The "Duck of Minerva" on novels about theocracies

The Duck of Minerva is a blog run by some academics who specialize in international politics. I figured anyone who could riff on Hegel* that way just might have some interesting suggestions for our series on novels which illustrate what theocracy might be like.

Two of these scholars weighed in with suggested fiction.

Daniel Nexon:

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Series envisions--through the lens of SF/Fantasy--an alternate world where Calvinism triumphs in early-modern Europe producing a diffuse theocratic system. Pullman's books are, in essence, an extended rant against theocracy and religion itself.

Patrick Thaddeus Jackson:

I'm a fan of Robert Heinlein's Revolt in 2100, which is a collection of short stories rather than a novel. The stories in the book are part of Heinlein's "future history" sequence, an alternative future for the world (and for the United States in particular) which is marked by the election of a zealot named Nehemiah Scudder to the presidency. The stories are about the consolidation of his reign and its eventual demise—and its replacement by something quite different. The lead story, entitled "If This Goes On --" is in my opinion a better and more incisive analysis of the dark side of American national identity than almost any work of social science with which I am familiar. Indeed, it was that story that inspired me to put together a course on the interplay between social science and science fiction.

Not really religious as much as fascist is the dystopia presented in Alan Moore's brilliant V For Vendetta. Far richer and more complex than the recent film, Moore's graphic novel poses the political choice as fascism or anarchy, and brooks no compromises. V is a revolutionary figure, but also a prophetic one, and the regime against which he struggles has more than a few theocratic overtones. The solution that the novel preaches, a kind of radical existentialist transformation of the self, presents itself as the only reasonable alternative in such extreme situations: survival by transcendence of the spirit, as it were. That, and blowing a lot of stuff up :-)

For a somewhat different take -- this novel is not principally set in a theocracy but several of its major characters are either refugees from one or striving to reestablish one -- you might point your readers to Iain M. Banks' Look to Windward. It's set in a liberal-socialist utopia called the Culture which has intervened in a religiously-oriented society for the purpose of "improving" it; things went horribly wrong and that provides the backdrop for a sustained set of examinations of what is gained and what is lost when religion is replaced by technologically-enhanced hedonism.

Thanks to Daniel and Patrick for these suggestions. For other novels about life in a theocracy, see here, here, and here.

Daniel Nexon (PhD., Columbia) is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University. He has published articles and chapters on international relations theory, globalization, and American foreign policy. His broad interests involve the relationship between culture and international politics, as well as on comparative-historical analysis of international institutions and politics, and he is currently exploring how the dynamics of historical empires do and do not shed light on the dilemmas of US international primacy.

Patrick Thaddeus Jackson (PhD., Columbia) is currently Assistant Professor of International Relations in the School of International Service at the American University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles; his book Stopping Asia at the Elbe: Postwar German Reconstruction and the Invention of Western Civilization is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

*"When philosophy paints its gray on gray, then has a form of life grown old, and with gray on gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known; the Owl of Minerva first takes flight with twilight closing in." --G. W. F. Hegel, "Preface," Philosophy of Right

The Booker Prize's "Henry Fonda" year

When I started the series on "bad Booker beats" (see here, here, and here) I thought it might shed some light on worthy (Man) Booker prize nominees that failed to capture the top prize. The idea was not to perpetuate the worst aspect of literary prizes--the competitive comparison of works of art--but to amplify one of their better features--the discussion of quality fiction that encourages more readers to read more quality books.

My most optimistic hopes for the series are fulfilled by this superb consideration of the issue by Perry Middlemiss:

Leaving aside minor judging glitches such as 1991, when Ben Okri's magic realism beat out the better "real realism" of Rohinton Mistry, the major Booker Prize gaffe occurred in 1986 when Kingsley Amis got the gong. I like to think of this as the Booker’s “Henry Fonda” year.

In 1981 Henry Fonda was the ageing doyen of a famous acting family and near the end of his career when he appeared in “On Golden Pond” with his daughter Jane and Katherine Hepburn. Fonda was nominated for a Best Actor Award in a relatively weak year (Dudley Moore?) which had one stand-out performance, that of Burt Lancaster in “Atlantic City”. I don’t know what odds were given on Fonda going in to the ceremony but having seen both films that year I thought Lancaster was a shoe-in. And then sentiment over-ruled logic and Fonda was given the Oscar, for a performance which reeked of sentimentality and which was carried by Fonda's two female co-stars. Fonda died within a few months of the award ceremony.

