Review of Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words, published January 28, 2016 in The New Republic:
https://newrepublic.com/article/128486/jhumpa-lahiris-roman-holiday
Published on October 13, 2015 in The New Republic:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123100/orhan-pamuks-perpetual-loners
Published in the May 24 Sunday New York Times. Read online at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/books/review/the-distant-marvels-by-chantel-acevedo.html
[Published May 18, 2015 in The New Republic]
Postmodernism is now a rather unmeaning term, dulled by overuse, and unfit to describe a new group of authors of varying ages and nationalities who are often lumped together under its umbrella: Ben Lerner, Sophie Calle, Teju Cole, Tom McCarthy, Alejandro Zambra, Siri Hustvedt, Michel Houellebecq, Sheila Heti, W.G. Sebald, Orhan Pamuk, and Enrique Vila-Matas, the sexagenarian Barcelona-based writer who, with over 20 novels to his name, is perhaps the most prolific yet least-known of them all.
Call them, instead, the Reality Hunger generation, after David Shields’ ingenious and prophetic 2008 manifesto on contemporary writing. For Shields, novels that employ the traditional conventions of narration, plot, and story no longer make sense. Reality is fiction, and fiction is reality. For a more accurate reflection of how we experience this reality, we ought to think of novels the way we think about art. “A novel, for most readers—and critics—is primarily a ‘story,’” writes Shields. “But a work of art, like the world, is a living form. It’s in its form that its reality resides.” So if form is now all-important—more so than content—what is the form that contemporary works of art so often take? Collage. This also happens to be the form of Reality Hunger. In addition to outlining the future of artistic production, Reality Hunger doubles as a blueprint for it: It is a pastiche, a series of intentionally “plagiarized” aphorisms, presented without quotation marks. (The original sources are listed in the index for legal reasons, but Shields encourages the reader to cut them out of the book.)
But in the years since Reality Hunger was published, fiction has evolved and adopted its own post-Shields specificities. While all of these novelists (Lerner, Calle, Cole, etc.) are transparently their narrators, there tends to be a specter of trauma in the background as well: Zambra writes in the shadow of the Pinochet coup in Chile, Sebald excavates the memory of the Holocaust, and Lerner documents the aftermath of the 3/11 train bombings in Madrid. Above all, this genre is marked by its generic porousness, its willingness to embrace a collage of forms—Zambra’s Ways of Going Home and Lerner’s 10:04 become poems, while other novels dialogue with music and theater. Many of these novels include moments of essayistic prose or literary criticism within themselves—the sadly untranslated Jorge Carrión even inserts a fictional piece of literary criticism in his novel The Dead. (This last genre-merging technique may stoke the anxieties of literary critics: How do you say something new about a book that writes its own criticism?)
Most significantly, these novels intersperse their prose with photographs and paintings. At first, these additions seem to pose a basic question of realism: Can the novel compete with the “reality effect” of the photograph or texture of the painting? In this, the writers are channeling W. G. Sebald, who deploys visual art not as a supplement to the text but as inspiration for it. Sebald’s photographs, as Teju Cole put it in an interview with Aleksandar Hemon in BOMB Magazine, “propose a dare. ‘Look, this is all testimonial,’ he seems to be saying. And we almost believe it—until we notice the slight fracture between the claim in the text and the photograph. … [H]is photos … create the uncanny, destabilizing mood of his books: it must all be true, we think, but we know it can’t all be true.” Sophie Calle’s novel Suite Vénitienne/Please Follow Me—a diary of photos she surreptitiously took of a stranger she followed to Venice—takes Sebald to another level: Photos provide the main action, while the text, her diary, serves as a interlude—almost like a caption.
In addition to the insertion of actual art within the novel, many of these reality-fictions feature scenes in museums or at contemporary art exhibitions. The opening scene of Lerner’sLeaving the Atocha Station takes place at the Prado, where the narrator finds the reluctance of the museum guards to close in on an erratic visitor more moving than the actual paintings. Sheila Heti spends three days at Art Basel in How Should a Person Be?, and Michel Houellebecq lampoons the contemporary art world in The Map and the Territory. Siri Hustvedt’s novel What I Loved begins with the discovery of a painting, while her most recent effort, The Blazing World, lays bare the systemic bias against women in the art world. Orhan Pamuk’sThe Museum of Innocence literally became a museum in Istanbul.
The art world has seeped into the literary world in other ways. Most art fairs, including Frieze London and Frieze New York, feature talks by writers in their programs. Hustvedt, the author of a well-received book of art criticism as well, has lectured at the Prado and the Met. And in aninterview published this spring (also in BOMB), the novelist Tom McCarthy described how falling in with a crowd of visual artists in his twenties gave him a more sophisticated understanding of literature’s possibilities: “These people generally had a much more dynamic engagement with literature than most ‘literary’ people … and their work seemed to be actively addressing the whole legacy of literary modernism (in the same way that Bruce Nauman works through questions posed by Beckett, for example, or Cage with Joyce). … [T]he art world—to a large extent—provides the arena in which literature can be vigorously addressed, transformed, and expanded.”
This literary coalescence around visual art seems increasingly less coincidental and more and more the entire point. The avant-garde writers of today aspire to be conceptual artists, and have their novels considered conceptual art. This may be literature’s Duchampian moment. Welcome to the readymade novel.
Just as Marcel Duchamp asked if a urinal could be art, the readymade novel asks what literature can be, and what it should be in the future. Instead of trying to understand reality via a slew of concrete details, omniscience, multiple viewpoints, or anything else that we’ve traditionally expected from fiction, the readymade novel poses an idea or raises a question. It is more interested in the concept behind a work of art—behind itself—than its execution. The readymade novel underlines the chief virtue (or curse) of conceptual art: Unlike traditional visual art, you don’t actually need to see a readymade to “get it.” But if you do go to see it, it’s just as if you’ve opened up a readymade novel: You’re not merely a passive viewer of art, but an active participant in its formation.
Two newly published books by the Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas show just how deeply this literature-as-conceptual-art trend has permeated avant-garde contemporary literature. In Vila-Matas’ latest novel, The Illogic of Kassel, the writer has literally become a contemporary art exhibition. The novel lightly fictionalizes Vila-Matas’ real-life experience at the Documenta art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, where he was invited to participate in a week-long writer-in-residence program in 2013. The curators of Documenta ask him to spend the week writing in the corner of a small Chinese restaurant. Vila-Matas finds this absurd, and spends most of his time at the (real-life) Dschingis Khan restaurant sleeping, inventing conversations between the German and Chinese people around him, and actively avoiding the one crazy person who approaches him. Despite seemingly wasting his time in the restaurant, Vila-Matas becomes the piece of performance art that the curators of Documenta hoped he would be: “Art is art, and what you make of it is up to you,” one curator tells him.
Vila-Matas is also the author of A Brief History of Portable Literature, originally published in 1985 and jointly released this summer with The Illogic of Kassel. A Brief History of Portable Literature is the rawer of the two books, a whimsical romp based on the peregrinations of a secret literary society of “Shandies” (as in Tristram Shandy). It is perhaps best (self-deprecatingly) described within its own pages as “a journey that sought no goal, no fixed object, and was clearly futile.” This book is a catalogue of the avant-garde—with allusions to Duchamp, Walter Benjamin, Man Ray, Georgia O’Keeffe—that is composed in a style that teeters between funny and obnoxiously in-the-know. There is a mockumentary retrospective feel to it: a piecemeal investigation into the events that precipitated the demise of this gloriously short-lived secret society, which required its members to make portable art, i.e., readymades a la Duchamp’s box-in-a-suitcase.
Read together, these two novels, published some 30 years apart, demonstrate the evolution of Vila-Matas’s thinking on the relationship between contemporary art and literature. A Brief History of Portable Literature, on one hand, simply ventriloquizes this gaggle of Duchampian disciples. It’s almost like highbrow fan fiction. But in The Illogic of Kassel, Vila-Matas doesn’t merely tell us how great artists attempted to create portable art—he becomes part of the portable art. Sulking in the Chinese restaurant, writing or merely pretending to do so, Vila-Matas was an official exhibition at Documenta 13, whose Writers’ Residency “sought moments of ‘chorality’: instances of mutual commitment, whether loud or muted; the possibility that voices could meet and join together, without the outright demand that they should.” The concepts or questions—what if we make the solitary act of writing a public performance? Can we have privacy in a public space?—outstrip their execution in importance.
That’s not the sole project of the readymade novel, however: Vila-Matas also reminds us that we don’t live like nineteenth-century French novelists anymore, so we should stop writing according to their demodé, quasi-scientific conventions of realism: “We loath the realist who thinks the task of the writer is to reproduce, copy, imitate reality, as if, in its chaotic evolution, its monstrous complexity, reality could be trapped and narrated,” writes Vila-Matas in The Illogic of Kassel. “We are amazed by writers who believe that the more empirical and prosaic they are, they closer they get to the truth, when in fact the more details you pile up, the further that takes you away from reality.”
Our reality, instead, lies in something more akin to conceptual art. In The Illogic of Kassel, Vila-Matas is fond of repeating a line that Mallarmé told Manet: “Paint, not the thing, but the effect that it produces.” In other words, the effect of art has now become more important than the canvas. It’s not surprising that this line is repeated so often in the novel: In The Illogic of Kassel, Vila-Matas is very much painting the effect that art produces. The reader has unvarnished access to his rich interior life—all his anxieties, opinions, and experiences of viewing installations at Documenta. Indeed, Vila-Matas demands an active reader: Just as the conceptual art installations at Documenta demanded viewer participation to form meaning, Vila-Matas asks the same of his readers. “Art is art, and what you make of it is up to you,” the Documenta curator reminds us. Grapping with competing interpretations, processing your various associations, feelings, and theories—this is the work of art in the new millennium.
The “readymade” writers are, of course, still on the fringes of contemporary literature. Only Pamuk and Sebald are currently internationally famous. Cole and Lerner are on their way to greater recognition, and one hopes their future novels will create more buzz, but Vila-Matas and Zambra will have to wait for more English-language translations of their work to get their proper due; Sophie Calle may be perpetually too avant-garde. Regardless of their varying commercial successes, the emergence of these writers suggests at least a small audience with an interest in how we experience art today. And it seems likely that the younger writers of this generation will continue to write similar books in the future. The “readymade” novelists may inspire a few readymade imitations of their own.
[Published on June 19, 2014 in The New Republic; Translated into Italian on June 28, 2014 in Movimento Libertario]
Soccer is popular,” Jorge Luis Borges observed, “because stupidity is popular.”
At first glance, the Argentine writer’s animus toward “the beautiful game” seems to reflect the attitude of today’s typical soccer hater, whose lazy gibes have almost become a refrain by now: Soccer is boring. There are too many tie scores. I can’t stand the fake injuries.
