'Bitch-Godess Success' at M/c Royal Exchange

review by Brian Bamford

Above, is the original cross, Viburnum x bodnantense, flowering at Kew earlier this week.
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BEFORE I went to review the play  'Death of a Salesman' at the Manchester Royal Exchange, I went to put out the rubbish bins in the backyard, and I was delighted to see the Viburnham Farreri in bloom with its pink and white clusters.  It is mid-Autumn and the fragrant shrub flowers at its best now.  It was Autumn when Arthur Miller began to work on :'The Death of a Salesman' (1949), and  Miller says:  'A morning in the spring.  And everything was starting to bud.  Beautiful weather.  Like this, except now it's fall.'

Before Miller began writing the play he constructed a cabin in which he wrote the play to be on his own.  He says it was an impulse to do a practical act before addressing the problems of a man who was impractical:  a salesman called Willy Loman who struggled to make a sale.  He's a salesman who in the first lines in the play tells his wife that 'It's all right.  I came back.'

Arthur Miller in an interview told John Lahr:  'It's a denial.  I mean, imagine a salesman being unable to get past Yonkers.  It's like the end of the world.'  

Yonkers is the fourth most populous city in the U.S. state of New York.

It's a play about human failure of someone confronted with an ideal 'the American Dream' which he somehow can't live up to.  Yet in his mind he deludes himself and he unsuccessfully tries to recruit others to share in his delusions. 

Here is a man who is deluded to some fixed ideas of what it means to be successful by become a different person from what he really is.  In this version of the play at the Royal Exchange he is presented as a black man Willy (Don Warrington) who is not only uneasy in his own skin but who is envious of Charley played by Tom Hodgkins, the white man, who offers him a position that could have saved him.

Here is a fixed body of cultural values which we could call the 'American Dream':  perhaps a false belief system of what the philosopher William James called 'our national disease' or the 'exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success'.

Sarah Churchwell writing in the programme for the play almost inevitably relates the play to the present day, and she writes:  'The deterioration of American ideals from meritocracy into selfish entitlement' and she adds, 'the damage such a loss of values presents to a society, is the real moral arc of Miller's play; if Willy Loman is an American everyman, then his tragedy is not that of one man, but of a nation he represents.'

Is Willy's problem one of 'Bad Faith', such as Sartre might have called it, or do we see it in the context of Marxist 'False Consciousness'?  Is the play about a state of one man's mind or about a reaching out to a social ideal?

The moral philosopher, Mary Midgley, who died only last week wrote:  'The trouble with human beings is not really that they love themselves too much; they ought to love themselves more.  The trouble is simply that they don’t love others enough.'

The trouble with Willy is that he's not at home in his own skin.  Miller told John Lahr he wanted to have Willy in the play, so 'We should literally see, or be conscious of, his mind working elsewhere, with other people.'   

With Sartre it was the idea of the wine waiter banging the glasses down on the table, while his mind is elsewhere or the woman having sex and imagining she's with someone else.  With Willy he's hearing his brother Ben's voice in his head going on about the gold and wealth in Alaska.  Or as Miller says:  'I think we all think on two, three or four different levels at the same time.'

Sarah Churchwell, the literary academic in the programme writes of the subtitle of the play as being 'Certain private conversations in two acts and a requiem'.  She claims the play condemns the 'superficial fetishization of objects and rationalization of selfishness and greed.'  The materialisn that leaves the American dream 'rotting from the inside out'.

Miller based Willy on a family friend, Manny Newman, but the director of this Royal Exchange play, Sarah Frankcom, has staged 'Salesman' around a black family with what could well be a cultural coconut - brown on the outside and white on the inside, in the central role.

Towards the end of the play Willy tells his brother Ben 'I'm worth more dead than alive!'

And in almost the final utterance of his wife, Linda Loman, ejaculates over his grave is 'I've just paid off the final payment on the mortgage!'

When I got home I checked to make sure the Viburnham Farreri was still in flower and still fragrant..

 Go see the play!

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Germaine Greer on 'Bad Faith' & 'career rapees'

An anthropological approach to rape in society

by Brian Bamford

YESTERDAY Germaine Greer argued on Radio Four's 'TODAY' program that we need to look at how the rape narrative is tackled and defined in society, and what this tells us about the treatment of women today.  She said, among other things, when asked to define her stance on #MeToo, Ms Greer declared: ‘I don’t actually think it’s gone too far, I don’t think its got anywhere at all.'

She then added:  ‘What we need is to sort out the law regarding rape and to sort out our concept of what it is.
‘It’s pointless now bringing up this stuff when [for] most of it no action can be taken.
‘Why wait 20 years?’

She of course neglected to concern herself here with the treatment of men or boys in society.

 Cambridge House & the abuse of boys

And yet, I live in Rochdale where it was at Cambridge House in November 2012, that the issue of the exploitation and abuse of boys by Cyril Smith in the 1960s was initially reported on this NV Blog and simultaneously on the Westminster Politics Home website.  A few hours later Simon Danczuk made his speech in the House of Commons (an earlier story about this in 1979 in Rochdale's Alternative Paper [RAP] had been squashed by a threat of legal action by Cyril Smith's solicitor).

