referred to an intelligent or rational spiritual being outside the human realm, such as an angel, a spirit or extraterrestrial life. This sense of intelligence recalls the 1816 coinage intelligent design, which describes deliberate design in the natural world attributed to an intelligent entity often identified as God. More recently, confusion has arisen over the distinction between the theory of Intelligent Design (ID), whose proponents claim is based on empirical evidence, and creationism, which is based on religious texts and teachings, particularly in the context of discussions about whether evolution and intelligent design should be taught in state-funded schools. Intelligence took on a measurable aspect from the mid-fifteenth century, denoting ‘Understanding as a quality admitting of degree; spec. quickness or superiority of understanding, sagacity’. This idea that intelligence can be quantified and compared in terms of scope, depth or speed of understanding is most evident in the compound noun intelligence quotient, which was modelled after the German term Intelligenzquotient proposed by German psychologist William Stern and first attested in English in 1913. The OED defines intelligence quotient (IQ) as ‘A number intended to represent a person's intelligence, measured using problem-solving tests and compared to the statistical norm or average for their age (which is taken as 100)’, and the Stanford-Binet test and Weschler Intelligence Scale are two of the most used intelligence tests today. Although intelligence tests have long been controversial, they have come under scrutiny recently due to greater public awareness of their racist, classist and ableist origins, particularly their history of use in eugenics. Metaphorical uses of the term intelligence quotient are also possible, as in the following example cited in the OED: ‘They dumb-down the city's intelligence quotient’ (Chicago-Sun Times, 15 June 2008). However, over the past decade, researchers have developed analytical frameworks to measure a city's intelligence level or smartness. The IMD Smart City Index produced by the International Institute for Management Development World Competitiveness Center, for example, uses survey data to compare cities around the world according to different social, cultural, environmental, economic and technological dimensions. Intelligence acquired specialised meanings in political and military contexts in the late fifteenth century, becoming synonymous with words like information, knowledge and news, particularly if that information had military value. This sense of intelligence expanded again in the early seventeenth century to describe not only information but also the covert processes involved in collecting such information, making intelligence synonymous with espionage and surveillance. Some of the most frequently used collocations with intelligence in English relate to this sense of the word: intelligence agency (1878), intelligence officer (1779), national intelligence and military intelligence. Technological advancements after the First World War supported the formalisation and expansion of intelligence agencies during the inter-war period (1918–39). Intelligence and counter-intelligence (1940), which the OED defines as ‘The activity of preventing the enemy from obtaining secret information’, became even more expansive industries around the world during the Cold War (1947–91), and the United States established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947. Intel, the clipped form of intelligence, has been used colloquially since 1961 to describe information of military or political value. While the Google Books Ngram Viewer shows a steady increase in the relative frequency of intel beginning around 2001, corpus data include references to the multinational technology company Intel, which seems to have profited from the positive associations of intelligence in its branding since the corporation's founding in 1968. The meaning of intelligence has also continued to evolve alongside advancements in computer technologies. In 1950, English computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing developed an imitation game to determine whether a computer can exhibit human intelligence: a computer would be considered intelligent if it could carry on a conversation and ‘pass’ as human without being identified as a machine. This method, now known as the Turing Test, has been important in the development of the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. First attested in 1955, artificial intelligence, abbreviated as AI, refers to ‘The capacity of computers or other machines to exhibit or simulate intelligent behavior’. However, the term artificial intelligence has been contested, and some experts on the social implications of AI have claimed that the term is a misnomer. Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford, for example, has argued that artificial intelligence ‘is neither artificial nor intelligent. Rather, artificial intelligence is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications. AI systems are not autonomous, rational, or able to discern anything without extensive, computationally intensive training with large datasets or predefined rules and rewards.’2 Smartness, a synonym for intelligence first attested in 1340, has taken on new meaning in the age of AI. The adjective ‘smart’ in smart technologies originally comes from the acronym SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology). Smart technologies are devices designed to connect with internet networks and other devices, and they ‘allow inanimate objects such as tools and machines to communicate with humans, and vice versa: they integrate digital and non-digital functionalities’.3 The smartphone (1980), which is now typically understood as a mobile phone equipped with computer applications and internet access, is just one example, but smart technologies include smartwatches, smart wearables, smart doorbells, smart gardens, smart thermostats, smart homes and many more. Headlines of recent online news articles and videos, such as ‘Is smart technology making us dumb?’ (Deutsche Welle, 30 October 2021) and ‘Are smartphones making us stupid?’ (Psychology Today, 25 June 2017), communicate a general sense of anxiety about the potential negative impact of new technologies on human intelligence. According to recent cognitive science research, however, there is no evidence that smart technologies diminish human cognitive capacities, and some researchers have even emphasised that smart technologies enhance our abilities to perform more creative and intellectually demanding tasks. Speculation about whether non-human animals and plants have a soul or are intelligent has existed for centuries. In the early twenty-first century there is more widespread acceptance of the idea that other lifeforms possess intelligence, due to both scientific discoveries and the semantic broadening of the word intelligence. The brain, specifically the cerebrum, is the centre of intelligence in humans, and most animals, except for some ocean floor creatures, have a brain or other nervous tissue. Plants lack a brain, but already in the late nineteenth century Charles Darwin recognised that plants are much more complicated than we think they are. Arguing that intelligence unites rather than divides humans, other animals and plants, Italian researcher and founder of plant neurobiology Stefano Mancuso has written extensively about plant intelligence, defining intelligence as ‘the ability to solve problems’.4 Contemporary definitions of intelligence, whether rooted in adaptability or problem-solving abilities, demonstrate an expanded, more inclusive understanding of the term beyond its original limited sense meaning the (human) faculty of mind or intellect. Answers to the questions of whether plants or computers are intelligent hinge on our understanding of intelligence, and ongoing heated debates about the validity and ethics of IQ tests reflect not only disagreements over how to define intelligence, but also the social importance attached to the concept. Intelligence remains a complex and contested term, as the concept it represents holds great value in many societies, and discussions about who or what qualifies as intelligent, how to define it, and how to measure it are shaped by power dynamics. Awareness of these power dynamics is important because the act of attributing or denying intelligence to humans and other entities often implies attributing or denying respect. See artificial, communication, education, excellence, experience, information, life, network, security, soul, technology. Holly Yanacek is an associate professor of German at James Madison University. Her research focuses on emotion, narration, gender, care ethics and posthumanism in nineteenth- to twenty-first-century Germanophone literature and culture. Yanacek coedited Animals, Machines, and AI: On Human and Non-Human Emotions in Modern German Cultural History (DeGruyter, 2021) with Erika Quinn and Keywords for Today (OUP, 2018) with Colin MacCabe.