And it’s true: Borges did call soccer “aesthetically ugly.” He did say, “Soccer is one of England’s biggest crimes.” And apparently, he even scheduled one of his lectures so that it would intentionally conflict with Argentina’s first game of the 1978 World Cup. But Borges’ distaste for the sport stemmed from something far more troubling than aesthetics. His problem was with soccer fan culture, which he linked to the kind of blind popular support that propped up the leaders of the twentieth century’s most horrifying political movements. In his lifetime, he saw elements of fascism, Peronism, and even anti-Semitism emerge in the Argentinean political sphere, so his intense suspicion of popular political movements and mass culture—the apogee of which, in Argentina, is soccer—makes a lot of sense. (“There is an idea of supremacy, of power, [in soccer] that seems horrible to me,” he once wrote.) Borges opposed dogmatism in any shape or form, so he was naturally suspicious of his countrymen’s unqualified devotion to any doctrine or religion—even to their dear albiceleste.
Soccer is inextricably tied to nationalism, another one of Borges’ objections to the sport. “Nationalism only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity,” hesaid. National teams generate nationalistic fervor, creating the possibility for an unscrupulous government to use a star player as a mouthpiece to legitimize itself. In fact, that’s precisely what happened with one of the greatest players ever: Pelé. “Even as his government rounded up political dissidents, it also produced a giant poster of Pelé straining to head the ball through the goal, accompanied by the slogan Ninguém mais segura este país: Nobody can stop this country now,” writes Dave Zirin in his new book,Brazil’s Dance with the Devil. Governments, such as the Brazilian military dictatorship that Pelé played under, can take advantage of the bond that fans share with their national teams to drum up popular support, and this is what Borges feared—and resented—about the sport.
His short story, “Esse Est Percipi” (Latin for “to be is to be perceived”), also may explain his hatred of soccer. About halfway through the story, it’s revealed that soccer in Argentina has ceased to be a sport and entered the realm of spectacle. In this fictional universe, simulacra reigns supreme: the representation of sport has replaced actual sport. “These [sports] don’t exist outside the recording studios and newspaper offices,” a soccer club president huffs. Soccer inspires a fanaticism so deep that supporters will follow nonexistent games on TV and the radio without questioning a thing:
The stadiums have long since been condemned and are falling to pieces. Nowadays everything is staged on the television and radio. The bogus excitement of the sportscaster—hasn’t it ever made you suspect that everything is humbug? The last time a soccer match was played in Buenos Aires was on 24 June 1937. From that exact moment, soccer, along with the whole gamut of sports, belongs to the genre of the drama, performed by a single man in a booth or by actors in jerseys before the TV cameras.
This story goes back to Borges’ discomfort with mass movements: “Esse Est Percipi” effectively accuses the media of complicity in the creation of a mass culture that reveres soccer, and, as a result, leaves itself open to demagoguery and manipulation.
According to Borges, humans feel the need to belong to a grand universal plan, something bigger than ourselves. Religion does it for some people, soccer for others. Characters in the Borgesian corpus often grapple with this desire, turning to ideologues or movements to disastrous effect: The narrator of the story “Deutsches Requiem” becomes a Nazi, while in “The Lottery in Babylon” and “The Congress,” small, innocuous-seeming organizations quickly transform into vast, totalitarian bureaucracies that dole out corporal punishment or burn books. We want to be a part of something bigger, so much so that we blind ourselves to the flaws that develop in these grand plans—or the flaws that were inherent to them all along. And yet, as the narrator of “The Congress” reminds us, the allure of these grand narratives often proves too much: “What really matters is having felt that our plan, which more than once we made a joke of, really and secretly existed and was the world and ourselves.”
That sentence could accurately describe how millions of people on Earth feel about soccer.
[Published on June 13, 2014 in The New Republic]
On an overcast Thursday afternoon, just hours before Neymar would open the World Cup in Brazil, the robots took to the pitch at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.
I didn’t know what to expect, and I suspect the 50 or so other humans in attendance didn’t either. Robots are already smarter than most of us. Machines will continue to take more of our jobs. And Hollywood is sure they will eventually rise up and kill us all. Sports are all we have left, really. What if robots started beating us at soccer, too?
This demonstration, led by Daniel D. Lee, head of the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, put some of these fears to rest. “We think of machines as being better than us in a lot of things—chess, Jeopardy—but if you look at [robot soccer], we see how humans are much better than machines at something we consider natural: just running around on a field, following a ball, and kicking it,” said Lee. “That is still a very difficult task for a robot.”
Lee motioned to his students—a handful of undergrads and master’s students who made the day trip from Philadelphia—to start the demonstration. The students set four robots on the ground, along with a ball and goal; the robots are, in theory, designed to follow and move toward the ball, though that didn’t happen every time. Instead they crab-walked upside-down, rolled over, collided several times, and even flopped.
“Like an Italian player!” a man in the audience yelled, to laughter.
The audience found the robots endearingly clumsy, more reminiscent of a gaggle of tykes clustered around the ball, indiscriminately kicking and frequently falling, than any of the midfield maestros you’ll see on ESPN over the next month. Their size—these robots stood roughly two feet tall—and inability to maintain balance seemed to remind people of babies struggling to take their first steps. But like babies, they were kind of cute: the crowd cooed and rooted them on.
While the robots were not especially successful at making contact with the ball or scoring goals, these kinks are apparently not unique to the Penn team (nickname: UPennalizers). Lee recalled one Robot Soccer World Cup match in which all the robots simply left the field. But that’s not the worst result he’s witnessed on the robot-soccer circuit: “I’ve seen a match where the robot, after making a kick, fell over and decapitated itself, and then the head rolled across the field.”
After the demonstration ended, about half the audience stuck around to watch the first game of the World Cup on a big projection screen. Some people were talking about how far America’s Major League Soccer had come; Brazil’s starting goalkeeper plays for Toronto FC. An older gentleman, watching the game to avoid going outside in the rain, commented that he couldn’t wait for real football to start. Then Marcelo scored an own goal, and everyone agreed that even a robot would never do that.
[Published on June 6, 2014 in The New Republic]
By Shaj Mathew
It’s disappointing, though not terribly surprising, that this is how Jonathan Clegg begins his jeremiad against American soccer fans, published in the Wall Street Journal Thursday night: “Growing up as a soccer fan in England…”
Here we go.
To lend credibility to the screed that follows, Clegg reminds us that his English upbringing allows him to understand the sport in a way that Americans never will: “I’ve witnessed my fair share of horrors. I’ve seen shocking acts of violence, overheard hundreds of abusive chants and watched Pelé retire to sell erectile dysfunction pills.” He’s seen things. Clegg’s nod to his nationality also gives away his real reason for writing, the familiar hipster lament: he liked soccer (football) before it was cool, and now these neophytes are ruining everything.
“I’ve discovered there’s a new scourge on my beloved game that I simply cannot tolerate: Americans,” he writes. Particularly distasteful to Clegg are those on this side of the pond who really care about the sport; they are “derivative, excessive and utterly ridiculous,” their behavior “an elaborate affectation.” In other words, they’re posers—unlike Clegg, who earned his fandom by watching English fans behave in infinitely more deplorable ways. Makes sense.
Clegg notes that U.S. soccer fans are copycats of European soccer fans. This is true. But Clegg does not find this flattering, arguing instead that we should stop mimicking the language and customs of the Old World. We Americans are not allowed to say “kit” or “pitch” in reference to jerseys or fields, and we should not wear scarves to “matches” when it’s hot out. Clegg wants us to develop our own soccer identity instead—and then immediately criticizes us for adding our own spin on things, deeming heretical the relatively innocuous American trait of shortening “penalty kick” to “PK.” He also cannot abide by fact that we call Team USA captain Clint Dempsey by the nickname he chose for himself, Deuce. We have to do it the British way: “Ever since a ball was first kicked into a net, it has been an inviolable law of the game that Dempsey should be shortened to Demps.”
But I thought we were supposed to chart our own course?
Clegg’s biggest flaw, though, is his fundamental misunderstanding of American culture. He complains about “a soccer fan wearing a replica Arsenal jersey, a team scarf around his neck and a pair of Dr. Martens lace-ups. He looked like he he’d been born and raised along the Holloway Road. In fact, he was from Virginia.” But he fails to mention—or perhaps is unaware—that Dr. Martens aren’t indigenous to England, but rather Germany. And when he observes that American “soccer snobs have pilfered elements of fan culture from Spain, Italy and Latin America,” he’s ignoring the fact that a significant percentage of U.S. soccer fans are of Latin American descent. (One-third of Major League Soccer fans are Hispanic.) American culture is uniquely shaped by the diversity of its immigrants, and that explains why our soccer fans have incorporated—or stolen, if you’re of Clegg’s persuasion—the habits of fans throughout the world, from Rio de Janeiro to London.
Clegg’s hypocrisy, argumentative contradictions, and ignorance of American culture notwithstanding, he makes a valid point about the elitism of soccer fans here, describing “a peculiar species of fan here whose passion for soccer seems to be less about 22 men chasing a ball up and down a field and more about its intellectual and cosmopolitan qualities. Never mind that no other sport is so linked to the working class. For these fans, rooting for an English soccer team is a highbrow pursuit and a mark of sophistication, like going to a Wes Anderson movie or owning a New Yorker subscription.”
I agree that it’s strange how, despite its proletarian roots, soccer is “the go-to sport of the thinking class” in the U.S. But isn’t it also a bit strange for Clegg to make that complaint in America’s go-to newspaper for the obscenely rich?
[Published June 5, 2014 in The Millions]
If, according to the Grey Lady, soccer is now “the go-to sport of the thinking class,” you’ll want to brush up on your footy knowledge before the World Cup begins on June 12. Fortunately, there are a number of books that examine politics and culture through the optic of the beautiful game. David Winner’s Brilliant Orange traces the Dutch soccer team’s penchant for self-destruction to the country’s Calvinist culture, while Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World describes the successes and failures of globalization by looking at soccer clubs and their communities, both local and global. Most recently, Soccernomics, by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, uses data judiciously (ahem, FiveThirtyEight) to challenge our conventional beliefs about both club and national sides. And the most literary of the bunch, Eduardo Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow, waxes poetic about the history of soccer, starting in China five thousand years ago. Lucky for the true footy intellectual, a new addition to this repertoire of soccer nonfiction has arrived just in time for the World Cup.
Dave Zirin’s Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: the World Cup, the Olympics, and the Struggle for Democracy is a formidable, if flawed, entry into this canon. To be sure, this book is more about Brazilian economic, social, and political history than soccer. In particular, Zirin’s book attempts to capture in nonfiction what its counterparts in the novel (Roberto Bolaño’s 2666) and cinema (Amores Perros) have already dramatized, that is, the matrix of structural violence, political corruption, and income inequality that, according to some, has attended the rise of neoliberalism in Latin America around the turn of this century. These networks of violence are often difficult to discern and distill for the average reader precisely because these are processes and systems at work — in fact, such a task is probably better suited to fiction than nonfiction — but Zirin makes a valiant effort to connect the dots. In Brazil’s Dance with the Devil, he explains the unrest in Brazil in advance of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics with the anger, erudition, and clarity we have come to expect from his sports columns for The Nation. On occasion, however, Zirin is blinded by his own zeal for the subject and fails to consider opposing viewpoints or other causal factors.
