Tag: freedom

Book Review: A Cat at the End of the World, by Robert Perišić

A Cat at the End of the World is a wondrous study of human society and the institutions of freedom and slavery arising therefrom. It draws the reader forward by means of brief chapters that alternate between plot advancement and commentary by a chorus named Scatterwind. It is mostly Scatterwind who develops the themes of freedom and slavery by noting their origins in human interactions with other species.

As Scatterwind recounts, man learned of freedom from cats:

Cats…caught mice and baby rats, and humans saw that they shared a line of interest. Cats befriended humans by doing what came to them naturally. At first they were mere acquaintances, then some children made friends with kittens and the kittens got used to human scent. When they grew up, they stayed close to their friends’ homes. They were simply there and no task could be given to them except for the ones they did anyway. No one had a reason to tie a cat on a leash because that would stop them from hunting. No one had a reason to teach cats anything apart from what they were already doing, and they saw that cats didn’t want any lessons. There was no reason to stick cats in a cage or close them off in a pen. People didn’t pay attention to whether the cats might leave. They were of no use when tied or trapped, so they didn’t bother. They could be around and hunt mice, or they could leave. Cats remained free. They were there, but were not part of the property….No one, in fact, owned a cat. (p. 133)

Conversely, slavery, or overlordship, was suggested by donkeys.

Maybe donkeys had been the catalyst; they weren’t kept for milk and meat, they were the true first laborers. When the peasants domesticated them down deep by the Nile, in the Nubia, the first pharaohs soon appeared. The donkeys later built the pyramids, together with the slaves. Sheep, goats, and cows had been domesticated before donkeys, but none of them were just workers. Was it donkeys that first gave the idea of a slave? No, not them, but the straw broke their backs, so to speak, and thus man got his idea of a worker. I saw people, those who worked the most, who knew donkeys were their brothers. But slavery, that comes from above. It is the organization from above. (p. 277)

The author’s (and/or translator Vesna Maric’s) style is accessible and fresh. Here are my favorite few sentences:

When [men] stopped believing trees had a soul, they soon stopped believing anything around them was truly alive. It was just matter. I saw that it wasn’t about the existence of spirits…but that it was about life. When human words deny the spirit of something, then it really ceases to be alive. The sprit is true life, and not the body. A body without a spirit is matter: meat, wood. (p. 309)

Like many books with classical settings, A Cat at the End of the World is permeated by a bleak sadness, perhaps born of the foreknowledge that, although freedom may triumph over slavery, its victory is often short-lived, for politics, another “organization from above,” waits in the wings.

Book Review: When True Love Came to China, by Lynn Pan

Lynn Pan’s When True Love Came to China is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read about anything. It argues that China was a stranger to love – or at least to “true love” – until the New Culture and May Fourth movements of the 1910s, when love was imported to China from its Western place of origin.

To make her case, Pan reviews Chinese and Western literary sources and shows that China, where “feeling” and “lust of the mind” were indeed well known, nonetheless fostered only a pragmatic experience of male-female coupling, due to the prevalence of arranged marriage and also to the Confucian preoccupation on moral perfection, which left little room for supposedly frivolous pursuits such as being in love. It fell to the Western mind, with its predisposition toward religious ardor, to develop the tradition of ecstatic devotion to one person. Even if the reader is uninterested in China, Pan’s chapter on the idea of love in the West is worth the price of the ticket.

That Pan limits her search for love to the Chinese and Western literary corpora tempted me to call foul, for love, as I thought, must surely evince itself outside of books. Psychologists, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and folklorists might be even more insistent that Pan’s approach is myopic and that  a better-directed hunt for love should also lead through their respective fields. Upon reflection, however, it makes sense that broader cultural phenomena such as love would sooner or later find expression in books, with the more significant phenomena garnering the most articulation. When True Love Came to China is in fact a monumental testament to the importance of books. Pan’s treatment of China’s pioneering lovers of the early twentieth century makes the primacy of book-borne sensibility undeniable.