Holly Yanacek

Intelligence

Peter Boxall

A Revolution of the Screw: Peripheralising Europe

Critical QuarterlyEarly View Original Article 'Shut Your Eyes and See': Time, Ekphrasis and Enargeia in James Joyce's Ulysses Francis Haran, Corresponding Author Francis Haran [email protected] Search for more papers by this author Francis Haran, Corresponding Author Francis Haran [email protected] Search for more papers by this author First published: 28 October 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12750Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Francis Haran

‘Shut Your Eyes and See’: Time, Ekphrasis and Enargeia in James Joyce's Ulysses

Critical QuarterlyEarly View Original Article The rescue plot: Maritime encounter and the borders of Europe Chloe Howe Haralambous, Corresponding Author Chloe Howe Haralambous [email protected] Columbia University, New York, New York, USA Correspondence: Chloe Howe Haralambous, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Chloe Howe Haralambous, Corresponding Author Chloe Howe Haralambous [email protected] Columbia University, New York, New York, USA Correspondence: Chloe Howe Haralambous, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 27 October 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12743Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Chloe Howe Haralambous

The rescue plot: Maritime encounter and the borders of Europe

Matthew Sperling

After reading this set of fascinating essays in cultural-political analysis, one is left with an overwhelming question: Is there any Europe that is not peripheral? Is Europe actually the continent where everything, everywhere and everyone is liminal? If so, has not Critical Quarterly brilliantly subverted its own special issue title ‘Peripheral Europes’? Tempting though it is to pursue this conceit, the sober truth is that most but not all of Europe sees itself, secretly fears itself and/or is seen by some other Europeans as peripheral, in one way or another. Witness the fact that there are few European countries in which people do not talk about ‘Europe’ as being, in some contexts, somewhere where they are not, but usually (unless they are British Eurosceptics) want to be. Logically, I cannot be in X and going to X at the same time, but this is the European condition. Today's Ukrainians, for example, insist passionately that their country belongs at the heart of Europe yet also habitually talk about going ‘to Europe’ when they cross their western frontier. Perhaps France alone has no doubt that it is fully and in all respects in Europe. In fact, France tends to believe that it is Europe. Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands also have few doubts about their European belonging. Together with Germany, they constitute something that most Europeans recognise (albeit reluctantly) as some kind of a core Europe. This is, roughly speaking, the territory of Charlemagne's empire that coincided, twelve centuries later, with the bounds of the original European Economic Community. Here has been a persistent, although never exclusive, geographical locus of European economic, political and cultural power. Projects of European unification have usually gone out from here. Yet even Germany has in the past had major doubts about its full European belonging, witness the endless post-1989 reiteration of Thomas Mann's post-World War II observation that Germans should aspire to create a European Germany, not a German Europe. Indeed, in the tensions between its own western and eastern parts (where the geographical location and ascribed character of ‘the East’ has itself changed across history), Germany exhibits some of the internal schizophrenia that Gabriele Lazzari analyses in the relationship between the north and south of Italy. ‘Asia begins at the Elbe’, Konrad Adenauer is reputed to have quipped. Nonetheless, it is the central, eastern, south-eastern and southern parts of Europe (those apparently simple geographical terms themselves being the subject of constant redefinition) that most clearly at once challenge and exemplify the multiple dichotomies of what Daniella Gáti