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| Burning questions No doubt you have remembered, remembered that tonight is bonfire night. But how much have you forgotten about fires and fire-starting in literature? There's only one way to find out ... feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Oprah Winfrey to announce her talkshow is ending Ratings powerhouse to close in 2011, allowing Oprah to concentrate on her own cable channelAfter more than 20 years in which Oprah Winfrey shook up the medium of the daytime talkshow, rising to become a ratings and cultural powerhouse, she is to announce today that she is bringing her show to an end.Yesterday she told her 600 staff in Chicago that the Oprah Winfrey show would end in September 2011. That will be its 25th season, after it was first broadcast to the US in 1986.Since then, the show has grown to become the most successful talkshow in syndication, with about 7 million viewers each day. Winfrey's own standing has risen with it – confirmed last year when she became a key figure behind the political success of Barack Obama.Tim Bennett, president of her production company Harpo (Oprah spelt backwards), wrote to advertisers on the syndicated show to say: "Tomorrow, Oprah will announce live on the show that she has decided to end what is arguably one of the most popular, influential and enduring programmes in television history."It soon became clear however that the announcement would not represent Winfrey's demise as a media superstar so much as her metamorphosis under a new guise. The most credible explanation for her decision to close such a fabulously successful programme was that she intends to transfer her energies to her own forthcoming cable channel.The channel, appropriately called OWN for the Oprah Winfrey Network, is expected to launch in January 2011, some nine months before her syndicated talk show goes off air.In its 23 years, the Oprah Winfrey Show has dominated daytime television and turned its presenter into not just a celebrity, but a brand in her own right. A sign of its cultural hegemony is that it can be understandably referred to with the use of a single letter — O.On the back of it, Winfrey has come to be a major presence in book publishing, through her book club, and even in cinema, as was demonstrated this month with the release of the film Precious, which she co-produced.Over time Winfrey has made the contents of the show more sophisticated and sympathetic, moving away from its sensationalist beginnings to an exploration of spirituality and community which has proved popular particularly with women.She has by coincidence or design made the bombshell announcement at a very opportune moment. Her hour-long interview with Sarah Palin this week pushed her ratings up to a two-year high.Her show's success has also depended on her ability to pierce through the PR armour of celebrities and reveal inner conflicts. Most famously, Tom Cruise displayed another side of himself when in May 2005 he hopped around the set declaring his love for Katie Holmes. In 1993, Michael Jackson appeared on the show to denounce his critics and declare he had the skin pigment disorder vitiligo.Yet Winfrey also covered regular stories of ordinary people surviving extraordinary catastrophes. One of her favourite guests was Jacqueline Saburido, a burns survivor from a car crash; in similar vein she recently interviewed Charla Nash, who had severe facial damage after she was attacked by her friend's pet chimpanzee.Talk showsTelevisionUnited StatesSarah PalinTom CruiseMichael JacksonTelevision industryEd Pilkingtonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Pashas by James Mather Maya Jasanoff enjoys a sensitive history of the Levant CompanyTo early English visitors, the grandeur of Constantinople's setting alone, on the border of Europe and Asia, made the city seem "built to command all the world". They marvelled at a skyline of cascading domes and pencil minarets, the fearsomely fortified city walls, and the majestic Topkapi Palace, home of the Ottoman sultan, one of the most powerful rulers on earth. Under the arches of the Grand Bazaar, spices, perfumes, coffee and silks made the city appear the "greatest emporium upon the face of the earth".Long before oil dominated western interest in the Middle East, these exotic goods lured English traders into the Ottoman empire. In 1581, a group of London-based "Turkey merchants" received a royal charter granting them a monopoly on Ottoman commerce. The Levant Company, as it was called, established "factories" at Constantinople, Smyrna and Aleppo, and developed a profitable import business based primarily on silk fabrics and, oddly enough, currants – the brown gold of their day. So central was commerce to Anglo-Ottoman relations that the Levant Company also managed England's diplomacy in the region, making it for almost a quarter millennium the primary conduit for English encounters