Central to the book’s thesis is Zirin’s idea of the “neoliberal trojan horse.” But before we get to that, we should unpack what neoliberalism — a term often bandied about without much explanation — actually means. Generally attributed to Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, the term has evolved over time and today is deployed primarily as a pejorative by critics of laissez-faire economics. Neoliberalism prizes individual freedom over government interference, regulation, and labor unions. “The assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market and of trade is a cardinal feature of neoliberal thinking,” writes David Harvey in his Brief History of Neoliberalism. Somewhat dubiously to the Left, this philosophy holds that economic benefits will “trickle down” to the poor, though according to Harvey, “the process of neoliberalism has, however, entailed much ‘creative destruction’, not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers…but also of divisions of labor, social relations…ways of life.” In his account of neoliberalism’s origins, Zirin attempts to explain how an economic philosophy whose “top priorities include crushing unions, privatizing health care and education, abolishing worker protections like safety rules and the minimum wage, and removing environmental protections” became ubiquitous today.
This section on neoliberalism should be one of the book’s most important and elucidating, and yet it leaves something to be desired. Readers are left wondering — at the very least — what those in favor of neoliberal policy found attractive about it in the first place (i.e. promoting economic growth). In fact, neoliberalism in a different context has also described a more moderate form of liberalization; for example, the Third Way under Tony Blair and Bill Clinton aspired to deregulate and rely on the market — instead of the government — to solve problems. Zirin’s critiques may very well be on point, but if he more explicitly linked neoliberal policy to the points he makes on surveillance, inequality, and education in Brazil, he would have created a more textured portrait of the structures responsible for shaping the country as it is today.
That said, let’s consider his basic argument. Leaning on Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine,” Zirin asserts that large-scale events like the Olympics and the World Cup — the “neoliberal trojan horses” — offer countries like Brazil the perfect opportunity to install neoliberal economic policies that their publics would otherwise never authorize. “Nobody wins elections by promising to turn the country into a sweatshop zone,” says Zirin. “So in order to get neoliberal policies in place, the world’s elite need a strategy — some clever sleight of hand.”
This legerdemain lies in what former soccer player turned academic Jules Boykoff has called “celebration capitalism.” Quoting Boykoff, Zirin argues that massive, international sporting events like the World Cup offer the state a “‘once-in-a-generation opportunity [for police and military forces] to multiply and militarize their weapons stocks, laminating another layer on to the surveillance state. The Games justify a security architecture to prevent terrorism, but that architecture can double to suppress or intimidate acts of political dissent.’” And what happens after the Games are over? What are those drones that hovered over the 2012 Olympics in Great Britain doing now?
More disturbingly for Zirin, events like World Cup and the Olympics also allow governments to justify the eviction of their cities’ poorest residents. Zirin describes how Brazilian authorities have used the World Cup as a pretext to clear out the favelas in Rio de Janeiro that occupy prime real estate. He isn’t merely pontificating from his armchair, either: Zirin takes us into the cities, and while taking care not to romanticize their poverty, he humanizes the struggle for resistance by speaking with both residents and scholars. These are among the strongest moments of the book.
These favela evictions take on a more sinister dimension when one realizes that most of those being kicked out are Brazilians of African descent. “In 2014, when the official line is that race is ‘not an issue,’” writes Zirin, “it is the descendants of slaves who…live shorter lives, make less money, have more difficulty finding employment, and are more likely to be among the ten thousand people killed by police over the course of the last decade.” For Zirin, neoliberalism systemically attempts to efface poor, dark-skinned Brazilians who live in favelas.
In the book’s last chapter, Zirin reminds us of Brazil’s failure to deliver new schools and hospitals of the same “FIFA-quality” as the stadiums being built in a country already filled with them. More infuriatingly, most of these stadiums will be empty or severely underused after the World Cup. “One idea,” Zirin notes regarding the post-World Cup function of a $325 million stadium constructed in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest, “is to turn the entire stadium into a massive, open-air prison — a use with a notoriously bloody echo in Latin American history, one not lost on those protesting the priorities of both FIFA and the Brazilian government.”
Zirin’s points on heightened surveillance, favela evictions, and inadequate schools in the run up to the World Cup are valid on their own; however, he lumps them together under the banner of general neoliberal evil, and this is somewhat misleading. A surveillance state in a World Cup or Olympic city, for example, could have emerged just as easily under a different type of economy or government — more drones and greater security at the World Cup are not necessarily unique or attributable to neoliberal policy. It is also arguable that the excesses of state capitalism — not neoliberalism — are responsible for the chaos in Brazil, but Zirin seldom entertains alternative theories. Throughout the book, Zirin takes shots at The Economist and the Financial Times for their stances on neoliberal policy, but in the future he might consider their arguments with greater intellectual empathy in order to provide a more objective analysis of views other than his — if only so that he can offer a more comprehensive and compelling refutation of them.
Describing structural violence and complex economic theory in accessible, stylish, and substantive prose — while simultaneously weaving in Brazil’s social and sporting history — is an extremely difficult enterprise. Few books can pull off such a feat, and for this Brazil’s Dance with the Devil deserves commendation. Its yellow card on the issue of neoliberalism notwithstanding, this book will be an essential companion for any member of the “thinking class” who wants to approach the World Cup protests with a critical gaze.
[Published in Guernica Magazine on February 26, 2014]
By Shaj Mathew
“Poetry is my God,” Forugh Farrokhzad once wrote in a letter to her father. “I am happy when my soul is content and poetry satisfies my soul, whereas if I have all these good things that people kill themselves for and am deprived of writing poetry, I will kill myself.” Farrokhzad encapsulates this life-or-death relationship to her art in “Another Birth,” the titular poem of a collection that by turns modernized and scandalized literary Tehran when it was published 50 years ago in the spring of 1964. Its first line—“My whole being is a dark chant”—affirms the Persian littératrice’s artistic credo: poetry as life, life as poetry.
This was a revolutionary stance for a woman living in mid-century Iran. After all, men dominate the entire Middle Eastern literary tradition, so much of which is organized around the tension between the active male lover and the passive female beloved. The paradigmatic example of this is of course the centuries-old story of Leyli and Majnun, a sort of proto-Romeo and Juliet that figures prominently in the history of Middle Eastern and South Asian art and literature. (Briefly: The two are forbidden to marry, leading Majnun, which literally means mad, to go crazy, move to the woods, and write poetry; in the end, Leyli dies, as does Majnun.) Originating in the verse of the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami, this legend of star-crossed lovers still permeates Middle Eastern literature. But many later interpretations of the story dwell on the point-of-view of the moon-struck Majnuns and never the Leylis with whom they are helplessly besotted.
Here’s where Farrokzhad offers a corrective: Another Birth, as well as her three earlier collections, The Captive, The Wall, and The Rebellion, inverts this patriarchal dynamic, privileging Farrokhzad’s own feminine voice above all others.
Many scholars take Farrokhzad to be the speaker of “Another Birth,” which begins by observing how poetry has the power to preserve the people who make a life so meaningful—and painful: “in this chant / I grafted you to the tree, / to the water, to the fire,” she writes, probably alluding to one Ebrahim Golestan, doubtless the “E.G.” to whom the volume is dedicated. That’s at least the interpretation of Michael Hillman, the professor of Persian whose excellent book, A Lonely Woman, is one of the few English-language treatments of Farrokhzad’s life and poetry.
Golestan, a prominent Iranian filmmaker and intellectual, was married with kids, but that didn’t stop the two from beginning a sensational affair that was the talk of the Tehran literary set in the 1960s. Farrokhzad did little to quell the gossip: in fact, she offers her side of the story in “Another Birth.” According to Hillman, Golestan would leave Farrokhzad to go home to his family every night and return in the morning, an experience Farrokhzad seems to describe in “Another Birth”:
This affair with Golestan suffuses Farrokhzad’s poetry with a melancholy reminiscent of Plath. Farrokhzad did have more than enough reason to feel low. At 18, after she divorced her husband—the satirist Parviz Shapour, who she had begged to marry two years earlier—she was forbidden by law and by her husband’s family from seeing her young son ever again. This event would haunt her later verse and likely figured in her decision to adopt a child from the leper colony that she filmed in her acclaimed documentary, The House Is Black, which Golestan produced.
The specter of Golestan aside, “Another Birth” is very much a paean to the quotidian. That’s where real life takes place, the individual moments of the day to day—which are occasionally punctuated by things not so ordinary:
This focus on the single moments of the present shortly gives way to a preoccupation with linear time and literary legacy. Farrokhzad wonders aloud: Is her poetry good enough to make a dent in “the line of time?” Will she endure?
Today Farrokhzad’s popularity is such that the prospect of her fretting about her future reception seems absurd. She was widely read during her lifetime, and scholars now consider her one of the most important Persian poets of the 20th century. She continues to influence Iranians and the diaspora in this century as well, including the likes of Shirin Neshat, who adapted a Farrokhzad poem for a visual piece in the New York Times in 2011. “The epitome of what the Islamic Republic wanted to eradicate, Farrokhzad is now the Iranian equivalent of a rock star,” writes Farzaneh Milani in the Washington Post. “An industry has developed around her name.”
Tragically, Farrokhzad would not live to see this legacy. In 1967, just three years after the publication of Another Birth, she died in a car accident, aged 32. The actual details of the accident are apocryphal: some say that she swerved to avoid hitting a school bus full of children, while others (even more dubiously) claim it was a suicide. In any case, many have noticed that her poem “Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season” seems to eerily presage the season and manner of her death:
Ah,
who’s looking out for accidents at the intersection
when the whistles are shrilling Stop!
…
I said to my mother, “It’s all over now”
I said, “The accident always occurs before there’s time to think—
we have to send condolences to the obit page”
Even in these lines, it seems Farrokhzad was mulling her poetic afterlife. In an interview she gave three years before her death, she waxed philosophic on this subject:
Farrokhzad’s comments recall both Sappho (“You may forget but / Let me tell you / this: someone in / some future time / will think of us”) and T.S. Eliot, whose essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” emphasizes the simultaneous order in which all literature—present, past, and future—traffics. Farrokhzad did not pretend to know her place in the literary pantheon, but the poem’s last lines, flecked with Sufi imagery, suggest someone who might: Hafez. “No fisherman shall ever find a pearl / in a small brook that empties into a pool,” writes Farrokhzad, alluding to a poem by 14th-century Sufi poet. The pearls are in the ocean. You might find them, you might not. But if you want to write great poetry, you have to take the plunge.
