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English Non-fictie Tekst Tekst-overig Text WONDROUS CALS Book Club

The Joy of Revolution


No Need to Know Where You’re Going If You Know You Need to Leave

WONDROUS CALS Book Club, 30-12-2024

Living while constantly aware of the many injustices and inequalities of modern society creates a constant strain on the minds of empathetic humans. With a developed idealism and enough education, most people find themselves wanting to change things for the better, while at the same time feeling that the task is impossible. The drive for positive change is met with the unmoving reality of an endless stream of disasters, wars, scandals and the systematic exploitation of the underprivileged. Nearly as long is the list of suggested solutions competing for people’s energy and resources. Although every solution contains some hope, there is also potential for confusion and disagreement amongst those aiming to improve the world, leading to infighting and further disillusionment. This state of alienation can lead to stasis, either through conscious withdrawal from activism for wellbeing or through being overwhelmed with the quantity and complexity of both problems and solutions. Nevertheless, many feel a drive to resist the status quo, even if they do not know exactly how to create a better alternative. Through an exploration of resistance across Bea Wolf, “Bartleby the Scrivener, a Story of Wall-Street”, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Dispossessed, the qualities of positive, self-assertive and joyful revolutionary action become clear, leading to an outlook that harnesses the energy of outrage to create a communal yet personal path towards changing the world. Even though it is an almost self-contained impossibility to imagine a future outside of the confines of this present, fiction allows for the bravery and confidence to defy the harmful elements of oppressive structures and set out on a path of resistance that is productive, shared, energised and rises beyond a cycle of repression. When the alternatives to an unjust world are not fully realised, compassionate and joyful revolution nevertheless allows for the setting of a new course that makes improvements possible while remaining open to course correction.

Bea Wolf, the retelling of the classic saga Beowulf by Zach Wienersmith and Boulet, shows the fighting of evil through the protagonist Bea Wolf. Like all other main characters, she’s a child who revels in adventuring, feasting on candy and soda, and resisting the pull of adulthood and adolescence. The joy of this resistance is visible in every panel where the young heroes are asserting themselves, whether it is through the building of the treehut called Treeheart, the liberation of animals from a farm or the discovery of toys, candy and water balloons (23). The joy of the revolt against the drab of society is threatened by the antagonist Grindle, an adult neighbour of Treeheart who symbolises all that is boring and stale in adulthood (29). His terrifying power is to age anyone he touches, so that “those who felt Grindle’s finger grew old – fog-eyed and furrow-faced” (33). The battle against Grindle shows the children’s resolve to hold on to fun as a weapon against the conformity, armed with foam-bolt guns, balloons and catapults (52). However, Grindle manages to defeat them: “Ten kids turned teenaged, tired-eyed, ever-texting. Eight turned middle-aged, aching, anxious, angry at the internet” (53). As Grindle manifests the children’s worst fears, the ageing magic shows the power of society to incorporate rebellion into the status quo. It is impossible for the warrior children to resist the inevitable growing up, but moreover, they are turned into bland, uninspired people who are unoffensive to Grindle’s sensibilities. They no longer enjoy life, just like Grindle, the “baron of boredom” (32), who can only find a static contentment in a perfectly cleaned and quiet house, but finds no happiness there. His overwhelming might causes the remaining children, including Roger, their king, to despair. During this “midnight of mirth” (59), they see no possibility to continue their resistance against the status quo, mirroring the hopelessness felt by many in the face of a relentlessly pessimistic world.

This paralysis is dispelled when Bea Wolf comes to Treeheart to offer her help to Roger. Just like in the saga of Beowulf, she is the mightiest warrior of the area and brings hope to a kingdom terrorised by a monster. Bea Wolf’s courage and past feats convince the children that parties are possible again, and in defiance of Grindle’s destruction, Roger throws another feast, showing the inspiration that can come from a figure that embodies idealism with joy. The children’s happiness is apparent in their star-pupilled eyes while they gorge themselves on a mountain of sweets (140), further illustrating the playfulness of both their revolution against Grindle’s killjoy overseeing and the story as a whole: reworking an ancient English text to be about children is in itself a joyful, fun act, infusing all of the weighty words and stylistic features of the original Beowulf with a humorous undertone. Bea Wolf, the text, resists the expectations and rules of literary conformity as Bea Wolf, the character, resists the confines of Grindle’s joyless conventionality. Challening him to a duel, she says “Make no more clouds. I have drawn rainbows here.” (148). Rainbows here symbolise the colourful and boundless state of play of the children, but also hint that the supreme state of the world after the revolution is a dreamlike, idealised world, not fully defined, but nevertheless felt and partially realised whenever people live their lives full of idealism. Trying to see behind Grindle’s spectacles, she instead sees only “a joy-void, empty as vacuum” (149), underlining how he has no goals or suggestions for positive change, but only strives to undo any threat to the status quo. He does not fight for anything, but fights against the fun of the children. When Bea Wolf manages to rip Grindle’s tie, he shrinks to a child himself, and becomes harmless. The symbolism of the tie as a representation of corporate conformity and adulthood emphasises how even Grindle, as intimidating and powerful as he is, is only a pawn in the larger forces trying to suppress the joy of the children. This becomes even more clear as Grindle flees to his mother, who is foretold to bring renewed darkness to the victorious children at the end of the story. However, the feats of Bea Wolf are handsomely rewarded by the just king Roger and become part of the mythology of the children, celebrating the day she overcame the oppressive neighbour who stifled their fun. In the end, Bea Wolf showcases the excitement of adventure that is the core of many stories, where heroes overcome great odds, to inspire a spirit of resilience against the monotony of every-day life. The children’s perspective on Beowulf demonstrates that the hero’s courage can be combined with the joy of children’s play to defy overwhelming odds, creating a part of an ideal world in the here and now, even when there is no outline for that ideal.

A similar appeal to joyful resistance is described in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. Despite the pain and harm that are inherent in the setting of the insane asylum, the revolution against the regime of the authoritarian nurse Ratched by Randle McMurphy is focused on humour, fun and rambunctiousness, which shows how their can be joy in revolution even if the rebel is ultimately destroyed. The story of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is told by Chief Bromden, one of the patients at the asylum who suffers from paranoid delusions and traumatic memories. Like most of the patients, he is docile and insecure, which is further exacerbated by the fear they feel because of the Big Nurse’s tyrannical treatment. Under the guise of care, she humiliates the patients to remain in control of the institution, enlisting the help of the aides and manipulating the doctors to enforce her will. Through the process of group meetings, she maintains a facade of political representation, but her overbearing directions to staff and patients leave her in total control of the ward. Harding, one of the patients, even says: “All of us here are rabbits (…). We need a good, strong wolf like the nurse to teach us our place.” (Original italics, 64). The metaphors of rabbits and wolfs illustrate the hierarchy and helplessness that are fostered in the asylum under the Nurse’s rule, but also show that Harding is aware of the dangers this poses. After all, all rabbits can be torn to pieces by the predator, and they have no hope of defending themselves. However, despite the obvious unhappiness in the ward, nurse Ratched has convinced everyone there that the problem is with themselves, and that all of their discomfort is the right path to improvement. Resisting her is not only futile, but shameful self-sabotage.

Like in Bea Wolf, the situation changes with the appearance of the hero. In this case, Randle McMurphy arrives at the asylum, where he hopes to avoid the more uncomfortable punishment of prison by being treated as a “psychopath” (13), which he is told is “a guy that fights too much and fucks too much” (13-14). Even before the other patients see him, they hear his voice, loud and uncompromising, indicating that his political will will not be dominated. Immediately, it becomes clear that his charisma is a threat to the routines of the asylum. However, his most powerful tool for disruption is symbolic of the joy of revolution: it is his loud and genuine laugh.

