PB's Notebook From The Republic of Letters, No. 10, September 2001

Our navy's been up to tricks again. Not only do our submariners yield the helm to guests to practice emergency surfacing maneuvers and ram Japanese fishing vessels, thirty-five of the same were also recently ordered to stand on deck in ceremonial blues for two hours as part of "a work of art" by the Italian artiste Vanessa Beecroft. Maybe the name "Vanessa" is ill-fated (think Redgrave), but what I would love to see—far more than visiting her "installation"—is the year's worth of correspondence with "administrators in the navy" which produced this little oddity. What on earth could they have spent a year talking about? And what did the poor sailors have to say about this project?

It is a dead certainty that Chichikov was politicallly incorrect in his depiction of the "dead souls" he harvested so rapaciously. Monsieur Homard felt aggrieved. If we ran contests the way some magazines do, there'd be a nice prize for rewriting fiction to take care of these and other like injustices.

In which case we'd be following the example of Ms. Alice Randall, who feels that the black folk in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind didn't get a fair shake from the author. Ms. Randall, a Harvard graduate (her undergraduate thesis was on feminism in Jane Austen), decided she'd set things to rights with The Wind Done Gone, which she terms a "parody." (Of what, pray tell? Where that wind done gone to, honey chil'?) In Ms. Randall's version of the novel, poor Scarlett has a half-sister called Cynara, naturally the result of a misalliance between the (wicked) plantation owner and his Mammy. To show her novel is not just a rip-off, Ms. Randall has introduced the obligatory 21st century frisson or two, several homosexuals (cos' that was common in the ol' South), slave-owners who are uniformly lazy (shiftless) and incompetent, and of course very correct discourse on women and blacks.

But before you hop to your screen to re-write Richard III from the standpoint of his missing horse, or re-tool Philip Roth's work from the dick's point of view, be aware that an Alabama court has found Ms. Randall's novel to be "unabated plagiarism" and its publication (due in June) has been canceled, pending appeal.

Mind you, I didn't expect the appeal to fail and it didn't. In our times, no appeal to free speech (the right to besmirch anyone and anything with impunity) goes unrewarded. Houghton Mifflin (older readers will remember this house as one that, long ago, published serious work) claims Ms. Randall is entitled to publish (in the New York Times' words) "an important political parody of a mythic story that many African-Americans find demeaning."

Speaking as a writer (Miss Mitchell is long-dead, and her rights to her work are held by a trust), I well understand why the lower court ruled as it did. You don't rewrite history to right a wrong, and what writers create is their inalienable property. Sure you can parody it, briefly. But to steal a novel's characters, its setting, its time and its place is as much theft as, say, what foundations do when they betray or alter the intent of their founders, or museums when they charge admission to see works given them for free exhibition to the public.

I have to admit, I'm not at all sure that freedom is some sort of absolute good that we should pursue for ourselves and for all, or that the absence of freedom is an absolute bad that ought to be castigated in all places at all times. There are many freedoms we happily give up: a monk in a monastery is not "free" to rise at ten; a soldier is not free to take a joy-ride in the company tank. In theory, at least, politicians are our servants. Marriage maketh not a man or a woman free, and I can think of many times in which freedom might be a positive encumbrance. Faced with a complex machine (say one controlling the electricity grid for California) and told to pick a button to push, ignorance of possible results would put me (and you) in a dither. That's not the kind of freedom we want to have.

Reading a rather awful book on slavery under Islam by a South African journalist (you know a book is pseudo scholarship when the authorities cited are all from secondary sources and the author clearly hasn't checked out the accuracy of the statements made in those sources) leads to some melancholy conclusions—primarily that conclusion which holds that any absence of freedom is to be considered intrinsically bad.

The French are lonesome, said an old friend this summer. It's noticeable. The trouble lies with the fact that ever fewer speak their language—or have reason to speak it—and almost no one takes their culture or their power seriously any more. Apart from William Pfaff, who exalts France from his Herald tribune, and Richard Mayle whose cotton-candy Provence bears only the faintest relation to reality, who in the world really looks to France for… ? For new technology, for political or cultural leadership? For initiative, efficiency?