In 1986 Kingsley Amis was on the Booker list for the third time and hardly likely to win for his novel The Old Devils. Beloved by the old school of British critics, Amis had produced little of worth since his debut, Lucky Jim, in 1954. He had never won anything and the prospects of him ever doing so looked decidedly thin. His time was past and he was falling out of favour as authors such as his son Martin, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan were in the ascendant.

I’ve only read four of the six novels included on the 1986 Booker shortlist and can safely say that, of the four, the Amis ranks a very distant fourth. Best of the lot was Paul Bailey’s Gabriel’s Lament, a semi-autobiographical novel depicting the damage that fathers can inflict on their sons. Somehow or other, the Booker judges in 1986 thought Amis’s novel the best of the year: better than the Bailey, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro. And this leaves out novels by Robertson Davies and Timothy Mo which I haven't read. Both, I suspect, in a class above Amis’s phoned-in effort. It was a strong year, yet we are left with a novel about middle-class, middle-aged has-beens drinking themselves to death. A novel about Amis and his friends, presumably.

A major mistake.

Perry Middlemiss's websites are treasures for book lovers, particularly those readers interested in Australian and Commonwealth fiction. Click here for his pages on "everything pertaining to the Booker Prize."

Thanks to Perry for such a stimulating discussion.

I hope his argument will spur readers to consider Bailey’s Gabriel’s Lament, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World. And don't pity Amis--he won the prize, after all--but do him the honor of reading his Lucky Jim, perhaps the greatest comic campus novel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jane Smiley's 100 novels

Jane Smiley plans to read 100 novels in an attempt to "illuminate the whole concept of the novel." In the first of a series of articles for The Guardian, she explains the basis for her selection.

It's my confident opinion that Smiley is one of our great living novelists. Maybe I shouldn't write that having read only three of her novels. But A Thousand Acres, her retelling of King Lear set in the American Midwest, was a brilliantly executed piece of art which won her a Pulitzer prize. From tragedy she shifted to comedy, turning out Moo, a comic campus novel that reminded critics of Balzac for her attention to the social atmosphere of a large agricultural university. And then with her twelfth book, Good Faith, she moved beyond the tragic and the comic and toward Dickensian realism, successfully capturing the American small town of 1982.

Of her series on the 100 novels she says something that is also true of this blog's aspirations:

My purpose will be served if a reader is moved to try a novel she has never heard of before, or one she never thought she would like, if she is moved to reread a novel she loves in a new way, or try again with a novel she has not been able to get through.

And then--for a blogger who has been asking readers to think of novels that illuminate what life is like in theocracies or in societies that lack the protections afforded by habeas corpus, and to consider novels that might help understand issues in philosophy--it was heartening to read Smiley's take:

Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.... My 100 novels were not outdated at all, but testified over and over, to the perennial nature of regular human thought - not only are there problems and conflicts that persist in not being solved, there are also the insight and common sense people have brought to bear on those problems. It was not only that misery loves company, but also that Jane Austen is a good guide to personal integrity; Anthony Trollope does know how marriage works; Honoré de Balzac is indispensable when Jacques Chirac refers to the relationship between France and England as un amour violent. It's worth remembering The Makioka Sisters when the newspaper reports a typhoon in Japan. It's worth knowing that serious thoughts are being thought, and also that serious fun is being made of fools everywhere. It's also worth knowing, in dangerous times, that dangers have come and gone and we still have these books.

Thanks to Friend of the Blog "Cochise" for alerting me to the Smiley series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Man without a Country"

Robert A. Ferguson has a very interesting suggestion for our search for novels that illustrate what's at stake in the current legal debate over the right of the executive to imprison suspects without judicial intervention or oversight:

It is a short story rather than a book, but you might use Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without A Country." It is the most popular story of the second half of the nineteenth century and is still anthologized everywhere. Philip Nolan is kept in perpetual prison aboard ship because bureaucracy and governmental policy want to forget about him after his original sentence. Moreover, the whole story is wrapped in patriotic rhetoric of the kind that is being misused today.

There are several free sites where you can read the story. Click here or here. The story was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, December 1863, which is available in facsimile form here.

The story effectively gets at Professor Ferguson's point in part by its realistic style--it reads like a well-written non-fiction essay--and because it was written, at the time of the Civil War, apparently to boost patriotism. Hale's protagonist is redeemed in an ironic twist, yet the irony is of another order when read from our later vantage point. It's a fine story and well worth your attention.

