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Notes for Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses

Introduction

First mounted August 18, 1996
Last revised August 28, 2008.

This study guide was prepared to help people read and study Salman Rushdie’s novel. It contains explanations for many of its allusions and non-English words and phrases and aims as well at providing a thorough explication of the novel which will help the interested reader but not substitute for a reading of the book itself. Many links are provided to other sites on the Web where further information can be found.

The “Rushdie Affair”

This is not a site for polemics about the novel or the “Rushdie Affair”. To many Western readers The Satanic Verses appears as a brilliant attack on religious bigotry. To many Muslims, East and West, it appears as a vicious series of insults to many of their most cherished beliefs. There are other positions: liberal and conservative non-Muslims deplore his irreverence, and liberal Muslims deplore the fatwa against Rushdie and support his right to publish, or even admire his work; some American and British non-Muslim critics have been critical of him. But the important debate, the one that makes a difference in the real world, is the one between the extremes, and between those extremes there remains a seemingly unbridgeable gulf. It is not my desire to exacerbate the tensions surrounding this novel, nor to delve in any depth into the controversy. That has been done, exhaustively, by many others. I recommend especially Michael Hanne’s “Salman Rushdie: ‘The Satanic Verses’ (1988)” as a thoughtful overview of the “affair” and Joel Kuortti’s Place of the Sacred: The Rhetoric of the Satanic Verses Affair (1997). But one cannot entirely ignore the controversy. A note on the terms “East” and “West” as used on this page.

Perhaps the contribution I can most usefully make is to discuss the differences in perspective of the antagonists in the affair toward the modern novel as a form. Islam is a religious tradition which in many influential quarters is self-consciously seeking to purify itself from modernizing, liberal tendencies. Although Islamic tales both short and long abound, and there are many authors of fiction who are highly honored, the modern novel as such is not a comfortable form in the Muslim world. Often it is identified with the West, with mere entertainment, with lax morals. In addition, Muslim writers who write novels are often critical of tradition. The 1994 near-fatal assault on the Egyptian Nobel Prizewinner Naguib Mahfouz illustrates the perils that even the most acclaimed of novelists may encounter in an era of religious polarization. To be sure, most Muslims abhor such assaults; but the feelings which cause them are all too familiar in such countries as Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, and even Turkey.

To a conservative Muslim, Islam is not just a religion in the sense that most Westerners use the term, a private faith which provides hope and consolation within a secular world. Islam is a way of life, a body of law, an all-embracing cultural framework within which novels are distinctly unimportant and potentially troublesome. That a mere novelist should dare to satirize fundamental religious beliefs is intolerable.

In the Western European tradition, novels are viewed very differently. Following the devastatingly successful assaults of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment upon Christianity, intellectuals in the West largely abandoned the Christian framework as an explanatory world view. Indeed, religion became for many the enemy: the suppressor of free thought, the enemy of science and progress. When the freethinking Thomas Jefferson ran for President of the young United States his opponents accused him of intending to suppress Christianity and arrest its adherents. Although liberal and even politically radical forms of Christianity (the Catholic Worker movement, liberation theology) were to emerge from time to time, the general attitude toward religion among that class of people who value serious fiction has been negative.

Pious bigots were the objects of scorn by such popular Nineteenth-Century authors as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Twentieth-Century writers as different as James Joyce and Margaret Atwood have vividly depicted in novels the threats posed by conservative religious beliefs. So-called “Catholic” authors such as T. S. Eliot and Graham Greene routinely explore doubt more than faith; and even the greatest of all Christian novels, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov is so harrowing in its investigation of the challenges of faith that it has probably swayed more people away from religion than toward it.

Furthermore, from the time of Matthew Arnold onward, it has been frequently claimed that serious fiction and art could largely fill the gap left by the collapse of the cultural influence of traditional religion. The claims to the importance of high seriousness in fiction have been under assault by the most recent generation of critics for some time; but the justification for studying novels in an academic setting ultimately rests on the very claims of cultural significance that these critics attack. Fiction has not just been an irritant to religion in the West; it has posed itself as an alternative to it.

Rushdie’s own claims for the importance of the novel are only slightly less exalted in his essay, “Is Nothing Sacred”. Although at its end he rejects the claims of the novel to be able to replace religion, he makes some strong claims for it:

Between religion and literature, as between politics and literature, there is a linguistically based dispute. But it is not a dispute of simple opposites. Because whereas religion seeks to privilege one language above all others, the novel has always been about the way in which different languages, values and narratives quarrel, and about the shifting relations between them, which are relations of power. The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language, but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyse the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.Carlos Fuentes has called the novel “a privileged arena“. By this he does not mean that it is the kind of holy space which one must put off one’s shoes to enter; it is not an arena to revere; it claims no special rights except the right to be the stage upon which the great debates of society can be conducted.

(420)

. . . while the novel answers our need for wonderment and understanding, it brings us harsh and unpalatable news as well.It tells us there are no rules. It hands down no commandments. We have to make up our own rules as best we can, make them up as we go along.

And it tells us there are no answers; or rather, it tells us that answers are easier to come by, and less reliable, than questions. If religion is an answer, if political ideology is an answer, then literature is an inquiry; great literature, by asking extraordinary questions, opens new doors in our minds.

(423)

. . . literature is, of all the arts, the one best suited to challenging absolutes of all kinds; and, because it is in its origin the schismatic Other of the sacred (and authorless) text, so it is also the art most likely to fill our god-shaped holes.

(424)

In the Twentieth Century the novel came to be viewed as primarily oppositional, critical of the culture which produced it. Rather than providing values, it challenges them. Modern novels are praised for their courage in exposing hypocrisy, challenging tradition, exploring forbidden themes. If blasphemy is not the most common of techniques in Western fiction it is because so few writers take religion seriously enough to feel it worth attacking. Popular religious books are generally excluded from the New York Times best seller list as unworthy of notice, no matter how well they sell. The writer who does not challenge the beliefs and prejudices of the reader is generally viewed by the literary establishment as dull if not cowardly.

To complicate matters, the Enlightenment ideals of freedom of speech and press have an almost religious significance in the West. A typical response to the fatwa is Silvia Albertazzi’s statement that “Freedom of expression is more important than any offence any book might cause,” a statement which would be unthinkable in any profoundly religious culture. Albertazzi’s own Catholic ancestors would certainly have disagreed.

Rushdie came from a liberal Westernized family which had no great fervor for religious tradition:

My relationship with formal religious belief has been somewhat chequered. I was brought up in an Indian Muslim household, but while both my parents were believers neither was insistent or doctrinaire. Two or three times a year, at the big Eid festivals, I would wake up to find new clothes at the foot of my bed, dress and go with my father to the great prayer-maidan outside the Friday Mosque in Bombay, and rise and fall with the multitude, mumbling my way through the uncomprehended Arabic much as Catholic children do–or used to do–with Latin. The rest of the year religion took a back seat. I had a Christian ayah (nanny), for whom at Christmas we would put up a tree and sing carols about baby Jesus without feeling in the least ill-at-ease. My friends were Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, and none of this struck me as being particularly important.

(Rushdie: “In God We Trust” 376-377)

At the time of the writing of the novel he evidently did not even consider himself a Muslim (see below, note on p. 29). Certainly he was never an adherent of that sort of Islam which believes that apostasy is a capital offense. He was steeped from an early period in fiction, both Eastern and Western; and as a writer seems to have accepted the High Modern view that the writing of outspoken controversial fiction is a calling, perhaps even a duty. All of his works contain controversial themes; and beginning with Midnight’s Children in 1981 he took on South Asian politics in a way that earned him denunciations and bans as well as praise for his courage. He has often expressed his opposition to the religious extremism that informs modern Pakistani and Indian politics, and The Satanic Verses is another stage in a consistent critique of such extremism. What makes it different, however, is that in it he chose to criticize not only modern religious figures such as the Ayatollah Khomeni, but dared to question the authority of the very root of Islam: the inspired nature of the Qur’an and the authority of the Prophet Muhammad.

To a secularized European, his critique of Islam in the novel seems very mild and tentative; but there has never been anything like it in the Muslim world. Scoffers and libertines there have been; but they were fundamentally unserious. Rushdie seems to have been trying to become the Muslim Voltaire; but Islam has never undergone an equivalent to the European Enlightenment, let alone the development of a “higher criticism” such as the West has subjected the Bible to for the past two centuries. (But see Saadi A. Simawe’s ” Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Heretical Literature in Islam” for a thorough discussion of Islamic scepticism in relation to the novel and Feroza Jussawalla’s “Rushdie’s Dastan-e-Dilruba: The Satanic Verses as Rushdie’s Love Letter to Islam,” for an interesting exploration of Islamic revisionism in Muslim India.)

In the secularized West his critique seems routine; in much of the Islamic East, it is unspeakable. The modernist assumptions it springs from are irrelevant, hardly understood. Many Muslim critics have asserted that equivalent blasphemy against Christian beliefs would never be tolerated, whereas in fact a wildly anti-Catholic comedy like “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You” can have a long, profitable run without any encountering any physical or even legal threat. Obscenity is taken much more seriously in the West than blasphemy. Rushdie tried to bridge the gulf between East and West and instead fell into the void. No one can reconcile these two views with each other because they are rooted in basically incompatible, even hostile world views.

Many of his Muslim critics have argued that The Satanic Verses, besides being offensive, is bad fiction. Non-Muslim views have been distinctly mixed, the most common criticism being that the novel does not “hold together” in a disciplined fashion. But that is true of many fine novels, including many of Rushdie’s favorites. In a 1983 interview with Una Chaudhuri on the influences on Midnight’s Children he commented on his penchant for unconventionally-shaped fictions:

As for other influences, well, there’s Joyce, for a start. And Swift, and Stern. I’m very keen on the eighteenth century in general, not just in literature. I think the eighteenth century was the great century. Well, take Fielding; the thing that’s very impressive about Tom Jones is the plot, that you have this enormous edifice which seems to be so freewheeling, rambling — and actually everything is there for a purpose. It’s the most extraordinary piece of organization which at the same time seems quite relaxed and not straitjacketed by its plot. I think that’s why the book is so wonderful. So, yes, I would have thought the eighteenth-century novel had something to do with mine. And Joyce, because Joyce shows you that you can do anything if you do it properly.

“Imaginative Maps,” Turnstile, p. 37.

For my own argument that the novel does possess a special kind of unity, see my essay, “The Unity of The Satanic Verses.

Unfortunately, many of his most ardent defenders defend him out of ignorance, for they have not managed to read past the first few chapters of this dense postmodern, intertextual, multicultural work. Nevertheless, the book continues to draw admirers, many of whom now consider The Satanic Verses Rushdie’s finest work. When I first opened its pages I was introduced into one of the most intoxicating, thoughtful, and hilarious works I had ever read. It is a playground for literate readers, filled with allusions and symbols of all kinds, which delight by their incongruity or their aptness. It is also a highly interesting attempt at establishing a middle ground between Western and Eastern chauvinisms, asserting that the immigrant has a uniquely valuable perspective. Rather than being outsiders, exiles, the immigrants create a unique perspective that allows them to comment insightfully on both East and West. (But see also Feroza Jussawalla on this subject.)The mixture of cultural influences, or what Rushdie calls the “chutneyfication” of culture, is one of the most enlivening aspects of his work. He throws off phrases in Hindi, Arabic, and Urdu which are bound to make the Western reader feel something of an outsider. He delights in playing with those aspects of Indian and Arabic culture which have been trivialized in the West in what Edward Said calls “orientalism,” satirizing the failure of Europeans to grasp what they persistently exoticize. Indeed the work is largely a critique of Western racism, of anti-immigrant prejudice, and a defense of the richness and worth of South Asian and Middle Eastern culture. But because it is a contemporary critique, it is not one-sided. His Indians are no angels–even if they sometimes take on the form of angels. Nevertheless he exuberantly celebrates Indian literature, music, film, and food; portraying the South Asian immigrants as providing an enlivening spice in dull, overcast London.

No one has better described this aspect of the novel than Rushdie himself:

If The Satanic Verses is anything, it is a migrant’s-eye view of the world. It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis (slow or rapid, painful or pleasurable) that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity.Standing at the centre of the novel is a group of characters most of whom are British Muslims, or not particularly religious persons of Muslim background, struggling with just the sort of great problems that have arisen to surround the book, problems of hybridization and ghettoization, of reconciling the old and the new. Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves.

(“In Good Faith” 394)

After Khomeni condemned Rushdie to death, it became impossible to experience this light-hearted, playful side of the novel in the way he surely intended. Yet to be fair to the book we should try to read it without letting the fatwa obscure its merits.

Between its hostile critics who refuse to read it and its supporters who fail to read it, The Satanic Verses must be one of the most widely-unread best sellers in the history of publishing. Rushdie’s allusiveness is much more transparent than that of James Joyce, one of his main influences; but it still provides a major obstacle to many readers. In the “Acknowledgements” to the novel, Rushdie lists only a few sources, while stating, “The identities of many of the authors from whom I’ve learned will, I hope, be clear from the text. . . .” But much of the effect of his allusions has been lost on readers curious about this controversial work. These notes are an attempt to gather together the ideas of many different scholars who have contributed to understanding the text, adding my own notions and insights to the mix. Many consultants, both within India and abroad, have contributed to these notes, but requested that they remain anonymous, Such is the fear of Rushdie’s enemies. Yet I hope that even they will read these notes as they are intended: not as a brief on behalf of the novel or an indictment of it, but as a guide to understanding it–for whether one views it as a postmodern masterpiece or decadent desecration of all that is sacred, it is incumbent on the reader to understand what is on the page.

I have not assumed that Rushdie’s allusions to traditional icons of Western culture are universally understood either, and have taken some pains to explicate for Americans the numerous Britishisms in novel which are easily comprehensible to English readers. My experience with students reading the work leads me to believe that over-explanation is less harmful in this case than under-explanation.

Rushdie clearly never envisioned the kind of annotation I am providing here. After all, part of his style is meant to startle the Western reader into realizing he/she is not the center of all stories. In an interview with Salon magazine, he commented on his use of words unfamiliar to many of his readers:

. . . I use them as flavoring. I mean, I can read books from America and I don’t always get the slang. American writers always assume that the whole world speaks American, but actually the whole world does not speak American. And American Jewish writers put lots of Yiddish in their books and sometimes I don’t know what they’re saying. I’ve read books by writers like Philip Roth with people getting hit in the kishkes and I think, “What?!”It’s fun to read things when you don’t know all the words. Even children love it. One of the things any great children’s writer will tell you is that children like it if in books designed for their age group there is a vocabulary just slightly bigger than theirs. So they come up against weird words, and the weird words excite them. If you describe a small girl in a story as “loquacious,” it works so much better than “talkative.” And then some little girl will read the book and her sister will be shooting her mouth off and she will say to her sister, “Don’t be so loquacious.” It is a whole new weapon in her arsenal.

The interview from which this quotation comes.

However, on May 3, 1999, Melinda Penkava interviewed Salman Rushdie about his new novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet on the National Public Radio phone-in talk show, “Talk of the Nation.” Asked about the possibility of “Cliff’s Notes” to his writings, Rushdie answered that although he didn’t expect readers to get all the allusions in his works, he didn’t think such notes would detract from the reading of them: “James Joyce once said after he had published Ulysses that he had given the professors work for many years to come; and I’m always looking for ways of employing professors, so I hope to have given them some work too.”

The problem with The Satanic Verses, is that many readers have found themselves so disoriented that they have never finished the book. If you want to savor the text the way Rushdie originally intended, try reading it without the notes; but when you come to a term or reference that just begs to checked out, you can search for it here.

Biography

Much of the following is based on Ian Hamilton’s article, “The First Life of Salman Rushdie,” which is the most systematic and thorough treatment thus far of the author’s life. Rushdie himself is reportedly working on an autobiography.

Rushdie was born to liberal, prosperous Muslim parents in Bombay June 19, 1947. In August 14 of that year, Pakistan divided itself from India as part of an agreement ending the period of British colonialism in South Asia. The result was a chaotic and extremely violent period as 6,000,000 Muslims moved north to the newly-established Islamic state and 8,000,000 Hindus and Sikhs moved south fleeing it. Rushdie’s parents, however, remained in Bombay while Rushdie was growing up, so that he never identified with the strongly pro-Islamic stance of many Pakistanis. In 1961, when he was 13, he was sent to England to study at Rugby School. In 1962, his family followed him to England, became naturalized British citizens, and lived for two years in Kensington, which features as a locale in The Satanic Verses. When his father decided to move the family to Karachi, Pakistan, a country that Rushdie detested, he felt as if his homeland had been taken away from him.

In 1965 he went on to study history at Kings College, Cambridge, where his father Anis Ahmed Rushdie had also studied. In his senior year Rushdie investigated the origins of Islam and encountered for the first time the story of the “satanic verses.” He also pursued his interest in movies and became involved in the theater as an actor. When he graduated in 1968 his father tried to persuade him to take over the new towel factory he had established in Karachi, and their already strained relationship worsened.

Venturing into television production and publishing, he encountered instances of censorship which persuaded him that he belonged back in London, where he lived for a time on welfare and occasionally acted, enjoying being young in London during the height of the sixties. However he eventually went to work writing ads for a firm called Sharp MacManus. In 1971 he finished a novel entitled The Book of the Pir (a term which occurs as well in The Satanic Verses), but it was rejected and never published. He returned to advertising, preparing television commercials for Ogilvy & Mather. The character of Hal Valance in the novel is based partly on bigoted advertising executives he met during this period in his life.

In 1970 he met Clarissa Luard, the model for Pamela Lovelace in The Satanic Verses and they began living together two years later. In 1976 they married. In 1971 he had written his first published novel, Grimus, a bizarre science-fiction/fantasy novel with few ties to the South Asian material which was going to inform his best fiction. His experiences in 1977 working with a project to assist immigrants from Bangladesh convinced him that racism permeated British society. He himself, with light skin and English accent, was better accepted.

He comments:

     The phrase that really gets me angry is this thing about being “more English than the English.” It is used as if it should be offensive. I point out to these people that if there was an English person living in India who adopted Indian dress, who had learnt to speak Urdu or Hindi or Bengali fluently without an accent, nobody would accuse him of having lost his culture. They would be flattered and pleased that the language had been acquired so efficiently. And they would see it as a compliment to themselves. But they wouldn’t accuse him of having betrayed his origins.

(Quoted in Hamilton 102.)

Although the Anglophile Saladin Chamcha is portrayed as more than a bit of a fool in the novel, his rejection of Zeeny Vakil’s accusations that he has betrayed his Indian roots may reflect Rushdie’s own struggles with this issue.

In 1980 Rushdie published Midnight’s Children, the novel that catapulted him to fame. It is a brilliant and searing satire on the history of modern India, with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as one of its main targets. It gained lavish praise in the West and won the famous Booker Prize for fiction, and was also well received in South Asia, But not by everyone. His relatives were offended when they recognized unflattering portraits of themselves in the novel. One of its prime targets, Mrs. Gandhi, sued for libel and won her case demanding an expurgated, revised version shortly before she was assassinated (it was never published).

Like The Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children combines fantasy and magic with political satire in a manner strongly reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, though he has preferred to claim Günter Grass as a greater influence. Like García Márquez he integrates fantastic elements into everyday life, and routinely refers to events to come as if they were already known, techniques which he were to be a hallmark of his later fiction as well. Another García Márquez pattern which recurs in Rushdie’s fiction is the doomed love affair which is at first resisted by the female partner, then burns wildly and destructively in an outburst of almost supernatural eroticism.

His next novel was Shame, a 1983 critique of the Zia ul-Haq regime and of Benazir Bhutto which was effective enough to earn its banning in Pakistan. After falling in love with author Robyn Davidson on a tour of Australia, he ended his marriage to Luard by moving in with her for what was to be an extremely stormy relationship, resulting, suggests Ian Hamilton, in the portrait of Alleluia Cone in The Satanic Verses. His portraits of both characters based on Clarissa and Robyn in The Satanic Verses are rather sympathetic, with Rushdie apparently casting himself in the rather unsympathetic Saladin Chamcha role (Hamilton 106).

A 1986 trip to Nicaragua under the Sandinistas led to the nonfiction book, The Jaguar Smile, much criticized as simplistically partisan, but reflecting the constant interest in politics which runs through his fiction. In 1986 Rushdie met the American writer Marianne Wiggins, whom he married two years later. (Their relationship was a difficult one as well; they were to stay together longer than they might have when he was forced underground by Khomeni’s fatwa, but ultimately they were to be divorced.) In 1987 he returned to India to make a film just in time to encounter the outbreak of Hindu/Muslim violence resulting from the controversy over the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, a conflict which was to have a major influence on the writing of The Moor’s Last Sigh.

Back in London to edit the film, he was suddenly summoned to his father’s deathbed where he achieved a reconciliation with the old man which is reflected in the novel in the final reconciliation between Saladin and Changez.

On September 26, 1988, Viking Penguin published his long-awaited novel, The Satanic Verses. Although the book was generally praised in Europe and America, it was viewed by some as undisciplined and by others as baffling. Few Western readers understood much of what was to be so offensive to Muslim readers. A Muslim Minister of Parliament in India attacked the novel, and it was quickly banned there. Photocopies of the pages considered most offensive were circulated among various Islamic organizations and to the embassies of Islamic nations in London. On October 8, a Saudi newspaper published in London denounced Rushdie, and various threats and complaints followed; but it was only in January of 1989 that the protests burst into full public consciousness. The book was burned before the television cameras in England, in Iran five members of a mob attacking the American Culture Center in Islamabad in protest were shot to death, and in Kashmir, sixty were injured in another protest and one person died.

Rushdie responded to the book burning in January with a bold defense in which he said, in part:

     Nowadays . . . a powerful tribe of clerics has taken over Islam. These are the contemporary Thought Police. They have turned Muhammad into a perfect being, his life into a perfect life, his revelation into the unambiguous, clear event it originally was not. Powerful taboos have been erected. One may not discuss Muhammad as if he were human, with human virtues and weaknesses. One may not discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time. These are the taboos against which The Satanic Verses has transgressed (these and one other: I also tried to write about the place of women in Islamic society, and in the Koran). It is for this breach of taboo that the novel is being anathematized, fulminated against, and set alight. . . .The Satanic Verses is not, in my view, an antireligious novel. It is, however, an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations, from the point of view of migrants from the Indian subcontinent to Britain. This is, for me, the saddest irony of all; that after working for five years to give voice and fictional flesh to the immigrant culture of which I am myself a member, I should see my book burned, largely unread, by the people it’s about, people who might find some pleasure and much recognition in its pages. I tried to write against stereotypes; the zealot protests serve to confirm, in the Western mind, all the worst stereotypes of the Muslim world.

“The Book Burning,” p. 26.

The Ayatollah Khomeni, leader of the Iranian revolution and the target of a fiercely satirical portrait in the novel, responded by issuing a denunciation of Rushdie called a fatwa:

I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses–which has been compiled, printed and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur’an–and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death.I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they may be found, so that no one else will dare to insult the Muslim sanctities. God Willing, whoever is killed on this path is a martyr.

(Quoted in Hamilton 113.)

Many Muslims have since criticized the fatwa, and denied Khomeni’s authority to issue it; but it has had an immediate and lasting effect on Rushdie’s life.

Shortly afterward he went into hiding, guarded by British policemen who have been his constant companions ever since. Rushdie attempted a reconciliation with his enemies by meeting with a number of prominent Muslim clerics and declaring himself Muslim, at least in a cultural sense; but the détente he had attempted to achieve came to nothing, and he has since resolutely defended himself. Rather unfairly, a number of smug academics safe in their offices have blamed this gregarious, energetic man for this early attempt to find a way out of his life of enforced solitude and mortal peril. (The essay “In Good Faith” incorporates his earliest and fullest defence of the novel and critique of his attackers.) He has become an international celebrity in the cause of freedom of speech, a target for would-be assassins, and the subject of endless discussion over the merits and influence of the novel that began it all: The Satanic Verses.