When Pan quotes from Yu Dafu’s (1896-1945) letter to Wang Yingxia (1908-2000) – “Oh Yingxia! You are truly my Beatrice.” (p. 204) – she clinches both arguments, proving that love is a Western import to China and that books are important. Earlier chapters of When True Love Came to China highlight the role played by Ellen Key (1849-1926) and her book Love and Marriage, as well as the better-known effect in China of Henrik Ibsen’s (1828-1906) play A Doll’s House, in which the protagonist Nora walks out on her family. Nora is shown to be the role model proposed by the ardent Xu Zhimo (1897-1931) to the married Lu Xiaoman (1903-1965) in Xu’s exhortation for her to leave her husband and run off with him (p. 217).

For love to flourish, freedom and the idea of personality (see p. 163 and thereabouts) must also be secured, and Pan traces China’s quest for these latter prizes as well. The liberation of women, obviously, becomes an important part of the story, and students of this subject will find much in the way of further reading in Pan’s bibliography.

There is simply too much here – love, freedom, religion, marriage, feminism, history, China, Japan, Europe – for the present reviewer to summarize. When True Love Came to China is enthralling from so many angles. It is essential reading for life.

Book Review: Sanshirō, by Natsume Sōseki

Sanshirō’s namesake protagonist journeys to Tokyo from his provincial hometown in 1908, to pursue his education in Western subjects. What he finds on arrival is no brave new world of expanding horizons but a stagnant morass of demoralization. On a basic level, the Western ideas he encounters are not liberating but imposing, adding nothing to the native culture but confusion:

‘The sky was so clear before,’ said Mineko. ‘Now the color is all muddied.’

Sanshirō took his eyes from the stream and looked up. This was not the first time he had seen a sky like this, but it was the first time he had heard the sky described as ‘muddied.’ And she was right, he saw. There was no other way to describe this color. Before he could say anything in reply, however, Mineko spoke again.

‘It’s so heavy! It looks like marble,’ she said, using the English word. She was looking up high, eyes narrowed. Then she moved her narrowed eyes slowly, until they were turned upon Sanshirō. ‘It does look like marble, don’t you think?’

Sanshirō had no choice but to agree. ‘Yes, it looks like marble.’ (p. 97)

Mineko was doing so well with “muddied.” Why did she switch to marble? Why did Sanshirō have no choice but to go along with it?

I confess that I remembered this passage incorrectly. I thought that Mineko had described the sky consistently as marbled and that Sanshirō concluded that marbled was the only adjective that suited it. The difference, however is only one of nuance, with the true text showing how an English word comes to replace a Japanese one and my misremembered version accepting the imposition of English as an accomplished fact, conforming to my experience of Japan in recent years. On drives along the hilly coastline of southern Hokkaido, our car frequently passes through tunnels, uniformly designated as ton’neru, which has always seemed to me like bad English and not Japanese. I wonder how the Japanese named tunnels before the arrival of Commodore Perry and what was wrong with the old name.  Why not call it a zuidō, using two kanji? (But then again, kanji are Chinese characters and zuidō is a Chinese pronunciation. Perhaps the Japanese really can’t avoid borrowing a foreign term, the only choice being the era in which the term was imported.)

At any rate, as though responding to the general marblization of things, a student at Sanshirō’s school addresses a gathering, “We do not study Western literature in order to surrender ourselves to it but to emancipate minds that have already surrendered to it.” (p. 116) Very soon after hearing this bold proclamation, Sanshirō attends a crowded track meet, which, auguring poorly for the emancipation project just announced, takes place under both the Japanese and the British flags.  

Sanshirō was disappointed to find that the ladies’ seats were separate from the rest and unapproachable for ordinary human beings; also, there were a lot of important-looking men here in frock coats, which made him appear less impressive than he might have wished. Ogawa Sanshirō, youth of the new age, had shrunk a little in stature. (p. 118)

Of course, it doesn’t matter if skies are muddied or marbled, or whose flag flies over the track meet, if sex segregation and aristocracy are still so prevalent. As Haruki Murakami observes in his introduction to the 2009 Penguin edition I read, “Western ‘modernity’…had not yet taken root in Meiji Japan, nor, perhaps, is it all that firmly rooted in our own day.” (p. xxxv)

As for the plot, it involves Sanshirō’s somewhat passive pursuit of the witty and cosmopolitan Mineko and leads, rather predictably, to the contradiction between free and arranged marriage, which is fundamental to the Westernization question. The persistence of arranged marriage, as evinced in the storylines of myriad Asian movies and TV dramas popular today, confirms the truth of Murakami’s observation.

