“Young Romantics” by Daisy Hay

Hay makes the case that the second generation of Romantic poets, particularly Shelley, Keats, and Byron, coalesced around Leigh Hunt, an editor and publisher of the political newspaper, The Examiner, who also wrote his own, if more ephemeral, poetry. Hunt was a radical whose own editorials earned him two years in Surrey Gaol on a charge of libel to the Crown. The Examiner’s motto was “Party is the Madness of the Many for the Gain of a Few.” From 1813 to 1815, Hunt and his brother John, The Examiner’s printer, who was also incarcerated on the same libel charge, were able to keep the paper running every week from prison. In fact, the fame and repute of the paper only grew and Leigh Hunt attracted many famous visitors to his prison cell, amongst them Lord Byron. Soon after their first meeting, Byron would write in his journal of Hunt that he is a soul “not exactly of the present age [and] he is, perhaps, a little opinionated, as are all men who are the centre of circles, wide and narrow.” To contemporary friends and foes, Hunt was the man to whom the fashionably avant-garde painters, sculptors, journalists, and poets of the day gravitated. Hunt would establish ‘sociability’ as an ideological principle in its own right.

This book is a joint biography of the group Hay labels as the “young romantics.” It skips along between the travails of the Hunt family, both pecuniary and political, the affair and marriage of Percy Shelley to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and the brief romance, the ensuing pregnancy, and the much longer feud between Lord George Byron and Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairmont. To a lesser degree, John Keats’ relationship with Hunt and Shelley floats in and out of Hay’s story. Throughout her book, lesser known family, friends, and artists such as William Godwin, Thomas Peacock, Thomas Hogg, Vincent Novello, Benjamin Haydon, Joseph Severn, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Edward Williams, and Edward Trelawny add color to the lives of the protagonists.

Percy Shelley, despite being married to a wife enduring her first pregnancy, upon his first meeting with his idol, William Godwin, ended up falling head over heels in love with his sixteen year old daughter, Mary. Shelley would write to a friend of her, “how deeply did I not feel my inferiority, how willingly I confess myself far surpassed in originality, in genuine elevation & magnificence of the intellectual nature until she consented to share her capabilities with me.” This affair of “free love” would shape the lives of Percy, Mary and Claire, the latter of whom would accompany the previous two on their escape from the unreceptive Godwins across the Continent and back to England. Shelley was part aristocrat, part radical, and part reformer, whose first major poem Queen Mab would be decried by the establishment for its atheism, republicanism, and materialism, particularly the Tory press. Hay writes, “it was the poem of a man who could never be dull: cool and reasoned maybe, but also susceptible to fits of hyperactive over-excitement and to dreams and hallucinations.” After all, Shelley was the type of man who, on their escape through war-torn France, “one day…. decided to adopt a beautiful little girl he saw on the road, and was surprised and put out when her father informed him she was not available.” The most practical of men he was not. Shelley’s friend Peacock would agree “that a man who lived so totally out of the ordinary world and in a world of ideas, needed such an ever-present sympathy [of a woman like Mary] more than the general run of men.” Shelley’s second major poem, Alastor, would be a meditation on the virtues of isolation versus companionship for the artist. Was the search for knowledge a solitary one? Was isolation necessary to produce a great work? In Alastor, Shelley would disagree, “those who love not their fellow-beings, live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.” Shelley had a specific teleological idea of poetry at its best. He wrote, “poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not, the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.”

To many of her contemporaries Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was no more than the sum of her components. Her father, William Godwin, was a radical anarchist, whose political writings were among the most influential of his day. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a feminist and philosopher, whose thoughts on marriage and childrearing were among the most well-known, if radically subversive to mainstream morality, of her times. Her lover and future husband, Percy Shelley, was an up and coming poet of the new school, whose political verse was already causing a rage amongst the conservative press. However, Mary Shelley came into her own with the publication of her novel, Frankenstein. She published the work when she was twenty-one, having started it on a challenge by Byron to write a ghost story. Hay writes that “Frankenstein condemns…. isolation, self-indulgence, and an abnegation of social responsibility…. It champions a method of endeavour in which ideas reach fruition through ‘many a walk, many a drive, many a conversation.’” Mary Shelley’s novel combined her father’s ideas of historical perfectibility, her mother’s thoughts on parental responsibility, and her husband’s materialism in her own way, while throwing in her own ideas on the importance of community for the impetus of creation. Frankenstein was a social critique, as well as a manifesto of social duty. It’s nuanced prose led to a reading of layered meanings with multiple interpretations. Some of Mary Shelley’s later works would play on darker themes. Isolation and regret would seep to the fore. Later in life, Mary, having lived through much tragedy, including the deaths of three of her children, would admit that “the living were not fit companions for me, and I was ever meditating by what means I might shake them all off, and never be heard of again.”