Robert A. Ferguson is George Edward Woodberry Professor in Law, Literature and Criticism at Columbia Law School. His publications include Law and Letters in American Life (1987); The American Enlightenment 1750-1820 (1997), and Reading the Early Republic (2004), as well as numerous articles on American literature, legal history, and the relationship of law and legal institutions to American writing.

Thanks to Robert Ferguson for this valuable suggestion.

For previously nominated books in the "what's at stake in the debate over habeas corpus" series, click here, here, here, and here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott Turow's habeas-inflected thriller

I asked best-selling author Scott Turow to recommend a novel that might help us better understand what's at stake in the debate over habeas corpus. His suggestion:

My novel Reversible Errors centers on a habeas proceeding for a man on death row, brought when another man confesses to the crime.

Wendy Lesser raved about Turow and Reversible Errors in a New York Times review:

IT must be frustrating to be Scott Turow. Since 1987, when he published Presumed Innocent, he has been hailed as a master of the courtroom thriller, a best-selling author, a Time magazine cover boy--all of which has managed to suggest, backhandedly, that serious readers needn't buy his books. But serious readers should be reading Turow, because he is not just one of our best crime novelists; he is also one of our better novelists. Like John le Carré, his British equivalent, he has been made to suffer for his choice of the thriller genre. Yet this genre is one of the few in which the old-fashioned virtues of the novel (suspense, rich characterization, satisfying conclusions) can still be practiced without seeming out-of-date. What Turow has done, in book after book, is to give us page turners that are also pleasing literary artifacts, mysteries that are also investigations into complicated social questions and complex human emotions.

Nothing he has written in the 15 intervening years has beaten the suspense quotient of Presumed Innocent; that was a perfectly constructed mystery, or as close to it as we are likely to get. But in each novel since then, Turow has deepened the psychological and social atmosphere that surrounds and inflects his plots.... Reversible Errors...may well offer us the richest blend yet.

Michiko Kakatuni wrote:

the real appeal of Mr. Turow's legal thrillers has always resided in his ability to create complex, conflicted characters, and to make palpable the world of the law: how the system works and doesn't work, how lawyers use and abuse it. And in Reversible Errors, he gives us a highly sympathetic if unlikely hero, an engaging supporting cast and an intimate sense of the incestuous and highly competitive world that these people all inhabit. ....

Mr. Turow is able to show how time and age and the vagaries of fate have affected each of his principal characters, and he uses his own firsthand knowledge of the legal system to lend the world they inhabit a piercing verisimilitude.

Thanks to Scott for weighing in. He's now in the running for a free copy of The Body and the State: Habeas Corpus and American Jurisprudence (SUNY Press, 2006). Know a novel that illuminates the issues around habeas corpus? Let me know: see details here.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sapientia" and the benefits of theocracy

Invited to suggest a work of fiction about life in a theocracy, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote:

If you don't mind a play, I'd give you Sapientia by Hrotswitha von Gandersheim, which has remained inspiring to feminists because of its use of a theocracy to suggest rational resistance against its enemy.

Hrotswitha, or Hrotsvit, was a Catholic nun who lived in the thriving abbey of Gandersheim in Saxony in the latter part of the tenth century.

A summary of the play:

Sapientia tells the story of a mother, Sapientia, and her three daughters Fides, Spes, and Karitas, confronted by pagan Roman emperor Hadrian, who wants them to renounce their Christianity. Each female character refuses to foreswear her faith, and the three daughters are tortured and killed; then the mother dies in grief. The details of the torture of these martyrs are typical of medieval legends of saints' lives and martyr dramas. Each woman is offered the chance to give up her Christian beliefs. After she refuses, she is subjected to various tortures such as being boiled in tar and pitch and having her body mutilated with knives. In every case, the women are emotionally and spiritually unscathed by the torture, joyfully willing to suffer for their faith until death. Such stories and plays were intended to serve as inspiration to believers, illustrating the power of God to strengthen and aid the faithful in times of trouble or persecution.

Gayatri Spivak is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.

Among her publications are Of Grammatology (translation with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida's De la grammmatologie), Imaginary Maps, Breast Stories, Old Women (translations with critical material of the fiction of Mahasweta Devi), In Other Worlds, The Post-Colonial Critic, Outside in the Teaching Machine, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, and Death of a Discipline.

Thanks to Gayatri Spivak for the recommendations.