Therefore, as I finish Sanshirō, and as I finish also the 2020 Japanese movie Aristocrats, which features an arranged marriage, I resolve that my next reading, perhaps my next several readings, will focus on the crucial conflict between arranged marriage and freedom in marriage. No sooner have I closed the cover of Natsume’s novel than I have rushed to the library to borrow Lynn Pan’s nonfiction When True Love Came to China, which has some bearing on Japan as well.

Book Review: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs

This book was written (and published in 1861) to inoculate northerners against southern sugar-coating of slavery. This passage exemplifies its purpose:

One day I saw a slave pass our gate, muttering, ‘It’s his own, and he can kill it if he will.’ My grandmother told me that woman’s history. Her mistress had that day seen her baby for the first time, and in the lineaments of its fair face she saw a likeness to her husband. She turned the bondwoman and her child out of doors, and forbade her ever to return. The slave went to her master, and told him what had happened. He promised to talk with her mistress, and make it all right. The next day she and her baby were sold to a Georgia trader.

Another time I saw a woman rush wildly by, pursued by two men. She was a slave, the wet nurse of her mistress’s children. For some trifling offense her mistress ordered her to be stripped and whipped. To escape the degradation and the torture, she rushed to the river, jumped in, and ended her wrongs in death.

Senator Brown, of Mississippi, could not be ignorant of such facts as these, for they are of frequent occurrence in every Southern State. Yet he stood up in the Congress of the United States, and declared that slavery was ‘a great moral, social, and political blessing; a blessing to the master, and a blessing to the slave!’ (pp. 135-136)

So attuned to hypocrisy, Jacobs takes special aim at the church, as in the following scene:

I well remember one occasion when I attended a Methodist class meeting. I went with a burdened spirit, and happened to sit next to a poor, bereaved mother, whose heart was still heavier than mine. The class leader was the town constable – a man who bought and sold slaves, who whipped his brethren and sisters of the church at the public whipping post, in jail or out of jail. He was ready to perform the Christian office any where for fifty cents. This white-faced, black-hearted brother came near us, and said to the stricken woman, ‘Sister, can’t you tell us how the Lord deals with your soul? Do you love him as you did formerly?’

She rose to her feet, and said, in piteous tones, ‘My Lord and Master, help me! My load is more than I can bear. God has hid himself from me, and I am left in darkness and misery.’ Then, striking her breast, she continued, ‘I can’t tell you what is in here! They’ve got all my children. Last week they took the last one. God only knows where they’ve sold her. They let me have her sixteen years, and then – O! O! Prey for her brothers and sisters! I’ve got nothing to live for now. God make my time short!’

She sat down, quivering in every limb. I saw that constable class leader become crimson in the face with suppressed laughter, while he held up his handkerchief, that those who were weeping for the poor woman’s calamity might not see his merriment. Then, with assumed gravity, he said to the bereaved mother, ‘Sister, pray to the Lord that every dispensation of his divine will may be sanctified to the good of your poor needy soul!’ (pp. 78-79)

“No wonder,” Jacobs writes, “the slaves sing, –

‘Ole Satan’s church is here below;
Up to God’s free church I hope to go.’ (p. 84)

The founding principles of our republic fall under the charge of hypocrisy too; yet despite their authorship by slave-mongers, they inspire. When Jacobs slips away from her tormentors, she resolves that, “come what would, there should be no turning back. ‘Give me liberty, or give me death,’ was my motto.” (p. 111) If Patrick Henry hadn’t meant for his declaration to be echoed by everyone, then he shouldn’t have blared it.

Instrumental as she no doubt was in helping to crystalize public opinion against actual slavery, Jacobs would not join in the mounting mid-century chorus against “wage slavery,” or bourgeois society, that was first voiced experimentally by Thoreau (“It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one”), developed heroically by Gandhi (“Formerly, men worked in the open air only as much as they liked….Now…their condition is worse than that of beasts….They are enslaved by the temptation of money and of the luxuries that money can buy”), and finally reprised in satire by Orwell (“Freedom is slavery”). On a trip to England after her escape, she observes:

