The “power to think / has clean left me”, Tom Paulin claims – not quite convincingly – in his sharply observant new poetry collection, Namanlagh, which chronicles the author’s experience of crippling depression and advancing age. “Have I at last started to climb out / of the deep pit”, he wonders, “where I’ve been / this three and a half years?” Physical and intellectual lethargy, it would seem, can be the stuff that poems are made of. Luckily for us, at any rate, Paulin’s “gift survived it all.”
If the volume, his first in a decade, has been justly lauded for its ethical courage and linguistic zing, it also confirms Paulin as successor and torch-bearer to a generation of Northern poets, whose time has largely passed. When he freeze-frames two young victims of a loyalist murder-gang – “Each in his open coffin / each with a polo-neck jumper / to hide the slashes” – we hear a murmur of Seamus Heaney’s shade, still grieved and grounded by “the actual weight / of each hooded victim, / slashed and dumped.” Likewise when we encounter, in “The Spare Room”, “the light’s ekeing growth” like “a bandage being torn off very slowly, / always with a sense of the damage / and the fictive hand’s quiet sloth”, we’re restored to the kind of hard-edged perceptual cogency pioneered by Derek Mahon, adrift “in a riot of sunlight / watching the day break and the clouds flying.”
The list could be extended. The canny imaginative shape-shiftings of Paulin’s title-poem, for instance, seem to have a Muldoonian tinge – and the same may be said of “Not to Speak of the Cheese”, a playful flex of ancestral speculation, which is also an inspired “trip”, attempting to locate “our common awkward surname / back in the town of Nîmes”, a site of “impacted paint” where “the Huguenots were massacred / in the White Terror / that followed the Hundred Days”. The book as a whole might be understood as the final flare of an aurora borealis that once seemed nearly permanent, and unassailable, in its rich, revelatory shining.
Admittedly, few of Paulin’s poetic peers and forebears have ever dared to broadcast, in print, their “regret” for “the loss / of the educational genius / of Martin McGuinness”, a former paramilitary commander who would, Paulin posits, quite sensibly, “have dropped the 11+”, and with it
the whole sectarian and therefore necessitarian system of training the minds of the young and imagine all those smug fee-paying schools taxed out of existence swept off the face of the province!
This is pure Paulin, lippy and punctilious, skillfully converting bowsy provocation into good politics and better poetry. That he’s managed to smuggle such an honourably elegiac salute into a Faber-published manuscript, indeed, may be considered a small victory in the long peace – which has yet to be won. For as Paulin reminds us, “direct rule / means the same old skules”.
In contrast to many of the younger luminaries of the Irish and Northern Irish poetry scene, for Paulin, we sense, politics means more than selective self-projection in the name of art, and necessarily transcends the well-crafted, fully costed pleas for balance that often pass for liberal opinion. Paulin is the kind of lateral thinker, instinctively partisan, for whom, bravely, there is “nothing” anymore “to be said” about “the sight of Ben Bulben, / massive and tabled”, fringed by “wild rhododendrons”: a pained vacancy that calls to mind Robert Emmet – dying for a vision of Irish nationhood that remains unrealised – and the “epitaphs / that could neither get written / nor chiselled in hard stone.” As here, the experience of personal despondency Paulin charts often comes across as the weariness of an emancipationist whose cause, for now, has been forced into dormancy.
In a literary landscape grown sleek, and chic, amid an unceasing rain of sinecures and market opportunities, the Oxford don stands out from the pack, combining the fire of a citizen-poet with the sad intelligence of a gnarly visionary. Like all great stylists, he is distinctive and elusive with every breathing lyric. To pilfer a phrase of Mahon’s, Paulin has become “The Last of the Fire Kings”: an anomaly and outsider, strangely attuned to the deeper weathers of his time and tribe. As in his tribute – one of a few – to the Palestinian poet Walid Khazendar, Namanlagh grants us entry and permission to “poke about in his darkness”: a “puzzle” that impels us with its intricacy and power, “though” we “can tell that in spirit / he’s gone out the door.”
Gaza’s history since the Nakba of 1948 is punctuated by waves of forced displacement. The enclave has been the epicentre of Palestinian refugees since 1948, having welcomed Palestinians from all over the colonised territories. Since Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza began in October 2023 its entire population of over two million, in a territory of just 151 km2, has been rendered internally displaced persons.
Displaced in Gaza: Stories from the Gaza Genocide, Edited by Yousef M Aljamal, Norma Hashim, Noor Nabulsi, and Zoe Jannuzi (Haymarket Books, 2025) is a collection of twenty-seven testimonies of Palestinians living in Gaza enduring the genocide. An immediate response upon reading through the chapter titles is: to what extent have we become desensitised as spectators or activists? And, moreover, what is the link, or disconnect, between this wider perception of a genocide occurring and a person living through it?
It begs the question, when reading through the testimonies, after more than two years how much can our mind take before the experiences themselves, narrated by survivors, merely become background noise? With the daily recounting of Israel’s kill toll being reduced to statistical data – a roll call similar to the reporting of Covid cases that gradually desensitised the listener – can our minds link back to the human tragedy?
Of course we should. For the chapter titles speak of a shattered, mundane reality. Birthdays morph into atrocities. Education is ruptured by bombs. A woman is widowed by targeted assassination. A husband is killed while searching for food. Entire families are wiped out. The details are so mundane, so quotidian, yet genocide is an immense, unforgivable laceration in both its experience and the memory if it. That memory should, and must, extend to the rest of us. Narratives can combat desensitisation, as long as we know what to prioritise.
In the foreword to the book, Ahmad Alnaouq writes:
Everyone on Gaza is now a citizen journalist, determined more than ever to confront and challenge the Western media narrative – the demonising and dehumanising of the Palestinians, the lack of agency recognised, and the distortion of truth.
This collection of testimonies directly challenges the Western hegemonic narrative which, even while reporting the official genocide kill toll, still finds ways of sanitising bloodshed and diminishing the humanity of Palestinian survivors. The kill toll is represented in two ways – as a statistic that either supports sporadic calls for accountability or offered in support of Israel “finishing the job.”
Yousef Al-Jamal references the Palestinian poet and academic Refaat Alareer, who was killed by Israel in 2023, and for whom storytelling was an integral component of Palestinian history.
‘For centuries,’ AL-Jamal writes, ‘Palestinians have tended the rich oral history of Palestine, preserving cultural heritage, including folktales and stories about the land.’ This collection of narratives from the Gaza genocide is a contribution to Palestine’s oral history, and one that, due to its international dissemination, cannot be destroyed by Israel.
The personal narratives in this book speak of a disrupted simplicity, but not a disrupted normality. This includes death or killing, displacement, hunger, the tribulations of living and enduring life under a highly militarised genocide. We find the disruption of education and attempts to teach, as well as the full spectrum of forced displacement including of a Nakba survivor, along with attempts to rebuild a semblance of normality even as Israel destroys Gaza’s infrastructure. Even before the genocide, Palestinians in Gaza faced immense hardships and restrictions which were normalised into manageable deprivation, even by international institutions.
For many Palestinians, as evidenced by several contributors to this anthology, the large scale killing meant that families were welcoming other relatives into their midst. At times it was orphaned children, as was the case with Aisha Osama Abu Ajwa, a mother of four children who began taking care of two children whose parents were killed when Israel bombed an entire residential block. In her description of forced displacement, Abu Ajwa writes, ‘The children witnessed dozens of martyrs’ bodies strewn on the ground. They cried intensely, while blood covered the streets.’
‘I hope war ends soon. Eight months of continuous killing exhausts us,’ writes Fidaa Fathi Abu Yousef, whose son was killed while riding a bike just 800m away from the family home.