For the novels about life under theocracies suggested by Joseph Epstein and Todd Gitlin, click here. For the recommendations from K. Anthony Appiah, click here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hostage story

The release last week of Christian Science Monitor freelance reporter Jill Carroll after 82 days as the captive of armed militants in Iraq was greeted with relief in most corners. Some of that relief faded quickly and shamelessly, no less so for being predictable, when armchair pundits rushed to analyze why Carroll did not unequivocally condemn her captors in a video she made when she apparently knew she would be released. The New York Times reported the "video had raised questions about whether Ms. Carroll was suffering from Stockholm syndrome...."

Click here for a brief recap of the sordid media episode; click here for Jill Carroll's statement about her captivity and release.

Could we please put a moratorium on the use of "Stockholm syndrome" by anyone who doesn't have psychological training and hasn't actually examined the hostage? Otherwise it makes me think of the moron newscaster in one of the Die Hard movies who does not even know which country Stockholm is in.

Anyway, enough of that messy nonfiction known as real life.

This blog is about books, not current events. I only mention the Carroll episode because it reminded me of one the finest novels published in our present young century: Ann Patchett's Bel Canto.

From Patchett's website:

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening -- until a band of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different countries and continents become compatriots. Friendship, compassion, and the chance for great love lead the characters to forget the real danger that has been set in motion and cannot be stopped.

Click here to read an excerpt of the novel and interview with the author.

--Marshal Zeringue

More novels about jails without judges

Jeremy Dibbell came up with two more novels about life in societies that lack habeas-protected individual rights:

Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. I prefer the Orwell to the Huxley, but both are interesting treatments of "what could happen" after diving down those slippery slopes.

Thanks to Jeremy, who blogs over at Charging RINO, for the suggestions.

Know of a novel that does a better job than the television show 24 of illustrating why the executive branch sometimes needs to arrest and detain individuals without a judge giving the OK? Please share the title.

Alternatively, suggest a novel set in a society without habeas-protected individual rights. Previous suggestions include The Count of Monte Cristo and Kafka's The Trial.

Send me the title and an explanation (of up 150 words) of why the novel fits the bill and you just might win a scholarly book valued at $65. More details are here.

Coming soon: Columbia Law Professor Robert Ferguson's suggestion.

--Marshal Zeringue

Who is Osama bin Laden?

"Who is Osama bin Laden?" is no longer an interesting question.

Where is Osama bin Laden, and why is he still alive? Now that's an interesting two-part question.

When was Osama's first appearance in a work of fiction? Not a very interesting question, but it's the sort of thing that's easier to find out in the Internet Age than it was not that long ago.

(I remember asking the first question, back in the late 1990s, when well-informed Friend of the Blog Kurt van der Walde mentioned the terrorist. I was a little embarrassed when Kurt enlightened me, but it wasn't as if Osama was a major figure in the media back then.)

As far as I can tell, Osama's first appearance in the Washington Post was on the front page in 1996: "Saudi Islamic Radicals Target U.S., Royal Family," by Edward Cody; August 15, 1996.

The New York Times picked him up a little earlier: "Sudan Linked To Rebellion In Algeria," by Chris Hedges, December 24, 1994. Datelined Khartoum, The Sudan, the article opens:

The Sudan's Islamic Government, censured for its human rights violations and its support for various armed Islamic militant groups, is now helping Muslim fundamentalists in their effort to topple the Algerian Government, according to Western intelligence reports.

Then, thirteen paragraphs down and after more prominent mention of Carlos the Jackal, a terrorist who Sudanese officials had tried unsuccessfully to expel, came this passing mention:

Osama Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi financier who bankrolls Islamic militant groups from Algeria to Saudi Arabia, also lives under heavy guard in Khartoum.

But when did Osama first appear in a novel?

My entry:

"Please ... Please ..." The FBI, the police, drug-lord hit men, Osama bin Laden, and probably Mossad--they were all at that very moment converging on Buddy's position.

These lines appear in John Ridley's, Everybody Smokes in Hell, published August 17, 1999.

Ridley is one of my favorite writers of contemporary noir fiction and I recommend this novel if you appreciate the genre.

Do you know of an earlier mention? Let me know (email: bolling dot binx at gmail dot com) and get your reading knowledge, or your sleuthing skills, praised here on the blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coming attractions

Coming attractions:

Suggestions from Columbia Law Professor Robert Ferguson and from Jeremy Dibbell of works of fiction about life in societies without habeas corpus protections.

An interesting take by Perry Middlemiss on a Booker Prize competition decided wrongly.

The Great Kansas Novel

Fiction about life in a theocracy suggested by a couple of political scientists who blog at The Duck of Minerva and by the scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

The start of a series on the coolest women in crime fiction written by men.

Continuing the series initiated with the recent post on Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?: John Updike or Thomas Wolfe?