I had heard much about the oppression of the poor in Europe. The people I saw around me were, many of them, among the poorest poor. But when I visited them in their little thatched cottages, I felt that the condition of even the meanest and most ignorant among them was vastly superior to the condition of the most favored slaves in America. They labored hard; but they were not ordered out to toil while the stars were in the sky; and driven and slashed by an overseer, through heat and cold, till the stars shone out again. Their homes were very humble; but they were protected by law. No insolent patrols could come, in the dead of night, and flog them at their pleasure. The father, when he closed his cottage door, felt safe with his family around him. No master or overseer could come and take from him his wife, or his daughter. They must separate to earn a living; but the parents knew where their children were going, and could communicate with them by letters….There was no law forbidding them to learn to read or write; and if they helped each other in spelling out the Bible, they were in no danger of thirty-nine lashes, as was the case with myself and poor, pious, old uncle Fred. I repeat that the most ignorant and the most destitute of these peasants was a thousand times better off than the most pampered American slave. (pp. 205-206)

This edition comes with a narrative by Harriet’s brother, John, which includes this pithy farewell note to his “master”:

Sir – I have left you, not to return; when I have got settled, I will give you further satisfaction. No longer yours, John S. Jacob. (p. 248)

Book Review: Tales of Ming Courtesans, by Alice Poon

Tales of Ming Courtesans is a freedom book. Utilizing an approach that is very different from Lisa See’s in her Peony in Love, Alice Poon has created characters that do more than make the most of miserable situations. Rather, they rail at the injustice of them and seek liberation. In one passage, Poon credits very liberal expressions to the Hangzhou merchant Wang Wei and includes a ringing endorsement from Liu Rushi, perhaps the most intrepid of the three Ming courtesans portrayed in this book:

‘Confucius was dead wrong to have classed women as inferior humans. Just think of all the female talent that has gone to waste over the past several millennia because of that stupid gender discrimination! Aiya, too tragic! And our society is so depraved to exploit girls from poor families and allow the thin horse [human trafficking and procurement] trade to thrive! Why aren’t learned men ashamed at just ignoring it and do nothing about it! Let me tell you this: [Qian] Qianyi and I have always shared the same view on this issue. We have even planned to jointly petition the Emperor to ban the slave trade. That’s why we are great friends!’

‘Ah, now I understand why you call your boat the “Untethered Villa”! You are a freedom lover, true? Wasn’t it the Song poet Su Shi who had used the term “untethered boat” to portray his freedom from the burdens of officialdom?’ (p. 183)

Such discourse was indeed atypical of old China, but it was not unimaginable in the late Ming dynasty, when traditional dogma came under bold scrutiny and received norms of gender relations were challenged. Of course, Liu Rushi and her sisters are not merely interested in “freedom from the burdens of officialdom” but are desperately seeking to escape from brutal chains of control and chronic abasement. As their desperation increases, idealistic talk of freedom fades, and only the struggle for survival remains.

Nonetheless, they fight the good fight. Tales of Ming Courtesans is compelling and very exciting – and hard to put down. Readers will be sorry when it’s over, and if they are like me, they will be eager to learn more about Liu Rushi and her extraordinarily forward-thinking times.

Book Review: Washington’s Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer

As our republic is ground to nothing between the boulders of socialism and populism – the abyssus abyssum invocat of our two-party system – it seems pointless except as an act of masochism to read anything about its founding and early history. Our institutions of freedom have been so glibly discarded that books about them can amount only to quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore, immersion in which would make anyone weak and weary indeed.

Neverthehoo, old habits die hard, and this year, with a gap in my reading list and with July Fourth approaching, I decided to re-read David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing, which I’d assigned myself as a morale-booster in the years after 9/11. (External blows stimulated my interest in the history of American freedom; self-inflicted ones killed it.) I’d remembered Fischer’s book for its stress on the ideological aspect of the Revolution and can now report that my memory was in this case true. Washington’s Crossing illustrates how different people (not just British, Germans, and Americans but different groups of Americans such as New Englanders, Virginians, and backwoodsmen) took different views of freedom and related it differently to ideals of equality and social order. My favorite players in this story are the Philadelphia Associators, radical egalitarians, who went so far as to design their uniform to “level all distinctions.” (p. 27)