Because the story of his subsequent struggles and triumphs since is readily available from other sources and not really relevant to understanding The Satanic Verses, it will not be repeated here. He remains under the threat of the fatwa, which has been renewed several times by the successors of Khomeni now governing Iran; but in recent years he has ventured out in public more and more for surprise speeches and other appearances.

About a year after the issuing of the fatwa, a film portraying a successful attack on the author was released but not widely viewed. In a March 1996 interview with the Gleaner, an electronic publication of Gleebooks in Sydney, Australia, Rushdie commented on the film:

When, within a year or so after the Fatwah, there was a movie made in Pakistan called International Guerillas in which I was portrayed rather unpleasantly as somebody wearing a rather ugly range of pastel safari suits and also behaving as a drunkard, a torturer, and indeed a murderer. And in the end– and the heroes of this film were the international terrorists they sent to hunt me down and in the end I did indeed get killed.There was one–I have to say to in parentheses–one scene of rather good unintentional comedy which I hope you’ll appreciate when the kind of– the “me” character has had his fill of lashing and slashing at one of the international terrorists who’d been imprisoned for his pleasure by what looks like the Israeli Army, when he has finished having his fun, he says–he orders the Israeli Army to take this fellow away to some dungeon and spend all night reading him The Satanic Verses. Whereupon this man completely crumples, and says, “Not that, anything but that, etc.” That was a good scene. But many of the other scenes of the film were less good.Anyway the film got to England and was refused a certificate by the British Board of Film Classification largely because the Board correctly saw the film was extremely defamatory, that I would have a very straight-forward case in law, it would be able– if they gave it a certificate to sue not only the film makers but also them. So the film got banned. And so I found myself in the extraordinary position of having to write to the Board, waiving my legal rights, promising that I would not sue and saying, “Would you please give this film a licence,” because I did not want to be defended by an act of censorship.And the thing turned into a rather shapely parable of the free speech position. Because if this film had been banned, if it had not been given a certificate it would have become a very hot number indeed. The illicit videos of this film would have circulated in their goodness knows how many thousands and it would have become glamorous as an object. And instead it got its certificate and the producers of the certificate booked a very large cinema in Bradford in the North of England which is where the largest Muslim Community in England lives, and nobody went. You know. The film got taken off after one showing because it was playing to an empty house. It just goes that actually if you do let people make up their minds they can tell the difference between rubbish and what is not rubbish. And nobody wants to pay money to see a bad movie in the end.

According to Sara Suleri (“Whither Rushdie” 199), popular hostility to the author was so strong that the actor who played Rushdie in the film himself received several death threats.

Rushdie has also replied to those who argue that novels such as his deserve condemnation because they do not respect the religious sensibilities of some believers:

Religious extremists, these days, demand “respect” for their attitudes with growing stridency. Few people would object to the idea that people’s rights to religious belief must be respected–after all, the First Amendment defends those rights as unequivocally as it defends free speech–but now we are asked to agree that to dissent from those beliefs, to hold that they are suspect or antiquated or wrong, that in fact they are arguable, is incompatible with the idea of respect. When criticism is placed off-limits as “disrepectful,” and therefore offensive, something strange is happening to the concept of respect. Yet in recent times both the American N.E.A. and the very British BBC have announced that they will employ this new perversion of “respect” as a touchstone for their funding and programming decisions.Other minority groups–racial, sexual, social–have also demanded that they be accorded this new form of respect. To “respect” Louis Farrakhan, we must understand, is simply to agree with him. To “dis” him is, equally simply, to disagree. But if dissent is also to be thought a form of “dissing,” then we have indeed succumbed to the thought police.

I want to suggest that citizens of free societies do not preserve their freedom by pussyfooting around their fellow citizens’ opinions, even their most cherished beliefs.

 

“How News Becomes Opinion, And Opinion Off-Limits”, p.20.

The Title

Rushdie writes of the title:

You call us devils? it seems to ask. Very well, then, here is the devil’s version of the world, of “your” world, the version written from the experience of those who have been demonized by virtue of their otherness. Just as the Asian kids in the novel wear toy devil-horns proudly, as an assertion of pride in identity, so the novel proudly wears its demonic title. The purpose is not to suggest that the Qur’an is written by the devil; it is to attempt the sort of act of affirmation that, in the United States, transformed the word black from the standard term of racist abuse into a “beautiful” expression of cultural pride.

(“In Good Faith” 403)

List of Principal Characters

Gibreel Farishta, born Ismail Najmuddin
Indian film star, specializing in playing Hindu gods, though he himself is a Muslim, takes the form of an angel. Rushdie has said of Gibreel:

the character of Gibreel himself is a mixture of two or three types of Indian movie star. There was in the forties a Muslim actor, a very big star at the time, who did somehow get away with playing major Hindu divinities and because he was so popular it was not a problem. And it was interesting to me that mega-stardom allowed you to cross those otherwise quite fraught religious frontiers. So there was a bit of that in Gibreel. And then there was an element of the big South Indian movie stars, a bit of Rama Rao. And finally there was a large bit of the biggest movie star in India for the last fifteen or twenty years, Amitabh Bachchan.

Rushdie: “Interview,” p. 52.
(See also Brennan 155, Ruthven, Aravamudan: “‘Being God’s Postman is No Fun, Yaar'” 9 and Jussawalla 231).

Raj Kapoor has also been mentioned as a model (Fischer 122). The name means “Gabriel Angel” in Urdu and Persian.

Saladin Chamcha
Born Salahuddin Chamchawala, a voice impersonator, “Chumch,” “Spoono” (because “chamcha” is Hindi for “spoon,” see p. 83). Takes the form of a devil. His original name is comical because it combines a heroic first name (Saladin–the great Muslim hero of the Crusades) and the term “spoon-seller.” Chamcha also means yes-man:

     A chamcha is a very humble, everyday object. It is, in fact, a spoon. The word is Urdu; and it also has a second meaning. Colloquially a chamcha is a person who sucks up to a powerful people, a yes-man, a sycophant. The British Empire would not have lasted a week without such collaborators among its colonized peoples. You could say that the Raj grew fat by being spoon-fed.

(Rushdie, “Empire” 8).

Feroza Jussawalla says that the name echoes a Bombay street slang insult–“salah chamcha”–“bastard homosexual” (“Resurrecting” 107).

Pamela Lovelace
Saladin’s wife, leftist. Her name combines those of the heroine in Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela and of the villain in his Clarissa; thus the name may be a subtle allusion to the given name of Rushdie’s first wife, Clarissa Luard..However, the name is almost certainly also meant to refer to the sixties porn star of Deep Throat, Linda Lovelace.

Mahound
The prophet featured in the Satanic Verses plot. His name is taken from a relatively obscure insulting European name for Muhammad, most likely borrowed by Rushdie from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (VI, vii; see Jussawalla: “Resurrecting” 108).

Zeeny “Zeeny” Vakil
Doctor at Breach Candy Hospital, art critic and political activist, lover of Saladin.

Mimi Mamoulian
Female partner of Saladin in the voice impersonation business, later companion of Billy Battuta. Her name may be suggestive of mammalian breasts, though Yasmine Gooneratne suggests the name means something like “worthlessness” in Hindi. On p. 274, the newspapers say her name is Mildred, so “Mimi” may be merely a nickname, or the papers have got it wrong.

Rekha Merchant
Wife of a businessman, lover of Gibreel. Commits suicide with her three children by jumping off the roof of Everest Vilas and then haunts Gibreel throughout much of the novel. Her first name calls to mind the brilliant actress (renowned for her beauty and brilliant dancing) of the same name. The actress was much talked about in the gossip rags of Bombay in the seventies, her name being linked to the megastar Amitabh Bachchan (whose injury during the shooting of a fight scene in “Coolie,” and the life-threatening infection that subsequently developed, mirrors what happens to Gibreel. The 1981 movie Silsila was partly based on the Amitabh/Rekha affair. (David Windsor) “Merchant” may be an allusion to the famous Indian filmmaker Ismail Merchant, the model for S. S. Sisodia.

Alleluia Cone
Allie Cone (originally Cohen). Tender-footed climber of Mount Everest. Her name may also allude to that of the goddess Al-Lat (Seminck 17).

Karim Abu Simbel
Ruler of Jahilia. The last two parts of his name refer to the location of the gigantic sculptures of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II (r. c.1304-1237 BC); probably intended to suggest his imposing, grandiose manner. However, his name is probably also linked to that of Abu Sufyan, an opponent of Muhammad who was married to one Hind (see below).

Jamshed” Jumpy” Joshi
Lover of Pamela Chamcha, Saladin’s wife. Like Baal, he is a poet.

Muhammad Sufyan
Proprietor of the Shaandaar Café, father of two daughters: Mishal and Anahita.

S. S. Sisodia
Indian filmmaker living and working in London. His name not only mocks his stuttering, but inspires the punning nickname “Whisky” (“whisky and soda”).

Mirza Saeed Akhtar
The zamindar of Titlipur, whose wife, dying of cancer, follows the mysterious Ayesha to the sea in search of a miracle.

Characters who share a name

One of the techniques used by Rushdie to knit this multifaceted work together is to assign the same names to certain characters in different plots of the novel. (It is worth noting that García Márquez also repeats the names of characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude, but to very different effect.)

Ayesha
The cruel ruler of Desh in the Imam plot (playing the role of the former Shah of Iran); the fanatical girl who leads to the march to Mecca in the Titlipur plot; and the name of the youngest and favorite wife of Mahound and of the historical Muhammad, whom he married when she was only eleven and about whom several stories are told which indicate she was rather independent-minded and occasionally critical of the Prophet (see Netton: Text, pp. 30-31; Haykal 139, 183-184, 331-333). Her name also alludes to Queen Ayesha of H. Rider Haggard’s She, pale, long-haired queen of an Arabic-speaking people in Africa (Seminck 24). The text of She. Information on Haggard.

Bilal
A follower of Mahound; follower of the Imam. See below, note on p. 101. The historical Bilal was a former black slave who converted to Islam and was made the first muezzin (the official who calls the faithful to prayer).

Hind
The grasping wife of Muhammad Sufyan in the main plot; the cruel, lascivious wife of Abu Simbel in the “satanic verses” plot. Named after the seventh-century Hind bint ‘Utba, wife of Abu Sufyan (see above), powerful local leader in Mecca and custodian of the temple (Parekh 30). She is famous for her ferocity during the Battle of Uhud in 625 when she tore open the chest of Muhammad’s uncle, Hamzah ibn ‘abd al Muttalib, and bit into his liver. She was also the mother of one of Muhammad’s wives (Fischer 131-132; see also Haykal 267-268). Hind also shares a characteristic with another fictional character, H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha (see above, note on “Ayesha.”)

Khalid
Follower of Mahound; follower of the Imam.

Mishal
Mishal Sufyan is the older daughter of Muhammad Sufyan and lover of Hanif Johnson in the main plot; Mishal Akhtar is the dying wife of Mirza Saeed Akhbar in the Titlipur plot. “Hanif” is the first name of Anglo-Pakistani novelist and film director Hanif Kureshi and historically is a term referring to pre-Islamic monotheists (Haykal 601, no. His last name is used for the minor character of Mrs. Qureishi (Nazareth 171). The Qureishi (or Quraysh) were the tribe of which Muhammad was a member and whose name means “shark”.

Bilal, Khalid and Salman
Followers of Mahound, and of the Imam. The guard outside the Imam’s room on p. 210 is Salman Farsi (“Farsi” is a term designating a follower of the Persian religion of Zarathustrianism); Salman the Persian is a follower of Mahound who ultimately loses his faith in him in the “satanic verses” plot; and of course it is the first name of the author.

The notes to each chapter are on a different page. Since the notes are quite detailed, this means that some pages are quite long. I cannot break these notes up into smaller pieces without making them much more difficult to manage. Having a limited number of pages also allows you to search through them for the passage you are interested in with a minimum of trouble.

Note: In the following annotations, the page numbers refer to the hardbound first edition and to the first paperback edition of The Satanic Verses published by “The Consortium.” Where the pagination of the Holt Owl paperback edition differs, its page numbers are given in [square brackets].

Our Trip to Spain, May 2006

When we were planning a trip to Spain I inquired online about local Spanish tourist agencies and got a tip to try Madrid & Beyond. I’m back to report that they are fabulous and to give some travel tips for folks headed for Spain.

This is a long message, so if you don’t want to be bothered reading the whole thing, just go to http://www.madridandbeyond.com/ and check them out.

We don’t much like group tours, and the U.S. travel agents we’ve tried want to put us in big chain hotels with fancy prices with very limited options. We’ve done many trips on our own, looking up hotels and apartments on the Web, but that can be exhausting, and sometimes disappointing when you discover things aren’t just as advertised.

Here’s what we told Madrid & Beyond we wanted. In and out of Madrid, with time to check out Toledo and Madrid museums, thern off to Andalucia, concentrating on Cordoba, Sevilla, and Granada-essentially Moorish Spain. I told them we preferred to stay in historic centers of cities and in small towns, not moving around too much from day to day, but staying in one place to explore out from there. We asked for quiet rooms, sometimes in apartments where we could prepare our own breakfasts (and eat a quick dinner when Spanish restaurants haven’t opened yet, usually at 8:30). Apartments also give you a chance to do your laundry for free, nice on a long trip. We wanted bathrooms in the hotel suites, large beds for two instead of the small twins typical of European hotels. We also wanted some beach and hiking time for relaxation. We are fascinated by music and asked for tickets to a flamenco performance and a zarzuela (Spanish operetta) performance. We wanted personal guided walking tours of major sites because we’ve found them much more satisfying than group tours.

We got just about everything we asked for. This is a custom-travel service which tailors your trip to your precise desires. They arrange bike tours, family tours, even group tours if you want.

Here’s what we got:

Four nights in Madrid at a lovely apartment ten minutes’ walk from the Prado (we arrived on Sunday when the museum is open free). We explored several major museums while there.

When US Air lost our luggage Oscar Soler of M&B spent the next three days tracking it down while we went about our touristy way. He actually showed up at a restaurant where we were eating to tell us he had asked US Air to deliver our luggage there, but since they didn’t show, we finally collected it at their office across from the Cathedral near the Palacio Real (it’s upstairs over a restaurant with only a very small nameplate to identify the location at Bailen 19, should you go looking for it). This feat alone made their service worth its cost, since otherwise we would have been stuck day after day waiting in the apartment for promised deliveries from US Air that failed to transpire.

The first night we attended a Zarzuela performance, which was utterly thrilling. Our Spanish was adequate to get a fair idea of the plot, and the singing and production were stunning. Think of Gilbert & Sullivan crossed with the Gershwins but using operatic voices. Few tourists ever experience this distinctively Spanish musical form, but it’s worth pursuing. M&B had bought the tickets for us and included them in our packet.

I bought some recordings at the video/CD store of El Corte Ingles, which had a good stock. Virgin had a somewhat depleted stock of Zarzuela recordings when we visited.

The next evening we had a guided tapas tour, but since I desperately needed clean clothes, our guide spent an hour with us in El Corte Ingles helping me shop-quite beyond her contracted duties. Then we were taken to small restaurants specializing in specific tapas-a delicious experience. Again, all paid in advance: she just recommended things and we chose what we wanted.

M&B also supplied detailed restaurant recommendations for every location we visited, tailored to our expressed tastes.

The next day we took a bullet train to Toledo on our own hook and explored it (not as thrilling in person as in El Greco’s famous “View”). That night we went to the excellent Flamenco show at the Tablao Flamenco Restaurante and were able to order anything we wanted from the menu. It was one of the best meals we had in Spain, and again, all paid in advance.

I can’t emphasize enough how relaxing it is to know that most costs are already taken care of and you can just relax and enjoy yourself.

What follows is car info. Scroll down past it if you aren’t interested and want to read about the rest of the trip.

The fifth day we walked to the nearby Atocha Railway Station to pick up our rental car from Avis. That too was reserved and paid for in advance, a modest but comfortable BMW. We had to pay for insurance on top of the regular rental because our Visa insurance didn’t cover the required liability insurance.

Avis in the train station in Madrid was hard to find-in the area right by the tracks where trains pull in. The people behind the desk were fine, but the fellow who took us to our car had very limited English and did almost no instruction. I couldn’t get the car started until I summoned him back and he showed me the BMW’s pushbutton starter (trick: step on the brake while pushing the button). The car’s instruction manual was entirely in Spanish, which surprised me in this age of the EU. We had a terrible time trying to figure out the car’s light controls, especially since the system described in the manual was slightly different from the one actually in the car.

On the highway a couple of truck drivers shouted at us to say something was wrong with our car, but we couldn’t figure out what. I thought maybe my lights were on high beam at first. Finally in Granada a young bicyclist gave up trying to make us understand what was wrong with our car at a stoplight and went around to the front of it and slammed the hood shut. I must have accidentally unlatched it when I was trying out various controls. People were just trying to be helpful but we were too dense to get it.

I had thought I’d gotten through all those narrow streets unscathed, but when we returned the car in Granada I noticed a small paint scratch on the front bumper, probably from a wall brushed by somewhere. We had declined the no-deductible insurance, and the damage was less than the deductible, so we got charged. However, it looks as if my Visa insurance will reimburse me, though the paperwork hasn’t come through yet. Visa said normally they would cover damage only if I declined all coverage from the rental company, but seemed to accept my explanation that we were required to take out liability insurance that Visa didn’t offer, and it was inseparable from collision insurance.

M&B gave us detailed driving instructions from the Michelin site, rather like Google maps, plus maps marked with our route in highliner. This worked pretty well, though we still managed to go astray (rule: if there’s an important turn to make inside a city if it’s marked on your driving directions there will be no street sign at the intersection itself and if you see a street sign you won’t be able to find it on your map-only partly kidding). But with our various navigational aids we were able to find our way back on route most of the time. A couple of times our rudimentary Spanish was invaluable when we had to stop and ask for directions.

It took us quite a while to figure out the Spanish method for validating a parking slip in a parking garage (by paying at a machine and inserting the time-stamped slip into it to be validated before driving toward an exit to insert it again in a different machine). This is so foreign to American practices that it was difficult to absorb.

By the way, a couple of times we forgot that the bottom floor of a building is the zero floor in Europe, and what Americans call the second floor is the first in Europe.

Generally we found driving much easier than in Italy. On two-lane highways I had to get used to the fact that there seemed to be only two driving speeds: slower than the limit for trucks, and much faster than the limit for cars. Determined not to get a ticket, I tried to observe the limits, but that meant dodging back and forth between the too-slow and too-fast lanes a lot. The only other pattern I wasn’t used to was that people emerging onto a freeway from an onramp do not expect you to slow down and allow them to proceed as would happen in the U.S. They stop and wait for an opening in the traffic. Trying to let drivers come on ahead of me just seemed to confuse and alarm them.

OK, enough about driving. Now back to the trip.

We drove through broad plains and steep mountain passes to the lovely little town of Carmona. It’s notable for not being given over entirely to tourists. A minimum of touristy shops, with lots of local people gathering in the square in the evening, good restaurants, beautiful architecture. M&B had chosen it as strategically located between Cordoba and Sevilla. I had our best-tasting jamon iberico (the famous local ham) in the Ferrara Restaurant attached to our hotel, the lovely Alcazar de la Reina. The hotel has a stunning swimming pool and grand views from the edge of this hill town.

The next day’s drive to Cordoba took much longer than we had expected: the city sprawls hugely, and penetrating to the train station where we were told to park the car was much more difficult than we expected. We should have allowed 2 hours. We were late to our rendezvous with our guide as a result (we would rent a local cell phone if we did this again-it would have come in handy several times). Our guide there was very expert and spent about 3 hours showing us around the Mezquita and the Cathedral as well giving us a glimpse of many delightful private courtyards which were open for the annual patio contest. Because we arrived too late to eat on our own she also showed us where to get a quick breakfast of pastry and tea, introducing us to a local citron pie which was delicious. This is one of the chief advantages of having a personal guide: you can have a bite or a bathroom break when you need one and get tips about shopping and restaurants from a local expert.

We took a wrong turn out of Cordoba and came upon the very much restored but delightful castle at Almodovar del Rio. It would be a great place to take kids. A little kitschy, but it gives an excellent idea of what a Medieval castle would have been like in its heyday.

The next day our drive to Sevilla went much more smoothly. It was a short drive, and we had no trouble locating and parking at the train station (I felt safe parking right in front of the entrance near the taxi stand). We then took a cab to meet in the lobby of the lavish Hotel Alfonso XIII (much too expensive for our budget, but worth exploring). They had genuine anquities for sale in display cases at 5-figure prices. We were early, so we indulged ourselves in the lavish brunch buffet (caviar, anyone?).

Our guide took us through the lovely Alcazar Palace and the Cathedral, then we set out on our own to the archeological museum. If you have any interest in antiquity, this is not to be missed, with wonderful Roman mosaics and sculptures and earlier Phoencian remains. The nearby folk museum was not so interesting, but the imposing Plaza de Espana (built for the 1919 world’s fair) and the lovely adjacent Maria Luisa Park were very nice. An overly friendly cab driver tried to sell us $50 US bills in exchange for Euros at par, but I assumed they were counterfeit and declined.

We explored Carmona a bit more before leaving, then were off the next day for Vejer La Frontera. Oscar had explained that the ritzy Costa del Sol on the Mediteranean was very touristy, very over-developed, very crowded; so for our beach break he sent us west to the Costa de la Luz, on the Atlantic Coast. The contrast with the famous Marbella region we later drove through was stunning. Vejer was another adorable white town, with more tourists than Carmona, but still feeling like a real town. There we had a comfortable rented apartment for five days and used it as a base to explore Cadiz, the “white towns” of Ubrique and Ronda in the lovely national park surrounding them (including an enchanting cork forest) on a very, very long day trip, and the fabulous beaches of nearby Conill-one developed for families with restaurants and facilities, the one to the south across the bridge almost deserted for miles. These are golden beaches of very fine sand decoratively strewn with lovely unbroken shells and very little litter. Very gradual drop-off so you hike across very wide beaches and then into surf that doesn’t come up to your waist until you go far out. Because the beach has a shallow slope, the water gets relatively warm-a perfect place to play in the water. My wife is a real beach connoisseur, and she pronounced this the best ever (we’ve been to Kauai and Tobago).

At the beach at Zahara las Atunes we ran into what is evidently not an uncommon scam in Spain: a vagrant with an impressive vest and a walkie-talkie ushered us ceremoniously into a parking spot in what was obviously a free lot and wanted us to pay him for the service. We encountered this scam again in Malaga. If the “attendant” has been truly helpful you might give him half a euro, but he’ll try to get much more; but don’t assume by paying these scruffy guys that you’ve actually paid for your parking spot, or you may wind up getting a ticket.

Vejer was another very picturesque town. I stumbled on a stone and ripped off a toenail which got infected, but it was treated for free by a very kindly and skilful doctor at a local clinic we happened on by chance. We ate twice at the Moroccan restaurant in the Hotel Califa-yum.

The next stint of driving took us to Malaga, where we were put up in the lovely Hotel Ataraznas, opened just two years previously, so it wouldn’t have been in a typical guidebook or shown up on the screens of most travel agents. If you stay there, however, ask for a room on the side or back rather than on the street side, since the merchants at the nearby market start noisily unloading their goods at about 5 in the morning. The Mozarabic-style market is fascinating (we bought great fresh strawberries). We explored the Alcazaba palace and my wife had a massage and steam bath and the hamam while I explored the Picasso museum (the entrance is hard to find, even following the signs-look for a concentration of souvenir shops selling Picasso-related materials). We were delighted with the small but very interesting Museo de Artes y Tradiciones Populares near our hotel.

We got lost going both in and out of Malaga.

We then took a very long and slow road winding through mountains to Capileira in Las Alpujarras, beneath the snow-capped Sierra Madres. People come here from all over the world to hike and do mountain-biking. The trails are exceedingly vaguely marked, though, and we got thoroughly lost on the one hike we tried. The Hotel Finca Los Llanos was very pleasant. My eKit phone card wouldn’t work with their phone system but on the other hand they didn’t charge us for breakfast (why, we’re not sure, since it was advertised a paid buffet-but we weren’t complaining). Throughout the trip the countryside was green and lush with flowers, alive with singing birds. May is the perfect time of year to explore Andalucia. Capileira was a wonderful respite from the big cities we were often threading our way through, even though we didn’t get in much hiking. The hotel had a very nice pool.

