Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro

  The punnily titled Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? is a historical critique of the author of plays like Hamlet, The Tempest, and Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare, one of if not the most influential writer in the English language has been subject to a number of conspiracy theories. For example, perhaps Chrisopher Marlowe wasn’t actually murdered and his death was all a cover-up that allowed him to be spirited away to write plays under the pseudonym Shakespeare. James Shapiro’s thesis: these conspiracies are bogus. Shakespeare existed and wrote the plays we attribute to him. I’m sure we’ve all heard some conspiracies that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays. I even remember that in our high school edition of Macbeth the marginalia suggested that Christopher Marlowe wrote Act 3, Scene 3, and that is why there is an extra murderer that had never been introduced previously. Bunk, Shapiro would say.

Shapiro dismantles a number of common “clues” for Shakespeare’s inauthenticity throughout the book. For example, there’s the common belief that Shakespeare was uneducated because there is no record of Shakespeare attending school. Shapiro suggests, though, that Elizabethan England was not keeping records of the sort, but in fact plenty of people were educated, even if the attendance register is lost to history. The same goes for the argument that Shakespeare couldn’t possibly be as worldly as he presents in his texts. How could he possibly know about life in Italy, for example, if he never even left England? Well, Shapiro argues, often playwrights worked for play houses and were hired to write. The play houses would have their own collections of books that their writers would read and draw from—not that books were inaccessible in Elizabethan England; Shapiro points to some stats of how many book dealers existed. 

Shapiro works through a number of specific theories for alternate identities for Shakespeare that emerged in the years following his death, dismantling each one. He points to records that we do have (like lawsuits that bear Shakespeare’s name), the errors in peoples’ assumptions about Elizabethan writerly culture, famous frauds, and so on. Shapiro documents a fraud where one man wrote a wealth of extra missives, poems, and plays bearing Shakespeare’s name trying to convince others of a different Shakespeare. Even famous authors like Henry James and Mark Twain were Shakespeare skeptics, referring to “the author of the Shakespeare plays” rather than Shakespeare himself. Another prominent theory was that Francis Bacon was the author of Shakespeare’s plays—but to what end? Why conceal his identity?

Perhaps most compelling is the undercurrent of Contested Will. Beyond an exploration of who Shakespeare really was, the book presents some reasons that people might buy into conspiracies. In some ways, it’s far more broadly applicable than we might anticipate from the outset. For example, Shakespeare is presented as a unique force; he’s essentially a divine being in the world of literature. Thus, at one point in history, we see the debate rise up to challenge Shakespeare, Shapiro suggests, alongside other forms of divinity worship. At another time, we see the pushes for and against individualism. Scholars examined the idea of Homer being multiple rather than a singular writer; by extension, people then examined the works of Shakespeare as collaborations between a number of unidentified people, again dismantling his singular importance. Alternatively, scholars could not accept that the plays are anything but the work of a singular genius, but that we have identified the wrong person and that we now need to pull someone out from obscurity. We can’t have a Shakespeare that is an upper class figure; we need a scrappy everyday hero. Essentially, Shapiro’s argument is that political, religious, and social issues are the driving force of conspiratorial thinking. I actually hoped Shapiro would put a finer point on it and bring everything into a distinct framework, but the intimation is enough as a starting place.

One of the main arguments against Shakespeare’s identity is that he is so hard to pin down and find documentation of in his time. Shapiro, though, argues against that line of thinking. He notes how the spelling variants make it more challenging to find definitive record of Shakespeare. There was Shak-spar, Shakespear, Shakspar, or other variants before language got standardized in its spelling, so we can’t find or maybe have destroyed records with variations in spelling. One argument against Shakespeare is that people in his time weren’t talking about him—but Shapiro points out that they were. There are references to him as an employee of theatre companies, for example. Sure, he did collaborate on some plays (and Shapiro names the actual collaborators, which is pretty cool), but that was part of the process. Stories were commissioned and workshopped and shifted for different venues. Essentially, Shakespeare was known to others and we do have record of the man and the actors that he worked with.

Shapiro goes into some analysis, for example, of how specific roles may be written for specific actors. There is textual evidence for the specific people who were cast in particular parts. Shapiro also corrects the record on at least some of the order of the plays, which a number of anti-Shakespeare conspiracists got completely wrong in tracking to track Shakespeare’s development as an author and to pair his plays with autobiographical moments of their preferred candidates. (Sidenote: is it appropriate to call these conspiracy theorists Shakespeare birthers? It’s the same phenomenon, sort of.)

One of the most compelling literary arguments Shapiro makes in the book is against biographical criticism. It was interesting to see how previous conspiracists read and misread the plays to match their theories of who Shakespeare was (Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, for example). They would match the characters with real world figures and ensure that each aligned. These biographical readings, Shapiro and other new critics would suggest, fail to do justice to the actual content or logic of the plays. There’s actually a compelling anecdote where Shapiro discusses Helen Keller’s literary career. She is of course known for her life story. What I did not know is that she wrote fiction, too, and Shapiro documents how Keller was frustrated by the fact that nobody was interested in her fiction because her life overshadowed her work. People longed for more autobiographical fiction. Shapiro shows the way in which our society became more invested in an individual talent and why that led to autobiographical criticism and, moreover, demanded a specific identity for Shakespeare.

The book was pretty illuminating. I think it could have been used a little bit more of a push to lock down the frameworks for conspiratorial thinking that Shapiro exposes through case studies. The case studies are effective for showing errors in thinking and gives Shapiro an opportunity to correct the record and challenge the gaps in our own knowledge about the era and about Shakespeare the man. I’m not an expert, but I am persuaded.

Happy reading!

Complicity by Iain Banks

       

        Iain Banks’ Complicity places you in the terrible position of—and I’m sorry to tell you this—being a murderer. There are lengthy passages in which you are invading homes, tying people up, abusing them and murdering them in all sorts of grisly ways. Banks narrates these sections with the second person “you”, placing your agency as a reader in a tough spot: do you keep reading, and thereby enacting the horrific murders you are perpetuating? Or do you put the book down, disgusted by your own capacity to be drawn into the killing spree?