An important subplot of the book details how George Washington, accustomed to believe in “liberty [within] a system of stratification” (p. 14), became general of an army composed of men (like the Associators) who saw freedom in a different light. As such, Fischer’s book is a study of leadership. Now, leadership today has become something of a fetish, with a cottage industry of how-to courses and its own section in the bookstore. Understood vaguely, leadership can encompass both democratic and undemocratic modes of motivation. Washington’s stereotypical embodiment of leadership is something that should be subjected – as it is in this book – to careful analysis, to yield a more precise conception of how it should function in a democratic society. Fischer’s book starts with an image of Washington as leader – the one in Emmanuel Leutze’s painting Washington Crossing the Delaware – in which he is shown with a telescope, symbolizing “a statesman’s vision.” (p. 2) Someone who leads by virtue of his unique sense of vision calls to mind Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which Socrates opines that only he with the true view of reality is qualified to be king. Indeed it was quite common in the before time to believe that kings were crowned by a special endowment such as vision, and I hope that readers of this review know that such a belief is as obsolete as kings are themselves.

Thankfully, Fischer uses the picture of Washington as the true-seeing leader only as a starting point and argues in the rest of his book that the real Washington was a leader of a different sort. At one point, he distinguishes democratic leadership from its non-democratic cousins by quoting Washington himself: “A people unused to restraint must be led; they will not be drove.” (p. 6) At another two places, Fischer draws important distinctions in his own words, remarking that Washington functioned “not only as a leader but a comrade in arms” and “more as a leader than a commander.” (pp. 251, 366) Elsewhere, Fischer employs a qualifier (“consultative leadership”), provides an example (“It was typical of Washington’s style of leadership to present a promising proposal as someone’s else’s idea”), and uses words besides “leading” to describe what Washington was doing (“listening, responding, encouraging, persuading.”) (pp. 265-266)

Since Fischer takes such pains to define Washington’s mode of leadership so narrowly, to the point of having to find better words for it, the reader may conclude that it scarcely warrants the term. (As for Washington’s using other people’s ideas, Fischer reports that the plan to attack at Trenton may have originated with Washington’s adjutant, Joseph Reed, and that the campaign that led to both second Trenton and Princeton was opened by the Associators – and not the officers but the men. If true, these cases stretch the definition of leadership about as far as it can go. [pp. 201-203, 265]) In fact, leadership has long been understood as a paradox, something so dependent on subtlety that it only functions in the absence of its assertion. Laozi’s injunction to “preside yet not control” (Daodejing, ch. 10) is typical of this paradox and seems to anticipate Washington.

The issue with Washington was that he initially failed to grasp leadership’s paradoxical nature and was thus forced to learn on the job. The first part of Fischer’s book is a catalogue of his slowness to learn. He ordered his troops not to plunder farmers, to no avail. He forbade them from visiting prostitutes, with the same result. He insisted that the Connecticut Light Horsemen get rid of their mounts and serve as infantry, causing them, after a brief period of conditional obedience, to leave the army (thereby depriving it of their service as scouts).  (pp. 85-86) Encountering a group of militiamen fleeing the British at Kip’s Bay, Washington beat their officers and dashed his hat on the ground. (p. 104)

The main crisis occurred on the eve of second Trenton, when many soldiers’ enlistments were set to expire. Washington’s expression of vexation on the occasion is interesting for its repetition of the word liberty, once as a cause and once as a curse: “‘The great and radical Evil which pervades our whole System & like an Ax at the Tree of our safety, Interest, and Liberty here again shews its baleful influence – Tomorrow the Continental Troops are all at liberty.’” (p. 270)

“If Washington hoped to remain in the field,” Fischer notes, “he had to persuade some of his veterans to stay with him.” In the event, Washington resorted to bribery and begging, authorizing a ten dollar bounty for an additional six weeks of service (another idea borrowed from someone else) and imploring his men,

‘My brave fellows, you have done all I asked you to do and more than could be reasonably expected; but your country is at stake, your wives, your houses, and all that you hold dear. You have worn yourselves out with the fatigues and hardships, but we know not how to spare you. If you will consent to stay one month longer, you will render that service to the cause of liberty and to your country, which you probably can never do under any other circumstances.’

