The Question of the Degradation of War (paper for Seminar on Gender and War, Warwick 28th May 2004) excerpt from "Friendship, Interiority and Mysticism" (2007)

Simone Weil And the Questions of Resistance to the Degradation of War The late Michelle Murray compiled some notes on Simone Weil, before her own tragic premature death at the age of 40. I shall use these to begin my paper, although there is an industry at work, since the 1930s on the life and death of Simone Weil. Murray’s insights are valuable, because she places Weil on the feminist grid, which other writers might not – since overtly it seems that Simone Weil rejected all things female in herself. Her mother, Selma, encouraged her boyishness by making her feel that equality with her brilliant brother Andre, could be had through imitativeness. By using the tropes of androgyny, anorexia and abstention as political metaphors, Michelle Murray argues that Weil was a tragic activist against the industrialism of war. This is a more empathetic reading than that of Thomas Nevin’s writings, which suggest that Simone Weil suffered from penis envy, so she exchanged the master discourse of the Lyceums, including the Normale Superieure, for factory work,which embodied emasculation and servility. From there to mysticism and to Catholicism is not a far leap! Biographers tend to bracket her life and work into the following categories 1. Radical Student Activism (the so called Red Virgin period, when she was also called “The Categorical Imperative in Skirts”). 2. The Teaching at Lycee and Trade Union Period. 3. The Factory Period. 4. The Refugee/Resistance period It is the last that Murray handles, and where this story begins. Simone came to London, after having spent four months in New York, settling in her parents, who had escaped with her via Casablanca in 1942. Her aim was to return to France at the earliest, as she had a nurses - on- the front programme which she hoped to persuade the Free French Forces to implement. In England, Michelle Murray writes, “isolated from her family, her country, and all familiar surrounding, Simone nevertheless devoted herself to France and to returning to France, whatever the risks” (George Abbot White, 1981: 25). She told her parents that she was in love with London, in love with England, that the people here had known tragedy, but not so as to dull them, which had been the case of France. She wrote L’Enraciment, or the Need for Roots, during this time, taking the task set to her by the Free French very seriously. “During those months of 1943 - first the damp winter months, then the glorious early spring which was one of the finest in memory sending Londoners pouring out to what undamaged parks remained and softening the ruins with growths of flowering weeds – Simone Weil was working on the manuscript. She had worn herself out, begging the Free French in London to allow herself to parachute into France as an agent, a contact person, an intellectual liaison between the Resistance and the world outside. And she could not understand their refusal. She did not regard her poor health, blinding headaches and physical fragility as any handicap in such a mission” (ibid 50,51). Michelle Murray argues that Simone was the stereotype in her looks and behaviour of Jewish female intellectualism, a visible target for the Vichy government, and the Germans. The Free French gave her a task which they thought would keep her quiet, but she worked ferociously to produce what she called “Prelude to A Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind”. Simone had always believed in the polemical tract, but this draft is one of the finest examples of a sane, rational and generous voice. While writing this very secular, rational and powerful text, she continued steadfastly her parallel activities, which were studies of Greek mythology, Hindu shastras in Sanskrit, spiritual meditations, particularly focused on reciting the Lord’s prayer in Greek. For Sociologists, a re- reading of Emile Durkheim’s Division of Labour, and Moral Education, would provide a lucid framework for the understanding of Weil’s work. Just as we ignore many parts of Durkheim’s texts because they are are Victorian or unacceptable (size of cranium and proportion of brain for man and woman, for instance!) the same objectivity is necessary in a reading of Weil. I do not see this as a methodological problem. Durkheim was concerned with the differing types of division of labour, showing us that mechanical solidarity was integrative in a different way from organic solidarity. Like reproduces intensity. Difference produces diffusion. The State becomes the symbol of the latter type. Trade Unions would be integral forms of manufacturing solidarity, and would draw from the medieval guilds, some of their key similarities. The critique of socialism as a cry of pain does not detract from the value of the reciprocities found in primitive communism, as Marcel Mauss would later show. If we read “The Need for Roots” (1987a) against this background, the sociological validity of Simone’s tract would be manifest. It is, in its way, as powerful as The Communist Manifesto which is known to be a work of art, only this text is rooted in the idea of dialogue, collectivity, individual responsibility and the goals of social justice. It draws deeply from Marxist writng, while critiquing all forms of absolutism in collective life. The freedom and responsibility of the individual were paramount for Simone Weil. The State is Always Ready for War It is against this background, that my paper is set. War is a state, It is continuous for preparation, engagement and disengagement are modern industrial activities. Resistance is possible only through the awareness of one’s own ability to understand and thus transform the world. Bureaucracy and the Factory are thus two emblems of modernism. Thus, war embodies the hierarchical structure of these two institutions in its totality. Even if people should wish for liberty and equality, by being implicated in the machineries of war, as soldiers or miners, they cannot separate themselves from the structures of oppression by which the State, even in a democracy, marks itself as unquestionable