Death in Venice

On a trip this summer I picked up one of Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti murder mysteries in an airport bookstore and quickly became a fan; I’ve now read the entire series (sixteen so far, with a seventeenth due out in April). Not only are they quite good generally, but I also think they’d be of particular interest to left-libertarians. Not that the author, an American expatriate living in Venice, is by any means a libertarian; I would guess that her political sympathies are broadly social-democratic. But because Leon combines traditionally leftist concerns (environmentalism, feminism, secularism, gay rights, antiracism, antimilitarism, anti-nationalism, opposition to class exploitation) with a deep skepticism about political solutions, the overall vision that emerges from her novels is relentlessly left-libertarian.

Through A Glass Darkly Venetian police commissioner Guido Brunetti is not an eccentric detective on the model of Holmes or Poirot or Columbo; he is simply a fundamentally decent man struggling to do the right thing in a corrupt world. His wife sometimes accuses him of caring more for the law than for justice, but the charge is clearly false; Brunetti cares little for the letter of the law and is indeed quite willing to bend or break it. By contrast with fictional police heroes of the Dirty Harry stripe, these bendings and breakings of the law are more often to help someone evade the clutches of what Brunetti wryly calls the “forces of order” than to broaden those forces’ grasp. When in the course of his investigations Brunetti comes across evidence of tax evasion or violation of various petty regulations, he always ignores it, identifying less with the state apparatus than with the vast informal fraternity of ordinary people trying to get on with their peaceful lives.

The grain of truth in the charge is that Brunetti has abandoned all hope of achieving justice in the large; he has seen that the system is too hopelessly corrupt for that, and so can only hope to use the tool of the law to achieve little bits of justice here and there. And even this more modest ambition is not necessarily successful. While Brunetti always solves the crime, he doesn’t always manage to apprehend the criminal, who frequently proves to be too highly placed in government, business, church, military, nobility, or Mafia to be touched. Brunetti’s chief obstacle is generally his fatuous kiss-up-kick-down supervisor, Giuseppe Patta, who tries to make sure that Brunetti’s inquiries cause no discomfort too far up the hierarchy.

In Book 13 Leon describes Brunetti’s political evolution:

In his youth Brunetti had considered himself an intensely political man. He had joined and supported a party, rejoiced in its triumphs, convinced that its accession to power would bring his country closer to social justice. His disillusionment had not been swift …. He had denied, both in word and in belief, the first accusations of dishonesty and endemic corruption against the men he had been sure would lead their nation to a bright and just future. But then he had looked at the evidence against them, not as a true believer, but as a policeman, and his certainty of their guilt had been immediate.

Since then, he had stayed clear of politics entirely, bothering to vote only because to do so set an example for his children, not because he now believed it could make any difference.

Brunetti’s quaint supposition that voting, despite being useless, sets his children a good example (of what? for what purpose?) aptly illustrates the fact that no coherent set of new political ideas has filled the place vacated by the old. As Brunetti puts it: “I don’t have any big answers, only small ideas.” Brunetti – like, one suspects, his author – is a leftist who has lost faith in the state without having acquired any faith in the market (probably, I would guess, because Leon identifies the market with the corporatist capitalism she rightly despises). Hence Leon’s novels share the left-libertarian vision of the problems, albeit not of the solutions. Leon sees no solution, and the Brunetti mysteries are consequently a model of how to live upright lives under conditions of political despair. Brunetti strives to achieve what small fragments of justice he can in his police work, while placing the core of his emotional concerns elsewhere – in his family (his wife Paola, an indignantly radical literature professor clearly modeled on Leon herself; his teenage children Chiara and Raffi, who never age despite the series’ having run for nearly two decades), and in his reading (his tastes run to Greek and Roman history; his wife prefers Henry James and Patrick O’Brian).

Incidents in Brunetti’s family life relieve the bleakness of the political landscape, as do loving explorations of Italian food and the geography – physical and cultural – of Venice. (I challenge anyone to read these books without longing to pay a visit to the Serene Republic. Given Leon’s antipathy – expressed both in the books and in interviews – toward the hordes of tourists that invade Venice annually, it’s ironic that she is nevertheless doing her part to inspire more of the same.) These digressions rarely contribute to advancing the plot, but as I’ve explained recently, I’m not a fanatical devotee of plot advancement; what matters is that the digressions contribute to the success of the story as a whole, not by pushing forward the plot of criminal investigation but by reminding us of what is really important, what deserves to be cherished amid the failures of the political.

Donna Leon While Leon uses Brunetti’s adventures as ways of vicariously expressing her rage and hopelessness concerning the Italian – and more broadly the global – political scene, there is plenty of humour in her books also. The aforementioned Giuseppe Patta, Brunetti’s pretentious asshole of a boss, provides Leon with some of her best opportunities to satirise the bureaucratic mindset; during interminable committee meetings, Brunetti and his colleagues relieve their boredom by playing surreptitious bingo, betting on which bit of bureaucratese jargon Patta will use next.