Two such appeals were necessary, and even then the deciding factor was individual soldiers encouraging each other to stay. As Fischer summarizes, “Only a few days before, Washington was infuriated with these men and ready to clap some of them in irons. Now he was leading them in another way. This gentleman of Virginia was learning to treat a brigade of New England Yankee farmboys and fishermen as men of honor, who were entitled to equality of esteem.”  (pp. 271-273)

There’s at least a little bit of American exceptionalism operating here. For a gentleman to address once-thought-of inferiors as fellow gentlemen and to give up commanding in favor of entreating them was truly extraordinary. (Fischer discusses the evolving use of the term gentlemen and shows that the deemphasizing of formal status and prevalence of consultative leadership would have been unthinkable in British ranks. [pp. 273, 315-316, 331]) Washington could only resign himself to egalitarianism in a polyglot Yankee society in which no one was entitled to tell another what to do. Others were forced to accommodate as well. The immigrant officer Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben wrote home to a Prussian friend, “You say to your soldier ‘Do this and he doeth it’; but I am obliged to say [to the American soldier]: ‘This is the reason you ought to do that’: and then he does it.” (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/baron-von-steuben-180963048/) Sometime later, we are told, Abraham Lincoln, as a militia captain, once issued an order, only to be told to go to hell. (https://www.historynet.com/black-hawk-war)

For this reminder that, in spite of everything, Americans can’t be driven like cattle (and often, as we are daily reminded, speak out of turn), I’m grateful for my Fourth of July reading.

Book Review: Iola Leroy, by Frances E.W. Harper

Frances E.W. Harper’s Iola Leroy is a portrait of slavery and its aftermath in mid-19th century America. It focuses on two protagonists of mixed race, the mother and daughter Marie and Iola Leroy, to illustrate the absurdity of American slavery: One moment, the two light-skinned women are paragons of gentility – with Iola going so far as to defend slavery at her Northern girls’ school – the next moment, they are slaves.

Covering the Civil War and emancipation, Iola Leroy is an inspiring story of liberation. As Harper narrates, “The lost cause went down in blood and tears, and on the brows of a ransomed people God poured the chrism of a new era, and they stood a race newly anointed with freedom.” (p. 138)

As one of Harper’s characters recounts:

‘When de war war ober an’ de sogers war still stopping’ yere, I made pies an’ cakes, sole em to de sogers, an’ jist made money han’ ober fist. An’ I kep’ on a workin’ an’ a savin’ till my ole man got back from de war wid his wages and his bounty money. I felt right set up an’ mighty big wen we counted all dat money. We had neber seen so much money in our lives befo’, let alone hab it fer ourselbes. An’ I sez, “John, you take dis money an’ git a nice place wid it.”’

(In fact, Aunt Linda and husband John do manage to buy a plot of land from some friendly Jews.) (pp. 154-155)

A third observer is “delighted at the thrift and industry” well in evidence in the postbellum South, as its people taste their first draft of freedom. (p. 153)

However, even as the freedmen adapt to liberty with manifest “thrift and industry,” Harper’s more elite protagonists remain convinced of their need for shepherding. At a meeting of self-appointed black leaders, described in the chapter called “Friends in Council,” one speaker laments “‘the fearful grinding and friction which comes in the course of an adjustment of the new machinery of freedom in the old ruts of slavery.’” (p. 255) Another poetizes, “‘Oh, children of the tropics, / Amid our pain and wrong / Have you no other mission / Than music, dance, and song? / When through the weary ages / Our dripping tears still fall, / Is this a time to dally / With pleasure’s silken thrall?’” (pp. 251-252) Discussing the possibility of freedmen emigration, yet another speaker warns against “‘emptying on the shores of Africa a horde of ignorant, poverty-stricken people.’” (pp. 246-247) More than one participant at the meeting voices alarm at the freedmen’s susceptibility to drink, an ironic echo of the argument against black enfranchisement then being made by the unreconstructed.

Naturally, these intellectuals see themselves as the rectifiers of their people’s supposed defects. “‘I do not think,’” says one, “‘that we can begin too early to teach our boys to be manly and self-respecting, and our girls to be useful and self-reliant.’” Iola agrees: “‘We must instill into our young people that the true strength of a race means purity in women and uprightness in men.’” (pp. 253-254) Another concerned person characterizes this civilizing we as “‘a union of women with the warmest hearts and clearest brains to help in the moral education of the race.’” (p. 254) This note of paternalism (or maternalism) is sounded with breathtaking self-confidence and presumption, in ways that harken (again, ironically) to the old paternalism of the planters.