Nobody can tell exactly why he laughs; there’s nothing funny going on. But it’s not the way that Public Relations laughs, it’s free and loud and it comes out of his wide grinning mouth and spreads in rings bigger and bigger till it’s lapping against the walls all over the ward. Not like that fat Public Relations laugh. This sounds real. I realize all of a sudden it’s the first laugh I’ve heard in years. (12)

His laughing is a shock to establishment, but also to the oppressed “rabbits”, who are at first confused and later emboldened by it. His laughing is not just an act of expression, but part of a larger attitude of playfulness and self-assertiveness. “Even when he isn’t laughing, that laughing sound hovers around him, the way the sound hovers around a big bell just quit ringing – it’s in his eyes, in the way he smiles and swaggers, in the way he talks” (12). The laughing represents an attitude of resistance, a signal to the world, enforced by the simile of the bell, that something has arrived or something needs to change. In being apologetically himself, enjoying himself despite the setbacks, he upsets the meticulous and oppressive order built by the systems of the Big Nurse. Where she has worked to reduce everything particular into a part of a large machine, mirrored by the narrator’s delusions of a mechanical Combine that eats away at every piece of individualism in the United States, McMurphy is a unique and personal element, inviting the other patients to assert themselves and express their own voices. This is not an unconscious act. McMurphy instinctively despises despotism and uses the language of the rough environment he has grown up in to analyse power structure of the asylum. He calls nurse Ratched a “balls-cutter” (60), an example of a type of person who rules over people unfairly. He recognises this type of person from outside the asylum: “Seen ‘em all over the country and in the homes – people who try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want you to” (60). He calls it “going for the vitals” (60), the life force, which is why his life energy is such as threat to her control. He encourages the others to fight back and stand up for their desires, such as watching the baseball game on television despite the change it requires to the routine, and takes them on a fishing trip where they can experience the outside world through danger, fun and contact with women.

When McMurphy’s resistance becomes powerful enough to inspire change in others, Chief Bromden realises it is because he has remained himself despite the outside forces that push people to conform. Despite the never-ending resources of society directed to submit the rogue elements, McMurphy keeps true to his character and enjoys it as well as he can. Bromden says:

There was times that week when I’d hear that full-throttled laugh, watch him scratching his belly and stretching and yawning and leaning back to wink at whoever he was joking with, everything coming to him just as easy as drawing breath, and I’d quit worrying about the Big Nurse and the Combine behind her. I’d think he was strong enough being his own self that he would never back down the way she was hoping he would. (…) He’s what he is, that’s it. (…) He’s not gonna let them twist him and manufacture him. (161).

Nurse Ratched tries all her tricks and succeeds in subduing him for a while when she threatens his chances of being released. The threat to his future freedom makes him less belligerent and even makes him accept the nurse’s domineering for a while. However, the friendship he has built with the others patients makes him rebel for their sake when he realises that they cannot fight back without him. His last big ploy is to sneak into the medicine supply and throw a midnight drinking binge in defiance. When the Nurse threatens all of them with severe consequences, she singles out one of the patients, Billy Bibbit, and uses her ultimate weapon over him: to tell his mother of his behaviour. This sends Billy into such a frenzy that he kills himself, which nurse Ratched hounds over McMurphy until he attacks her a final act of revolution before he is taken for a lobotomy that turns him into a “Vegetable”, comatose. Bromden realises McMurphy “made me big again” (287), but also sees how he pushed himself beyond what he could for the sake of his friends on the ward (319). While the Nurse uses his catatonic body as a warning to the others, Bromden considers what McMurphy would have done: “he wouldn’t have left something like that to sit there in the day room with his name tacked on it for twenty or thirty years so the Big Nurse could use it as an example of what can happen if you buck the system” (322). Determined, he kills his friend with a pillow before using his renewed strength to break out of the ward and start a new, free life. Although Bromden does not know what to do, he has learned he cannot abide by the dehumanisation that has limited him so far. His life after the asylum will be an alternative to the subjugation he has felt his whole life, even if he does not know what that life will look like, yet. Bromden’s defiance ensures that despite McMurphy’s demise, he still inspires change. His revolution had no defined goal that he tried to achieve, but was born from his recognition of the unethical treatment of himself and others around him. There is tragedy is McMurphy’s fate, but the resilience and attitude with which he defied the regime of the Big Nurse lives on in the other patients. The story of McMurphy’s sacrifice focuses on Bromden’s escape, and the ring of his laughing will echo throughout many of the lives of the patients, showing how not even death can still the ring of McMurphy’s revolution.

In contrast to the bold resolution of Bea Wolf and McMurphy, Bartleby, the hero of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener: a Story of Wall-street, does not revolt through action, but through inaction. Nevertheless, his determination and self-sacrifice mirror both heroes, and though his revolution appears to have no goal except resistance, he presents an alternative to the status quo by means of his quiet, polite refusal to cooperate. When he first enters the scrivener’s office run by the narrator, he is described as “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn” (9) – hardly the description of a figure who is bound to overthrow the social order. However, after initially working well, Bartleby refuses to assist in an errand with the singular phase “I would prefer not to” (10). The narrator is startled into acceptance by the hurry of his business and the politeness and oddness of the phrase, and when Bartleby refuses more and more work later on, it becomes clear from that “his decision was irreversible” (12), despite his gentle and meek attitude. Although the Narrator says he would have fired Bartleby if there had been any “uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner” (10), his manner instead dissipates all his tools of reasserting the hiearchy. In fact, it undermines his confidence in his own perspective: “when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his own plainest faith. He begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side” (12). Though the only violence or force that Bartlebly has employed is to be “violently unreasonable”, it is enough for the narrator to make him question his usual responses to insubordination. When Bartleby refuses to work at all, and even turns out to live in the office, the narrator resorts to the absurdity of moving his offices instead of setting Bartleby out of door (27-28). Here, the ungraspable power of Bartleby’s revolution becomes apparent, and in the absurdity of the situation, humour is revealed. When Bartleby is promptly sent to prison by the next tenant, the narrator cannot help but be entangled in Bartleby’s fate, and tries to make his imprisonment as comfortable as possible by paying a “grub-man” (32) to see him well-fed. However, Bartleby refuses to eat, dying soon after, leaving the narrator disturbed and guilty, feeling endless pity for Bartleby (34). Thus, without doing anything, Bartleby has upset the status quo at the heart of Wall Street.

In essence a tragic tale, the enigmatic nature of Bartleby allows for a wild range of readings, leading from those of civil disobedience, as set out by Melville’s contemporary Henry David Thoreau, to existentialist dread or an absurd joke. In any case, despite any communicated goal being achieved, Bartleby succeeds in withstanding the expectations of Wall Street, symbolising the churning productivity of the 19th-century United States, which closely resemble the Combine as imagined by Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Bartleby has no strength, charisma or community to provide him with the power to overthrow the system he finds himself in, but the quiet yet undeniable statement that he “would prefer not to” draws an ultimatum that causes a revolution in the people around him. The cast of side characters takes over the use of the word “prefer” (20-21), even though one of them, Turkey, considers it a “queer word. I never use it myself” (21). The hierarchy of the office is overthrown, and though the narrator remains in control of the others, nothing he can imagine sways Bartleby. His ultimate summation, “you must” (22, original italics) yields no result, showing the absurdity of language acts and power structures in the face of blatant refusal to accept them. On the whole, Bartleby the Scrivener shows another face of the revolutionary hero by deconstructing the tools of the ruling class and countering them with gentle self-assertion. Bartlebly’s death, like McMurphy’s sacrifice, is not to be interpreted as losing the battle for self-determination. In fact, both resist past the point of death, showing that their revolution remains after their lives end.

Imagining a world after the revolution, Ursula K. Le Guin imagines two parallel worlds in The Dispossessed. When a revolutionary movement on Urras becomes a serious threat to the establishment, they offer the barren twin planet of Anarres, where the revolutionaries build an anarchist-communist community that, centuries later, brings forth the hero of the book, Dr. Shevek. Dr. Shevek is an outsider in both societies, but continues to strive for the best of both through he conviction that following his ideals is ultimately for the common good of both worlds. Although his urge to criticise both governments brings him into conflict, he feels he cannot do otherwise. The society of Anarres is based on the teaching of Odo, an activist from Urras that sparked the revolutionary movement. One of the central works of Odo, Analogy, works around the central metaphor of cells in a larger body. In it, society is compared to an organism, where individuals are its cells. This means that for society to flourish, individuals must be willing to work together for the well-being of the greater whole, which sometimes includes sacrifice. When discussing the state of their twin planet Urras, Shevek’s friends discuss how their society is afraid of “infection” by Urras’s corruption (43). Bedap, one of the friends, comments that “in a sick organism, even a healthy cell is doomed” (43), describing that there can be no ethical living in a society with unethical values or practices. This shows how the revolutionary and analogical thinking of Odo informs the perspective of the inhabitants of Anarres. Shevek strives to be a healthy cell, true to himself, in a healthy organism, which is how he and his friends perceive the world they work in.