The Great Michigan Novel, Part 2

Novels by poets: Jay Parini

--Marshal Zeringue

"Midnight's Children"

Before he became known to the world--with the kind of publicity you can't (and wouldn't want to) buy--for having written The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie was known to readers as author of Midnight's Children. The book is surrealist fiction that tracks the history of India from 1910 to the declaration of the Emergency in 1976 through the eyes of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of midnight, August 15, 1947, when the Partition of India and Pakistan took effect.

Twenty-five years after the publication of Midnight's Children, Rushdie has written a new introduction in which he looks backs on how the novel came about and the reaction that it provoked in people from his father to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Read this new introduction here.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Count of Monte Cristo"

Jonathan Freiman suggested a novel that captures what life might be like when the sovereign is unencumbered by habeas corpus protections:

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, père.

There’s a useful plot summary of the novel here.

The French Literature Online Library makes available a free online edition of The Count of Monte Cristo here.

If the novel leaves you unmoved about the plight of a man wrongly accused and imprisoned—it’s only a story, after all—consider: Dumas got the idea from an actual case of a Parisian shoemaker who was engaged to be married until four friends accused him of spying for England. He spent seven years in jail before he was freed.

Jonathan Freiman works jointly as a litigator and appellate advocate at Wiggin and Dana and as Senior Fellow and Clinical Advisor at Yale Law School's Schell Center for International Human Rights.

He co-teaches a class at Yale Law School with Dean Harold H. Koh on appellate litigation and strategy, with a focus on the interplay between national security and civil liberties. His legal analysis has appeared widely in journals, newspapers, magazines, radio and television. His most recent publication, "A Brave New World for ADR?: In NAFTA Arbitration, Even High Court Rulings May One Day Be Set Aside" (2005) (with B.Jacoby), was the cover article to a special ADR section of the National Law Journal.

Thanks to Jonathan for the suggestion.

Got a novel that depicts life in a society where the sovereign can toss someone in prison without presenting evidence before a judge? Recommend it—and gives us a short spiel for why it fits that category—and you might win a copy of The Body and the State: Habeas Corpus and American Jurisprudence (SUNY Press, 2006). Details here and here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Early entry in the habeas-related novel contest

Pete Anderson was first to check in with a suggestion of a novel that captures what's at stake in the debate over habeas corpus:

the all-time classic novel in this vein has to be Franz Kafka's The Trial, which unforgettably shows how an innocent man can be unfairly persecuted by a totalitarian state.

As Pete noted, it's an obvious candidate...so obvious, in fact, that it really doesn't need to be flushed out: we know exactly what he's talking about.

Do you know of a novel of what life is like in a society where the authorities can arrest and detain a man without justifying the jailing to a judge?

Do you know of a novel where innocent lives are imperiled by demanding the authorities have to produce evidence to jail a menace to society?

Mail in your title with an argument to support your choice. There's a reward. Details here.

--Marshal Zeringue

What's at stake with habeas corpus?

There is a principle in American law that says the government cannot arrest someone and imprison him without a judge reviewing the reasons for the arrest and detention. This pillar of liberty was inherited from English common law, and it came about because subjects of the crown demanded that the king shouldn't be able to jail whomever he pleased, whenever he pleased.

This principle is called habeas corpus, and it is getting a workout in the U.S. these days. See, for example, here and here and here. Habeas corpus ad subjiciendum is Latin for "(That) you may have/hold the body to be subjected to (examination)."

But the popular imagination isn't exactly gripped by the legal debate.

I suspect part of the reason is that while the principle is clear, the details quickly get complicated. Moreover, those detainees who have not gone before an American judge are people about whom we know little (if we even know who they all are), and it may therefore be difficult for many of us to imagine ourselves in their situation.

Or perhaps the public does understand the stakes for individual liberty perfectly well, but they have a greater appreciation for the position of those authorities who maintain that certain individuals should be denied recourse to a writ of habeas corpus.

Anyway.... Faithful readers of this blog know that when I want to make sense of a political issue or philosophical idea, I reach for a novel.

So: what is a good novel that illustrates what life is like when the sovereign/king/president is not subject to the constraints of habeas corpus? What is like when the executive authority doesn't have to explain to a judge why it has someone in prison?

Or, what's a good novel about how things can go horribly wrong precisely because the executive is constrained by habeas corpus? What are the circumstances that make it necessary for the executive to not risk having a judge say a detainee must be released? (The television show 24 did a campy riff or two on the theme last season.)