Not all the humour is political satire. Here are a couple more examples of Leon’s humour, this one from Book 11:

[H]e was even happier to see that she was reading a magazine. ‘What is it today, Signorina?’ he asked. ‘Famiglia Cristiana?’

She looked up but she did not smile. ‘No, sir, I always give that to my aunt.’

‘Is she religious?’ Brunetti inquired.

‘No, sir. She has a parakeet.’

And this one, doubtless autobiographical in inspiration, from Book 14:

The bookseller suggested they buy a heavy cardboard tube for the poster, which turned out to be a good idea, so thick was the press of people on the streets. Three or four times, bodies bumped into Brunetti with such force that an unprotected print would surely have been crushed. After the third time, Brunetti toyed with the idea of holding the cylinder at one end and using it as a club to beat their way through the crowds, but his awareness of how much at variance this would be with the Christmas spirit, to make no mention of his position as an officer of the law, prevented him from acting on that thought.

There are also passages of gratifying psychological and ethical subtlety, like this one from Book 8 relating the resolution of a conflict between Brunetti and his wife:

‘I’m sorry, Guido. I’m sorry for all the mess I’ve caused you. I do that to you and you can bring me flowers.’ She began to sob, face pressed into the soft petals of the irises …. He took them from her …. and put his arms around her. She sobbed against his chest ….He held her and rocked a bit from side to side, saying her name time and again. He had never loved her as much as at this moment. He felt a flash of vindication, then as quickly felt his face suffuse with a shame stronger than he had ever known. By force of will he pushed back all sense of right, all sense of victory, and found himself in a clean space where there was nothing but pain that his wife, the other half of his spirit, could be in such agony.

I suspect most readers don’t read the books in order – since some of the books are in print only in the U.S. and others only in Britain (though that is beginning to change, as the series gains in popularity). But it pays to read them in chronological order, because, e.g., sometimes a supporting character who is a murder suspect in one book will show up as a trusted ally in a later book, and if you read them in the wrong order you’ll know that suspect can’t be guilty and so you’ll lose some of the suspense.


Again, Dangerous Visions

1. This is supposed to be another new trailer for The Golden Compass. I don’t know whether this is the same one I linked to recently or something even newer (I’m at home with a slow connection and won’t be able to check it till tomorrow), but it should at least be bigger than that version.

The Golden Compass 2. Peter Hitchens has called Phillip Pullman (author of the His Dark Materials series on which the upcoming film trilogy is based) “the most dangerous author in Britain” and charges him with having “set out to destroy Narnia” – which shows, I guess, that a tendency toward fatuously abusive, hysterical paranoia is a trait that runs in families. Both brothers seem to have a taste for issuing simplistic fatwas – just against different targets. (Plus, you’d never guess from Hitchens’ account that the novels’ chief anti-religious character, the leader of the rebellion against God, is … well, I don’t want to give too much away, but the character in question is not the shining paragon of liberal humanism that Hitchens’ distorted review would lead one to expect Pullman to offer us.)

In fact Pullman’s trilogy has as much for Christians to enjoy as C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series has for atheists to enjoy. Hitchens’ ranting is the equivalent of Christians waxing hysterical because Aquinas praised the pagan Aristotle, or atheists waxing hysterical because Rand praised the Christian Aquinas. Admittedly Pullman’s own comments on Lewis have been intemperate and unfair also. Come on, guys; if you look for value only in those with whom you agree, you’ll subsist on a pretty meager diet.

3. The director of The Golden Compass has announced a slight change from the book; to spare the SPOILER-averse I’ll discuss it in the comments section.


Marx Atomic

Karl Marx’s doctoral dissertation wasn’t on economics or history or political philosophy; it was on the Greek atomists. Specifically, it was a systematic comparison of the atomic theories of Democritus and Epicurus.

Marx-Atomic Perhaps ironically, given his later reputation as arch-determinist and arch-materialist, Marx takes the side of Epicurus, the anti-reductionist and proponent of spontaneously swerving atoms, over the necessitarian reductionist Democritus; Epicurus makes nature active, Marx tells us, while Democritus leaves nature passive and inert. (As Marx points out, this criticism of Democritus was first made by Aristotle, and Epicurus may have formulated the doctrine of the swerve in order to rescue atomism from this Aristotelean charge.) Many of the ideas that Marx would eventually become famous for in the sphere of social philosophy he tries out here for the first time in the field of natural philosophy; hence the dissertation is an important document for the study of Marx’s intellectual development, just as Nietzsche’s early writings on the Presocratics (Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks and The Pre-Platonic Philosophers) are important for understanding Nietzsche’s own thought.

But the illumination isn’t directed solely authorward. Like Nietzsche’s study of the Presocratics – and if anything even more so – Marx’s study of the atomists views the early Greek thinkers through the lens of 19th-century German philosophy, and anachronistically reads modern concerns back into the ancients. Yet, again like Nietzsche’s Marx’s discussion nevertheless sheds insightful light on the ancients and raises fascinating questions about them. Thus even if the Hegelian categories that Marx labours to impose on Epicurus won’t quite take, much of what he has to say about him is, I think, genuinely useful for classical scholars. (For example, I was intrigued by Marx’s suggestion that the atomic swerve is reproduced structurally throughout the Epicurean system, in the sage swerving away from public life, the gods swerving away from the kosmoi etc.; and I was forcefully struck by Marx’s enumeration of the respects in which the celestial bodies that Epicurus scorned mirror the properties of his beloved atoms.)