Read “Another Birth” here.
Shaj Mathew has contributed to the New York Times, The New Inquiry, Lapham’s Quarterly, Sports Illustrated, and The Millions. He attends the University of Pennsylvania, where he is an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow of the Penn Humanities Forum.
[Published in Guernica Magazine on September 30, 2013]
By Shaj Mathew
Chemical weapons have been deployed in Syria. After over two years of fighting, the conflict between rebel forces and the government of Bashar al-Assad shows no signs of abatement. Foreign powers may intervene. And yet, the sonorous voice of Adunis, the Syrian-born writer widely considered the world’s foremost Arab poet, has largely been silent. He did write an open letter to Bashar al-Assad in June 2011, but he was roundly criticized by fellow Arab intellectuals as being too soft on the dictator. Perhaps stung by this criticism, he has offered little comment since then.
His absence hasn’t prevented a new vein of Syrian poetry from emerging out of this uprising; a poem by Najat Abdul Samad, translated by Ghada al-Atrash for al Jazeera, epitomizes this movement’s jarring, visceral realism: “I bandage my heart with the determination of that boy/ they hit with an electric stick on his only kidney until he urinated blood./ Yet he returned and walked in the next demonstration…/ I bandage it with the outcry: ‘Death and not humiliation.’”
That said, according to fellow Syrian poet Maram al-Masri, “people are waiting for opposition poems from Adunis. He does a little, but for me and for a lot of people, we feel disappointed. It’s not enough. We need the fathers of modern Syrian poetry to speak out.” More damningly, the Iraqi littérateur Sinan Antoon told the Guardian that the Arab Spring has “consigned Adunis, the self-proclaimed revolutionary, to irrelevance.”
Although Adunis, who has lived in exile in Paris since the 1980s, may not be inclined to opine further on this conflict, his oeuvre contains a rich array of political poetry for those dissatisfied with his current silence. In particular, his 1963 poem “The Homeland,” translated into English by M.M. Badawi in the 1971 Journal of Arabic Literature, seems particularly apposite today. Throughout the poem, Adunis variously describes his homeland as a father, a stone, a house, a child, faces, and the streets: “all of these are my homeland, not Damascus,” Adunis writes.
At its core, “The Homeland” is a lament for Syrians and an acknowledgement of their sufferings, one that sadly still rings true some fifty years after its initial publication. “To the father who died, green as a cloud/ With a sail on his face, I bow,” Adunis writes. These lines, with their wonderful simile, “green as a cloud,” capture the wartime fates of so many who died too young, with so much potential lost, the direction of their lives halted. An acidly sarcastic parenthetical aside—“(in our land we all pray and clean shoes)”—briefly interrupts the poem’s elegiac tone and warns against orientalist stereotypes. But Adunis waxes melancholic again in the poem’s final lines as he attempts to preserve the “dust” of a former home, his memories of hardship.
Much of Adunis’ early poetry also seems relevant today, given its use of the phoenix as a symbol of resurrection, rejuvenation, renewal—ideas that are sorely needed in a time of near-constant violence and despair in Syria. His poem “Resurrection and Ashes,” for example, radically evokes both the predicament of the nation and the poet in describing “a bird in love with its death/ Who, for the sake of a new beginning/ Will burn itself alive.” This is a provocative call for rebirth, to say the least, albeit one that promises a better future. In their original context, these poems represented an attempt to save Arab society from sclerosis and corruption; when read today, in light of the current revolutions, we can also find a note of hope in them, the promise of a better future after the necessary struggle.
Adunis is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though his lack of political or literary commentary on the ongoing Syrian conflict may diminish his candidacy in the eyes of the Swedish Academy, who, some have argued, tend to reward political writers. (His odds to win the prize this year are 14/1.) To focus on his current silence, however, would be to ignore his decades of remarkable political and literary activity in the Arab world, during which time he has by turns championed the causes of Syrian individualism and, later in his life, pan-Arabism. For those unhappy with Adunis’ lack of response to the war in Syria, look to the poet’s past, look to the people, places, and things that, as his poetry reminds us, make up a life worth remembering. Look to “The Homeland.”
The Homeland
By Adunis
To the faces that harden behind a mask of gloom
I bow, and to streets where I left behind my tears;
To a father who died, green as a cloud
With a sail on his face, I bow,
And to a child that is sold
In order to pray and clean shoes
(In our land we all pray and clean shoes);
To a stone I inscribed with my hunger,
Saying it was lightning and rain, drops rolling under my eyelids,
And to a house whose dust I carried with me in my loss
I bow—all these are my homeland, not Damascus.
Translated by M.M. Badawi
Shaj Mathew has contributed to the New York Times, The New Inquiry, Sports Illustrated, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Millions, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and McSweeney’s. He attends the University of Pennsylvania, where he is an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow of the Penn Humanities Forum.
[Published in Guernica Magazine on September 5, 2013.]
By Shaj Mathew
Ten years after his death, the craze over Roberto Bolaño appears to have subsided. The Third Reich, serialized two years ago in The Paris Review, met largely tepid reviews. Critiques of Woes of the True Policeman regularly ascribed a mixtape quality to the work. The New York Times called it “a collection of outtakes” while The New Republic argued that “the continued publication and popular packaging of his incomplete work may actually be diluting his reputation as a writer of varied talents and fearless ambition… We have enough.”
These disappointing, occasionally strident reviews might normally discourage the release of even more of Bolaño’s writing but a recent exhibition of his unpublished manuscripts, photos, letters, and even web history makes an extremely compelling case for exactly that. “Archivo Bolaño,” which was on display at the Barcelona Contemporary Culture Center (CCCB) earlier this year, was curated by Valerie Miles, the editor of Granta en español, and Juan Insua, a veteran curator at the CCCB, with the collaboration of Bolaño’s widow, Carolina López. The exhibit attempts to set the record straight on the life of a man who embraced, and even cultivated, myths about himself. Did he actually do heroin? (No.) Did he prefer poetry to fiction? (No: “We’re less young every day, fortune with some, poverty with others: I write verses, dream of a novel,” he scribbled in a notebook from 1978.) Was he in Chile during the Pinochet coup? (Nope.) While the literary community may be experiencing Bolaño fatigue, López and the curators felt that these speculations about his work and life deserved the more critical take offered by their exhibit, which charts three separate stages of Bolaño’s literary development during the years he lived in Catalonia (1977-2003).
“We’re trying to reorder some of the myths based on the documents,” said Miles, who guided me through the exhibit for nearly two hours. According to Miles, who has spent the past four years looking through Bolaño’s notebooks, López wanted visitors to “have a look at the archive and then speak for themselves.”
Despite the minor backlash against a perceived Bolaño overload, it’s clear to Miles that Bolaño wanted his unpublished work to see daylight. “He had the sense that he was doing important work,” said Miles. “He was a packrat. He kept everything in order. He was organizing his archive.” The handwriting in his notebooks, Miles notes, markedly improved during the latter period of his life. Woes of the True Policeman was on his desk, ready to go, when he died. And if there was any further doubt about whether Bolaño wanted posthumous attention, consider this scene from one of his notebooks from 1983, in which a woman discovers a set of manuscript pages in a bookshelf drawer:
She picks up one page at random: “Sometimes I’m immensely happy!” The writing is small. She has a sip of beer and keeps reading (no need to mention it right now but she doesn’t feel she’s violating anything by reading these sorts of notes, life diary, or whatever). The important thing, the really important thing I want to say is that the beer’s getting warm and the moon pops up over the alley for just a few seconds.
This might not seem like much, but the metafictional significance of this passage (quoted in Miles’ essay, “A Journey Forward to the Origin,” from the exhibit catalogue) becomes clear after one learns that the phrase “I’m immensely happy” is all over Bolaño’s notebooks. Simply put, this passage is about someone discovering Bolaño’s archive. “It’s another little Bolaño twist: he’s saying, ‘I’m speaking from the future,’” said Miles, who felt as if she was being described on the page. In that moment of discovery, she was reading Bolaño writing about her experience of reading Bolaño.
After poring over Bolaño’s notebooks, which also feature impressively sketched self portraits of “San Roberto de Troya,” a nickname he gave himself, and notes of encouragement to himself, Miles and Insua classified Bolaño’s development in Catalonia into the exhibit’s three stages: “The Unknown University” (Barcelona, 1977-1980), “Inside the Kaleidoscope” (Girona, 1980-1984), and “The Visitor from the Future” (Blanes, 1985-2003). In Barcelona, writing by hand, Bolaño developed his voice, doing unusual writing exercises—he wrote stories based on the art on his matchboxes, among other things—to produce different styles. Bolaño found Barcelona too distracting and was unable to publish much, so he moved to Girona where he isolated himself completely and wrote Monsieur Pain and three still unpublished novels on a mechanical typewriter: Diorama, The Spirit of Science Fiction, and DF, La Paloma, Tobruk.
Girona saw the emergence of Bolaño’s kaleidoscopic technique, which produced writing many American critics have misunderstood as a substandard pastiche of his previous work. In particular, Bolaño began to experiment with metalepsis; that is, he began to use characters from his previous works as starting points for new writing. For example, Distant Star emerges from the last chapter of Nazi Literature in the Americas, just as Amulet springs from chapter four of The Savage Detectives. Likewise, American critics have observed that Woes of the True Policeman tells the familiar story of a key character from 2666.
But this is no mere “collection of outtakes,” as the Times would have you believe—Bolaño’s intertextual continuity throughout these works is intentional, for it creates a self-referential literary terrain in which the reader, surrounded by so many recognizable signs and symbols, can arrive at several different readings of the work. Miles describes Bolaño’s kaleidoscopic process, and its effect on the reader, in her essay “A Journey”:
Bolaño didn’t leave things behind, but threw them back into the stew, this evolving project of a multidimensional universe turning like a grand kaleidoscope of symbols and metaphors and themes and meanings with secret passageways, wormholes back and forth in time and place, occult intentions and shadowed suggestions, placed and replaced in different orders or alongside different texts. Like Melville’s Moby Dick, the metaphors and themes are untethered in the end, unanchored by a single authorial interpretation. The signs and signifiers are occult, mysterious, secret because they belong individually, and each reader brings a different experience to the interpretive act.
When Miles and I were discussing this in the Blanes section of the exhibit, a man in his early twenties—perhaps a fellow Bolaño disciple—hushed us as he hovered over a nearby vitrine containing Bolaño’s model for 2666. “Too loud,” he said. Miles explained to the man in Spanish that she was one of the curators of the exhibit, but he simply responded, “too loud” again and continued eying the manuscripts. This is what he saw: a very roughly drawn diagram resembling a living, breathing, and wholly unclassifiable organism—at once human and alien, with lines like blood vessels sprouting out of a small, circular saucer. I imagine that these vessels represent the five parts of 2666, which intersect at the saucer, the center that coheres the novel. Think of it as a self-enclosed, self-sustaining environment: each individual vessel or part of the book tells its own story; taken together, these vessels create a whole novel. But the diagram also looks like many other things: A crustacean that evokes the nautical motifs of the Gaudi houses in Barcelona, or a cell diagram. Its ineffability is quite apposite: a novel like 2666 demands a structure equally sui generis, one that recalls some form of life.
