The stories behind the titles

Gary Dexter wrote the book "Why Not Catch 21? The Stories Behind the Titles"

There is an excerpt from The Independent:

The stories behind some of literature's best-known novels

Would 'Catch-22' still be a masterpiece if it was called 'Catch-18'? Why did T S Eliot change the name of 'He Do the Police in Different Voices' to 'The Waste Land'? Gary Dexter tells the stories behind some of literature's best-known novels

Published: 26 November 2007

Catch-22 (1961)

"Catch-22" has passed into the language as a description of the impossible bind. Joseph Heller complained that the phrase "a Catch-22 situation" was often used by people who did not seem to understand what it meant. Given the mental contortions of the catch, this is not surprising.

There are no catches 1 to 21, or 23 onwards, in the book. "There was only one catch and that was Catch-22." Like the final commandment left at the end of Animal Farm, "Catch-22" is an entire rule book distilled into one lunatic decree. Its very uniqueness meant that Heller had to think carefully before naming, or numbering it. And his choice was – Catch-18.

In the Second World War, Heller was a bombardier with the 12th Air Force, based on Corsica, and flew 60 missions over Italy and France. Yossarian in Catch-22 is a bombardier flying the same missions. In 1953, Heller began writing a book called Catch-18, the first chapter of which was published in the magazine New World Writing in 1955. When, three years later, he submitted the first large chunk of it to Simon & Schuster, it was quickly accepted for publication, and Heller worked on it steadily – all the time thinking of it as Catch-18 – until its completion in 1961. Shortly before publication, however, the blockbuster novelist Leon Uris produced a novel entitled Mila 18 (also about the Second World War). It was thought advisable that Heller, the first-time novelist, should be the one to blink.

Heller said in an interview with Playboy in 1975: "I was heartbroken. I thought 18 was the only number." A long process of numerical agonising began in which the author and his editor at Simon & Schuster, Robert Gottlieb, worked their way through the integers looking for the right, the unique formula. Catch-11 was one of the first suggestions, but was rejected because of the film Ocean's Eleven. Heller at one point settled firmly on Catch-14, but Gottlieb threw it out for being too nondescript. When 22 came up, Gottlieb felt it had the right ring: "I thought 22 was a funnier number than 14," he told the New York Times Review of Books in 1967. Heller took two weeks to persuade.

But the journey from 18 to 22, although tortuous, was worth making. The reason is this: 22 has a thematic significance that 18 and most of the other choices do not. In Catch-22, everything is doubled. Yossarian flies over the bridge at Ferrara twice, his food is poisoned twice, there is a chapter devoted to "The Soldier Who Saw Everything Twice", the chaplain has the sensation of having experienced everything twice, Yossarian can name two things to be miserable about for every one to be thankful for, all Yossarian can say to the dying Snowden is, "There, there", all Snowden can say is: "I'm cold, I'm cold", Yossarian overhears a woman repeatedly begging "please don't, please don't", and Major Major is actually Major Major Major Major.

Doubling is thus a stylistic device suggestive of the qualified nature of reality. Nothing is singular, unblurred or unambiguous. The title, with its doubled digits (2 representing duality, itself doubled to make 22) conveys this in a way that Catch-18 could never have done.

It seems clear therefore that what happened when Simon & Schuster found out about Leon Uris's book was a piece of great good luck.

My Man Jeeves (1919)

My Man Jeeves (1919) was the first PG Wodehouse book with Jeeves in the title. There were 10 more, and several novels or story collections about Jeeves and Bertie but without Jeeves in the title (such as The Mating Season, 1949). Although My Man Jeeves was the first Jeeves title, Jeeves the gentleman's gentleman himself first made an appearance in the story "Extricating Young Gussie" in the Saturday Evening Post of 18 September 1915. He had two lines: "Mrs Gregson to see you, sir," and, "Very good, sir. Which suit will you wear?"

Wodehouse said in the introduction to the anthology The World of Jeeves (1967): "It was only some time later, when I was going into the strange affair of 'The Artistic Career of Corky', that the man's qualities dawned upon me. I still blush to think of the off-hand way I treated him at our first encounter." "The Artistic Career of Corky" was in fact a later title for the story "Leave It to Jeeves", which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post of 5 February 1916.

One more tale deserves mention, one which has misled some into thinking it features Jeeves's debut. This is "Jeeves Takes Charge", a short story published, again in the Saturday Evening Post, on 18 November 1916, more than a year after "Extricating Young Gussie".

Jeeves, then, was born in 1915 or thereabouts – during the first battles of the First World War. Wodehouse was working in the New York theatre at the time, having been living in the USA on and off since about 1909. Before he left permanently for America, however, he went to a cricket match in Cheltenham. And this was where war, cricket and Jeeves met and coalesced.

Percy Jeeves was, by all accounts, a very useful player. Born in 1888, in Earls-heaton, Yorkshire, he played for Goole and then Hawes cricket clubs before signing up for the Warwickshire County side. An attacking right-hand bat, and right-arm medium-fast bowler, he played first-class cricket from 1912 to 1914. The season when he really began to distinguish himself was 1913, taking 106 wickets and scoring 785 runs. It was also the year in which Wodehouse, a keen cricket fan, saw him play at Cheltenham.