About phones: Spanish 800 numbers work much like American ones. I’d need to drop a euro coin in the slot to initiate the call, but then I’d dial the local Spanish access 800 number of eKit and talk as long as I wanted, with the coin being returned when I hung up. Tip: some phones require you to wait for the tone, then insert the coin, then push a plunger sideways to make the coin descend into the machine, then wait again for the tone before dialing.

After Capileira we moved on to nearby Granada, where we stayed at the four-star Hotel Hesperia, our most luxurious hotel, very near the Cathedral where we heard the organ playing and enjoyed the excellent gift shop and the adjoining Capilla Real where Ferdinand and Isabella are buried. We had a very interesting guided tour of the Albayzin and a late afternoon guided tour of the Generalife and Alhambra. Our guide cannily took us in with the last scheduled group of the day, and by loitering behind the other tourists we had an essentially private view of this stunning palace and its gardens. We had decided to try the famed restaurant La Mimbre near the entrance, and she guided us to it before leaving. The food was fabulous and the service great, but we wished we’d dressed more warmly for our outdoor dining experience. A shuttle bus takes people cheaply down the hill from the Alhambra from just beside La Mimbre every ten minutes or so, back downtown.

Another delightful discovery in Granada was a terrific record shop with an excellent selection of recordings of flamenco, Spanish classical and popular music, and zarzuela. It had DVD’s compatible with American equipment which we had not found in Madrid’s Virgin Megastore or El Corte Ingles. It is very close to the Plaza Bib-Rambla, on a small street between Calle Reyes Catolicos and the plaza. I would recommend it highly to anyone interested in Spanish music. The owner was happy to make suggestions and even open CDs and play samples for us. But remember that PAL DVDs will not play on American DVD players-though they will play on some computers.

The next day we took an early train for Madrid, and departed in the middle of the night for the airport to fly back to the U.S. via Milan.

The total charge by Madrid and Beyond came to just under $6,000 for a custom-tailored 20-day vacation for two (the air travel to and from Spain was separate of course; they handle travel only within Spain). Our only additional expenses: gas, food, souvenirs, admissions to sites where we didn’t have prepaid tours. Tipping is not generally expected in Spain.

You can decide whether you think this sounds like something you’d like to try, but they will gladly draw up an itinerary and give you a price for any tour of Spain you might care to design. If you accept their proposal, you pay deposit in advance, then the rest shortly before departing, using your charge card.

We had some initial problems getting through to M&B using e-mail (they said they’d had server problems). If you don’t hear back from them within a few days of contacting them it’s worth phoning (34) 91 758-0063.

Paul Brians

Research Paper Assignment

The Assignment

Of necessity, the instructions for this assignment are somewhat vague. Each student will have to explore different resources and will need to develop an individual approach to the subject. The goal is a brief but detailed exploration of some narrowly defined aspect of the Humanities during the period stretching from the Enlightenment to World War I. These instructions are aimed mainly at distance-learning students, but local students in Pullman should also find much of them useful. The students working in Pullman who can spend time in the library there have a number of advantages in working on the literary and philosophical topics. Distance-learning students can request journal articles and books by e-mail from the library. For information on how to use WSU’s library remotely, see the Distance Degree Library Services page. The DDLS librarians should be able to help you find materials you can use if you phone them at (800) 435-5832.

Note that this is not an Internet-based research assignment. You are expected to use the resources of the WSU libraries, both books and journals. The “request this item” button in Griffin will lead you to a page where you can request items from WSU to be mailed to you. If you have access to a large public library like Seattle Public or a good academic library attached to a college, you may use that with permission from me; but do not try to rely on small local libraries. They will not have the kinds of specialized materials you are expected to use in your research.

It is crucial that you be in constant contact with me about what you are doing, what you are trying, what is working and what is not. I want to have e-mail from you at least every couple of weeks about how your research is going. Any time you run into a problem or have a question, drop me a line at paulbrians@gmail.com. Do not put this assignment off until near the due date–you will certainly not be able to do a satisfactory job at the last moment.

 

Suggested research paper topics for which you will probably need a large library:

Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary: its composition and reception in the 18th century.
Voltaire’s thought and reputation and the French Revolution.
Voltaire and deism.
The relationship of Baroque music or art to the political structures of the age of Absolutism.
Émile Zola and art.
Romanticism and the French Revolution.
The relationship between Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Influences of
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra on the 20th century.
Nietzsche’s relationship to the enlightenment, to the romantic movement.

 

More general topics which can be done from anywhere
(must be chosen from the artists and musicians listed on the syllabus or in assignments for this course)

Any topic dealing with Goethe’s Faust.
Any topic dealing with Zola’s Germinal.
Any topic dealing with Notes from Underground.
The influence of an artist or musician on others. The history of a particular movement in art or music.
The influence of a literary work on a work of art or piece of music.
The reflection of historical events in a piece of art or music.
Other topics relating to art or music, but avoid strictly biographical papers which simply retell the individual’s life without examining his or her works. Many students enjoy working on operas.

There is a list of opera videotapes you can borrow from WSU’s MMS at it’s new webpage.Look up information about the opera that interests you to make sure it was written between 1700 and 1914–the period covered by this course. Then call the DDP librarian at (800) 435-5832 for help in checking out your opera.

All papers on art and music must examine individual works of art and music the writer has seen reproductions of or heard recordings of and describe how they look and sound. Do not treat operas as if they were plays, paying attention only to plot and dialogue.

 

Steps in doing the assignment

  1. Select your topic and have it approved by me.
  2. Do some background work to find sources and submit an annotated bibliography (a list of sources, with an explanation attached to each one of why it should be useful).
  3. Do your research USING THE WSU LIBRARY.
  4. Write your paper and turn it in.
  5. After I have marked it up, you must revise your paper following my suggestions to improve your grade

See the syllabus for due dates.

 

Good reference works to check for information
(Note: “Dictionaries” are often actually encyclopedias in disguise.)

 

For art
The Dictionary of Art
Art Index

 

For literature
The Humanities Index
Dictionary of Literary Biography
Oxford Companion to French Literature
Oxford Companion to English Literature
Oxford Companion to German Literature

Especially useful are the following massive sets published by Gale Research. If you are lucky enough to find a library that has them, be warned that they are tricky to use. You can also ask Distance Degree Library Services (DDPlib@wsu.edu or (800) 435-5832 ) to help you use the copies that are on the WSU campus and photocopy and send you the relevant pages. Ask a librarian to show you how. Which set you use is determined by the death date of the author on whom you are doing research. Zola died in the early 20th century, so for information on him you have to look in the third set.

Literature Criticism 1400-1800
Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism
(Note the inconsistency in this title, “literary,” not “literature” like the others.)

 

For Music

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (available online through Griffin)
Music Index
New Grove Dictionary of Opera

For Philosophy
Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Philosopher’s Index
The Humanities Index (availablee online through Griffin)

If a library lacks one of these, ask a librarian to show you something similar.

 

Tips:

Begin by looking up your topic in the Encyclopedia Britannica, available through the WSU Libraries pages here. Note bibliographic citations at the end of the articles you read; these may be sources you’ll want to track down. Other computer-based encyclopedias like Encarta are inadequate for the kind of research you will be doing.

Go to WSU Libraries. This is a huge and powerful database (which may also be available online or on CD-ROM at a library near you), but it needs some care in using it. Many other libraries have bound, printed volumes of this as well. Here are some tips:

Don’t use the MLA bibliography to look for articles about Voltaire or Nietzsche. It is best for literature, not philosophy (see “For Philosophy,” above).

After you do your intial search, you can use the “limit search” button to restrict the search to articles and books in English unless you are fluent in some relevant foreign language. Or, alternatively, when you first enter MLA, you can click on the button marked “Advanced Search” and narrow the search to English before you start.

Entries are given ten at a time. To see the next ten, click on the “Next Page” button.

Ignore references to dissertations. You do not have easy access to these and they are usually not considered authoritative sources.

Using the on-line version, copy and paste the bibliographic data into a word processing document to save you time. You can reformat it later.

Do not assume that all these books and articles are available in the WSU library; but you may well be able to get some of them through Summit.

In the case of journal articles you want from WSU note that many of the online databases such as Project Muse go back only a few years–you will need to search the last 25 or 30 years for many of these topics.

Similarly, if the item you are seeking is actually a chapter in a book rather than in a journal, search for the title of the book it appeared in, not the author or title of the chapter.

In the case of books, use the Griffin Catalog at http://www.systems.wsu.edu/griffin/wsugate.htm to search for the author or title. If you have only a subject, but no author or title yet, note that often a keyword search is more effective than a subject start to get started. For instance, to find the English translation of the source of Bizet’s Carmen you need to use “Carmen” and “Merimee” as keywords (you would have read in Grove or the Britannica that Prosper Merimée wrote the original novel).

The MLA Bibliography online covers articles published since 1963, and in the earlier years, many interesting journals were not indexed. But you can read the bibliographies of the articles and books you find here to discover what the classic earlier works are which discuss your topic.

Do not stop at the first few hits. Not all the information you find will be useful. You need to do some background reading on your subject to get a sense of which sources might be helpful. This is the reason for checking the encyclopedia first, before starting your MLA search.

Finally, local students find your materials in the library, and DDP students use the “Request This Item” button in Griffin.

To begin your library research, start at the DDLS website http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/electric/library/, in the left-hand frame, click on “Article Indexes/Full Text & More,” then on “General & Multidisciplinary.” There are several databases on this page that may be helpful to you, depending on your topic:

1. ArticleFirst (request articles from DDLS)

2. JSTOR (full-text)

3. Oxford English Dictionary (full-text)

4. WorldCat (request items from Interlibrary Loan, or DDLS)

At the bottom of the “General & Multidisciplinary” page, you will find another link to “Humanities” resources. Click on that link, and you will find the following databases which may be useful:

1. Art Abstracts (request articles from DDLS)

2. Arts & Humanities Search (request articles from DDLS)

3. Grove Dictionary of Art (full-text)

4. Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians (full-text)

5. International Index to Music Periodicals (request articles from DDLS)

6. MLA (request articles from DDLS)

7. Project Muse (full-text)

8. ProQuest Direct (many full-text)

Beware of sources dating back before 1950; most of them are out of date. Normally I will not accept such sources. If you are unclear on how to access any citations you find in the above databases, contact DDLS. (DDPlib@wsu.edu or 1-800-435-5832)

Another service available through Griffin is WorldCat via FirstSearch. Start at the usual Gateway page and click on “Article Indexes/Full Text & More,” then on “General & Multidisciplinary,” then on “FirstSearch.” If you can’t figure out how to create and use login ID and password, ask a librarian. DDP students write Extended Degree Library Services at DDPlib@wsu.edu or phone (800) 435-5832. Once inside FirstSearch, click on the first “Database Areas” link: “Arts & Humanities. Then, under “General Databases,” click on “WorldCat.” This database will give you mostly books, not articles. Some of them may be very old. Beware of sources dating back before 1950. Most of them are out of date. By clicking on “Limit Search” you can limit your search to books dating 1950-1999, or any other two years you want, and while you’re at it, limit the language to English. FirstSearch may tell you whether the book is in the WSU library; but you may also be able to borrow a book we don’t own from another library near you or through the Interlibrary Loan service of your local library. This latter option, however, can be a very slow process, so you need to plan weeks in advance if you want to try it.

A faster alternative is Summit, a free interlibrary loan service for certain Washington and Oregon libraries only. This can be especially valuable if the only copy of a book you need is checked out from WSU. If you do not find what you want in Griffin, click the green “Search Summit” button. Again, ask your librarian if you have questions.

In looking for books, the obvious place to start is Griffin itself. Remember: you cannot search for article titles or authors within Griffin, only for the titles of journals which contain such articles. The natural temptation is to search by subject, but this is usually a mistake unless you know the precise wording of the Library of Congress description of the subject you are looking for. Instead, use “keyword” searching to type in terms that are associated with your subject.

ProQuest, also available through Griffin, is good for doing research on current events, but is rather poor for the kinds of subjects you will be studying in this class. Because ProQuest only goes back to the mid-1980s it is missing many important and useful articles that are included in the MLA bibliography. In addition, MLA contains books as well as articles while ProQuest is confined to articles only. Its only advantage over MLA is that you may be able to view articles you find either as a whole or in part on your computer screen, without having to wait for them to be sent by the library. Give it a try, but don’t spend a lot of time trying to do serious research there. Librarians will be able to give you advice about which databases are most appropriate for your subject.

Searching the Web

The Web is good for pictures, dates, and basic information; but it should not provide the main sources for your paper. Papers based mostly or entirely on Web research will not receive passing grades. Here are some tips on Web searching to get you started. Serious scholarship on the humanities in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries is spotty at best online. However, there are some extremely valuable sources out there. Here are some tips to guide you as you search.

Be flexible about trying different search terms. This bit of advice applies to all kinds of searches, not just on the Web. If you are searching for Voltaire’s influence on the French Revolution, you will probably also want to look separately for sites dealing with Voltaire and sites on the history of the French Revolution. You might also look for the terms “enlightenment” and “revolution” together.

Google is now the premier search engine because it gives better results for most searches, by finding first the sites to which most other sites have linked. The upshot is that pages that others have found useful bounce immediately to the top of Google’s hit list. Try typing in “influence of the enlightenment on the french revolution” (between quotation marks) in Google and you’ll find a ton of papers on this topic other students have written. Be cautious about using them as sources–they aren’t necessarily experts, but you can certainly get ideas here. Just don’t copy them. Remember, I can find these sources just as easily as you can.

Here’s an important tip. The first time I tried this, I mistyped “enlightenment” as “enlightnement,” and found only five pages whose authors had made the same typing error–all of them useless. If you get an unexpectedly small number of hits, check your spelling.

Asking an Expert

Sometimes the easiest way to find a good Web page is to ask someone knowledgeable; but how do you find such a person?

The obvious answer, is TRY ME! In fact, part of this assignment involves me or a librarian giving you suggestions about what sources to look at. You are absolutely expected to follow up on these suggestions. Papers which turn out weak because suggestions were ignored will receive a failing grade. For instance, anyone who is interested in writing about Voltaire and the French Revolution is always told by me to look at an old but excellent source: volumes 7-10 of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization. These are big fat volumes, so may look forbidding; but a few minutes spent with their indexes will teach you more about your topic than many hours of Internet searching (and they’re wonderfully readable). They also have the great advantage of being in just about any library, even small local ones. But the only way you are likely to hear about these books is from me. Asking for help is not “cheating”; it’s one of the main skills we are trying to teach you.

 

Doing your research

Step 1: Gathering and selecting information

One of the secrets of a good research paper is gathering much more information than you will actually use at the end. You want to avoid at all cost writing a paper on sources you don’t understand. Let’s look back at an article I once found on “The Influence of the Enlightenment on the French Revolution” at the Mining Co. (now defunct). Looking more closely, I found that it refers us to arguments by Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine about the French Revolution. (I also note that the author was not particularly skilled in spelling and punctuation; I wouldn’t want to copy his errors.) In fact, this was a page from a course in which students were reading articles by these two authors. The names are vaguely familiar, but if you look their names up in the encylopedia you’ll discover that the first was an Englishman and the second an American. Therefore these people may have analyzed the French Revolution; but they were not themselves French, or involved in the Revolution directly. We may decide not to use them, because they tell us more about what non-French contemporaries thought about the Revolution than what modern historians think about it. Encyclopedias are great resources for giving us background information to help explain what we are reading.

Suppose you had used Griffin to look for books whose titles included the words “French Revolution” and found Roger Lawrence Williams’ The French Revolution of 1870-1871. But because you have done background reading on the revolution in the encyclopedia, you realize that this book can’t possibly refer to the 1789 revolution. In fact, there were several “French revolutions” of which only the 1789 one is usually referred to as the French Revolution. You have to know enough about your topic to reject irrelevant sources like this.

Step 2: Evaluating information

Judging authoritativeness

If you find a book in a scholarly library or in the pages of a scholarly journal, it has probably gone through one or more screening processes to ensure that it has some degree of authority and reliability. However, anyone can publish anything on the Web, which is filled with amateurish, biased, fraudulent and satirical pages which can damage your paper if you depend on them. How do you decide whether a Web source you’ve found is from a trustworthy source?

  1. Trust brand names. Articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica may not be perfect, but they come from respectable sources.
  2. Look for scholarly authorship. Is the author a specialist in the field working for a famous or distinguished university?
  3. Do other people frequently refer to this source as authoritative? Check bibliographies.
  4. Has it been selected by some thoughtful scholarly group such as the people who run The English Server at the University of Washington (http://eserver.org/) or created by a well-known institution such as the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art (http://www.metmuseum.org/)?

Judging Comprehensibility

Use a source only if you understand it. Of course you can increase your comprehension by using dictionaries and encyclopedias; but, if even after trying that, much of what you are reading remains obscure to you, move on to another source you can better understand. Trying to use a source which the student author has not understood is a fatal flaw of many research papers.

Judging relevance

Not every item you find by using a key word or subject search will really be relevant to your topic. You need to define the topic of your paper yourself, not let it be defined by a dumb search engine. This almost always means learning more about a topic than you will be able to use directly in your paper. Be ruthless about throwing away irrelevant material.

Detecting bias

Suppose you had found the site called “The French Revolution” which seemed pretty well organized and straightforward. But as you read through it you note numerous Biblical quotations and much discussion of religious issues. You slowly realize that the author of this site has a very definite point of view: he is a conservative Christian attacking the ideas of the Enlightenment as expressed in the French Revolution. You may or may not agree with him, but you need to judge his words in the light of that information and compare what he says with what other historians say. You may also realize that this is mostly a lecture outline and that you would have to attend his course to get the real substance of his arguments. Don’t let yourself be “captured” by a single source.

Getting help

If you are having trouble deciding whether a source you have found is useful, share it with me and let me advise you. Constant communication with the teacher is an essential tool of doing good research. Don’t flounder on your own. If the source is a Web page, send me the URL at brians@wsu.edu.

For help with the WSU library, write Extended Degree Library Services at DDP@wsu.edu or phone them at (800) 435-5832.

Step 3: Taking notes

Photocopiers and Web browsers have made the gathering and reproduction of raw data much easier; you can even use recent versions of Microsoft Word to open a Web page directly and save it as a document. However, this is not note-taking. Nothing is more frustrating than sitting down on the night before a paper is due to that pile of photocopies and books you gathered weeks ago, only to find that most of it is irrelevant junk and that you desperately need other materials. Spend a good long time in the library or on the Web looking closely at the resources you find to decide whether they are worth copying, checking out, or otherwise reproducing them. A highlighter can be a useful tool in marking important passages (just don’t use one on a library book!), but ultimately you’ll need some real notes. The old file-card system still works well; but if you’re comfortable at a computer you’ll find that organizing your notes in a database or the outline view of your word processing software will work even better. Make sure that every note is securely tagged as coming from a specific source with a complete bibliographic citation (author, title, etc.)

Once you have a good many notes, begin to sort them into groups by topic. Try various arrangments, and a structure for your paper should slowly emerge.

Step 4: Organizing your paper

Always begin with at least an informal outline. Don’t just start writing without any notion of where you are headed.

Create some logical order for your paper. A chronological order may explain how some idea developed. A geographical order may relate a topic across national boundaries.

Digest your sources and use them for your own purposes. A summary of an article followed by another summary of a different article, and so on, is not a paper. It is just a set of notes. You need to compare sources, often referring to two different ones in the same paragraph or even sentence.

Avoid making your big points first and then trailing off into minor ones. Structure your paper to lead up to a strong conclusion.

Step 5: Making Citations

For this class, you will use the Modern Language Association format, which is explained in Arthur C. Banks’ helpful “Guide for Writing Research Papers.” Pay close attention to the section on “Parenthetical Documentation.” Do not substitute APA style, in which only last name of the author and the date of the article are given. This does not work in the humanities. Page numbers are crucial.

Cite only sources you actually use; use only sources you cite.

Call your list of sources “Sources Cited,” not “Bibliography.” A bibliography is a much more ambitious and thorough project than what you will be doing for this paper.

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!

Cite a source not only when you quote from it, but when you paraphrase from it or draw ideas from it. Failure to do so is plagiarism, and can incur severe penalties (typically, failing the course).

Always introduce your sources by name; don’t just start quoting them. For instance: “Jessica L. Rabbit argues in her article on Los Angeles history that . . . (98).” Note when you mention the author of an article or book in this way, you need not repeat it in the parenthetical citation. Later citations from the same source do not always need introduction if they occur soon after the original one, so you can just cite the source as follows: “(Rabbit 72).”

For information on how to cite Web sources, see this Web page.

Avoiding plagiarism

Computers make it easy to copy. Don’t be tempted. Computers also make it easy to track down the sources of copied information. I am ruthless with plagiarists. Persons caught plagiarizing material in their papers will not be allowed to revise for a better grade. All cases of plagiarism will result in a failing grade for the course and a report to Student Conduct.

Other helpful documents

Be sure to check out these before you write your paper:

MANDATORY: Helpful Hints for Writing Class Papers

OPTIONAL BUT EXTREMELY USEFUL: Common Errors in English

These contain directions for avoiding my pet peeves.

Length

The minimum length for this assignment (see syllabus) is very, very short for a research paper. Unless your writing is wonderfully concise, you will need to write more. If you cannot stretch your material to this minimum you don’t have enough material or–more likely–aren’t examining it closely enough. Believe it or not, the chief reason people run out of things to say is that they have defined their topics too broadly. A narrow, tightly-focused topic will allow you to get specific and dig into the finer shades of the topic, and finding enough to write about will be no problem. Avoid vague generalizations.

If your paper reads like an encyclopedia article, giving an overview of a person’s entire career, it is too broad. You need to focus on a narrow subject within the general work of the writer, artist, philosopher, or musician. You should not write at all about their birth, childhood, and education unless they are strictly relevant to your topic.

If you are writing about one of the books we study in this class, your paper needs to go well beyond the ideas and facts presented in the relevant study guide. You are supposed to become something of an expert in your subject, and come up with new information and ideas not already discussed in class.

Revising your paper

Almost all the papers in this course should be revised at least once. That is part of the point of the class, teaching you how to write better. Be sure to incorporate suggestions that are made, particularly broad, general ones like “this section lacks focus–concentrate on a single topic.” Merely cleaning up typos and spelling errors is not revision–it’s proofreading, and will not improve your grade.

Be careful about trying to solve problems by simply moving chunks of text around. Usually you have to do some actual rewriting to improve a paper. When a paragraph is moved, it often needs to be adjusted somewhat to fit within its new environment. If I ask you to develop a section further, do not simply cut it out. You get no increase in grade for simply making the specific spelling and grammatical changes I suggest; you have to do actual rewriting for that.

Seeking help

The point of this assignment is not to fling you in the sea of knowledge and stand by to see if you can avoid the sharks; it is to teach you something more about how to do research in the humanities and write about it. You get no credit for struggling silently on your own. Again, please use the resources available to you: For questions about this assignment, ask me. Keep asking me questions and sending me ideas. If you find yourself tempted to tell someone else “I don’t know what he wants,” it means you need to ask me more questions. For help with the WSU library, ask the DDP librarian at DDPlib@wsu.edu or phone them at (800) 435-5832. If you need help with your writing, try the WSU Online Writing Lab at http://owl.wsu.edu/. You can send them drafts of your paper and they will help guide you through the process of revising it. You can even arrange to “chat” with a writing tutor in a chat room about your work. Take advantage of this terrific resource.

Step 6: Submitting your paper

Pullman students will hand in printed copy in person, but for DDP students, unlike most of your weekly writing assignments, which can be pasted into the forms in the Bridge, you need to send formally formatted papers through “My DDP.” This method is simple and works quite well, but write or phone DDP if you have any questions about how to use it. Be aware that papers submitted through My DDP may take up to a full working day to reach me.