Another recurring horror is Palestinians fleeing to supposedly safe zones, while Israel bombs move in the direction the displaced are heading, leaving not only a trail of displacement but bloodshed. The killing of Palestinian children, as described by the narrators of this genocide, encompass all ages. The visibility of Israel killing children is magnified when the writers note the dead children’s ages. Thus removed from the general term, the children take on meaningful identities; allowing the reader to recognise how Israel has attempted to obliterate Palestinians through its killing of the younger generations. Children killed on their birthday, children killed while sleeping, the tragedy is portrayed through the eyes of the living, bereaved and those unable to process their loss due to a perpetual quest for survival.
Their attempt to persist in living instead of perishing at times makes the writing of these recollections and experiences become slightly devoid of emotion. Emotion almost becomes a luxury when surviving a genocide, but the almost matter-of-fact narratives in this collection make grief all the more important, not only to grasp but experience. Israel has not only wiped entire families out and lacerated others beyond repair, it has also obliterated entire psychological processes that are necessary when experiencing traumatic events. In the midst of a genocide, Palestinians are unable to experience the grieving process.
Incessant worry about family members displaced in different locations around Gaza is another hardship Palestinians must endure. Without means of communication for the most part, relatives receive no news of each other. ‘Gaza is small, yet we have not seen each other since the war began. We have not reunited. I know nothing of my sons. My life’s dream is to reunite with them in one home before my death,’ Yusra Salem Abu Awad states in her narrative.
The script flips to a twelve-year-old boy, Youssef Qawash, writing about how he has lost his father and uncle in a bombing and not knowing whether his father’s remains will ever be discovered. ‘My uncles have searched in Deir al-Balah and Maghazi, but no one knows where my father is buried,’ Qawash ponders, noting that his father might still be buried under the rubble of destroyed houses.
The ramifications of starvation are reflected in Najlaa Al-Kafarna’s story. Her husband was killed while searching for food for the family on the third day of the genocide, which was their second day of forced displacement. Six other relatives were also massacred in their search for food. Her special needs son, Muhammad, is malnourished and lacks medication and physical therapy sessions.
Throughout most of the narratives in the book, the cry for food recurs. So does the lack of basic necessities, and the wearing of the same clothes through different seasons. We find the rationing of flour, and the shelling of a school while forcibly displaced Palestinians are baking bread. The deprivation is exacerbated by employment being almost non-existent during the genocide. Profound mental health issues as a result of ongoing trauma (Palestinians cannot speak of post-traumatic stress disorder) are also a common experience.
‘This war is larger than the 1948 Nakba. I am 91 years old,’ Mohammed Abdul Jabbar Abu Seif says. Aged fifteen, he experienced the first Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine and he notes the differences between the specific targeting of Zionist paramilitaries in 1948, and the widespread destruction of the current genocide in Gaza. One of the few remaining survivors of the Nakba, he narrates his experience of displacement in 1948 and how his family settled in Gaza in the Nuseirat camp. ‘My testament to my children and grandchildren is to never leave Gaza. We cannot leave Gaza, and we cannot migrate again,’ Abu Seif asserts, noting the miscalculation in 1948 of an eventual return and of leaving to save their lives.
Narrating the Israeli colonial aggressions he has experienced throughout his life, he describes the genocide as ‘a war of extermination and destruction of humans and nature.’ The description is far more tangible than the word genocide will ever be, particularly now that the international community has diluted its meaning to preserve Israel’s impunity. A destruction of humans and nature is something that anyone anywhere in the world can easily envisage. This narrative brings the consequences of destruction, as well as fear, to the reader’s mind.
The entirety of this anthology also serves to highlight what a vibrant society Palestinians in Gaza had created before the genocide. Education stands out in particular as one of their achievements. Indeed the tenacity to attempt to study and teach throughout the genocide is remarkable. Ambitions are currently stilted, but dreams are still cherished, An awareness of the many hurdles to overcome in order to create a healthy society post-genocide is also to the fore in many narratives in this collection. As the UNSC hands over the rebuilding of Gaza to the U.S. administration, thus prolonging the genocide, these testimonies will stand in opposition to the U.S.-Israeli narrative. More importantly, they are a sliver of testimony from Palestinians that neither the U.S. nor Israel, have the power to annihilate.
U.S. citizens Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi were detained and executed in Chile during the early days of the US-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Investigative reporter and author John Dinges, who has written extensively about Latin America and Operation Condor, investigates the earlier premise that both men were murdered by the Chilean military upon direct orders from the U.S. government. Chile in Their Hearts: The Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing After the Coup(University of California Press, 2025) finds no evidence to confirm direct US involvement, upon which earlier books, as well as the 1982 film Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, were based.
Dinges wastes no time in affirming the outcome of his research. In the early 2000s, thousands of declassified documents pertaining to the dictatorship were released, including some relating to Horman and Teruggi. ’I had long thought the movie’s theory of the case was highly probably, and I set out to find the evidence to prove it,’ Dinges writes in the introduction. The author also reveals a personal interest, having lived in Chile during which time he met Horman once, and was friends with Teruggi.
Charles Horman
U.S. involvement in Chile’s destabilisation, brutal military coup and dictatorship is well documented. Thus the theory of U.S. involvement in the execution of both men is plausible. The only mention, however, of direct U.S. involvement rests on a statement by Rafael Gonzalez, a National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) agent who was on the scene at the time of Horman’s detention, and who retracted his testimony years later.
Frank Terrugi
There is a certain note of dejection that immediately strikes the reader in this book. Dinges’s meticulous research rests on careful scrutiny of documents, the court files and interviews, through which he pieced together a picture that reveals no direct U.S. involvement. This is disconcerting when one considers the extent of U.S. involvement in toppling the democratically-elected socialist government of Salvador Allende.
Elimination of the earlier premise is also compounded by the absence of a known motive for why Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi were targeted and killed by the Chilean junta, other than them being leftists.
’The evidence I found,’ Dinges writes, ’led me to conclusions I had not expected, especially about the U.S. role.’ However, the author notes that the U.S. is not entirely lacking in culpability. ‘The evidence demonstrates definitively that the U.S. Embassy and State Department shielded the Pinochet regime by hiding the truth, conducting a sham investigation, and sanctioning Chile’s official coverup of the murders.’
Dinges devotes separate chapters to the backstories of Charles Horman and his wife Joyce, and Frank Teruggi, who arrived in Chile separately. Both men met in Chile through their involvement in the Fuente de Informacion Norteamericana (FIN). Chile had become a safe haven for those fleeing oppressive dictatorships across Latin America. At a time when U.S. activists had mobilised against their country’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Chile offered alternative, participatory politics as part of the socialist reform implemented by Salvador Allende. At the time, Chile was hosting around 20,000 foreigners.
Salvador Allende in 1972.
Both Horman and Teruggi became involved with left-wing movements in Chile. Horman was carrying out his own research into the assassination of General Rene Schneider, while also working with Chile Films, which brought him into close proximity to socialist and communist groups. Teruggi became involved with the Frente de Estudiantes Revolucionarios (FER, Revolutionary Students Front) and also became friends, and willingly involved with, the Movimiento Izqueirda Revolucionaria (MIR, Revolutionary Left Movement). Notably, Teruggi had also been on the FBI’s radar for his antiwar activism in the U.S..
Valparaiso, the port city which was central to the plotting of the coup, emerges as a key component of the earlier premise of direct U.S. involvement. Both Horman and Teruggi had taken photos of military ships in the port, to be published in the magazine Punto Final. Horman’s presence in Valparaiso and his conversations with Captain Ray Davies, the head of the U.S. Military Group in Chile – as the coup was underway – were central to the narrative around his death. For decades, Horman’s execution and disappearance were linked to him having unearthed information about U.S. involvement while in Valparaiso, condensed into the phrase “he knew too much”.