However, the cell has another meaning in The Dispossessed, representing the restraints of imprisonment. This double meaning is woven throughout Shevek’s growing up, first started when his class is taught about the phenomenon of prisons, which do not exist on Anarres. In their youthful curiosity, Shevek and his classmates find a place that can be locked and imprison a volunteer to investigate this concept that is so foreign to them. After a night of imprisonment, during which the boy suffered from diarrhea, they all become sick with the idea of prisons and never speak of their experiment again (40). When one of them brings it up with others, they do not understand what he is talking about. Later, when Shevek travels to Urras, the concept of imprisonment becomes relevant again, as he is not allowed to travel from the university grounds except under supervision. He learns of modern revolutionaries and soldiers being imprisoned in the country he is staying in and reflects back on the boundaries that control people, both on Anarres and Urras. When he returns to Anarres, his thinking has changed. He now perceives the restrictiveness of collectivism on Anarres more consciously and can give words to the feelings of unease he has experienced his whole life. The double meaning of the cell is explored by Shevek explicitly when he reflects on his duties to society and his desires as an individual:

He recognized that need, in Odonian terms, as his cellular function, the analogic term for the individual’s individuality, the work he can do best, therefore his best contribution to his society. A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum function freely, in the coordination of all such functions finding its adaptability and strength. That was a central idea of Odo’s Analogy. That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsibility to it; just the contrary. With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice – the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind. (333)

Shevek realises through the analogy of the cell that his duties and desires are not opposites, but align in bringing the best to his community. As long as his desires do not hurt or exploit the world around him, following his intuitions and thoughts are the best means to contribute. A society that forbids this, even out of the idealism of Odoniasm, has changed the concept of the cell as a metaphor for healthy individuals into the cells of a prison, with walls that cannot be broken, another central metaphor of The Dispossessed. This distinction Shevek makes between sacrifice and compromise is the core of the fates of McMurphy and Bartleby. Both sacrifice their lives in pursuing their uncompromising spirit of revolution, which shows why they succeed despite their demise.

Ursula K. Le Guin is most explicit in her commentary on revolution, since The Dispossessed centers around the theme of individual responsibility to the common good. Where Bea Wolf, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Bartleby the Scrivener all represent larger struggles against machinal oppression through individual revolution, The Dispossessed is explicitly about the social structure after the revolution. Its central lessons are that revolution is never finished and that every individual bears the responsibility of resisting structures that imprison people. When Shevek joins his old friend Dulap in a meeting of the Syndicate of Initiative in order to try and reopen Anarres to people from Unarres, the prejudice and habits of the Annaresti resist any change that might threaten the status quo (350-359). When the discussion derails into accusations towards Urrasiti “propertarians” and Shevek personally (358), he formulates his goal with the reopening of the settlement, which is to oppose the restrictions on Anarres:

“You see”, he said, “what we’re after is to remind ourselves that we didn’t come to Anarres for safety, but for freedom. If we must all agree, all work together, we’re no better than a machine. If an individual can’t work in solidarity with his fellows, it’s his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We ve been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. ‘The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.’” (359)

The language of evolution and survival mirrors Odo’s Analogy, but his insights have moved against the dogmatic Anarresti who force each other to conform to the rule of the majority. Revolution is not static, but ongoing, and it is every individual’s duty to resist opression, even if it is oppression in the name of shared betterment. This spirit of revolution, the individual’s dedication to justice, can be found in all the heroes of resistance: Bea Wolf, McMurphy and Bartlebly. They all resist as individuals, upsetting a status quo that limits, because it works as a “machine”, or as the Combine described by Bromden. Agents of machination and conformity can be explicitly evil, such as Grindl, or well-meaning, such as the narrator in Bartleby, but no individual should allow the rigidity of tyranny. Every individual is responsible for resisting oppression. Shevek, Bea Wolf, McMurphy and Bartleby all show paths that are true to their own spirit and successfully overthrow and undermine coercive and exploitative power structures, even if they do not always know how to define the ideals they are striving for. This shows that it is not necessary to have settled on a definitive solution to social problems before action can be initiated. In fact, it shows the opposite. Revolution against oppression is the duty of every individual, who can resist in the manner most suitable them. It is through the struggles of individuals that new alternatives become accessible to larger groups, who must then embody these alternatives in their own revolutions, sharing change until oppression has been eliminated.

As revolution is never finished, and the fight against oppressive power structures is perpetual, it is essential to find joy and freedom in revolution. In order to resist the constant threat to people’s freedoms, literature can picture heroes and revolutions that show the successes and sacrifices necessary to achieve the best possible world and thus inspire a spirit of joyful revolution in its readers, even when the end goals of revolution are difficult to imagine. Zach Wienersmith and Boulet show the determined rebellion of legendary children in their fight against Grindle, the agent of conformity and oppression, by flaunting their adventures and indomitable playfulness. They do not aim for a particular goal, but they recognise the restriction of their freedom and happiness, and break the hold Grindle has over them by playing, feasting and expressing their courage. Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest shows that rebellion can inspire change in even the most timid and downtrodden people when McMurphy’s laughter and outrageous behaviour free Chief Bromden from the insecurities and inhibitions that have been imposed on him by a dismissive and cynical society, represented through him overcoming the Combine and escaping from the ward of Nurse Ratched. While Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener seems a melancholic tale of a broken individual, Bartleby nevertheless embodies the same spirit of resistance when he asserts his right not to do what he is asked. His end is without compromise, allowing him to show the absurdity of the society around him. Finally, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed shows that even after the revolution has led to “an ambiguous utopia”, every individual is still responsible for being true to the ideals of freedom for everyone while contributing to the community. Together, these works show that what is required of everyone is not to know where their revolutions lead, but to persist, joyfully if possible, in refusing to accept a world that is not yet a healthy organism for every cell to live in.

Works Cited List

Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Viking, 1962. Berkley, 2016.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. Harper Collins, 1974. Harper Voyager, 2011.

Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street.” The Piazza Tales, 1856. Melville’s Short Novels. Norton Critical Edition, 2002.

Weinersmith, Zach and Boulet. Bea Wolf. First Second, 2023.

Other Sources

Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. 1957.

Woolf, Virginia. “A Room of One’s Own.” 1928. A Room of One’s Own and the Voyage Out. Wordsworth Classics, 2012.

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Podcast

Herwaarns Podcast 27 – Oriëntalisme

Oriëntalisme is een idee geïntroduceerd door Edward Said in het gelijknamige boek uit 1978. Hij definieert oriëntalisme als een systeem van vooroordelen en politiek gedachtegoed dat het Westen, de occident, tegenover het Oosten, de orient, plaatst. Het bevat stereotypering, romanticisering, maar ook blindheid en onderdrukking. Het Oosten wordt afgeschilderd als een wereld tegelijkertijd vol mysterie, wonderen, sensualiteit en puurheid, alswel barbaarsheid, kinderlijkheid en monsterlijkheid. Het creëert een beeld “buiten de geschiedenis”, een tijdloos en uniform beeld van culturen zo divers als de Arabische, Perzische, Indiase en zelfs Aziatische. Zo ontstaat er een beeld van een “ideale Ander”, een ideologische verschijning van de buitenstaander ten opzichte van de Westerling. Ethnomusicoloog Farya Faraji noemt het: “The East as viewed by the Zeitgeist, the hivemind or collective pop culture of the West. It’s not the East as it exists in reality, but a fictional, exocitised version of the East that only exists in the Western Zeitgeist and Western culture.” (Farya Faraji, 4:00-4:15.)