Lord George Byron would tell Hunt immediately following his engagement to Annabella Milbanke, in what would be a disastrously loveless marriage, that he was “in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness.” At this time Byron was already engaged in semi-secret sexual relations with his half-sister, Augusta, perhaps fathering her child. Byron was the embodiment of the aristocrat. He would wake up after noon, chat, read, ride, and shoot pistols through the day, dine with friends late into the night, and finish another bottle of wine while writing verse, before going to bed around four or five in the morning. He seduced women, young and old, married and virginal, with abandon. Byron was a man on contradictions. He lived a life of solipsism and decadence, but also with his own particular code of honor and virtue. He could alternate between being miserly with his fortune and secretly helping an acquaintance in desperate need. His poems, particularly Don Juan, were regarded by his peers as the pinnacle of the day’s verse. His contemporaries only wished that he lived a little bit less and wrote a little bit more. Towards the end of his life, Mary Shelley would note that “she had seen him be kind to children and servants- to the weak and defenceless- [and] that it was only to his equals that he was cruel.” 

“The Mountain Shadow” by Gregory David Roberts

This sequel to Shantaram is pretty much more of the same. It has Lin still working for the Company in Bombay and still in love with a married Karla. Didier is still hanging out at the Leopold bar, drinking too much and doing enough dirt to get by. Even, the Zodiac Georges have an improbable role in the story. Abdullah, the nicest and most honorable street thug killer there ever was, pops in and out of the tale, helping as stoic best friend, sparring partner, confidant, and angel protector. The warring mafias still rule the streets and bribe the cops with abandon. The fast paced plot lines interweave and are occasionally interspersed with quasi-deep philosophical asides. There is love, sex, murder, bribes, beatings, and lots of joints being smoked by all. Again, the star character is the city of Bombay herself. The city pulses with vibrancy as the story unfolds.

“Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Behind” by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This is the third novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. The two women, Elena and Lila, have both grown into married adults, but have also grown apart. Elena is married to a university professor and has moved to Florence, while Lila is working in a sausage factory on the outskirts of Naples. Elena’s novel is a huge, if risqué, hit, reviewed in all the major Italian newspapers. She travels the country, staying in fancy hotels, and giving lectures on her writing. But soon all is not well. After giving birth, she feels the strains of family life. Suddenly her leg begins to hurt, reminding her of her crippled mother’s, her baby never sleeps and refuses to nurse from her breast, and her husband is too distracted by his work to help out around the house. Despite all her worldly success, Elena is still shackled by the traditional roles expected of a married woman in Italy. Lila, meanwhile, struggles through her life in Naples, raising a child out of wedlock, and living together with an old neighborhood friend, Enzo, in an ambiguously sexual relationship. Power, sex, and tradition all intermingle as these women try to navigate and defy social expectations in post-war Italy.

What ties the novel together is the ongoing politicization of Italy. The country is being divided between the Fascists and the Communists. There are pitched battles in the streets every day. The universities have been taken over by radical students, who berate their own professors and spend all day out of class and plotting revolution. The workers in the factories are organizing, while gangs of fascist thugs, recruited from the slums, menace any leftist political gathering, carrying metal pipes and knives. One cannot help but have a political opinion. Italy is on fire and both Elena and Lila are caught in the middle. Despite time and distance, however, they cannot seem to break the childhood bond between them, for better or for worse.

“Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture” by Rene Girard with Pierpaolo Antonello and Joao Cezar de Castro Rocha

As in many of Girard’s other works, this book is constructed as a series of dialogues between Girard and his interlocutors. This book was published in 2008 and thus is an attempt to clarify and modify his mimetic mechanism, first developed in works like “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.”  It also deals with the familiar Girardian themes of doubles, sacrifice, scapegoating, ritual, victimhood, and the founding murder, portrayed through myth, literature, and religion. Girard explains his underlying methodology, “there is also a strong curiosity, and curiosity and understanding are obviously linked. There is a form of humility as well, in the sense that it is a methodological attitude, a postulate that you have to have in order to solve specific problems. I have the impression sometimes that a book I am reading could upset my entire existence.” Girard never claims to be a theologian. He views himself as a literary scholar and an anthropologist.

Girard’s analysis goes back to man’s origins and that is where he seeks to find the beginnings of culture. “Stoning (or crushing) and throwing someone from a rock are forms of sacrificial killings which are related to each other. They are forms of capital punishment where everybody participates and nobody is responsible. Nobody touches the victim. It is a form of collective and unanimous capital punishment, and it is a way of uniting the community when you have neither the central power nor judicial system that can prevent mimetic conflicts. There must be a device that makes collective killing possible at a distance, without any polluting contact with the victim. This is really the beginning of the state as an institution.” He explains the mimetic mechanism, “it describes the whole process, beginning with mimetic desire, which then becomes mimetic rivalry, eventually escalating to the stage of mimetic crisis and finally ending with the scapegoat resolution.” Girard goes on to detail how the scapegoat mechanism works, “in the frenzy of the mimetic violence of the mob, a focal point suddenly appears, in the shape of the ‘culprit’ who is thought to be the cause of the disorder and the one who brought the crisis into the community. He is single out and unanimously killed by the community. He isn’t any guiltier than any other, but the whole community strongly believes he is. The killing of scapegoat ends the crisis, since the transference against it is unanimous. That is the importance of the scapegoat mechanism: it channels the collective violence against one arbitrarily chosen member of the community, and this victim becomes the enemy of the entire community, which is reconciled as a result.” This founding murder is embedded in culture through ritual. “Ritual is a cultural form that prepares for the sacrificial resolution, but it serves mainly as a form of controlling violence, and the increasing sophistication of ritualistic forms and elements helps in distancing further and further a given culture from the original violence implicit in the ritualistic act…. As in all sacrificial rites, it is the ritualization of a spontaneous collective murder…. Repetition is as important as imitation for cultural transmission. ” 

However, Girard also recognizes that mimetic desire can be a positive for society. “Mimetic desire is what makes us human, what makes possible for us the breakdown from routinely animalistic appetites, and constructs our own, albeit inevitably unstable, identities…. There would be no human mind, no education, no transmission of culture without mimesis.” Humans might have come from humans, but there is also a distinction in quality, not just gradient between ethology and ethnology. “Symbolicity is essential. Scientists have the tendency to overlook the emergence of symbolicity as the force behind the discontinuity between animals and humans.”  

Girard sees truth embedded in ancient myths. “Myths are forms of organization of knowledge- and in fact the word veda means knowledge, science- and this knowledge is essentially related to desire and sacrifice…. Why are there myths and stories that seem so similar? Why do all these cultures carry similar features and tell of an original murder?…. I am in search of the innocent victim in any historical, mythical and fictional account…. One has to regard mythology and archaic religion as a riddle, and the solution of that riddle is quite real. Myth is primarily the accusation of the victim presented as guilty. Moreover, the myth is written from the point of view of the accusers.” Myth and ritual are intimately intertwined. “Whatever one demonstrates in myth, there is a direct counterpart of it in ritual, and vice versa…. Ritual is the deliberate reproduction of the mechanism; myth is the narrative…. Normally ritual is more directly revealing than myth, and this is because it confirms the interpretation of the latter as the resolution of the mimetic crisis…. Ritual confirms that the victim is really killed. Myth suggests that the victim is killed in order to reproduce the effects of the first murder.” Girard recounts three elements he finds in these myths, “(1) a crisis of undifferentiation (which corresponds to the orgiastic elements in rituals); (2) a victimary sign that singles out a villain; (3) an expulsion/killing of this villain (which is also represented as a hero because he/she eventually saves the community.” The link between myth and the founding murder (and its coverup) is what is most essential. “In myth, it is much more obvious that there is this logical inconsistency, and when one realizes that inconsistency is an invariant, it no longer looks like a mere logical inconsistency, but it turns into a clue which suggests the violent origin of the myth: a logical break, which is the same in so many myths, can’t be meaningless. This constant similarity, in spite of the diversity of myths, points to the presence of a common cause of logical distortion at the threshold of human culture. I believe that this cause is the original founding murder, and myths do their best- unconsciously at first, and then more consciously- to erase the traces of scapegoating…. Practically every story of origin or foundational myth states that society was founded upon a murder.” This origin of culture gradually evolved until its origins were obscured. “If the scapegoat mechanism is our common cultural ‘ancestor’, ritual sacrifice is an intermediate step in the evolution of cultural forms, while social institutions are mature forms derived from this process.”