U.S. Complicity
Dinges uncovered no documentary evidence to support this premise, but the book illustrates two main components that can be proven. One is about the U.S. embassy’s painstaking efforts to shield the Pinochet dictatorship from accountability over Horman and Teruggi’s murders. The other concerns the U.S. failure to investigate important leads on both men’s executions. These findings illustrate the U.S. intent to prioritise diplomatic relations with the Chilean junta at all costs.
Both Horman and Teruggi were reported as missing to the U.S. embassy. Their disappearance, however, is described by the author as representing to the embassy, ’an awkward inconvenience, a snag in the U.S. determination to help the junta succeed.’ The U.S. embassy could have investigated the detention and execution of both men, but orders from Washington, specifically from Henry Kissinger in the immediate aftermath of the coup, directed otherwise: ’The first thing for us not to do is to give the appearance that we are putting pressure on them.’
Thus, U.S. embassy officials upheld the dictatorship’s official narrative, which shifted from statements that no foreigners had been murdered, to denying the military operations that led to Horman and Teruggi’s detention and subsequent executions. One cover story disseminated by the Chilean military and taken at face value by U.S. diplomats was that both men were killed by leftist snipers in the aftermath of the coup. The State Department repeated this narrative to the media, allowing the U.S. to deflect questions on why it had failed to investigate.
With the U.S. rigorously maintaining the dictatorship’s official narrative, it stands to reason that the gaps would be filled by analysing the contradictions spouted by the Chilean dictatorship and U.S. officials. Dinges explains that this was Ed Horman’s process. Having travelled to Chile to investigate his son’s execution and disappearance, and encountered enough ambiguity and insufficient solid evidence from U.S. officials, Ed Horman concluded that the Chilean military would not have acted without U.S. complicity.
Dinges writes, ’The mere absence of such evidence cannot be used to argue that such evidence must exist. Or, as I tell my students in teaching the techniques of investigative reporting, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absent evidence.”’
While direct U.S. involvement can be ruled out for want of evidence, Dinges shows that upholding the Chilean dictatorship’s narrative aided the U.S. embassy’s refusal to investigate. One new piece of evidence that Dinges unearthed and included in his book is that Michael Townley, a U.S. citizen who worked for the CIA and DINA, and who was responsible for the assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976, knew the identity of Frank Teruggi’s killers. U.S. officials failed to pursue this lead.
U.S. officials also failed to follow up on the evidence gathered by Raul Meneses and Jaime Ortiz, the two Intelligence Military Services (SIM) investigators who told Ed Horman that his son had been executed, despite their names being included in an embassy draft letter dated 1973. Meneses’s report detailing that Horman had been killed on the orders of DINA agent Pedro Espinoza was destroyed by SIM. In 1987, the U.S. State Department hesitated to accept Meneses’s testimony. Embassy officials also knowingly withheld information and failed to call in the FBI to investigate the cases.
Photographs of victims of Pinochet’s regime.
National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation
Such wilful negligence had legal implications. In 1991, the cases of Horman and Teruggi were among the first to be made public by the National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation. Nine years later, the Horman family filed charges of murder and kidnapping in the Chilean courts, but the judicial investigation was based on the interpretation of declassified documents, rather than hard evidence. By 2003, the court’s attention had shifted to the presumed U.S. involvement and Davis was charged with Horman’s murder, on the premise that the latter “knew too much”, based upon Gonzalez’s initial statement, later retracted.
Despite the U.S. coverup for the Chilean military, Dinges’s examination of court records do not reveal evidence of direct U.S. involvement. In his discussions with Judge Mario Carroza – well known for his role in investigating crimes related to Operation Condor – Dinges notes that the Chilean courts required ‘an assumption deemed to be reasonably based on other established evidence.’ According to Carroza, the charges against Davis were so weak, ’It would have been easier to convict Henry Kissinger.’
Dinges also recalls research by Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archives, and investigative author Pascale Bonnefroy, who conducted extensive research into Chile’s terror under the dictatorship. Neither unearthed evidence regarding US involvement in Horman and Teruggi’s executions. Reflecting Dinges’s own research, Bonnefroy stated that assumptions were being made upon association and liaison, rather than documented evidence.
This is perhaps an unsatisfactory conclusion to such detailed investigation into this snippet of U.S.-Chilean history. Even as Dinges lays bare the logic guiding his research, readers cannot help but grapple with the question of whether there is more to the story. While Dinges writes with both logic and humanity, it is in the acknowledgements that Dinges pays tribute to the questioning of the unknown, particularly to the Horman family, who remained committed to uncovering the truth. Dinges’s research narrows the search, but the heart will keep searching.
How would you feel upon discovering the objects of your daily, habitual use—ordinary objects of every imaginable function and variety—were inspirited, sensitively keen observers with their own desires, gripes, preoccupations, and ways of understanding the world?
This is precisely the brain-tickling puzzle Jennifer Maier’s newly-released third collection The Occupant (University of Pittsburgh Press) shakes, opens, and pieces together with feeling and skill. A deft mingling of prose and traditional poems offer pathos, wit, and vulnerable, costly wisdom as 30-odd objects speak from the vantage point of their respective individual existences alongside the titular “occupant,” – an unnamed woman living alone to whom they belong; and whose point of view is also poetically inhabited.
Maier is at her best in these moving poems, which deliberately rely on the rhythms of one person’s quotidian existence and ‘stuff’ to raise urgent, profound questions about human life and experience. Take, for instance, the goosebump-inducing rebuke of “Alarm Clock” –
–How like you not to see
that even I, untouched by time, can’t keep it. – Some days I want to drop my hands
in futility at the way you equate passing with – dissolution: each tick a small erasure,
like the beat of your own heart: one less, – one less. And have you ever stopped to think not even you can spend a thing you can’t possess?
The wonderful tonal panoply of this collection—which moves with the poet’s characteristically fluid grace through everything from wry humor (Think opposites attract?//Ix-nay on that) to loneliness (The woman wonders if she has taken up knitting because she has no children) to existential angst—is enabled by the dynamic marriage of Maier’s own prolific emotive range with the metaphysical conceit at play throughout The Occupant; which includes in its opening pages Paul Éluard’s words—“There is another world, but it is in this one” –a marvelous and discreet key unlocking the pages that follow.
In penning this review, I found I couldn’t waste my privileged position as Jennifer Maier’s MFA student-advisee. She was good enough to tell me (following the careful consideration with which she approaches even the smallest endeavor) what inanimate object she would herself elect to become for eternity. (I told her I’d be a gargoyle, which is accurate, if mildly out-of-pocket) She went with a rather more elegant selection—
‘As ever, I would be torn between beauty (my French Empire walnut bookcase) and utility (a whisk, or a pair of scissors). But if I had to be a single object for eternity, I think I would be a mirror – a beautiful one, to be sure. As a mirror, I could encounter a wide variety of faces and objects and reflect them back, neutrally, without preconceptions. And I would certainly enjoy observing the private responses—satisfaction, dismay–of those searching my reaches for “what they really are,” or believe themselves to be.’
Because of the immense and obvious thematic consistency, I wondered if Jennifer had encountered a recent, fascinating-if-head-scratching development in philosophy. I shot her an email:
Are you familiar with the (quite new!!) trend in metaphysics called Object-oriented Ontology?? There’s SO much natural overlap with your book that I think I’ll have to highlight the connection.
In brief:
Object-oriented ontology maintains that objects exist independently of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. For object-oriented ontologists, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal ontological footing with one another.