It is the opinion of the reviewer that the new birth of freedom in the mid-19th century, which affected not only America but also such places as Russia (where serfs were emancipated in 1861), inspired great panic on the part of the elite. On the one hand, deposed masters such as the gentry of the American South contrived to recover their position. On the other hand, intellectuals, often the same people who had welcomed servile emancipation, now regarded the newly liberated masses (or newly enfranchised masses like Irish immigrants) as unfit for self-rule. They either looked the other way when the aristos returned to power or, more adventurously, sought to take the aristos’ places under the guise of enlightened (or even revolutionary) leadership.

Iola Leroy is a case study of this latter approach. Civil War liberation epic that it is, Harper’s novel actually becomes rather preoccupied with the reimposition of hierarchy; it is more representative of the thermidorian reaction of the postbellum Reconstruction or Gilded Age years, when new elites sought to supplant old. The book was published in 1892. Significantly, one of its characters, during the above-mentioned friendly council, takes stock of the recent years’ broken chains in a somewhat dispirited way (““Millions of slaves and serfs have been liberated during this century, but not even in semi-barbaric Russia, heathen Japan, or Catholic Spain has slavery been abolished through such a fearful conflict as it was in the United States.’”) before turning his attention to alcohol (“‘The liquor traffic still sends its floods of ruin and shame to the habitations of men.’”), implying that the freedman remains in a degraded state, from which only a redoubled effort, no doubt by those with the warmest hearts and clearest brains, can redeem him (for as yet “‘no political party has been found with enough moral power and numerical strength to stay the tide of death.’”). (p. 250) The reader will have noted that ordinary freedmen are shown by Harper to speak in dialect, while their aspiring redeemers orate in formal English, as though the author were suggesting almost-organic differences between them, justifying the need for guidance.

Even before the friendly council, Harper’s heroine aspires to fill the need. She hopes, in plain language, to become a teacher, but she spreads her enthusiasm a bit thick:

‘To be,’ continued Iola, ‘the leader of a race to higher planes of thought and action, to teach men clearer views of life and duty, and to inspire their souls with loftier aims, is a far greater privilege than it is to open the gates of material prosperity and fill every home with sensuous enjoyment.’ (p. 219)

In fact, Iola feels well qualified for the role. “‘I should be very glad to have an opportunity to teach,’ said Iola. ‘I used to be a great favorite among the colored children on my father’s plantation.’” (p. 145)

Thus does yesterday’s mistress become today’s missionary, retaining her seat at the head of her constituency, with the relation of superior to subordinate preserved.

Book Review: The Third Son, by Julie Wu

Julie Wu’s The Third Son is economically written, powerful, and unsentimental. The latter virtue keeps it well clear of the saccharine exoticism that taints many depictions of Asia, particularly of Asian family life. The protagonist, Saburo (a Japanese name often given to third sons), is low in his family’s hierarchy and is treated appallingly by his parents and oldest brother.

The story includes a superlative panorama of Taiwanese history of the mid-twentieth-century and would make an excellent college-course reading-list adoption for this reason; yet only its first part is set in Taiwan, for Saburo makes his bid to escape his dim prospects via higher education in America. The novel’s subject thus changes from Taiwan to the Taiwanese diaspora.

The Third Son is therefore a freedom story, and America is depicted as the promised land of Saburo’s salvation; yet America too is shown warts and all, its promise offering Saburo only a toehold, which he must struggle to maintain and improve. There is little sense in this book of a culture clash between the old world and the new. A fine rebuke to coercive tradition is indeed delivered by an American, as in: “‘Filial piety,’ I [Saburo] said. ‘You Americans obviously don’t know anything about it.’ ‘We do,’ he said, “and we reject it.’” [p. 184] However, the urge to escape to the US is implanted by a cousin back on Taiwan, who calls America “‘a country founded on principles, on personal freedom’” [p. 24] and who later advises Saburo, “‘You have only one life. Fight for it.’” [p. 79] Both Taiwan and America exhibit similar patterns of corruption and institutional hindrance, which Saburo must overcome. (An America that brings out the best in people by constantly challenging them is a strange sort of paradise.) It is in America, however, that Saburo is (nearly) free from the wanton meanness of his kindred, and it is on that freedom that he pins his hopes.

The Third Son is fast-moving and compelling. The reader will not be able to put it down.

Book Review: Fatelessness, by Imre Kertész

The protagonist of Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness is so congenitally rational that he manages to justify every aspect of his suffering. Interned at the Zeitz labor camp during World War Two, Georg Koves at one point drops a bag of cement.