Rape & Jean-Paul Sartre on  'Bad Faith'

Ms. Greer told listeners to Radio Four that #MeToo doesn’t work:  ‘I don’t actually think it’s gone too far, I don’t think its got anywhere at all.
‘What we need is to sort out the law regarding rape and to sort out our concept of what it is.’

To understand this better perhaps we should consider the nature of bad faith and exploitative behaviour in human relationships generally.  Ms. Greer talks about women who 'open their legs' to gain career advantages from Harvey Weinstein

In the North it was in the 1970s and 80s, and may still be, a common practice for women to hang around in  pubs using their charms in order to get men to buy them free drinks, and one (perhaps I should say second generation feminist) use to complain to me about these working-class women who boasted about it as she thought it was 'disgusting' and anti-feminist.  When I went working in London I worked with men in the sugar refinery in Hammersmith who used to chat-up women in clubs and when the women went to the toilet they would tell me how they would empty their handbags. 

Dealing with bad faith in a way which seems to relate to what Ms. Greer has said, the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. gave an example of a young girl on a first date:
'The young woman’s date compliments her on her physical appearance, but she ignores the obvious sexual connotations of his compliment and chooses instead to direct the compliment at herself as a conscious human being. He then takes her hand, but she neither takes it nor rejects it. Instead, she lets her hand rest indifferently in his so as to buy time and delay having to make a choice about accepting or rejecting his advances. Whereas she chooses to treat his compliment as being unrelated to her body, she chooses to treat her hand (which is a part of her body) as an object, thereby acknowledging her freedom to make choices.'

 The #MeToo Mob in Hollywood want to argue that they had no choices and had to succumb to Weinstein's wilds and that they had no power of agency. 

Another example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a young woman on a first date.  The young woman’s date compliments her on her physical appearance, but she ignores the obvious sexual connotations of his compliment and chooses instead to direct the compliment at herself as a conscious human being.  He then takes her hand, but she neither takes it nor rejects it.  Instead, she lets her hand rest indifferently in his so as to buy time and delay having to make a choice about accepting or rejecting his advances.  Whereas she chooses to treat his compliment as being unrelated to her body, she chooses to treat her hand (which is a part of her body) as an object, thereby acknowledging her freedom to make choices.

For Sartre, people may pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make choices, but they cannot pretend to themselves that they are not themselves, that is, conscious human beings who actually have little or nothing to do with their pragmatic concerns, social roles, and value systems.

 Germaine Greer's anthropological analysis & the initiation of 'Donkey Dick'!

Germaine Greer's approach to what she calls 'career rapees' is it seems to me anthropological, while Sartre's is philosophical.

I mentioned Rochdale, and the historic case I knew about of the teenagers abused by Cyril Smith at Cambridge House, using spanking practices and 'false medicals'.  I could have dealt with the historic practices of the initiation ceremonies which took place in the factories in the North West of England in the 1950s and 60s, when I was an apprentice electrician.  Last month we had Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tueday, and it was at that time common for young apprentices to get their balls blacked or greased, or both.  De-bagging's of lads were often indulged in on the shopfloor on the pretext that it was an ancient custom of an 'iniation ceremony', in the 1950s it was argued that this should be done when lads reached 18-years when the lads became 'improvers', perhaps owing to the advent of the Welfare State, lads were becoming too big at 21 on completion of their apprenticeship when they officially 'came out of their time'.  One lad at Tweedale & Smalley where I worked, gained the title 'Donkey Dick' and seemed to enjoy the title as well as the exploits and High Jinks.

However an outsider may view these escapades, and when I did try to protest I was made to feel like a wet blanket,

How do we consider these initiation practices?  Are they to be represented as the abuse and exploitation of young people and apprentices by tradesmen?  Or are we to see it as an ancient custom perhaps handed down to us from the times of the rural village? Perhaps even Harvey Weinstein and those who engaged with him thought they we involved in some ancient ritual or initiation ceremony.

 Jean-Paul Sartre on Bad Faith | Outre monde:

www.https://outre-monde.com/2011/03/29/jean-paul-sartre-on-bad-faith/ 
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Juan Goytisolo: his ideas on politics & literature

by Brian Bamford

 Juan Goytisolo

1931-2017

THE Catalan writer Juan Goytisolo died last Sunday in Marrakesh.  Goytisolo, though born into a privileged family in 1931 - his father was imprisoned by the republican government during the Spanish Civil War, he had a difficult relationship with the Franco regime which censored his books, and he went to live in Paris permanently in 1956.

All his works had been banned in Spain until after Franco's death.