She replied—
I was not aware per se of Object-oriented Ontology, but the objects in my home – or in the Occupant’s, for that matter – may well be “ontologically exhausted,”
especially today, when I’m trying to get everything back in order after last week’s renovations and painting (I decided to do the same color in the living room—Farrow & Ball’s “Elephant’s Breath,” partly for the name, and partly because I love how it slouches between gray and lavender, depending on light and time of day)
Ontological exhaustion is no joke—person or saucer or spider—and the remedies seem few and far between. Even so, The Occupant’s occupant appears to find a strange, imprecise respite in Maier’s closing poem; in the character of the light, which may be instructive for us all:
–Time is flowing forward again; sunlight gilding this still room in the house of the mind that deplores a vacancy as, then and now, the Occupant looks up from her writing to trace particles of dust drifting everywhere in the air, alighting on every surface.
Jennifer Maier’s work has appeared in Poetry, American Poet, The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, The Writer’s Almanac, and in many other print, online, and media venues. Her debut collection, Dark Alphabet, was named one of “Ten Remarkable Books of 2006” by the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the 2008 Poets’ Prize. Her second book, Now, Now, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2013. She serves as writer in residence and professor of modern poetry and creative writing at Seattle Pacific Universit
If you count my two unsuccessful (all cough no high) undergraduate attempts to smoke weed and the later (nominally) more successful fractal bits of gummy I consumed (once) at a wedding reception, you must grant I possessed sufficient knowledge and experience with recreational imbibing to feel I was setting myself up for an evening of hilarity when I decided to get drunk and high (with friends, in case you were staging an intervention) to watch Nicole Kidman’s latest brow-raising toast of Tinseltown, Babygirl. Following an oyster repast and several gin martinis, my desire to witness the infamous milk scene in its original context (I’d seen an endless stream of momfluencers parodying it) became oddly irrepressible and very, very funny.
Admittedly, the film and its lengthy press tour—red-hot topics for keen culture-vultures in the run up to Christmas—are slightly old news: Babygirl has been thoroughly ravished, digested, reviewed and psychoanalyzed by critics everywhere, and resultantly a chorus of voices primed a cacophony of conflicting expectations (liberating! brave! fresh! tired! cliché! smutty! dull! THE PERFORMANCE OF NICOLE’S CAREER!) I was eager to interrogate and settle. I’d read enough about the movie to anticipate a slightly intellectualized 50 Shades of Grey filtered through a modern, sex-positive female gaze. In this regard, the film delivers.
“I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius, the more you beat me, I will fawn on you: use me but as your spaniel,” cries love-sick Helena in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Forgive my mildly drug-addled brain for recalling this text—between severe bouts of giggling—and thinking ‘ok, so, same-same, but different’ upon encountering Kidman’s icy boss-bitch (woof) Romy Mathis, a powerful CEO who is so unhappy with her beleaguered conjugal sex life that she fakes *every single orgasm* with husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) and self-pleasures to BDSM porn afterwards.
We are quickly given to understand that Romy—beautiful, successful, and comfortably past age 50—is the deeply depressed prisoner of sexual repression and malaise. Her obvious adoration for her family (laid on rather too thickly by the writers, who *really* need us to understand women can be simultaneously kinky and family-oriented) and work-place chops do not sufficiently off-set the deficit she feels.
Enter much-younger corporate intern Samuel, (Harris Dickinson) whose mysterious and increasing erotic appeal (situated squarely in classic dominance) ultimately overwhelms Romy, as the two engage in a very risky and protracted entanglement. Claims about Kidman giving the performance of her career are a somewhat doubtful—between Big Little Lies and A Family Affair, I’ve seen enough of her sighing deeply and speaking in breathy, hyper-feminine tones while gazing moodily toward the horizon. Kidman’s acting in this film is basically her classic haunted shtick, plus long, motel-entrenched orgasms.
Speaking of the big o—if I withhold praise for this film’s acting, I mustn’t do the same for its valor. Lauding Babygirl for boldness makes sense. It does not merely permit, but celebrates unreserved expressions of female sexual pleasure in an ostensibly middle-aged woman; the key takeaway for every feminist with eyes and ears.
After the big 4-0, female representation in tv and film is generally reduced to variations of ‘matriarch,’ ‘spinster,’ or ‘embittered housewife’; it has certainly not been the standard in Hollywood to explore (or even acknowledge) the sprawling erotic realities of women from whom the bloom of youth has departed. The film is self-aware enough to showcase Romy herself facing this pressure and subsequent insecurities—despite her high-powered position—and receiving Botox injections. In a moving, intimate nude scene, she is fragile and unable to accept Samuel’s assertion that she is beautiful. We can and ought to credit writer/director/producer Halina Reijn’s vision for liberated, integrated female sexuality defined by the mutual emergence of self-acceptance and at any/every age.
The film attends partially and imperfectly to the psychology of kink, which we experience vicariously in Romy’s need to be told exactly what to do and when to do it, to the tune of the affirmation “good girl.” This is delivered in low, husky tones by Samuel, whose intuitive understanding of challenging dogs ambiguously imparts an intuitive understanding of Romy in the bedroom. The importance of consent gets a cursory dialogue nod, as does the oft-stymying intersection of power dynamics and danger with human sexuality. A savvy (if reductionist) review I read recently was entitled ‘She’s His Boss At Work, He’s Her Boss In Bed.” I was hoping for a deeper, more profound dive into the mental landscapes of Babygirl, but only Romy’s gets serious attention. Samuel’s character verges on lapsing into a one-dimensional tool or supplement to churn up her inner life—even at the end of the movie, we know next to nothing about him.
For a dark erotic thriller, Babygirl delivers something like a fairytale ending. The explosive discovery of Romy’s trysts with Samuel ultimately serves to usher in a new age of sexual understanding and compatibility between Romy and Jacob, who are happily going at it (in a way that finally fulfills Romy’s needs) at the film’s close. The message is almost disappointingly simple—accept yourself and your desire to make rabid eye-contact whilst downing a very tall glass of milk ordered to the purpose on your behalf in three consecutive gulps..or something.
I jest, but Romy’s liberation is achieved (too) quickly and (too) decisively; her guilt at being caught red-handed and abusing her professional position along the way all subsumed in new-found erotic contentment. Babygirl asks good questions, but ventures slightly pre-packaged, inadequate answers on the difficult and ever-evolving topics of sexuality, aging-while-female, and the corrosive nature of power.
The most subversive thread in this film’s tapestry is Romy’s tacit refusal to grovel after an intentional act of enormous selfishness—her illicit liaison with Samuel—paired with the implication that she’s not a bad person—or a bad woman—despite this refusal. Male selfishness is so culturally ingrained and expected it’s become almost acceptable in society—unavoidable, a fact of life we must simply learn to negotiate while we shake our heads resignedly. But the insidious, unforgivable sin of female selfishness (a selfish act committed by a member of the sex universally expected to be demurring and sacrificial) is given a notably fresh turn in Babygirl’s deliberate avoidance of wholesale condemnation. Romy is neither Hester Prynned nor Anna Kareninaed—she retains her status, her relationships and even her composure. What she loses in struggle, conflict and grief is carefully regained in self-acceptance. That’s enough to get a ‘good girl’ from me, and it’s not just the gin martinis talking.
“Trump Inhabits Trumpistan”, writes Chris Agee in his rampaging poetic satire, Trump Rant: “Trump Is the Wolf of Washington”. Written over a four-year period from 2017 onwards, and arranged as an expanding series of mock-newspaper headlines, Agee’s book begins as an act of stinging personal portraiture and ends as a thorough-going investigation of America itself – which appears, over the course of the poem, as both an empire in decline and a dysfunctional democracy in crisis. “Trumpian Fever”, Agee writes, “Continually Reminds Me of the Civil War Build-up of the 1850s”. As Agee recognises, and as Mark Twain likewise knew, the past and present have a habit of rhyming through the flux.