The bag’s paper had burst and the contents spilled out, leaving a heap of the material, the treasure, the costly cement, powdering the ground. By then he was already on me, I had already felt his fist on my face, then, having been decked, his boot on my ribs and his grip on my neck as he pressed my face to the ground, in the cement, screaming insanely that I scrape it together, lick it up. He then hauled me to my feet, swearing he would teach me: [‘I’ll show you, asshole, shithead, goddam Jew-dog,’] so I would never drop another bag again in the future. From then on, he personally loaded a new bag onto my shoulders each time it was my turn, bothering himself with me alone; I was his sole concern, it was me exclusively whom he kept his eye on, following me all the way to the truck and back, and whom he picked to go first even if, by rights, there were others still ahead of me in the queue. In the end, there was almost an understanding between us, we had got the measure of one another, and I noticed his face bore what was almost a smile of satisfaction, encouragement, even, dare I say, a pride of sorts, and from a certain perspective, I had to acknowledge, with good reason, for indeed, tottering, stooping though I might have been, my eyes seeing black spots, I did manage to hold out, coming and going, fetching and carrying, all without dropping a single further bag, and that, when it comes down to it, I would have to admit, proved him right. (169-170)

The tortuous interrupters throughout Georg’s narrative – “I have to admit,” “unless I’m mistaken,” “truth be told,” etc. – are typical of his overriding devotion to objectivity. Seeking always to accept any given situation as reasonable, Georg is incapable of influencing it. Indeed, his resistance to impulsiveness is absolute. When, shortly after his initial arrest, he might have had a chance to slip away, he decides against it:

I became alive to the sudden flash of a piece of yellow clothing up ahead, in the cloud of dust, noise, and vehicle exhaust fumes: it was ‘Traveler.’ A single long leap, and he was off to the side, lost somewhere in the seething eddy of machines and humanity. I was totally dumbfounded; somehow it did not tally with his conduct at the customs post, as I saw it. But there was also something else that I felt, a sense of happy surprise I might call it, at the simplicity of an action; indeed, I saw one or two enterprising spirits then immediately make a break for it in his wake, right up ahead. I myself took a look around, though more for the fun of it, if I may put it that way, since I saw no other reason to bolt, though I believe there would have been time to do so; nevertheless my sense of honor proved the stronger. The policemen took immediate action after that, and the ranks again close around me. (55-56)

Georg is a prisoner of his own nature or perhaps his fate. Later in the book, Georg suggests that fate is the opposite of freedom. “If there is such a thing as fate, then freedom is not possible….If there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate.” (259-260)

So why is the book called Fatelessness, when it seems to be about fate? Perhaps the implication is that the latter is only an excuse for the former. When Georg says, “I took the steps, no one else, and I declared that I had been true to my given fate throughout,” (259) is he admitting that his “declaration” had always been false, that he took all of his steps freely, even as each step took him closer to Auschwitz, Zeitz, and Buchenwald?

“We ourselves are fate, I realized all at once….All that was needed was to admit it, meekly, simply, merely as a matter of reason, a point of honor.” (260)

A Meditation on Freedom and Equality, Inspired by The Last of the Wine

Though freedom and equality are the warp and woof of American life, some difference of opinion exists as to how to they are related. For example, the argument between the political left and right may be viewed as one of ends versus means, with those on the left believing that equality is the key to freedom and those on the right believing the opposite.

In Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine, a remark made by Lysis suggests another relationship between freedom and equality:

I want a City where I can find my equals and respect my betters, whoever they are.

In other words, equality is a subset of freedom: the freedom to recognize our equals (and betters) without having them recognized for us.

It’s interesting that while searching for his equals and betters, Lysis mentions no inferiors. Perhaps he is conscious that he lives surrounded by people possessing talents he lacks, and that absent an unfree system of imposed social classes, designed to denigrate most talent as menial, the notion of inferiority is meaningless. Thus does Melville’s Ahab, in contemplation of his ship’s carpenter, lament, “Here I am, proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on!” More acceptingly, I reflect that when I summon a plumber to my house, the very reason for my doing so is that he can do at least one thing I cannot. In him, therefore, and in enjoyment of the freedom imagined by Lysis, I see only an equal or a better.