and secret. In the process of colonization, this becomes even more apparent. Sara Ruddick in “Maternal Thinking” (1990) argues that “Very few of the men who take part in war can be said to “make war’. Most are foot soldiers and workers in the service of grand campaigns they did not design, about which they were not consulted, and which they rarely comprehend. Even within the military, the proportion of of suppliers and bureaucrats to active fighters is high.” (Ruddick 1990:152) Cannon fodder, we know, consists of very young men, conscripted because of their poverty, or their boredom, and inability to cope with civilian life, or exhibiting a youthful idealism in the cause of nationhood. Compulsory military service draws on these to communicate the ever present existence of the industry of war. The power elite locks hands, being instititutionalised in their collaboration in the war, medical and food industries. Ruddick says, “If men were so eager to be fighters, we would not need drafts, training in misogyny and macho heroes, nor would we have to entice the morally sensitive with myths of patriotic duty and just cause. Indeed, history suggests that men have an even more ambivalent relation to the fighting expected of them, than women do the mothering work for which they are said to be naturally suited” (ibid 152) Liddle and Nakajimo, in their study of gender and work in Japan, “Rising Suns, Rising Daughters” discuss the fact that political states are desperate in their search for symbolic capital, and they are competitive for legitimacy and visibility on the world stage and that they use gender and class as forms of symbolic capital to compete for global power (Liddle land Nakajima 2000).War as a form of aggression open to women has been the scandal of the long years of the Iraq war. The non responsibility of women soldiers to human rights, or rather the exact ability to enact orders displayed by them open up for observers, the War Crimes issues raised by Hannah Arendt in all her work. Liddle and Nakajima (2000) borrow from Terry Lovell’s reading of Pierre Bourdieu’s work (1984) to say that, “It is men who inherit, invest and accumulate capitals of various kinds, and convert them into symbolic capital to acquire respect, honor and power, or conversely who trade in “non convertible” currencies in “protected markets” which produce power deficits, because in the struggle for recognition of different social truths, the capitals of those who are less well armed with the resources to impose their truths are not values or acknowledged as legitimate (Liddle and Nakajima 2000:292). Thus their specific theoretical position is that gender and class cannot be separated from the events of the global political economy (ibid 30) Simone Weil, in the manner of Mary Wollstonecraft, believed that tracts were the first step towards redrafting policy and ways of thought. She believed in the power of writing as a form of activism (Visvanathan 1998). A Need for Roots is a powerful critique of war and masculinism as hierarchy, however restricting itself within gender neutrality as the metaphor for charting out the text of Human Rights. The dangers of gender neutralization we well know from the work of the feminists and Ivan Illich. Simone Weil argues that the first ability of being human is to recognize hunger in another. Human Rights – food, shelter, clothing, education, medical facility, community – these appease hunger. But there is the hunger that arises from the moral condition of humans as well.’’ This is where the question of obligations must become most evident. Privileges accrue toward oneself - obligations is towards the other. There is a dialogicity that is set up as soon as we recognize the needs of others – this would then be conversation rather then a monologue. “A man left alone in the world would have no rights, he would have only duties” (Weil 1987a: 3) There is for Weil, a dialectic between the subjectivity of rights and the objectivity of obligations. The needs of the spirit are real, for Simone Weil, for she says they are difficult to recognize or to count, but everyone knows they exist. There are the palpable and different forms of cruelty which “a conqueror may exercise over a subject population; such as massacre, mutilation, organized famine, enslavement or large-scale deportation” and there are forms of cruelty which “can injure a man’s life without injuring his body”, such as the loss of freedom, or the fear of the loss of freedom (Weil 1987a). For Weil, the collectivity is sacred in the Durkheimian sense, as are rules, and the insitiutions even more so. These institutions must be protected, they are “unique and irreplaceable” for they are our link with past generations, and are the conveyor of ideas (ibid 8). But she beckons us to beware of those collectivities which demand unspeakable sacrifices, and those “dead collectivities” which without devouring souls, don’t nourish them either (ibid 9). She recognized the difference between needs and desires, whims, fantasies and vices. “Man requires not rice or potatoes but food.” The maintenance and representation of order is paramount. Like Durkheim, there is a fragility to this position, a possibility of compromise or mitigation. Order, like symmetry can become an end in itself. The search for order she defines as a journey. This journey is often in the dark, without a light, and sometimes without a guide, demanding the ultimate sacrifice, but it is characterized by hope – it is this which makes us human and pacifist. In order, contradictions are reconciled, and there is a fine balance between antithetical poles. Hunger and appeasement, desire and waiting. For Weil, this is the ability to choose that is the greatest attribute of freedom. Yet we are encircled by rules. These rules must be comprehensible to the people who are thus bound by them. People must understand their usefulness, their applicability and their necessity. They must be simple enough, so that people who adhere to these rules are not confounded every time, they wish to apply them or think about them. This right to information, it would seem is an inherent human right for Simone Weil, as described in the Need