Oriëntalisme is vervlochten met allerlei onderdelen van Westerse culturen: de schilderkunst, de wetenschap, film, muziek en geschiedschrijving. Het proberen te vatten van een andere cultuur is zowel een romantisch ideaal als een politieke exercisitie die de superioriteit van de Westerse cultuur laat zien. Een voorbeeld dat Said geeft is de invasie van Egypte door Napoleon in 1798, waarbij een onderdeel van de bezetting is om Egypte te doorgronden en te vangen in wetenschap en kunst. Oriëntalisme kan de vorm aannemen van een imperialistische blik, zoals bijvoorbeeld de Franse en Britse, maar ook een abstract beeld in de popcultuur, zoals door de blik van de Verenigde Staten. In het laatste geval worden verschillende culturen samengevoegd tot één geabstraheerd, want onbekend, beeld van het zogenaamde Oosten, zoals in bijvoorbeeld verschillende variaties van The Prince of Persia of het weergeven van Oosterse karakters in films, of het maken van zogenaamde Oosterse muziek. Zoals een Iraanse muzikant zegt in Farya Faraji’s video “Orientalism: Desert Level Music vs Actual Midde-Eastern Music”: “It feels like the idea of Eastern music that someone unfamiliar with Eastern Music would have.” Saïd merkt ook op dat de Noord-Amerikaanse blik op het Oosten vooral gericht is op Japan, China en Korea. Op die manier is het effect van oriëntalisme van toepassing op een enorme reikwijdte aan culturen.

Net als bij het uitbrengen van Saïds boek, is oriëntalismee nog steeds onderdeel van verhitte discussie. Bij het uitbrengen van media die zich verhoudt tot het Oosten is het nu gebruikelijk dat er kritiek wordt geuit en dat deze kritiek wordt bekritiseerd. Zoals Saïd al schreef: “In brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism unilaterally detennines what can be said about the Orient, but that it is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved in) any occasion when that peculiar entity “the Orient” is in question.” (Said, 1978, p.3)

Vandaag onderzoeken wij oriëntalisme in de hoop deze discussies te nuanceren, verhelderen en verbeteren.

Te gast is Zehra, sociologe en visueel ethnograaf.

www.herwaarns.nl

Bronnen

Intro

Merel

Zehra

  • Het Ei, ookwel de koepel van het stadscentrum van Beirut. Architect: Joseph Philippe Karam. 1965.
  • Burst Out. Regie: Zehra Eekhout. 2023. (Te zien op: https://vimeo.com/844697970?share=copy. Wachtwoord: Ksposgykf897)
  • Zehra Eekhout. Reclaiming the Past: Reimagining a Concret Ruin of Beirut’s Past – The Egg. 2023. Universiteit Leiden. Culutral Anthropology and Development Sociology.

Wessel

Overige verwijzingen:

  • James Fenimore Cooper. The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757. H. C. Carey & I. Lea, 1826.
  • The Last Samurai. Regie: Edward Zwick. 2003.
  • Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press, 1995.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/hUvRqV4SedU

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Podcast

Herwaarns Podcast 26 – Populisme

Populisme is een begrip dat sinds 2016 volop werd gebruikt om de dreiging aan verschillende politieke fronten te duiden, maar het is een verrassend breed gebruikt begrip. De meeste definities verwijzen naar het onderzoek van Cas Mudde, die populisten duidts als: “Parties that endorse the set of ideas that society is ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”, and which argue that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale, or general will, of the people.” Mudde, 2004. Benjamin Moffitt, hoogleraar en schrijver van het boek Populism, noemt nadrukkelijk dat populisme geen ideologie is, maar een stijl van politiek bdrijven, “a way of speaking, acting, and presenting oneself.”

Hierdoor zijn er veel verschillende groepen die onder deze noemer vallen, die op verschillende manieren worden beschuldigd van populisme. Populisme is niet hetzelfde als extreem-rechts of extreem-links gedachtegoed, maar die beide groepen gebruiken wel regelmatig populistische methodes. Populisme is niet hetzelfde als populariteit, hoewel er groepen zijn die populisme op die manier proberen te zuiveren van de negatieve bijklank. Populisme is ook niet hetzelfde als fascisme, hoewel populistische rhetoriek wel een kenmerk is van fascisme.

De klassieke term die veel overlap vertoont met populisme is “demagogie”, waarbij een demagoog of “volksmenner” of “rabble-rouser” specifiek inspeelt op de driften en wensen van het volk door ze tegen de elite op te jagen. Dit valt samen met de definitie van populisme gebruikt door Catherine Fieschi, die stelt dat populisten niet alleen zeggen te spreken namen de moreel superieure stem van het volk, maar ook uniek in staat zijn om die stem te horen. Daarmee worden hun tegenstanders dus weggezet als vijanden van de waarheid en puurheid van het volk.

Het nieuwere woord populisme komt uit de Verenigde Staten, waar in 1892 een partij genaamd de People’s Party of ook de Populist Party in opstand kwam tegen de elite. Zij zagen zichzelf als gerechtvaardigd in het democratisch opstaan tegen de elite die hen onderdrukte. Sindsdien blijft de tweedeling tussen het volk en de elite een kenmerk van populistische retoriek, of er nou sprake is van een tweedeling tussen volk en elite, of niet.

Vandaag onderzoeken wij de kenmerken van populisme in de hoop de term minder beladen en met meer precisie te kunnen gebruiken. Is populisme ooit “goed” of terecht? Is populisme een inherent onderdeel van bestuur door het volk? Is populisme altijd bron van polarisatie?

Te gast is Sjoerd, net als in aflevering 4.

Bronnen

Intro

Merel

Sjoerd

Wessel

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English Tekst Tekst-overig Text WONDROUS CALS Book Club

Preparing Against War: The Absurdity of War Narratives


WONDROUS CALS Book Club 2, 29-06-2024

The experience of war is impossible to convey. The pain, the sensory input and the emotional duress are too much for words to express. Literature can only capture very little of the intensity of war, but it cannot leave war untouched. There is an unresistable urge in survivors of war to share their experiences and try to convey the horrors of war, even when language falls short. This urge to speak the truth about violence struggles with a dual desire: to convince the outsiders of war that the death and destruction is not justifiable, but also to convince those that survived that their suffering can be justified. War entails meaninglessness, because people’s lives will be reduced to collateral damage in a struggle between factions, but suffering cannot be meaningless if people need to maintain a will to endure. Consequentially, war stories inject meaning into conflict, ranging from the heroism of individual soldiers and the nobility of fighting for one’s country to the necessity to carry the burden of violence or the wisdom in striking first. These attempts to impose meaning on war are the dominant voice in war representation, but their meaning is not true significance, but justification. The desire to make war appear as more than suffering and despair thwarts logic, rationalising the unjustifiable. Meaning dies in a war, but stories are born. In response to this phenomenon, writers that attempt to deconstruct the heroism imposed on war take different approaches to combat the twisted logic that leads to and prolongs war. World War One poets such as Wilfred Owen seek to reveal the reality of war to a propaganda-numbed homefront. Writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller undermine the notion of war heroes with parody and sharp criticism of the glorification of veterans. Writers like Han Kang, Simone Weil and Martin Amis aim to scrutinize the logic used to defend wars and expose the fallacies that result from violent thinking. Together, they show that war is inherently absurd and cannot be given true significance. In order to prevent the loss of meaning that comes with war, humanity has to resist the simplistic narratives and dangerous pseudo-logic of war heroism as well as notion that war is inevitable by fundamentally choosing to not prepare for war, but against war.

War has been a presence in history since the beginning of its representation, usually with a focus on the glorious victories. This reveals the desire to impose an idealised version of conflict, where heroes can emerge from the bloodshed having gained more than they have lost. The virtues of the war hero vary across time and space, but often include courage, selflessness, nobility, idealism, superior power and strategy, charisma or leadership and the willingness to sacrifice. Although many of these qualities are also celebrated outside of violent conflict, they are a necessary component of the representation of war, because they impose meaning on the suffering that was endured. From the legendary exploits of the heroes in Homer’s Iliad to the modern blockbuster, war becomes a proving ground for protagonists to show their comraderie, strength and valour. It almost makes it appear as if war is worth the pain. However, the “old lie”, as Wilfred Owen calls it, which claims it is sweet to die for one’s country, is opposed by the realities of suffering. Owen’s picture of the soldiers in “Dulce et Decorum Est”, stumbling through trenches, leaves no room for idealised heroism:

Bent- double, like old beggars under sacks

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

These soldiers have been broken by the war, despite their strength and love for country. Later, when the gas attacks hit the trenches, they scramble for masks, but one of them is too late. The speaker describes his death, seen in “all my dreams”, where he is “guttering, choking, drowning.” The details of his death, “the white eyes writhing in his face” or the “blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs”, make it impossible to look away from the suffering of war to the supposed heroism. The poem ends with the claim that if people could see and hear the suffering of soldiers dying at the front,

(…) you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desparate glory

The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est

Pro Patria Mori.