“Archivo Bolaño” imparted a tremendous amount of casual knowledge to its visitors: The fact that Bolaño wrote poetry on graph paper, much of which hasn’t been published, and that he actually played the war games that the narrator of The Third Reich loves so much, sending in game pieces by mail. But that was only a piece of the exhibit’s appeal. As you walked around peering at the collection, you heard whooshes, cascading waves, foreboding beeps, screams, a typewriter clacking away, a meow seemingly uttered by a something other than a cat—all of which collectively mimicked the movement, terror, and wonder of a Bolaño novel.
As we ambled out of the exhibit, Miles told me that after Bolaño’s death, the novelist’s widow, López, who was separated from Bolaño when he passed, felt that “people who thought they knew him didn’t know him as well as they think they did.” “Archivo Bolaño” allowed readers to make such a judgment themselves, and in so turning over the reigns to the visitor, inviting them to examine how both truth and myth are constructed, the exhibit further enacted the experience of reading Bolaño. For always Bolaño’s detectives/readers/visitors don’t just interrogate criminals—they interrogate facticity itself.
Shaj Mathew has contributed to the New York Times, The New Inquiry, Sports Illustrated, The Millions, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and McSweeney’s. He attends the University of Pennsylvania, where he is researching Bolaño as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow of the Penn Humanities Forum.
[Published July 16, 2013 in The Huffington Post]
The coup that toppled Egyptian President Morsi has inspired a slew of op-ed columns around the world attempting to make sense of the latest from Tahrir Square. Instant analysis, however, is an oxymoron. If only David Brooks, who lamented that Egyptians “lack even the basic mental ingredients” for democracy, and the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which hopes that the new government takes after Pinochet, knew that. Perhaps it would behoove these pundits to look beyond the literal truths of the situation, which can yield only so much insight (or stupidity). Experiential truth — that is, fiction — can remind us of the ambiguity of a situation and the subtlety that any critical take demands. In uncertain times, we ought to remember our novelists, and luckily for Egypt, the oeuvre of Naguib Mahfouz can help illuminate the unrest in Cairo.
For Mahfouz, the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, life after a revolution is necessarily cantankerous; while a polyphony of voices shouts for attention, none are heard to the extent they desire. That’s at least the case in Miramar. In this 1967 novel, Mahfouz’s characters grapple with the aftermath of a different revolution: the political and economic idealism of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s policy of “Arab Socialism.” Four of these characters, each representing a different ideology, come to stay at the eponymous Pension Miramar and narrate the same series of events from their respective points of view, Rashomon-style. They are Amer Wagdi, an octogenarian ex-journalist with sympathies for the Wafd Party; Hosny Allam, a young, wealthy nihilist cut off from his educated family; Mansour Bahy, a Marxist radio announcer prone to bouts of melancholy; and Sarhan al-Beheiry, a socialist, cynic, opportunist, and lothario.
Mahfouz characterizes this diverse political lot with texture absent from most contemporary news analyses: Following last week’s coup, some networks have reduced the Egyptian political landscape to a clash between the Muslim Brotherhood and everyone else. But in the next presidential election (that is, should there be one), expect a Miramar-esque struggle among a number of fissiparous political parties. “Where once they were barely heard,” the BBC wrote last year, “now some Egyptians are starting to complain of the cacophony of competing voices.” The four narrators of Miramar predict a post-revolutionary descent into political dissensus, as they contradict, complicate, and interfere with each other’s stories. But unlike some modern takes on the matter, their interactions reflect the Egyptian political sphere for its nuanced, imperfect self.
Back at the pension, the arrival of Zohra — the attractive, nubile chambermaid who symbolizes an Egypt in flux and in search of direction — creates rivalries between these four narrators and sets the plot into motion. It also signals Mahfouz’s (ever-important) commentary on the status of women in the Egypt: Zohra is the novel’s protagonist, and yet she is denied the opportunity to tell her own story. While Zohra receives both advice and abuse from these male narrators, we can only speculate about her thoughts and feelings, for her psyche is totally inaccessible. That Mahfouz instead provides the perspectives of four men to narrate the novel is a damning assessment of gender equality in Egypt in the ’60s. Since then, Egyptian women have made strides, especially with regard to education, but the hundreds of sexual assaults reported in Tahrir Square in the past two weeks suggest that a much larger change in attitudes towards women is necessary for progress to continue. If Mahfouz wrote Miramar today, it’s unclear whether Zohra would get a chance to tell her story even now.
The ouster of Morsi has by turns enthralled and infuriated many Egyptians, but ultimately promises nothing. If Egyptians are feeling exasperated by this latest political upheaval, they would do well to heed one of Miramar‘s last lines. Zohra, a stand-in for Egypt, has endured a torrid time at the pension, but Amer Wagdi tells her,
Remember that you haven’t wasted your time here. If you’ve come to know what is not good for you, you may also think of it all as having been a sort of magical way of finding out what is truly good for you.
[Published in The New Inquiry on September 12, 2012]
On April 28th, the Museum of Innocence, the long-awaited realization of Orhan Pamuk’s novel of the same name, opened in one of Istanbul’s more bohemian quarters. But let us not begin with the Museum of Innocence or The Museum of Innocence. Rather, let us begin with the word museum. It comes to us from the ancient Greeks, who created a temple to the muses at Alexandria, the Mouseion. As a site of remembrance, it suggests an almost Montaignian retreat inside oneself; this makes sense, given that “museum” stems from the Indo-Germanic root /*mon/ meaning “to think” or “to remember.” In a modern museum, these acts of thinking and remembering are publicly introspective motions, and this retreat inside ourselves becomes a collective affair. We are alone with our thoughts, together.
None of this is news to Kemal, the protagonist of Orhan Pamuk’s novel and the (fictional) founder of the (real) Museum of Innocence. He spends all his time thinking of Füsun—a poor shop girl 18 years his junior—and plotting ways to extend their dalliance. Their affair seems destined to end as quickly as it began, however, for the 30-year-old Kemal is engaged to another girl “who, according to everyone, was the perfect match.” But as the law of probability and necessity requires, Kemal and Füsun fall madly in love, the kind of love that undoes the perfect engagement, ostracizes Kemal from high society, and condemns him to eight years of anguish and awkwardness, during which his wistful reveries of Füsun hardly abate. In an effort to ingratiate himself to her family and atone for his misdeeds, Kemal dines with Füsun and her parents for 1,593 nights. (He counts.) There’s just one complication: at the dinner table also sits Füsun’s new husband.
Kemal initially thinks this is a sick joke (her husband is a “fatso”), and is emotionally undone but remains undeterred. Over the course of these 1,593 painful evenings, Kemal, a businessman who can also name-drop Proust, Dostoevsky, and Nabokov, oscillates between states of madness, desire, and frustration. This is all in his head, of course, for not much action actually takes place at Füsun’s old home. With their family, Kemal watches old Grace Kelly films. He drinks rakı /ra.’kɯ/, a type of milky-looking alcohol favored by senescent Turkish men. He smokes. He drinks more rakı. But mostly he steals from them the quotidian objects that end up populating his Museum of Innocence: 237 hair barrettes, 419 national lottery tickets, one saltshaker, and 4,213 cigarette butts.
During those eight trying years, Kemal could have used a number of things—family support, diversions, a good therapist. But given his diverse and impressive literary sensibilities, it might not be too grandiose of us to say that Kierkegaard’sRepetition could have changed the course of his entire life. Like Kemal, the protagonist of Repetition falls under the same spell of recollection, enchanted by thoughts of an obsessive love that also doom him to a broken engagement. But while Repetition reads as a cautionary tale (and doubles as autobiography: Kierkegaard left his fiancée too and lived sorrowfully ever after), The Museum of Innocence, at first glance, embraces this dangerous penchant. Kemal’s museum, in its commemoration (or objectification) of Füsun, aspires to never transcend the past: “the Museum of Innocence was to be a place where one could live with the dead,” Kemal tell us.
Kierkegaard makes the salient distinction between the states of repetition and recollection, the former salutary, the latter dangerous. For Kierkegaard, repetition entails reliving the joys of an individual moment, anticipation included. Recollection—the disease Kemal so acutely suffers from—conversely entails reimagining the memories of the past, plangent or pleasing. Over, done with, finished, the beauty and joy of these moments is only to be remembered. And remembrance of these moments, for Kierkegaard, is sad: “recollection is a beautiful old woman with whom one is never satisfied at the moment; repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never wearies for one becomes weary only of what is new.”
The Museum of Innocence is inextricably tied to Kierkegaard’s notion of recollection and its corresponding unhappiness. “Recollection has the great advantage that it begins with the loss,” says Kierkegaard. “The reason it is safe and secure is that it has nothing to lose.” Kemal has the great advantage that he, too, begins with loss. In terms of collecting Füsun’s household items during his thrice-weekly visits to Füsun’s house, the reason he is safe and secure is that he has nothing to lose.
Kierkegaard would lambast Kemal’s project as selfish. “He who will merely recollect is voluptuous; he who wills repetition is a man,” he says, before telling a story that tracks the plot of The Museum of Innocence. Or, more likely, the other way around. This wouldn’t be the first time Pamuk has borrowed from philosophy: The White Castleliteralizes Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic.In Kierkegaard’s story, a man bewitched by the spell of recollection—memory and desire impel him to see his beloved, not unlike the case of a certain Kemal—breaks off a happy engagement in order to see if repetition, the idea that this great happiness could be exactly repeated, is possible. In the second part, after he realizes that his former fiancée has married someone else, he becomes disconsolate and even suicidal. That Kemal cuts a similarly melancholy figure after realizing the same is an understatement. More interestingly, in both Kierkegaard’sRepetition and Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, the two fiancées exist in memory or recollection for both male protagonists—they are denied the psychological realism the male characters enjoy. Likewise, in the Museum of Innocence, we have access to Kemal’s recollection of Füsun in the minutest of great details: its 83 vitrines correspond to the book’s 83 chapters. In both the Museum and Museum, we never truly get Füsun’s take on anything: she is everywhere yet she is nowhere.
2.
In his essay “No Ends in Sight,” Bard professor Thomas Keenan locates the museum as a generative space of grief. “Museums are built on loss and recollection,” says Keenan. Loss, while potentially devastating for the curator, inspires the museum, for “we can say that the museum finds in loss its most powerful alibi. Elsewhere, something is said to be nearing its end, threatened with extinction, and demands memory and protection. There is inevitably something of the cemetery and the epitaph where the museum is concerned.” In other words, the specter of death animates the museum.