nicely describes as the Empire of the Binary. West/East, North/South, centre/periphery, coloniser/colonised, Christian/pagan – all these binaries are at once present and subverted in these parts. Gáti reminds us that early twentieth-century Hungarian culture polarised around two competing influential journals, Nyugat, meaning the West, and Napkelet, meaning sunrise or the East. In the speeches of Hungary's authoritarian, anti-liberal prime minister Viktor Orbán, she finds a tension between presenting Hungarians as the true western Christians and celebrating the original Magyars, those pagan nomads. Marta Figlerowicz explores a similar tension in Maria Janion's analysis of Poland's complex relationship with its own Christian and pre-Christian past. Historically, Poland and Hungary were both themselves imperial powers, before joining the ranks of the colonised. Measured against these master dichotomies, we conclude that Poland and Hungary are at once both and neither of most of the constructed opposites. There is a long tradition of intra-European orientalism, in which some self-appointed Western Europe views Europe's ‘East’ as backward, exotic and vaguely barbaric. Here are the fantastical lands of vukojebina (wolf-fuckery), to use a salty term from Saša Stanišić's novel Herkunft, here perceptively analysed by Lilla Balint and Djordje Popović. In his seminal book Inventing Eastern Europe, Larry Wolff traces the origins of this immense condescension of the self-styled West back to the Enlightenment. Lazzari vividly reminds us that there is also an intra-European orientalism directed towards the south of the continent and, in the case of Italy, an intra-national orientalism of the Italian North towards the Italian South. Beyond this, I draw three further conclusions from this special issue. First, I believe Sabrina, the central figure of Sabrina Efionayi's Addio, a domani, with her two mothers – the biological, Gladys, a migrant from Nigeria to Italy, and the adoptive, Antonietta – is a representative European of our time. So is the Bosnian-German hero of Stanišic's Herkunft. Biographical hybridity is now the norm, homogeneity the exception. Probably even Stanišić's ‘Dr Heimat’ actually had a Macedonian grandfather or an Algerian grandmother. A book by the American writer Christopher Caldwell is subtitled (in some editions) ‘Can Europe be the same with different people in it?’ The correct answers to this question are: no and yes. No, obviously, because different people make it a different place. But yes, European societies can keep their same basic character and values with inhabitants having complex origins and multiple identities. The most distinctive quality of being a European, namely that we can be ‘at home abroad’, helps with that. That is why I have called my personal history of Europe Homelands, in the plural. Second, perhaps the biggest single moral challenge that Europe now faces lies in the sea that the Romans called mare nostrum. This is brilliantly documented in Chloe Howe Haralambous's chapter on the fate and treatment of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean from the North African coast to the promised land of Europe. A continent that likes to define itself against its own barbaric past – a chronological rather than a geographical Other – is here consigning would-be Europeans to a watery death, or paying authoritarian regimes to drag them back, against their will, into inhuman conditions. Her account of the case of the Vos Thalassa continues to haunt me. This brings me to my final observation. These essays demonstrate the immense value of using literature, and culture more broadly, for historical and political analysis. And Haralambous's essay on rescue at sea would furnish material for great fiction. I think of it as a new story by Joseph Conrad: The Mutiny on the Thalassa. Timothy Garton Ash, Professor of European studies at the University of Oxford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, is the author of 11 books charting the contemporary history and politics of Europe, including, most recently Homelands: A Personal History of Europe (Yale UP).