First Writings of Karl Marx So I’m pleased that the “first complete single-volume edition of Karl Marx’s doctoral dissertation to appear in English” has been published. (Previously one had to dig through the 800-page first volume of Marx’s Collected Works.)

Logically this book should appeal both to readers with an interest in Marx and to readers with an interest in Greek philosophy. But the publishers seem to be marketing it solely to the first group – for the title they’ve given it is not Marx’s own title Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, nor yet the perhaps sexier Karl Marx on the Greek Atomists, but instead the topically opaque First Writings of Karl Marx – perhaps as a bait-and-switch for consumers who will buy a book on atomism only if they think it’s a book on politics. Unfortunately, this probably means that the book will fail to attract the notice of some readers who might otherwise be interested in it. (The author of the Introduction also seems to be interested in the book solely for the light it sheds on Marx and not at all for the light it might shed on the Greek atomists.)


The Plot Thickens

The end of a melody is not its goal; and yet:
if a melody has not reached its end,
it has not reached its goal.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow

Beginning fiction writers are often told to ask themselves whether something they want to put in will “advance the story” or “advance the plot.” Rand, for example, wrote that an author should “devise a logical structure of events, a sequence in which every major event is connected with, determined by and proceeds from the preceding events of the story – a sequence in which nothing is irrelevant, arbitrary or accidental, so that the logic of the events leads inevitably to a final resolution.”

On the face of it this seems like bad advice. After all, the point of a story is not to get to the end as quickly as possible; it’s to enjoy the journey along the way. It’s certainly true that all the elements one includes should hang together organically and contribute positively to the work as a whole, but to equate that with pushing the plot along is to reduce the work to its plot.

Admittedly one function a story element can serve is to advance the plot. Advancing the plot is one desideratum among others, but in each case it needs to be weighed against competing considerations; it’s not an iron rule that trumps everything else.

Key Largo Consider Key Largo (a Bogart-Bacall movie far inferior to, say, The Big Sleep or To Have and Have Not). The characters are holed up in an inn during a hurricane, and being held hostage by a gangster, an escaped con who is waiting for a boat that will take him out of the country. The gangster has been reunited with his former girlfriend, an aging ex-singer, and at one point he demands that she sing to the group.

At that point the filmmakers have a choice: should she sing well or badly? is she still in good form, or is she over the hill? They choose to have her sing badly, and doing so indeed serves to move the plot along: her poor singing leads the gangster to treat her cruelly, which allows Bogart’s character to express sympathy for her, which in turn lays the groundwork for her betraying the gangster to help Bogart later on. Having her sing well wouldn’t have moved the plot forward at all. But just imagine: in the middle of a Florida Keys hurricane – the winds howling outside, the lights flickering – a singer stands up and sings beautifully, hauntingly, defying the storm without and the terror within …. Wouldn’t it have made a better scene? It would have improved the movie for this viewer, at least; I’d happily trade away the more plot-integrated scene for the more beautiful scene.

Nevertheless, the advice I mentioned above isn’t necessarily bad advice. We may think of it as remedial advice; advice that describes, not the way an accomplished practitioner would do things, but rather something that may help an un accomplished practitioner become accomplished. Aristotle says the right thing to do is whatever the wise person would do; but since he recognises that an unwise person may have trouble identifying what the wise person would do, he also recommends erring on the side of the vice that is the opposite of one’s own vice. For example, the coward should err on the side of being too bold and the rash person should err on the side of being too cautious. In this case his advice is not to do what the wise person would do (the wise person would not err on either side), but to do what will make it easier for one to develop the habits that help one become a wise person.

Similarly, the requirement often taught in grade school composition, that each paragraph should have a “topic sentence,” can look utterly crazy if it’s thought of as a description of what good writers do – since good writers of course do no such thing. But it’s less crazy advice (I’m not actually convinced that it’s especially good advice, but anyway it’s less crazy) if thought of as on a par with training wheels, as a way of forcing writers to think about the unity of their paragraphs, and thus curbing the tendency to make breaks among paragraphs arbitrary.

On the same principle, telling writers to make sure that every element advances the plot no matter what can be good remedial advice, as a corrective to the tendency of inexperienced writers to let their stories become episodic and fragmented. But this shouldn’t be confused with a description of what accomplished writers actually do. And fortunately, writers (e.g., Rand) who give this sort of advice as though it were something more than remedial are usually too sensible to follow it religiously in their own works. (Rand is not fanatically averse to coincidence in her plots, for example.)


Free Roark!

Amazingly, the entire film of The Fountainhead – with all its many cinematic virtues and vices (I’ll get into a list of each some other time) – appears to be available to view online. As I assume this film is still under Time-Warner’s IP control, I suspect it may be yanked down before long. But for now, there it is.


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