Keenan continues, saying, “Loss and the fear of destruction, especially after the fragility of a collective identity, is a terrible stimulus to preservation.” Without giving too much away, this explains Kemal’s feverish quest to collect Füsun’s belongings. Keenan’s notion of collective identity is also germane, considering Kemal often remarks about the physical sense of communion the two shared: Füsun literally resembled him. The fusion of identity and notion of doubles, among Pamuk’s favorite themes, also introduce a sort of physical repetition at the level of character. Füsun repeats Kemal. This repetition marks a rare departure from the haze of recollection that accompanies all of the book’s discussion of the Füsun and the museum.
“The museum,” for Keenan, “wants to be a salvational and sheltering institution, a machine for preservation and transmission, an archive of what is lost or at risk of disappearing and a mechanism for reanimating it.” The salvational aspect is twofold here: not only is Kemal trying to preserve Füsun’s memory, but he is also attempting to redeem himself after having fallen out with society. Keenan perhaps also reclaims Kemal from Kierkegaard’s critique, for recollection has the potential for “reanimation,” the sort of vivacity that underpins his concept of repetition.
Further, Keenan adds, “Museums shelter not so much objects as meanings, and their work is that of articulating, linking and arranging them in a network of significance.” The physical Museum of Innocence may contain 237 hair barrettes, 419 national lottery tickets, one saltshaker, and 4,213 cigarette butts, but only collectively do these objects form a network of significance. This is not to understate Pamuk’s desire to recover the marginal—he recently told the Financial Times, “we’re preserving things that were never represented, underlining commonplace, daily-life qualities”—but in terms of Kemal’s broader project, it is the totality of these ephemera that produces his mental image of Füsun.
3.
The top floor of the museum—a well-attended converted apartment whose red façade mostly meshes with the surrounding residential architecture—displays Pamuk’s early drafts and drawings, in addition to a bed ostensibly belonging to Kemal. While this floor is comparatively smaller than each of the preceding floors in terms of size and ornament, it is one of the most significant parts of the museum. Here, casual visitors who may not have read the book get a taste of Pamuk’s trademark metafictional sensibility—whether they realize it or not. Near the bed, a caption notes that Kemal lived in this room between 2000 and 2007 while Orhan Pamuk listened to his story. It is not clarified whether this is Orhan Pamuk the character or the author. I lingered long enough in this room to witness the dismay of a few visitors at this perceived sleight-of-hand—Pamuk (the author) had billed this as a fictional museum, and now the last exhibit had upended their expectations: So this was a true story, after all? He didn’t even make it up? Not quite: at the end of the novel, readers learn that The Museum of Innocence is actually narrated by a character named Orhan Pamuk, who is telling Kemal’s story for him. That Pamuk (the author) omitted this crucial detail is no attempt to cruelly mislead less perspicacious visitors; rather, this note exists in the service of metafiction, asking us to reconsider the rigid domains of fiction and reality.
The similarities between events in The Museum of Innocenceand Pamuk’s memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City further invite speculation and reexamination of the relationship between fiction and reality. To name just a few, we learn inIstanbul that the 19-year-old Pamuk used to rendezvous with his younger lover in a family apartment, just as Kemal and Füsun did. And after his lover is tragically sent away to Switzerland, the star-crossed teenage Pamuk still returns to the gates of her school every day in the hopes of seeing her; this heartbreak possibly served as inspiration for Kemal’s endless visits to Füsun’s former residence, long after she’s gone.Istanbul also may suggest that Pamuk’s fascination with doubles Kemal says at one point, “had [he] been a girl,” he would look like Füsuncomes from his youthful idea that “there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double.”
Pamuk is aware of our awareness these similarities, but refuses to confirm or deny the reality of any scenes from his fiction. “We always ask this question: Did the writer invent this, or is it that he experienced this? Is this the strength of his imagination, or is that how interesting his life is? And there’s never an answer,” he told the New York Times when the museum opened in May. But even if he could answer these questions, he would keep the so-called truth to himself, for “the power of the art of the novel lies on this question of the ambiguity between fiction and reality.”
4.
For Nietzsche, Kemal has wasted his life—or, rather, hasn’t truly lived. “Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all,” he says in “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life.” Nietzsche predicts Kemal’s degeneration into melancholy in which the “historical sense no longer preserves life but mummifies it,” railing against the “repugnant spectacle of a blind lust for collecting.” In the modern, Western sense advocated by Nietzsche, the museum can enable memory and generate pride, strength, and clout; however, when abused as in the case of the Museum of Innocence, collection can cripple its curator. But how do we reconcile the stern advice of Nietzsche—and Kierkegaard, for that matter—with the last lines of the book?
Kemal regards a photograph and kisses the image of Füsun, the woman who has caused him so much anguish over the majority of his adult life. Speaking to the character of Orhan Pamuk—who, as we mentioned, turns out to be the actual narrator of the book—Kemal lets out a “victorious” smile and says, “Let everyone know I lived a very happy life.”
This, at first glance, is doubtful. How could Kemal, the brooderpar excellence, the one who visited his beloved—and her husband!—for eight years, the one who has been ruined socially, physically, and economically by lovesickness, so confidently tell the reader he has lived a happy life?
The answer lies in the novel’s complex temporality. Kemal explains to Pamuk: “In Physics Aristotle makes a distinction between time and the single moments he describes as the ‘present.’” Consider for a moment each object in The Museum of Innocence, and then consider the power of each object to encapsulate one such “present” moment from Kemal’s past. “Single moments are—like Aristotle’s atoms—indivisible, unbreakable things. But Time is the line that links these indivisible moments. Though Tarık BeyFüsun’s father asked us to forget Time—that line connecting one present moment to the next—no one except for idiots and amnesiacs can succeed in forgetting it altogether. A person can only try to be happy and forget Time, and this we all do.”
Here Kemal identifies the essential psychological struggle of his existence. Unlike Kierkegaard, who is worried about succumbing to the siren song of recollection, Kemal has no qualms about plumbing the depths of his memories of Füsun. What concerns him more is remaining within the present moment, and in order to achieve this he avoids thinking about the bigger picture, the Milestones or Life Events that organize our existence. In an Aristotelian sense, then, Kemal evades Time: “My life has taught me that remembering Time—that line connecting all the moments Aristotle call the present—is for most of us a rather painful business…but sometimes these moments we call the ‘present’ can bring us enough happiness to last me the rest of my entire life, and it was to preserve these happy moments for the future that I picked up so many objects large and small that Füsun had touched, and took them away with me.” While Kemal loses his sense of the Time that whirrs inexorably forward in the background, he can still make time. Time to forget the West, time to remember the indivisible, unbreakable moments of those 1,593 evenings, time to regard her 237 hair barrettes, 419 lottery tickets, one saltshaker, and 4,213 cigarette butts.
[Published in Sports Illustrated on April 2, 2012]
The Glaswegian faithful were unusually somnolent on this February night some five years ago. Making a rare foray into the round of 16 of European soccer’s elite Champions League, their green- and white-striped Celtic side were hosting AC Milan, who had quickly established themselves as rude guests, lazily stroking the ball around the pitch, suffusing each cross-field pass with an infuriating insouciance that inspired as many scowls as yawns. The imperiousness of their play was not wholly unexpected, however: both current form and pedigree made Milan the obvious favorites to win the game. (Number of Champions League titles won: Milan 7, Celtic 1). And in this moment, Milan finally looked ready to deliver the knockout blow. It went like this: Kaká played a silky ball on the ground to Alberto Gilardino, who zipped into the penalty box. Celtic’s last defender and goalkeeper rushed to confront the Italian, but he nimbly touched the ball around them to his right. Unfortunately for Gilardino, his efforts to round the keeper placed him at an impossibly acute angle on the right-hand-side of the penalty box. The €24 million man was good, but he would’ve never scored from here. Alone in the box with no immediate help from his teammates, he pulled the most dastardly trick out of his repertoire. No, he did not conjure up a clever step-over. No, he did not cross the ball to a marked teammate. And no, he did not magically curl the ball into the net. Instead, Alberto Gilardino fell on his face.
The crowd roused itself from its stupor. The Celtic players erupted. The cheat!
If Gilardino successfully deceived the referee, he would have earned Milan a penalty kick. And if he had gotten really lucky, he would have gotten one of the Celtic defenders carded, or better yet, sent off. But what distinguished Gilardino’s flop here from the dives that occur each weekend around the world was its sheer stupidity. During a typical dive, a player will topple over and grab a random body part — maybe his face, maybe his knee — but only after he’s been touched, however lightly. This seems like common sense. But in this case, Gilardino was easily a few yards from anyone else on the field before he thrust himself forward and crashed to the ground, without so much as a tap on the shoulder. You don’t have to be familiar with Stanislavsky to know that this is bad acting. Confronted with such obvious evidence, the referee, the Norwegian Terje Hauge, awarded Gilardino a yellow card for “simulation,” FIFA’s official term for diving. Gilardino, still sitting on the grass, turned to the sideline referee for sympathy, and, upon receiving none, muttered a small protest in Italian.
This may be the most egregious dive in recent history. Which is a shame, because antics like Gilardino’s invariably mar the experience of watching soccer, whether you are new to the sport or partaking in a decades-long Sunday tradition. The stakes get higher when you consider that the dive, as a horrible affront to machismo, is probably the most-cited reason that soccer will fail in America. After all, what better captures the “grass fairy” stereotype than a grown man flailing to the ground, untouched, as if Mike Tyson had just sucker punched him? As the theatrics of players like Gilardino return to American households during this summer’s Euro 2012 tournament, it’s worth taking a closer look at the phenomenon that is diving. How can referees better detect these inglorious tumbles to the turf? What can we do to eradicate the culture of simulation? And can we learn something from Gilardino’s famous flop?
***
A gradual shift in soccer’s attitude toward cheating paved the way for the culture of rampant diving we see today. Artifice on the pitch became de-stigmatized, acceptable, even glorified, starting with Argentina’s 1986 World Cup quarterfinal victory over England, in which Diego Maradona scored two of the most famous goals in the history of soccer. In the first goal, the 5-foot-5 Maradona beat the 6-foot-1 English goalie Peter Shilton to an aerial ball in the penalty box, punching it into the net with the aid of his outstretched left fist: The Hand of God. (His second goal, a half-field solo run known as the Goal of the Century, exuded an air of virtuosity and technical artistry never before seen. Still: “Sometimes I think I almost enjoyed [The Hand of God goal] more,” said Maradona.) Thanks to the Hand of God, Argentina won the game 2-1 and went on to win the World Cup. Given the high-profile nature of the match and its consequences for England, it might not be an exaggeration to say the devolution of “fair play” — soccer’s long-standing culture of sportsmanship — began with The Hand of God goal. Thanks to the diminutive Argentine, cheating was now a real possibility — a glorious, World-Cup-winning possibility — and this opened the door for diving to emerge and gain popularity; in fact, in The Guardian‘s compilation of “best” dives, the earliest entry is three years after Maradona’s sleight-of-hand — none register before his inspired leap. It might seem extreme to pin the degradation of soccer’s sportsmanship on one player, but Maradona was (and continues to be) one of sport’s great icons, and with that power comes commensurate capacity for influence. The fact that FIFA created its “Fair Play Award” (designed to recognize good sportsmanship) the very year after the Hand of God goal said it all. Soccer’s culture of gentility was over: sportsmanship was now to be rewarded, not expected.