I want you to remember that question for later.

For now, let’s take a step back. Running opposite to the narration of ‘you’ is a first-person narration from Cameron Colley, a journalist with a penchant for the “big story.” In this case, he continues to receive phone calls from a mysterious Mr. Archer, who sends him names to investigate. Meanwhile, Cameron is trying to engage in counter-culture journalism, suggesting a corporate conspiracy in a would-be local interest story about the brewery. He’s also a drug addict, having an affair with his friend (who happens to be another friend’s wife), and he is a chronic masturbator who loves playing a computer game called Despot, which sounds like a more heavily sentient Age of Empires.

In the first half of the book, it’s perverse, but the most engaging parts are the murders and conspiracy that Cameron is trying to uncover. The hypermasculinity and hedonism is absurd, ridiculous, and gets boring pretty quickly. The transgressive nature of the text recalls works like American Psycho or perhaps Fight Club, but has that distinctly mid-80s to mid-90s  ethos of hyperreality popularized by works like William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It’s a work of profound excess.

I would say until the last fifty pages or so, I was a sceptic. But Banks’ conclusion delivers and justifies so much of what came before.

Around the halfway point of the book, something happens. I will try not to spoil too much here, but it’s worth noting that Cameron is pulled in for police questioning. He’s being interrogated for the murders. As it turns out, the victims are all important figures that have been specifically denounced in some of Cameron’s articles. He is forced to watch the videos of a gorilla-masked figure as he sexually abuses his male victims, severs peoples’ limbs, injects them with the HIV virus, and other more spectacular murders. After being sick, it is then that Cameron begins delving into memories. He is told to think of who else could have—might have—committed the horrific crimes.

The text devolves into a stream-of-consciousness panic before revealing backstory through flashbacks to Cameron’s youth. I think the best way to experience the book is going in ignorant, so if you’d like to preserve the sanctity of the secret, now is the chance to navigate away.

Through a series of flashbacks, we are invited to witness Cameron’s various failures. He lets his friends down in a number of ways, and it’s alluded to that there are two times Cameron abandoned a particular friend. Once, when he nearly drowned under a frozen lake, and the second—well, it’s a little ambiguous. The plot slows, somewhat, abandoning the high-octane whodunnit approach for a more ruminative exploration of old friendships. The section does a lot to humanize Cameron, which the novel desperately needs following his drug-fueled binges of self-indulgence. For example, in one scene, Cameron is enticed into performing a sex act on his slightly older male friend. An adult man then confronts them, having witnessed the act, and Cameron fails to defend his friend as the man rapes him. They then are able to attack and kill the man and hide his body. That bit of backstory gives a bit more depth to Cameron and his friend.

Banks offers effective twists and tensions throughout the book, both in the ‘present’ of the story and in the past. New details come to light and the filmic delivery of the book allows for some jump-cutting into different moments for greater impact. The tension heightens with interrogation scenes and Banks offers a great deal of impact through dialogue and sparse narration. The uncertainty of motivations, including for Cameron himself, is an excellent device for creating the atmosphere of the book. Even in the sections where ‘you’ are the narrator, your own motivations are not directly stated, which makes the project seem, at first, senseless.

When the murderer is revealed, Banks repeatedly layers the killer’s intentions. There are personal motivations, political ones, moral ones, and a healthy dose of nihilism. In the first half of the book, Banks develops a finely wrought political paranoia. It reads like a conspiracy and entices us in—just as it entices Cameron. The genius of this is that Cameron is so susceptible to paranoid fantasies that he is rendered oblivious to more obvious motivations in front of him. Through a finely crafted red herring, we, too, are pulled into the falsehoods, allowing ourselves to be deceived. It’s an odd situation where the conspiracy is a lie, but still serves its intended function and has the internal coherence of a bona fide conspiracy.

The whole situation sets up a paranoid mood, which only intensifies as the cat-and-mouse game progresses. We are led through the chase, the traps, the hunt. Even when you recognize the killer has been three steps ahead at every turn, there’s still the genuine horror of discovering the depth of the plan and the accounts of murdered and dismembered bodies are genuinely disgusting. Take that for what it’s worth from a literary perspective. As the book progresses, the ever-present killer stalks his prey and you start looking for him everywhere. In fact, the book easily could have resolved with him apologizing, disappearing, and with Cameron suspecting that he sees the murderer everywhere. That would be almost as chilling.

Some of the more superfluous aspects of the book take on a deeper significance in light of the killer’s omnipresence. For example, when Cameron describes his favourite video game, Despot, he talks about how he builds civilizations from scratch. He hops from individual serfs into other bodies and eventually takes on the power of a governing deity. Ironically, the game gets to know so much about your play style that if the game is on, it will play for you, though in a slightly degenerating way where your civilization slowly reverts. The game serves as an effective microcosm of all kinds of elements of the book. For instance, the fact that Cameron hops between bodies is like us at the start of the book, hopping into the body of the serial killer before shifting into an “I” and eventually taking on the position of the police department on the hunt for a killer. The omnipresence of the killer reads like the player of the game, able to manipulate the situation as he sees fit. The book also addresses themes about civilization, degeneracy, and the maintenance that is constantly needed in order for society to sustain itself. There’s something about a fictive video game that can give voice to so much.

Returning to the idea of paranoia, towards the end of the book, the serial killer is on the loose with the promise of behaving. But we all know it’s a lie, don’t we? There’s an excellent scene where Cameron’s car breaks down and someone pulls over to help him. The description does not at all match that of the killer—at first. From a narrative standpoint, though, we know that such a tense moment is likely to result in disaster, so our tension is heightened. Cameron, too, starts to recognize clues that are similar to the murderer—plus, we know that he puts on accents, has disguises, and so on. So we have this moment of a confrontation and it’s not initially clear whether it’s really the murderer. There’s a tension where you think that Cameron is in a rough enough place that he might attack or even kill this man, perhaps mistakenly. There’s a part of me that wanted to see it go that way—to see Cameron murder a man out of the lingering paranoia of a threat that no longer looms over him. That tension was just excellent.