Several decades later, RV Ryder, the son of the Warwickshire club secretary who had originally signed Percy Jeeves, wrote to Wodehouse to ask for confirmation that the Jeeves of literature really was named after the Jeeves of cricket. Wodehouse replied: "You are quite right. It must have been in 1913 that I paid a visit to my parents in Cheltenham and went to see Warwickshire play Glos on the Cheltenham College ground. I suppose Jeeves' bowling must have impressed me, for I remembered him in 1916, when I was in New York and just starting the Jeeves and Bertie saga, and it was just the name I wanted. I have always thought till lately that he was playing for Gloucestershire that day (I remember admiring his action very much)."

Percy Jeeves went on to even greater distinction in the 1914 season, and was tipped by England captain Plum Warner as a future England player. On 4 August 1914, however, Britain declared war on Germany, and Jeeves signed up with the 15th Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. In July the following year he was in the thick of the fighting in the battle of the Somme. On the night of 22/23 July the order was given for a major assault, in which the 15th Battalion was a small component. The assault made no headway whatever.

Jeeves's body was never found. It was only in September 1915 that High Wood was captured, after the loss of around 6,000 men. September 1915 was also, coincidentally, the month of the appearance of the first Jeeves story. Jeeves never got to play for his country, but did die for it.

The Great Gatsby (1925)

F Scott Fitzgerald agonised over the title of his third novel. Among the candidates he rejected, and then lighted on again, and then re-rejected, in a series of letters and telegrams to his editor Max Perkins, were Trimalchio, Trimalchio's Banquet, Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires, The High-Bouncing Lover, The Great Gatsby, Gold-Hatted Gatsby, Gatsby, On the Road to West Egg, Incident at West Egg, Trimalchio in West Egg and several others. Perkins steered him gently towards The Great Gatsby, despite Fitzgerald's doubts.

By the time The Great Gatsby was at the printers, Fitzgerald had changed his mind once again, asking Perkins for the book to be retitled Under the Red, White and Blue – a reference to the American Dream so horribly mutilated in the book – and continued to swing back and forth, later writing to Perkins: "I feel Trimalchio might have been best after all," but by then it was in the bookshops. The Great Gatsby it had to stay.

Why Gatsby? Gatsby, as a name, echoes the violence. One must recall that in the book Jay Gatsby is the hero's assumed name, not his real name. His real name is James Gatz. (His father, Henry Gatz, makes an appearance in the book's last few pages.) The significance of Gatsby and Gatz is in "gat" – the gun that ends Gatsby's life. Violent death lingers around Gatsby. As the book opens he is just back from the war in Europe, which he is reputed to have quite enjoyed. Gatsby, it has also been pointed out, sounds, if you say it out loud, rather like the French verb gaspiller, to waste.

If "Gatsby" is significant, so is "Great". In early drafts Fitzgerald had Gatsby refer to himself as "great": "Jay Gatsby!" he cried in a ringing voice, "There goes the great Jay Gatsby! That's what people are going to say – wait and see. I'm only thirty-two now."

But despite his legendary parties Gatsby is not "great". He is rootless, friendless, loveless, ultimately lifeless. Only three people come to his funeral. "Great" is irony. Gatsby is a rich nobody.

Perhaps there is another echo in the "great" of The Great Gatsby: that of "the Great American Novel". This was an artefact Fitzgerald was consciously trying to construct, after the pattern of Melville or James, and to which he paid homage in one of his final choices of title, Under the Red, White and Blue. Fitzgerald thought of The Great Gatsby as his greatest work; many of his readers have agreed.

The Great Gatsby, then, can be seen as Fitzgerald's attempt to represent his country in the medium of the novel. If this is so, then the title he finally chose is perfect, whatever his doubts. In the book, the dreams of greatness, wealth and success that form the nation's myth are brutally dispelled. In an atmosphere of high-class squalor Gatsby is meaninglessly shot down. In calling his book The Great Gatsby it seems that Fitzgerald was gunning for America.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

The early 1980s were not the most cheerful of times. Two heavily armed power blocs were keeping the world in a state of perpetual phoney war. There were authoritarian governments and repressive police forces. The Western world was looking forward to a date signalling the obliteration of all hope and human values. The countdown to 1984 was more "millennial" than the real millennium 16 years later.

Attempts were made from the moment of its publication to find significance in the date of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The best known explanation was the "year-reversal" theory; Orwell finished the book in December 1948, and "48" reversed is "84". But when Orwell began writing the book, in 1943, the action was set in 1980. As time wore on he advanced the date to 1982, and then to 1984. He may well have been aware of the year-reversal as he completed the manuscript, but fundamentally the date of 1984 was a product of the fact that he had taken such a long time to write the book.

The next best-known theory is the "Jack London" argument. In London's dystopia The Iron Heel (1908), a book Orwell admired greatly, the USA is run along fascist lines by a group of Oligarchs who control the population via the Mercenaries. In the story, the date of the completion of the "wonder-city" Asgard is – 1984. But 1984 is not a particularly prominent date in London's book. In fact it appears in a footnote.