Christianity was the break from archaic religion in that it proclaimed the victim as innocent. “Christianity, in the figure of Jesus, denounced the scapegoat mechanism for what it actually is: the murder of an innocent victim, killed in order to pacify a riotous mob.” Christianity is actually anti-mythology. “Christianity is also paradoxical, because the more similar it seems to mythology, the more clearly it becomes a radical rereading of myths, the preparation of the deconstruction of all mythical presuppositions…. Myth is against the victim, whereas the Bible is for the victim…. In the Old Testament, the innocent victim appears for the first time. The victim is the only innocent person within a guilty community…. Revelation is the reproduction of the victimary mechanism by showing the truth, knowing that the victim is innocent and that everything is based on mimetism. The Gospel represents the crucifixion as a mimetic phenomenon. The true cause of Peter’s denial, of Pilate’s behaviour, of the bad thief’s attitude, is their imitation of the crowd, the collective mimetism, the violent contagion. Jesus is innocent. But everything lies upon mimetic unanimity…. Jesus saves all human beings because of his revelation of the scapegoat mechanism, which also deprives us more and more of sacrificial protection, therefore forcing us to abstain from violence if we want to survive. In order to reach the Kingdom, man has to renounce violence…. violence which is not divine but human.” According to Girard, it is Nietzsche who has it backwards. “Nietzsche is never more wrong than when he says that Christianity is the religion of the crowd, as opposed to Dionysus, which is seen as the religion of the aristocracy, of a minority. It is exactly the other way around: Dionysus is the crowd and Christianity is the small minority able to resist the crowd.” The revelation in Christianity is that the guilty are the many, while the victim alone is innocent. “This compassion for the victim is the deeper meaning of Christianity…. We do not have to accuse our neighbour; we can learn to forgive him instead.”

“Free Food For Millionaires” by Min Jin Lee

This was Lee’s first published novel. Like “Pachinko” it is at heart a story of an immigrant family trying to find a place in their new world. They struggle with straddling the line between their old and new cultures, trying to feel at home in both or even in either one. However, unlike Lee’s latest work, this novel has more of a soap opera tone. I do not mean that in a disparaging way. The story is not tragic, while still dealing with the harsh realities that all immigrant families face. This novel deals with the dramas of dating, clothes, and style, while also touching heavily on more weighty themes such as familial duty, fitting in, and racial mixing. The protagonist, Casey, is a Korean girl who just graduated from Princeton and grew up in Queens, the daughter of two dry cleaner workers. She is thoroughly Western in mindset, but her family tries to assert their own Eastern sensibilities on her as well. Her younger sister, Tina, a pre-med at MIT, has seemed to have figured out how to balance both worlds and, therefore, is viewed as the golden child in the family. Casey struggles through life, dating and dumping a white boyfriend, hooking up with coworkers at an investment bank, and eventually dating a Korean-American banker from Texas. Her work life is equally hectic, as she refuses to settle for what is expected of her. Throughout the story socioeconomic class comes up again and again as Casey interacts with Ivy League graduate bankers and friends from Princeton who went to Andover, Exeter, and Groton and who summer on Nantucket. Her best friend from college is on a seemingly endless tour of men through Italy as she continually postpones a graduate degree in art. Casey’s mentor is an older Korean lady, married to an Italian Jew, who runs her own boutique department store in Chelsea. She freely gives out lavish gifts and advice, but expects devotion in return. One anchor in every Korean immigrant community is the Church. But even within the congregation in Queens there is a divide between the doctors, accountants, and other professionals and the dry cleaners, shopkeepers, and bodega owners. Class again asserts itself. This is a tale of a girl growing up in New York, finding herself, and learning how to be true to her values, while coming to terms with her parents and traditions.