Owen brings together the narrative of heroism with the realities of war and shows they cannot co-exist. Heroism is imposed onto war from the outside, hoping to instill bravery and readiness for war’s logic in new recruits and those at home. The meaning that is instilled in war is an illusion, a lie, for the sake of the nation’s ideals and hopes during a war.

A similar disillusionment can be found in the novels Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Both of the authors were in the American armed forces during World War II and use their own experiences to deconstruct the mythologising of American soldiers in the World War and by extension heroism in all wars. In both cases, the main characters are feeble, confused, afraid and moved by forces around them instead of by their own will. The cast of characters around them contains charicatures of every possible weakness found in humanity, such as the spineless cruelty of Roland Weary in Slaughterhouse Five or the selfishness, greed and hypocrisy of Milo in Catch-22. The war is portrayed as a chaotic mess of ineffectual attempts to destroy each other, with the only redeeming factor of the endless suffering that it is simply how things go. The motif of “so it goes” repeated after every death in Slaughterhouse Five, from the fire bombing of Dresden to the death of a fizzled drink, externalises the responsibility of Billy Pilgrim, the main character, and all other human beings, for the way things are. This is emphasised by the perspective of the Trafalmadorians, alien beings that perceive time not linearly, but all at once. There is no causality if all of time is always present. It remains ambiguous whether these aliens are a figment of Billy’s imagination, a result of his PTSS or an actual factor in the reality of the novel and possibly outside of it, but their perspective is the only solace provided to Billy Pilgrim after experiencing the horrors of the Second World War and continuing to face death and suffering afterwards. There is no heroism when all suffering and death is inevitable, but there is no need for guilt or shame, either. War and death are parts of existence that the Tralfamadorians would never deny, but spend as little time as possible concentrating on. A Trafalmadorian says to Billy: “There isn’t anything we can do about them, so we simply don’t look at them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments – like today at the zoo. Isn’t this a nice moment?” (117) Without the ability to perceive all of time at will, humans instead ignore the harsh realities of war by weaving stories around them, unconsciously or consciously.

In Catch-22, the tragedy of war is mostly experienced from a distance, as the characters are part of an American Air Force base in Italy and are sent on endless missions to bomb the enemy and support their allies. In Catch-22, heroism is inverted by showing the responses of a wide range of characters to the violence of the war, with not a single character able to approximate the heroic ideal of fiction and ideology.John Yossarian, the main character, is caught in the paradox called Catch-22. The constant life-threatening danger of the flights makes it obvious that anyone who still flies is insane, which would allow the doctor at the camp to keep them off the flights. However, as soon as they ask to be grounded, they are no longer insane, because the only sane response to the mortal danger and violence of deadly missions is to want to stop. When that happens, the doctor cannot keep them grounded on the basis of insanity anymore. “If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.” (52). This twisted logic, where insanity and the normal human response to death are necessary, inverted components to the war machine, show how war narratives rely on undermining common sense. In addition, Yossarian’s fear and resistance to self-sacrifice provide a more human picture than the sterile ideal, allowing audiences to feel both an urge to ridicule and a pang of sympathy. This applies to the entire menagerie of pilots, officers and crew, whose flaws and suffering illustrate the wide range of responses to the instution of war, which nevertheless grinds on, destroying lives when no one seems to want to. When Yossarian has been hospitalised again, he is psychologically analysed by Major Sanderson, who accuses him of many unhealthy dispositions: “You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions! (…) You’ve been unable to adjust to the idea of war. (…) You have morbid aversion to dying. (…) You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don’t like bullies, bigots, snobs and hypocrites.” (448) The reader understands that these are normal, benign behaviours in a mind untouched by war thinking, but in Catch-22, as in war, the normal world is flipped upsidedown. Everyday virtues and instincts are pathologies in times of war, revealing that an idealised soldier cannot be a sane human being outside of a war context. Beyond the army base, “mobs with clubs were in control everywhere” (477), showing how those Italians and Americans who have adapted to war mentality are abusing those who haven’t, uninterrupted by people like Yossarian, who are too afraid to interfere even though they know they should (475). Behind the parody and absurdity, Catch-22 presents a bleak picture of a world at war, incompatible with the image of heroes and glory. Both Slaugterhouse Five and Catch-22 show that the image of war heroes does not align with the brutalising grind of modern warfare. War is not glamourous. It is impossible for people to maintain honour and dignity during war, because war reduces people’s lives to immaterial accidents or tactical assets to achieve victory. No character can rise above the dehumanisation synonymous with war.

The notion that violence can be used and mastered is criticised incisively by Simone Weil in 1939, when she writes The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” (original French: “L’Iliad, ou le poem de la force”), hoping to alter the way warmongers see their chances in war. Violence is not a one-way tool for submission, but enslaves and reduces its users, as well, as they become increasingly passive channels for self-perpetuating violence. In her essay, Weil first defines “force” as “that x that turns anybody who is submitted to it into a thing” (3). Violence turns a “man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him” (3). However, it can also be more subtle, as she provides examples of those who are enslaved and threatened, who lose their autonomy. She identifies this in the Iliad as people are paralysed by fear, submit to threats and violence or become pawns, lackeys, playthings or slaves to those who use force against them. However, her warning is also to those who would consider themselves the master of violence. There are no real heroes in the Iliad, she claims:

The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagines it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. (3)

War is the ultimate power of objectification. On the side of the victims, humans are reduced to objects by limiting their ability to act freely. On the side of perpetrators, Weil shows that violence ultimately reduces them to automatons who cannot escape the violence they have used against others: “Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it” (11). They will be victims, one day, or lose themselves in an endless struggle to prevent that situation. Their reasoning, their self-perception and their view of the world will be consumed by violence, until there is no alternative or other perspective. Weil writes: “The conquering soldier is the scourge of nature. Possessed by war, he, like the slave, becomes a thing, though his manner of doing so is different – over him too, words are as powerless as over matter itself. And both, at the touch of force, experience its inevitable effects: they become deaf and dumb” (26). This way, they are lost to force, completely swallowed by war. There is no space for heroes in war. In the end, violence rules people.

The way war reduces people to things is visible in the writing of Vonnegut and Heller, but is also acutely explored by Han Kang in her novel Human Acts. Through a range of perspectives on both sides of the conflict, Kang portrays the violent suppression of the 1980s student revolt in Gwangju, South-Korea, and shows the long-lasting effects on Korean society. The physical pain and emotional trauma endured by the characters renders them almost catatonic, even years after the events occured. After earlier protest were suppressed through martial law, students protesting the martial law were attacked by the army, who were instructed to act with maximum force to discourage further protests. Han Kang describes how students, bystanders and family members are beaten, tortured and killed, specifically with the goal to reduce the uprisers to nothing. Jin-Su, one of the students who is captured and tortured, realises that they are underfed, humiliated and tortured for this reason: “We will make you realise how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking animals. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals.” (126). This utter dehumanisation is designed to delegitimise the calls for justice and freedom that were at the basis of the protest, but also to undermine the notion of basic equality. Soldiers that were rewarded for excessive violence during the Vietnam War are again rewarded bonuses when they surrender themselves to “especially brutal actions” (141), encouraging a lack of self-control and autonomy on both sides. The characters in Human Acts are broken by the enduring legacy of violence and are unable to move on, either through the results of the inflicted torture, the unresolved mysteries of disappeared family members or the persisting censorship of the violence commited. In their different ways, they demonstrate how people are “turning into a thing” (Weil 3), destroying all the dignity, reason and potential of human beings through violence. These are the “human acts” of the title, when people become one with force.

The catatonia, apathy and reduction of human autonomy is visible in Slaughterhouse Five, Catch-22 and Human Acts, both during and after the wars they depict. Under the pressure of violence, in order to protect the mind, people become apathetic and distance themseles from their situation as a necessary means to survive. The pain and turmoil of constant threat of death makes people unable to see into the future and find a path towards peace. As Weil describes it: “The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward” (Weil 23). Being unable to look outward, people become the pitiable figures shown in these anti-war novels, where both perpetrators and victims are unable to control their situations or themselves.