Some may point to the nebulous concept of “fair play” in defense of soccer’s enduring grace, yet this principle, so entrenched in the modern game, makes reform more difficult, if anything. Since there are no stoppages in soccer, one of the unwritten rules behind “fair play” (which is only now beginning to be questioned) holds that a good sportsman will kick the ball out of bounds when an opposing player is hurt. Fair play takes on a more ironic meaning when players abuse it late in games, feigning injury in order to interrupt the other team’s rhythm by forcing them to kick the ball out of bounds so they can receive treatment. Worse, when the injured player gets up, his team kicks the ball all the way back to the opposing team’s goal, meaning that the good sportsmen have forfeited any advanced field position or momentum they had before the opponent’s “injury.”
Dives and other violations of fair play aren’t typically as clear-cut as the cases of Gilardino and Maradona imply, however. So what if the player actually is hurt? How can we know for sure if a dive is a dive? Perhaps there is no way to tell. Consider another infamous dive against Celtic, attempted some two years after Gilardino’s ill-fated effort. In the 27th minute of a 2009 Champions League match, Arsenal’s Eduardo da Silva also appeared to fall down in the penalty box a little too easily. Two things differentiate this case from Gilardino’s, however. One, Eduardo actually earned and converted the ensuing penalty kick. Two, he also earned a two-game suspension from European soccer’s governing body, UEFA. While many agreed with The Guardian‘s instantaneous verdict — “a risible dive” — Arsenal unsurprisingly found the charge “deeply flawed” and launched a formal appeal on behalf of the player. Two weeks later, upon review of the footage and referees’ opinions, UEFA overturned the suspension. “The day after that match, Michel Platini, the UEFA president and one of the finest players of his generation, told me his view of the incident was inconclusive,” wrote Rob Hughes in The New York Times. “It looked like a dive, but only one man, Eduardo, knows if he went to ground because of contact. If Platini, with his personal experience of playing, could not be certain, why would the members of a committee sitting in Switzerland and reviewing the video overrule the appointed decision maker on the field, the referee?”
Academic studies exhaustively reach the same conclusion: it’s hard to tell. In a 2009 study, the University of Portsmouth’s Paul Morris and David Lewis had students watch short video clips of tackles and judge whether simulation took place or not, or if they couldn’t tell at all. The results were highly reliable in that most of the students’ answers matched up with each other. (Reliability is of course different from validity, but we’ve established that it is often only the player who knows whether he has dived or not.) Unfortunately, students most often agreed that they could not tell if a dive had occurred; for a number of the clips, virtually all the students selected the “not sure” option. Indeed, Morris and Lewis remark, “The frequent use of the ‘not sure’ category probably accounts for the controversy surrounding whether a player has attempted deception or not.”
The main problem with this study is, of course, the test subjects. They are students, not professional referees. Also, in the study’s efforts to eliminate bias, the researchers showed the students footage of lower league games. This complicates any conclusions we might draw since the lower divisions feature wildly different atmospheres to those of the upper echelon; diminished player and referee skill likely combine to create a very different culture of diving. Nonetheless, Morris and Lewis deserve credit for codifying Gilardino’s dive — whose form is among the most histrionic and ubiquitous we see in the modern game — as an example of the “archer’s bow.” The term’s description will instantly remind fans of a number of infamous divers and some of their best performances over the years: “the chest is thrust out; the head is back; the arms are fully raised and pointing upward and back; the legs are raised off the ground and bent at the knee.”
***
If we’re not sure if we can spot simulation with certainty, we can examine the set of circumstances that most often lead to diving. Another diving study published this past October by a University of Queensland professor and doctoral student analyzed 2,800 falls in 60 professional games across the world. The first finding, that players dived twice as frequently in the area closest to the attacking goal than when in any defensive area, is unsurprising, even in light of another finding: referees rewarded fewer dives in attacking zones. But more interesting was the scoreline’s effect on dive frequency. Players were significantly more likely to take a dive while the match was a draw, compared to when one team was winning or losing. The rationale offered by the study’s authors? A player has most to gain when his team is level with the other team, since the goal-scoring opportunity represents a chance to win the match. According to the study, he doesn’t tend to dive more when his team is losing, since the goal-scoring opportunity only represents a chance to draw, not win. While this argument could be argued vigorously — aren’t players on the losing side desperate for a comeback victory? — consider the points system used in leagues and tournaments anywhere. A win is worth three points, a draw one point, and a loss zero. This corroborates the authors’ logic: a player stands to gain two points for his team by breaking a tie game with a goal, but only one for his team if he scores the equalizing goal.
True, when making calls on the field, referees take these factors into account. Brian Hall, who became the first American to officiate a World Cup match in 2002, told NPR before the 2006 World Cup that referees consider the area 30 yards from the goalmouth a “red zone” for diving, especially since free kicks in this zone lead to goals 30 percent of the time. But it’s the ball itself that usually gives the diving player away. “When an attacker pushes the ball too far ahead of him and will likely lose possession, he thinks, hey, I’m not going to get the ball. I might as will hit the ground myself, try to get a free kick or penalty kick because the end result is going to be negative in the first place. And as they hit the ground what’s the first thing they do? They roll over and they take a peek to see where the referee is and trying to say aah, I got you.”
But there’s a difference between being aware of simulation’s red flags and actually punishing players for flopping. In the University of Queensland study, the researchers classified challenges between players into two categories: fair tackles and dives. None of the 169 observed dives were punished by the referee. And of the 2,633 tackles between players, the referees gave seven free kicks against the innocent players that fell down (but didn’t dive), as well as two yellow cards. “As such, no relationship between the punishment of deceivers and a decrease in the prevalence of deception was detected,” the authors concluded.
This is not to ignore the plight of the referee in this situation. “It’s very difficult because you have to hope you are close to the play and with the speed of the modern game that’s not always that easy,” said Hall. “You have to hope you have the best possible sight lines to the contact and to the play.”
***
So, how can we curtail diving? The fans have spoken, and players hate it as well (so they claim). The logical solution would be to levy extortionate fines at habitual divers in order to discourage repeat offending. America’s Major League Soccer has taken baby steps toward this goal, fining Charlie Davies and Alvaro Saborio $1,000 each for tumbles last summer. The official reason? They committed dives that “directly impacted the patch,” or, in other words, led to penalty kicks and, in the case of Saborio, the ejection of an opponent. (In a rare concession, Davies later admitted to “embellishment,” but refused to classify his fall as a dive). While the salaries of MLS players aren’t anywhere near those of NFL, MLB, or NBA players, it’s clear that a $1,000 fine isn’t making an impression on either Davies or Saborio. (They both make around $300,000.) But what if players had to hand over 10 percent of their salary after each dive? $30,000 isn’t anything to scoff at for either of those two, who would certainly think twice before ever attempting to fall over again. Sure, players like Landon Donovan or David Beckham would object to a $200,000 or $600,000 fines, but if the goal is to foster a sporting culture in which diving is anathema, attacking players’ checkbooks seems like the most effective way to go.
Very slowly, punishments for diving are becoming more common worldwide. (Unhappily, however, these punishments have not caught up to the weekly post-match condemnation of Opposing Player X for obvious simulation and/or crimes against humanity). Last year, Italy’s Serie A — home to some of the world’s worst serial offenders — suspended Juventus winger Milos Krasic for fall that led to a (missed) penalty kick. The sentence was no small tap on the shoulder either, since Juventus faced league rivals AC Milan in its next game. That said, the English Premier League, Spanish La Liga or German Bundesliga — easily the world’s best leagues — lag behind in their quest to eradicate diving, having never fined or suspended players for simulation. But perhaps their inaction represents pragmatism (and pessimism): it’s simply not worth the effort to punish players who can immediately — and often successfully –appeal the subjective nature of the call. Likewise, FIFA has the power to review events in question after international matches, but the process is often corrupted by the ever-exploitable element of inconclusiveness inherent to the dive. (Recall how Arsenal successfully appealed Eduardo’s Champions League suspension, just two weeks later.) Nonetheless, it seems that FIFA and the world’s greatest leagues have to stomach the fact that they may get a few heavy fines and suspensions wrong if they wants to effect greater, longer-lasting change in the game. I’m not saying these governing bodies shouldn’t try to avoid Type I errors — in this case, fining players who did not dive — but what’s a million euros to a notorious diver like Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo, who could pay that with a month’s salary? While it is possible that clubs could undercut the policy by indemnifying players against diving fines, it is enforcement — both during and after games — coupled with serious punishment that will only begin to mitigate the problem of diving.
When you think about it, the 10 percent solution isn’t an extortionate measure. A single dive truly has the potential to alter the course of a single match, especially if it leads to a goal-scoring chance. It’s true: in soccer, goals are hard to come by. And they’re getting even rarer. During the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, players scored a total of 145 goals over 64 games, an average of just 2.26 per game. This is part of a downward trend over the past 12 years; 171 goals were tallied in 1998 in France, 161 in Korea/Japan in 2002, and 147 in Germany in 2006. Goal scoring opportunities take on more meaning than ever and players, quick to recognize this, are ready to topple over easier than ever. But at competitions like the World Cup, the Champions League, or even a domestic league, more than glory is at stake. Individual games are incredibly lucrative. Consider the Champions League Final, which in 2005 surpassed the Super Bowl as the world’s most-watched sporting event. Unlike the tournament’s earlier home-and-home knockout rounds, the final is a single-elimination match: win one game and you’re champions of Europe. Excluding winnings from the tournament’s previous matches, the victor takes home €9 million, the loser €5.6 million. Granted, for the teams that usually make the final, money is typically no object. But considering the effect that a single goal has on soccer matches — which are becoming lower scoring each year — it’s really inappropriate to compare flopping in soccer to basketball or other sports. A single dive can completely change the outcome of a soccer match. A flop in basketball, on the other hand, might net a player two free throws out of the 90-or-so points his team will accumulate by the end of the game.