I know there are thousands of novels about life in societies that don't subscribe to the habeas-related rights that Americans and Britons usually enjoy. There must also be many novels that feature plots about those instances when these rights have been suspended in the U.S. and Britain. And, since the U.S. Department of Justice insists that there are circumstances when it's not required to adhere to normal rules on detaining suspects, surely there must be fictional accounts featuring those kinds of circumstances and exigencies.

Do you know one of those novels? Then send me your title, along with an explanation (not to exceed 150 words) for your choice.

Whoever sends the submission that I find most compelling—compelling as in I’d recommend it to someone who wanted to understand the stakes involved--will almost certainly receive a new copy of Cary Federman's just-released The Body and the State: Habeas Corpus and American Jurisprudence (SUNY Press, 2006). It's a $65 value and perfect for constitutional law enthusiasts and everyone with John Yoo on their Christmas list.

I note "almost certainly" because I fully intend to make the award; but if I promise to do so, then there are all sorts of restrictions and fine print to get into. This not-really-a-contest is open to everyone, everywhere but, if I pick a winner, the prize will have to be mailed to an address in the United States. This not-really-a-contest is not open to residents of states where it is prohibited by law. No purchase necessary. Limit one entry per person. This not-really-a-contest closes on May 15, 2006.

Mail your entry to mazeringue [at] excite [dot] com. Include your name. Make sure you spell everything correctly since I may cut & paste (without editing) your entry if I post it on the blog; you don't want to embarrass yourself.

In a day or two I'll post a couple of sample entries to inspire/challenge you. Or, if I can track down Professor Federman, I'll try to persuade him to write the entries.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?

A reader may reveal something about himself by his preference for one writer over another. Or by his preference for one book over another by the same writer.

One of the classic questions is: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? George Steiner made a great deal of the question--more than I'm equipped to get into, or want to get into, here--and wrote a book by that title. From the back cover:

George Steiner's Tolstoy or Dostoevsky has become a classic among scholars of Russian literature. An essay in poetic and philosophic criticism that bears mainly on the Russian masters, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky deals also with larger themes: the epic tradition extending from Homer to Tolstoy; the continuity of a "tragic world view" from Oedipus Rex to King Lear and The Brothers Karamazov; the contrasts between the epic and dramatic modes, between irreconcilably opposed views of God and of history.

If you are intrigued, pick up the volume. You can also find selected parts of the book in The George Steiner Reader.

Here's a significant excerpt:

Even beyond their deaths, the two novelists stand in contrariety. Tolstoy, the foremost heir to the traditions of the epic; Dostoevsky, one of the major dramatic tempers after Shakespeare; Tolstoy, the mind intoxicated with reason and fact; Dostoevsky, the contemner of rationalism, the great lover of paradox; Tolstoy, the poet of the land, of the rural setting and pastoral mood; Dostoevsky, the arch-citizen, the master-builder of the modern metropolis in the province of language; Tolstoy, thirsting for the truth, destroying himself and those about him in excessive pursuit of it; Dostoevsky, rather against the truth than against Christ, suspicious of total understanding and on the side of mystery; Tolstoy, "keeping at all times," in Coleridge's phrase, "in the high road of life"; Dostoevsky, advancing into the labyrinth of the unnatural, into the cellarage and morass of the soul; Tolstoy, like a colossus bestriding the palpable earth, evoking the realness, the tangibility, the sensible entirety of concrete experience; Dostoevsky, always on the verge of the hallucinatory, of the spectral, always vulnerable to daemonic intrusions into what might prove, in the end, to have been merely a tissue of dreams; Tolstoy, the embodiment of health and Olympian vitality; Dostoevsky, the sum of energies charged with illness and possession.

Heady stuff.

On the simple reader's question--Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?--I prefer Tolstoy.

Oprah, I take it, also favors Tolstoy. (Or does she? She recommended the book to her legions of book-reading viewers but, perhaps, she didn't enjoy the novel. I didn't hear how it turned out for the book club.)

First Lady Laura Bush, we're told prefers Dostoevsky. Asked to name her favorite book, she selected the ''The Grand Inquisitor'' section of The Brothers Karamazov.

I'll leave the last word to Nabokov:

... we might list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy; second, Gogol; third, Chekhov; fourth, Turgenev. This is rather like grading students' papers and no doubt Dostoevski and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks.