This apathy and helplessness is mirrored by the modern audiences outside of war, witnessing the suffering through modern media, but unable to act in meaningful resistance to the violence they perceive. Even though the degree of suffering is incomparable, with those in war zones suffering from the acute dangers of war, the effect displays similarities: crisis fatigue is a reduction in autonomy under a barrage of pain and suffering experienced vicariously. Since there is an endless stream of war urgently communicated through the news, people find there is simply too much to care and worry about. As the suffering from a single war is already too much to consider or communicate, there being multiple wars at any given time, and war being far from the only category of crisis, it is no wonder people have a tendency to switch off after having seen too much suffering, especially if they consider compassion to be limited (Robson). There is also another important notion that increases a submission to apathy: the idea that wars are inevitable. If nothing can be done to prevent war, it allows for a justification of inaction and resignation.

Given the historical record, war indeed appears omnipresent and unavoidable, as is also affirmed by the Trafalmadorians in Slaughterhouse Five. However, it is worth questioning this logic, as it part of the narrative of warmongers and dictators. The inevitability of war too often precedes an argument for starting or prolonging a war. If war cannot be avoided, it is best to strike first and achieve the best possible situation. Martin Amis, describing the language used in military writing about nuclear war, summarises their style while painfully exposing its senselessness:

In the can-do world of nuclear ‘conflict management’, we hear talk of retaliating first; in this world, hostile provocative, destabilizing nuclear weapons are aimed at nuclear weapons (counter-force), while peaceful, defensive, security-conscious nuclear weapons (there they languish, adorably pouting) are aimed at cities (countervalue). (10)

In this twisted language and logic, “refusing to cooperate” (Amis 10), the absurdity of trying to discuss war through a coherent, positive perspective becomes apparent. However, in the discussions on the possibility of war, it is only through Mutual Assured Destruction, where the threat of complete annihilation is the only thing preventing an initiation of war from one party, that stability can be created. However, Amis provides the syllogism of Failed Deterrence: “’He, thinking I was about to kill him in self-defence, was about to kill me in self-defence. So I killed him in self-defence.’” (16). This logic is often seen as unavoidable, where only naive idealists would believe anything could be different. However, the reasoning rests on the flawed assumption of war-logic, where the fighting has already ruined thinking, empathy and choice, rendering human agents into a thing. The suffering experienced in wars can also create cynicism, leading people to accept war as an unavoidable consequence of human nature. In Human Acts, one of the tortured survivors asks:

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered – is this the essential fate of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable? (140)

This outlook is understandable, even likely, when looking at the unending suffering visible in the world. Peace is precarious and conflict escalates with an astounding force, almost impossible to resist. Heated arguments and wounded pride are more than enough to initiate war, let alone the misunderstandings and mistakes that are bound to occur in a complex system such as Earth. From that perspective, the suffering of war might never be gloriously overcome, so the ideal is reduced to a stoic and realistic endurance of wars that occur, with a specific mode of thinking that will aim to reduce the length, brutality and scope of wars that cannot be stopped, even if that includes starting wars.

However, war isn’t inevitable. Admittedly, under current circumstances, it would be naive to claim that everlasting peace is possible, but this is due to a conceptualisation of humanity and an organisation of physical reality, both of which can be changed. Claiming that war is inevitable is avoiding the responsibility of preventing it. People are to blame for making the decisions that lead to war. In Catch-22, Yossarian realises that there is blame on everyone involved in the world as it exists when he is blamed for the death of Nately by his lover:

It was a man’s world, and she and everyone younger had every right to blame him and everyone older for every unnatural tragedy that befell them; just as she, even in her grief, was to blame for every man-made misery that landed on her kid sister and on all other children behind her. Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all. (465).

Submitting to the idea that war cannot be stopped or prevented is to continue the “lousy chain of inherited habit”. It is not war that is inherent to humanity, but conflict. When people can re-imagine their language and reasoning to account for ways of resolving conflict that need not escalate to war, it becomes possible to consider a world where peace is much more strongly guarded against the impulses that generate war. This includes resisting the false narratives and broken logic of war. Bringing meaning into peace is essential to make war avoidable. This can be achieved by bringing the appropriate responses to the clichés of warmongers. Life matters. War is illogical. Remember every war should be stopped. Consider the costs of war and never consider them acceptable. Weapon oneself against the rule of violence by staying a person, armed with logic, compassion, reason. Humanise all victims, not only the ones that resemble us. Prioritising some wars over others is part of a loss in significance. War is not justifiable, but defence is necessary. In short, do not prepare for war, but prepare against war.

It will remain necessary to train soldiers and stock weapons and ammunition as long as there are aggressors with weapons, which will be for a long time, if not forever. Still, they must not be prepared for war, they must be prepared against war, educated on the deterioration of meaning during battle and infused with the most powerful weapons against the loss of autonomy: critical thinking, compassion, understanding of and appreciation for different perspectives. In Human Acts, one of the students, Jun-Li, speaks about this to a professor investigating the violence: “I never let myself forget that every single person I meet is a member of this human race” (141). In the novel, this carries the double load of sympathy and fear. After all, humans committed all the atrocities Jun-Li experienced. Still, it embodies the necessity for a constant protection of meaning, exchange and the recognition of others that lies at the core of a preparation against war. Han Kang also speaks through Ms. Lim, another witness of the massacre, who voices the need for meaning at the foundation of war stories: “We needed the national anthem for the same reason we needed the minute of silence. To make the corpses we were singing over into something more than butchered lumps of meat.” (181). The representation of war should always serve to prepare against war whether through the restoration of dignity, the approximation of the suffering endured or the examination of the falsehoods and glorification of war heroics. Considering the tragedies of war, it is essential to reduce the grip force has over humanity, and the stories told about war are essential in resisting it.

The absurdity of war can be explored through a range of perspectives. Wilfred Owen exposes the lies of war propaganda, whereas Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller deconstruct the image of the war hero and Han Kang aims to show the depth of suffering that abounds in violent conflict. Simone Weil and Martin Amis address the absurdity of war logic to refute the cynical view that war can be justified. In all cases, the absurdity of war is impressed on the reader, even if the reader cannot know the pain and trauma directly. Every attempt to reach those outside of war without succumbing to the narratives of glorification and justification helps in preparing against war in the future. Authors and readers need to constantly work to restore meaning to the senselessness of suffering, while resisting the pull to invent meaning in the act of war. When stories do not work to make war more likely, but to make humanity better equipped to resist war, it becomes possible to imagine a future where war is no longer considered an inevitability, but a grim reminder of the dangers of stories.

Works Cited List

Amis, Martin. “Unthinkability.” Einstein’s Monsters. 1987. Vintage, 2003.

Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. 1955. Vintage, 2011.

Kang, Han. Human Acts. 2014. Translation Deborah Smith. Granta Publications, 2016.

Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce et Decorum Est”. The War Poets: An Anthology. 1992. Parke Sutton Publishing, 2015.

Robson, David. “The Big Idea: Is Compassion Fatigue Real?” The Guardian, 2-2-2024.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. 1969. Dell Publishing, 1991.

Weil, Simone. The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” Original: “L’Iliad, ou le poem de la force.” 1943.

Other sources

Alexievich, Svetlana. The Unwomanly Face of War. 1985. Translation Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Penguin, 2018.

Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. 1938. Penguin, 1974.

Homer. The Iliad.

Categories
Podcast

Herwaarns Verwikkeld 4 – The Last of Us

Welkom bij Herwaarns Verwikkeld! Dit is een variant op de Herwaarns podcast waarbij Merel en Wessel niet beginnen bij een thema, maar bij een centraal cultureel object. Van daaruit bekijken we verbanden met andere culturele objecten om een intertekstueel web te weven en daarmee het central object te onderzoeken.

Je wordt ingewikkeld geprikkeld in Herwaarns Verwikkeld!

Met in aflevering 4: The Last of Us.

Wil je een object aandragen voor een Herwaarns Verwikkeld? Neem contact op.

Bronnen

The Last of Us. Regie: Bruce Straley en Neil Druckmann. Naughty Dog, 2013.

The Last of Us. Gemaakt door: Craig Mazin en Neil Druckmann. HBO, 2023.