An intriguing third argument concentrates on a poem by Orwell's first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, which was published in a school magazine in 1934. It is called "End of the Century: 1984" and deals with a future society in which "scholars" are controlled by telepathy. Orwell could have been thinking of this in 1948 when he came to name the book, but it does not seem very likely: again, it would probably have appeared much earlier in the manuscripts.

Rarely can a date chosen with such little particularity have exercised such a frightful grip on the imagination. A collective sigh of relief was exhaled as 31 December 1984 slipped away and 1985 began (despite the fact that Anthony Burgess had written a rather indifferent book about it). The date that was, more than any other, symbolic of "the future" was now past.

Orwell had cast a shadow over us for four decades, staring out from old photographs and book jackets with his pencil moustache and his silly haircut. We had put up with his prediction of a new Dark Age, and now Nineteen Eighty-Four could be consigned to the memory hole.

Lolita (1955)

Lolita is one of those novels in which the protagonist-narrator is so coruscatingly brilliant that we are ready to forgive him almost anything. Twelve-year-olds? Well, she did seduce him. And she'd already had that boy at summer camp. For prose this dazzling, this ardent, this clever... tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner... But plagiarism?

In 1916 a German journalist, Heinz von Eschwege, writing under the name of Heinz von Lichberg, published a collection of stories, The Accursed Gioconda. One – only 12 pages long – was called "Lolita".

The story is short, silly and uninvolving. But the similarities with Nabokov's Lolita seem too many to discount. The main ones are these: both have a first person narrator who turns up at a boarding house; Lolita in both cases is the daughter of the house; she "seduces" him; sex and death (and death after birth) are presented as different aspects of the same violence, or as cause and effect; and finally, the title.

Of course, Nabokov would probably not have read those 12 pages in an obscure, untranslated book by a minor German writer, published when he (Nabokov) was 17 and still in Russia. Or would he? Nabokov left Russia with his family in 1919, and after three years studying at Cambridge, settled in Berlin in 1922. He remained there for 15 years, married there, had a son, wrote several novels, and made his reputation. These were 15 years in which Von Lichberg was a fellow Berliner, living in the same part of Berlin. The book was still in the shops, and Nabokov read German quite adequately. Von Lichberg became a quite prominent public figure.

It is common for authors to forget they have not invented phrases or situations which they then regurgitate in their own work. But to reproduce, unconsciously, something with this number of matches surely strains credulity.

Moby-Dick (1851)

Moby-Dick was a real whale. In the days when whales were not sages of the deep but floating oil repositories, sailors would give names to individual whales who were particularly dangerous or unkillable. One of the most famous was "Mocha Dick", named after the island of Mocha off the Chilean coast. An albino sperm whale (like Moby-Dick), Mocha Dick was said to have drowned over 30 men, sunk five ships and been harpooned 19 times, which probably accounted for his mood.

Herman Melville's chief source was an article by Jeremiah N Reynolds in the Knickerbocker Magazine of 1839 entitled "Mocha Dick Or, the White Whale of the Pacific". He also took from the article the ship's name the Penguin, changing it to the Pequod.

The change from Mocha to Moby is more difficult to explain. It may have had its origin in another project that was on Melville's desk at the time he was writing his whale story: this was "The Story of Toby" about a seafaring friend, Tobias Greene. It may be that "Toby" influenced the change from Mocha Dick to Moby-Dick.

So much for the title of Moby-Dick, one might think. But there is an odd twist in the tale. Moby-Dick was not the title of the book at all. The title was The Whale when it was first published in London by Richard Bentley on 18 October 1851. Now rare, the English edition was substantially different textually from the American Harper edition, which followed later on 14 November 1851, and bore the familiar title Moby-Dick.

And, as if to give its imprimatur to the true, the pure American edition, an odd circumstance heralded its publication. On 5 November 1851, just nine days before its appearance, news reached New York that the whaler Ann Alexander, out of New Bedford, had been rammed and sunk by a whale. Despite stories of vicious and malignant whales, this was still a rare event, and the news spread rapidly throughout the globe.

Melville could barely hide his glee. On 7 November he wrote animatedly to his friend Evert Duyckinck: "Crash! comes Moby Dick himself, & reminds me of what I have been about for part of the last year or two. It is really & truly a surprising coincidence – to say the least. I make no doubt it IS Moby Dick himself, I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster."

Hamlet (c.1600)

The legend of Hamlet dates to at least 400 years before Shakespeare. The story made its first appearance in English in 1608. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in around 1600, which means that the tale would have been available to him only in French.

There was, however, another source, this time in English: a play, now lost, referred to in Shakespearean circles as the ur-Hamlet, often ascribed to Thomas Kyd, the author of The Spanish Tragedy. Two diaries also yield mention of the ur-Hamlet: the first is that of the theatrical impresario Philip Henslowe, in 1594; the second is that of the playwright Thomas Lodge. These, then, were Shakespeare's two known sources.

But an odd fact exists. Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet. "Hamnet" and "Hamlet" are so close that he must either have named his son after his play, or his play after his son. Hamnet was born in 1585, and Hamlet was written 15 years later in 1600, and so the obvious conclusion is that it must have been the latter. Hamnet died, aged 11, in 1596, four years before Shakespeare came to write Hamlet.