A US-born Irish citizen, based in Belfast, Agee is singularly sensitive to the totalitarian impulses and tribal resentments that the title-figure – a “Beacon of Malevolence” – has proven adept at mobilising, both in and out of political office. “Trump Is Ten Times Worse Than Nixon”, he insists, reminding us that the current Republican nominee for president “Openly Supported the Kenosha Shooter”, Kyle Rittenhouse, in 2020. Such precedents alter the civic atmosphere, toxifying public politics, possibly beyond repair.
The Trumpian era, Agee suggests, is defined by ruthlessness, for “Trump” at heart “Is a Political Cutthroat”: a charismatic leader with brash demogogic tendencies, brazenly echoing white nationalist discourses in his bloated ascent to political power. “Trump Is Malcolm X’s “American Nightmare””, we’re informed: a proposition that feels at once historically grounded and chillingly prophetic.
In this respect, the Rant may bear a resemblance to the work of Allen Ginsberg, combining oratorical force with a deep-running sense of cultural urgency. “Trump Is the Real Plot Against America”, Agee declares, “Trump Is a Mouth Who Loves Mouthing”. It should be said that part of the appeal of Trump Rant – what stops it from being merely abrasive and makes it, instead, thought-provoking and often funny – is its fizzing sense of how ludicrous Trump can be. It’s possible, indeed, that when faced with the former president’s one-man circus-show, laughter may be the sanest response. “Trump Is Impossible To Imagine as a Scuba-diver”, Agee quips, and any honest observer would struggle to disagree.
“Trump Speaks No Languages (Not Even English)”, he continues, and we begin to understand the complex blend of fixation and anger that propels Trump Rant along its hurricane-course. Whereas Trump wields language like an ugly weapon, scattering falsehoods and distortions whenever he speaks, Agee, a poet, is using his words to hold up an accusing mirror to power itself. “Trump”, he suggests, “Is The Corrupted Dream”. The Rant, by contrast, might be thought of as a visceral attempt to re-galvanise the original promise – of language as a mode of truthful speech, and of the United States as a vibrant democratic republic (or what Langston Hughes called, with painful justice, the “land that never has been yet”).
With his Democratic rivals staunchly committed to neoliberalism at home and genocide abroad, and his own party plunging ever deeper into a sludge-pit of weaponised nativism, toxic conspiracy culture and personality-worship, as a political figure Trump in 2024 seems as peculiarly emblematic as he has ever been: both homegrown product and representative man, incarnating the feral aggression and strange emptiness of American capitalism. “Trump Is a Tacky Gatsby Bamboozling the National Nick (We’ve Read It All Before!)”, Agee writes, and the tarnished nature of America’s self-mythology seems all the more polluting; the rot too rampant to be reversed.
For all its declarative zest and referential range, Agee’s book is saturated with political dread: we read it in the shadow of things to come.
Feature Image by DonkeyHotey – Donald Trump – Caricature, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66578850
Few writers can do grief and loss like John MacKenna. He is, without question, the John McGahern of the ‘Ancient East’. Where McGahern has put the villages and drumlins of Leitrim along the inland cusp of the ‘Wild Atlantic Way’ at the heart of his writing, the landscape of South Kildare, and its surroundings are integral to MacKenna’s works and that is no different in Father, Son and Brother Ghost where place is the sorrowful score to MacKenna’s libretto.
Unravelling grief is the strange, poignant music of the heart: If ‘grief is the price we pay for love’ MacKenna paid that price. All MacKenna’s fiction revolves around Castledermot, The High and Low Terraces of Abbeylands where the MacKennas lived: The rivers Lerr and Barrow, Mullaghcreelan Woods, Kilkea, Athy, Carlow, the Sliabh Bloom mountains and the midland bogs looming beyond are accomplices in what becomes a landscape of bitter-sweet melancholy. This memoir, mimicking the prayerful intonation ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’ is a hymn to MacKenna’s older brother, Jarlath whose untimely death at 62 in 2005 left the writer so bereft that he has been writing and rewriting this memoir for seventeen years between various other pursuits, not least a plunge into psychotherapy as he told a packed audience at its launch recently in the library in Athy.
Jarlath spent the bulk of his working life as a doctor in North Carolina. In this moving memoir, landscape and place become sites of consecration to a lost brother, evoked through fragments of joyful memories, where often, more harrowing family anecdotes and memories interpose – his mother’s tears when the family were leaving the Low Terrace for a larger house on the High Terrace because she was leaving behind three still born babies buried there at the bottom of the garden.
The sometimes distraught attempt to recover this lost fraternal connection reaches back into his parents’ own history, and the increasing friction and disappointment between them, caused, it appears, by Jack MacKenna’s increasing dependence on alcohol. But if Jack MacKenna was an alcoholic, he was a highly functioning one. John, as the youngest child of three, experienced these tensions more intensely, as he was like an only child because his brother and sister were away at boarding school. They were all, to different degrees ‘survivors of their own small carnage’ but he ‘didn’t know it at the time’. Set apart from their neighbours by being the school mistress’s children, the yearning for belonging abides.
Ten years younger than Jarlath, MacKenna is first separated from him when his adored older brother is sent to boarding school in Limerick while the younger brother is still an infant. In the escalating tensions of the home, Jarlath became John’s rock and anchor and his sense of abandonment in the older brother’s many absences is a source of anguish.
It seems the younger brother only realised when Jarlath died that he had never overcome these earlier losses due to their many separations. The severances are amplified, not just by the large age gap, but by the fact that Jarlath spent his summers working in England during his college years when he first studied for an arts degree followed by a H. Dip in Education and then went on to study medicine.
During these periods, Jarlath’s trips to Castledermot were brief but they are jealously recovered here. In choosing to pursue his medical career in America, the miles of the Atlantic Ocean eventually stretched between them, keeping the brothers geographically apart as adult men.
Unsurprisingly, MacKenna conveys a sense of betrayal by all these ‘sunderings’ culminating in his brother’s death from motor neuron disease a few days after he visits him. They are only spared one last night together as Jarlath deteriorated unexpectedly. All this pours forth in torrents of ‘unending loss’. Loss is ‘the tiny, pitched hole in the sky at night or the sun’s hesitation about rising at dawn’. It is ‘a grief that has been given two decades to condense but it remains’.
With incredible skill this ceaseless grief, punctuated by cherished memories is movingly retold – snatched scenes during school and Christmas holidays, pranks played, photos of the three MacKenna children on swings, at picnics, on car bonnets – photos, not provided in the book but described in the minutest detail. In this, intense nurturing of memory, MacKenna manages, not just to keep his absent brother present but to evoke both brother and disappointed father with immense love.
MacKenna’s despair was so all-consuming that he lost his second marriage amid the wilderness of the fallout from his brother’s death and for this, he is not easy on himself. Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Simon and Garfunkle, Elvis, Mozart and even prayers become accessories in recovered memories – every child of the 60s will identify with them and the same goes for the rosaries and the stations of the cross. The smell of polish, beeswax and lavender evoking back-to-school nostalgia are experiences all those of MacKenna’s generation will easily identify with and they are all tinged with a hint of the sanctified.
Equally, we all knew a Lal McKenna – his single aunt whom, not unlike the heroine of Joyce’s ‘Eveline’, sacrificed her own prospects of love and marriage to care, first for her younger siblings and after that, for her sister’s children in Athy where she lived-in with the family, and also served in the shop. We all know too of the shoe-box coffins where dead and premature babies, excluded from ‘consecrated ground’ for not being baptised were, instead buried in old, abandoned graveyards or other local hallowed spots.
Jarlath’s kindness to the brother, ten years his junior are emotionally recalled as numerous amputations – the ‘tearing apart of what was their brotherhood.’ An image of their father, Jack leaning on a spade at the opening throws a shadow over the pages – a shadow ‘that reached back into the past eight decades’.
The narrative is not chronological but rather moves joltingly from different decades and places – itself evoking loss and dislocation. We are plunged into Jack’s own displacement when, after his mother died soon after he was born, he and his siblings were moved to his grandmother’s house in Celbridge. When his father remarried, Jack McKenna and his siblings were moved back to Bluebell Cottage in Athy where his father, a train driver, was based. Jack McKenna followed his own father into work on the railways and eventually becoming a signalman and foreman in Athy. ‘We are a railway family’ MacKenna informs the reader and his father was an exemplary worker. MacKenna’s earliest dreams was to be a railway worker too.
This beautifully crafted memoir on a grief that brings the writer to the edge of self-annihilation is full of hope too. We are ‘not just the people our parents make us but what we make of ourselves’ and we can ‘all if we are lucky, venture down the road of understanding and mercy’. Like his masterful debut novel The Last Fine Summer (1997) this memoir marks MacKenna out as a dazzling virtuoso of the poetics of love and loss.
Some viewers have noticed the numberplate on the Ford Cortina in That They May Face the Rising Sun, the recent film based on John McGahern’s 2002 novel of the same name. The plate reads ‘OZU 155’. Surely this is a reference to the Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu? In interview, the director, Pat Collins, has said that the coincidence of the number plate was unplanned, but deliberately retained.
Ozu is not well known in the West now, but he is certainly a canonical name among people, like Collins, who know their cinema history. Ozu is celebrated for an observational, restrained style of storytelling, with minimal music or camera movement and, indeed, minimal plot. Collins’s admirable adaptation of McGahern’s final novel bears more than passing resemblances to key Ozu films, such as Late Spring from 1949, Early Summer from 1951, Tokyo Story from 1953 and An Autumn Afternoon from 1962. Like Collins, these all share a concern with the gentle unfolding of inter-generational time, with subtle domestic interactions, and with the challenge (sometimes welcome, sometimes not) posed by the visitor from outside.
What is most pertinent about this playful reference, however, is the common take on Ozu that he addressed ‘universal’ themes, and that his appeal is ‘universal’. Similar observations litter the reception of That They May Face the Rising Sun, and of another recent Irish breakthrough hit that I consider a companion piece to this, 2022’s An Cailín Ciúin, directed by Colm Bairéad. Both of these films are set in isolated, unnamed rural locales, with ordinary folk as lead characters, and have plots that are not besmirched by the concerns of urban existence (crime and punishment, politics, violence, money, addiction, social isolation, class conflict), which tend to dominate the stories we watch on screen. As with Ozu, paring away as many specific plot details as possible makes these films feel, to reach for vocabulary favoured by reviewers, ‘timeless’, ‘classic’, ‘profound’, ‘dreamlike’, ‘beautiful’, ‘delicate’.
It has been a long-running complaint that Irish cinema was dominated too long by questions of national and/or sectarian identity, that its narratives were tediously populated by priests and hysterical IRA men running around in ill-fitting leather jackets. Why couldn’t we just have a ‘normal’ cinema that would tell non-political stories that would have a universal appeal? The embarrassment of a liberal commentariat, and academy, at our political backwardness means that any Irish film that is not about the British question in some form or other is greeted with praise for having achieved some kind of postnationalist maturity. The two recent Irish films that we are concerned with here are therefore feted, as evidence that we have grown up.
It is true of any film set in the past that it is as much about the time it is made as the time it depicts. That They May Face the Rising Sun is set in the early 1980s, but the couple at the heart of the story, self-exiled from the city, are recognisably from our times. The period details are minimal, and the sense of being in the past is achieved mostly by the omission of digital devices, screens and disposable homeware. The fashion and hairstyles, so often an important guide to period, are neutral enough to belong either to the 1980s or to the present, especially if we regard Joe and Kate as ageing hipsters. (All the other characters are timelessly old-fashioned in their appearance.) As for what they do, they are engaged in what we now call remote working and the back-to-basics simplicity of their existence, with its mix of intellectual life, light agricultural activity and overpopulation-conscious childlessness, has a whiff of prepperism.
A very memorable sequence dwells on the wake, hours after the unexpected death of the lonely Johnny, who has been marooned in a life of drudgery in London for decades. In the crowded kitchen of Johnny’s brother’s family, a woman leads the group of country people in reciting a decade of the rosary, keeping track with a set of beads on her lap. Everybody participates in the ritual, responding to her as she cycles through the prayers. We linger on the faces and voices for longer than a more distractable film would allow. In the midst of all this, our protagonists Joe and Kate remain silent. For all of their integration into the community and the vital welcome that they offer to all comers, they are nevertheless not fully part of it.
The tone of this separateness is carefully judged; the silence of Joe and Kate is not hostile, nor is it received badly, as the story is one of tolerance. But, whereas in the novel, it is the community that kindly tolerates the blow-ins who have landed in their midst, in the film the flow of tolerance has switched, and now it is the liberal couple who tolerate the traditional, conservative values of the community. The contemporary characteristics of Joe and Kate align them with our 2024 values. The vast changes that have taken place between the early 1980s and now are palpable in this difference.
Nobody knew better than McGahern the tightness of the stranglehold that the Catholic Church held over the life of the country, especially in rural areas and in the schools. (He lost his job as a teacher because of the content of earlier novels). It is apparent to us now that the church was in fact at an unsustainable peak of dominance, triumphant in the abortion referendum of 1983 and in the defeated divorce referendum of 1986. But events such as the outcries at the death of Ann Lovett and the persecution of Joanne Hayes would set in motion the church’s reputational freefall in the intervening decades (rapist priests, slave laundries, death camps for children of the unmarried, the list goes on) and the blanket implementation in recent times of what was in the past quaintly known as ‘the liberal agenda’.
That They May Face the Rising Sun is a document of the final years of the previous dispensation, before the enormous transformation that has brought us to the liberal consensus that now prevails. When did this change take place, and how? Certainly the election of Mary Robinson in 1990 is a milestone, and in and around that date we could also include the Maastricht Treaty, Sinead O’Connor ripping up a photo of the pope (both 1992), the rise of globalisation and neoliberalism (Clinton, Blair, the World Trade Organisation), the 1995 referendum that introduced divorce (by a margin of 0.28%), and the world wide web.
One other, admittedly cosmetic, landmark event was the switch in 1987 to the standard European style of car numberplates, where the numbers and letters actually mean something. ‘OZU 155’ stands for the Japanese filmmaker, whose work is celebrated for the vacuous virtue of being about everything and therefore about nothing — in other words, for being politically inoffensive. Any edge of critique present in Ozu is blunted on contact with a commentariat in search of liberal universalisms, hungry to understand ‘story’ as a virtue and ‘context’ as an embarrassment.
McGahern similarly needs to be pruned of embarrassing excrescences. The problem is that in all his books he is a border writer, constantly conscious of the Troubles, the aftermath of the Civil War, the problem of political-institutional legitimacy and the family dysfunctions that flow as a result. He presents the awkward vista of rural communities that to this day persist in voting for political gombeens, seemingly unable to adapt to the fact that people in Dublin and Brussels know what is best. The film adaptation of his final novel forgives these errors by the device of celebrating the tolerant humanism of the educated outsider, stand-ins for viewers who crave forgiveness for despising the backwardness of pre-liberal Ireland and its uncomfortable, unresolved politics and its quaintly non-rational numberplates.
Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense is a recently published work by Irish philosopher and public intellectual Richard Kearney. The book is the third in the ‘No Limits’ series published by Columbia University Press.