I can open documents created by any version of Microsoft Word and many other word processors. If you are using Word Perfect, or some other word processor, let me know. I can open most of them, but there are a few I can’t.

I can also open any document that has been saved as HTML or in Rich Text Format (RTF).

Revising your paper

Your first draft will be marked up and commented on, but not assigned a letter grade. You will receive credit and a grade for for this paper only after having revised it. Fixing typos and other small slips according to my suggestions is mandatory, but not an important way to improve your grade. The only way to get a good grade is to follow the suggestions spelled out at the very end of your paper, which may call for more research, narrowing of topic, or reorganization of your paper. Note that this revision is mandatory, and that it must be done in order to pass the course.

Created by Paul Brians, July 2, 1998

Revised May 10, 2005

For Philosophy

For Philosophy
Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Philosopher’s Index
The Humanities Index (available online through Griffin)

If a library lacks one of these, ask a librarian to show you something similar.

 

Tips:

Begin by looking up your topic in the Encyclopedia Britannica, available through the WSU Libraries pages here. Note bibliographic citations at the end of the articles you read; these may be sources you’ll want to track down. Other computer-based encyclopedias like Encarta are inadequate for the kind of research you will be doing.

Go to WSU Libraries. This is a huge and powerful database (which may also be available online or on CD-ROM at a library near you), but it needs some care in using it. Many other libraries have bound, printed volumes of this as well. Here are some tips:

Don’t use the MLA bibliography to look for articles about Voltaire or Nietzsche. It is best for literature, not philosophy.

After you do your intial search, you can use the “limit search” button to restrict the search to articles and books in English unless you are fluent in some relevant foreign language. Or, alternatively, when you first enter MLA, you can click on the button marked “Advanced Search” and narrow the search to English before you start.

Entries are given ten at a time. To see the next ten, click on the “Next Page” button.

Ignore references to dissertations. You do not have easy access to these and they are usually not considered authoritative sources.

Using the on-line version, copy and paste the bibliographic data into a word processing document to save you time. You can reformat it later.

Do not assume that all these books and articles are available in the WSU library; but you may well be able to get some of them through Summit.

In the case of journal articles you want from WSU note that many of the online databases such as Project Muse go back only a few years–you will need to search the last 25 or 30 years for many of these topics.

Similarly, if the item you are seeking is actually a chapter in a book rather than in a journal, search for the title of the book it appeared in, not the author or title of the chapter.

In the case of books, use the Griffin Catalog at http://www.systems.wsu.edu/griffin/wsugate.htm to search for the author or title. If you have only a subject, but no author or title yet, note that often a keyword search is more effective than a subject start to get started. For instance, to find the English translation of the source of Bizet’s Carmen you need to use “Carmen” and “Merimee” as keywords (you would have read in Grove or the Britannica that Prosper Merimée wrote the original novel).

The MLA Bibliography online covers articles published since 1963, and in the earlier years, many interesting journals were not indexed. But you can read the bibliographies of the articles and books you find here to discover what the classic earlier works are which discuss your topic.

Do not stop at the first few hits. Not all the information you find will be useful. You need to do some background reading on your subject to get a sense of which sources might be helpful. This is the reason for checking the encyclopedia first, before starting your MLA search.

Finally, local students find your materials in the library, and DDP students use the “Request This Item” button in Griffin.

To begin your library research, start at the DDLS website http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/electric/library/, in the left-hand frame, click on “Article Indexes/Full Text & More,” then on “General & Multidisciplinary.” There are several databases on this page that may be helpful to you, depending on your topic:

1. ArticleFirst (request articles from DDLS)

2. JSTOR (full-text)

3. Oxford English Dictionary (full-text)

4. WorldCat (request items from Interlibrary Loan, or DDLS)

At the bottom of the “General & Multidisciplinary” page, you will find another link to “Humanities” resources. Click on that link, and you will find the following databases which may be useful:

1. Art Abstracts (request articles from DDLS)

2. Arts & Humanities Search (request articles from DDLS)

3. Grove Dictionary of Art (full-text)

4. Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians (full-text)

5. International Index to Music Periodicals (request articles from DDLS)

6. MLA (request articles from DDLS)

7. Project Muse (full-text)

8. ProQuest Direct (many full-text)

Beware of sources dating back before 1950; most of them are out of date. Normally I will not accept such sources. If you are unclear on how to access any citations you find in the above databases, contact DDLS. (DDPlib@wsu.edu or 1-800-435-5832)

Another service available through Griffin is WorldCat via FirstSearch. Start at the usual Gateway page and click on “Article Indexes/Full Text & More,” then on “General & Multidisciplinary,” then on “FirstSearch.” If you can’t figure out how to create and use login ID and password, ask a librarian. DDP students write Extended Degree Library Services at DDPlib@wsu.edu or phone (800) 435-5832. Once inside FirstSearch, click on the first “Database Areas” link: “Arts & Humanities. Then, under “General Databases,” click on “WorldCat.” This database will give you mostly books, not articles. Some of them may be very old. Beware of sources dating back before 1950. Most of them are out of date. By clicking on “Limit Search” you can limit your search to books dating 1950-1999, or any other two years you want, and while you’re at it, limit the language to English. FirstSearch may tell you whether the book is in the WSU library; but you may also be able to borrow a book we don’t own from another library near you or through the Interlibrary Loan service of your local library. This latter option, however, can be a very slow process, so you need to plan weeks in advance if you want to try it.

A faster alternative is Summit, a free interlibrary loan service for certain Washington and Oregon libraries only. This can be especially valuable if the only copy of a book you need is checked out from WSU. If you do not find what you want in Griffin, click the green “Search Summit” button. Again, ask your librarian if you have questions.

In looking for books, the obvious place to start is Griffin itself. Remember: you cannot search for article titles or authors within Griffin, only for the titles of journals which contain such articles. The natural temptation is to search by subject, but this is usually a mistake unless you know the precise wording of the Library of Congress description of the subject you are looking for. Instead, use “keyword” searching to type in terms that are associated with your subject.

ProQuest, also available through Griffin, is good for doing research on current events, but is rather poor for the kinds of subjects you will be studying in this class. Because ProQuest only goes back to the mid-1980s it is missing many important and useful articles that are included in the MLA bibliography. In addition, MLA contains books as well as articles while ProQuest is confined to articles only. Its only advantage over MLA is that you may be able to view articles you find either as a whole or in part on your computer screen, without having to wait for them to be sent by the library. Give it a try, but don’t spend a lot of time trying to do serious research there. Librarians will be able to give you advice about which databases are most appropriate for your subject.

Searching the Web

The Web is good for pictures, dates, and basic information; but it should not provide the main sources for your paper. Papers based mostly or entirely on Web research will not receive passing grades. Here are some tips on Web searching to get you started. Serious scholarship on the humanities in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries is spotty at best online. However, there are some extremely valuable sources out there. Here are some tips to guide you as you search.

Be flexible about trying different search terms. This bit of advice applies to all kinds of searches, not just on the Web. If you are searching for Voltaire’s influence on the French Revolution, you will probably also want to look separately for sites dealing with Voltaire and sites on the history of the French Revolution. You might also look for the terms “enlightenment” and “revolution” together.

Google is now the premier search engine because it gives better results for most searches, by finding first the sites to which most other sites have linked. The upshot is that pages that others have found useful bounce immediately to the top of Google’s hit list. Try typing in “influence of the enlightenment on the french revolution” (between quotation marks) in Google and you’ll find a ton of papers on this topic other students have written. Be cautious about using them as sources–they aren’t necessarily experts, but you can certainly get ideas here. Just don’t copy them. Remember, I can find these sources just as easily as you can.

Here’s an important tip. The first time I tried this, I mistyped “enlightenment” as “enlightnement,” and found only five pages whose authors had made the same typing error–all of them useless. If you get an unexpectedly small number of hits, check your spelling.

Asking an Expert

Sometimes the easiest way to find a good Web page is to ask someone knowledgeable; but how do you find such a person?

The obvious answer, is TRY ME! In fact, part of this assignment involves me or a librarian giving you suggestions about what sources to look at. You are absolutely expected to follow up on these suggestions. Papers which turn out weak because suggestions were ignored will receive a failing grade. For instance, anyone who is interested in writing about Voltaire and the French Revolution is always told by me to look at an old but excellent source: volumes 7-10 of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization. These are big fat volumes, so may look forbidding; but a few minutes spent with their indexes will teach you more about your topic than many hours of Internet searching (and they’re wonderfully readable). They also have the great advantage of being in just about any library, even small local ones. But the only way you are likely to hear about these books is from me. Asking for help is not “cheating”; it’s one of the main skills we are trying to teach you.

 

Doing your research

Step 1: Gathering and selecting information

One of the secrets of a good research paper is gathering much more information than you will actually use at the end. You want to avoid at all cost writing a paper on sources you don’t understand. Let’s look back at an article I once found on “The Influence of the Enlightenment on the French Revolution” at the Mining Co. (now defunct). Looking more closely, I found that it refers us to arguments by Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine about the French Revolution. (I also note that the author was not particularly skilled in spelling and punctuation; I wouldn’t want to copy his errors.) In fact, this was a page from a course in which students were reading articles by these two authors. The names are vaguely familiar, but if you look their names up in the encyclopedia you’ll discover that the first was an Englishman and the second an American. Therefore these people may have analyzed the French Revolution; but they were not themselves French, or involved in the Revolution directly. We may decide not to use them, because they tell us more about what non-French contemporaries thought about the Revolution than what modern historians think about it. Encyclopedias are great resources for giving us background information to help explain what we are reading.

Suppose you had used Griffin to look for books whose titles included the words “French Revolution” and found Roger Lawrence Williams’ The French Revolution of 1870-1871. But because you have done background reading on the revolution in the encyclopedia, you realize that this book can’t possibly refer to the 1789 revolution. In fact, there were several “French revolutions” of which only the 1789 one is usually referred to as the French Revolution. You have to know enough about your topic to reject irrelevant sources like this.

Step 2: Evaluating information

Judging authoritativeness

If you find a book in a scholarly library or in the pages of a scholarly journal, it has probably gone through one or more screening processes to ensure that it has some degree of authority and reliability. However, anyone can publish anything on the Web, which is filled with amateurish, biased, fraudulent and satirical pages which can damage your paper if you depend on them. How do you decide whether a Web source you’ve found is from a trustworthy source?

  1. Trust brand names. Articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica may not be perfect, but they come from respectable sources.
  2. Look for scholarly authorship. Is the author a specialist in the field working for a famous or distinguished university?
  3. Do other people frequently refer to this source as authoritative? Check bibliographies.
  4. Has it been selected by some thoughtful scholarly group such as the people who run The English Server at the University of Washington (http://eserver.org/) or created by a well-known institution such as the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art (http://www.metmuseum.org/)?

Judging Comprehensibility

Use a source only if you understand it. Of course you can increase your comprehension by using dictionaries and encyclopedias; but, if even after trying that, much of what you are reading remains obscure to you, move on to another source you can better understand. Trying to use a source which the student author has not understood is a fatal flaw of many research papers.

Judging relevance

Not every item you find by using a key word or subject search will really be relevant to your topic. You need to define the topic of your paper yourself, not let it be defined by a dumb search engine. This almost always means learning more about a topic than you will be able to use directly in your paper. Be ruthless about throwing away irrelevant material.

Detecting bias

Suppose you had found the site called “The French Revolution” which seemed pretty well organized and straightforward. But as you read through it you note numerous Biblical quotations and much discussion of religious issues. You slowly realize that the author of this site has a very definite point of view: he is a conservative Christian attacking the ideas of the Enlightenment as expressed in the French Revolution. You may or may not agree with him, but you need to judge his words in the light of that information and compare what he says with what other historians say. You may also realize that this is mostly a lecture outline and that you would have to attend his course to get the real substance of his arguments. Don’t let yourself be “captured” by a single source.

Getting help

If you are having trouble deciding whether a source you have found is useful, share it with me and let me advise you. Constant communication with the teacher is an essential tool of doing good research. Don’t flounder on your own. If the source is a Web page, send me the URL at brians@wsu.edu.

For help with the WSU library, write Extended Degree Library Services at DDP@wsu.edu or phone them at (800) 435-5832.

Step 3: Taking notes

Photocopiers and Web browsers have made the gathering and reproduction of raw data much easier; you can even use recent versions of Microsoft Word to open a Web page directly and save it as a document. However, this is not note-taking. Nothing is more frustrating than sitting down on the night before a paper is due to that pile of photocopies and books you gathered weeks ago, only to find that most of it is irrelevant junk and that you desperately need other materials. Spend a good long time in the library or on the Web looking closely at the resources you find to decide whether they are worth copying, checking out, or otherwise reproducing them. A highlighter can be a useful tool in marking important passages (just don’t use one on a library book!), but ultimately you’ll need some real notes. The old file-card system still works well; but if you’re comfortable at a computer you’ll find that organizing your notes in a database or the outline view of your word processing software will work even better. Make sure that every note is securely tagged as coming from a specific source with a complete bibliographic citation (author, title, etc.)

Once you have a good many notes, begin to sort them into groups by topic. Try various arrangements, and a structure for your paper should slowly emerge.

Step 4: Organizing your paper

Always begin with at least an informal outline. Don’t just start writing without any notion of where you are headed.

Create some logical order for your paper. A chronological order may explain how some idea developed. A geographical order may relate a topic across national boundaries.

Digest your sources and use them for your own purposes. A summary of an article followed by another summary of a different article, and so on, is not a paper. It is just a set of notes. You need to compare sources, often referring to two different ones in the same paragraph or even sentence.

Avoid making your big points first and then trailing off into minor ones. Structure your paper to lead up to a strong conclusion.

Step 5: Making Citations

For this class, you will use the Modern Language Association format, which is explained in Arthur C. Banks’ helpful “Guide for Writing Research Papers” at http://webster.commnet.edu/mla/index.shtml Pay close attention to the section on “Parenthetical Documentation.” Do not substitute APA style, in which only last name of the author and the date of the article are given. This does not work in the humanities. Page numbers are crucial.

Cite only sources you actually use; use only sources you cite.

Call your list of sources “Sources Cited,” not “Bibliography.” A bibliography is a much more ambitious and thorough project than what you will be doing for this paper.

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!

Cite a source not only when you quote from it, but when you paraphrase from it or draw ideas from it. Failure to do so is plagiarism, and can incur severe penalties (typically, failing the course).

Always introduce your sources by name; don’t just start quoting them. For instance: “Jessica L. Rabbit argues in her article on Los Angeles history that . . . (98).” Note when you mention the author of an article or book in this way, you need not repeat it in the parenthetical citation. Later citations from the same source do not always need introduction if they occur soon after the original one, so you can just cite the source as follows: “(Rabbit 72).”

For information on how to cite Web sources, see this Web page.

Avoiding plagiarism

Computers make it easy to copy. Don’t be tempted. Computers also make it easy to track down the sources of copied information. I am ruthless with plagiarists. Persons caught plagiarizing material in their papers will not be allowed to revise for a better grade. All cases of plagiarism will result in a failing grade for the course and a report to Student Conduct.

Other helpful documents

Be sure to check out these before you write your paper:

MANDATORY: Helpful Hints for Writing Class Papers

OPTIONAL BUT EXTREMELY USEFUL: Common Errors in English

These contain directions for avoiding my pet peeves.

Length

The minimum length for this assignment (see syllabus) is very, very short for a research paper. Unless your writing is wonderfully concise, you will need to write more. If you cannot stretch your material to this minimum you don’t have enough material or–more likely–aren’t examining it closely enough. Believe it or not, the chief reason people run out of things to say is that they have defined their topics too broadly. A narrow, tightly-focused topic will allow you to get specific and dig into the finer shades of the topic, and finding enough to write about will be no problem. Avoid vague generalizations.

If your paper reads like an encyclopedia article, giving an overview of a person’s entire career, it is too broad. You need to focus on a narrow subject within the general work of the writer, artist, philosopher, or musician. You should not write at all about their birth, childhood, and education unless they are strictly relevant to your topic.

If you are writing about one of the books we study in this class, your paper needs to go well beyond the ideas and facts presented in the relevant study guide. You are supposed to become something of an expert in your subject, and come up with new information and ideas not already discussed in class.

Revising your paper

Almost all the papers in this course should be revised at least once. That is part of the point of the class, teaching you how to write better. Be sure to incorporate suggestions that are made, particularly broad, general ones like “this section lacks focus–concentrate on a single topic.” Merely cleaning up typos and spelling errors is not revision–it’s proofreading, and will not improve your grade.

Be careful about trying to solve problems by simply moving chunks of text around. Usually you have to do some actual rewriting to improve a paper. When a paragraph is moved, it often needs to be adjusted somewhat to fit within its new environment. If I ask you to develop a section further, do not simply cut it out. You get no increase in grade for simply making the specific spelling and grammatical changes I suggest; you have to do actual rewriting for that.

Seeking help

The point of this assignment is not to fling you in the sea of knowledge and stand by to see if you can avoid the sharks; it is to teach you something more about how to do research in the humanities and write about it. You get no credit for struggling silently on your own. Again, please use the resources available to you: For questions about this assignment, ask me. Keep asking me questions and sending me ideas. If you find yourself tempted to tell someone else “I don’t know what he wants,” it means you need to ask me more questions. For help with the WSU library, ask the DDP librarian at DDPlib@wsu.edu or phone them at (800) 435-5832. If you need help with your writing, try the WSU Online Writing Lab at http://owl.wsu.edu/. You can send them drafts of your paper and they will help guide you through the process of revising it. You can even arrange to “chat” with a writing tutor in a chat room about your work. Take advantage of this terrific resource.

Step 6: Submitting your paper

Pullman students will hand in printed copy in person, but for DDP students, unlike most of your weekly writing assignments, which can be pasted into the forms in the Bridge, you need to send formally formatted papers through “My DDP.” This method is simple and works quite well, but write or phone DDP if you have any questions about how to use it. Be aware that papers submitted through My DDP may take up to a full working day to reach me.

I can open documents created by any version of Microsoft Word and many other word processors. If you are using Word Perfect, or some other word processor, let me know. I can open most of them, but there are a few I can’t.

I can also open any document that has been saved as HTML or in Rich Text Format (RTF).

Revising your paper

Your first draft will be marked up and commented on, but not assigned a letter grade. You will receive credit and a grade for for this paper only after having revised it. Fixing typos and other small slips according to my suggestions is mandatory, but not an important way to improve your grade. The only way to get a good grade is to follow the suggestions spelled out at the very end of your paper, which may call for more research, narrowing of topic, or reorganization of your paper. Note that this revision is mandatory, and that it must be done in order to pass the course.

Created by Paul Brians, July 2, 1998

Revised May 10, 2005

Retirement address

Keynote speech for English Dept. Awards Ceremony, April 15, 2008

Teaching, Politics, & Me

Paul Brians

I’ve been asked to look back over my career in this highly political season, and I’ve decided to share with you some thoughts about my work in English and its relationship to politics. I think in many ways my career has been quite typical of many English professors, but some of our ideals and practices have been the target of criticism from some colleagues who have different ideas about the proper relationship of politics to English studies, and that’s the subject I want to explore.

I’ll begin with a well-known quotation from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

As a young teenager who loved books I was fascinated by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. What a concept! Bookish scholars not only understand the course of history, they can secretly shape it. Talk about being the “unaknowledged legislators of the world”! I read it a half-dozen times.

But then I read Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, which scrambled my brain and rendered me an unfit reader for Asimov’s simplistic fantasy. The complexity and vividness with which the Russian author conveyed the contradictions, tensions, convolutions of human experience blew open a window that gave me new idea of what fiction could do.

As a Comparative Literature Ph.D. student at Indiana University in the 60s, I learned not only how to read literature across national, linguistic, and temporal boundaries, but also how to relate literature to music, art, and philosophy. My interests gradually shifted to the history of ideas as reflected in the arts, and that is the course I have pursued ever since, in a variety of ways.

Part of situating literature in history is situating it politically, and my MA thesis was a exploration of the unique achievement of Emile Zola’s Germinal in exploring the complexities of the labor movements and various radical philosophies fermenting in the late 19th century. During this time, the Vietnam War was heating up, and when I arrived in Pullman in 1968, I plunged headfirst into the anti-war movement, writing an anti-ballistic missile poem, radical critiques of conservative religious thought for a small activist group, and numerous letters to the editor. I was
the only really active faculty member of the local Students for a Democratic Society chapter, and wound up as a delegate at the disastrous 1969 Chicago SDS convention where the organization tore itself apart as the University of Wisconsin chapter sprang to its feet waving Mao’s little red book at every opportunity and the national leadership unveiled the manifesto of what was to become the terrorist cell known as the Weather Underground.

It was routine in that period to speak of liberals with scorn, and to escalate the ideal status from dissenter to radical to revolutionary—although these terms were seldom clearly defined. For a while I was influenced in the same direction, but my basic political beliefs and instincts have always remained essentially liberal. I’m just not ashamed to say so any more. Years of close study of Marx and Marxism and visits to the Soviet Union and China convinced me that although Marxist analysis can provide useful insights into problems and issues, Marxist solutions are usually worse than the problems they purport to solve.

As certain voices in the movement grew more and more extreme and irrational, they progressively shed their following, until the group optimistically shouting “the people united shall never be defeated” were a pathetic remnant speaking for almost no one. My own political activities shifted to support for the nascent women’s movement (I was an officer in the Pullman NOW chapter for several years), and I began a long career of exploring and teaching about women writers, composers, and artists which has continued to the present.

All during this period, while introducing Zola, Marx, Lenin, and other radical texts into my teaching, and offering courses on utopian topics, I continued to revel in the opportunity to share with my students the complexities and nuances of writers whose concerns were very different: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and Virginia Woolf, to name just a few.

It became common among activist teachers in the 70s and 80s to argue that since absolute neutrality was impossible, students deserved an overt statement of the teacher’s political stance. But although in politics outside the classroom I strove to define my position and articulate it forcefully, in the study of literature I wanted my students to be able to immerse themselves in the widest possible range of experiences and ideas. One thing I most value about literature is precisely that it challenges our certainties, makes us think more complexly about ideas and
issues. When I first read Nietzsche he horrified and repelled me, but when I revisited him years later I realized that although I would always resist much of what he had to say, he opened up new ways of understanding life as an adventure in the creation of values as a human enterprise. He also undermined any attraction that finding an ultimate universal truth might have had for me.

I also was convinced that overtly activist teaching can deteriorate very quickly into preaching to the choir on the one hand and alienating students who differ on the other. I respected my students enough to think that they could arrive at their own positions in much the same way I had, not by becoming my disciple, but by exploring a wide range of ideas and experiences and applying their minds and personal experiences to them. I am proud of the fact that students were often unable to figure out where I stood on issues I spoke about even as I articulated with some passion arguments that could be made from various perspectives. I think that sort of traditionally humanist/liberal approach provides a stronger basis for students to deal with political issues once they leave the academy, building up and keeping their intellectual muscles and tendons flexible.

I discovered as time passed that many of those whose thought had been shaped in the sixties took a rather different path. For them, the classroom was an extension of—or even replacement for—their activism. Arguing that neutrality is impossible and that students deserved to know honestly the positions they held, they became open advocates of defined political positions and shaped their curricula to channel young minds in the political paths they advocated.

Huge bodies of politically oriented criticism and theory grew up to eventually dominate literary studies in the eighties and later. The only “serious” ways to regard literature were political: once you had figured out who was being oppressed, who caricatured, who silenced in a text, you knew all that was really significant. I contributed my own bit when I reacted to the Reagan revival of the Cold War by launching into a ten-year study of the vast corpus of nuclear war fiction. It led to some very interesting opportunities for me, and I think the work was worth while; but in some ways I regret having polluted my head with so many wretched post-nuclear holocaust fantasies. The canon wars of the 70s and 80s were essentially an attempt to rank authors by their degree of alignment with the political concerns of the teachers. I was glad to help widen the curriculum to include previously unheard voices by women and writers of color; but the widespread insistence on discussing only issues of power and oppression rendered much of the result simplistic and mind-numbing. Those aspects of literature reflecting less than “progressive” values were called “problematic” and teachers who still emphasized esthetic and formal concerns were often disdained.