***
There’s a kind of beautiful symbolism immanent to the perfect dive. I’m picturing Gilardino’s fall, the textbook archer’s dive: his knees buckling, feet dragging across the grass, both arms flinging upward, inexplicably, spectacularly; the hysterical childlike panting — what, me? — betraying his unshaven, importunate visage; the look of feigned incredulity. Think now of Paradise Lost, where each character consciously falls from upright splendor and sins prostrate. Likewise, with each dive to the ground, soccer falls further from innocence. Gilardino tasted the fruit and flung himself on the floor, lying in “moping melancholy and mood-struck madness” before 60,000 angry souls at Celtic Park. But is there a felix culpa within all this? Can we view dives like Gilardino’s as positives if they embarrass FIFA into reforming the game by issuing suspensions, fining players, and introducing replay evidence? Enactment of any of these solutions might even redeem a diver’s sin, such are the financial and competitive stakes at hand. But action is not to be taken for granted inside soccer’s monolithic governing bodies, which have plenty of sins of their own to atone for. A lot of players in this situation are in the wrong, of course, but it all starts with the conscious choice of the player on the field. He does not conjure up a clever step-over. He does not cross the ball to a marked teammate. And no, he does not magically curl the ball into the back of the net. Instead, he elects to fall on his face.
Still on the ground, Alberto Gilardino regards the referee, who looks to restore justice to the situation. In an ideal world, the referee’s actions wouldn’t deserve commendation — they would be as routine as whistling for a throw in — but on this sleepy night some four years ago in Scotland, they do. Standing erect, Terje Hauge peers down at the fallen Italian, briskly raising the yellow card into the marmoreal Glaswegian sky.
Shaj Mathew has contributed to The New York Times Soccer Blog, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Lapham’s Quarterly’s Roundtable Blog, The Millions, and McSweeney’s. He lives in Philadelphia and can be reached at shaj.mathew@gmail.com and @shaj10 on Twitter.
[Published on August 31, 2011 in Goal, The New York Times Soccer Blog]
“Why sit you doomed one?”
These were not the words the Greeks wanted to hear. It was the summer of 480 B.C. and they had just fallen to the Persians at Thermopylae. Worse, Athens appeared to be the next target. But the Oracle of Delphi continued, burying a modicum of hope in his inscrutable message:
“Though all else shall be taken, Zeus, the all seeing, grants that the wooden wall only shall not fail.”
The wooden wall. What could it signify?
Many believed the Oracle was alluding to the Acropolis, which was surrounded by a “wall” of thorn bushes. For Themistocles, however, an Athenian statesman, the wooden wall meant one thing: a naval fleet. His interpretation quickly won over the public. Under the aegis of Themistocles, Athens built up a navy of over 300 triremes, or warships, and employed a canny sleight of hand. A messenger, sent by Themistocles, fed Persia’s King Xerxes lies about the supposedly weakened state of Athens, prompting Xerxes to send ships to finish off the Greeks at Salamis. Hindered by the narrow straits near the coast of Salamis, the Persians lost 200 ships — the Greeks, only 40 — in a battle that ensured the superiority of Ancient Greece, and, as such, shaped all of Western civilization.
While refreshing readers on their ancient history, this story from Herodotus’ Historiesalso serves an unlikely sporting purpose — it illuminates the current plight of Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal.
Arsenal imploded last Sunday in a mortifying (for Gunners fans) 8-2 loss at Manchester United, the club’s worst defeat since 1896. They have mustered just one point from their first three games of the English Premier League. Their two biggest stars, Samir Nasri and Cesc Fàbregas, spurned them for clubs offering bigger paychecks and more ambition. And yet, having accrued nearly $100 million from the sale of those two players; their coach, Wenger, has hardly spent any money on new signings, defiantly ignoring criticism from fans and players alike.
Why sit you doomed one?
At the moment, Wenger mistakenly believes the Acropolis is the wooden wall. Consider some of his newest additions: Ryo Miyaichi, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Carl Jenkinson, and Joel Campbell. Wooden wall? More like pencil lead.
While the Athenians rightly struggled to decipher the Oracle of Delphi’s words, Arsenal should have no trouble coming up with their modern-day analogue. The wooden wall, plain and simple, is an experienced world-class player. Miyaichi, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Jenkinson, and Campbell are all unproven teenagers. Even the club’s more recent and more experienced signings, such as Park Chu-Young and Per Mertesacker, have been obtained to patch holes in the squad, not necessarily to dramatically elevate its quality (like, say, the arrival of Kaká might).
These are not words Arsène Wenger wants to hear. (He has already heard them many times over.) It is the summer of 2011 and his Arsenal side has just suffered one of the most severe defeats in its history. Worse, should the slide continue, the team teeters on the edge of being labeled a feeder club to Europe’s true elite.
Just as the fate of the Greeks hung in the balance at Salamis, so too does Arsenal’s soccer philosophy in the next few days. But if Wenger wants his team to exhibit the courage and efficiency of that Greek fleet, he would do well to take three lessons from its leader, Themistocles.
¶ No. 1: Persuade. Themistocles sold the Athenians on his interpretation of the wooden wall; Wenger needs to convince his team and a revolting fan base that his youth policy will improve, not hurt, Arsenal’s style of play and quest for silverware. How can he win over his team and the fans?
¶ No. 2: Discover the wooden wall. Themistocles heeded the Oracle’s warning by mobilizing a huge navy; Wenger needs to remedy his team’s lack of star power and depth by purchasing exceptional players in the transfer market and raising the club’s wage cap.
¶ And No. 3? Be clever. Themistocles duped Xerxes into fighting in the perilously narrow channels of Salamis; Wenger needs to revise his tactics to innovatively accommodate the players he has. These traits helped Themistocles’s Greek force vanquish the Persians. Arsène Wenger, on the other hand, is not fighting a war, but he is fighting for his players, his club, and possibly his job.
Shaj Mathew is a student at the University of Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in The Millions, The Alcalde, McSweeney’s, This is American Soccer, Goal.com, and The Run of Play. He can be reached at shaj.mathew@gmail.com
[Published on February 9, 2011 in The Run of Play]
The vast conceptual morass of modernism, modernity, and the modern subsumes many different strands. Christopher Mann, in an earlier piece for this site, articulates one such strand quite nicely, ultimately lamenting global soccer’s inexorable march toward “materialistic modernity.” For Mann, the modern robs soccer of its spontaneity, its naïveté, its inner Romanticism. For me, the modern strips soccer down to its most raw and most beautiful form. Mann treats the modern as a cultural condition, one that defines an era of commercialization and celebrity. But it’s also possible to view the modern as an aesthetic category, and in that vein, T.S. Eliot’s version—the one to which I subscribe—illuminates the unlikely literary underpinnings of the beautiful game.
The Eliotian conception of modernism, which I derive from his 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” presents at its core the idea of “tradition.” In a literary sense, this idea holds that all literature, from the works of Homer to those of Jonathan Franzen, enjoys a “simultaneous existence,” and that this simultaneous existence endows any given work with meaning. We measure artistic significance in this version of modernity by judging the work vis-à-vis the work of “the dead,” according to Eliot. Interestingly, and controversially, Eliot also believes that this canon constitutes a “simultaneous order,” an order that is altered every time a new work enters the canon. Upon a new work’s entry into the canon, a process of modulation occurs until “the values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted.”1 As Eliot sees it, the present can alter the past, and vice-versa.
Sound confusing? Well, the same goes for soccer, where Eliot’s essay can help us consider the accomplishments of players past and present. Consider the case of Lionel Messi. On the surface, he appears to exemplify the Romantic, full of youthful guile, inimitable skill, and iconically bad hair—an individualist anathema to Eliot’s impersonal tradition. Some say he’s the best player in the world, others say he might be the best player in history. Regardless, these claims are actually grounded in modernity. Eliot writes, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.” How can we evaluate Messi? By comparing him to the players he competes against. Who is Messi better than? Pretty much everyone playing right now. This juxtaposition of the work (Messi) to the canon (worldwide player pool) makes the claim possible. Who else do we compare Messi to? More grandiose claims about his greatness invariably include his fellow Argentine, Maradona. The YouTube videos comparing every single (eerily similar) step of their mazy half-field runs side-by-side—those are extensions of Eliotian tradition, Eliotian modernism, in modern day. Maradona’s run gives meaning to Messi’s, and his past accomplishments situate Messi’s current ones. Similarly, Messi’s current feats alter our perception of Maradona’s past ones. Messi is pretty damn good, but he doesn’t have meaning alone.
Moreover, modernism can reveal to us insights into the success of Messi’s club. Here we must consider Eliot’s depersonalized conception of beauty because, for Eliot, “it is not the greatness” or “sublimity” that matters “but the intensity of the artistic process.” The “artistic process” I equate to Barcelona’s system: for me, the joy of watching the system collectively overwhelm an opponent trumps any ephemeral awe from watching an individual bit of skill from Messi. Barcelona’s flashy players will come and go—see: Ronaldinho—but Catalonia’s most famous onomatopoeia, tiki-taka, remains. Barcelona actually employs an almost mechanical system—the kind of artistic process that Eliot later refers to as “an efficient engine”—that deemphasizes the individual. After all, Eliot says that “poetry…is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” The Barcelona system neither caters to a superstar—just look at the emergence of former squad-players like Pedro—nor relies on the particular attributes of any of its players (e.g. Ronaldo’s pace for Real Madrid). On the contrary, each player essentially has the same role: pass and move. At Barcelona, “there is no room for puffed-up, show-boating individuals,” says Iain Rodgers for Reuters Soccer Blog. “The players work as a unit, constantly creating space for each other and harrying the opposition into giving up the ball.” Each player is fungible, for “the emotion of art is impersonal.” Behold! Modernist thought is behind the production-line success of one of the world’s biggest clubs.
Next Saturday. Cold. The cacophony of metal cleats. Lionel Messi is in a Blaugrana shirt, standing in the tunnel before the game and thinking. He might be thinking about his coach’s pre-game instructions. He might be thinking about the abuse that awaits him from opposing fans. And he might be thinking about how itchy his right shin guard is. But the one thing that Lionel Messi will not be thinking about is the only thing that is guaranteed to happen every single time he plays for Barcelona. Once he steps on the field, he will give up his self- contained existence and open himself up to immediate evaluation, unfair speculation, and comparison to his peers and his predecessors. Once he steps foot on the field, he will shed his individuality and assume the 112 years of his club’s existence, Total Football, tiki-taka— tradition. Once Lionel Messi steps on the field next Saturday, in the cold, amidst the clatter of cleats, he will become modern.
Shaj Mathew attends the University of Pennsylvania. His writing has appeared in The Millions, Goal.com, This is American Soccer, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. You can reach him at shaj.mathew@gmail.com.
1 In a literary sense, recall how Chinua Achebe’s (recent) criticism of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has affected the current perception of the (much older) book. Likewise, Edward Said’s Orientalism has revised contemporary opinion on many novels (Mansfield Park, for example) that have already been published.
Article URL: http://www.runofplay.com/2011/02/09/tradition-and-the- individual-superstar/
[Published on April 15, 2010 in McSweeney’s]
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