--Marshal Zeringue

K. Anthony Appiah on novels about life in theocracies

K. Anthony Appiah offered three books in reply to my request for some books about life in a theocracy.

I thought first, for some reason, of An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears, which is set in England in the period of the Civil Wars. The book conveys wonderfully a sense of a life pervaded by the religious authority of the state...and the fear induced by that authority. Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner gives one a vivid sense of the contrast between Afghanistan before and after the Taliban came to power. (And one shouldn't forget Voltaire's depiction of life under the Inquisition in Candide.)

The New York Times reviewer called An Instance of the Fingerpost "a compendious historical pageant set among 17th-century clergymen, scholars and politicians concerned with the natural and the supernatural in roughly equal measure," and praised it as of similar quality and interest as Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

The Kite Runner is Khaled Hosseini's debut novel and has enjoyed wide praise. Click here to read Hosseini's account of how he, like his protagonist in The Kite Runner, journeyed back to Afghanistan from his life in California.

At the time of its initial circulation in Paris, religious officials pronounced Candide "full of dangerous principles concerning religion and tending to moral depravation." Later, the critic Madame de Staël called Candide a work of "infernal gaiety" by a writer who laughs "like a demon, or like a monkey at the miseries of this human race with which he has nothing in common." No one reads Madame de Staël today, but everyone who has read Candide can't help but remember it whenever they hear someone--usually someone not among the victims--claim that a natural disaster happened for "the best."

K. Anthony Appiah is Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University.

He was born in London (where his Ghanaian father was a law student) but moved as an infant to Ghana, where he grew up. He was educated at Cambridge University. His dissertation explored the foundations of probabilistic semantics; once revised, these arguments were published by Cambridge University Press as Assertion and Conditionals. Out of that first monograph grew a second book, For Truth in Semantics.

Professor Appiah has also published widely in African and African-American literary and cultural studies. In 1992, Oxford University Press published In My Father's House, which deals, in part, with the role of African and African-American intellectuals in shaping contemporary African cultural life.

In 2003, he coauthored Bu Me Bé: Proverbs of the Akan (of which his mother is the major author), an annotated edition of 7,500 proverbs in Twi, the language of Asante. He is also the author of three novels, of which the first, Avenging Angel, was largely set at Clare College, Cambridge.

But his major current work has to do with the philosophical foundations of liberalism. His introduction to contemporary philosophy entitled Thinking It Through was published in 2004. The Ethics of Identity was published last year and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers in 2006.

Of cosmopolitanism he writes:

I am urging that we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement but because it will help us get used to one another -- something we have a powerful need to do in this globalized era. If that is the aim, then the fact that we have all these opportunities for disagreement about values need not put us off. Understanding one another may be hard; it can certainly be interesting. But it doesn't require that we come to agreement.

Thanks to K. Anthony Appiah for the recommendations.

For the novels about life under theocracies suggested by Joseph Epstein and Todd Gitlin, click here.

--Marshal Zeringue

The Great Alaska Novel

The playwright-poet-screenwriter Anne Hanley was Alaska State Writer Laureate, 2002-2004.

Here's her take on the Great Alaska Novel:

Even the verbally mighty James A. Michener got bogged down when he tried to tackle all of Alaska in one novel. Michener was able to dispatch whole island chains, states and even entire countries in one volume, but he ran out of gas in Alaska. I don't know anyone, in state or out of state, who ever made it all the way through Michener's Alaska. (I gave up some place around page 525 when he was still following the spawning salmon on their journey.) Michener's is the only attempt at a comprehensive Great Alaska novel that I can think of.

It certainly is not the Great Alaska Novel, but in terms of its influence, I can't fail to mention Edna Ferber's Ice Palace which was published in 1958. Both the book and the movie based on the book captured the public's imagination.

Actually there aren't many novels about Alaska. But there are a great many memoirs, journals, and biographies. In Alaska, the truth is a much better read than fiction.

There are, however, a number of contemporary Alaskan writers tackling fiction. I think the most successful are almost memoirs. Seth Kantner's novel Ordinary Wolves is a good example. Kantner grew up in a sod house in northwestern Alaska. His parents were educated whites who chose to go back to the land and try to eke out a subsistence life style. They were the kind of folks labeled "hippies" in other places. In Alaska they were called "White Eskimos." The protagonist in Kantner's novel has a similar upbringing. His perspective on the world is what makes the book so unique. Kantner grew up about as close to the land as it is possible for a modern person to get. Native people in the village closest to his home had TV, basketball and snow machines. Kantner had nothing. His novel offers a window on another way of looking at the world.