I have always thought this was a mistake, for several reasons.

First of all, this sort of overtly politicized teaching expressed a basic distrust in the ability of students to sort through the complex maze of human ideas and arrive at their own conclusions. Few of us deserve disciples, and the kind of teaching I admire most resembles more that of Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra in which he dismisses his listeners and tells them to resist him if they can, and find their own paths.

Second, a convert to a view argued one-sidedly is acutely vulnerable to disillusionment and apostasy: better to seriously engage the most powerful and intelligent arguments of your opponents. I learned a lot studying Plato: mostly how to resist him. If I had been taught to resist Plato I might well have been more eager to see value in his ideas.

Third, when we sort out writers according to how well they match our political agendas, we deprive ourselves of some of the richest experiences literature has to offer. There is greatness in the forthright angry eloquence of a Claude McKay or a Malcolm X, but there is also greatness in the fiercely complex ideas of a Derek Walcott or a Samuel R. Delany.

Two of the authors I was instrumental in bringing to this campus illustrate this point. The late Octavia Butler wrote powerfully—even fiercely—about matters of race and oppression; but often in ways that made readers on all sides acutely uncomfortable. She identified not only tensions generated by inequalities, but by profound flaws in the individual characters of all races and classes. Wole Soyinka disappointed the “post-colonial” crowd and orthodox Marxists by refusing to make the evils of colonialism his subject, instead preferring to focus on the nightmare into which Nigeria and other African nations descended during his lifetime. The fact that he preferred not to spend his time analyzing how all of this disarray was partly the legacy of the British in West Africa did not signify that he held them guiltless: after all, he wrote a book advocating reparations for slavery. But his body of work might well bear a label common to many Anglophone writers from non-Western nations: “This story is not about you.” To many writers from some nations, “postcolonial” studies is another way of Europeans introducing themselves into the center of the picture. It is remarkable how very distant most fiction from India, Nigeria, Jamaica, and other countries is from the agendas of postcolonial scholars, even those from the same countries. All too often, the scholarly agenda is reduced to the level of carping and complaining about insufficiently political authors in tediously repetitive critiques.

I also spent five years intensively studying Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which occupies a territory deeply troubling to committed literary activists. He fiercely attacks the tendency of the white majority to demonize all foreigners and view them as interchangeable, but he also fiercely attacks Iranian fundamentalism and Sikh terrorism. And he mocks Trotskyites and other activists. The temptation of some is to dismiss him as a reactionary; but there is much more to Rushdie’s novel than he’s often given credit for, and he literally—if unintentionally—put his life on the line when he wrote it.

Fourth, formal esthetic qualities are, of course, the very qualities that attract most readers to literature; and denigrating them alienates a great many students. The 90’s revival of the old Stalinist term “formalism” to denigrate esthetic considerations repelled me. For most students literature which is not alluring or engrossing in some sense is not worth talking about. Social and political concerns can be far more effectively discussed directly using sociology, political science, psychology and other disciplines rather than literary criticism.

Finally, if political activity has any justification, it is the hope of creating a better life. The puritanical tendency of some teacher-activists to scorn the sheer pleasure that literature can bring evinces a certain insensitivity to the richness of life’s possibilities. Literature which puzzles, exhilarates, frightens, excites, and amuses is worth exploring and celebrating. If we choose only literature which forwards our pet agendas we are little better than the worst sort of Victorian critic who disdained any writing judged not properly edifying. “Problematic” is the new “improper.”

One of the greatest gifts the reading of literature can convey is surprise: the opening of our minds and hearts to ideas and feelings we had never previously experienced. If we approach each text always already knowing what we shall find, we are not only bad readers, but impoverished human beings. All too much modern literary scholarship teaches us nothing new, but circles around the same familiar set of ideas. Often the more complex the language and theory involved, the more simplistic the conclusions being made.

Fortunately younger faculty and students alike are interested in a much wider range of approaches to literature than the last generation; and I see more adventurous, independent thought among my colleagues and students these days than I have for a long, long time.

I want to conclude by making a few remarks about the work that I’m best known for outside the university, my website Common Errors in English and the various publications derived from it. A standard objection to this sort of thing is that correctness in English usage is a social construction, and that the proper role of the professionals should be confined to tracking changing usage and celebrating diversity. Yet English professors are not the gatekeepers of usage, and their permission to stray from traditional usage goes unheard by the general public.
Instead, people want to know how they can make themselves clear, impress their readers, communicate effectively.

It is precisely because language usage is an artificial social construction that one needs a lot of information to navigate the dangerous waters of modern English to avoid embarrassment and disdain. We can tell bosses that they should ignore the tendency of their job applicants to write “for all intensive purposes” and “one in the same.” They are not listening. The pronunciation by eastern newscasters of our neighbor state’s name as “Oregawn” alienates listeners. The tendency to call a slash a “backslash” confuses computer users. Mistakes are essentially social, but that does not make them unreal: we need to know the social reality which our words encounter when others read or hear them. Some English teachers are happy to critique the obfuscatory jargon and and cliches of bureaucrats but not to address the verbal gaffes of the downtrodden: but who needs more help? Who is more endangered by linguistic patterns that arouse contempt?

My attitude is not to smugly announce what is right and wrong, but to provide information: speaking of “tradegy” will not impress your English professor, “oriental” offends a lot of Asians, but using “decimate” to mean “utterly destroy” probably offends only truly picky people you can safely ignore. This is information: social information.

So how do I reconcile my praise of ambiguity and complexity in literary studies and my praise of clarity and consistency in language usage?

First, literature is often at its best when it’s ambiguous and puzzling; ordinary communication is not.

Second, the complexities and surprises of literature are intentional and lead us to admire the writers when we understand them whereas verbal and written stumbles are mostly unintentional and tend to make people look foolish or poorly educated. Knowing standard usage lets you make a conscious choice of whether to say “penultimate” when you mean “last” or “exalt” when you mean “exult.”

Third, the drive to prune the canon and throw open the doors of English usage flowed from similar impulses: to reject the irreducible complexity of both literature and social interaction in the service a political ideal.

Finally, my experience of trying to explain language matters to a broad public using simple language and humorous illustrations seems to have found a large audience hungry for such material. Millions of visitors to my site and thousands of e-mails reinforce every day the notion that people find guidance on language matters just plain useful.

I’m happy to have worked in a department where there is a lively variety of approaches to both language and literature, where students can encounter both challenging complexity and helpful clarification, and where my wildly varied and sometimes unorthodox approaches to scholarship and teaching have been more than tolerated—they’ve even been rewarded, sometimes by the very people who disapproved of them.

The sort of narrow politicization of English studies I’ve focused on is looking increasingly dated nationally, and certainly does not characterize the majority of younger scholars I’ve encountered here. Though we are constantly pressured to mold ourselves in the service of mission statements and benchmarks, I am content that English at Washington State University will remain gloriously unorganized and varied. Today’s students are fortunate to be able to plunge into the rich, messy stew that is English studies at WSU.

Books by Paul Brians

I’ve had a varied career and none of my books has much to do with the others; but here’s information about each of them.

Bawdy Tales from the Courts of Medieval France

This is a collection of stories ranging from risqué to raunchy from mostly obscure Medieval French originals. The book was published in paperback as a Harper Torchbook in 1973, but was too sensational for classroom use and not sensational enough for popular sales. Harper & Row decided to put out a hardcover edition to stimulate library sales (at that time libraries seldom bought paperbacks), but they never advertised it and few were sold. After selling the bulk of the first edition, Harper & Row sold off most of the rest to a reseller cheap and let it go out of print. However, the book has entertained and informed quite a few people (including Barbara Tuchman, who cited it in A Distant Mirror), including some teachers who use photocopies of certain stories in their classes. For this I get an occasional royalty check. It includes the only English translation of a very rare Arthurian tale, "The Knight of the Sword" in which Gawain is tested on a magical bed, as well as such low-brow entertainments as "The Lady Who Was Castrated" and "The Lay of the Lecher." The hardbound library edition is extremely rare (I have a few copies for sale to libraries only), but paper copies appear from time to time at reasonable prices from used book dealers. Try searching at ABEBooks.com
This is a collection of stories ranging from risqué to raunchy from mostly obscure Medieval French originals. The book was published in paperback as a Harper Torchbook in 1973, but was too sensational for classroom use and not sensational enough for popular sales. Harper & Row decided to put out a hardcover edition to stimulate library sales (at that time libraries seldom bought paperbacks), but they never advertised it and few were sold. After selling the bulk of the first edition, Harper & Row sold off most of the rest to a reseller cheap and let it go out of print.
However, the book has entertained and informed quite a few people (including Barbara Tuchman, who cited it in A Distant Mirror), including some teachers who use photocopies of certain stories in their classes. For this I get an occasional royalty check. It includes the only English translation of a very rare Arthurian tale, “The Knight of the Sword” in which Gawain is tested on a magical bed, as well as such low-brow entertainments as “The Lady Who Was Castrated” and “The Lay of the Lecher.”
The hardbound library edition is extremely rare (I have a few copies for sale to libraries only), but paper copies appear from time to time at reasonable prices from used book dealers. Try searching at ABEBooks.com
Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction 1895-1984 This history and annotated bibliography of nuclear war as it has been depicted in fiction was the product of ten years of research. I published widely on the subject until the end of the Cold War led to a sharp dropoff in interest in the subject. The first edition of 1986 almost sold out before Kent State University Press remaindered it. There are no copies presently available for sale, but many libraries own a copy. However, this book has been rendered obsolete by the Web publication of the second edition, which should be used instead.
Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction 1895-1984
This history and annotated bibliography of nuclear war as it has been depicted in fiction was the product of ten years of research. I published widely on the subject until the end of the Cold War led to a sharp dropoff in interest in the subject. The first edition of 1986 almost sold out before Kent State University Press remaindered it. There are no copies presently available for sale, but many libraries own a copy. However, this book has been rendered obsolete by the Web publication of the second edition, which should be used instead.

Reading About the World, Vols. 1 & 2. A custom-published reader for the study of world civilizations. Samples and further information are available by clicking on the title above. Copies can be purchased from Amazon.com.
Reading About the World, Vols. 1 & 2.
A custom-published reader for the study of world civilizations. Samples and further information are available by clicking on the title above. Copies can be purchased from Amazon.com.

reader_cover_2

Common Errors in English Usage Published 2003 by William, James Co., this is the book version of my popular Web site, "Common Errors in English." It is a usage guide which attempts to be helpful and entertaining without overwhelming the reader with technical detail. Click here to read more about the book.
Common Errors in English Usage
Published 2003 by William, James Co., this is the book version of my popular Web site, “Common Errors in English.” It is a usage guide which attempts to be helpful and entertaining without overwhelming the reader with technical detail.

Modern South Asian Literature in English Published 2003 by Greenwood Press. This is a discussion of some authors from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka who write fiction in English (Attia Hosain, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry, Bharati Mukherjee, R. K. Narayan, Michael Ondaatje, Raja Rao, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Shyam Selvadurai, Khushwant Singh, Bapsi Sidhwa, Manil Suri, and Rabindranath Tagore). These essays are aimed at being helpful to readers beginning to explore this popular literature. It avoids fearsome theoretical and critical vocabulary and aims at explaining what needs explaining without giving away plot surprises. Ideal for libraries, reading groups, and beginning college courses on the subject.
Modern South Asian Literature in English
Published 2003 by Greenwood Press. This is a discussion of some authors from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka who write fiction in English (Attia Hosain, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry, Bharati Mukherjee, R. K. Narayan, Michael Ondaatje, Raja Rao, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Shyam Selvadurai, Khushwant Singh, Bapsi Sidhwa, Manil Suri, and Rabindranath Tagore). These essays are aimed at being helpful to readers beginning to explore this popular literature. It avoids fearsome theoretical and critical vocabulary and aims at explaining what needs explaining without giving away plot surprises. Ideal for libraries, reading groups, and beginning college courses on the subject.

This book (Island Seasons Press, 2010) is a self-published collection of photographs of Bainbridge Island, Washington, focusing on characteristic flowers and other plants in different times of year. Information is provided about parks, hikes, other attractions, and various seasonal events on the island. For more information, write paulbrians@gmail.com.
This book (Island Seasons Press, 2010) is a self-published collection of photographs of Bainbridge Island, Washington, focusing on characteristic flowers and other plants in different times of year. Information is provided about parks, hikes, other attractions, and various seasonal events on the island. For more information, write paulbrians@gmail.com.

For a full list of my publications, including articles, contributed chapters in books, and e-publications, see my vita.

Paul Brians
Department of English
Washington State University
Pullman 99164-5020.

Paul Brians’ Home Page

Paul Brians’ Recipes

Paul Brians’ Fruitcake 

As featured in the Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2007. Reporter Susan Warren later wrote me to say “We did get your sample and we had great fun in our bureau with a taste test of several fruitcakes. I am pleased to tell you that your fruitcake was the universal favorite!”

Tired of jokes about your fruitcake? My recipe has converted a lot of skeptics. The secret lies in avoiding those disgusting glacéed cherries, citron, etc. that are packaged for use in fruitcakes. This isn’t exactly health food, but it’s probably considerably closer to what our ancestors enjoyed than the modern stuff.

 

The Fruit:

Amounts can vary wildly. If you want a dense, fruit-rich cake, you’ll need two or three pounds of fruit. Other people like a more cakey texture and can use much less. It’s all up to you. But use good dried fruits, not glacéed ones. If you must use “organic” stuff from your health food mart, go ahead; but try to avoid discolored and over-dry fruit. Don’t put anything in your cake that isn’t tasty eaten separately. My old favorites: dried apples, pears, pineapple, date bits, sliced apricot logs (go easy on the apricot–it can overwhelm everything else), golden raisins, and cranberries. Look for packaged fruit bits to save yourself trouble, but read the label: some are mostly raisins. I find ordinary raisins boring, but you may like them. I add mango strips and papaya bits for color and extra-rich flavor. Recently I used dried mangoes, papayas, pineapples, and golden raisins bought at Winco. Avoid dried bananas.

A little fresh-grated lemon or orange peel is a nice thing to add.

Chop everything up into suitably-sized bits with a heavy, sharp knife and place it in your biggest bowl. I aim for 1/4″–larger chunks mean the cake won’t hold together well when sliced. A canning kettle will do. Dip the knife occasionally in very hot water if it gets harder to use.

The Soak:

Pour a cup or two of your favorite liquor or sweet dessert wine over the fruit bits, toss them, and let them sit for a few hours (or days) to absorb the liquid. Don’t try to submerge them in liquid: just moisten them. This softens the fruit and creates thousands of tiny little sponges that will spread the flavor through your cake much more efficiently than mere soaking after the cake is done. Again, don’t cheap out and use wine that’s gone bad or is unpleasant-tasting; but don’t waste a fine burgundy on your fruitcake either. A dessert wine too sweet for sophisticated palates may do just fine in a fruitcake. Most of the time I use Myers’s dark rum. If you are avoiding alcohol, apple juice is a good substitute.

The Nuts:

Walnuts are fine. In a dark fruitcake the nuts mainly add crunch: the spices overwhelm subtler-flavored nuts. But make sure they are fresh. Walnuts turn rancid if not refrigerated. Personally I use pecans because I love them and they look pretty. I splurged on macadamia nuts one year but it was a waste of money because you couldn’t detect their buttery flavor in the end result; though I’ve made a great Hawaiian fruitcake with fresh coconut, macadamia nuts, and dried pineapple. Don’t put the nuts in the marinating fruits: they’ll lose their crunch. Don’t like nuts? Leave ’em out. I like nuts, so I use a lot: a pound or more. I buy halves and don’t chop them because I like big pieces, but it’s all a matter of taste.

The Pans:

You’ll want to prepare your pan or pans ahead of time. Fruitcake cooks a long time and is very sticky, so getting it to come out of the pans cleanly is a trick. You can use loaf pans, ring molds, or whatever you like; but you’ll need to line them. Even “nonstick” coatings will be defeated by fruitcake. You can use baking parchment if you have it; but I sometimes use a cheap substitute: greased pieces of paper cut from brown paper bags. Don’t use waxed paper; it dissolves and shreds. If you’re concerned about dyes, you can avoid the printed portions of ordinary shopping bags. Grease the pans, line them with paper (cut in as few pieces as possible, but without wrinkles), then grease the paper and flour it.

The Batter:

This is essentially a classic pound cake with added spices. You can use any recipe you like, but here’s mine. If you’re avoiding butter, forget it. Substituting margarine or shortening will ruin the recipe. What makes my fruitcakes taste special is that I always begin with fresh whole spices (bought in bulk, so I can get just the amount I need), ground in a small coffee mill just before adding them to the recipe. This releases many volatile oils and perfumes which are long gone in commercial ground spices. I use a mill I bought just for spices; if you use your coffee mill be prepared for spiced coffee for a while afterward.

Break nutmegs up a bit with a hammer or large knife before grinding them. Cloves and nutmeg are moist, so you may want to grind them with a little of the sugar. Soft “Mexican” cinnamon sticks grind nicely. Hard cassia sticks sold as cinnamon are horrible to grind and are not nearly as flavorful. Penzey’s makes a cinnamon mix that is amazing.

There is no such thing as “whole” mace. Because fresh-ground spices are so pungent you will not need to increase the amounts below; just roughly measure the spices before grinding. Substitute preground spices if you must, but it won’t be the same.

  • 2 cups butter (I prefer unsalted)
  • 2 cups sugar (Don’t reduce the sugar! If you want health food, eat rice cakes.)
  • 9 large eggs
  • 4 cups cake flour (I now use gluten-free flour, and it works fine)
  • 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 tablespoon cinnamon
  • 1 tablespoon cloves
  • 1 tablespoon allspice
  • 1 tablespoon nutmeg
  • 1/2 tablespoon mace

Cream the butter together with the sugar. Then beat in the eggs one at a time, mixing thoroughly until it’s light and fluffy. Add cream of tartar as you beat the eggs. In a classic pound cake the eggs are separated and the whites beaten to lighten the dough, but we want a dense texture here. The eggs will provide just enough leavening: no baking powder needed.

Sift the flour together with the salt and ground spices. Sprinkle some of the flour mixture over the soaking fruit and toss it. The idea is keep the fruit from sticking together. If you’ve been too generous with your soaking liquid, you may have to add more flour.

Add the spiced flour into the wet mixture a cup at a time, beating it only long enough to produce a smooth, fairly thick batter. Try to resist licking the batter if you’re concerned about salmonella–but you’ll find it hard.

Stir the batter into the fruit, then add the nuts. Use a wooden spoon or just plunge in with your hands and reminisce about what fun it was to make mud pies when you were little. Or you can wear disposible plastic gloves. Mix it all up. You will have a mixture that is mostly fruits and nuts with just enough batter to hold it together.

Assembling and Baking:

Place the dough in the lined pans, pressing down to fill in the corners. You can fill the pans almost to the brim because the cake will rise only slightly. Place the pans in the lower third of a 275 degree oven for 1 1/2 to 3 hours, until a knife or testing straw comes out clean. Timing is extremely variable. Small cakes will cook quicker, larger cakes take longer. Test each cake separately, and take it out as soon as your tester comes out clean. You don’t want to dry out the cake. If it starts to burn before the inside is done, cover the top with foil. You can’t bake a fruitcake in a hurry.

Beautifully baked fruit cake, by candle light.

When the cakes are done, let them cool on racks for an hour or so before trying to remove them from the pans. Use a knife to loosen any stuck spots. Sprinkle them all over with your liquor or juice to get the outsides good and moist. Traditionalists will wrap cakes with soaked linen, but I find that enclosing them in plastic bags works as well and is cheaper and more efficient. Let them mature in the refrigerator or other cool space for at least a couple of weeks to blend the flavors. Months is better; but who thinks about making fruitcake in August? If they seem to be getting dry, sprinkle on more liquid, but don’t make them sodden. The sugar and alcohol will retard spoilage; but once you start serving this cake you’re unlikely to discover how long it might have lasted. It’s too irresistible.

Old-Fashioned Mincemeat

A food processor makes this recipe a snap. The result is far more flavorful than the canned product: rich, really fruity and not overwhelmingly sweet. Vegetarians can omit the beef and substitute butter for the suet; the result is distinctly different, but good. But then you’re honor bound to call the end product “mince pie” and not “mincemeat pie.”

Ingredients:

  • 1 lb stewing beef, boiled until thoroughly cooked (20 minutes or so), drained and ground. Or you can roast or braise the meat. Browning it gives it a richer flavor.
  • 5 large, firm, rich-flavored apples.
  • 1 cup (5 oz) ground suet (firm beef fat—many butchers give it away, but you often need to arrange to get it in advance).
  • 3 cups raisins
  • 2 cups pineapple juice (this is the one ingredient that probably wasn’t around in the 19th century, but it does add to the flavor).
  • 2 cups canned beef broth, or beef concentrate diluted with the cooking water from the stewing beef.
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 1/2 cup cider vinegar
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons allspice (freshly ground is best)
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons ground cloves (ditto)
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons salt
  • 2-4 peeled oranges, chopped and seeded, or substitute a half-dozen tangerines for a milder flavor.
  • 1 lemon, pulp and grated zest (the yellow part of the rind) only
  • 1/4-1/2 cup marmalade
  • a little rum or brandy (optional)

Instructions

Grind or chop all the solid ingredients and mix everything together. Boil the filling, stirring occasionally, until it reduces to a fairly thick consistency. Cool and test a spoonful to see whether it needs more sugar. Keep in mind that it will thicken more when it is cool. I like to get it to the point where little volcanic spurts of liquid are erupting through a fairly solid mass; but be careful that the bottom doesn’t get scorched. You can pour in a little dark rum or brandy or whatever to give it an extra punch.

Because this has meat in it, I have never been able to confirm with an expert what a safe canning time would be, but it freezes extremely well. This recipe makes enough filling for two large pies or three smaller ones. Don’t overfill and you will avoid drips and burning in the oven.

To bake pies, pour the filling into your favorite pie crust, cover with a top crust or lattice. Seal and flute the edges. Make sure there is some sort of slit or steam hole in the top.

Bake at 425 degrees for 40-50 minutes until the juices begin to bubble up out of the holes in the top and the crust is browned. A glass pie plate will let you check how well the bottom has browned.

Serve at room temperature or slightly warmed, with whipped cream or straight. Again, because it contains meat, the pie should not sit out for days at a time. Refrigerated portions can be rewarmed in a conventional oven, but microwaving will toughen the crust.

 

Grandma Brookover’s Christmas Pudding

 

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup butter, softened (2 sticks, 1/2 lb.)
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp ground cloves
  • 2 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp nutmeg
  • 1 cup raisins
  • 1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans
  • 2 cups carrots, grated
  • 2 cups potatoes, grated
  • Hard Sauce:
  • 1/4 lb butter (not margarine)
  • 1 cup powdered sugar
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 1 Tbl rum (preferably Myerís dark)

Directions:

Prepare mold by greasing, lining with waxed paper to aid in unmolding. Use a large pudding mold, or a 3 lb coffee can, or a 4 quart pot, or several smaller containers. At any rate, the containers must be sealed tightly during cooking, whether with lids, or foil.

Cream the sugar, butter, and flour together. Add the salt, baking soda, baking powder, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Beat in well. Stir in the raisins, nuts, grated carrots and potatoes. A food processor is great for grating the vegetables.

Pour the pudding into the mold(s). In a large kettle with about 2-3 inches of boiling water in it, place the pudding container. Let the water return to a boil, lower the heat to the lowest point at which the water will still boil (not just simmer). Cover the kettle tightly and steam about 2 hours, or until the pudding assumes a fairly solid shape. Two or more small molds will take less time than one large one. Don’t worry about overcooking: as long as the kettle doesn’t boil dry, you’re safe.

Serve with hard sauce, made by creaming together the listed ingredients. Can be reheated by steaming, or wrapping and reheating in microwave or conventional oven.