The final confrontation with the killer is a bit super-villain-ish. It’s like the scene in every James Bond movie where, feeling he has the upper hand, the villain explains the plot in full. The killer reveals the full intentions and the message of his “work.” The philosophy teeters on the notion of a kind of Nietzschian claim to the Overman or an opportunistic Social Darwinism. The murderer, though, frames it as the natural extension of Cameron’s leftist beliefs. The rich people who exploit and kill others through their own negligence (either directly or indirectly) deserve to be killed themselves. The killer suggests it is no different that an oil baron, for example, kills any number of people through ecology than him taking one life to shock the system back into order.

The dialogue itself is a little on-the-nose, but the delivery is redeemed by giving Cameron an impossible choice in which both options are philosophical losses. Cameron could call the police to apprehend the murderer, which is the morally right thing to do, perhaps, but also would be to admit that his leftist politics (or at least the popular understanding of them) are a lie. Alternatively, he can let the murderer go free and admit that we are all complicit in a system which produces death. This is the kind of paradox I could see emerging in the work of Mark Fisher or Slavoj Žižek, if he hasn’t analyzed this book already. The seeming hypocrisy at the core of the philosophy is a profoundly challenging notion to grapple with.

I also loved the way Cameron approaches the phone call. Banks dramatizes Cameron’s inner conflict effectively and the choices of phone call on the killer’s cell phone are fantastic. First, Cameron calls his parents and receives an answering machine. Second, he calls his doctor to check if he has lung cancer. It’s a great moment that reinforces Cameron’s self-interest. He wants to know, in my reading, “am I going to die?” The answer to that question seems to impact his choice to call or not call the police—-which way the answer influences his decision is left to your own interpretation.

The ending of the book, despite the villain’s monologuing, is excellent. The final chapter shifts back to using the second person, but it’s a different second person than before—or is it? “You” used to be the murderer. Now, “you” are (seemingly) Cameron. The implications of that shifting “you” are intriguing from a political, moral, and literary standpoint. Essentially, “you” are complicit at every stage of the project. It’s an experiment in narrative culpability.

I’m not quite sure where to place Iain Banks in the literary canon. At times, Complicity feels like a conceptual literary work, at others a pulp whodunnit or political thriller. Plot-wise, I would say I was pretty consistently engaged, especially past the halfway point of the book. From the point of view of characterization, I can’t say I actually loved the characters, but Cameron’s consistency was finely achieved through his response to extreme situations. You may recall that a few months ago I reviewed John Updike’s Terrorist. This book is what that book should have been: stunningly paced, finely-wrought tension, more dialled-back misogyny, and more consistent characterization with a plot that had actual events. It has its flaws as a text (psst, your 1990s are showing), but it still feels at least somewhat relevant thirty years on.

 

Keep fighting the good fight and happy reading!

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

The very premise of Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein is the kind of absurdity that validates the idiom that truth is stranger than fiction. Naomi Klein, who I am ashamed to admit I last read about twenty years ago (Fences and Windows), has been continually conflated with Naomi Wolf, an ex-feminist who has become an alt-right figurehead largely associated with the likes of Steve Bannon. There’s a number of peculiar surprises in that sentence alone. The fact that a prolific feminist has gone to what appears to be the opposite extreme is strange enough, but the fact that Naomi Klein and her have taken on the same identity to casual observers is even stranger.

Thus we find ourselves in Doppelganger: A Trip to the Mirror World. Taking on a largely narratological approach that I tend not to associate with political non-fiction and not with Naomi Klein in particular, Klein leverages the identity confusion imposed upon her as a compelling angle for exploring political phenomena: namely, why politics so often resembles its own grotesque double. Klein traces this effect through a range of sub-topics, starting with an exploration of literary history and criticism with double-narratives, then discussing the transition of ex-leftist figures finding home in the alt-right, then into more precise topics like our collective treatment of autism, the Covid-19 pandemic, and even the Israel-Palestine conflict.

It’s interesting to see a crossover of literary and political interests, namely Klein’s exploration of Dostoyevski’s The Double and Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock—I feel like it’s pretty rare to see people actually turning to literature as an appropriate resource for political discussion, so it was a refreshing approach running opposite fact-based infodumps. Further, Klein’s discussion of her own double reads like a novel. There are all kinds of moments that stand out as a twist in a would-be novel. For instance, after a confusing interaction on Twitter, another user apologizes that Twitter autocompleted Naomi Wolf’s name: “Autocomplete?” Klein writes, “I felt blood rush to my face.” She notes that “the confusion was now so frequent that Twitter’s algorithm was prompting it, helpfully filling in the mistake for its users to save them precious time.” While the moment has an impact at the personal level, Klein then expands to the political layer in discussing how machine learning works:

the algorithm imitates, learning from patterns. So if my name is repeatedly mixed up with Wolf’s, even in jokes, then my name would start being suggested instead of hers, leading to even more mix ups, which also meant that anything I did to correct the record or state my own position on what had become her pet topics, would just train the algorithm to confuse us even more. This is what happens when we allow so many of our previously private actions to be enclosed by corporate text platforms whose founders said they were about connecting us, but were always about extracting from us.

This bridge between the personal and the political serves as an effective anchor for the text, making each moment feel as impactful as it is enlightening. It also serves as a nice supplement to the recently-reviewed Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Our Culture. In both texts, we see that machine learning serves to flatten identity, in this case with the extreme example of two people literally being fused into one. In Klein’s case, this renders her into speechlessness. Parallel to Dostoyevski’s double novel, “the double replaces the original, while the “original fades away or worse.” In fearing to become the other, to have your identity usurped from under you, Klein notes a trajectory towards speechlessness and silence, not wanting to be confused or to fuel the conflation any further. Essentially, even when we don’t act against our doubles, it affects us.