for Roots (ibid 13). There is however a point when choice becomes an obstacle when too varied and multiple choice becomes a burden, resulting in irresponsibility. Puerility, indifference, boredom, or the fear of harming others are such obstacles. Then liberty does not feel like it is valuable. It leads to chaos. Weil contrasts this with Semitism, which is, according to her, so rule bound and egotistical that it perpetuates a particular condition of mind. From ghettoization to annihilation was the most tragic state of historical events which ran across millennia – but the Jewish state of cannon ball and flag, without a sense of obligation to the other was a fearsome proposition for Simone. Weil was loyal to ideas and fearless. Accusations of anti-Semitism by some, or conversely the regret communicated by others, that she did not convert to Christianity, did not affect her at all. For Weil, the question of hierarchy and inequality was paramount. Thus, the right to develop capacities, regardless of the accidents of birth, and the significance of maintaining ascending and descending balance in equitable terms were equally significant. She wrote in the Need for Roots “To the extent to which it is really possible for the son of farm labourer to become one day a minister, to the same extent should it really be possible for the son of a minister to become one day a farm labourer…This sort of equality, if allowed full play by itself, can make social life fluid to the point of decomposing” (ibid 17) Manual and Mental Labour – the Preoccupation. Simone Weil spent weeks harvesting grapes, tiring herself out to the extent, that one day she exclaimed, “Hell is a vineyard.” She also worked on the land of Gustave Thibon, a Catholic intellectual who gave her inspite of her many differences and conflicts with him, a loyal friendship, hospitality and shelter. He became the custodian of her notebooks, because she trusted him implicitly. Simone Weil used the idea of “proportion” which she defined as the combination of equality with inequality, and everywhere, throughout the universe, according to her, it is the sole factor making for balance. Peter Winch’s classic study of Simone Weil, using the tradition of the Notebooks, has been titled “The Just Balance” in tribute to her preoccupation with order. It is in that context of power, balance and order, that she had argued that, “Applied to the maintenance of social equilibrium, it would impose on each man, burdens corresponding to the power and well being he enjoys, and corresponding risks in cases of incapacity or neglect. The exercise of important public functions should carry with it serious personal risks”(ibid 17). Michael Ferber (who was an anti-Vietnam activist, and stood trial with Dr Spock in the Boston Area) wrote an essay on Simone Weil, which argues that soul force was an integral part of the activist stock. Force, for Weil is pitiless, but for him, soul force as evident in Gandhi and other pacifists, becomes a source of optimism. (ed Abbot White, 1981, cited on pg 81). He contrasts Hannah Arendt’s idea of forgiveness against Weil’s idea of force, for Arendt says, “Forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of reacting against an original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process.” (ibid 83) In contrast is forgiveness, where every act is new, and unexpected, “unconditioned” by the act which provoked it”. Simone Weil argues that there must always be a critical imagination centred around the idea of ‘my country’, which is the same as ‘my nation’. “When a lot is talked about patriotism, little is heard about justice, and the sense of justice is so strong among workmen, even if they are materialist, owing to the fact that they are always under the impression that they are being deprived of it, that any form of moral education (italics mine) in which justice hardly figures cannot possibly exercise any hold over them…they always need to feel that..they are dying for something much greater, taking part in the universal struggle against injustice” (ibid 128) Moral Education which was Durkheim’s Sociological statement against forms of communal violence in France, the Dreyfus case being the catalyst, is centrally structured around collectivities, such as the nation, and parochialities such as the family. Education mediates these, and by arguing for rationality, human rights and freedom, Durkhiem compels us to understand the forms of socialization that allow us to believe in the future of Society. And why not, when the first task of Sociology is to propagate the wisdom of community. Simone Weil lived a tragic life, and a very short one, but no one forgot her, and every invitation to read her work, brings our attention to the questions of fearlessness, and the will to survival. Whether her life was cut short because of her tragic identification with those more victimized than herself, the legacy of empathy is not a small one for practitioners of Sociology today or at any other time. References Durkheim, Emile: The Division of Labour in Society, Free Press, New York and London, 1964. Moral Education. Free Press, New York, 1973. Ilich, Ivan Gender, Pantheon, New York, 1982. Liddle, Joanna and Sachiko Nakajima. Rising Suns, Rising Daughters: Gender, Class and Power in Japan, White Lotus Bangkok, and Zed books, London and New York,2000. Miles. Sian. Simone Weil: An Anthology. Penguin, London 2007. Murray, Michelle. The Jagged Edge: A Bibliographical Essay on Simone Weil. in George Abbot White(ed), Simone Weil: An Interpretation of a Life. University of Massachusetts 1981. Nevin, Thomas R. Simone Weil, A Life, Pantheon, New York, 1976 Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking, Toward a Politics of Peace Ballantine Books:New York, 1990. Visvanathan, Susan. An Ethnography of Mysticism, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 1998 Friendship, Interiority and Mysticism, Orient Blackswan, New Delhi 2007. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace Routledge and Kegan Paul (Ark) 1987 The Need for Roots Routledge and Kegan Paul (Ark) 1987a White, George Abbot (ed) Simone Weil: An Interpretation of a Life. University of Massachussets 1981.

Enter Stage Right: Feisal Alkazi.(Speaking Tiger, New Delhi 2021)

Enter Stage Right: The Alkazi /Padamsee Family Memoir. Feisal Alkazi. Speaking Tiger Books, New Delhi 2021 This interesting memoir carries with it the sense of two cities: Delhi and Mumbai. It conveys how family histories are essentially a map of mnemonics. where objects as much as people, houses, streets, institutions all come alive, carrying with them, the sense of conversations which have survived. What people say, and to whom they say it, and how they say it, carry with it the weight of memory, of feelings and emotions. Feizal knew from an early age how important the clan was, and why being interlocked between two powerful families, that of his mother and father, would give him a sense of belonging and of identity. While there is essentially the safety net of being a mere witness in the ribald spaces between clan members and their doings, the child as an observer remains a lonely child. He is constantly looking out for familiar spaces which provide him with a sense of rectitude and propriety, while writing with intensity about the eccentrics in the family. It is in that sense, not an autobiography. Once Leela Dube, when she was in her eighties, asked me “ Do you think an autobiography should be completely truthful?” I replied, insouciantly, circa 1994, “Yes, ofcourse!” She looked astonished, and said, “I don’t agree, there are things which cannot be disclosed.” The Alkazi and Padamsee families, with Ibrahim and Sultan as their representatives make an entry on page 1. Waiting in the wings is Roshen, his mother, Sultan’s sister, who at 19 had a role to play in Salome, as an understudy for the actress who did not want to do a dance on stage. As Feisal describes it, young people putting up plays, writing poems, and falling in love was not uncommon in 1942, when war time brought a cosmopolitanism into the city of Bombay. His father Ibrahim Alkazi fell in love, it was mutual, and the children Amal and Feizal grew up in the close company of actors and friends. His mother’s family was influential and completely westernized. His paternal grandfather was a merchant, trading in spices, who migrated to Pakistan, but on being hounded there by the State, (who took over his house and furniture) he left for England, and then settled in Beirut. Ibrahim Alkazi’s parents were liberals who allowed their son, one among nine siblings, to choose theatre as his career. So Roshen and Ibrahim bought a small house in Matheran.. It was to represent the space in which theatre artists would meet. The sense of unnerving readiness to be prepared for the audience underlies the narrative about his parents and their friends. His mother’s mother who was a powerful force in the family and dominated everyone, is described in endearing terms. Here was where the cousins met, congregating with their parents around the family dining table. In the summer, thirteen members of the Padamsee family, excluding some busy male affines would leave for the hills: Mahabaleshwar, Matheran, Panchgani, by train. These holidays would be carefully planned, involving how time would be spent, sleeping arrangements, food served, and roster for bathroom usage. It’s the infinitely small details that make this book so readable. Culturally distinct, it is representative of how the upper class bohemian elite would make a world of their own. Nostalgia has its place in culture studies in conjuring up a world that has disappeared or is secreted away. The point that Feisal Alkazi makes is that an Anglicized world does not deplete the citizen of the 1950s and 1960s from being deeply invested in nationalism. Their preoccupations in the next generation, that of Amal and Nissar, and Feisal’s and his wife Radhika’s, remained in the spaces of interdisciplinary scholarship and archivalisation of the material culture of the people of India. This argument for the stability of constitutional rights and properties is well articulated even in the domain of the visual arts. The poverty of post war years had earlier been well conveyed in the reported recollections of Ibrahim Alkazi. It never silenced his compatriots, who were gifted artists, poets and photographers. Family memoirs therefore become one way by which emotional sustenance is provided to the reader, when the State begins to define war time economies as a simulation in the times of Covid and religious fundamentalism and social exclusion. The sad stories of death, privation, loss, divorce /separation, recouping, survival are all intermeshed here, told with an intensity of living with these phenomena, or being reminded of them by an older generation. Yet, the volatility and grandeur of the family is entrancing, because they lived, and left a trail. Told with humour where the pace flags, Feisal gives us reasons to understand his own professional world, where as a theatre director and trained social worker he attempts to make a difference in the world of the young.

25th year anniversary at Queen's University of Charles Wallace Fellows: A lecture on Iris Murdoch's 'The Philosopher's Pupil"

The Philosopher’s Pupil by Iris Murdoch Every one in the novel is alone, though Ariadne ties them together by a spool of narrative that runs for 576 pages. It is as if the protagonist exists in a multitude of characters, and in giving them a fictional stance, a biography of a tourist town is mapped. The town overtakes the characters. We begin to know it not just from the cryptography of the Baths, where the locals as much as tourists, take pleasure in the everydayness of having recourse to the therapeutic waters, but its fields, fallow lands and alleyways all resonate with the footsteps of the characters (16-29). Solitude allows Iris Murdoch to put to good use her skills in weaving the story, as each character takes centre stage to display the nuances of identity. Everyone is evil, and yet, at the same time, astoundingly capable of immense goodness. What is this goodness, and how do minor characters become great? It is because they are capable of change and of transformation, as Dostoevsky showed us in Crime and Punishment. Love becomes a kind of currency, so that their evil is transmuted into something else, sometimes with frightening consequences for all the characters in the novel. What