Marjorie Kowalski Cole's new novel Correcting the Landscape draws on her years of growing up in Alaska through several boom and bust cycles. It tells the story of Gus, who owns and edits a small weekly newspaper in Fairbanks. Gus tries to tell the truth and that means he often gets in the way of exploiters and developers who call themselves pioneers and philanthropists. It's complicated and for my money those writers who recognize that it is complicated and tell the stories they know are the future of the Great Alaska Novel.

Anne Hanley is the first playwright to be named Alaska State Writer Laureate. She lives in Fairbanks, where she is the CEO, staff and maintenance crew of Panache Productions. Anne has an MFA in Film from UCLA and is an associate member of the Dramatists Guild of America and the Society of Children's Book Writers. She is a founding producer of The Looking Glass Group Theatre in Fairbanks.

Anne Hanley is co-editor of The Alaska Reader: Voices from the North (2005), an anthology of writing from Alaska.

Thanks to Anne for the insights and recommendations.

--Marshal Zeringue

For The Great Texas Novel, part 2 click here.
For The Great New York (City) Novel, click here.
For The Great Florida Novel, click here.
For The Great Illinois Novel, click here.
For The Great Michigan Novel, click here.
For The Great California Novel, click here.
For The Great Oregon Novel, click here.
For The Great Texas Novel, part1, click here.
For The Great Louisiana Novel, click here.

Two novels about theocracies

Two excellent suggestions have come in responding to last week's post regarding novels about life in a theocracy.

Todd Gitlin suggested Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Joseph Epstein nominated Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

Atwood describes her novel:

The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopia set in the future, and as such it owes debts to Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, and the tradition in general - a tradition that can be traced back to Plato's Republic, through Sir Thomas More's Utopia and the horse's paradise of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and then through the many literary utopias and dystopias of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In it, a totalitarian dictatorship has appeared in the US, now called the Republic of Gilead. It has emerged during a period of disruption: in such times, people are likely to trade in their rights in favour of militarist governments that claim to be able to guarantee their safety.

Once in power, such governments tend to go for absolute power and, like all absolute power, this power corrupts. Such dictatorships gain initial acceptance by justifying their actions in the name of their subjects' most cherished beliefs. Thus the Republic of Gilead is not a Communist state or a monarchy: neither would get a toehold in the US. Instead it claims to be religious, and bases some of its more arcane practices on the literal interpretation of certain passages in the early books of the Bible.

While The Handmaid's Tale is set in the future, The Scarlet Letter takes place in America's past.

Hawthorne set his allegory of adultery, guilt, and social repression in Puritan New England. The Scarlet Letter is a canonical work of American literature that explores the divide between the public and private realms, passion and convention, and introduces Hester Prynne, who develops the strength to confront social ostracism.

To read an excerpt from Kathryn Harrison's introduction to the Modern Library edition of The Scarlet Letter, click here.

Todd Gitlin is the author of 11 books and numerous articles in periodicals ranging from The New York Times to Theory & Society. A regular contributor to TPMcafe.com, he is currently a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. The Intellectuals and the Flag, a book of his essays, was published in January 2006. To read his essay "All The President’s Friends," click here.

Joseph Epstein edited The American Scholar from 1975 to 1997. He is author of numerous books of essays and short fiction. He also edited The Norton Book of Personal Essays and is a regular contributor to Commentary, The New Yorker, Harper's, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. To read an excerpt from his book Snobbery: The American Version, click here.

Thanks to Todd Gitlin and Joseph Epstein for their suggestions.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roundup

A roundup of feedback regarding recent posts:

New Orleans native Ellis Stich said I picked the wrong book as The Great Louisiana Novel:

The great Louisiana novel has to be A Confederacy of Dunces. No book that I have read captures the soul of New Orleans with such great characters.

Pete Anderson weighed in with his choice of The Great New York City Novel:

Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos. An unforgettable book about a cross-section of NYC lives.

Cary Federman called my attention to a writer who wrote a number of twice-told tales: Kathy Acker, who revisited, among others, Cervantes, Dickens, Rimbaud, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Books on 20th century wars

There is a brief article by Victor Davis Hanson over at the Wall Street Journal op-ed page on "the definitive books on the battles of the 20th century." Hanson is the author of (most recently) A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

Click here to see the five books Hanson selects.

One selection is John Keegan's The Face of Battle, a fine book.

Friend of the Blog Kurt van der Walde once alerted me to the closing lines of the acknowledgements where Keegan reveals why he did not dedicate the book to his "wife Susanne: ...were the title and the subject of this book not so inappropriate, I would have dedicated it to her, for all she has done."

Smart man.

--Marshal Zeringue