Doubled, the recipe fits into a 5-lb coffee can to be cooked for 3 1/2 hours; but you may find it more convenient to divide such a large batch into two molds and cook them separately to save time.

If you insist on flaming your pudding, do so at your own risk. English flamed puddings are generally denser and less porous than this, which is like a heavy cake. Pouring brandy or other alcohol over this pudding does not result in a nice flame, but in a sodden, unignitable, inedible mess.

Apple Pie

When we first began coming to Bainbridge Island there was a farm on Miller Road that in the fall sold fresh-pressed cider from heritage apple varieties and something called “a pie in a bag.” This was simply a paper bag filled with assorted tasty varieties, and the idea was to make a pie from them in which all those flavors would be mixed together, resulting in a really delicious pie.

We tried it, and it worked.

The farm is gone, but every autumn I make another mixed-apple pie, and it gets raves; so I thought I’d share some tips on how I go about this. When we lived in Pullman, we would go to the WSU Tukey Orchard stand where we could sample all sorts of rare and newly developed varieties, but today almost every grocery store offers an interesting variety beyond the bland Red Delicious and the super-tart Granny Smith.

Currently I’m using a slightly adapted version of Mark Bittman’s traditional apple pie recipe from my favorite cookbook: How to Cook Everything.

Filling recipe

  • ½ cup light brown sugar
  • ½ teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/8 teaspoon grated nutmeg
  • pinch salt
  • 5 or 6 good-tasting apples
  • 3 tablespoons tapioca

Directions

First, the crust. You already know whether you can make a nice flaky crust. I use Julia Child’s recipe, which involves half butter and half lard, made in a food processor.

If you’ve never mastered this art, don’t despair. You can buy an OK pre-made crust in the frozen-food department of your grocery store. Unfortunately these are only bottom crusts, and trying to flatten one into a top crust is a hassle. So you can make streusel topping. Or you can bag the whole pie idea and make an apple crisp. The filling will taste the same.

Gluten-free tips

I happen to be one of the unfortunate 1% who is actually gluten-intolerant, not just a gluten-free wannabe, so I use gluten-free baking mix. Some of these are rather gritty in texture because the brown rice that makes up the bulk of most mixes is not ground finely enough. If you’re ambitious enough to make your own mix, pay the extra for a bag of Authentic Foods superfine brown rice flour. It has an excellent texture. Authentic Foods also makes a piecrust mix which I haven’t tried. They don’t make any claims to it being superfine, but it might be worth a try if you can find it— most likely in your local health-food store. Ordering their products by mail costs a fortune: they’re not only pricey, but the shipping fees are huge.

Traditional piecrust recipes call for you to allow the crust mixture to “relax” in the refrigerator because the initial kneading develops the wheat gluten and makes the dough chewy. Using frozen butter and refrigerated lard I found that this wasn’t really necessary, but guess what—you can skip this step altogether if you’re baking gluten free because—no gluten!

However, the downside of GF dough is that it is really crumbly: it doesn’t want to hang together and form nice flakes. So I add a teaspoon of xanthan gum to the crust mixture. Xanthan gum is used in all sorts of GF baked goods to make them chewy but it’s pricey (buy it in bulk when you can) and this is a lot; however, I find using this much makes my crust hold together better.

If it’s not a medical necessity, use regular wheat flour. It tastes much better and may actually be more nutritious.

Another crust tip

Adding the correct amount of water to piecrust mix is one of the trickiest things in the process. Too little, and the crust won’t hang together properly. Too much, and it will be a soggy mess that bakes up into a hard, tough crust. Buy the cheapest vodka you can find and substitute it for half or more of the water. It will evaporate in the baking and make your crust lighter and flakier.

The filling

Now to the good stuff. Use apples that taste good.

Period.

What you like and what others like won’t necessarily match. Pay attention to flavor, not crunch. This filling is meant to be soft and any apple baked long enough will do. I often choose five different varieties, one apple apiece.

Core, peel, and slice the apples. I prefer thin slices, ¼ to 1/8 inch thick. That way the filling collapses to give a nice, solid texture without apple-free voids. You can also pack more apples into a pie when they are thinly sliced.

Bittman calls for half white sugar and half brown. I prefer all light brown. Suit your own taste, but don’t skimp a lot on the sugar or your pie may not hold together.

Spices

I’m a cinnamon fanatic. A bottle of cinnamon that’s been sitting in your spice cabinet for years has lost all the volatile oils that give a good cinnamon its magic. The good stuff is true cinnamon—otherwise known as Ceylon cinnamon. The hard sticks sold for putting in cider are usually Cassia cinnamon, which is much less complex in flavor. Penzey’s sells several kinds of cinnamon, including their own mix, which is wonderful. Always use Ceylon cinnamon if you can find it.

But my preference is to grind my own spices. They are much fuller-flavored when freshly ground. You don’t need a mortar and pestle. I use a cheap electric coffee mill that is devoted entirely to this task, but wipe it out carefully after grinding spices— or if you like spiced coffee you can use it as is.

A popular line of Mexican spices used to sell true cinnamon sticks quite reasonably, but they’ve changed to cassia in recent years. The two are easy to tell apart: if the sticks are like hard curled pieces of wood, they’re cassia. If they consist of soft shreds you can crumble with your fingers, they’re true cinnamon. You can find true cinnamon sticks in specialty stores and buy just enough to use for a half-year or so. Grind it to a very fine powdery texture.

Nutmeg is even more important to use freshly grated. A cheap grater will do fine. If you need to grind a large quantity of nutmeg (like for a large batch of fruitcake batter), you can slice it with a heavy knife and put it in the electric mill with some flour or sugar from the recipe. Nutmeg is moist and will not become powdery by itself.

Why salt? Salt is a flavor enhancer. You don’t want the pie to actually taste salty, but it enlivens the other flavors.

Bittman adds a tablespoon of freshly squeezed lemon juice. That’s a matter of taste. Some apple varieties are more tart than others, and some people like an edgier taste than others. Suit yourself.

Thickening

Cornstarch or flour often makes for a runny or gooey filling. I use tapioca for all fruit pies. I made the mistake of going overboard with a recent blackberry pie that came out with a texture sort of like chewing gum. Bittman calls for 2 tablespoons of tapioca. I find 3 works better for me. This is the regular cheap little tapioca pellets that come in a box to make tapioca pudding: not pearls or tapioca flour.

Mix everything thoroughly so the spice mixture coats the apples and the various varieties and mixed together. Topping it off Most fruit pie recipes call for you to dot the filling with butter before applying the top crust. I usually forget, but it does make for a nicer finish.

You can brush the top crust with egg or milk to give it a nice smooth brown finish, and sprinkle it with white sugar if you like that look.

Baking the pie

Bittman calls for baking the pie at 450˚ for 10 minutes and at 350˚ for 40-50 minutes. I don’t know why, but my pies always take much longer. The challenge is to get the top nicely browned and the bottom thoroughly cooked without burning any part of the pie. With standard recipes, the bottom crust often comes out underbaked or raw.

Things that will cause bottom crusts to bake too slowly:

1) ingredients too cold

2) mixture too moist

3) flour not ideal

Baking a fruit pie on a sheet to catch drips is a good idea if you hate cleaning the oven, but it will slow down the process of baking the bottom crust. Using a black cast-iron griddle to catch the drips should speed things up.

A metal pie plate, especially a black one, will brown the crust faster, but I always use a Pyrex one. It takes longer, but I can see how the bottom crust is doing. It will never be as dark as the top, but it should show some color. To my taste, as long as nothing is burning the pie isn’t overdone.

The usual instruction to cook until the filling liquid bubbles up through the slits in the topic crust (you did slit it, didn’t you?) for me results in an underbaked pie. I always have to leave it in longer. The pie will hold together better if you let it cool until it’s just slightly warm. This can take a few hours.

My father always had a slice of Velveeta cheese on top of his hot apple pie, and for a lot of people this dish is not complete without vanilla ice cream; but first sample the pie by itself to savor its true deliciosity.

Paul Brians

Bainbridge Island, WA

First posted October 22, 2016.

Revised January 3, 2024.

A Voice from Dead Pripyat

by Adolph Kharash
Science Director, Moscow State University

I first met Lyubov Sirota late in January 1988 in Kiev, in an area of the city called Troeshchino where, in November of 1986, there settled a group of people evacuated from Pripyat, the satellite city of the Chernobyl nuclear plant. They warmly greeted our group of students and professors from Moscow University in the Zemliaki club , where the children from the deserted city were taking classes in dance and drawing, and adults were meeting to recall what had been and plan what would come.

People from Pripyat very much appreciated any kind of attention. It was no joke that for almost two months after the catastrophe not a single word about Pripyat was in the central press or tv or radio–nothing about the fate of the city which was in an hour forever deserted by more than 50,000 inhabitants. Even some knew of its existence (the town was designated “special purpose” or “Secret”), nobody knew that this was the nearest city to the Chernobyl nuclear plant, only three kilometers away. I learned about the existence of this city only in June, 1986, when I went to the site. The inhabitants of Pripyat knew nothing of the explosion. They suspected nothing, took no precautions, and were exposed to the fallout from the Chernobyl catastrophe for thirty-six hours.

The City of Ghosts is how the city was called in the poems of another acquaintance from Troeshchino, Vladimir Shovkoshitny, a friend of Liubov Sirota; he had formerly worked in the Chernobyl nuclear plant and was one of the first volunteers for the cleanup of the aftermath.

Lyubov Sirota and her little son lived in the neighborhood of Pripyat closest to the nuclear plant. The night of the April 25th was very warm and clear. Lyubov couldn’t sleep. She went outside to breathe the fresh, fragrant spring air. She was one of the first–one of the few–people in Pripyat to see above the Chernobyl plant the evil flash of light, the star Wormwood (in Russian,Chernobyl ), which two thousand years ago was prophesied in the Book of Revelation, and which that night abruptly incinerated people’s hopes and plans. If she had only known then that she should have closed her eyes and run, not looking back, away from this dawn glow, from this air rich with spring blossoms.

“Nobody knew anything.”

This is how I see Lyubov; even today, though I have often met with her after that remarkable evening in Troeshchino She was the embodiment of defenselessness, and of limitless baffled anger.

“Nobody knew anything.”

She was the first to try to explain to us, the uninitiated, who came from well-protected, undisturbed Moscow, what had actually happened in Pripyat that night and in the following thirty-six hours of anxious waiting. Now, three years after we met in Troeshchino I can see the Pripyat of that time in the light of my endless pondering and in the pain in the voice of Lyubov Sirota in the poem “At the Crossing.²;

Has day died?
Or is this the end of the world?
Morbid dew on pallid leaves.
By now it’s unimportant
whose the fault,
what the reason,
the sky is boiling only with crows . . .
And now–no sounds, no smells.
And no more peace in this world.
Here, we loved . . .
Now, eternal separation
reigns on the burnt out Earth . . .

The destruction of Pripyat is the destruction of the promised land; it is a metaphor of universal destruction, a prophecy and sign of the Apocalypse. For the latter inevitable and universal catastrophe there will be in reality no one who can be called guilty. Any merely human cause is utterly petty, trifling, not worth mentioning. But for earthly tragedies earthly beings must pay the price. The perishable flesh prevents the spirit from freeing itself from earthly cares and soaring into cosmic space. Flesh drags the spirit down to the deserted hearth, forces it to grieve unconsolably for the fate of relatives and neighbors, to look into the eyes of children in which an unchildish despair is fixed.

Again and again, we torture ourselves with the living pictures of that summery April day, when the people–unsuspecting–opened the windows of their apartments, strolled about in the streets, sunbathed on the river beaches, celebrated weddings, picnicked in the nearby forests, eating ice cream which was sold in the street, the children frolicking, thrusting their bare arms up to the elbows into the foaming streams of radioactive water streaming profusely through the city streets. Again and again one seeks in torment the guilty and laments for the victims. This is why Lyubov Sirota’s apocalyptic insights are not for an instant abstract or passionless, even prophesying as they do the end of the world. These insights are deeply personal and quite mortal. They are penetrated by physical pain and inscribed with the grief for the casualities and concern for the lives and fates of mortal, living people and also by angry accusations against other people–also very much alive and mortal–who did not rush to help, did not warn of the danger, did not prevent the fatal outcome.

In one of the films of Rolan Sergienko, who created a cycle of films on the Chernobyl catastrophe, fact is uniquely combined with artistic expressiveness. Lyubov Sirota participated in making one of the films, Threshold. One scene, shot in Pripyat April 26, 1986 by a young local cameraman named Nazarenko, shows a sunlit street filled with people in the midst of their festive Saturday holiday, women strolling carelessly, wearing light, loose dresses, infants in their strollers, bareheaded men relieved of their workday burdens. Suddenly two strange and gloomy figures appear, looking like characters from a science fiction film about an invasion from another planet: two militiamen in shiny protective clothing fully covering their bodies, wearing gloves, hoods, and tightly-sealed military respirators. A passerby who meets them stands still as if petrified, looking at this fantastic vision, not trusting his own eyes, as if he had seen them in a dream. Or perhaps this is what our terrifying reality is: a dream.

“Nobody knew anything,’ repeats Lyubov Sirota, but this does not apply to everybody–not to those who in one way or another knew about the April tragedy. The citizens of Pripyat, who should have been informed in the first place so that they could immediately take care of their own safety, knew nothing about it,. But those who made decisions knew everything about the catastrophe–or almost everything. As can be seen from the posthumously published notes of academician Legasov prove that by four o’clock A.M. of April 26, 1986, in the Kremlin, a thousand kilometers from carefree and defenseless Pripyat, they already had sufficient information about all elements of that night’s catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Those authorities took care to have the militiamen dressed in special protective clothing; the unsuspecting citizens were given only counseling. The official declaration by the important bureaucrats from the Ministry of Health was that the evacuation was carried out in time, and that none of the city’s inhabitants had suffered any harm. Their fears and concerns were declared unnecessary, groundless, labelled with the sinister psychiatric term “radiophobia.’

The event in Chernobyl inspired special documentary films such as Rolan Sergienko’s movies and also the writings of the poets from Pripyat. Works in this genre are difficult to understand if you do not consider their factual basis. The poem “Radiophobia,” which stands out in the poetic work of Lyubov Sirota, belongs to this genre.

“Don’t promote this terrible word radiophobia!”

This was the first request made to us that evening in Troeshchino by the citizens of Pripyat. For those who were at the epicenter of the Chernobyl cataclysm this word is a grievous insult. It treats the normal impulse to self-protection, natural to everything living, your moral suffering, your anguish and your concern about the fate of your children, relatives and friends, and your own physical suffering and sickness as a result of delirium, of pathological perversion. This term deprives those who became Chernobyl’s victims of hope for a better future because it dismisses as unfounded all their claims concerning physical health, adequate medical care, food, decent living conditions, and just material compensation. It causes an irreparable moral harm, inflicting a sense of abandonment and social deprivation that is inevitable in people who have gone through such a catastrophe.

Does the term “radiophobia” console anyone? Yes, of course. First, it calms public opinion , suggesting that only a handful of victims of Chernobyl ecxists. And what are tens or hundreds of thousands of people, or even several million, in such a large country, or measured against all of humanity? A handful of super-sensitive individuals who gave in to panic. Most important, the term excuses the authorities from worrying, relieves them of responsibility for the destructive effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe on human organisms, and helps them to “conserve&” huge material resources.

That meeting in Troeshchino went on late into the long winter night. “Look, he’s fallen asleep,” said Liubov” Sirota, looking at her son as he napped in a corner. “He’s tired. Before the war he sat in front of the TV until long after midnight.” [These words have a special meaning: “before the catastrophe” as they are used by those who happened to be in the area contaminated by radioactive rain of cesium, plutonium, and strontium. People call that period in history, which began for them on the night of April 25th, 1986 and which stretches into the present– “the war.”]

“My apartment is not in order,’ she apologized when I unexpectedly visited Lybov Sirota one week later in her small two-room apartment in Kiev’s Kharkov district. She added bitterly, “I’m still young, a little over thirty, but have no energy to clean the floors properly, no energy.’ This is also the voice motherly anxieties, the voice of physical exhaustion which came Unbidden. The fate of children and adults burned by the invisible fire of Chernobyl became a very heavy burden.

This is how we live.
The body is heavier and heavier,
the spirit is subtler and narrower.
It can enter the deserted house;
it circles like a bird above Pripyat in the night . . .
and you often wish that it would leave the inept body
and not days but years flow away
and numberless are the losses.
But one has to live,
and for the sake of the children,
accumulate anger,
to efface the old age in children’s eyes
with the hope for a cure.

These lines are not printed in the copy of the collection Lyubov gave me. She wrote these lines by hand on the last page as a personal gift from the poet. But one has to live.

In her poems Lyuba entrusts her soul to other people. She believes that people will carry on this burden and help her, as she herself is ready to help everyone who lives on earth. The source of her faith is a crystal-clear spring of love, friendship, comradeship, mutual understanding, which penetrates her lyrics from the beginning to the end.

We are with you, dear reader; while people live on earth, hope is alive, hope for a better future, and this is what the poet wrote on my copy of Burden.From dead Pripyat comes the voice of living suffering, of a living soul, living hope. This hope is the underlying current of the creative impulse that inspires the poetry of Lyubov Sirota, the sacred meaning of her lyrics. I am enormously happy that this voice will sound for thousands of readers whose friendly help will no doubt ease the uneasy burden one poet. Perhaps this is also a small foreshadowing of the message about the better future for which Lyubov Sirota hopes.

Translated by Arkady Rovner, with Paul Brians, Birgitta Ingemanson, and Elizavietta Ritchie.
The Chernobyl Poems from Burden by Lyubov Sirota

Terminator vs. Terminator

Nuclear Holocaust as a Video Game

Paul Brians
Professor of English
Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99164-5020

The following piece was written in 1991 for a proposed special issue of a journal which abandoned the idea so many months later that the article had lost its immediacy. I didn’t feel like revising it according to their suggestions for publication as an independent piece because their consultants’ views of the Terminator films differed drastically from mine. I am no longer doing research in this area, but I think the article may still be of interest to some readers, so am posting it here.

This article has been translated into German: Terminator vs. Terminator: Nuklearer Holocaust als Videospiel.

Translations of this article also available in Czech and Dutch.

Copyright Paul Brians 1995
You can write me at: paulbrians@gmail.com.
Home Page

Back in 1984 I participated in a conference on war in fiction at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Part of the program was a screening of Philippe de Broca’s 1967 antiwar classic King of Hearts . It struck me as sadly irrelevant to the mood of young people in the eighties, so I skipped the session to take in the latest hot flick in a downtown theater: The Terminator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Though I am not a fan of “action” movies, I hoped to learn something about what was exciting contemporary audiences.

What I experienced surprised and angered me. It was not the relentless, brutal violence and manipulative terror—these I expected. But I was taken aback by the way in which the predominantly youthful audience gleefully rooted for the Terminator, whose purpose was after all the total extermination of the human race through the murder of the destined mother of its future savior, John Conner. I don’t think my experience was unique. David Edelstein, reviewing the film for the Village Voice, noted that when the Terminator appeared “the audience whoops and applauds.”1 I shouldn’t have been surprised. The Terminator had villain written all over him in bold block letters; but audiences who gleefully cheer the monstrous slasher Freddie in the Nightmare on Elm Street films cannot be expected to shift emotional gears just because the target is enlarged to embrace the entire human community.2

The popularity of the Terminator concept is also evidenced by the popularity of several series of comic book adaptations featuring plenty of graphic violence.3 Schwarzenegger’s signature line “I’ll be back!” became a catch phrase widely and humorously quoted, but more as a promise than a threat: there is more exciting action to come.

My second reaction was to a disturbing subtext I perceived in the film itself. It struck me immediately as a survivalist fantasy arguing that nuclear war is inevitable and that our only hope lies in gathering skill in using personal violence to fight the wars which lie beyond Armageddon. Those crazies who busily stockpile food and ammo, expecting to fight indifferently the Russkies, their neighbors, or the U. S. Army had seen their vision endorsed by Hollywood.

Wrestling with my emotional revulsion against this message and the audience’s reaction, I was inevitably struck by a seeming contradiction. If the film was preaching survivalism, why was the audience cheering for its own annihilation?

Critics are routinely contemptuous of films such as this (Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome is another good example) because they simultaneously seem to reject violence (the war which threatens human sur vival) and glorify it (the battles after the war).4 But on the simplest level this is not necessarily a fatal contradiction. A gory tale like The Iliad or The Song of Roland can both revel in and deplore war without raising such cavils; and only pacifists are prone to equate personal violence with worldwide warfare. Not that The Terminator is likely to join anybody’ s canon of masterpieces, but the common wisdom is that if a good deal of killing is morally acceptable to prevent even greater amounts of killing.

No, the contradictions embedded in The Terminator are more complex, and much more threatening. Most of humanity is about to die, and there is nothing whatever we can do about it. Why is this an acceptable subtext for an escapist entertainment?

There are several possibilities. Spectacular screen violence is so appealing to adolescent audiences (especially but not exclusively males) that they may not even notice the context in which that violence is embedded. Certainly most viewers of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome seemed to miss entirely its anti-nuclear war message, although it was much more prominent than the same message in The Terminator. But it may also be the case that the audience did absorb on some level the prophecy of doom delivered by the film but found it attractive and exciting out of the sort of adolescent nihilism that fuels the immense popularity of heavy metal bands and super-violent comic books. Today’s rebels without a cause are mostly comfortably well-off youth whose restlessness scorns idealism or radicalism and glories in images of destruction for its own sake. Kids often amuse themselves with violence these days, though their rebellion is actually quite trivial and easily domesticated and marketed, of course. Another possibility is that such films are just another vehicle for adolescent bravado: viewing the fall of civilization is the cinematic equivalent of an exceptionally terrifying roller coaster ride: the only relevant question is can you take it?

I suspect that each of these explanations has some truth in it; but I am convinced that there is another dynamic at work here which has deep connections with the way Americans have mythologized nuclear war. When they have not simply repressed the threat from consciousness as they usually have the next most popular attitude has always been fatalism. From the early days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki onward, it was commonly accepted that atomic bombs could, and one day might, “destroy the world.” By far the most commonly expressed sentiment about nuclear war is “If the bomb goes off, I hope I’m at ground zero.”

Given the relatively trivial numbers of these weapons in existence during the early years of the cold war, the power of this mythology is impressive. Of course governments encouraged such attitudes by assuring their citizens that nuclear weapons are so apocalyptic as to make the most insane enemy blanch at the thought of attacking another nuclear power. But such reassurance entails its own subversion. Clearly in the atomic age it makes no sense to feel safe because our enemies are terrorized. The Cold War was not called a “balance of terror” for nothing. Forced to think about the prospect of annihilation, people resorted to a standard psychological mechanism familiar in connection with thinking about death: accepting it as inevitable and putting it out of mind as much as is possible.

The popularity of Dr. Strangelove is probably to be attributed at least in part, paradoxically, to its comfortingly nihilistic message: our leaders are insane, there are no effective controls, we’re all doomed, so we might as well have a good laugh before we go. Although it is a fine film in many ways, Dr. Strangelove is one of the most profoundly disempowering tales ever spun about nuclear doom. Similarly, much of the appeal of On the Beach resides in the relentless way in which death marches across the globe, sparing no one. Depicting nuclear war as universal extinction is the next best thing to not thinking about it at all. We manage to live with the prospect of our personal deaths because we know death is universal and inevitable. Applying the same mechanism to reacting to the arms race, we manage to muddle on, released from responsibility. Nuclear war as a problem has been defined out of existence. It has become instead a fact of life.

The problem is, of course, that nuclear war is not the same thing as death; and while young people in the eighties were flirting with apocalyptic imagery, an accelerated arms race was making a real apocalypse ever more likely.5

Another striking political message of The Terminator is an apparent endorsement of the National Rifle Association’s position on gun control. When a gun dealer explains the required waiting period for certain weapons, the Terminator short-circuits the process by shooting him dead on the spot. Obviously when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.