The blurb and introduction promise a timely meditation on the importance of touch in an age of virtuality. The book, we are told, asks how we are to reconcile the physical with the virtual, our embodied experience with our global connectivity. Unfortunately, however, it contributes little towards answering these questions, spending most of its few pages mulling over the history of philosophy and Western medicine; lingering around the goalposts without registering a direct hit.
This is disappointing because Kearney has his finger on the pulse of a real undercurrent of dissatisfaction with our mainstream cultural model. Many of us believe that something has gone wrong, so we turn to our writers, artists and public intellectuals to identify the root cause. Is capitalism to blame? The invention of print? The discovery of fire?
Kearney considers a neglect of touch as a key feature of our cultural predicament. It all began with the Greeks – he suggests – exemplified by Plato’s valorisation of the spiritually pure sense of sight over our beastly sense of touch. Now, we see the unhappy conclusion of such an idea; a culture founded around the image, where life is increasingly lived virtually at the expense of our physical existences.
This mass sense of disembodiment, caused by engagement with digital technology, Kearney calls excarnation, a term loaded with esoteric theological significance. This aspect to our culture was brought into stark relief during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thus, most workers and students began working virtually from their own home, as nationwide quarantines were enforced, and social distancing was put in place in supermarkets, restaurants, and other public places. We realised that this was, in a way, the logical next step to the virtualisation of education and work. We just needed one catastrophe to put it in place.
Worthy Premise
‘A civilization that loses touch with flesh’, writes Kearney, ‘loses touch with itself.’ (p. 47). This is a worthy premise to a book, and from this beginning, one can imagine an author moving towards a rich discussion of the effects of ‘excarnation’ on such matters as sex, violence, sport, the prevalence of body dysmorphia, self-harm etc. in our contemporary culture.
The topic of ‘touch’ is indeed broad, but contemporary writers and cultural critics have gained good mileage with similarly broad topics in the past. An example is Maggie Nelson’s book The Art of Cruelty (2011), which takes the broad theme of cruelty as a foundation to a wide-ranging discussion on everything from avant-garde performance art, to the tropes of advertising, to the coverage of U.S. war crimes during the so-called ‘War on Terror’.
This book, however, fails to deliver on its ambitious premise. Instead of diving into an analysis of contemporary culture, it stalls before it starts with two lengthy chapters introducing a glossary of terms, distinctions and concepts that are seldom used later in the book.
Kearney meanders through etymologies and distinctions, drawing neat moral messages from vague, linguistically questionable associations. The root cause of this may be the unnecessary broadening of an already vague theme. Thus, he writes:
As I hope I clear by now, when we speak of touch we are not just referring to one of the five senses … we are talking about touch in a more inclusive way, as an embodied manner of being in the world, an existential approach to things that is open and vulnerable, as when skin touches and is touched. (pp.15-16)
This is a little too sweet to swallow. Even if we accept the Heideggerian mysticality of this passage, it’s obvious that Kearney is widening his subject matter out of manageable proportion.
Indeed, he draws strongly on Heidegger in his concern with words and their hidden meanings. At times, this can be surprising and intriguing, but at other times, the connections seem banal. He argues:
But tact is not the same as contact. Being tactful with someone does not always imply immediate physical proximity. One can be tactful, for instance, by practicing discretion in particular circumstances, as one negotiates the right space between oneself and others. (p. 10)
Handshake
A baby-steps approach would be justifiable on philosophical grounds if Kearney wasn’t taking flights of fancy elsewhere. At one point, he speaks of the handshake as being the ‘origin of community’(p. 42) without adequately explaining how.
Indeed, in many cultures bowing or other non-contact gestures are the norm. We turn to the endnotes to find an essay that ‘analyses the first wager of hand-to-hand encounter between Diomedes and Glaucus in Homer’s Iliad and Abraham’s greeting of the strangers at Mamre.’ These literary scenes are certainly interesting, and may indeed point to episodes passed down through folk memory, but to suggest that they represent a historically verifiable moment in human history is unsatisfactory.
The first chapter is structured around the questionably useful coining of new terms to describe sight, taste, smell and sound being used ‘tactfully’. ‘A person with tactful taste is savvy.’(p. 17), Kearney writes, a person with a good nose has ‘flair’(p. 21), and so on. But when we talk about the ‘tactfulness’ of touch we don’t really mean the sense of touch; remember we mean the metaphorical way of being in the world that touch acts as an analogy for.
It’s odd to focus on the specifics of each sense when we’ve already established that we aren’t taking the theme of touch literally. In any case, is it still believed that there are only five senses? Isn’t it the case that there are many others beyond those traditional five?
At this point in my reading, the unanswered questions become overwhelming, and I decided to stop thinking too hard about them. Instead, I focused on the texture of Kearney’s style, clearly influenced by Continental Philosophy. There is a lot of jargon, which is at times hard to follow. On the flipside, it is quite playful, making use of a number of touch-based puns and idioms. There is also a tendency towards moralistic aphorisms, and using words poetically. The following sentences give a flavour:
Without the transversality of touch, sensibility risks sensationalism: sense without sensitivity, perception without empathy, stimulation without responsibility. (p. 16)
Savvy is a carnal know-how. (p. 18)
For if ontogeny repeats phylogeny, it also repeats cosmogony. (p. 20)
Hearing is tactful when it resonates with what resounds. (p. 27)
In response to this, however, I am moved to quote Wittgenstein: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.’
Visual Culture
It is popularly acknowledged that we live in a ’visual culture’, and Kearney sees this ‘optocentrism’ as the source of our woes. In his own words, ‘Optical omnipresence trumps tactile contact. Cyber connection and human isolation go hand in glove.(p. 5)’
But Kearney never specifies exactly what a visual culture is, or what it means to live in one. What does the shortening of our attention spans, our growing inability to read longer texts, or the increasing popularity of podcasts and audiobooks actually mean in a ‘visual culture’? Do these elements suggest a deterioration in our visual faculties? Kearney doesn’t linger on these questions. In his eagerness to champion touch, he fails to determine exactly what it is he is fighting against.
The second chapter of Touch is even murkier than the first. Kearney embarks on a historical tour of different philosophical considerations of touch, but only discusses two philosophers at any length: Aristotle, and Edmund Husserl. This leaves a gap of some two thousand years in between. Was there nothing to say about the Christian philosophers and touch, or about Descartes’s suspicion that his physical sensations could be a mere dream?
As someone untrained in philosophy, I found the explanations of Aristotle’s thought particularly difficult to follow. I couldn’t tell where Aristotle’s opinions ended and Kearney’s began, especially since Kearney quotes Aristotle using terms like “tact”, which Kearney had given idiosyncratic definitions for in the previous chapter. Are we to take it that Aristotle aligned with Kearney’s usage of the word?
At one point, Kearney remarks that Aristotle saw touch as the most foundational sense, since all the other senses rely on it. Food must touch the tongue to be tasted, soundwaves must ‘touch’ the eardrum, and ‘light strikes the iris’(p. 43). But was Aristotle aware that photons were material objects? And are photons actually material objects, if they have no mass, and can act like waves?
When you start considering this subject at a quantum level, everyday notions of touch break down. After all, when I ’touch’ a table, at a molecular level none of the atoms in my finger are touching the atoms in the table, and I am only feeling the electromagnetic resistance of the table’s atoms.
Likewise, none of the atoms in my body are ’touching’ each other, but are held in a bond through their orbitals. So, in what sense can you say that light ’touches’ the eye, or sound ’touches’ the ear?
Odysseus and Polyphemus (1896) by Arnold Böcklin.
No Central Thrust
Even if you accept all the concepts, definitions and distinctions found in the philosophical survey, your work won’t be rewarded because Kearney barely mentions them again. Instead, the text turns to medicine. In chapter three, he talks about literary/folkloric/mythological figures like Odysseus and Oedipus who embody a ’wounded healer’ archetype. Then, in chapter four he talks about the importance of physical touch in modern medicine, particularly in psychotherapy.