De ontwikkeling van de zombie

  • W. B. Seabrooks. The Magic Island. Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1929.
  • White Zombie. Regie: Victor Halperin. 1932.
  • Richard Matheson. I Am Legend. Gold Metal Books, 1954.
  • Night of the Living Dead. Regie: George A. Romero. 1968.
  • Dawn of the Dead. Regie: George A. Romero. 1978.
  • Max Brooks. The Zombie Survival Guide. Three Rivers Press, 2003.
  • Robert Kirkman en Tony Moore. The Walking Dead. Image Comics, 2003-2019.\
  • Shaun of the Dead. Regie: Edgar Wright. 2004.
  • Max Brooks. World War Z. Crown, 2006.
  • I Am Legend. Regie: Francis Lawrence. 2007.
  • Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. John Landis. Quirk Books Philadelhia, 2009.
  • Zombieland. Regie: Ruben Fleischer. 2009.
  • The Walking Dead. Regie: Frank Durabont. 2010-2022.
  • World War Z. Regie: Marc Forster. 2013.

The Last of Us franchise

Spellen

  • The Last of Us. Regie: Bruce Straley en Neil Druckmann. Naughty Dog, 2013.
  • The Last of Us: Left Behind. Regie: Bruce Straley en Neil Druckmann. Naughty Dog, 2014.
  • The Last of Us: Remastered. Regie: Bruce Straley en Neil Druckmann. Naughty Dog, 2014.
  • The Last of Us: Part II. Regie: Neil Druckmann, Anthony Newman en Kurt Margenau. Naughty Dog, 2020.
  • The Last of Us: Part I. Regie: Matthew Gallant en Shaun Escayg. Naughty Dog, 2022.
  • The Last of Us: Part II, Remastered. Regie: Neil Druckmann, Anthony Newman en Kurt Margenau. Naughty Dog, 2024.

Serie

  • The Last of Us. Gemaakt door: Craig Mazin en Neil Druckmann. HBO, 2023.

Andere media

  • The Last of Us: American Dreams. Neil Druckmann en Faith Erin Hicks. Dark Horse Comics, 2013.
  • The Last of Us: The Board Game. Nog niet verschenen.
  • The Last of Us: Escape the Dark. Rollenspel. Nog niet verschenen.

Computerspellen

  • Dungeons and Dragons. Wizards of the Coast.
  • The House of the Dead. Regie: Takashi Oda. Sega, 1997.
  • Left 4 Dead. Ontwerper: Mike Booth. Valve, 2008.
  • Magic: the Gathering. Wizards of the Coast.
  • Plants Vs. Zombies. Ontwerper: George Fan. Popcap Games, 2009.
  • Resident Evil. Regie: Shinji Mikami en Tokuro Fujiwara. Capcom, 1996.
  • Resident Evil 4. Regie: Shinji Mikami. Capcom, 2005.
  • Resident Evil: Village. Regie: Morimata Sato. Capcom, 2021.
  • Uncharted. Gemaakt door Amy Herrig. Naughty Dog, 2007.
  • Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. Regie: Frank Pearce Jr. Blizzard, 2002
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! Konami.

Muziek

  • Michael Jackson. Thriller. 1983.
  • Fela Kuti. Zombie. 1976.
  • The Cranberries. “Zombie.” 1994. No Need To Argue.

Andere verwijzingen:

  • Arcane. Gemaakt door: Christian Linke en Alex Yee. 2021.
  • Blade Runner 2049. Regie: D. Villeneuve. 2017.
  • Captain Fantastic. Regie en script: Matt Ross. 2016.
  • Carter, Angela. Heroes and Villains. 1969. Penguin Classics, 2011.
  • Cormac McCarthy. The Road. M-71, Ltd, 2006. Vintage, 2007.
  • Errant Signal. “The Last of Us.” 22 juli 2013. https://youtu.be/bAzqDgKYfiM?si=ZjBVBI9JBf9u8hkV
  • Fallout. Gemaakt door Graham Wagner en Geneva Robertson-Dworet. 2024.
  • Fantastic Fungi. Regie: Louie Schwartzberg. 2019.
  • Gaiman, Neil. American Gods. 2001. Headline Book Publishing, 2013.
  • Mad Max. George Miller en Byron Kennedy. Oorspronkelijke film: 1979.
  • Magnola, Mike en John Byrne. Hellboy. Dark Horse Comics, 1994-1999.
  • Moore, Alan, Stephen Bissette en John Totleben. Sage of the Swamp Thing. DC Comics, 1983-4. Vertigo, 2012.
  • Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life. Random House, 2020.
  • Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. Penguin Books, 2012.
  • Waters, Daniel. Generation Dead. Hyperion Books, 2008.


YouTube: https://youtu.be/tWJp0006wBI

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6q7dqhNUX7VcIjLS1G2slP?si=XPv39-nyQIS6bhiMVV9B0w

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/herwaarns-podcast/id1480092710

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Mini-Poëzie Tekst

Ik liet mezelf kwijtraken.

Ik liet mezelf kwijtraken.

Door Marc.

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Podcast

Herwaarns Verwikkeld 3 – Beowulf

Welkom bij Herwaarns Verwikkeld! Dit is een variant op de Herwaarns podcast waarbij Merel en Wessel niet beginnen bij een thema, maar bij een centraal cultureel object. Van daaruit bekijken we verbanden met andere culturele objecten om een intertekstueel web te weven en daarmee het central object te onderzoeken.

Je wordt ingewikkeld geprikkeld in Herwaarns Verwikkeld!

Met in aflevering 3: Beowulf.

Luister! We vertellen over de grootste held van het oude Engeland, protosuperheld, protomonsterjager en protocarriè-idool. Eén van de oudste en meeste vormende teksten van de vroege Engelse taal en cultuur, die onder andere inspiratie was voor Tolkien, Dr. Seuss en de Animaniacs.

Wil je een object aandragen voor een Herwaarns Verwikkeld? Neem contact op.

Bronnen:

Beowulf. Auteur onbekend, vermoedelijk uit de 8e eeuw. Verschillende vertalingen worden genoemd, waaronder die van Maria Dahvana Headley en Seamus Heaney.

Academisch onderzoek

  • Baker, Peter S. Honour, Exchange and Violence in Beowulf. 2013.
  • The Beowulf’s Afterlives Bibliographic Database. http://beowulf.dh.tamu.edu/. 2020.
  • The Beowulf Reader. Ed. Peter S. Baker. 2000.

Tolkien:

Andere verwijzingen:

  • Beware: Children at Play. Regie: Mik Cribben. 1989.
  • Corzon, Walter and Horacio Ottolni. “Brainwulf.” Animaniacs. DC Comics, 1999.
  • Gaiman, Neil. “Bay Wolf.” 1998. Smoke and Mirrors.
  • Jeffs, Amy. “The Wanderer and the Hall”. Wild. 2022.
  • Dr. Seuss – How The Grinch Stole Christmas
  • Homerus Odyssee en Iliad.
  • Risden, E. L. Beowulf for Business: The Warrior’s Guide to Career Building. Whitston Publishing Company, 2007.
  • Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. “Green’ ich Grendel.” Lil’ Red Riding Hood. UMG Recording, 1966.
  • Treharne, Elaine. “#Beow100” Beowulf in 100 Tweets. https://historyoftexttechnologies.blogspot.com/2014/01/beowulf-in-hundred-tweets-beow100.html
  • Wood, Wally. “The Ghost Beast.” Tower of Shadows, number 6. Marvel Comics. 1970.

www.herwaarns.nl

YouTube: https://youtu.be/P7ZW0wo6iXE

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Herwaarns Podcast 25 – Herdenken

Wat is herdenken? Meer dan alleen “opnieuw denken” is het volgens Van Dale het “(op plechtige wijze) stilstaan bij iets uit het verleden”. Door rituelen, monumenten en interne reflectie verhouden mensen zich tot hun eigen verleden of het verleden van hun cultuur of omgeving.

Al sinds 1946 wordt er op 4 mei de Tweede Wereldoorlog herdacht. Het is voor veel Nederlanders het meest expliciete moment van herdenken. Het Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 mei heeft een memorandom opgesteld om “richting te geven en is bewust algemeen geformuleerd om alle verschillende oorlogsslachtoffers in te kunnen sluiten.” Het memordanum luidt:

Tijdens de Nationale Herdenking herdenken wij allen – burgers en militairen – die in het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden of waar ook ter wereld zijn omgekomen of vermoord; zowel tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog en de koloniale oorlog in Indonesië, als in oorlogssituaties en bij vredesoperaties daarna.