with the Middle East.Astonishingly, no history has appeared of this influential organisation since 1935. James Mather has brilliantly stepped into the breach with Pashas, a vivacious vade mecum to the little-known operations of the Levant Company. Following the traders – or pashas – themselves, Mather whisks the reader into the souks and khans of the Ottoman empire, evoking at once a powerful sense of place and a real feel for the pleasures, pressures and profits that characterised the pashas' careers. Like many modern expats, they created self-contained little Englands in the Levant, hunting, playing cricket and drinking to excess. Yet, Mather stresses, they acquired more in the Middle East than sunburnt skins and personal wealth. Mixing among people of many faiths, writing copious observations for readers and correspondents back home, and bringing Arabic and Turkish texts back to England, the pashas helped shape British understanding of the Ottoman empire as an entity to be feared, respected and at times admired.Mather's description of this cosmopolitan milieu chimes with recent portrayals of contemporary British India by William Dalrymple, among others, covering a time when relations between Europe and the Muslim world had not yet hardened into a familiar Victorian mould. Mather draws a pointed contrast between the Levant Company and its better-known contemporary, the East India Company. Where the East India Company raised armies of sepoys, collected taxes, and administered whole provinces – becoming, in Edmund Burke's famous phrase, "a state in the disguise of a merchant" – the Levant Company pursued its trade at the sultan's pleasure, and never sought territorial control. The Levant Company's "commerce", Mather observes, "in no sense led to colonisation". The pashas could hardly imagine "that the Muslim map would one day be painted in shades of imperial pink". After all, the king's own ambassador, presenting his credentials at Topkapi, found himself seized by guards, pushed to his knees, and his forehead pressed to the floor beneath the sultan's feet – a forceful reminder of where authority rested.Mather makes a forceful case, and an appealingly well-written one at that. As with many attractive historical pictures, the rosy hues Mather illuminates sadly faded into black and white. By the time the East India Company governed parts of the Mughal empire, what held western Europeans back from encroaching into Ottoman domains was less an inability to do so than an unwillingness — compounded, for the British, with what seems in hindsight a stunning lack of interest. The French invasion of Egypt in 1798 changed all that, turning the Middle East into a prime arena of European imperial competition. Though the Levant Company itself may not have nurtured imperial ambitions, in 1825 it would be gobbled up by a British state that certainly did.This points to what is at once the greatest strength and weakness of Pashas. It offers much more Levant than Company. For all the rich human detail, the reader craves analysis of corporate structures and practices. How, for instance, did the company compare with the greatest commercial concerns of the period, oriented not toward Asia but toward the Atlantic? All those alluring Levantine imports were overshadowed in the British economy by the massive Atlantic traffic of fish, fur, tobacco, slaves – to say nothing of sugar, which ousted currants as the scourge of English teeth. And it was in North America, not Asia, that colonisation and commerce truly walked in step. It seems impossible fully to take the measure of Britain's eastern trade in this period without situating it alongside that of the Atlantic – as Captain John Smith, a founder of England's first successful North American colony, knew more intimately than most. Just a few years before settling Virginia, he had been a slave in the Ottoman empire.Mather frames his book as a response to the "clash of civilisations" arguments so prevalent in the wake of 9/11. As British troops are deployed in two predominantly Muslim countries, such a deeply felt plea for cross-cultural understanding continues to have its place. It is hard not to share Mather's hope that in "our post-imperial times" we may recover something of the cultural fluidity that characterised the pashas' age. But our world has never been post-imperial, and probably never will be. One can't help wondering, on putting down this elegant study, whether this is really the most important lesson to draw from Mather's book. Surely the greatest topical resonance held by the Levant Company's history does not lie with those distant Englishmen's capacity to appreciate an Islamic empire. It lies in the relationship of commercial to imperial power. Now, as western economies are declining in relation to rising Asian ones, Mather notes that Korean textiles and Chinese plastics fill the souks of Aleppo. We will not live to see how Asian historians two or three