In France, mainly through his wife who was a writer and editor, he came to know the anarchist film director Luis Buñuel, as well as Sartre and de Beauvoir, Guy Debord, Camus, Raymond Queneau, Marguerite Duras and – especially – Jean Genet, who became a ‘moral, rather than literary’ mentor. Goytisolo has published over forty books, in various genres; his fiction, certainly since the 70s, is modernist in style and difficult to classify.  He is best known for his journalism, memoirs, and the novels that make up the ‘Alvaro Mendiola’ trilogy published between 1966-75.

He went into exile in France due to his 'total disagreement' with the Franco regime and the censorship it imposed.

He flirted with the communist party during the late 1950s, which brought him a four-month jail term, but he was inspired more by his opposition to the Franco dictatorship than by proletarian conviction.

He began writing at the age of 11, encouraged by his uncle Luis, and his first novels were published after attending law school.

His book Count Julian (1970, 1971, 1974) takes up, in an act of outspoken defiance, the side of Julian, count of Ceuta, a man traditionally castigated as the ultimate traitor in Spanish history.  In Goytisolo's own words, he imagines 'the destruction of Spanish mythology, its Catholicism and nationalism, in a literary attack on traditional Spain.'  He identifies himself 'with the great traitor who opened the door to Arab invasion.'  The narrator in this novel, an exile in North Africa like Goytisolo at the end of his life, rages against his beloved Spain, forming an obsessive identification with the fabled Count Julian, dreaming that, in a future invasion, the ethos and myths central to Hispanic identity will be totally destroyed.

In November 2014, Juan Goytisolo gave an online interview to the White Review with J.S. Tennant, in which he was asked about his attitude to Franco's Spain and his family background as well as questions on his view on the contempoary literature and the political situation: 
THE WHITE REVIEW—  Your works, and those of your two brothers, have continually recreated episodes from your family history to give a window onto Spain and Barcelona of the 1930s and ’40s. Has this semi-obsession with the period ever surprised you?

JUAN GOYTISOLO:
—  Well, the Civil War cast a long shadow and the death of our mother was a great shock. Later, I hated the Francoist regime and from the age of about 18 decided that this Spain was not my Spain. I lost my faith, became obsessed with the idea of escape, and read only banned books, which I sought out from among my mother’s shelves or in the back rooms of bookshops. 
 THE WHITE REVIEW:
—  You’ve written before that there’s no better reading experience than that of a banned book…
 JUAN GOYTISOLO:
—  Oh yes, a book by Cabrera Infante has a lot more worth in Cuba than outside the country, for example…Censorship has the Midas touch – everything it infects turns to gold. Everything becomes politicised; censorship exists to get rid of politics, but in fact it achieves the reverse.
THE WHITE REVIEW:
—  You taught yourself Catalan when living in Paris, but did your mother speak it?
JUAN GOYTISOLO:
—  She was bilingual Spanish/Catalan, and mostly read books in French. When she disappeared, Spanish became the only language of the house. I was taught practically nothing in the religious colleges I was sent to – I learnt French and English on my own, after I’d moved away.
 THE WHITE REVIEW:
—  When the Arab Spring started in Tunisia you were one of the first to publically predict the same would happen in Egypt…
JUAN GOYTISOLO:
—  It was like all revolutions, which start with a great yearning for freedom. All those young people on the barricades, thinking they were going to create a democratic state within a short period, I said to them, ‘Look at Spain, from the first Constitution in 1812 until 1879 there was an absolutist monarchy, then a liberal monarchy, three civil wars, four dictatorships…’ In France it was the same, it started with the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’, then came the Terror, the Directorate, and Napoleon as emperor. Creating democracy is a slow and circuitous process.
THE WHITE REVIEW:
—  Do you see any solution to what’s happening in Syria?
 JUAN GOYTISOLO:
—  No, and for a very simple reason (as things tend to be) that it is not in the United States’ interest for either side to win. So they are waiting for each to exhaust itself –sacrificing, in the process, the Syrian people. The mistake was not arming the opposition forces when they could have made a difference, and before their radicalisation.
 THE WHITE REVIEW:
—  Could popular uprisings happen here in Morocco, or Algeria?
 JUAN GOYTISOLO:
—  Algeria suffered a terrible civil war in the 1990s. People don’t want anything to do with extremism. There were a few reforms here, some of them cosmetic, and free elections were allowed which were won by an Islamist party, but the king still holds most of the power.
 THE WHITE REVIEW:
—  Do you believe that literature created from the margins is always better than more popular, visible, forms?
JUAN GOYTISOLO:
—  I’ve always found a perspective from the periphery more interesting than one from the centre.  I learnt this from the Christian converts in Spain, the Jewish conversos, who maintained a critical view of society because they were marginalised.  (But of course there are also those who situate themselves at the centre of things are still great writers.)  In spite of what they say, I’ve never promoted heterodoxy for its own sake, but to widen the traditional Spanish canon by rescuing what Arab culture, that of the Jews, the Enlightenment, the Illuminati, the freemasons and encyclopédistes have bestowed us.  My mission has been to rescue all that’s been excluded for religious or ideological reasons.

He went into exile in France due to his "total disagreement" with the Franco regime and the censorship it imposed.