Het bepalen van het memorandum en het formuleren van de groepen die wel of niet herdacht worden is een proces dat altijd in beweging is. Het Comité erkent dat ook: “De vorm en inhoud van de herdenking en viering zijn blijvend in ontwikkeling.” Het blijkt uit de veranderingen van de rituelen, maar ook uit het onderzoek dat het Comité heeft laten uitvoeren in 2020: “Constant en in beweging: vorm en betekenis van herdenkingsrituelen.” Hierin wordt onderzocht hoe herdenken relevant kan blijven voor nieuwe generaties, onder andere omdat er steeds minder mensen in leven zijn die de Tweede Wereldoorlog hebben meegemaakt.

Omdat traditie en herkenbaarheid cruciaal zijn voor de betekenis van herdenken, is er echter ook veel verzet tegen het verbreden van herdenking. Aan de ene kant geeft het ruimte aan het individu en persoonlijke herinnering, maar aan de andere kant lijkt het voor velen de herdenking te verzwakken of te versplinteren, of zelfs schade te doen aan de mensen die herdacht worden of die geëerd worden. Er ontstond in 2012 een nationale discussie toen in Vorden werd voorgesteld om ook de gesneuvelde Duitse soldaten te herdenken. De toenmalige directeur Nooter van het Nationaal Comité zei “We herdenken slachtoffers, niet de daders.” (NOS)

Vandaag onderzoeken we herdenken, de spanning tussen traditie en vernieuwing, tussen inclusiviteit en exclusiviteit en tussen reflectie en handelen.

Te gast is Merel, net als in aflevering 15 over Antropocentrisme. Merel is literatuur- en cultuurwetenschapper.

Bronnen

Intro

Merel (vaste Merel)

Merel (te gast)

Wessel

  • Art Spiegelman. The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. Penguin Books,1980.
  • Art Spiegelman. MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus. Interviews door Hillary Chute. Random House/Pantheon Books, 2011.

Overige verwijzingen:

YouTube: https://youtu.be/F_fFhyNhTvY

Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5oZXJ3YWFybnMubmwvZmVlZC9wb2RjYXN0Lw

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Herwaarns Podcast 24 – Verzet in Rusland

Hoewel er in de jaren negentig nog hoop bestond voor een vanzelfsprekende groei van democratische en vrije regeringen, stelt Freedom House in hun rapport van 2024 dat dit het 18e jaar op rij is waarin vrijheid en democratie zijn afgezwakte. Hoewel 2024 een recordjaar is wat betreft de hoeveelheid stemmers over de hele wereld, maar worden veel van deze verkiezingen “schijnverkiezingen” genoemd. Autoritaire regimes worden sterker en werken meer samen, en democratische waarden worden uitgehold in landen over de hele wereld, zoals de VS, Hongarije, India en Argentinië. In veel landen woedt er een strijd om democratische rechten, ook als overheden strenger optreden tegen protesten.

Rusland is een belangrijk voorbeeld van een staat waarin vrijheden steeds verder worden ingeperkt. De uitholling van onafhankelijke verslaggeving, de onderdrukking van kritiek op de oorlog en de grote hoeveelheid staatspropaganda zijn hier voorbeelden van. De dood van Alexander Navalny, de belangrijkste oppositieleider, was een nieuw dieptepunt in de onderdrukking van andere geluiden in de Russische samenleving. De schijnverkiezing van 16 en 17 maart werd breed bekritiseerd, maar vanwege draconische maatregelen vanuit het Kremlin was er geen mogelijkheid tot demonstraties of een roep om verandering, waardoor Vladimir Poetin zoals voorspeld zijn overwinning uitriep.

Is het nog mogelijk om verzet te bieden in een autoritaire staat als Rusland? Wat zijn de processen die verzet mogelijk en onmogelijk maken? Is de situatie in Rusland uniek of vergelijkbaar met andere autoritaire landen?

Te gast is Dominique, met een master in Russian Studies.

Verwijzingen

Intro

  • The Freedom House. Freedom in the World 2024: The Mountaing Damage of Flawed Elections and Armed Conflict. Yana Gorokhovskaia en Cathryn Grothe. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2024/mounting-damage-flawed-elections-and-armed-conflict
  • Trouw. Liveblog Russische verkiezingen. 18-3-2024. https://www.trouw.nl/russische-verkiezingen/live-russische-verkiezingen-eu-landen-zetten-betrokkenen-bij-dood-navalny-op-sanctielijst~ba3b9e7a/
  • VRT. Liveblog Russische verkiezingen, 18-3-2024. https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2024/03/17/liveblog-presidentsverkiezing-rusland-poetin/
  • Putin vs the Wes. Regie: Lotte Murphy-Johnson, tim Stirzaker, Max Stern. BBC. 2023, 2024.

Merel

  • Yevgeny Zamyatin. We. 1924. Canongate Books Ltd. 2020.

Dominique

Wessel

  • The Death of Stalin. Regie: Armando Iannucci. 2017.
  • Chernobyl. Gemaakt door: Craig Mazin. HBO, 2019.
  • Fabien Nury en Thierry Robin. La Mort de Staline. Dargaud. 2010, 2012.
  • Simone Weil. “L’Iliad, ou la Poème de la Force.” 1939. Trans. Mary McCarthy. Politics. 1945. Rpt. in War and the Iliad. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2005.

Overige Verwijzingen

  • 3 Body Problem. Gemaakt door David Benioff, D. B. Weiss en Alexander Woo. Netflix, 2024.
  • Svetlana Alexievich.
  • Liu Cixin. The Three-Body Problem. Chongqing Press, 2008. Vertaling: Ken Liu. Head of Zeus, 2014.
  • De Gouden Horde: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gouden_Horde
  • The Matrix. Regie: de Wachowski’s. 1999.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/6GealtdbrAo

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Spotify:

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Herwaarns Verwikkeld 2 – Sherlock Holmes

Welkom bij Herwaarns Verwikkeld! Dit is een variant op de Herwaarns podcast waarbij Merel en Wessel niet beginnen bij een thema, maar bij een centraal cultureel object. Van daaruit bekijken we verbanden met andere culturele objecten om een intertekstueel web te weven en daarmee het central object te onderzoeken.
Je wordt ingewikkeld geprikkeld in Herwaarns Verwikkeld!


Met in aflevering 2: Sherlock Holmes.
De ultieme detective en de meest vertolkte (menselijke) figuur in fictie in film en op tv: Sherlock Holmes. We onderzoeken de vele verschillende versies van en perspectieven of Sherlock Holmes en abduceren (dus niet deduceren) de redenen voor zijn succes. Het is niet zo elementair, beste Watson.


Wil je een object aandragen voor een Herwaarns Verwikkeld? Neem contact op.


Bronnen:
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “A Study in Scarlet.” 1887. (en daarna alle Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) – Strand Magazine.

Adaptaties:
Sherlock. 2010. Regie: Mark Gatiss & Steven Moffat. BBC.
Sherlock Holmes. 2009. Regie: Guy Ritchie.

Variaties en connecties
Bones. 2005. Gecreëerd door: Hart Hanson. 20th Century Fox.
Agatha Christie. Poirot.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
Enola Holmes. Regie: Harry Bradbeer. 2020.
The Great Mouse Detective. 1986. Regie: John Musker. Disney.
Professor Layton. 2007-2017. Level 5. Nintendo.
Ian Fleming. James Bond. 1953-nu.
Neil Gaiman. “A Story in Emerald.” 2003. Shadows Over Baker Street.
Bob Kane, Bill Finger. Batman. 1939. Detective Comics 27.
Luther. Gecreëerd door: Neil Cross. 2010-2019. BBC One.
Mitchell and Webb. Sherlock Holmes and Watson.
Alan Moore, Kevin O’Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. 1999-2019.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Regie: Shu Takumi. Capcom. 2001.
Edgar Allen Poe. “ Murders in the Rue Morgue.” 1841.
Scooby Doo and Guess Who. “Elementary, my dear Shaggy.” 2009.
Nancy Springer. The Enola Holmes Mysteries. 2006-2021. Penguin Young Readers.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. “Elementary, my dear Turtle.” 1993.