There are several theories about the influence of Hamnet on Hamlet. The first is that father and son were not close (Shakespeare spent all of Hamnet's life in London) and that the story of the Danish prince was just a random subject for a revenge tragedy. A second has Shakespeare turning to the Hamlet legend as a way to explore his grief over the death of his son.

A third theory, however, gives Shakespeare as the author – or co-author – of the ur-Hamlet. In this scheme, the choice of the Hamlet-legend as a subject for a play would have been made at the same time as Shakespeare named his son Hamnet. It would have been a christening present.

It is an intriguing possibility. If he did write his first Hamlet in 1585, in a spirit of celebration at the birth of Hamnet, and perhaps with a happy ending – both earlier versions have happy endings – it would probably not have occurred to him that in 15 years' time he would feel compelled to revisit the play with a new, darker understanding of the bond between a father and a son.

Around the World in Eighty Days (1872)

Around the World in Eighty Days, as a title, is simple, descriptive and enticing. It has generated a huge number of parodies, puns and spin-offs. Of course, it all began with Jules Verne, and his Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours. Or did it?

Verne himself claimed that the idea was sparked in 1871 when he read an article about a Thomas Cook round-the-world tour package. But there is one man whose career so closely parallels the fictional Phileas Fogg that it would be rash to ignore him: an eccentric American rail magnate called George Francis Train.

Born in 1829, Train began his career as a shipping merchant and opium trader. Moving to Britain, he introduced the country's first trams, which were taken up in every major city and spread throughout Europe. With the fortune he gained, he returned to America and ploughed all his money into financing and publicising the Union Pacific railroad.

By now his ambitions were turning to politics. He began campaigning in 1869 with the ultimate ambition of the US presidency. In the middle of his campaign, "Citizen Train" announced that he would make a trip around the world in 80 days or less. He started from New York in late July 1870, taking the Union Pacific Railroad to California, and on 1 August boarded the Great Republic for Yokohama. From there he sailed to Hong Kong, then Singapore, the Suez Canal and Marseilles.

In Marseilles, his trip struck the rocks. Delegates from the Commune burst into his hotel room and demanded that he speak in favour of the revolution. Train became embroiled in revolutionary politics. He delivered public harangues and led a march on the military fortifications in Marseilles, which surrendered. In Lyons, he was thrown into prison. After appealing to the international media for help, Train was released, but not before 13 days had been wasted. He arrived back in late December, missing his deadline by at least two months. The 1872 election was won by Ulysses S Grant.

And there the matter might have rested, except for Jules Verne. Verne needed a new idea. In late 1870 and early 1871 news of Train's exploits was arriving in France. Verne very probably saw – the coincidences are surely suggestive – the news about Train. He quickly finished the tale of Phileas Fogg and Passepartout and sold the idea as a serial to Le Temps, who published it in daily instalments from late 1872.

Verne never acknowledged Train as the inspiration. Train lived until 1904 and made three more round-the-world trips, beating his record each time, finally achieving 60 days. He once told an English journalist: "Remember Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days? He stole my thunder. I'm Phileas Fogg. But I have beaten Fogg out of sight."

The Waste Land (1922)

"The Waste Land" begins (of course):

April is the cruellest month,

breeding Lilacs out of the dead land,

mixing Memory and desire,

stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

Not so the first version:

First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom's place,

There was old Tom, boiled to the eyes, blind

(Don't you remember that time after a dance,

Top hats and all, we and Silk Hat Harry,

And old Tom took us behind, brought out a bottle of fizz...

The transformation occurred in January 1921. TS Eliot met Ezra Pound in Paris and showed him a draft of a long poem he had written. It was called "He Do the Police in Different Voices" and was the proto-"Waste Land". It took its title from a passage in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, in which "Sloppy" (a young man so named because he had been found in the street on a "sloppy" night) is praised by Betty for his reading.

Pound, given the job of editor, slashed through page after page, reducing the poem almost by half. He cut the embarrassing scenes above of a drunken spree in Boston with old Tom and Silk Hat Harry; he cut 27 lines on the further adventures of the typist and the young man carbuncular; a further 160 lines dealing with the doings of Fresca and Phlebas; and junked 84 lines of part IV, making it the shortest of the five parts. He made around 200 suggestions and emendations. By the time he had finished, the poem was radically different.

In Pound's version, the poem began with the prophetic voice of Tiresias ("April is the cruellest month...") and this voice went on to dominate the poem. Gone was the archness, the vaudevillian scenes of lowlife, the period-piece flavour. "He Do the Police in Different Voices", which had originally been chosen – apologetically? – to suggest a miscellany of voices, was now not quite so accurate. The poem had gained structure.

Casting around for a title, Eliot settled on "The Waste Land", and the poem was published as such in The Criterion in October 1922 (and later as a small book).

A Clockwork Orange (1962)

Anthony Burgess gave at least three possible origins for the title A Clockwork Orange, none convincing. The first was that he had overheard the phrase "as queer as a clockwork orange" in a London pub. He wrote in the introduction to the 1987 US edition: "The image was a bizarre one, always used for a bizarre thing."

Then, in an essay, "Clockwork Marmalade", published in 1972, he claimed he had heard the phrase several times, usually in the mouths of aged cockneys. But no other record of the expression in use before 1962 has surfaced. Several commentators have doubted it ever existed. Why an orange, in particular? Why not a clockwork apple? The phrase does not seem to have much wit or accuracy when describing something queer, odd or strange.