Timothy Garton Ash

Afterword to the Critical Quarterly Special Issue ‘Peripheral Europes’

all speech envelopes itself in the unspoken Glou. I haue a Letter guessingly set downe2 Say you want to send a letter. Easy: sign, seal, deliver (it's yours/theirs). But also say you're a poet, and one that's given close – occasionally obsessive – attention to the troubles of communication, and you understand language, even at its most off-handedly practical, as an obstacle as much as a vehicle. W. S. Graham is such a poet, and, for him, posting a letter was no simple matter. His poem ‘Letter X’, for instance, designates such a text ‘Our obstacle in common’, run through with personal signature but subject to the same stumbles as any written word.3 The contours of genre – the line that separates and connects letter and poem – are routinely pressed upon and disturbed by his writing: he treads tentatively along the fraught hyphen of a poem-letter, simultaneously blurring and keenly sharpening their distinctions. Or else, their forms get complexly imbricated, as letters suddenly delineate, becoming, for a turn, verse; or, elsewhere, poems take on the formal qualities of epistle, confusing the varying registers and timbres of private or public voice. As Angela Leighton puts it, ‘the urgent sense of an addressee is never far from Graham's poetic consciousness’.4 Graham, in other words, was well versed in letters and vice versa. And the letter is a form worth complicating, because, as Hermione Lee writes, ‘If you are using a letter in a biography, you must recognize the dangerousness of enlisting such a performance, and you must have some idea of what the performance entails’; and that ‘Of course literary autobiography can be read just as data of the life; but it is also evidence of what mattered to the subject, and a form of self-dramatisation or disguise’.5 Graham's genre-skipping words increase such dangers considerably, because his forms of ‘self-dramatisation and disguise’ extend to his most personal – and, as we'll see, most heartfelt – interactions. So, this article wishes to think through the problem of Graham's minute deceptions and micromanagement of his friends and readers, and how this occurs in his letters and letter-like poems. I'm terming this way of writing, of using the letter's unassumingness to enact kinds of control (both personal and critical), Graham's smalltalk – and Graham's talk can be small to the point of vanishing altogether. A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend. Indebted to our talk to attitude and accent, there seems a spectral power in thought that walks alone6 I hate having to say anything which needs saying. I would rather write to someone I like when I've nothing to say (which I'm aware of) and just to let them hear my sweet voice.11 a feeling that the writer would rather be writing about some world made up from his head and not have to stick to those facts which have to be given over the pages to the people. – It's like me when I'm writing a letter. (NF, p. 83) So, the implicatory force of a speech-act, however tiny, is at least in part established by breaking unwritten rules and using unuttered ways of speaking that guide our personal social dependencies. Graham will often carry across letter-chatter, as well as the generic features of a missive, into his poetry. By tacking back and forth like this, and by redrawing their edges as overlaps, he makes the social formalities of letters into a pointed structure of verse. He employs a classic sign-off in his poem ‘Wynter and the Grammarsow’, whose title partially addresses his painter-friend Bryan Wynter: ‘Yours Truly saying with an invisible voice’ (NCP, p. 187). This ushers in the language of letters into the poem's world, and in doing so gently disturbs the discreet categories of both modes of writing, as well as sound and sight. There is an unreadable absence to the printed voice, the missing intonation, gesture, social context that becomes the implicature we retroactively place: ‘saying with an invisible voice’. Like Pyramus, we might be confused about the voice we see, because there it is, in print. But the invisibility hides in plain sight: ‘Yours truly’ being one of those habits of writing we know all too well, a transparency of expression by its nature avoiding obscurity, a feature so common that we scarcely acknowledge its presence. Graham presents this see-through voice (parodically mirroring a letter's usual classification as a more ‘open’ text) in a different contextual light, asking us to read the gaps of social niceness. What is now true with this sign-off is hard to determine, ‘those facts’ of the page and those of the people writing them become less and less clear, a ‘self-dramatising or disguise’ conjured from airy talk, in a way of saying something for nothing. It isn't surprising that such crossovers occur; Graham was a delightful and delighted letter writer. Nor is it unimportant that one of his first jobs was writing the Lord's Prayer on a postage stamp: a place in which address and deliverance co-habit in almighty miniature. (‘Amen’, in fact, comes from biblical Hebrew and means ‘truth’ – the original ‘Yours Truly’.13) Stamps, like smalltalk, like stock phrases such as ‘Yours Truly’, take up space and serve a practical purpose, getting us to where we need to be; they aren't designed, usually, to arrest undue attention. Writing the Lord's Prayer on a stamp would break several of Grice's equivalent conversational maxims, for example under QUANITY: ‘Do not make your contribution more informative than is required’.14 first let me get this over with. As we did last time and paid you back do you think you could go through the bore of helping us this time. You know I am not good at keeping money back to do anything with. (NF, p. 213) private letters often seem most exquisitely adapted to their setting when written most casually; it is exactly the extent to which their language is careless, the proportion of carelessness they give to the different matters in hand, which is so precise […] this gives an inherent opportunity for ambiguity which is regularly exploited.15 YOURS TRULY In reply to your last letter Which came in too confused For words saying ‘Listen. And silence even has turned Away. Listen.’ Dear Pen Pal in the distance, beyond My means, why do you bring Your face down so near To affront me here again With a near expression out Of not indifferent eyes? I know you well alas From where I sit behind The Art barrier of ice. down so near To affront me here again With a near expression out Of not indifferent eyes? Indeed, Graham elides these different kinds of expression as things that both require careful reading. And here we can see how a letter's peculiar and perhaps impossible tense (written presently with a future voice in mind to tell you of the past) becomes for Graham, in various ways, a site of translational performance: translation of letter-speak into poetic diction, transmission of illocutionary force in the mind of the receiver, as well as a kind of self-translation, a rereading of one's old letters and poems. Within this translational space, which will not yield to apprehension for long, Graham harnesses dual conditions of deictic surety and sudden aporia, and through linguistic carelessness (which is, of course, always careful) he brings to light those features of writing that so often go unnoticed but form a vital part of the auditory and readerly imagination. DEAR BRYAN WYNTER This is only a note To say how sorry I am You died. You will realise What a position it puts Me in. This potential triviality might be funny because it's so inappropriate, disregarding, here, what some might call the proper tone of bereavement; but the implication is that Wynter would understand – or more simply get – this subtle way of speaking better than we ever could, and it causes the humour's heart to break. In a sense, the poem formalizes the rhetorical character, as it later states, of ‘Speaking to you and not’ – as we already know, Graham ‘hate[s] having to say anything which needs saying’ – or, in full, ‘Speaking to you and not / Knowing if you are there / Is not too difficult. / My words are used to that’ (NCP, p. 258). These words have gotten more ‘used to’ things now, though they retain the well-known strangeness of a person's sudden disappearance. What one is ‘used to’ – something either that repetition has made familiarly tolerable or coldly deadened – also shades into its own imperfect past: addressing what used to be. Simultaneously ‘Speaking to you and not’ is an oddly comfortable mode for Graham, and describes, at once, sending a letter and writing an elegy, enveloping these weirdly similar forms of address. This is to say, the ‘Speaking to you and not’ might be an address to the dead, a place in which ‘to’ means nothing, but also friends will often talk and say nothing at all, a conversation in which it is more about the sweet exchange of voices, the air of implication, and a shared silent history, than anything else. It is with the gap between skimming and reading that he weaves a serious part of his verse-texture, as well as a theory of elegy. Dear Bryan Wynter, Indeed sorry is it that your old shy self should have entered my house to find no possible Graham. I thank you for your visit, your vinboozler and your logs. You are a brick, a gem, a constant north, a main stay, a long-standing friend. (NF, p. 264) [‘]The turbulence thus set up engenders new forces which in turn hinder or deflect the original paths.’ […] Other activities are fairly self-evident – a crowded field, a concern with space as against location and volume, a feeling of suspension, of ‘floatingness’, of everything about to move on (difficult to be objective about this).18 And here I stand looking Out over the top Half of my bedroom window. There almost as far As I can see I see St Buryan's Church tower. An inch to the left, behind That dark rise of woods, Is where you used to lurk. I am trying to be better, Which will make you smile Under your blue hat. Bryan Wynter died last night. Whether you knew him or not does not matter […] He happened to be a man who was very near to me in my life for about 30 years. This is not a letter to tell you that somebody has died. You don't know him anyhow […] I can't believe it. But here we are, Robin, still going through our lives as respectively do. Are you there? Is your dog there? I make your dog a symbol. (NF, p. 287) Bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire, The little speedwell's darling blue, Deep tulips dashed with fiery dew, Laburnums, dropping-wells of fire.23 All of this shows letters to be importantly imaginative encounters and ambiguous objects of knowledge, minimal surfaces that extend indefinitely beyond the reader's reach, even as they come to hand. Griffiths writes of a letter by Keats that ‘the closeness of the imaginative activity Keats asked of his brother and sister-in-law to what is asked of a reader now preserves an intimacy with his writing across the time since the letter was sent out’.25 And this is similar to the ‘imaginative activity’ Keats once described in a letter: ‘it would be a great delight to know in what position Shakespeare sat when he began “To be or not to be” – such thing<s> become interesting from distance of time and place’.26 ‘Interesting from distance’ is also an interest in distance, and both Keats and Griffiths highlight that imaginative intimacy might increase over space and time. Getting to know a poet (as a poet and not a friend) is, then, a strange activity of gauging the space between us. ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’ performs in reverse what Stanley Cavell writes of pieces of art: ‘They mean something to us, not just the way statements do, but the way people do’.27 What is important for ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’, and our reading of it, is the art of poetry and the art of friendship are found in pieces: the pain is levelled as partial, one-sided, missing its usual conversation-partner. And this is a pain (though a slightly different one) for the critic, too, because it appeals to an over-active imagination. This is perhaps where implicature becomes shaded with the risky edge of illocution, which is what Quentin Skinner thinks ‘lies at the heart of literary-critical procedures’.28 Illocution was famously noticed and unfolded by J. L. Austin and John Searle, and was defined by the former as the ‘performance of an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something’.29 This literary-critical heart, however, watches carefully over its own imagination, and will forever brink uneasily on making something and someone up by trying to make more visible the invisibilities of voice. Graham knows this, and fuels his elegy with it. It is a little like asking for money: similar uneasiness (and uneasy similarity) exists in making such financial requests and a greedy elegy. ‘Or am / I greedy’, Graham writes, ‘to make you up / Again out of memory?’ (NCP, p. 258). To an extent, he was used to the dangers of such conjuring-acts, and worried about them, writing to Wynter's widow shortly after he died, ‘You mustn't think I am eccentrically making a thing of Bryan dying. It is only me writing to you, suddenly being struck by the realization of his absence’ (NF, p. 289). This gives some insight as to why the poem is so intensely un-eccentric; again, ‘it is only me writing to you’ – that's the point, not all this greedy (and dodgy) elegy-making; let's be serious by keeping it light. [M]aking a thing of Bryan dying’ betrays a nagging guilt through a nagging rhyme, unavoidable or irresistible, that we are sounding too clearly our meaning, that maybe I too am eccentrically making a thing of Wynter's death. illocutionary re-descriptions make explicit that imaginative voicing which turns readers into an audience; they are the heart of literary criticism by being ways in which literature comes to life.32 Tennyson's surface, his technical accomplishment, is intimate with his depths: what we most quickly see about Tennyson is that which moves between the surface and the depths, that which is of slight importance. By looking innocently at the surface we are most likely to come to the depths, to the abyss of sorrow.33 So we must engage in sensing out and sometimes placing illocutionary force in texts, and part of this imaginative game-playing is built up from the idea of what Graham was, as an idea that sits alongside his texts, felt as much in an off-hand remark as an ars poetica. ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’ has the lines ‘I would like to think / You were alright’. On ‘were’ the present tense wilts, and also alludes to the first thing people regularly say to each other on meeting: ‘How are you?’ A question which might only demand a serious reply if it's the last thing you're saying. Now, for Graham, it's ‘It was all fine, wasn't it? We didn't waste our time talking about money?’ You may like to think so. You have to think so. But his awareness of this tension drives this poem as well as many of his others and is perhaps what makes them unusually and especially moving. He uses smalltalk to trouble over smalltalk, on the verge of vanishing altogether, and the intense feeling of privacy this creates fuels the elegy's success and the critic's sense of transgression. The poem, I think, is gilded with guilt of a kind that is scarcely acknowledged, and so particularly serious. That very specific regret felt at the passing of a close one: that there were always more nothings to say; or that ‘those facts’ put over a page were the real waste of time. If there's a joke between us Let it lie where it fell. The exact word escapes me And that's just as well. I always have the tune by ear. You're an afterthought. But when the joke and the grief strike Your heart beats on the note. Jack Barron recently completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge on managing (and/or failing to manage) W. S. Graham. His work has appeared in Cambridge Quarterly, PN Review, The Arts Desk, Review 31, and elsewhere.

Jack Barron

‘Yours truly saying with an invisible voice’: W. S. Graham's Smalltalk

Critical QuarterlyVolume 65, Issue 3 p. 121-122 Notes on contributors Notes on contributors First published: 17 November 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12753Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume65, Issue3October 2023Pages 121-122 RelatedInformation

Critical QuarterlyVolume 65, Issue 3 p. 48-50 Original Article Matter Colin MacCabe, Corresponding Author Colin MacCabe [email protected] University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Correspondence Colin MacCabe, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Colin MacCabe, Corresponding Author Colin MacCabe [email protected] University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Correspondence Colin MacCabe, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 20 October 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12752Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume65, Issue3October 2023Pages 48-50 RelatedInformation

短名	Crit. Q.
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