At this point, to my mind at least, it became clear that there was no central thrust to this book, and my attempt to follow his train of thought would go unrewarded. Instead, I found a collection of loosely connected rambles through Kearney’s reading, with no development between the chapters.
The final chapter on popular culture (social media, video games, movies) finally gave me what I had been hoping for – a discussion of touch in contemporary culture – but is, sadly, the least satisfactory of the lot. Kearney is clearly unfamiliar with the details or nuances of internet culture, consistently misusing terms. At one point, he refers to the leaking of Hillary Clinton’s emails as ’revenge porn’ (p. 119), a blunder that reveals a deep unfamiliarity with the expression he is using.
At another, he disparages the state of internet discourse as infuriatingly simple compared to the Golden Age of communication that existed back in an Edenic past: ’communication is becoming daily more simplified by social media tweets, memes, acronyms, and hash tags – ’What’s up’ being replaced by WhatsApp.’
Putting aside the cringeworthy final sentence, is it really self-evident that internet communication is more ’simplified’ than print or verbal speech? Couldn’t you argue the opposite – that the increasingly ironic, self-referential, meme-ified soup of internet discourse is actually maddeningly Baroque?
Avoiding odious comparison, you could speak of internet discourse not as better or worse, simpler or more complex than speech, but just as a new modality which is still in the process of growth, of finding its feet and testing its limits.
There are plenty of scholars analysing internet culture now. It may seem absurd to study memes, but when you consider their effect on politics, it appears intellectually reckless to dismiss them as simplistic, and unworthy of analysis.
Grand Theft Auto V.
Video Games
The ignorance latent in Kearney’s cultural analysis hits a peak in his discussion of video games, such as Grand Theft Auto V (2013), which he calls ’controversial’. When describing it he first gives an inaccurate description of its contents, speaking of how players can ‘build or destroy cities’ (Is he thinking of SimCity (1989), perhaps?) and ’seduce strippers’ (according to my research on the GTA forum, you can only purchase lap dances from the strippers in the game).
He gives an inaccurate account of what it feels like to play a game he surely hasn’t played. It’s ’vicarious’ he says. With ’a click of a button, one exits the world of tangible reality and enters a computer-generated universe’. If only GTA V gave one the escape from tangible reality Kearney imagines. Alas, however, technology can only progress so fast.
After painting this Black Mirror-esque picture of the reality-warping power of the computer game, Kearney exhorts the lost souls of gamers that ‘it is but a simulacrum’, and warns against ’the risk of losing touch’. The only one out of touch here is Kearney himself.
Apart from GTA V, Kearney lists a number of examples from modern media that deal with the sense of isolation and alienation engendered by digital media, referencing such titles as ‘Her’ (Spike Jonze, 2013), ‘The Truman Show’ (Peter Weir, 1998) and ‘Black Mirror’ (Charlie Brooker, 2011 – present). But all these works communicate much more nuanced and rich critiques of contemporary culture than Kearney is able to muster in this text.
There are insights and interesting titbits scattered throughout the book, but on the whole it is lacking in a sense of progression, with little development from chapter to chapter, and a cumbersome amount of time is spent advancing distinctions and definitions that are never called into use.
Columbia University Press claims that the No Limits series ‘brings together creative thinkers who delight in the pleasure of intellectual hunting, wherever the hunt may take them and whatever critical boundaries they have to trample as they go.’ With Touch, we see the weaknesses of this interdisciplinary approach, as the book’s lack of precision and relative naivete provides unsatisfactory responses to important questions in contemporary culture.
Featured Image: A Missouri National Guardsman looks into a VR training head-mounted display at Fort Leonard Wood in 2015
Picture the scene: the small backyard of a tiny working-class pub in Belfast at around 8pm on a dark Autumn night. I am smoking with a friend, older by a few years, and with way more life experience, talking about books. A dim-light is ebbing away, further subdued by the frosted glass of the bar-door. He looks at me and says: ‘Strumpet City (James Plunkett‘s 1969 novel) is a good book’. I did not take the time to ask about the work as the conversation was rolling along, covering other novels about Ireland which we had both read, and were reading, or intended to read.
Here were two talking heads, tongues loosened and wagging after a couple of pints. Yet somewhere in the back, ploughed, crow-lifting fields of my sub-conscious, the adjective ‘Strumpet’ and the noun ‘City’ lodged as an unlikely pairing; lighting a candle of intrigue that would burn inside my brain. A decade has sailed past since then.
Cut to a month ago, and I am in my local library with the mad literary hunger on me – the reading hunger. This is where one desires material to satisfy personal taste and preference. For me this is for a well-written and narrated book. And not what I find so demoralising: one that bends down on one knee to the easily accessible, clichéd fountain whose water(s) flow tepidly, and which is, in the beginning, saccharine sweet but gives way to a brackish and unpalatable torpor.
I pick the work up and thumb through its 549 pages. A novel of heft, requiring dedication it seems. I bring it to the desk, and steal away into a showery, sun-lit Wednesday evening with the novel safely stowed inside my bag.
Strumpet City is an historical-led novel which sets out… well… this is a work which, ostensibly, is about the Dublin Lockout(s) of the early twentieth century, narrating fictional, and real, lives of the people involved, including the almost mythological Union leader, Jim Larkin (1874-1947), who James Plunkett previously worked for as his secretary.
This is a novel of coal, ash, and soot. Of wasps amongst blackberries; of hunger and of greed; a novel of slum dwellings and collapsing dockside houses; a work which radiates a stench of unclean bodies and souls, in dire need of cleansing and thorough rituals of purification brought to task.
There is an alcoholic priest who loses his mind due to the drink, whiskey, and on one occasion, topples a coffin off its trestles. It tips over, and the enclosed incumbent resident, due to the lid springing open, falls out, rolling on to the floor. The widowed wife, upon seeing this, screams and two priests soon come over, calm her down and take her away from the morbid scene. The priest, a Father Giffley (memorably played by Cyril Cusack in a memorable 1980 RTE adaptation), is found, soon thereafter, prostrate at the foot of the altar, face-down, unaware of the immoral chaos he has just created and is dozing away.
There is Rashers Tierney, the almost toothless, romantic wanderer who is dirt poor but in the ownership of a rarefied wit and tongue which darts rebuttals in defiance of perceived, and real, attacks; with his mongrel, Rusty, and a penny-whistle in tow. Rashers, as my Belfast friend would have said, ‘Hasn’t a bar in his grate.’
Father O’Connor is the moral authority in the book, a ‘sky pilot’ who turned his back on the riches of a diocese more becoming of his class. He finds his spiritual bedfellow in the form of Mrs. Bradshaw, the face of female humility; in contrast to the encompassing greed of her ideologue, capitalist husband. However, there is an artifice to O’Connor too, which yields a quavering hatred to his position as sitting tenure in the local, disenfranchised, Dublin district which he does acknowledge but does not run away from, which would be the coward’s option. No. He has staying commendable power and you feel for him.
There is a terrible accident at a coal yard and you feel empathy for big Mulhall and the further poverty his family will suffer in its wake.
There are wonderful characters, including Fitz, Hennessy and Mary, set against the backdrop of the 1913 Lockout; striking dockers; the stamping foot(s) of the law and the piercing, shrill whistles of authority. This novel, let me tell you, has a social-economic range, and has it in abundance.
This is not a work to compare to the quotidian, creative deliciousness’ of Joyce’s Ulysses. On this, I have read a good few books, and have many, many more to grapple with, but having read some of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekov, and other Russian masters’ creations, this work here, Strumpet City, is, in my view, the Irish equivalent, and a masterpiece.