There are two notable instances where Klein withdraws from offering comment, recognizing the capacity for her position to be co-opted by the right or recognizing that the position has been preemptively tainted. In one case, Klein (a climate activist herself), wants to offer comment on an ecofascist future “in which ecological fears are harnessed to rationalize violent security crackdowns against those deemed “lesser humans”, often immigrants and the poor.” Klein says that “Ecofascism is a real threat and it is becoming more explicit on parts of the right” and yet in writing her piece she sanitizes “ecofascism” into “ecoauthoritarianism.” She makes the change knowing that “throwing the term fascism around is what other Naomi does—and hadn’t she helped make the very word absurd?” Klein recognizes that the right has co-opted the term “fascism” and through imprecise use has rendered it less meaningful. Yet, “ecofascism is the accurate term to describe the threat. And how convenient it is for coalescing fascist forces if the term has been so abused and pippicked that anti-fascists are loath to use it to accurately describe events in the real world?” It’s a fascinating phenomenon and Klein helps to give language to something I noticed throughout the rise of Donald Trump and the Covid-19 pandemic. So many of the valid critiques of the left have been distorted through imprecise application—more on this momentarily.

Another example of the limitations on Klein’s discourse emerge when she is asked to review Bill Gates’ book about climate change. She “made some notes about Gates’ interference on Covid-19 health policy, how he had shown his bias towards protecting corporate profits over human safety, and that we shouldn’t let him do the same to our climate responses.” All of this is valid critique, of course, “But then, [she] remembered that anything [she] wrote about Gates would likely fuel my “other Naomi” problem. In the speed-glossing of the Internet Age, wouldn’t it all blend and blur together, sound like one big conspiracy?” I find the moment to be chilling in its implications. My context for understanding the phenomenon emerges from being a part of the 90s and early 2000s punk scene. So much of the leftist discourse revolved around questioning authority, being distrustful of government officials, refusing to conform to standards, not trusting mass media, and so on. I saw each of those get co-opted by far right discourse, as if they recognize the truth in certain of those claims, but steal the kernel and twist it into something less nuanced. Wearing a mask, for example, suddenly came to be “conformity” to a government plot. (What’s that line from Ginsberg…“I saw the best minds of my generation appropriated by madness, starving hysterical naked”?).

Klein recognizes this, herself. She discusses the response of conservatives to “technofetishism” that largely goes unquestioned by mainstream liberals. Steve Bannon “recognized a similar neglect happening with regard to Big Pharma.” Klein notes that “drug company price gouging and profiteering have traditionally been the purview of the left. They’re the kind of thing Bernie Sanders rails against.” During the pandemic, though, “there was weak resistance among progressives to the way vaccine manufacturers were profiteering [...] and so Bannon became the one taking on Big Pharma’s greed, but once again via unfounded conspiracy theories rather than real scandals.” Klein offers a surprisingly moderate position on Covid-19 protocols, recognizing that perhaps they were overblown—or at least manipulated—to serve larger interests. But, isn’t that exactly what the conspiracy theorists said? Klein even notes that Bannon would play clips from major news outlets like MSNBC and CNN with “the clear implication being that they cannot be trusted because they are in the pay of [pharmaceutical] companies.” She notes that “he sounds like Noam Chomsky or Chris Smalls, the Amazon labour union leader known for his Eat the Rich jacket, or for that matter, [Klein herself].” I recognize the exact phenomena, especially with respect to Chomsky. Having read his discussion of how the media industry works and its structural composition which inevitably produces a conservative bias, it’s hard to disagree with his lack of trust in mass media. Yet, I feel like the election of Trump and the subsequent pandemic galvanized more rigid divisions. Suddenly, I had to trust CNN more because my enemies were against it. The same is true of Trudeau—sure, he’s a disappointment, but I can’t criticize him as much as I’d like, lest I be perceived as being pro-Polièvre or fuelling a conservative alternative.

Klein offers a passage that I think summarizes the issue incredibly effectively. I’ll present it here in its entirety as worthy of deep consideration: 

we have two warring political camps defining themselves in opposition to whatever the other is saying and doing at any given time. No, these camps are not morally equivalent, but the more people like Wolf and Bannon focus on very real fears of big tech, its power to unilaterally remove speech, to abscond with our data, to make digital doubles of us, the more liberals seem to shrug and sneer and treat the whole package of worries like “crazy people stuff”. Once an issue is touched by them, it seems to become oddly untouchable by almost everyone else. And what mainstream liberals ignore and neglect, this emerging alliance lavishes with attention. All of this helps me to understand my doppelganger, but not in a way I find at all reassuring, because it means she represents a larger and more dangerous form of mirroring: a mimicking of beliefs and concerns that feeds off progressive failures and silences.

I have been pretty critical of conservatives for having no other platform than “liberals bad,” but Doppelganger makes me consider if we’re substantially different in our approach. I’m glad that, despite recognizing the failures of the left, Klein still notes that there is not a moral equivalent (even if that moral high ground is sometimes what makes us falter in the double-standards of politics). I, too, recognize in myself the aversion to any issue that I perceive as “crazy people stuff” and the untouchability of certain discourses. I see a lot of truth in this passage and a lot that is worth striving to fix.

I think one of the main benefits in reading Doppelganger is seeing how that process works. Conservatives “follow a similar playbook” to Bannon. They capitalize on real fears, but through a strange backward rationale. In effect, it plays into the double-standard we’ve seen time and time again. For instance, Klein talks about the press conference Trump held  a few hours before his debate with Hillary Clinton where he paraded a lineup of women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual crimes. Klein notes that Bannon was “smirking on the sidelines as if thoroughly enjoying the show.” We’re placed in a position where on principle we have to agree with Trump—we believe victims and believe we should hold Bill Clinton to account. Meanwhile, he doesn’t care about his own sexual assaults, which he himself described in that famous audio recording. We care about the principle and he does not: it puts us in a disadvantageous no-win position. Klein describes the approach as “mirroring, deflecting, and projection” and notes that they work well “especially when you’ve got a point.” The mechanics of conservatives appropriating leftist values for their own use, making our values imprison us to certain forms of action, is actually a pretty genius move, as much as I hate to admit it.

The other side of the coin is that the right fabricates outrage over the things it itself is doing. Klein refers to Putin in particular, whom “throughout Russia’s illegal invasion and occupation of Ukraine, [...] would accuse the Ukrainian government of the precise crimes he was busily committing or considering committing himself.” If you operate with no shame and skirt any issues of internally contradictory ideology, it’s a very effective strategy. Plus, the context allows us to believe it:

if Putin was able to sell these upside-down claims to many, it’s partly because the U.S. government consistently does this kind of mirror-imaging itself, feigning outrage over Russian interference in U.S. elections with no concern for the irony that its intelligence operatives have meddled in elections and helped overthrow democratically elected governments the world over since the 1950s, from Iran to Chile to Honduras.

So, two big takeaways so far: 1) conservatives are able to capitalize on issues under-addressed by the left and 2) by appropriating the thoughts and tactics of the left, conservatives can garner support and undermine us by our own principles.

There’s a third tactic: acceptance (kind of ). Klein persuasively outlines just why Naomi Wolf went from prolific feminist to alt-right conspiracy nut. When Wolf started questioning Covid protocols or started offering other objectionable views, the left that had once supported her dropped her. People became increasingly critical. I can only help but imagine her inner monologue: So much for the tolerant left. Yet, Bannon welcomes the outcasts to his show, actually modelling the supposed principle of inclusion that governs the left. The implicit conclusion is that we have to do better when our fellow leftists disappoint us or hold questionable stances.

In fact, one of the other big takeaways from the book is a quotation Klein includes from civil rights scholar John A. Powell: “We can be hard and critical on structures, but soft on people.” The left, admittedly, is not always soft on people—going for personal attacks (a failed attempt to co-opt the tactics of the right) rather than acting from a spirit of love and support. So, while Klein focuses on the divisiveness of our world, the need for strategic alignment emerges as the solution. There are essentially two steps to this process: 1) to unself and 2) to find strategic alliance, even when we find groups unpalatable.

We are often wrapped up in ourselves. In one insightfully amusing moment, Klein challenges the practice of self-citing (now commonplace in discourse): ““Quoting is what we do to bring in the voices of others, to expand the frame, not to narrow it further. Now self-citing happens all the time. As I wrote here, see my earlier Tweet, just bumping this up. We have to do it, or so many of us believe.” There’s a sense that we need to continually update our identities and push our way to the front. We double ourselves as a tactic: “We are caught in a roaring river of voices that seems to wash away all that came before. If we don’t remind people of what we’ve said and done, surely we will soon be floating downstream to the sea with all the other cultural detritus.”

Yet, this desire to protect our identities is counterproductive for genuine change. Instead, Klein encourages us to go through the process of “unselfing.” For instance, when talking about what was once known as multiple personality disorder, she notes that “the capacity to have internal discussion [...] is healthy and human.” Moreover, she cites how for Hannah Arendt, “it is when everyday people lose their capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation and find themselves only able to regurgitate slogans and contradictory platitudes that great evil occurs. So too, when people lose the ability to imagine the perspectives of others, or, as she put it in her essay “Truth and Politics”: ‘Making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent.’” It’s funny how often the solution to issues is to be less dogmatic and rigid about them. How, exactly, to cultivate a capacity for considering others, is more likely a more challenging matter. It appears that we need to challenge the rigidity of our own identities and become multiple — i.e. less individualistic and more multifaceted in our being. The discussion about Hannah Arendt continues that, “ In that state of literal thoughtlessness, i.e. an absence of thoughts of one’s own, totalitarianism takes hold. Put differently, we should not fear having voices in our heads, we should fear their absence.” When we are able to create a more permeable boundary of self, we resist the impulse for the oversimplification of reality.

The discussion occurs within the discourse of branding, including the fact that our identities are all brands now. Klein points to the “deepest danger of our era of branded humans” by noting that “Brands are not built to contain our multitudes. They demand fixedness, stasis, one singular self per person. Human statues. The form of doubling that branding demands of us is antithetical to the healthy form of doubling, or tripling, or quadrupling that is thinking and adapting to changing circumstances.” 

This bridges into a discussion of bell hooks, who refers to “amnesiac habits” that we tend to hold. bell hooks is ever an inspiration, and no less so when Klein draws on her work. As noted above, we need to be soft on people and hard on systems. Drawing on hooks, Klein notes that the process “starts with naming [...] the systems that have carved out the shadowlands, deemed them erasable, disposable: capitalism, imperialism, White supremacy, patriarchy.” She continues, “It requires teaching those words and their true meanings to the people in our lives so that the next time someone tells them that their suffering and burdens are the fault of child-stealing globalists, or job-stealing immigrants, or well-meaning teachers, or the Jews, or the Chinese, or the drag queens at the library, they will know better. And they will be able to fight better.” Once again we return to language and its ability to render experience more precisely. There is always the risk, though, as Klein discusses in an earlier chapter, of the language being co-opted: the right using the word fascism to the point of absurdity, for example. In this I experience some concern, too, for leftist discourse online and TikTok in particular. Certainly, most of the world’s problems emerge from a White supremacist, capitalist system, but when the discourse is so vaguely defined it might render the terms less meaningful and less pragmatic when we’re trying to combat their effects.

Klein notes that as things are today, we are “hard on people and far too soft on structures.” In order to push back at systems, the issue becomes once again an issue of “unselfing.” We cannot do the work alone as individuals. Capitalism thrives on individualism and convinces us that we can “solve climate change with an electric car, transcend your ego with a meditation app” and so on. We can “fix massive crises on our own through self-improvement.” While Klein acknowledges that some of these actions can help, the “truth is that nothing of much consequence in the face of our rigged systems can be accomplished on our own, whether by our own small selves, or even by our own identity groups. Change requires collaboration and coalition, even, especially, uncomfortable coalition.”

I think that’s the biggest challenge with the highest yield that Klein offers in the book. I’m thinking about strategic alliance over common issues and setting aside other particular views. For instance, I think the trucker convoy in Ottawa was a ridiculous and morally reprehensible movement. Yet, perhaps we could find strategic alliance and protest together over something like the cost of groceries (surely that is as harmful to the common man!). There are a number of examples that Klein offers towards decentering of the self. She recounts, for example, the story of a man who lost his daughter to drowning prematurely and then dissolved himself into the reef he studies to “feel like coral, or a fish.” There’s a sort of escapism here, but also potential for connection. Klein discusses Iris Murdoch’s “description of observing something beautiful, whether a bird or a painting, as ‘an occasion for unselfing.’” Rather than being something passive and contemplative, though, Klein sees this as something urgent—”people who are the exploiters of this planet are people who put themselves first, unable to unself even for a moment” and the climate change crisis is as much about a “surplus of heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere” as it is “a surplus of self.”

As you can see, Klein connects the deeply personal to the more broadly political. This happens in the case of climate change, of course, but she links it to a range of politicized phenomena. The weakest part of the book, in my mind, is when she links explores the treatment of autism through this framework. She discusses the symptoms of autism and draws on the historical co-optation of autism treatment and diagnosis by the Nazis. The section feels insufficiently connected to the rest of the book and somewhat superfluous.

One of the other major issues that Klein draws on which seems more immediately relevant is the conflict in Israel and Palestine. Throughout the book, Klein draws on her own Jewishness as a framework for talking about issues. It was particularly interesting to hear her discussion of being educated about the Holocaust as a young Jewish woman. She talked about how its aim was “re-traumatization” and how “re-traumatization is about freezing us in a shattered state.” It’s a perceptive commentary on the instrumentalization of the Holocaust for unjustified ends. She describes her Holocaust education as “a regime of ritualistic reenactments designed to keep the losses as fresh and painful as possible” and continues, “Our education did not ask us to probe the parts of ourselves that might be capable of inflicting great harm on others and to figure out how to resist them.” Instead, she says, “It asked us to be as outraged and indignant at what happened to our ancestors as if it had happened to us and to stay in that state.” In reflecting on the experience, she says that the purpose of this mode of education was to freeze the pupils because “the Holocaust was a plot-point in a larger, pre-written story we were not only being told but also were trapped inside: a phoenix-from-the-flames narrative that begins in the gas chambers of Nazi-controlled Europe and ends on the hilltops around Jerusalem.”

I think the most relevant comment in terms of current discourse is that “for the most part, the goal of these teachings was not to turn us into people who would fight the next genocide, wherever it occurred. The goal was to turn us into Zionists.” Thus, when Klein talks about the contemporary issues in Israel-Palestine, she sees the separate sides of the issue and has a clear moral stance. Again, she focuses on the language of the issue and Palestinians referring to Israel as an “entity.” She describes how Israel’s leaders demand Palestinians to answer whether Israel has a right to exist. In this narrative, Palestinians often refuse to answer the question, “knowing that conceding Israel’s right to exist would change nothing about its actions and would uphold an idea of an exclusively Jewish homeland that they contest on principle.” Klein notes that she understands their refusal because “it is one of the few tools available to an occupied and vastly outgunned people.” By the same token, though, she says that for Jewish people, “who have been treated as inhuman for so much of our history, being called an ‘entity’ is a wounding thing, and wounding in a way that may not be particularly constructive.” Klein again calls for a kind of de-personalization of the issue. She advocates for greater contextualization, like, for instance, that the Israelis who came to Palestine in the 1940s were refugees who had survived a genocide but simultaneously settler colonists who “participated in the ethnic cleansing of another people” or that they were victims of White supremacy but became White in Palestine. She notes that “contradictions like these don’t fit comfortably within the usual binaries of anti-imperialism (colonizer-colonized) or the binaries of identity politics (White-racialized).” Ultimately, she explains that binary thinking “will never get us beyond partitioned selves or partitioned nations.” That said, she is clearly against the practice of Israeli settler-colonialism but is attempting “to go into the mindset of Zionism without blocking the exit.” Again, decentering ourselves becomes an imperative to better consider context and attempt to move forward productively.

All things told, as you may guess from the length of this review, Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger proves an illuminating piece of work. It’s non-fiction that exists in a strange literary-political scope that I rarely see enacted by contemporary scholars. I gleaned a lot of benefit from this book and find myself thinking about it often when seeing news reportage, social media discourse, and when engaged in interactions with others. Some books can change what you think, but it’s rare for a book to change how you think, and I think that’s pretty darn commendable.

Now, let’s go save the planet. Collectively.

The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet

    On the heels of reading Roland Barthes, I have here a novelization of his death: The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet (translated by Sam Taylor). Here’s a zero-context excerpt to entice you into reading it:

In Bologna, he had sex with Bianca in a seventeenth-century amphitheatre and narrowly escaped death in the bombed train station. Here, he has almost been stabbed in a library at night by a linguistics philosopher and has witnessed a decidedly mythological doggy-style sex scene on a photocopier. He met Giscard in the Élysée Palace, bumped into Foucault in a gay sauna, took part in a car chase that ended with an attempt on his life, saw a man kill another man with a poisoned umbrella, discovered a secret society where people had their fingers cut off if they lost a debate, and crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of a mysterious document. In the course of a few months he has lived through more extraordinary events than he expected to witness in his entire lifetime … Simon knows how to spot the novelistic when he sees it. He thinks again about Umberto Eco’s supernumeraries. (247).

I hope this passage sparks your fancy because Binet is up to something delightful, comic, and profound with this historically-inspired murder mystery. In some ways, Binet brings forth the historical record accurately, at least in its broad strokes. For instance, it’s true that Roland Barthes was hit by the driver of a laundry van on February 25th 1980 and died a month later; it’s true that Louis Althusser murdered his wife. Where the story is not (necessarily) true is where Roland Barthes was carrying a secret document that outlines how to use language to magical effect and persuade people to act in a kind of hypnotic fashion. Where the story is not (necessarily) true is where Louis Althusser murdered his wife because she threw out a junk mail envelope that hid Barthes’ secret document. Where the story is not (necessarily) true is where Julia Kristeva and her husband Philppe Sollers sicced a pack of dogs on Derrida that tore out his throat and murdered him. The blend of past / present / reality / unreality is achieved with a sense of surprise (is this the new Bliss that Roland Barthes discusses in The Pleasure of the Text?!). There are passing moments that Binet shows his hand in a cheeky way. When Bernard-Henri Georges Lévy (BHL) appears, Binet narrates that “even back then, he is always where the action is.” Notice how the present creeps into the past. He is where the action is—even in the past.

In the wake of Barthes being hit by the laundry van, the central characters of the book are called upon to investigate: detective Jacques Bayard and a young professor named Simon Herzog, who gets enlisted as a“translator” (of deconstructionism) and co-investigator. Binet’s voice is fresh, lively, and intensely humorous, which allows the book to work well as a detective novel and a satirical lampoon. For example, the fact that the detectives interview Michel Foucault while he receives oral sex in a gay bath is such a ridiculous image, but it still works in the context of a mystery novel.

Progressing through the novel, Binet has a caravan of literary figures to progress the story. In addition to the previous figures mentioned, we see from the likes of Umberto Eco, Judith Butler, Jonathan Culler, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and a range of others. If I have one gripe about the novel, it is that Binet really makes readers rely on their extant knowledge of deconstructionists and French intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s and political figures like Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterand. Without at least baseline knowledge, this text could be pretty inaccessible. It was a little challenging to keep the circus in order.

I think what I love about the book is that it engages sincerely with philosophical discourse, even if it’s presented in a somewhat tongue-and-cheek manner. For instance, early in the book Simon Herzog is lecturing about James Bond (why is the topic so fruitful? I’ve seen all kinds of academics comment on it!). The professor does a semiotic reading (in the style of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. He talks about how the Double 0 is code for the right to murder because death is nothingness and “nothingness is zero” (25). He continues, “It is death times two: his own inevitable death [...] and that of the other” (25). He continues on to talk about the magic of the number 7 and then contrasts it with the protagonist Number 6 from The Prisoner who wants to assert his identity (25). James Bond is presented as antithetical: one who dwells in the anonymity, Number 6 is the one who longs for identity. Because of his special privileges, 007 works to maintain the established order:

“Where Number 6 is a revolutionary, 007 is a conservative. The reactionary 7 here opposes the revolutionary 6, and as the meaning of the word reactionary supposes the idea of posteriority (the conservatives ‘react’ to the revolution by working for a return to the ancient regime, i.e., the established order), it is logical that the reactionary figure succeeds the revolutionary figure (to put it as plainly as possible: that James Bond is not 005). The function of 007 is, therefore, to guarantee the return of the established order. The end of each episode coincides always with a return to ‘normality,’ i.e., ‘the old order.’ Umberto Eco calls James Bond a fascist. In actual fact, we can see that he is, above all, a reactionary” (26).

The passage gives a sense of Binet’s experience and facility with semiotic discourse. Clearly, Binet is much-learnèd, given that Simon is a fictional professor and serves as a voice for Laurent Binet. In the 007 scene, a student then raises the question of Q and the significance of his name. Herzog expands:

“Q is a paternal figure, because he is the one who provides James Bond with weapons and teaches him how to use them. He passes on his savoir faire. In this sense, he ought to be called F, for Father…. But if you watch the scenes involving Q carefully, what do you see? A distracted, impertinent, playful James Bond, who doesn’t listen (or pretends not to). And, at the end, you have Q, who always asks: ‘Questions?’ (or variations on the theme of ‘Do you understand?’). But James Bond never has any questions; although he plays the dunce, he has assimilated what has been explained to him perfectly because he is an extraordinarily quick study. So Q is the q of ‘questions’---questions that Q calls for and that Bond never asks, except in the form of jokes, and his questions are never those that Q is expecting.” (26).

I love this reading of the James Bond, first off. It’s somewhat absurd (I’m not sure if I give Ian Fleming so much credit), but also entirely plausible. Recognizing the role of questions in the James bond series like this, I think, provides a productive reading of the films (even if the premises are spurious). The conversation continues afterward, with the student pointing out the similarities in sound of Q and queue—people waiting to be served, dead time between action scenes (27). It’s a great observation, which Herzog acknowledges “that one interpretation never exhausts the sign, and that polysemy is a bottomless well where we can hear an infinite number of echoes: a word’s meaning never runs dry” (27).

It’s worthwhile to pause here for a moment to consider the epistemic framework of the book. At the two-thirds mark for the text, Binet offers a discussion of how continental philosophy has become more successful in the U.S. than europe. He outlines the process pretty poignantly where “For English departments, French Theory was a revolutionary weapon that enabled them to go from being the fifth wheel of the social sciences to being the one discipline that subsumes all the others” (235). The premise is that French Theory is “founded on the assumption that language is at the base of everything, then the study of language involves studying philosophy, sociology, psychology” (235-236). Then, people like Searles and Chomsky demand clarity and demystification. The passage outlining the process ends with an amusingly anticlimactic phrase: “But you have to admit, Foucault is a lot sexier than Chomsky” (236).

It’s surprising how well Binet can navigate the deeply intellectual with the shlocky fun of an action novel. Yes, the book involves car chases and kidnappings and mutilations and the highly political intrigue of a spy thriller. Yet, it also involves deeply intense intellectual debate. In fact, some of the most intense scenes of the novel are pages and pages of debate—for instance, which is better: written or spoken language? Throughout the book, there’s The Logos Club, a cultish debate society where people go up against one another and whoever is deemed to be the loser has a finger cut off (or, in the case of a bizarre scene between Sollers and Eco: a castration). I found myself completely engrossed in these debate scenes, the intellectual stakes being as high as the stakes of car chases and hostage negotiations.