Several critics have commented on the anti-machine message delivered by the film. Karen B. Mann lists the the malevolent technology which dominates the world of the film and embodies the reality of the threat symbolized by the Terminator: ” hair dryers, electric curlers, Walkmans, TVs, radios . . . the essential telephone answering machines, technology dominates meaning relationships and transactions in the film.”6 America’s love/hate relationship with technology is broadly satirized throughout the film, and cleverly alluded to in the name of the dance club where Sarah takes refuge from Reese: Tech Noir. On one level The Terminator is a descendant of such anti-technological satires as Chaplin’s Modern Times or Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle. The politics of this sort of satire are Luddite rather than Marxist. The shallowness of The Terminator’s satire is revealed by the fact that the machine is ultimately defeated by other machines (a point even more clearly made in Terminator 2).

But The Terminator is more specifically about nuclear technology. Its basic premise that the defence network Skynet has launched a nuclear war in an effort to annihilate humanity seems borrowed from The Forbin Project .7 Both films mythologize nuclear weaponry as a modern-day Frankenstein’s monster: a misbegotten creation which turns on its creator. Their ancestry includes countless tales in which scientists have “gone beyond the limits of what man was meant to know” and which in the post-Hiroshima era have almost always been parables of atomic-age anxiety. But The Terminator is ultimately not truly an anti-nuclear war film precisely because it accepts the inevitability of such war, never suggesting that it might be in any way preventable. The arms race and the holocaust in which it logically culminates are givens, and mighty convenient givens for generating an exciting sense of impending doom and destruction.

Lillian Necakov, looking for progressive elements in the film, perceives Sarah Conner as an unconventionally assertive and powerful woman.8 Other feminist critics object. Margaret Goscilo asserts that Sarah “is a mere conduit of male power and supremacy between her son and her lover.”9 And Vivian Sobchack argues that the film justifies men’s refusal to take responsibility for child-rearing.10 According to Sobchak, Sarah is a strong, self-sufficient single mother who has not been truly abandoned because the dead father of her child still exists in a future and is forever returning to impregnate her in the past. Sarah’s strength exists only to absolve men of their responsibility to women and children.

In The Terminator, Sarah certainly doesn’t strike me as a pillar of strength; but Necakov was probably on to something; the next two thrillers made by James Cameron and his wife Gale Anne Hurd feature unmistakably powerful heroines. The heroine of Aliens is a courageous, skilled, and intelligent woman who destroys vicious monsters from space when the male soldiers have been wiped out because their macho attitudes got in the way of effective combat; and The Abyss features a brilliant, tough, and domineering female scientist.

Not that these characters are models of feminist correctness. They are also both physically attractive, and the latter might almost have been designed by a male masochist fantasizing the ideal dominatrix. Tough women are very hot stuff currently in a variety of popular media ranging from female body-builder competitions to comic books featuring leather-clad female assassins. It’s clear that contemporary male taste in erotic fantasy embraces models radically different from the traditional passive, submissive one.

Even so, Lindsey Brigman, the ruthless woman scientist in The Abyss, has to learn humility and tenderness from her sensitive, less assertive husband. Yet she does not surrender her competence or courage. It is notable that in this film husband and wife take turns risking their lives to save each other. The Abyss is an equal-opportunity, interracial, anti-military, pro-working class thriller. While certainly not a progressivist tract, The Abyss marks a large step in the continuing shift of Cameron’s films from the reactionary politics of The Terminator.

Thus I looked forward with great interest to the sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. How could Cameron’s new politics be reconciled with his old themes? Would the subject of nuclear war be more prominent in the sequel? I was pleasantly surprised by the answers to both these questions.

I am not going to pretend that my generally positive reaction to the film is shared by everyone. Stanley Kauffmann, writing in The New Republic states that “The surprise is that a picture made to be exciting for 136 minutes is so unexciting most of the time.”11 Ralph Novak in People magazine found it “shamefully sadistic, achingly dull and totally predictable,” claiming that ” it rehashes the far superior 1984 original.”12

In contrast, Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times, “Mr. Cameron has made a swift, exciting special-effects epic that thoroughly justifies its vast expense and greatly improves upon the first film’s potent but rudimentary visual style.”13 Reviewers for the LA Times and San Francisco Chronicle agreed.14

Clearly there is no point in insisting that a film that bores some viewers is in fact engrossing. Some viewers prefer the first film simply because they like the meaner, tougher Schwarzenegger in an unambiguously violent setting. I suspect that certain critics who prefer the first film are drawn to it by its anti-technological bias and repelled by the high-tech gloss of the computer-created special effects of the second one. It isn’t considered sophisticated to enjoy expensive dazzle and flash, and the first film is redeemed in their eyes by its low-budget grunginess.

But Cameron always wanted to make The Terminator a special effects film; he was prevented from doing so by a modest $6.5 million dollar budget.15 The success of the first film enabled him to make the sequel into the film that he had wanted to make all along, reportedly the most expensive ever made.16

Terminator 2 reworks a number of elements from the first film. Both open in a scene of future combat. A pair of time travellers—an assassin and his adversary—arrive naked amidst powerful electrical disturbances (which in Terminator 2 are even more strongly reminiscent of the scene of the creation of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster). The toughs Schwarzenegger confronts at the beginning of each film—punks in the first, bikers in the second—are the sort of convenient, disposable scum that serves as cannon fodder in all sorts of cheap men’s fiction. In both films, it is not revealed until well into the plot that the character which seems to be trying to kill Sarah is actually trying to protect her, though the extreme efforts at building suspense on this point in the second film were utterly vitiated by the massive publicity touting Schwarzenegger as the good guy in Terminator 2. The assassin in both films is shot for the first time just as he’s about to kill his victim. Even trivial details are repeated. Schwarzenegger drives a cop car in both. He slices open his arm in both. In The Terminator a truck driver is forced from his truck; in Terminator 2 a helicopter pilot is similarly forced from his vehicle. The little girl playing at shooting in the dismal future of The Terminator is echoed in Terminator 2 by the scene at a gas station in which a boy and girl pretend to shoot at each other, shouting, “You’re dead!”

But if in some ways Terminator 2 is more a remake than a sequel, in other ways it is a reply to the first film. Almost as if Cameron had been reading his feminist critics, the new Sarah Conner has lost every ounce of her early cute freshness and become a wiry bundle of nerves, bones and muscles. We first see her as she does chin-ups in her cell, looking nothing like the Lisa Lyons model of female body-building. She rages, claws and smashes through obstacles with a fearsome energy that is completely determined by her nightmare visions of the nuclear war to come. Unlike Ripley in Aliens, Sarah displays no motherly affection for the child she is so frantically trying to protect. She wants to save him because she has nightmares about the death of other children. When we are once tricked into thinking that she will at last hug him, she actually gives him a quick check for bullet holes and bawls him out for risking his life to rescue her. As an object of the male gaze, Sarah is a pretty startling sight.

Of course one could make out a case that, as is the case with other Cameron females, this is gender-bending to excuse male violence and insensitivity, telling men, “See, some women are like that too.” But Cameron seems to anticipate this objection by giving Sarah the widely-quoted speech in which she hails the CSM-101 as a better man than any of her other male partners. She may be less nurturing toward her son than the cyborg, but she appreciates his nurturance and loyalty. The fact is that Sarah is as sympathetic as she is disturbing because hers is the moral vision that informs the film, and that vision consists of a determination to prevent the nuclear holocaust which seemed so inevitable in The Terminator. Lindsey’s ruthlessness in The Abyss was “bitchy.” Sarah’s is heroic.

Terminator 2 constantly argues with criticisms of The Terminator. You didn’t like all that killing in the name of saving lives in The Terminator? Okay, we minimize the killing. You object that assassination is a lousy way to improve the world? This time around John gets to make just that point to his mother when she finds that she can’t cold-bloodedly shoot the scientist destined to create the robots who are destined to destroy humanity.

Most importantly, from my point of view, Terminator 2 rejects the nuclear fatalism of The Terminator. The point of this film is to prevent the nuclear war looming in the near future. Cameron explains his intentions an interview contained in Don Shay and Jody Duncan’s book on the making of the film:

I’ve tried to make people think about the unthinkable nuclear war. We have to if we don’t, we’re screwed. I believe that. So if I can sugar-coat it with a big epic action thriller and get people into the theaters and get them thinking about something that they wouldn’t otherwise, then maybe that does some good other than just making all of us a lot more money.17

As Oliver Morton notes, “Terminator 2 ‘s structure is an explicit denial of The Terminator’ s. Whereas the point of The Terminator is to reach that final scene and make the preceding film a necessary consequence of its ending, the point of Terminator 2 is to reach an ending in which neither that film, nor its predecessor, were necessary in the first place.”18

Of course this is contradictory, but contradictions are inevitable in any time-travel story that does not follow (like Woody Allen’s Sleeper ) the inexorably forward-pointing arrow of time. They succeed only by ignoring their own illogic, or like Terminator pointing it out only to dismiss it. Excessive literalism is fatal. After leaving the theater we may realize, for instance, that if the nuclear war has really been averted, John should not exist, since he is a product of that war. Sarah’s efforts to save his life could be seen as threatening his very existence. But both films discourage such speculation by keeping the diverting action going and letting the characters express their own bewilderment at the contradictions built into their story.

It’s no use carping as many critics have about Terminator 2′s logic. What is of some use is noticing the limitations of its attitudes toward nuclear war. For all its virtues, this film has some amazingly stupid things to say on the subject. The problem is not, as some have argued, that its vision of such a war is understated; it contains the most carefully researched, accurately depicted portrayal of a nuclear explosion in any film yet made.19 Its scenes of carnage put The Day After to shame. The only film to focus more closely on the effects of nuclear weapons in a graphic way is Shohei Imamura’s story of the Hiroshima bombing, Black Rain.

But its conscientiousness does not make Terminator 2 a smart film about nuclear war. The first obvious problem is that it uses that hoariest of bad science fiction film clichés: the crucial scientist whose elimination can save the world. The fact that the scientist is a brilliant, sympathetic black man may prevent us from noticing the cliché for a while, but it’s there. It’s true that the storyline does not really require his death–only the destruction of the microchips he’s been studying; but the point made by this variation on the myth is the same: science is the product of irreplaceable individuals, so one can uninvent a device by killing its inventor. As applied to the atomic bomb, this was early on proven a fallacy when the Soviet Union developed its own bomb (though Americans long clung to the myth that it couldn’t have done so without stealing our secret formulas). As the anti-nuclear-disarmament crowd never tires of repeating, you can’t uninvent the bomb. Terminators may be prevented: they don’t exist yet. Bombs do.

I stated earlier that the apparent contradiction that violence is used to prevent violence is not necessarily fatal. However, the problem with the tension between these two kinds of violence in Terminator 2 is that they do not seem to inhabit the same stylistic universe. Sarah’s visions of Judgment Day are overpoweringly horrific, her reactions to them intense and moving. The violence perpetrated by the two Terminators is cartoonish, often comic. The antics of the liquid-metal T-1000 strongly resemble those of the old comic book character Plastic Man (though today’s kids might think of him as an unusually supple Transformer). The Terminator was a pure escape film because the future nuclear war was barely sketched in, obviously only an excuse for the depiction of exciting action. In structure it was little more than a car chase film combined with the excitement of a shooting gallery where the targets keep bobbing back up after being hit.20

But Terminator 2 uses a technologically more advanced narrative metaphor: it is a video game. A kid—John—is at the controls. The targets pop up left and right, but the harm done them never seems serious. The cops are at worst kneecapped, and the T-1000 is as indestructible as a typical videogame adversary, continually reassembling himself for another round. The metaphor is underlined when, just before he meets the terminators, we see John playing the old anti-missile defence game “Missile Command” in a videogame gallery. Atari is listed in the credits; and of course Terminator 2 is also literally a videogame that you can play in your local arcade or at home on your Nintendo.21 (It’s also a rock video. Guns and Roses’ video of “You Could Be Mine,” contains scenes from both films.)

The entertainment and the sermon clash. There is little effort to reconcile them. By emphasizing the seriousness of the nuclear threat, Cameron has revealed to the thoughtful viewer the moral bankruptcy involved in trivializing violence in the rest of the film. By devoting by far the greatest part of the film to exciting chases, shootings, and explosions, he has undermined the earnest anti-war scenes. The net result is likely to be that the viewer’s appetite for mayhem is satisfied without his or her awareness of the danger of nuclear war being effectively aroused. Many action films present moralizing rationales for their mayhem of course, but it is rare for that rationale to be given the sort of emphasis and weight that Sarah’s visions have in Terminator 2.

The most important problem exists in both films, and that is the myth that nuclear weapons have a mind of their own. Skynet, as many have noted, is a version of SDI. Richard Corliss calls Terminator 2 “a Star Wars movie that is anti-Star Wars.”22 In fact, the term “hunter-killer” used in both films is taken directly from SDI plans for “hunter-killer” anti-satellite weapons. The Skynet myth reflects the (wholly justified) notion that nuclear weapons threaten their possessors as much as the enemy. As a metaphor it has great power. But it is also disempowering because it removes humanity from the equation. The fact is that nuclear weapons don’t cause nuclear wars: people do. Defense labs and the scientists who work in them are easy targets, but the real menaces are the politicians who have refused to accept responsibility for holding the whole world hostage at gunpoint and the voters who have elected them.

But in the event, the film may prove to be wiser than it at first seems. It became clear in 1991 that the U.S. and Soviet governments had finally gotten sufficiently afraid of their nuclear arsenals to start disposing of them. It took the collapse of the Soviet Union and the threat that missiles and bombs would fall into the hands of angry, vengeful Ukranians, Moldavians, and Latvians to precipitate the current anti-arms race in which both sides are frantically trying to match each other in the number and size of the weapons they can throw away.

It was Terminator 2’s misfortune to reach the screen just as its earnest sermon against the threat of nuclear annihilation was seeming more than ever irrelevant. Of all the problems threatening the world at the moment, imminent all-out nuclear war is not one. The proliferation of nuclear weapons in third-world countries poses different (and very serious) sorts of threats; but it is difficult any longer to imagine some fanatical dictator triggering a world-wide exchange of such magnitude that it could be called a nuclear holocaust. We need new myths to wrestle with that problem.

Endnotes:

1“Cling to Me.” November 13, 1984, p. 62.

2Cameron acknowledged the appeal of his villain in an interview with David Chute. “. . . you love to root for the bad guy; you want to see him get up again, you want to see him dumbfound the poor cops.” ” Three Guys in Three Dimensions,” Film Comment, February 1985, p. 59.

3 Young readers write in comments such as this, from a twelve-year-old enthusiast: “This comic is probably the best I have ever read because, and this is gonna sound morbid as hell, people die. I mean you don’t see them being ten inches away from an explosion and be okay.” Other fan comments: “I like the guns they use. I also like the part where the kid says, ‘You just bought a one way ticket to hell! my man.’ I really like the Plasma rifle.” Issue no. 11 of The Terminator . Chicago: Now Comics, August 1989, pp. 28-29. Publication of the Terminator comic books was taken over in August 1990 by Dark Horse comics, which produced a decidedly slicker and even more violent product for an evidently expanding market.

4Peter Fitting reads The Terminator as not as a frivolous nuclear war film, but as a fairly thoughtful metaphor for modern urban wastelands. See “Count Me Out/In: Post-Apocalyptic Visions in Recent Science Fiction Film,” CineAction! Winter 1987/88, p. 48.

5For more on the popularity of nuclear war imagery among eighties youth, see my article “Americans Learn to Love the Bomb,” New York Times, July 17, 1985, Section 1, p. 23, col. 1.

6“Narrative Entanglements: The Terminator, ” Film Quarterly, 43 (Winter 1989-90), p. 19. See also J. P. Telotte, “The Ghost in the Machine: Consciousness and the Science Fiction Film,” Western Humanities Review 42 (1988), pp.249-258. A more interesting discussion of this subject which includes Terminator 2 is Oliver Morton’s “A General Theory of Terminators,” The Modern Review 1 (Autumn 1991), pp. 32-33.

7Harlan Ellison saw in The Terminator the influence of his story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” in which a misanthropic computer launches Armageddon, as well as others of his works; but although Cameron acknowledged some indebtedness (under the threat of a lawsuit), the parallels with The Forbin Project seem much more striking. See Max Rebeaux. “Harlan Ellison vs The Terminator: No More Mr. Nice Guy,” Cinéfantastique 15 (October 1985), pp. 4-5, 61.

8“ The Terminator: Beyond Classical Hollywood Narrative,” CineAction! Spring 1987, pp. 84-87.

9“Deconstructing The Terminator ,” Film Criticism 12 (1988), p. 46. See also Elayne Rapping. “Hollywood’s New ‘Feminist Heroines’.” Cineaste 14 (1986), pp. 4-9.

10“Child/Alien/Father: Patriarchal Crisis and Generic Exchange,” Camera Obscura 15 (1987): 29-31.]

11Beagles, Black Harrowers, etc.” August 12, 1991. p. 28.

12“Terminator 2.” People Weekly July 8, 1991, p. 13.

13“In the New ‘Terminator,’ The Forces of Good Seek Peace, Violently,” New York Times July 3, 1991, p. C11. Maslin makes several important criticisms of Terminator 2, but she does not deny that it is exciting.

14Kenneth Turan. “He said He’d Be Back.” Los Angeles Times , July 3, 1991. pp. F1, F6. Mick LaSalle. “‘Terminator 2’ Is the End-All.” San Francisco Chronicle, July 3, 1991, p. E1.

15See David Chute’s interview with Cameron, cited above. Cameron had thought up the idea of a shape-changing villain in working on the first film, but had to use “a more traditional kind of robot” because of budget constraints. See Shay, p. 29.

16This claim, repeated endlessly and uncritically in the press seems dubious. I would like to see the $20,000,000 figure adjusted for inflation and compared to the budgets of some of the old massive Bible epics.

17P. 19.

18“A General Theory of Terminators,” p. 33. A third film in which the threat is renewed is a very live possibility, of course, but it is worth noting that Randall Frakes’ novelization ends with a scene which confirms that the looming holocaust has been successfully averted. Terminator 2: Judgment Day. New York: Bantam, 1991, pp.237-240.

19The filmmakers studied old atomic bomb test footage in preparing the scene. See Shay, p. 113.

20It should be noted that the Terminators in both films are amazingly inefficient killing machines. They often move with glacial slowness at crucial moments and when aiming at their more important targets and miss most of the time. These are not “smart weapons.” But I wouldn’t make too much of the point. Their clumsiness is necessary to prevent them from annihilating the entire cast in seconds and wrecking the movie.

21Arcade game by Midway; Nintendo game by LJN, which also makes a hand-held Game Boy version. There is also a pinball game featuring a gleaming silver skull, by Williams. See Anonymous. “Terminator 2: Judgment Day: T2.” Electronic Gaming Monthly 4.12 (December 1991), “Masters of the Game” section, pp. 4 – 5 and Anonymous. “Terminator Pinball Wizardry” and “T-1000 Video Games Sweepstakes.” T2 (The Official Terminator 2: Judgment Day Movie Magazine. New York: Starlog Communications International, 1991, p. 4.

22Half a Terrific Terminator.” Newsweek July 8, 1991, p. 56.

Sources

Anonymous. “Terminator 2: Judgment Day: T2.” Electronic Gaming Monthly 4.12 (December 1991) “Masters of the Game” section, pp. 4 – 5.

Anonymous. “Terminator Pinball Wizardry” and “T-1000 Video Games Sweepstakes.” T2 (The Official Terminator 2: Judgment Day Movie Magazine. New York: Starlog Communications International, 1991, p. 4.

Brians, Paul. “Americans Learn to Love the Bomb,” New York Times July 17, 1985, Section 1, p. 23, col. 1.

Chute, David. “Three Guys in Three Dimensions.” Film Comment, February 1985, p. 55, 57-60.

Corliss, Richard. “Half a Terrific Terminator.” Newsweek July 8, 1991, p. 56.

Edelstein, David. “Cling to Me.” The Village Voice, November 13, 1984, p. 62.

Elayne Rapping. “Hollywood’s New ‘Feminist Heroines’.” Cineaste 14 (1986): 4-9.

Fitting, Peter. “Count Me Out/In: Post-Apocalyptic Visions in Recent Science Fiction Film,” CineAction! Winter 1987/88, pp. 42-51.

Fortier, Ron, writer. Thomas A. Tenney, artist. The Terminator no. 11 (August 1989), pp. 28-29.

Goscilo, Margaret. “Deconstructing The Terminator ,” Film Criticism 12 (1988): 37-52.

Kauffmann, Stanley. “Beagles, Black Harrowers, etc.” The New Republic August 12, 1991. p. 28-29.

LaSalle, Mick. “‘Terminator 2’ Is the End-All.” San Francisco Chronicle, July 3, 1991, p. E1.

Mann, Karen B. “Narrative Entanglements: The Terminator,” Film Quarterly, 43 (Winter 1989-90): 19.

Maslin, Janet. “In the New ‘Terminator,’ The Forces of Good Seek Peace, Violently,” New York Times July 3, 1991, p. C11.

Morton, Oliver. “A General Theory of Terminators,” The Modern Review 1 (Autumn 1991): 32-33

Necakov, Lillian. “ The Terminator: Beyond Classical Hollywood Narrative,” CineAction! Spring 1987, pp. 84-87.

Novak, Ralph. “Terminator 2.” People Weekly July 8, 1991, p. 13.

Rapping, Elayne. “Hollywood’s New ‘Feminist Heroines’.” Cineaste 14 (1986), pp. 4-9.

Rebeaux, Max. “Harlan Ellison vs The Terminator: No More Mr. Nice Guy,” Cinéfantastique 15 (October 1985): 4-5, 61.

Shay, Don and Jody Duncan. The Making of T2: Terminator 2: Judgment Day. New York: Bantam, 1991.

Sobchack, Vivian. “Child/Alien/Father: Patriarchal Crisis and Generic Exchange.” Camera Obscura 15 (1987): 6-35.

Telotte, J. P. “The Ghost in the Machine: Consciousness and the Science Fiction Film,” Western Humanities Review 42 (1988): 249-258.

Turan, Kenneth. “He said He’d Be Back.” Los Angeles Times , July 3, 1991. pp. F1, F6.

 

Last updated December 17, 2013

Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction

by Paul Brians
Chapter Five
Avoiding Nuclear War

Avoiding a nuclear holocaust: it might be supposed that such would be the aim of the authors of nuclear war fiction. The issuing of awful warnings. The depiction of Armageddon. Foreshadowing the wretchedness of the new dark age. And for a minority of authors, this is so.

Yet most of those who have depicted nuclear war or its aftermath in fiction have done so in ways that avoid coming to terms with the nature of a nuclear war in the real world. There are sound commercial reasons for this avoidance. The subject has never been truly popular, as noted in chapter 1: realistic depictions of nuclear holocaust are too disturbing to appeal to a mass audience. The experience of reading such a work is too much like staring into one’s own grave. The best-seller status of Shute’s On the Beach was an anomaly, perhaps due in part to the book’s careful exclusion of all aspects of the war except the relatively tidy effects of the blanket of fallout which engulfs the globe. It contains no melted eyeballs, no hanging flaps of skin, no suppurating sores, no cancerous lesions, no mounds of rubble, no deformed babies–in short, no nuclear war. Even so, it scared readers silly. The relative success of Kunetka and Strieber’s Warday may be ascribable in part to the moderate scale of the war it describes, and the same is even more true of the amazingly understated Alas, Babylon.

Aside from these three, few fictional works which have focused primarily on depicting the course or immediate aftermath of a nuclear war have ever attained true best-seller status. In science fiction, by far the greater number of well-known novels and short stories depict the distant future, with the holocaust Iying in the distant past: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Davy, Dreamsnake. And even when they choose nuclear war as their subject, most authors accommodate it to our fears and willful ignorance in one way or another. The strategies of avoidance are many, but it is this form of avoidance that we shall discuss first.

In spy thrillers the holocaust is usually avoided literally. The superagent hero almost always succeeds in thwarting the plot of terrorists or vicious pacifists to plunge the world into atomic Armageddon. When their bomb does explode, as in the cases cited in the Bibliography, it usually does not signal the beginning of a holocaust. The danger of nuclear war provides only a source of suspense, a motivating threat of the sort provided in earlier fiction by the microbes, rays, and poison gases wielded by would-be rulers of the planet.