centuries hence may write about the decline of the west; instead we must hope their investigations will be as sensitive as this.Maya Jasanoff's Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750-1850 is published by HarperCollins.Maya Jasanoffguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Author! Author! | Andrew Brown An astonishing anti-semitic outburst shows how distrust of strangers increases under stressThis hasn't anything directly to do with religion, but it is an interesting anecdote about tribalism. First, a question: who wrote the following passage about life in London during the blitz?What I do feel is that any Jew, ie, European Jew, would prefer Hitler's kind of social system to ours, if it were not that he happens to persecute them. Ditto with almost any Central European, e.g. the refugees. They make use of England as a sanctuary, but they cannot help feeling the profoundest contempt for it. You can see this in their eyes, even when they don't say it outright. The fact is that the insular outlook and the continental outlook are completely incompatible. The clue, I think, both to the author, and to his motivations, comes in the next paragraph. According to F. it is quite true that foreigners are more frightened than English people during the raids. It is not their war, and therefore they have nothing to sustain them. I think this might also account for the fact – I am virtually sure it is a fact though one mustn't mention it – that working-class people are more frightened than middle-class.So this is how Londoners felt on or around 25 October 1940, after a month of heavy bombing. Under that kind of stress, ordinary decent people concluded that only their own kind or tribe could be trusted, and saw all kinds of horrible motivations in anyone who was in the least bit unlike them. I should add that the author of these bitter and blimpish animadversions against Jews and Central European refugees was in his right mind quite a close friend of Arthur Koestler as well as a man sufficiently internationalist to have volunteered in the Spanish Civil War, where he was wounded fighting on behalf of a foreign working class. The question is whether this kind of thought goes on in peacetime, at a much lower level. Modern psychology argues that most of our cognition is unconscious, and that our conscious reasoning needs to overcome a lot of bias. Indeed much of the most interesting current research into the psychology of religion centres around the question of what sorts of stories accord best with our unconscious biases. Under conditions of extreme stress, they will bubble right up to the surface; but as anyone knows who works in the media they operate at a low level all the time on things we don't think really matter, like the stuff in newspapers. It is this kind of mechanism, rather than any theological beliefs, which makes religion so dangerous; and of course, long survives organised belief of any sort. Reading on through this account of life in the blitz, I wonder how much of this stress is still operative today, and still shaping some modern forms of paranoia: the author later wrote "During the bad period of the bombing ... everyone was semi-insane, not for much from the bombing itself as from broken sleep, interrupted telephone calls, the difficulties of communications, etc etc" This isn't a bad description of some of the more hectic and pointless forms of modern office life. Perhaps that does something to explain the continuing popularity of grand conspiracy theories involving the Jews, the Muslims, the Religious, etc.Oh, and the author? George Orwell, in his diary.ReligionGeorge OrwellJudaismAndrew Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
In theory: The Death of the Author Kicking off a new occasional series about the most influential literary theory, Andrew Gallix revisits a classic essay by Roland BarthesEcclesiastes famously warns us that "Of making many books there is no end" – the same, of course, applies to book commentaries. George Steiner has long denounced the "mandarin madness of secondary discourse" which increasingly interposes itself between readers and works of fiction. For better or worse, the internet – with its myriad book sites – has taken this phenomenon to a whole new level. Since Aristotle's Poetics, literature has always given rise to its exegesis, but now that no scrap of literary gossip goes untweeted, it may be time to reflect a little on the activity of literary criticism. I have chosen to inaugurate this series with a few considerations on "The Death of the Author" because of its truly iconic nature: it symbolises the rise of what would come to be known as "theory". Even if he never names them, Roland Barthes (like Proust before him) launches an attack on the traditional biography-based criticism Ă la Sainte-Beuve or Lanson which still dominated French academia in the sixties. The paradox, of course, is that this essay – with its