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I’m still trying to write review essays for these weblogs on Ronald Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (that history being a long, lovely mélange of antiquarians’ fantasies followed by competing orders of modern Druids projecting their present-day needs and dreams on religious antiquity) and the Andreas Huyssen anthology Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age.
What both have in common with John Crowley’s masterfully composed novel Four Freedoms is a deliberately invisible concern with problems of narration.
I am probably the only person to have had Farha Ghannam’s essay on Cairo (“Two Dreams in a Global City: Class and Space in Urban Egypt”) illuminate Four Freedoms and vice versa. (Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe is less relentlessly narrative, but has the structural problem of keeping the narrative thread going when there are so many inter-relating strands of event and past imagination to weave together without benefit of making things up…but Hutton handles the challenge in his usual thoughtful fashion.)
Ghannam picks two characters from opposite ends of the social-class spectrum, though not quite of the economic spectrum: the developer of a global-culture-themed planned community outside of Cairo (the gentleman in question has an engineering degree from Georgia Tech, which piece of geographic information may partially explain his fondness for the upscale utopian city as high-tech theme park) and an ambitious less-than-middle-class woman who is building a house for her family in one of the spectacularly unplanned communities outside Cairo that are being constructed bit by bit by their residents-to-be.
The problems of storytelling in Ghannam’s prettily footnoted essay (which has the new problem of citing printouts of websites that no longer exist!) are not dissimilar from John Crowley’s in Four Freedoms, where he has set himself the task of disallowing elements of the fantastic and of overly intrusive coincidence, presenting a narrative of ultimately intertwined but contrasting lives that performs all the traditional functions of good historical fiction—presenting a set of stories that are real in every respect except that they did not happen to these particular character—while deploying all the options of narrative strategy available to a self-aware novelist. (Each successive back story that soon threads into the central narrative illuminates something more about the social world from which have emerged the colliding lives of the workers on the imaginary B-30 bomber. The narrative structure doesn’t get in the way of the meticulous inclusion of one revelatory historical detail after another…it’s all done as well as in the best works of anthropology, with the disadvantage of having to invent the mesmerizing details of how the story turns out, rather than merely having to find the most stylistically gripping way of selecting the aspects of the tale, in order to hold readers’ attention and teach them something about the world that they didn’t know previously.)
Coming to all of this via Michael Taussig’s dazzling dialectics of narrative (wherein he does finally unite all the strands to convince us that he has in fact been going somewhere all along—something I obviously don’t usually succeed in doing), I am left in awe of the skills of the world’s assorted anthropologists of the contemporary. Among whom I would count John Crowley were it not for the fact that he makes no pretense that his characters ever existed if they did not, or did exactly the things he says they did when they bear the same names as figures from history.
But the problem of whether actually existing characters did exactly the things that the writers say they did is also the discussion that has bedeviled anthropology for a good many decades now, and the academic discipline of history for a very long time before that.
What both have in common with John Crowley’s masterfully composed novel Four Freedoms is a deliberately invisible concern with problems of narration.
I am probably the only person to have had Farha Ghannam’s essay on Cairo (“Two Dreams in a Global City: Class and Space in Urban Egypt”) illuminate Four Freedoms and vice versa. (Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe is less relentlessly narrative, but has the structural problem of keeping the narrative thread going when there are so many inter-relating strands of event and past imagination to weave together without benefit of making things up…but Hutton handles the challenge in his usual thoughtful fashion.)
Ghannam picks two characters from opposite ends of the social-class spectrum, though not quite of the economic spectrum: the developer of a global-culture-themed planned community outside of Cairo (the gentleman in question has an engineering degree from Georgia Tech, which piece of geographic information may partially explain his fondness for the upscale utopian city as high-tech theme park) and an ambitious less-than-middle-class woman who is building a house for her family in one of the spectacularly unplanned communities outside Cairo that are being constructed bit by bit by their residents-to-be.
The problems of storytelling in Ghannam’s prettily footnoted essay (which has the new problem of citing printouts of websites that no longer exist!) are not dissimilar from John Crowley’s in Four Freedoms, where he has set himself the task of disallowing elements of the fantastic and of overly intrusive coincidence, presenting a narrative of ultimately intertwined but contrasting lives that performs all the traditional functions of good historical fiction—presenting a set of stories that are real in every respect except that they did not happen to these particular character—while deploying all the options of narrative strategy available to a self-aware novelist. (Each successive back story that soon threads into the central narrative illuminates something more about the social world from which have emerged the colliding lives of the workers on the imaginary B-30 bomber. The narrative structure doesn’t get in the way of the meticulous inclusion of one revelatory historical detail after another…it’s all done as well as in the best works of anthropology, with the disadvantage of having to invent the mesmerizing details of how the story turns out, rather than merely having to find the most stylistically gripping way of selecting the aspects of the tale, in order to hold readers’ attention and teach them something about the world that they didn’t know previously.)
Coming to all of this via Michael Taussig’s dazzling dialectics of narrative (wherein he does finally unite all the strands to convince us that he has in fact been going somewhere all along—something I obviously don’t usually succeed in doing), I am left in awe of the skills of the world’s assorted anthropologists of the contemporary. Among whom I would count John Crowley were it not for the fact that he makes no pretense that his characters ever existed if they did not, or did exactly the things he says they did when they bear the same names as figures from history.
But the problem of whether actually existing characters did exactly the things that the writers say they did is also the discussion that has bedeviled anthropology for a good many decades now, and the academic discipline of history for a very long time before that.