The book is extraordinarily hard to summarize in its non-plot particulars. There are passages that are insightful tidbits of cultural criticism. For instance, one passage defends Machiavelli’s The Prince as a work not of “the height of political cynicism” but “a definitive Marxist manifesto” (176). The book is presented as making explicit the unspoken rules of political economies: “By publishing The Prince, he reveals the truths that would have remained hidden and reserved exclusively for the purposes of the powerful: so — it’s a subversive act, a revolutionary act” (176). The book “delivers the secrets of the Prince to the people. The arcana of political pragmatism stripped of fallacious divine or moral justifications. A decisive act in the liberation of humankind, as all acts of deconsecration are” (176). Reframing Machiavelli this way is an against-the-grain reading that I find illuminating—controversial, really. Similarly illuminating, Binet discusses how Baudrillard described the Centre Georges-Pompidou (an art museum that I absolutely adored—way more than the Louvre). Binet retells Baudrillard’s stance on the building and how it “risked ‘folding’ under too much pressure (200). Binet summarizes that “the mass (of visitors) magnetized by the structure should become a destructive variable for the structure itself” (200), destroying architecture and culture at the same time.

The quirky humour of the book, the last laugh of history, gets brought to the surface. Whether it be the odd couple buddy-cop dynamic of Simon and Bayard or the historically incongruous moments, Binet reaches multiple levels of humour—and he knows it. It’s a self-aware humour that invites the audience to play. Whether it’s Bayard and Simon arguing over language (whether to describe the same people as suspects or witnesses, or the joke of theorists’ affectations (“What would you do if you ruled the world?” The gigolo replied that he would abolish all laws. Barthes said: “Even grammar?” (44)), or the absurdity of situations (a revenge-driven climax in a volcano?), every layer is rewarding.

One of the funniest scenes, in my mind, is when Simon has sex with Bianca on a dissecting table following the cultish debate club (they wear Venetian masks, sometimes—it gets more and more like Eyes Wide Shut here!). The entire scene is described so grotesquely, borrowing language from Deleuze and Guattari. It’s deeply amusing to me to see their theoretical language appropriated (they would say reterritorialized) into a sexual context. Simon’s seductive line is “Let’s construct an assemblage”

 

Bianca shivers with pleasure. Simon whispers to her with an authority that he has never felt before: “Let’s construct an assemblage” (179). Following that, “She gives him her mouth” and tells him “Fuck me like a machine” (179). Then, SImon’s “tongue-machine slides insider her like a coin in a slot, and Bianca’s mouth, which also has multiple uses, expels air like a bellows” (179). The scene goes on; I’ll spare you the details, but it’s a hilarious use of gross-sounding language that makes the sexual act a completely inhuman exercise.

Of course, at the core of the novel is a discussion of language. The macguffin of the book is Roland Barthes’ copy of Roman Jakobson’s “the seventh function of language”, an idea he is purported to have considered but then left out of his book (is this true? Historically? It is irrelevant to the book.). The seventh function of language, as described by Jakobson, works out to be a kind of magic spell that makes people behave the way you want. People are murdered over the macguffin. Later, Phillippe Sollers relies on a falsified version of the text to win a debate and reading it is such a glorious mess. Ultimately, the seventh function is used for political ends, too. Incidentally, Binet offers some consideration of totalitarian countries emerging from their relationship to linguistic theories:”Rhetoric can truly blossom only in a democracy, because it requires a venue for debate that, by definition, neither a monarchy nor a dictatorship can offer” (127). Throughout the debate, there is some consideration of whether speech is valuable and a historical tracing of how “Speeches were no longer expected to be effective, simply beautiful. Political issues were replaced by purely aesthetic issues. In other words, rhetoric became poetic” (127). So, then, what does language do? (Incidentally, J. L. Austin, author of How to Do Things With Words, makes an appearance).

Running parallel to the power of language is Simon’s introspection. Throughout the book, he suspects himself of being a character in a novel. When he is almost crushed by crumbling architecture, he considers that his author will have to be trickier in defeating him. At one point, Simon hears about Morris Zapp’s theory that life should not be considered with literature because it “does not function in the same way” (234). He is told that “life is transparent, literature opaque” (234), which Simon suggests is debatable. He notes that “Life is an open system, literature a closed system. Life is made of things, literature of words. Life is what it seems to be: when you are afraid of flying, it is a question of fear. [...] But in Hamlet, even the most stupid critic realizes that it is not about a man who wants to kill his uncle—it is about something else” (234). The relationship between reality and fiction is well-worth thinking about.

Further to that point, our own identities are subject to question. Are we authored by someone else? In addition, there’s a section that questions where our identities come from and where our words are from. He asks, “when I make phrases, is it really me who is speaking? How can anyone ever say anything original, personal, unique to him, when by definition language obliges us to draw from a well of preexisting words?” (252). The ways we formulate our identities are so influenced by “external forces: our times, the books we read, our sociocultural determinisms, our linguistic ‘tics’ so precious that they form our identity, the speeches we are constantly bombarded with in every possible and imaginable form” (252). He then goes on to talk about how we note phrases emerging from our loved ones’ mouths that are clearly appropriated from elsewhere “as if he were the source of those thoughts rather than a sponge for them, rehashing the same formulas, the same rhetoric, the same presuppositions, the same indignant inflections, the same knowing tone, as if he were not simply the medium through which a newspaper’s prerecorded voice repeated the words of a politician who himself had read them in a book whose author, and so on…” (252). We become, essentially, citations.

I’m not even close to articulating how entertaining and thoughtful this book is. It’s a perfect blend of so-called high-brow and low-brow entertainment. I had the good fortune to read, essentially, 200 pages of this book in (almost) one sitting. As a result, the book was deeply satisfying. It felt like an intimate experience with central characters and had an ending worthy of literary classic. Not to spoil too much, but it offers multiple possibilities—again, language is never singular.

At times like this, I feel like the quality of my reviews is in direct contradiction to my enjoyment of the book. There are so many wonderful turns in the plot, thoughtful philosophical discussions, humorous incongruities between history and fiction, and … well, it’s just a good book.

If only I had the seventh function of language at my disposal, this review would compel you to read Laurent Binet’s book. If I just say “do it” would that work? “Do it.”