The political content of thrillers varies, but they are predominantly conservative, depicting the Russians or Chinese as crazed aggressors bent on world domination. Such views do not lend themselves to thoughtful warnings of the dangers of nuclear war, except insofar as such war is precipitated by the failure of liberals to accept the necessity of the policy of deterrence through strength. Because of their need for successful heroes and penchant for conservative politics, thrillers do not provide a hospitable setting for serious examination of the consequences of the nuclear arms race.

An exception to the rule is Nicolas Freeling’s examination of the responsibility of the scientist in the construction of nuclear weapons in his thriller of international terrorism, Gadget (1977). He depicts better than anyone the morbid fascination the bomb can exercise over a man of peace, a man like Robert Oppenheimer. Freeling gives concrete form to the debate over whether the scientist who works on arms can separate himself from responsibility for his products, as a kidnapped physicist finds himself fascinated by the task of constructing the bomb which terrorists have forced him to create. His wife’s reaction fits far better the mold of traditional heroism: she rouses herself from her stupefied lethargy to argue passionately that he must resist, and when she fails, removes the excuse that he must endanger others to save those he loves by escaping along with her children. Her “irrational” views–seen as literal madness by the authorities–are clearly the purest sanity.

But typically, atomic thrillers are nothing like this. The bomb is an arbitrary threat and the morality of its creation and use are not closely examined. Most nuclear war fiction is, of course, science fiction. Although science fiction is capable of thoughtful and sophisticated explorations of political and moral issues, the vast bulk of it is simple escapist fantasy. Far more thoughtful treatments of nuclear war exist in science fiction than in thrillers, but the majority of science fiction authors trivialize the subject in one way or another.

Perhaps most striking is the way in which, as we have seen, radiation-induced mutation becomes a sort of magic wand to justify the creation of marvels and monsters. The notion of mutated superbeings and beasts had been around for a long time before Hiroshima, and even before the bomb went off, Henry Kuttner was putting the new device to work in his “Baldy” stories. The equation radioactivity = mutation = telepathy is one of the most bizarre consequences of the atomic age in fiction, but that did not prevent it from rapidly becoming a cliché. Even when a science fiction author attempted a more sober treatment of the theme of birth defects, as in Judith Merril’s “That Only a Mother” (1948), the equation tended to creep in. The baby in Merril’s story may lack arms and legs, but it has preternatural abilities. Merril may have been satirizing the established pattern by portraying a superbaby who turned out to be defective, but outside of science fiction the combination would have seemed ridiculous. Indeed, outside of science fiction the supernormal maturity of the child would be seen as a delusion of the crazed mother, but the science fiction context suggests that its abilities are real.

When Merril explored the consequences of radiation more thoroughly, in Shadow on the Hearth (1950), which is hardly a science fiction novel at all, she depicted a mild case. And Merril’s treatment of the subject is one of the best. The protagonists of most nuclear war science fiction are spared the horrors of radiation disease entirely. It is almost entirely outside of science fiction–in the novels depicting the victims of the Hiroshima bomb–that detailed descriptions of the course of radiation disease are presented from the point of view of the sufferer. Given the claims of science fiction to scientific accuracy, the avoidance of this topic is remarkable. One would not expect the theme to appear in science fiction adventure stories, for there is nothing heroic about wasting away in agony, but radiation disease is absent even from most of the more thoughtful nuclear war science fiction. Indeed, cancer, blindness, even loss of hair and skin lesions–all of these ordinary consequences of exposure to high levels of radioactivity are extraordinarily rare in fiction. Radiation is often mentioned as a threat, but one which is successfully avoided by the principal characters.

Traditional science fiction sees itself as a problem-solving genre, and this attitude can lead to a peculiar sort of avoidance in which the problems posed by nuclear weapons are disposed of in a cavalier fashion. Impenetrable shields or other superatomic technology is developed, aliens invade and impose disarmament or computers do the same, nuclear war turns out not to be as bad as had been thought and can be lived with, or humanity is replaced by something less belligerent: superhumans or supermachines.

Less traditional writers (Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, for instance) often treat the subject in a satirical manner. There is something to be said for the argument that the concept of nuclear war is so irrational that only a satirical treatment of it is adequate. Norman Spinrad’s “The Big Flash” (1969) is both absurd and telling. But there are problems with this point of view as well. Often the writer seems to be considerably more concerned with working out a particular conceit than with exploring the absurdity of nuclear war (see Knight’s “Not With a Bang” [1950]). And the absurdist approach can be a sophisticated form of avoidance.

Surely one of the reasons for the relative popularity of the film Dr. Strangelove was that it echoed people’s feelings that the military was insane, the bombs uncontrollable, and doomsday inevitable. If these feelings accurately depict reality, the appropriate reaction would seem to be panic or despair rather than sardonic humor. Instead, absurdism is often a coping mechanism which allows one to shelve nuclear war mentally as simply one of life’s insoluble quandaries. This attitude is akin to the fatalism of people who cavalierly hope to be the first to go when the bombs fall. If nothing can be done about the danger of nuclear holocaust, then one is released from responsibility for doing anything whatever about it and is better off not thinking about the subject at all. Absurdist treatments of the theme then become not courageous explorations of what terrifies us but a form of not thinking.

Almost entirely absent from fiction, both science fiction and otherwise, is effective political action to prevent nuclear war or its recurrence, as noted earlier. When action is taken, it is usually by high government officials and not by ordinary citizens. There are very few works in which there is any sort of organized protest against nuclear weapons; and when common people do act, their deeds are usually either foolish or villainous. In those few cases in which the protesters seem intelligent and well motivated they are ineffectual. The effect of the vast majority of this fiction is not to inspire protest but to plunge readers into despair.

In part, this result may be an artifact of the parameters of this study. A truly successful protest movement would prevent a nuclear war from taking place, and therefore a novel that depicted one would necessarily be excluded from examination. Yet I have read hundreds of near-nuclear war novels as well, and the dearth of effective protest is universal. There are exceedingly few nuclear war novels which articulate pacifist positions. Insofar as writers express pacifist sympathies, they do so by imagining the worst of horrors, not by providing alternatives. There is some question whether the reading of more nuclear war fiction, if that could be promoted, would inspire more people to action or simply reinforce their tendency toward despair.

Such matters are, of course, outside the realm of literary criticism. An artistically successful novel can be morally and politically irresponsible. In the twentieth century the two go hand-in-hand more often than not. Yet political questions impose themselves in reference to this particular theme more than most others. It is safe to say that most writers decide to write about nuclear war at least partly because they wish to prevent one from happening. Such motivations have been cited to me personally by Brian Aldiss, Helen Clarkson, and Theodore Sturgeon. It is not irrelevant to ask how well they succeed, quite apart from artistic questions.

English-speaking writers generally lack the kind of political traditions so well established in countries like France and Germany. The remarkable degree to which German writers, for instance, have involved themselves with protests against nuclear arms is well documented in Raimund Kurscheid’s admirable study, Kampf dem Atomtod!: Schriftsteller im Kampf gegen eine deutsche Atombewaffnung [Fight Against Atomic Death!: Writers in the Fight Against German Nuclear Arms]. Not only have many German fiction writers and dramatists signed petitions, marched, and spoken out directly on the issue of nuclear war, but they have also frequently written nonfiction articles on the subject as well. However it is notable that few of them have written fiction depicting such a war (Hans Hellmut Kirst is one of the few well-known exceptions). Apparently nothing like the proliferation of nuclear holocaust tales in English has taken place in German-speaking countries. German writers may have been more committed and outspoken than their British and American counterparts, but aside from a handful of novels and plays aimed primarily at direct agitation, their concerns have not been expressed in their creative work.

There are individual English-speaking authors who have become directly involved in the antinuclear movement. Brian Aldiss is a striking example. As a young soldier who was spared the necessity of invading Japan by the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb, Aldiss felt grateful for the weapon, and during the fifties he remained critical of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, whose motives he suspected were contaminated by its leftist leanings. His first story dealing with the subject, “Basis for Negotiation” (1962), was actually a satire on the CND’s widely publicized Aldermaston marches. Even when, in 1964, Aldiss included in Greybeard a note of sympathy for the protesters, privately he was far from sure that they should be supported.

Later events changed Aldiss’s mind. Living as he did in the 80s a few scant miles from the Greenham Common encampment where British women have been protesting the placement of American cruise missiles, he became directly involved in the protest in person and in statements to the press, including a letter to the London Times. The issue that concerned him most directly was the danger of a nuclear winter. Having been at work for several years on his Helliconia novels, in which a planet goes through a multimillenial change of seasons, he found a fortuitous opportunity to treat the nuclear winter theme in Helliconia Winter. Although Helliconia’s winter is natural and not artificially induced, he parallels it with nuclear winter on Earth in a fascinating and most effective fashion. Even more strikingly, he satirizes the arms race by depicting the political leaders who insist on the ruthless extermination of the enemy as fools who fail to realize the essential interdependence of all Helliconian life. Helliconia Winter does a fine job of connecting ecological concerns to the danger of nuclear war. The novel is highly recommended, along with the two preceding volumes, Helliconia Spring (1982) and Helliconia Summer (1983).

The achievements of Aldiss and others demonstrate that artistry and political effectiveness cannot be entirely separated. Perhaps the politically most useful sort of tale is one in which the characters are so attractive and vividly realized that one identifies with them deeply and wishes them not to undergo the suffering entailed in an atomic conflict. Surely that is one of the secrets of the impact of Ibuse’s Black Rain (1967). The notorious failure of most science fiction to create vividly realized characters makes it generally an inhospitable genre for this sort of protest.

Another characteristic of science fiction leads to another form of avoidance: most science fiction is popular fiction which places heavy emphasis on adventure. Being vaporized in a millisecond is not an adventure. It is not even an experience. Therefore most science fiction dealing with nuclear war depicts the aftermath and not the war itself. A large number of these adventure stories take the postholocaust setting for granted as a well- established background, the exact nature of which need not be explained. The causes of the war which transformed the world are usually vague or unknown, the number of bombs dropped and their design are similarly not specified, and only those aspects of the war which relate directly to the plot (the mutation of monsters, a surviving supercomputer) are likely even to be mentioned.

Stories of grisly hand-to-hand combat in the wake of a nuclear holocaust can have a moral purpose, even when badly written. Leonard Fischer’s inept 1950 pulp novel, Let Out the Beast, is clearly intended as an awful warning. Its protagonist keeps insisting on the need for ruthlessness in the struggle to survive, but it is apparent by the end of the novel that the very qualities which have made him a survivor have also rendered him less than human. As the title implies, the Darwinian struggle has turned man into beast. In such works, tales of the struggles between postholocaust neofeudal tribes may become metaphors for the political struggles of our own time, as in the novels of Williams’s Pelbar Cycle.

More frequently the struggle is presented for its own sake. The nuclear war novel is often only a lightly disguised western or old-fashioned war yarn. Even in these cases, writers of postholocaust action tales have generally felt impelled to deplore the cataclysm which provides the background for their protagonists’ adventures. Or at least that has been true in the past. Recently a more ominous sort of combat-oriented nuclear war fiction has burgeoned. The seventies produced a spate of conservative thrillers denouncing the Left and the young, but the values reflected in these works were relatively conventional and the authors clearly deplored the wars they described. Only Robert Adams’s long-running Horseclans series and, to a lesser degree, Piers Anthony’s Battle Circle novels, both of which began in 1975, display a consistent enthusiasm for ferocious bloody combat. In Adams’s books the holocaust is barely mentioned. In the foreground is an unending round of rape, torture, mutilation, and gruesome slaughter. The Horseclans novels are also unusual in depicting surviving scientists as villains bent on world domination (although it is difficult in this sort of fiction to distinguish heroes from villains).

With the advent of the eighties, this became the dominant variety of nuclear war fiction, changing the aspect of the genre radically. Although more thoughtful works like Yorick Blumenfeld’s Jenny (1981) and Strieber and Kunetka’s Warday received notice from reviewers, the taste of readers of popular fiction seems to have undergone a shift which resulted in the greatly accelerated production of enthusiastically vicious, brutal, and gory nuclear war novels. Suddenly the postholocaust landscape, like the Wild West or the Dark Ages, has become a legitimate and popular landscape for combat stories. The success of films like The Terminator (1984) and the Mad Max movies from Australia (specifically Road Warrior [1982] and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome[1985]) reflects the same phenomenon, as does the popularity of roleplaying and video adventure games modeled on nuclear war, and comics with postholocaust settings, like the Judge Dredd series. Especially among younger readers, avoidance of nuclear war as a realistic possibility now takes the peculiar form of plunging gleefully into the radioactive landscape in search of adventure. More than forty novels of this type have been published in the period from 1980 to 1984. In previous decades it was unusual to find more than one or two a year. In the 80s they made up over half of the nuclear war fiction being published.

Typical is Jerry Ahern’s Survivalist series (1981-), discussed in chapter 3 and described in length in the Bibliography. Like most of the heroes of these works, Ahern’s hero is a combat veteran whose main survival skills are marksmanship and ruthlessness. These novels may reflect the frustration of the generation of young men who returned from Vietnam to find their experiences not only unappreciated but detested. They reflect the frustration and rage of young people who seem to have adopted the view that the only sensible politics is: waste the other guy before he wastes you. A speech by one of Ahern’s protagonists who learns to enjoy slaughtering villains with Rourke sums up the spirit of the whole series:

I know this sounds horrible, with all that’s happened–I mean, World War Three began two days ago. But here I am, wearing a cowboy hat, riding in a fire-engine red ’57 Chevy, out to rescue some people trapped in the desert. Two days ago, I was a junior editor with a trade magazine publisher and dying of boredom. Maybe I’m crazy–and I’m sure not happy about the War and all–but I’m almost having fun.

Ahern’s novels are fairly trivial entertainments for men who enjoy combat stories, yet they are disturbing because they demonstrate that there is still a significant audience for stories which follow one of the deepest- held American patterns in our Wild West mythos: the story of the Wimp Who Picks Up the Gun and Becomes a Man. Even Rourke’s squeamish wife learns to shoot and stab with the best of them, and is the better for it. Posing as a tough-minded confrontation with facts softer folks try to forget, Ahern’s survivalist fiction evades coming to grips with the likely consequences of a nuclear war in any realistic way.

In William W. Johnstone’s Ashes novels (1983-), the politics are even more extreme. The protagonist rages against gun control, the ACLU, Big Government, welfare, labor unions, newscasters, and pacifists. He creates a sort of right-wing utopia and eventually becomes the object of religious worship. Yet Johnstone is eager to demonstrate that he is no simple-minded redneck. He rails against racism (even while depicting blacks in rigidly stereotyped ways), endorses some liberal causes (profit sharing), and opposes some conservative causes (censorship of pornography, religion in the public schools–although he’s not consistent on the latter point). The protagonist has certain pretensions to culture: one of his favorite symphonies is “Wagner’s Ring,” and he reads poetry by “Wadsworth.” The cover of each volume features an alert figure holding an automatic rifle while over him hovers a phoenix, symbol of the bright new right-wing hope which will emerge from the ashes of corrupt liberal America.

But saturating Johnstone’s works, and making them typical of the type, is a pornographic concentration on extreme violence, in his case particularly on rape and sexual torture, especially of children. In this new atomic action fiction, violence is both a horror and a source of intoxication. Johnstone dissects the phenomenon in the eighth chapter of Part Three of Out of the Ashes:

Sometimes a soldier will fire his weapon until it’s empty and will never reload, so caught up in the heat and the horror of combat is he. Pull the trigger over and over; feel the imaginary slam of the butt against the shoulder; kill the enemy with nonbullets. The yammering, banging, metal against metal makes it difficult to think. So you don’t. The screaming, the awful howling of the wounded and the yelling of the combatants blend into a solid roaring cacophony in your head. An hour becomes a minute; a minute is eternity. God! will it never end? No! don’t let it end; the high is terrific, kind of like a woman moaning beneath you, reaching the climax.

Because for once Johnstone is not merely whipping up the bloodlust but truly trying to explain what it feels like for a soldier to be caught up in a killing frenzy, he adds: “One soon learns the truth: you didn’t climax, you shit your pants.” Aside from this one remarkably honest passage, however, most of the novel is a chain of sadistic sex, torture, and bloodshed, each incident thoroughly deplored, of course, then followed by the next, the whole profusely interlarded with right-wing editorializing.

Johnstone takes sadistic sex further than any ol the other later novelists of nuclear violence but he is not untypical of the rest in his emphasis on rape. These are quintessentially masculine novels aimed at a male audience. The fascination of rape haunts these works, recurring again and again. In fact, the entire atomic adventure drama is strikingly masculine. It is notable that whereas protagonists created by male authors normally set out on a quest when the bomb drops, the protagonists of women authors generally stay close to home, caring for the sick and the dying. Men sometimes rescue children in the course of their adventures (although more often than not children fail to be rescued), but they rarely settle down to care for them. That is the role of women. Vonda McIntyre’s Snake (in Dreamsnake) is a successful attempt by a feminist to combine the adventurous, erotic spirit of the traditional hero with the compassionate and nurturing qualities of the traditional heroine. The novel is admirable. But it was the macho swagger of the male writers captured the public imagination. The adventure stories continued to pour out. Others cited in the Bibliography are by D. B. Drumm, Frederick Dunstan, L. Ron Hubbard, Dean Ing, Dennis Jones, Luke Rhinehart, James Rouch, Ryder Stacy, and the indefatigable Robert Adams, who published the long-running Horseclans series. Not all of their books are as ferocious as those of Ahern and Johnstone, and most of them are better writers, but the same themes unite them: fatalism about nuclear war, extreme individualism in which survival for its own sake is the highest ideal, and–in most cases– bloody sadism.

In one of 1984’s most popular films, The Terminator, the audience is invited to regard nuclear war as inevitable and to suppose that the best way to prepare for the future is to arm oneself and prepare for the internecine combat which will surely ensue in the wake of the holocaust. Most of the new fiction takes the same view. It depicts political action to prevent a nuclear war as at best irrelevant, and at worst suicidal. These novels suit perfectly the 80s mood of revived cold war animosity toward the Soviet Union apparent in films such as Red Dawn, Rocky IV and White Nights.Although fiction writers preceded filmmakers in expressing this mood, they were clearly part of the same phenomenon. Nuclear saber-rattling was definitely in vogue.

Despite the title of Ahern’s Survivalist series, most of these novels are not about survivalism as such. Indeed, in one of Drumm’s Traveler books (1984-)–which in many ways seem like a parody of the whole genre–the hero destroys a villainous group of survivalists. (Dean Ing’s Pulling Through [1983] is a true survivalist tract, and it lacks most of the qualities we have been discussing.) In these stories, killing is not part of an integrated philosophy of survival; it is depicted for its own sake.

Atomic sadism does not entirely dominate the current crop of fictional nuclear holocausts, however. Several thoughtful and carefully researched works have appeared recently. The most significant are Strieber and Kunetka’s Warday and William Prochnau’s Trinity’s Child (1983). None of these authors was content to repeat the clichˆ©s of his predecessors, and all engaged in considerable background study and larded their works with fact. They take a firmly antiwar stance as well.

Prochnau’s novel is perhaps the more interesting. Its title refers, of course, to the code name for the first atomic bomb test in 1945, “Trinity.” The novel illustrates only too convincingly how a nuclear war once begun can become nearly impossible to control, and how close to holocaust we live on a daily basis. The novel also has a contemporary emphasis in that the president it depicts is in some ways similar to Ronald Reagan: he is an elderly hawk who refuses to believe that the Russians would ever dare to defy his firm stance. It is in fact his aggressive posturing which has triggered their decision to attempt a limited preemptive strike. He is not entirely a negative figure, however; his native common sense and good judgment save much of the country in the end. But for most of the novel, he is unfortunately unconscious, and the idiotic kneejerk reactionary secretary of the interior who is mistakenly assigned the duties of commander-in-chief almost precipitates Armageddon.

The book is filled with details concerning the difficulties of planning and communicating inside the military during a nuclear war, including a good deal of emphasis on the dangers of electromagnetic pulse effects–something Prochnau’s book has in common with Strieber and Kunetka’s. Unlike the latter, however, Prochnau does not assign EMP an overwhelmingly important role. A host of highly credible mishaps cause the course of the war to go wildly out of control. (In many ways the plot illustrates the weaknesses of the usual nuclear war scenarios produced by Pentagon experts as they are discussed in Paul Bracken’s The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces, published the same year.) The Russian missiles prove to be highly inaccurate and their commanders incapable of keeping accurate track of the damage they are causing. Less technically sophisticated nations like China and Pakistan cannot be certain even of the identity of their attacker. The presidential helicopter is all too probably destroyed in flight, EMP partially disables the command plane, and the war escalates in a blundering, idiotic fashion, beyond the control of anyone. Prochnau underlines the danger of destroying the leadership of one’s enemy when that very leadership is the only force capable of bringing a halt to the war and preventing ecocide. He even hints at the possibility of a nuclear winter by speculating that dust in the atmosphere might trigger a new ice age. This is an exaggeration but is remarkable considering that the novel was written before the first paper on the subject appeared: R. P. Turco, O. B. Toon, T. P. Ackerman, J. B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan, “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,” Science 222 (December 23,1983):1283-92. This seminal study is commonly referred to as the “TTAPS paper” from the initials of its authors.

The novel is interesting politically as well, as NATO refuses to sacrifice itself by coming to the aid of the U.S., the government of the USSR is depicted as torn by internal debate, and the mentality which insists on victory at all costs is seen as the most dangerous possible stance that the nation’s leader can take. Prochnau is unique in combining a high degree of political sophistication with a thorough knowledge of military hardware and strategy.

His treatment of women, however, is idiotic (few male authors of popular fiction who want to be modern about women seem to have any notion of how to go about it), but otherwise his characters are appealing and vividly portrayed, and the rather complex action is clearly conveyed. One of the most striking features of Trinity’s Child is the way in which the holocaust is finally prevented after a limited but devastating nuclear exchange. A long chain of improbable fortuitous coincidences and a great deal of simple good luck results in the president reestablishing command over the the military and calling a halt to the the plunge toward holocaust which his replacement has inaugurated. At one point, the mutiny of a crucial B-52 bomber crew plays an important role in averting disaster. Given the initial “bolt from the blue” attack by the Russians–itself highly improbable–the rest of Prochnau’s scenario convinces in its detailed depiction of disaster and fails–cleverly–to convince in its depiction of the rescue of humanity from annihilation.

During the years of research on this book I have often been asked which works I recommend most highly. In Chapter 1 I cited a number of them which I consider the most significant literary works depicting nuclear war or its aftermath. Here it is appropriate to list those works with the greatest potential for political impact on readers still uninformed about or unmoved at the threat posed by the world’s nuclear arsenals. Avoiding a holocaust in this sense is, after all, the most serious purpose such fiction can perform. For its persuasiveness and contemporaneity, Prochnau’s book certainly ranks high on the list. No other novel is as effective in depicting the probable course of a nuclear war. In portraying the effects of fallout, no one has done a better job than Helen Clarkson in The Last Day. And the work which best conveys the tragedy of the destruction of civilization is Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker.

But if I were to single out one work which should be read with attention by persons concerned with nuclear war, it would be Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain. No writer has more affectingly depicted the human tragedy that is nuclear warfare. Nuclear deterrence remains an acceptable policy of national defense largely because of the failure of imagination which our leaders willfully impose on themselves. The cloud of “nukespeak” which surrounds the atomic arms debate obscures the reality of the danger confronting us. Creative writers like Ibuse make the abstractions of the scenario writers concrete and remind us that nuclear war cannot be other than a crime against humanity and against the Earth itself. Blunted by decades of professional jargon and simple avoidance of the topic, the best of the fiction writers can reawaken our sensitivity to the holocaust that has loomed over the horizon for the past four decades and which threatens to shadow the future of our children unless we are stirred, at last, to do something to prevent it.

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