is evil is ofcourse defined only in the consequences it has for those around, sucked in by the plethora of ways that humans use to consciously hurt one another. Readers are entranced by the co-existence of contraries, the dialectical consummation of desire and death in the same breath. By the skeins of this fluctuating nature of reality, we do not know who wins, and who loses the novelist then manipulates our emotions. We take sides with the character, and the venom that then spews out is so dastardly, we jump back at the new revealations that it brings to us. This is probably why, when Tom is inadvaertantly locked in the Baths, and we do not know in that particular chapter whether he lives or dies, we understand the depth of emotion and suspense that Iris Murdoch herself experienced when her ally and friend, Frank Thompson (brother of E.P Thompson), dies in the World War 2, in the hands of Bulgarian fascists (Conradi 2000:200). It is this momentum of curiosity, intellectual and emotional self flagellation which makes the lives of those who are pedagogic socialists, so different from the sacrifices of those warriors who plunge into the sacrificial moment. Durkheim in his book on Suicide described soldiers’ unusual bravery and heroism in war as altruistic suicide. It is certainly how Iris Murdoch through the simulation of the terror of being in the lowest rung of the ladder in the hot steam, the sulphurous Baths, communicates how death must have seemed, when the hatchet bangs shut, and no amount of swinging from point to point allows Tom to hope to return to the surface from the bowels of the earth. The novel attempts to use imagination to state if not resolve the crises that writers continually feel, in their seemingly placid world, in ivory towers(Murdoch 1984: 518-525). The McCaffreys, who are at the centre of the novel, are wrapped around their fates, and their cross cutting strands of biological and social entrapments keep them occupied. They spend their time staying out of each other’s way, and are yet thrust unwittingly into one another’s path. How they hate one another! Yet, love and loyalty are like genetic codes (you cannot choose your relatives or hide your desires) which is the grammar that Murdoch uses convincingly. She herself revelled in a companionate marriage, and exulted in her secure nesting in her parents’ adoration of of her. Yet, she is persuasive as a novelist in describing the condition of those who run solo, even if they are opulently described to be in conjugal satiety. For Iris Murdoch, the non judgementality about homosexuality and adultery are probably the key themes of recreating images of life in Britain. She is ultimately a Belfast girl, inspite of the cat’s cradle of her representative iconic status as a novelist and philosopher in England. Peter Conradi writes that Iris went to meet her cousins in Belfast in 1939, and she and a friend of her cousin’s climbed the tower of Queen’s University and tied a friend’s pyjamas to the flagpost (Conradi 2000:80) Philosopher’s Pupil as the name suggests is about George McCaffrey and his tumultuous relationship with his teacher John Robert. This relationship is so vivid, it is like a scar that runs blood through the text, a murderous intent that rears up at every opportunity. George fantasises about murdering his wife and John Robert at every opportunity. He has a mistress whom he is emotionally dependent on, a tawdry space of love and longing, of great abnegation and servitude where the lovers constantly communicate the possibility of their continued liason, but it is ridden with lust, guilt and fear. John Robert Rozanov the great philosopher, returns to Ennistone, where the Romans have left traces of their presence in mnemonics of stone and in the Baths. He is eminent, well known in America, a great tyrannical presence to the inhabitants of Ennistone Spa. His granddaughter Hattie, who floated from place to place, having received an education sponsored by her grandfather, John Robert Rozanov hopes to further her education in England( Murdoch 1984:232). Alex McCaffrey, George’s mother, owns the house with a garden and outhouse, where Hattie is sent as a tenant by Rozanov. He is able to rent the house in the garden by manipulating Alex, who according to George, his former pupil, had shown no interest in John Robert when he was a young man and out of spite had married Linda Brent, Hattie’s grandmother, instead (ibid 222). At receiving the news that her excitement at John Robert’s return to Ennistone Spa was misplaced, Alex feels again, that ‘sudden piercing obsessive jealous remorse when she had heard that Linda Brent was going to marry John Robert Rozanov. Love she could give no one expanded painfully in her heart’ ( ibid 209). Rozanov wants Hattie Meynell to marry Tom, Alex’s stepson, but this means reordering emotions, which Tom had no idea would mean displacement of his primary affection to Emma, his musician friend. Emma is Tom’s closest friend, a musician formally training with a man, Hanway, who suppressed his sexual desire in his pupil’s company but always trained him alone, without fellow students, sometimes staring with great intensity into Emma Scarlet-Taylor’s eyes “with some involuntary signal of emotional need.’ ( ibid 215) . ‘In any case, music made a holy world within which Emma and Mr Hanway could lead safe intelligible lives, making sense of each other through the bond of transcendent necessity’ ( ibid 215). In contrast to this collegial nicety, is what Tom and Emma feel for each other as students on a brief holiday in Ennistone. Tom is a house sitter for a couple who have gone on holiday. The temporary house becomes the site of a a bond which is much more incestuously fraternal and intense. Emma is both sibling friend and lover to Tom. When Tom and Hattie marry they continue to live in the garden house, and are described as ‘amitie amoureuse’, though Emma and Pearl during this later phase have become sexual partners themselves. Clearly the memory of that primary friendship is still in force, if not practice: Tom said, ‘Emma – oh- Emma.’ Emma said nothing, but he drew the bedclothes aside. Tom, still in the swift impetus of his wafting, came to his friend, and for a moment they lay breast to breast, holding each other in a fierce bruising clasp, their hearts beating with a terrible violence’ and so they lay still for a long time.” (218) It is this bi sexuality that Iris Murdoch is dealing with through the entire text of the novel. The intensity of love and repugnance, of unrequited love, of betrayal or instinctual passions, and the manner in which social conventions provide brutal ordering mechanisms are her ever present themes. By foisting Tom on Hattie, John Robert Rozanov hopes to elide over his incestuous love for the young girl, who is only just out of boarding school in Colorado, America and wishes to study further in Britain. By sequestering her in the cottage in Alex’s garden he presumes that she will have safety and privacy in the company of her au par/ hired companion, who however is seen kissing Emma in the garden. (444). Here, too, the identity of the illicit young lovers are conveyed through confusion and transvestism. There is here a very striated set of social relations between Diane, George’s mistress who is a prostitute, (64) Pearl who is Hattie’s guardian and au par employed by Rozanov, (448) and Ruby, Alex’s housekeeper(58). These three women are shadow persons, who speak when spoken to, and yet are vivid representations of how menials are treated, and experience the secure life of their patrons through their access to material goods of which they are placed in charge of. Alex, in her old age, an abandoned wife who gets to keep all the property, feels in charge, and her children are affectionate but unruly in their emotions. Alex sees Ruby as someone who has power over her, and fears her. Ruby has a huge persona, which communicates the intensity of servility and ardour. Yet, as gypsies, the three women in service, all clearly demonstrate how intimacy does not stand in place of equality. Equality and freedom lie elsewhere. How, then, does Murdoch understand the place of humans in a vocabulary of intermeshedness, where their personal emotions are always interlaced in a poisonous web of contraindications. How do you govern emotions? Where is freedom, if emotions are bludgeoned by convention? The servants themselves feel that their power over their wards , Alex, George and Hattie are ingrained in their own nature, and that love is a connivance towards atleast a temporary security. In Hattie’s case, it translates itself into something bolder, friendship, but for Ruby and Diana exile must follow naturally because there has been a mutual predatory quality between them and their patrons. ‘Hattie and Pearl love each other with the deep love of childhood friends, tempered by the love of those who have been shipwrecked together.’(576) How could Harriet Meynell forget John Roberts’ words to her, ‘You mean you love me?’ said Hattie. ‘Yes,’ ‘You love me- like grandfather- or like – like being in love?’ ‘The latter,’ said John Roberts in a low voice.(463) In the dreadful pages that follow, Iris Murdoch leads to the blinding spaces in which Rozanov flounders to explain that his travels have led him away from what is the centre of his world, Hattie Meynell. “Oh, Hattie, if you only knew _’ ‘Knew what?’ ‘How I’ve yearned over you and wanted you. You think I don’t care about you, but that isn’t true, it’s the opposite of true..’ Hattie stared at the flat head, the lined bumpy fleshy brow, and the very short electric frizzy hair, the big birdlike nose framed by furrows in which grey stubble grew, the pouting prehensile mouth with its red lips and the froth of bubbly saliva at the corners, the fiercely shining rectangular light brown eyes which seemed to be trying so hard to send her a signal. The soft plump wirinkles of the brow, pitted with porous spots, so close to her across the table, gave her especially the sense of something so sad, so old. She felt frightened and full of pity. She said, just in order to say something soothing, ‘Oh don’t worry, don’t worry, please –‘ (469) Yet at the heart of an old man who loves a child, and a young woman who feels the intensity of his suffering lies the tale. It’s about confession, emotional anarchy and the sublime It is Rozanov’s jealousy of the love that Hattie and Pearl her servant share together, that makes him wish to sack Pearl, and corner Hattie in a monologic vulnerability that creates mutual panic. Murdoch’s own glamorous youth was spent in the resurrection of vagabond emotions which in the 1930s, and after the 11nd world war, were not historically out of place. Shiela Rowbotham has consistently shown that freedom at work for women, entry into hallowed university spaces as Virginia Woolf had hoped for, and the questions of masculine patronage which ignited and dominated the academic relations which were hierarchically placed were symbolically annotated. Memory, as spliced in the novel, is another type of coding for these complex and concurrent emotions. Iris Murdoch would turn up suddenly, pursuing her teacher the Philosopher Donald MacKinnon. He would be embarrassed by her fealty. His wife, he said, found it humiliating that his students took over their personal domestic spaces (Conradi 2000: 265-258). Does George with his hollowed persona, his crafty ingenuity stand for such a parasitical adoration? Iris Murdoch was so engaged in writing continuously, in the free play of the unconscious, that she could well absorb multiply present contradictory emotions in her narratives. She could show that intimacy brought love and hate to shuddering proximity. She constantly affirmed that people could say things that they did not apologise for, then or later. Inscription then brought the fleeting nature of language into an archetype of echoing similarities. Readers could recognize situations in which they themselves had been thrust. The plague of adoration which offends, which is unrequited love, remains the core of The Philosopher’s Pupil. The desire to murder the father which George suffers from, is wrenched away from him in a novelistic sleight of hand, where Rozanov’s suicide is simulated theatrically as murder by Murdoch, but (factually) it is not. Rozanov is already dead by overdose, as his magnum opus cannot be completed, and his granddaughter’s tenderness, for whom he feels a misplaced and grandiose love (as strangers might for one another where age is no barrier) becomes unbearable for the old philosopher. All