The second explanation was that the title was a pun on the Malay word orang, meaning man. Burgess taught in Malaya from 1954 to 1959. He wrote in Joysprick, his study of Joyce: "I myself was, for nearly six years, in such close touch with the Malay language that it affected my English and still affects my thinking. When I wrote A Clockwork Orange, no European reader saw that the Malay word for 'man' – orang – was contained in the title..." This conjuring of a clockwork man, central to the book's ideas, is clever, but sounds like an afterthought. Burgess wrote elsewhere that the orang echo was a "secondary" meaning – probably shorthand for a happy accident.

This leads to the third possibility, which is, as he wrote in a prefatory note, that the title is a metaphor for an organic entity, full of juice and sweetness, being turned into an automaton. This idea is built into the book. The story of Alex is one in which two unpleasant alternatives for future societies are contrasted. The first is one in which malefactors are allowed to exercise free will to torture and murder, and are, if caught, punished; the second is one in which they have their freedom of choice cauterised, resulting in a safe society populated by automata.

Burgess intended to contrast two ways of looking at the world, the Augustinian and the Pelagian. The Augustinian is that man's freedom is guaranteed, but original sin makes suffering inevitable. The Pelagian (heretical) view is that mankind is perfectible and original sin can be overridden. Burgess leant heavily towards the Augustinian side. The phrase "a clockwork orange", as representative of the Pelagian nightmare, appears in the book itself, in fact as the title of a book.

There is one other possibility. Did Burgess mishear that phrase in the pub? Terry's began making Chocolate Oranges in 1931. "Chocolate" and "clockwork" aren't homophones, but they might sound alike in a noisy pub. Perhaps Burgess misheard. Perhaps he knew it but liked what he had misheard. Perhaps – I speculate – he did not want to admit to the drab origins of his title.

Fear and fantasy in post-9/11 America

From The Nation: an interview with american journalist Susan Faludi about her new book,
The terror dream. Fear and fantasy in post-9/11 America

(click here for Susan Faludi's offical site)

Susan Faludi: America's Terror Dream
Rashi Kesarwani, November 12, 2007

In her new book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, journalist and author Susan Faludi examines the way America has come to tell the story of the 2001 terror attacks. Casting the events of 2001 against an evolving national mythology, Faludi concludes that American culture operates under a grand illusion--a terror dream--that in times of crisis, "manly men" are called upon to protect weak women.

Faludi deftly proved in her earlier works, Backlash and Stiffed, that this gendered American story line permeates our cultural consciousness. The gender myth that emerged in the wake of 9/11 is a puffed-up buckskin bravado that ultimately fails to ensure our safety.

In this conversation with Rashi Kesarwani, Faludi discusses The Terror Dream, politics and the "war on terror."

When did you first notice the post-9/11 exaltation of manly men and submissive women? Was there an Aha! moment?

Perhaps one needs to be out of the country to see such things clearly. My Aha! moment came to me while I was in Sweden during 7/7 [the bombing of the London subways]. I was following it by reading the British press and listening to BBC, and it struck me that the British, like the Spanish earlier, responded to their terrorist attacks by treating them as criminal matters to be methodically investigated and prosecuted. They did not react by calling for the return of manly men and submissive women. There was something peculiar in our response, peculiar to us as a nation.

This is your third book about gender. What draws you to this subject?

It's bedrock. When I started this book, I didn't even understand all the gender dynamics at work, particularly the historical ones. But gender, like class, is so overlooked in this culture's self-critiques that when you approach almost any subject with a gender-aware eye, you find answers and explanations to questions and problems that are otherwise opaque.

How does this "terror myth" affect men?

The myth is just as harmful for the people it designates as heroes as for the people it designates as victims. Men were given hero script in lieu of real support. Look at the firefighters, who were expected to settle for hero worship in place of the protections and tools they needed--and pleaded for--to be effective in their jobs. Or the US soldiers in Iraq, who are exalted as heroic while being denied the armor and medical care they desperately require.

You devote a chapter to the story of Jessica Lynch, a US soldier serving in Iraq whose injuries and recovery were grossly misreported by the media. Why did mainstream media seize on Private Lynch's circumstances?

It's a classic example of the media rewriting a real-life story to fit the master narrative of our security myth, just as our culture has done over hundreds of years. (See, for example, the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, a young woman taken captive by Comanches in the 1830s, who preferred Indian life and fought bitterly against her "rescue" and repatriation--and whose story was rewritten ultimately into a tale of John Wayne derring-do and helpless "little Debbie" gratitude in the 1956 John Ford Western classic, The Searchers.) The narrative we keep returning to demands inflated male heroes rescuing a helpless girl, ideally one in danger of violation, which is the story the media wanted out of the Lynch rescue tale--and distorted to get.

Look at how the media pounced on a one-day erroneous story in the Washington Post early on, an article that claimed Lynch kept shooting to the last bullet. That article was decried over and over again, for months, long after the Post had retracted it and decried the article itself, running three ombudsman apologias and a very long corrective article. The media much preferred the story it ultimately settled on, of Lynch as a little "doll-like" girl who loved pink and just wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, and who may have been raped by fedayeen soldiers (while ignoring the fact that Lynch enlisted twice, did not regard herself as passive or weak, and had no memory of being raped).

Nor did the American media rush to correct the military's farfetched tale that Lynch was rescued from bloodthirsty fedayeen death squads in a fierce battle, when in fact there was no battle and no death squads (the military entered and exited the hospital in six minutes flat and with no casualties). It was just a bunch of doctors and nurses trying to take care of Lynch and actually trying to return her to US troops. And it was left to the British press to correct the record.

You cite the capture of Mary Rowlandson by Native Americans in 1675, later popularized as a captivity narrative, as crucial to the gender myth. Why haven't alternative narratives--from Jane Addams to Betty Freidan--had the same effect on the American cultural mindset as narratives of female frailty?

There's no reason why they couldn't. But the American myth to which we resort was constructed to cover up a perceived and foundational male shame. If that's your founding insecurity, the evidence of strong women doesn't help to ease it. It didn't in the seventeenth century and it doesn't today.

Certainly, many Americans believe the events of 9/11 were unlike any attack the United States had faced before. What is your response to those who may question the link you draw between 9/11 and the terrorism experienced by early Americans?

I'm not talking about a recovered memory syndrome. We didn't remember the original trauma. We are, indeed, a history-averse culture, which prefers to forget what happened five minutes ago unless it has something to do with Britney Spears. But we are profoundly shaped as a society by the reigning mythology that our original trauma produced. We are shaped by its tangible cultural legacy--a worldview whose instructions are handed down in everything from newspaper accounts to novels to movie scripts. And that is the legacy we reach for all the more strongly in times of threat and crisis. The fact that we aren't aware of its historical provenance only makes us more susceptible to its siren call. We take it as a bedrock given, as normal, and fail to recognize the ways it disfigures our response.

In a recent review of your book, Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times alleges that The Terror Dream's premise "runs smack up against [your] own Backlash, which suggested that similar assaults on women's independence were being unleashed in the 1980s--a time not of war or threat, but a decade that witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the coming end of the cold war." How do you respond?

It's a willful misreading of my book to say that I'm trying to describe what 9/11 did to women and that what it did to women happens only in a crisis. I specifically stated (though it apparently went unnoted) that what 9/11 "did" to women, or men for that matter, was not the point of the book. Moreover, I argue that our reflexive reaction to 9/11 allowed us to see clearly mechanisms that underlie our culture all the time, including in the backlash era of the 1980s.

How do you interpret Hillary Clinton's status as the presidential front-runner?

As another indication of frustration over go-it-alone militarism. The Democratic candidates have distinguished themselves by largely not resorting to jingoistic fearmongering. This is a hopeful sign that we are, as Hillary Clinton said at a rally in Oakland, California, desiring an end to "cowboy diplomacy." But that said, we have only partially turned away from that myth. We have escalated levels of fearmongering from the GOP candidates. And of course we have Rudy Giuliani riding his dubious 9/11 rescuer "legend" to front-runner status. The coming general election promises to be a referendum on whether America wishes to be ruled by cartoon mythologies or pragmatics.

Laura Bush was recently photographed with Muslim women in hijab and later donned the hijab herself, saying that she did not think it was degrading to women. What do you make of this?

Some Muslim women, indeed, say they see the hijab as no less subjugating than high heels and bikinis in the West. Being in a culture where male modesty squads with guns and sticks force women to wear hijabs is, of course, another matter entirely, which Laura Bush evidently did not get into.

How do you make sense of the Bush Administration's linkage of the "war on terror" with the liberation of Muslim women?

The Bush White House was never interested in the liberation of women, only in mounting a rescue drama to provide heroic luster to its military aims. Feminist leaders, much to their shock, were summoned to the White House and State Department in the weeks leading up to the invasion of Afghanistan and asked their advice. But within a couple of weeks after the invasion, they were cut out of the picture, and Bush Administration officials were making it clear they had "other priorities," as one put it, than women's rights and didn't want to "impose our values" on that country.

It's telling that the Bush Administration was most opposed, according to feminist activists I talked to whose opinions were courted by the White House, to the financing of female NGOs in Afghanistan. The Bush Administration didn't want women to have agency; it just wanted women to be props in a chivalry fantasy.

And the result is that women are worse off in many ways in Afghanistan, where honor killings and sexual assaults are on the rise, girls' schools have been shut down and set on fire and teachers killed, and female politicians murdered. In Iraq, which once had made some significant progress in advancing women's rights, the pattern repeated after our intervention, with human rights groups reporting a rise in rapes, abductions, sexual slavery, severe restrictions on women's ability to travel, go to school and work, and the return of Sharia law in a US-brokered constitution.

How can Americans begin to dispense with the terror myth and directly confront the security threats at hand?

Before we can dispense with the myth, we have to understand it. And we're barely at that point. If one can say there's an opportunity in the horror of 9/11, it is that the attacks forced the myth to the fore and showed us its usually obscured machinery. If we take advantage of this moment of revelation to scrutinize and challenge the myth in a sustained manner, we might stand a chance of breaking free of it. It requires, though, being willing to look at ourselves and our frailties in a realistic light, instead of papering them over with dangerous delusions and buckskin bravado.

Remembering Norman Mailer

Yesterday the american writer Norman Mailer (1923-2007) died.
He was one of the most important novelist of the XX century, his most famous book was "The naked and the dead" (1948).
He won the Pulitzer Prize twice:
- 1969, General Non-Fiction: The Armies of the Night
- 1980, Fiction: The Executioner's Song

Salon.com writes:

Remembering Norman Mailer through his books

This entry from "The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors" takes us on a tour of his best, his worst and his bravest.
Nov. 10, 2007
By A.O. Scott

On an episode of "The Firing Line" broadcast in 1979, William F. Buckley declared Norman Mailer "the most prominent living American novelist," and then "the most notorious American novelist, devoting his time equally to literary production and self-abuse." Or, as Anatole Broyard once put it, "[Mailer's] career seems to be a brawl between his talent and his exhibitionism." For a time, the safe bet would have been exhibitionism by knockout, but now, in the fifteenth round, talent may yet triumph in a split decision.

It has often seemed, in other words, as though Mailer's notoriety would overwhelm his prominence -- that the six marriages, the failed campaign for mayor of New York, the fistfights, the wife-stabbing, the disastrous forays into filmmaking, and the political grandstanding would leave a deeper impression than "Why Are We in Vietnam?" or "The Gospel According to the Son." Mailer's celebrity has been both a burden and a temptation, a distraction from the lonely labor of writing and the source of some of his best work. The luckiest writers ascend gradually to prominence, cultivating their audience as they hone their skills; Mailer was famous at the age of twenty-five, with the publication of "The Naked and the Dead." Like a child actor, he has since faced the awkward challenge of growing up -- or refusing to -- in public. Sometimes, therefore, he has confused media attention with historical importance. And sometimes his hubris seems touchingly, charmingly naive. "If I have one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendahl, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way, Mailer wrote at the end of "Advertisements for Myself.

Hemingway and the rest, at last report, are moldering still. But if it is easy to ridicule Mailer for failing to realize such an extravagant ambition, it is nonetheless possible to admire him for having had the guts to conceive it and the temerity to confess it. If no other postwar American writer has produced as dazzling and spectacular a series of failures as Normal Mailer, it is because none has dared so much.

"Advertisements for Myself" begins with a short list of its author's favorite pieces, "for those who care to skim nothing but the cream of each author, and so miss the pleasure of liking him at his worst." The critical consensus is that the cream of Mailer's vast and various oeuvre consists, in chronological order, of "Advertisements for Myself," "The Armies of the Night" and "The Executioner's Song." None of these books is, strictly speaking, a work of fiction: "Advertisements" intersperses stories, magazine articles and fragments of abandoned novels with extended passages of self-justification; "The Armies of the Night" narrates Mailer's participation in an antiwar demonstration at the Pentagon in October, 1967; "The Executioner's Song" relates, in Balzacian detail, the story of Gary Gilmore, a habitual criminal executed in Utah in 1977. If we define the novel as a hybrid, intermediate form, bounded on one side by journalism and on the other by speculative philosophy, then these books -- with their mixture of stubborn empiricism and vertiginous abstraction, their density of detail and complexity of theme -- are among the most original and radical novels ever written.

But if we define the novel as a fictional form we encounter a paradox. Mailer is a brilliant journalist and a dogged, if mostly self-taught, philosopher. He is, however, a consistently bad novelist. This is not to say that he hasn't produced some good fiction: None of his novels is without pockets of terrific writing, vivid characterization, and narrative dexterity. But Mailer's most successfully executed novels -- "The Naked and the Dead," "Tough Guys Don't Dance," "Harlot's Ghost" -- are curiously unsatisfying. In each, his wilder impulses are checked by the constraints of his chosen genre: the war story, the policier and the spy novel, respectively. Each one fails to deliver the clean narrative punch these genres demand, and you realize that when he doesn't risk making a fool of himself, Mailer can be something of a bore. And so a second paradox follows from the first: the worse Mailer's novels are, the more pleasure they afford.

By all means, then, skim the cream, but to appreciate Mailer fully you must risk liking him at his worst. His second and third novels, "The Deer Park" and "Barbary Shore," were widely, and somewhat unfairly, reviled when they first appeared. Neither "The Deer Park's" attempt to reveal the spiritual corruption of Hollywood nor "Barbary Shore's" evocation of the political paranoia of the McCarthy era is particularly convincing, but both books have a crude and vivid power that many more polished performances lack. The novel, for Mailer, is less a literary form than an existential gambit, and this is why he is most interesting in triumph or in disaster, and most tired (and tiresome) when playing it safe. So "Tough Guys Don't Dance," for all its fine evocations of Provincetown and its engaging whodunit structure, is less memorable and less authentic a reflection of Mailer's gifts than the five hundred pages of Pharaonic sodomy that constitute "Ancient Evenings."

But Mailer's worst novel -- the novel whose place in his canon is absolutely central -- is "An American Dream." All of his characteristic preoccupations -- Manichean theology, political power, nostalgie de la boue, anal sex and the subterranean connections between them -- are on display, knit together in a plot that veers from the incredible to the incomprehensible. Yet the book's chaos seems now to be a vivid and indelible reflection of the disorder of its time and place. It is a work of sublime bravery.

See also: Because he is Jewish, Mailer is often carelessly grouped with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Because he writes about sex, he is sometimes mentioned alongside John Updike. But these writers are much more careful psychological realists than Mailer. Only one of Mailer's contemporaries can legitimately be called his peer: a great novelist who has never written a great novel; a political animal whose politics are an idiosyncratic amalgam of left and right; a writer who has dabbled promiscuously in journalism, movies and media celebrity; a sexual radical strangely at odds with the sexual revolution. Needless to say, this writer, never one of Mailer's friends, was for a long time his nemesis. Without Normal Mailer and Gore Vidal, American literature in the second half of the twentieth century would not exist; without everyone else in this book, it would.

Teaching literature in the army

An interesting article from Newsweek: a professor at West Point tells us about her job of teaching soldiers literature.

‘We Band of Brothers’
By Jennie Yabroff, Nov 1, 2007
Soldiers in training might not immediately appreciate the value of literature. But professor Elizabeth Samet has found that in time many come to realize the power of words.

When 1st Lt. Max Adams was deployed to Iraq in 2002, he took with him a 20-pound hardback edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare. Sometimes he would read from it to his soldiers—speeches from "Henry V" were always crowd-pleasers. "The one about 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,' they always liked that one," Adams says. The rest of the time the book rode around on the floor of his Humvee "as an additional plate" providing one more layer of protection from potential IEDs. Adams, who left the Army last year, still has the book, "beaten to hell, with bootprints all over it."

Writer Elizabeth Samet would be pleased to hear that Adams found both philosophical and practical use for the text, which she assigned him for a literature class at West Point. "Books are weapons," she writes in her new memoir, "Soldier's Heart," an account of her 10 years of teaching the sole required literature course, English 102, to first-year "plebes" at the military academy known as Sparta. West Point was founded on the model of the "citizen soldier," which Samet traces back to the Iliad's portrayal of Hector: "his martial ambitions always seem to me bound up with the survival of the city and the culture he defends," she writes. Integral to this notion is an understanding of the culture the soldier is defending. Although Samet contends the citizen-soldier model may be giving way to that of the "military professional," who sees service as a career, not a civic duty, she believes it's more important today than ever for soldiers to have a grounding in literature.

"When we talk about the values and principles we are defending, so many of them are literary or cultural products," she says. "Writers like Emerson and Thoreau give us our ideas of liberty, democracy and independence. So much of our national identity is part of our literary inheritance." (Samet, who still teaches at West Point, spoke to NEWSWEEK as a civilian, and her views do not represent those of the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense.)

When Samet joined the faculty of West Point, fresh from her Ph.D. in English literature at Yale, the country was at peace. Over the years, though, readings like Tim O'Brien's Vietnam story "They Things They Carried" or Randall Jarrell's World War II poem "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" took on new meaning as students saw former classmates deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. "At first I didn't know what to do after September 11," she says. "But I realized what we did in that classroom was just as valuable as before. My responsibility was to make sure we could still do it." She says that while she doesn't use the war as a "test case" for her teaching in the way her colleagues do, the war often comes up in class discussions, though she adds, "I can't let what might happen take over what's happening in the classroom."

The image of a soldier with the Army Officer's Guide under one arm and Milton under the other may seem incongruous, even for those within the military. Samet says she often encounters initial resistance among students to her curriculum. "What we do in the classroom may be frustrating to people who expect 'deliverables'—you hear that word a lot here," she says. "In the world of West Point, where facts and solutions are valued, it requires a lot more patience to figure out what one got out of a poem." But former students say the lessons they learned in her class prove invaluable beyond the classroom.

"Engineering, science, math and political science are extremely important," says Adams. "But it's been my experience that they are not nearly as important in a combat zone as a passage from a play." Another former student, Andy Scott, now a captain, says simply, "Literature is good for the soul when you're deployed." (Like Samet, his comments do not reflect the views of the Army.) Samet, who regularly gets e-mails and letters from former students in Iraq and often sends care packages of books (Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms," J. M. Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians") when they run out of reading material, says she thinks about "the ultimate fate" of her students every day. In their e-mails they tell her what they're reading, eager to continue the literary discussion. One former student writes that Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" should be required reading for all cadets.

For Samet, teaching her students to recite a particular passage of text is not as important as teaching them critical thinking skills so they can make sound ethical decisions in pressure situations. She writes that she is opposed to our ongoing presence in Iraq and deeply troubled by the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. She hopes her curriculum, which changes from year to year but may include Plutarch, Horace, Shakespeare and Freud, will help prevent future atrocities.

"My students are not going to be policy makers, except when they are on the ground, where they inevitably end up making decisions," she says. "I think if they have sharpened their analytical skills, if they are 'grade one thinkers,' that is the best insurance against the horrible things that have happened happening again. That is where the most pragmatic connection is between literature and war."
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At the beginning the journalist wrote: "When 1st Lt. Max Adams was deployed to Iraq in 2002" uhmm, 2002? are you sure? i don't think there were many american soldiers (with uniform) in Iraq before the invasion (March 2003). A typo?