The elites have shown themselves as comfortable with corruption and lies as those of any Third World nation: the president spends public moneys on private vacations, the prime minister lies for years about his political past. The educational system is in tatters, the economy is under-performing, the bureaucracy is Byzantine and inefficient (which the Byzantines were not), and French diplomacy, apart from a few vague "humanitarian" gestures is caught between German power, British obduracy and the fact that America runs the world. Worse still, the French are thronging to MacDo and Disneyland, Australian and American wines (not to speak of Chilean, Argentine and South African) are undermining the French wine trade, and, I can confidently report, classic French cuisine is largely a thing of the past.

One would be more sympathetic if the French, who invented the word chauvinism, were not quite so committed to their own grandeur. It is tempting to trace la solitude francaise to its present socialist government, but that would be unfair. Socialism has two fundamental defects: its internationalism (which is of course in conflict with France's obsessive nationalism), and a belief that there is a social and political solution to every problem. French socialism, however, is only a reflection of the notion that the state is everything and the individual nothing, and that misguided belief is as old as the French state itself.

In my new home-away-from-home in Uzes one can see this isolation and dependence on the state at work. When the present Jospin government came to power, unemployment was high. The reason it was high was obvious. Nobody wanted to hire young workers when the following ensued: when it was nearly impossible to discharge them if they were inefficient or business conditions deteriorated; when the cost of hiring a new employee involved paying an extra sixty percent plus for medical and unemployment insurance, etc; and when the French culture of work meant that sick days and holidays, official and otherwise, could amount to more than twenty percent of the working year.

The solution offered was the thirty-five-hour week. Enforced. By which I mean that there are real-live inspectors (there's job creation for you!) who come by to make sure that you do not work more than thirty-five hours. Thus, if like my cafe friend Jean-Louis, who stays open from seven until near midnight, you already couldn't afford to take on new help (and what gilded youth cossetted by the state, and able to work six months and then go on the dole for six, wants the hard work of a café?), you now would be obliged to take on two, because one would have to stop half way through the day.

I could say a lot about the sheer inanity of the legislation—not inane at all, of course, in political terms, since it swings some two million young (the chief beneficiaries) votes towards the sentimental left—but I have to admit that once the French state goes into action (and no country is more intrinsically totalitarian) there is nothing quite like it. A country that prides itself on its "democratic" traditions leaves no choice whatever to those who might want to work harder or longer? A country in which one person in twenty is a cop of some sort or another and something like three in ten persons are largely or wholly dependent on the state, now adds another layer of bureaucratic busybodies?

On a weightier note, allow me to return to art. Those two Russian con-men, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, have come up with a new art scam. Congratulate them, dear Reader, for it is getting harder and harder to come up with a new art scam, though the fringes of our art market are never short of earnest efforts—viz the young man, John Fryer, who went on the Net to sell everything he owned (except himself, of course) and the University of Iowa which bought two of his discarded front false teeth for the University's collections. The curator at Iowa, one Howard Collinson, plans to build an exhibit around those teeth ($27 is cheap for a modern scam, but then we have to factor in the overheads, the exhibit, Mr. Collinson's no doubt handsome emoluments). Says our noble curator: "John is doing what great art does, which is to explore the world around us and help us to think differently about it." Uh-huh. I need Mr. Fryer's teeth to help me think "differently"? (By the way, I think Mr. Collinson means that the dentures might give us fresh thoughts, not that we'd think in a different way; but grammar's never been a strong point among contemporary curators.)

Messrs Komar and Melamid have got elephants painting—with a brush held in their trunk and different colored pots of paint before them. Our hero curator here is a certain Russel Storer of the Australian (Sydney) Museum of Contemporary Art. It is to Mr. Storer that we owe the ultimate definition of art for our day. Says he: "Everything shown in a museum is artistic. If an artist says what he does is art, it's art. If recognized talents like Komar and Melamid say [the elephant paintings] are art, they are."

I fart, therefore I am. My fart is art. Solipsism's come a long way, baby!