these emotions are somewhat counterfeit. People feel what they do, but they assert themselves in socially defined ways. George thinks he has murdered his teacher, but the image of the old and dissolute intellectual baron sleeping and snoring are in themselves prophetically the death of the Father God. George had wanted so much to kill his erudite wife, so that he could go away with his mistress Diane. He thinks he murdered his wife, but everyone says he did not, including his wife and the local priest. In an alcoholic fog he roams through the pages of the novel attempting to understand himself, and relinquishing himself of all responsibility because Rozanov had snubbed him when he was a student. John Roberts had moved to rooms in Innistone Spa after leaving his granddaughter where he wrote a suicide note to an old friend, and swallowed some poison which had an irrevocable effect. Father Bernard, an interesting character in the book standing for those principle of ecumenism popular in England at that time, comes to meet Rozanov, and finds him dead in the bath, his manuscript floating in the water. How much hate is compounded in the paragraphs describing the will to murder the teacher! The priest does not know that the unconscious Rozanov was toppled from his bed into the bath, and floated like a hippopotamus totally unaware of the second order of death imposed by the obsessive George. It is this fearsome imagery of a poison which has no anodyne, and the drowning of the near corpse by George which carries the fetid nature of suppressed and coagulated hatred (ibid 551). How then does George free himself from the panic of his own guilt, his foreboding that as a murderer, he never pays his price, as the verdict always is that he was not responsible. It is in his wife Stella that he derives his healing rapprochement. George knows that his actions were expressions of his sense of continual revenge. ( ibid 558) Peter J.Conradi in his detailed analyses writes of the emotional alienation of those who survived the World Wars. George is no Septimus Smith, he is a product of the ways in which intellectualism forces itself as a form of narcissism, through the lives of others. There is something so dread about selfish motives, lusts which cannot be controlled, forced conversion to values which the protagonists find heavy handed. Is there a moral position that the reader is expected to take? That would take away from the volatility of life itsel, and the choices humans make about the good life. The novel is not about morality, it is about variations in human behavior which is what makes life so delicious, that agency is constrained by normative behavior, and the culpability of individuals in the face of fate. What would the law have judged George to be guilty of? And what indeed, as things stand, is he guilty, of? All these unanswered questions are likely to continue to disturb the minds of both George and Father Bernard ( ibid 560). The omnipresent narrator thus brings the frenzy of a number of interlocked lives to the plateau of a stable narrative present. Stella, George’s wife with her patience, her love, her great virtue closes the story of his ‘blindness’ (he actually loses his sight and blames it on an UFO),but we can imagine how that annoys, George, because his febrile spirit is always irritated by her magnitude of goodness. What Murdoch provides, in this jumble of displacements and refractions, an existential equilibrium to the challenges and struggles of those left behind, as the story never ends. It is the magnetic continuity into any number of kaleidoscopic possibilities that allows the author to represent the continuity of her existence beyond the tale. As Barthes would call it, the death of the author promotes the transcendent continuity of the work. The text must be able to withstand time and critics. The Indian communist leader, Vidya Munsi reminds us of the coincidental nature of friendships and war time memoirs, as Edward Thompson, Frank’s father, was a friend of Tagore and well known in Kolkatta. She writes, “Among much useless junk dating back to my student days in England during World War 11, I came upon a few typed sheets of poems and letters by a young Englishman named Frank Thompson”(Munsi 2006: 31). She goes on to describe in detail Frank Thompson’s death, since it had been brought to England as eye witness information in 1945 by Madame Sharova, a Bulgarian teacher who attended the World Trade Conference that year, and met Frank’s mother, a year after his assassination. The Gestapo had rounded up the freedom fighters in the mountains North of Sofia. At Litavako the Gestapo had to stage a mock trial in the village hall.. Mme Sharova was there with her young daughter. The trial was so brutal and such a travesty of justice that the daughter, weeping, left the hall. But Mme. Sharova had to stay. She tried to memorise every word of the questioning so that she could report it later to her underground trade union leaders. Frank was sitting against a pillar, calm and stern, smoking his English briar pipe, filled no doubt with Bulgarian tobacco. He answered his questioners in fluent Bulgarian( Munsi 2006: 32). He died giving the salute, the clenched fist and said his last words, “I give you the salute of freedom.” It was in June 1944. When the Germans were driven out of Bulgaria, three months later, the thirteen resistance warriors were given a burial in a garden in the village. “A crowd of 50,000 had gathered from all over the country to line the route as the coffins were borne there. The people had collected money for a memorial.” Vidya Munsi writes that the garden, which absorbed Frank’s bones and those of patriots, is still tended, and small children continue to lay flowers (ibid 33). In our shared worlds, we cross over many times, and our memories become the way we reflect on the circumstances of our common humanity. References Conradi, Peter J.2000. Iris Murdoch, A Life. Hammersmith: Harper Collins Geva, Dorit. 2013. Conscription, Family and the Modern State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Munsi, Vidya. 2006. In Retrospect: War Time Memories and Thoughts on the Women’s Movement. Kolkatta: Manisha Granthalaya Murdoch, Iris. 1984. The Philosopher’s Pupil. Harmondsworth:Penguin Rowbotham, Shiela. 2000. A Century of Women. Harmondsworth:Penguin Susan Visvanathan CSSS/ School of Social Sciences, JNU