symbolic slaying of the paternal "Author-God" – could lend itself to a textbook psychological reading given that Barthes lost his own father before his first birthday. The "Death of the Author" theme itself takes on added meaning, in hindsight, when you consider that Barthes's critical career was, at least in part, a displacement activity to avoid writing the novel he dreamed of. Does any of this invalidate his theories? I'll let you be the judge of that... In 2002, the prestigious Pompidou Centre in Paris devoted a major exhibition, not to an artist, philosopher, scientist or novelist, but a literary critic: Roland Barthes. Now that the "theory wars" – which had once torn apart literature departments on both sides of the Atlantic – were largely over, it served as a reminder of a time when a posse of structuralists and post-structuralists superseded the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre as France's premier intellectual icons. Many of them were primarily philosophers, anthropologists, historians, linguists or psychoanalysts – Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva et al – but the locus of this intellectual revolution was undoubtedly literary criticism. La nouvelle critique was flavour of the month, much like its culinary counterpart, nouvelle cuisine, albeit more of a mouthful. Critics-cum-thinkers such as Barthes himself – who was equally at home at the lofty Collège de France or down the trendy Le Palace nightclub – achieved bona fide celebrity status. Their works often became bestsellers in spite of their demanding and iconoclastic nature. Soon, NME journalists were peppering their articles with arcane references to Baudrillard while Scritti Politti dedicated a postmodern ditty to Jacques Derrida. The whole movement seemed as provocative, and indeed exciting, as Brigitte Bardot in her slinky, sex kitten heyday. Its defining moment was the publication of a racy little number called "The Death of the Author". As if mimicking one of its central themes, Roland Barthes's article first featured in an American journal in 1967: the original (an English translation of a French text) was thus, in effect, already a copy. With a nice sense of historical timing, it appeared in the critic's homeland in the quasi-insurrectionary context of the 1968 student protests. As it was only anthologised much later (first in Image-Music-Text in 1977 and then in The Rustle of Language in 1984), the essay was photocopied and distributed samizdat-fashion on campuses all over the world, which enhanced its subversive appeal. Subversive, it certainly was. In France, perhaps more than anywhere else, the secularisation of society (compounded by the Republic's struggle against the Roman Catholic Church) had led to the adoption of art and literature as substitute religions. Nietzsche had announced the death of God only to see Him replaced by the "Author-God". Enter Roland Barthes. His starting-point is a sentence lifted from Sarrasine (1830), a little-known Balzac novella about an artist who falls in love with a young castrato he believes to be a woman. Barthes (who was gay) was so taken with this gender-bending tale of mistaken identity that he would study it at length in S/Z (1970). Here, he draws a parallel between the ambiguity of Sarrasine's feelings and the ambiguous identity of the speaker who, ironically, describes the castrato as the essence of womanhood. Is it the deluded, love-struck protagonist? The narrator? Balzac the writer? Balzac the man?... Having exhausted all possibilities, the critic draws the conclusion that it is impossible to say for sure who the sentence should be attributed to. He goes on to describe literature as a space "where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes". The death of the author marks the birth of literature, defined, precisely, as "the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin". Indeed, the "modern writer" – or "scriptor" as Barthes calls him – can only mimic "a gesture forever anterior, never original" by recombining what has already been written. Whereas the "Author-God" maintained with his work "the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child," the scriptor "is born simultaneously with his text": for him, "there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now". As Barthes puts it, apropos of MallarmĂ©, "it is language which speaks, not the author" – or the scriptor for that matter. Works of fiction are palimpsests and as such are devoid of any "single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God)". The key to a text is not to be found in its "origin" but in its "destination": "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author". Next time, I'm planning to investigate the notion of mimetic desire – unless there's anywhere else you'd rather visit first. Suggestions on future topics are most welcome...  FictionAndrew Gallixguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |