A Private Spy The Letters of John le Carré edited by Tim Cornwell

 

Browsing a provincial auction catalogue, some years ago, I noticed for sale an autograph letter signed David Cornwell on notepaper headed John le Carré. I was reading lots of le Carré at the time and, out of curiosity, bought the letter unseen. Forty quid. He writes to Stacey [there was no envelope so I have no surname] who appears to be laid up in hospital after an accident and asks for reading suggestions. The writer obliges: start with P G Wodehouse (“the funniest man ever”) and for fine writing head to Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, and Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier. As if that’s not enough to be going on with, the writer then throws in The Three Musketeers and The Prisoner of Zenda. It’s all prefaced by advance notice for his The Mission Song, the galleys of which he is currently correcting. His full address in Cornwall is written in by hand and the letter dated 19:v:06. I was impressed. Stacey appeared to be a complete stranger who had written to a famous and almost certainly very busy author and received back a thoughtful, handwritten two-page reply.

In his Introduction to this very well-crafted collection of his father’s letters, the late Tim Cornwell indicates that his father was an (unusually) good correspondent, often replying to unsolicited mail and promptly (pages xxii-xxiii). He generally wrote by hand and often kept no copy. As a result, the le Carré archive in the Bodleian Library, on which this collection of over 600 pages is fairly dependent, will contain no trace of letters like that to Stacey and the deficit could really only be reduced by buying up such originals as appear on the internet, as they do. Sometimes the content will be of interest - as in the letter I have summarised - but, perhaps as importantly, those letters suggest what one could regard either as noblesse oblige or - and I incline to this - a rather democratic spirit. The latter interpretation is supported by what to me is the heartening fact that David Cornwell never accepted one of those tarnished medals handed out by our Monarch and which Woke novelists now declare after their names to show that they are Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. It is not as if he was opposed to all recognition:  he accepted, for example, a Goethe Medal in 2011 and a D Litt from Oxford.

In the book under review, le Carré does give reasons for refusing a CBE on the recommendation of Margaret Thatcher but the letter (at pages 238-39) is written to the then Head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Sir Dick Franks, and could be read as at least partly an effort to deflect any accusation of disloyalty to the Establishment. Much later, after le Carré has entertained the Russian Ambassador for a weekend at his home in Cornwall, he follows up with a report on the weekend addressed to Alan Judd, who has already been introduced in the editorial notes as a link-man into MI6/SIS (pages 387-396). Le Carré  expresses himself rather differently when writing to a friend, Sir John Margetson, in 2010: “PS. Did I tell you I passed on a K[knighthood]. All right for public servants, not good for artists, writers & the like”. (He’s right; I was disappointed when Kazuo Ishiguro accepted a K. Some way or other, it’s going to cramp your style).

In my own reading of le Carré’s novels I eventually got round to A Perfect Spy, wonderful on first read, not least because the narrative drive never lost out to a complex structure kept in place from start to finish. I was impressed enough to re-read and began to pick out literary devices which were being used but not pointed to. I found myself drawn to a one-liner attributed to a main character, “Never mind, E Weber love you always” which is repeated three times to great effect. I wrote a few hundred words about this and was quite pleased with the result. It occurred to me that I had John le Carré’s home address sitting in a file: I could send him what I’d written. It would be a bit cheeky: I would be evading the person in charge of the paper shredder in some literary agent’s office, employed to protect authors from crank letter-writers. But I sent it anyway.

To my astonishment, within a few days I had a handwritten reply (10^th Feb 2017) in which I am told, rather teasingly, that I have caught something of the real person behind the character of E.Weber, “at her charming best”.

Writers do depend on encouragement, and I was encouraged to expand what I had written into a more sustained reflection on A Perfect Spy for inclusion in a book I was working on. And then I thought I’d go for broke: I wrote again to ask permission to include his letter in the body of my essay and, if he was in principle agreeable, to give me the necessary contact details for his agent etc.  Came the handwritten reply (25^th July 2017), “…no need to trouble my agent: please regard this letter as consent enough”. And so the letter appears at pages 98-99 of my completely unsuccessful book, Prose Improvements (2017). I returned again to A Perfect Spy in a 2018 review on this site  https://www.readingthisbook.com/2018/07/john-le-carre-perfect-spy.html and, in contrast to my failed book, it’s one of the most popular pages here with over a thousand visitors.

The letters offered in the volume under review are to family, friends, lovers (though sparsely), secret and diplomatic service colleagues, fellow writers, agents, and so on. There are a handful addressed to what one might call members of the public: to Mrs Betty Quail who thinks that George Smiley’s problems would be solved by conversion to Catholicism (p 230); to a ten year old boy who wants to be a spy (p 281) and another to an eleven year old (p 359); to attentive readers in the Netherlands and Germany who have spotted plot impossibilities and inconsistencies (p 336, p 354) - the first one a beauty in which the Emperor is clearly caught with no clothes; le Carré is greatly amused and sends a signed hardback as a prize.

But these letters feel like curiosities alongside the more weighty correspondence, some of it providing useful grist for those who want to study plot and character and device in the novels. This is very obviously so in letters to Alec Guinness where le Carré is  clear and detailed about how he thinks George Smiley should be played (notably pages 211-15).

To my surprise, it was easy to read this book rather than pick up, put down, and basically browse.. A lot must be owing to the skills of the editor, le Carré’s son the late Tim Cornwell, who structures the book around the major novels and provides helpful, unassertive, notes of guidance. If there is a weakness it must (inevitably and invisibly) rest in the fact that the compilation is a family affair, approved by the family Estate, and appearing really very soon after le Carré’s death at the end of 2020.

Like father like son. I was struck by the similarities between father and son. Both display extraordinary energy, are on the move constantly (though le Carré likes to describe himself as a recluse in Cornwall - with a guest wing built to accommodate six …), and are good at making friends and influencing people. The difference, of course, is that Reggie was a career con-man criminal notching up jail sentences in several countries (not many criminals achieve that distinction) and losing his winnings every time, whereas le Carré amasses - and doesn’t lose, though sometimes gives away chunks -  a large fortune built entirely on his genius as a writer and the skill of his agents in selling film and TV rights.

There is hardly a page in the 630 pages of this collection of letters where the author is not busy, whether writing, travelling to dangerous places to do background research for a novel,promoting a new novel, or co-operating with scriptwriters, directors, producers. Both energy and achievement are extraordinary.

*

I will do my duty and make copies of the letters I mentioned at the beginning and post them to the archivist at the Bodleian.

 

 

 

 

Copyright in the Estate of William Shakespeare

 

The Works of William Shakespeare remain part of living cultures at least partly because there is no Estate of William Shakespeare. You can do what you like with Shakespeare and no one will appear to tell you that it’s going to cost or that under no circumstances may you cast a black actor as Hamlet. We are fortunate that Shakespeare was not born more recently, in which case he would surely join the ranks of those whose Estates are synonyms for rent extraction and cultural policing.

The Literary Estate Problem can be traced back to Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the American Constitution “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”. Well, that’s clear enough: a limited time is not an unlimited time. But is a limited time seven years, seventy years, or (watch out for Mr William Shakespeare’s lawful heirs & assigns) seven hundred years?

Theorists of intellectual property rights would probably like to go for perpetuity: a house can pass from heir to heir indefinitely and quite a number have done so ever since they were first built; the standing and success of English aristocratic families can be reckoned by how long they’ve not had to sell the house. If houses can pass on indefinitely, why not likewise copyright in the works of any writers who may have lived there?

The US Constitution implicitly blocks that argument and we may be grateful, though the block has occasionally been breached. The authors of the Constitution (who by the way claimed no copyright on their work) were working in the opposite direction, trying to create new rights where none or only very weak ones previously existed. So the intellectual property theorist, unable to sustain “perpetuity”, can simply focus on the interpretation of “limited times” and aim to make them long as possible.

How should one interpret "limited times"? One could start by asking if all cases are alike; intuitively they are not. Many technological developments (including pharmaceutical innovations) require enormous investments which will now only be made if there is a guaranteed period in which the exploitation of any successful innovation is protected by copyright and patent law. In contrast, I doubt that anyone has ever written a novel after careful assessment of local copyright law, and probably concluding, “Nah, the period is too short to make the labour of War and Peace worthwhile. But a little novella …”.

Some, maybe many, writers aspire to live by their pen (as John le Carré always liked to put it; he never typed so he was being accurate) and the aspiration seems legitimate but usually only realisable if there is some kind of copyright protection. An alternative model was pioneered in the Soviet Union where writers might aspire to collect a salary for their work rather than royalty payments, That’s what the Writers’ Union was all about and I doubt it is a model which now appeals to anyone. It’s true, we do pay writers salaries if they call themselves Academics but at the same time allowing them to collect royalties on what they write. Like NHS consultants, they end up working in both public and private sectors. This is most obviously true for those who work in university Creative Writing departments, the closest we get to the Soviet model.

The aspiration to make a living from writing might seem to suggest a clear interpretation to “limited times”: copyright protection would expire at death, when the writer can no longer aspire to anything.

But what about the widow? Or to modernise the question, What about the surviving partner? Well, normally, if there is a bread-winner then he or she is expected to make provision in their lifetime for anyone who may survive them and which will supplement or replace whatever state provision is on offer. Yes, but let’s be frank: writers rarely make a lot of money. They barely manage to make ends meet. But if you allow copyright to be inherited, a surviving partner at least gets something, though how much is unpredictable. And then when they die, the copyright expires.

Ah, but what about the writer who prefers to assign copyright to the dogs’ home? How long should it last then? In the case of J M Barrie’s Peter Pan here in the UK we have a special law, passed in Parliament, which grants Great Ormond Street Hospital copyright in perpetuity. But would you want to do that for your local dogs’ home? The trouble with the Barrie law (introduced by a former Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan when he had become Lord Callaghan) is that it sets a really bad precedent. Copyright gives you the right not only to ask for money but to dictate how a play may or may not be performed or a novel edited.

Except for that one case, then in current English law copyright expires seventy years after the death of the author. I don’t think that’s anything  more than  a triumph for rent extracting agencies, for corporations and lawyers. Is there any justification at all for it? I’m trying to think of some without much success. But let’s try.

If copyright expires at death then a publisher has less incentive to keep a work in print since anyone could now bring out a rival edition at a lower price. That seems a feeble argument, undermined by the fact that bookshops are full of cheap (and very well-edited) editions of the Bible, Plato, Shakespeare, Jane Austen … In many case, there are indeed rival editions and an informed reader will know that some (Penguin Classics) are usually better than others. Publishers manage to claw back a bit of copyright protection by commissioning Introductions and Bibliographical apparatuses. That doesn’t really undermine the general principle that other editions of the core work are possible, no permission needed. The argument is even more feeble if it is supposed to keep works in print for another seventy years; it won’t. Most books simply go out of print for reasons entirely unconnected to copyright law. They die from lack of interest, that’s all.

Keeping interest alive is a real problem for publishers. It is partly solved by the happy accident that all serious writers realise that they have an obligation to leave behind a room full of juvenilia, unfinished works, and - best of all - hundreds and hundreds of Letters which have been carefully crafted (both ways: sender and receiver) to arouse interest, ideally scandalised and prurient. He was anti-semitic. She was lesbian. He beat his wife. She fucked everyone. A serious Literary Estate will command enough resources to appoint researchers and editors who can convert this base metal into the gold of must-read hardbacks which, as an additional benefit to the Estate, lead some readers to the original poems, novels, and plays. How widely read would Bloomsbury’s authors be now without the Letters?

It’s a problem that the State is not neutral about the desirability of all this. It has a stake in extended copyright: governments collect tax on the income of Estates whose activities contribute to overall GDP. It’s as if the writer is still busy writing after death, generating income, jobs, and taxes. I hesitate to mention this benefit to the State because someone at my local UK Treasury is now going to make the case for creating an Estate of William Shakespeare: nationalising it and collecting bucketloads of money on copyright permissions - as well as forbidding any interpretations of Shakespeare which might imply criticism of the Ruling Party (“To be Prime Minister, or not to be Prime Minister. That is this week’s question”).

I’ll stop there (1282 words showing) and conclude that it would be a progressive move  to campaign for a reduction in the standard period of literary copyright. In place of seventy years I propose seven years - enough time to fund heirs and executors as they set about tidying up the affairs of a deceased writer.

Editorial Oversight at Oxford University Press

 

Clue: The Emperor's New Clothes

Review: Gary Gerstle The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order

 

This is an excellent book. It starts from what seems to be a very simple and even simplified model of American economic and political history in the past century and proceeds to document the case for its explanatory value. What convinced me of the model’s value was the realisation that it could be transferred to British history of the same period and equally well-supported from evidence.

Gerstle’s key concept is that of a political order. This captures the reality that in democratic polities with competing parties a common ground can emerge which is sustained for long periods across changes in the political complexion of governments. In the USA, Roosevelt’s originally Democratic Party New Deal of the 1930s persisted and was even doubled down on by the Republican administration of President Eisenhower.  In the same way in Britain, the Labour Party’s war time and post-1945 creation of a mixed economy and welfare state was sustained by Conservative governments through to the administration of Edward Heath. Here the common ground was locally identified in the expression Butskellism built from the names of the Conservative politician RA Butler and the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell. Butskellism also embraced a commitment to NATO and the Atlantic alliance.

Political orders fail and are replaced for complex reasons not always understood at the time. The New Deal and Butskell political orders were replaced by neoliberal orders which are often characterised using the names of the leaders who drove through the initial changes; thus we have Reaganomics and Thatcherism which survived through the Democratic administrations of Clinton and Obama in the USA and the Labour governments of Tony Blair in the UK. Neoliberalism was a political order which transcended and survived political party differences.

Gertsle concludes by documenting how the neoliberal political order has fallen apart in the USA with Donald Trump finding a constituency to vote for the destruction of at least its internationalist aspects. The UK narrative would focus on Brexit and the ongoing confusion within a Conservative Party whose neoliberals dressed in ethnonationalist clothes have cut the UK out of its principal free trade area. The eventual outcome is unclear. So far, all that we know is that the USA was weakened by Trump and the UK weakened by the Brexiteers, to the satisfaction of Mr Putin if no one else.

Review: Peter Salmon An Event Perhaps A Biography of Jacques Derrida

I am one of those people who would rather read a book about Jacques Derrida than read a book by Derrida. This one, though very well-written and diligent, isn’t going to change my mind. Derrida is just not my cup of tea - a phrase which the late Richard Wollheim used at the end of a superb essay on the work of Jacques Lacan which had involved him in a great deal of diligent reading. Nonetheless, I must have picked up something and not so long ago cheerfully titled an essay “Social Construction Deconstructed”. But then there is a generic use of “deconstruction” which is almost certainly not faithful to an original idea. To use the term doesn’t make me one of the (dwindling) band of the Derrida faithful.

When I arrived in Paris for a year’s graduate work in the autumn of 1971 I promptly spent most of my money on a pile of books by celebrity theorists of the time, intending to read them all. I bought Derrida’s De la Grammatologie and L’Ecriture et la Différence, both published in 1967, and  probably read half of each book - I don’t have the physical books any more so I can’t be more precise. But the material seemed at a distance from my more immediate concerns at the time and I didn’t finish them or do anything with them. Nonetheless, I found my way to the Ecole Normale Superieure and sneaked into Derrida’s (very sparsely attended) lectures in which he was offering a close reading of Hegel on the family and marriage, and that was even less of concern to me. So I stopped going. Salmon’s book (p. 166) tells me that those lectures were the basis of his 1974 book Glas. It was common practice in the Paris of the time for professors to use draft chapters of next year’s book as their teaching material. I stuck with Foucault for the whole year and he was working on his Pierre Rivière study and presented work in progress in seminars. But his approach was different, and it was much more of a teaching situation that he created, not least because he had dissuaded the tourists from attending: at the Collège de France all teaching was supposed to be open to anyone and Foucault devoted his first session grilling those present about their motives for being there. The grilling was severe enough to reduce numbers substantially at the second session. From Foucault, I got the idea of studying minor or parallel thinkers alongside  major figures and  a few years later writing about John Stuart Mill  tried to show how part of his system of thought had been more fully fleshed out by the more or less forgotten Sir George Cornewall Lewis. Likewise, I sought to show how you could make sense of Rousseau's arguments in Du Contrat Social by putting them alongside Condorcet's work on probability theory and majority voting.

Later, in the 1980s when  teaching at the University of Sussex one of my colleagues was Geoff Bennington who has now devoted a lifetime’s talent to promoting Derrida’s work, initially by translation and then in many other ways including direct collaboration with Derrida. There was an occasion when  I complained that Derrida was an improvisatore and  Bennington replied “I think he’s the bee’s knees”. I had put Derrida into the same category as Lacan, whose “seminars” (attended by hundreds at Saint Anne) were theatre in the tradition of Anton Mesmer and, by this stage in his career, more or less unintelligible. He entered each week wearing a fur coat; a female assistant helped him take it off and held on to it for the duration. In stark contrast, I greatly enjoyed the patient and relaxed seminars offered by Roland Barthes, who was my director of studies.

I made one more attempt to engage with Derrida’s work in 1997 at a Colloque held at Cérisy la Salle in Normandy devoted to Derrida and the topic of L’Animal Autobiographique. Derrida spoke at length, uninterrupted, and certainly for longer than Fidel Castro’s record. I found it exasperating. Peter Salmon now tells me that Derrida “presented a ten hour lecture” (p 273). It certainly felt like it. 

Unless you are very stupid, then if you spend your life writing eighty books (Salmon’s figure for Derrida) then you are more or less bound to say something interesting somewhere. But I’m happy to leave it to others to discover where. 

Review: Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary

 

There are so many universities in the world that we have only estimates of their number; an App can’t track them because some don’t call themselves universities (MIT and many others) and because some are bogus. But I’m fairly confident that spread across those universities there are thousands of Departments which offer undergraduate degrees in Literature, most commonly the Literature of the country in which they are based or, at least, written in its national language.

I’m also fairly confident that poems and novels are always taken as exemplary for Literature and that survey courses which introduce students to representative samples of different periods and genres within the national literature are very common. It’s for that reason that I can walk into my local bookshop and buy cheap, well-edited editions of nineteenth century English language novels easily identifiable by their black Penguin Classics spines. I benefit from the student demand for these things.

Undergraduates are expected to read the representative material assigned and quite often do. But what else are they supposed to accomplish? For over a century now departments of Literature have struggled to make their work - well, more disciplinary. Various approaches have been proposed and almost certainly more approaches than in the harder sciences where a textbook author can even dream of writing a book which will be used world-wide - at school in the 1960s my textbook for Economics was simply called “Samuelson” and probably got close to having world-wide success outside the then Communist world.

To begin with, the new Literature departments could trade off what was already an established way of responding to poems and novels which could be found in pre-1914 European and North American journals, reviews, and newspapers where Response often took the form of assuming a moral high ground from which, in particular, immorality could be seen for what it was. Literature was often immoral and readers needed to be told that in their own interests. How else could they know which novels to buy for themselves but keep from their servants (for whom a separate category of improving literature was available - The Blind Washerwoman, and such like). The new university departments could easily accommodate to such disciplinary activity and still do though nowadays there is much debate as to whether students are in the same category as servants and to be protected from immorality. Remarkably, students can now be found who will, in any case, demand protection, whereas In My Day ….

Beyond moralising raps on the knuckle the next most common form of Discipline was the demand that students Pay Attention to the words on the page in such a way that they would not attribute character traits or motives or moods or conclusions clearly contradicted by words to be found at page 123 et seq.

You could read Toril Moi as urging the case for a more subtle and sophisticated version of that kind of (elementary?) discipline, basing herself on the later philosophy of Wittgenstein as mediated by Stanley Cavell in particular. Literature makes use of ordinary language to do fairly extraordinary things and paying careful, engaged attention to it - and to one’s own responses - is the way in.

But is the way in also the goal and conclusion? When you’ve read something attentively is that it?  Toril Moi does not think so - she is not trying to resurrect what was once called the New Criticism whose advocates would tell you very firmly that if it wasn’t on the page you had no business talking about it and that if you did talk you couldn’t expect an A or even a B.  Like Rita Felski who uses the “flat” ontology of Bruno Latour [see my review of Felski’s Hooked on this site, 24 February 2022 ], Moi accepts that to fully appreciate (acknowledge) what the words on the page are being used to do it may be entirely appropriate to draw attention to the author’s biography, to the historical circumstances in which the book was written, to the author’s assumptions about likely or desired readers, to the author’s awareness of current censorship practices (an awareness which, in my reading, for example, blights Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, this site 16 August 2021). She wants us to think of poems and novels as forms of action or enactment connected to situated human existence and not detached “texts” which could have dropped from the skies.

 But at the same time she wants to resist the approaches of those who just want to put the “text” through a grinder - Marxist, Freudian, Feminist, Post-Colonial ….. basically in order to demonstrate how the work Fails but, as just reward, enables the grinder-operator to get an A. She is interested in keeping a mind which is at once open and informed so that the “text” has a chance to lead us to new ways of looking at things which we may otherwise take for granted. At page 211, for example, she separates Viktor Shklovsky from other formalists and says that he got things right when he championed defamiliarization as something rather more than simple “technique”. I agree - and the idea itself can be found a century earlier in Coleridge’s response to Wordsworth. The genuineness of Shklovsky’s commitment is to be found in his memoir, A Sentimental Journey.

*

 Just now I used the phrase “situated human existence”. Moi takes over from Wittgenstein the idea of “forms of life” which is closely connected to the idea of agreement (often unreflected) in our responses. I have a problem with this because I think that Wittgenstein does not distinguish two different kinds of agreement and in so doing opens himself to rival readings, which for short one might call “naturalist” and “sociological”.

If you show experimental subjects the two arrow-headed lines which comprise the Müller-Lyer illusion they will all agree, independently of each other, that the arrows are of unequal length. Even when told that they are not, the illusion persists.

The illusion reveals something about how human vision works; that we agree in our responses is a distributive agreement which has nothing to do with anything we have learnt, been taught, or discussed. Similarly, young children (before the age of four or five) make drawings which develop in ways and in a sequential order which is common across cultures and owes nothing to the surrounding cultures of visual representation into which some children will subsequently be inducted. The naïve child artists agree in the way they think faces and figures are to be represented though no one has taught them this (or, in Wittgenstein’s language, trained them). Pile up such examples of distributive agreement (being frightened by a scary story…) and you can then begin to think of agreement in responses as something natural and you can read some of the things Wittgenstein says as supportive of that and you can make him into a naturalist as did Colin McGinn in Wittgenstein on Meaning (1984). Wittgenstein does not make it easy, however, because he has very little to say about babies and infants and what he does say seems bleakly conventional and uncomprehending.

But, of course, there is another kind of agreement which can be called collective. This does not require that we have voted or held debates or even talked about it though sometimes we will have done so. We can come to agree by various means but by those diverse means our form of life comes to have a social or communal or conventional character as explored by philosophers like David Lewis in his Convention (1969) and much subsequent literature including the work of Margaret Gilbert. We agree collectively, not distributively, to drive on the left not the right, and so on. Social constructionists think that everything (or nearly everything) has this character and they can find ways of reading Wittgenstein which turns him into a sociologist of culture. They did a lot of that in Oxford where Wittgenstein’s account of “following a rule” got construed as “following our rule and don’t dare disobey”, as if the nature of language could be entirely understood via the local dialect. This emphasis on the social is found most clearly in the work of Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker in books such as Language, Sense and Nonsense (1984). My own view is that the Oxford Wittgensteinians fell into the trap which Dennis Wrong once characterised as “The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology” (a 1977 article).

Toril Moi’s book covers a lot of ground and is really the product of a life time of careful engagement. It’s lucid and held together by the thread provided by Stanley Cavell’s work, which is much more humane and resonant than anything the Oxonians came up with. Whether Moi’s book will in practical terms solve or dissolve the problem of what kind of Discipline is best suited to deal with Literature is another matter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Review: Rita Felski Hooked

 

I was introduced to Rita Felski’s work in 2020 when I consulted what in England we call an Early Career Academic about an essay on Lolita that I was writing (now published as Nabokov’s Dream); he suggested I read The Limits of Critique (2015). In that book, Felski writes about the importance of the pleasure we get from reading novels or looking at paintings, and so on. In this new book she starts from a reflection on the often odd and idiosyncratic ways in which we become attached, or attach ourselves, to a work - maybe re-reading it frequently or humming the tune every day. (In another book I was reading recently, an anecdote was told about the philosopher Gilbert Ryle who was once asked if he read any fiction. Oh , yes. Jane Austen. All of them, once a year).

In Felski’s work there is a background hum of unease with what has happened to the humanities during her career and even before her career begun. Both institutional and broader cultural pressures have turned teachers of the humanities into purveyors of artificially narrowed pre-occupations often enough combined with a narrow-minded demand for conformity, usually in favour of some politico-cultural orientation deemed progressive but not always seen as such by outsiders. (So, for example, myself I see  the “critique” of cultural appropriation as both a bit absurd - because opposing itself to what is probably the main dynamic of all cultural change - and a bit backward-looking - which is to say, reactionary).

Felski occupies a prominent position in the academy and her own particular reservations (cultural appropriation is not something she discusses in this book, I should add, though it often involves getting hooked on something) are expressed in a more nuanced way than might be used by an outsider and perhaps some are not expressed at all.

Her response to claustrophobia is to try to open up the field of what can and should be done under the rubrics of “The Humanities” guided by a theoretical commitment to the Actor Network Theory (ANT) pioneered by Bruno Latour - who I haven’t read. But it seems that the slogan of ANT might well be, “Only connect!” Let me give an example of what might be involved in an ANT-ish opening up. (This is my own example and will show whether I have grasped the point or not).

Suppose we have hitherto worked on the assumption that response to a painting begins at the point when we stand before it (at an appropriate distance) on a gallery wall.  Well, how did we get to that Point? In the immediate past, we ascended the steps of what is probably an architecturally impressive building (that counts as an actor in ANT), passed through turnstiles and past security guards and gallery attendants (there are people who want to steal paintings because they are often worth a LOT of money and the guards remind us of that so they are actors too). We have  side-stepped other gallery-goers who may look older or younger than us, better dressed or worse, unevenly distributed by sex and ethnicity in ways which we may note as placing us in a majority or a minority. So many actors! Eventually, we get to the painting only to discover that twenty seven people got there before us. (Tourist tip: If you are thinking of visiting the Louvre to look at the Mona Lisa…well, Forget It).

All this contributes towards the state of mind in which you at last (hopefully) look at your painting, the identity of which you may now check against the gallery label (another actor).

All that has happened since you climbed the steps has gone into creating the state of mind in which you now stand before the painting. In addition, of course, there is all the preparatory reading you may have done about the painter whose work you are now looking at, or about the period or school within which they worked, and the title of the course requirement essay you have to write. What chance some supposedly pure unmediated response to what is now in front of you?

You might feel that your chances of unmediated response are better when you walk down the street listening to a new album through headphones until one song catches you and even hooks you enough for you to spool back and listen again. And perhaps again. This scenario is also capable of being written up in the terms of Actor-Network Theory,though it might seem that a sudden epiphany, a break -out experience in which you suddenly and unexpectedly attach to something with delight is actually a breaking out from your usual networks. Epiphanies could be described as an unlearning experience. (See footnote) .

Felski is particularly interested in this kind of experience and it explains the title of her book. She thinks we are often coy about admitting that something has hooked us, and especially so in a college classroom where to admit to such enthusiasms might seem out of place - a bit childish, perhaps; a bit down-market; a bit politically incorrect - there are now many readers, female and male, coy about owning up to  enthusiasm for Lolita, novel or films.

There’s not much to argue with in what Felski argues. But the danger - which she seeks to address - is that in place of scholarly narrowness and puritan exclusion we end up with seminar discussions of marshmallow softness, lectures which are hopelessly idiosyncratic (…if I may digress for a moment, I recall Bob Marley and the Wailers ... You what? Yes, it was their first UK tour (Awed silence).Yes, it was in 1972…. (long digression)), and books which though interesting don’t close in on any claims which might exclude other claims. And I’m not sure about claims which do not exclude other claims but rather seek to bundle them all up into a narrative which nods to every interested party. 

I'm also doubtful that the dynamics of places like university seminars can actually accommodate every interested party: in my experience (and it may have been my fault) they tended to gravitate towards vicarage tea parties in which the tutor has fingers crossed that no one will say Fuck or take their clothes off (the latter once, the former more frequently). 

I enjoyed reading Felski’s book. She has an especial talent for incorporating references to the literature - and there are many - into the flow of her writing, so that you are never confronted with Tombstone Quotes which always lead me to the thought that they might be skippable.

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(Helen Thaventhiran writes an interesting review of Felski’s book in London Review of Books, 27 January 2022 and Rita Felski has a Letter in reply on 24 February).

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Footnote: This is how I characterise them in an essay "Lifelong Unlearning" included in Duncan Barford, editor, The Ship of Thought (2002) and in a revised version in my Silence Is So Accurate (2017)