An Interesting Life, So Far: Memoirs of Literary and Musical Peregrinations. Bruce King. Edition Noema, ibidem Verlag Stuttgart 2017 This extremely interesting book is like the author, larger than life, with a versatility of interests, emotions and hobbies. It is as much notation of professionals in the fields of literature, music (jazz) and multicultural cuisines, as it is an autobiography penned in the style of a formal diary. The chronology is evanescent of the 9 decades that hurtled past an age, beginning with the gift of a fast car by his mother when he was a teenager, so that he would ostensibly stay out of her way while she ran the family pharmacy in a town in New Jersey. This sense of small town boredom, and the ingenuity of a young man to whom erudition came easily led him to write many well recognized books on Shakespeare’s plays, Marvell’s poetry and Dryden’s plays, and consequently, immediate professional recognition as he straddled the continents. A secure life in Universities in America, however, was not to be. Bruce King became by the accident of his times, a teacher in the Common Wealth countries, in Africa, Caribbeans, New Zealand and India, escaping from each ideological net, when there was revolution or crises, by the skin of his teeth. His lovely wife Adele, to whom the book is dedicated accompanied him, but then settled to a teaching job in Muncie which allowed her a stable occupational life, and an income. Muncie, which was boring for Bruce, was where the sociological classic, well known to us, called Middletown was written by the Warners, and their team of research scientists. Bruce’s dismay with anything which is boring and rule bound runs through the 518 pages of the book. What would a bohemian intellectual who was pursued by global intellectuals for his standing power as a literary critic want with small town collegial politics? We have evidence from his striking descriptive prose about the eccentricities of academics, cosmopolitan or parochial. Sometimes his invective sounds foolhardy, and yet, no one has taken him to court for saying what he does, or maybe those described died of normal causes, boredom, or drug abuse or alcoholism. However, Adele’s love for Bruce, which was intensely reciprocal became the corner stone for writing the book. It is an autobiography which brims over with conjugal love, a shared sense of humour and the ability to match dancing steps perfectly. Anyone interested in the survival of Bohemia into the first quarter of the 21st century in America, Europe, Africa, Carribeans, Asia and Australia will find in this book startling escapades and a comic sense of what it means to struggle to be alive in the world of academia. Possibly, being Russian in genotypical terms, gives Bruce a sense of homecoming in Paris, with its aura of tragedy and aesthetic power, surveillance and elegant wit. Each vignette written by Bruce King carries with it a sense of the surreal and the absurd. The character assassination is perhaps the work of one who turns to the hara-kiri mode adroitly. He wants us to know him as he really is, and nothing is left unspoken. It seems like every thought that went through his head, and through Adele’s ears wafts back to us, starting from the 1930s, beginning with prenatal memories and reminders of his parents’ immigrant histories. What does it mean to be Jewish in a small town in America, and deny the significance of being bourgeoisie in America? It is the literature of a life of protest that appears to us here, where the lives of black musicians, the subterranean world of poets and writes in Deia, (where Robert Graves lived) near Mallorca, washes up in Goa, where the continuous need to thwart public opinion and enjoy the pleasures of intense hard work in free environments ties him to his desk. The questions he raises for us about bureaucracy, conformity, ambition (intellectual and personal) defy the rules of gravity. Bruce King shows us that where freedom is recognized, it is untrammelled and the dangers that follow are too horrible to imagine. This pendulum shift between freedom and conventions show us that the life of the mind can only be understood, in Bruce’s terms, by the continuous shadow place of humour that allows us to live. If this is taken away from us, there is nothing. His close friendship with Wole Soyinka often describes the way that revolution and incendiary moments follow in quick succession. His chapter on Derek Walcott gives us more than the sense of poetry, a frightening view of manners and distance as a way of creating walls between people. Bruce has brilliant pages on the Indian poets whom he often wrote about and seriously analysed, who became his friends. His lashing sarcasm of hypocrisy and venality in art worlds runs through the book. His descriptions of food, music, cars and dancing are the Barthesian preoccupations of culture studies. And Paris, where he continues to live, having celebrated his 89th Birthday on New Year’s day 2022, carries with it the resounding sense of its conversations, waterways, cafes, and of Adele’s and his daughter, who was an art dealer’s representative at a very young age. She died in a tragic housing fire, when Bruce was teaching in the district University, and he describes Adele’s and his loss in terms which we know to be ingrained in the hearts of mourners: a loss which can never be forgotten, or perhaps forgiven. Bruce King will always be remembered for the friends whom he made, and the honesty which accompanied his emotions, none of which are hidden. To write an autobiography in the latter years of Adele’s and his life, when they were holidaying in the summers in Hvar, (Croatia) and seeing the book come to light of day when he was in his mid 80s, is an achievement in itself. His promise of 600 pages of his Collected Essays in the near future, makes us feel that there is a purpose to being born. How to fulfill that purpose, in the presence of Fate, that is the biggest question that lies in front of each of us. Recovery from his daughter Nicole’s death, Adele’s death, and a decapitating cereberal stroke has given us this voluminous autobiography for which I feel grateful. Susan Visvanathan, CSSS/SSS JNU