Welcome to the Handmaid's Tale...

 

Despite claims to the contrary, it can happen here  as many of us who live in the United States learned last week. Some, including many Democrats, have long said or seemed to believe that something like a ban on abortion could never happen here. But last weeks events has once again foregrounded the fact that prophecies based on never saying never again and again are not, in the end, valid substitutes for the real thing.

As someone who has extensively studied American religion, particularly American Protestant and American new religious movements, over the years, I have long said that the nationalist Protestant and Catholic religiious right are on a holy crusade to roll back things that they think are unAmerican and damaging to what they think America is and should be, images that are, of course, more fantasy than reality but then most humans do generally construct their own realities. It has been clear since the 1960s that this authoritarian if not totalitartian ditto head theocratic often religious dominated right has no self-doubts about what they are doing and has no qualms about using majority rule to their political, ideological, and religious advantage. After all, they believe that they are god's chosen people and that they are on a mission for this god to make America holy and, by extension, great again, as if imperial America needs any more help in this regard.

What is clear is that these religious and predominantly Christian theocratic nationalists control a number of state legislatures in the US, that they increasingly control the legal apparatus of the nation, something that, as the ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade makes clear, matters, and that this nationalist faith lies deep in the hearts of "souls" of many of its devotees, men and women, across the country and particularly in certain parts of the nation. These American religious nationalists, in other words, aren't going anywhere soon and if you expect them to be raptured within the next week you might want to think again.

Given that this American religious nationalism isn't going anywhere soon and that these religious nationalists now basically control the courts of the nation it is time to think about what comes next. Justice Clarence Thomas urged the Court to revist the ruling making same sex marriage legal and to revisit its rulings on contraception in his assent in overturning Roe v Wade. He is, after all, a good right wing theocratic Catholic, at least selectively. At the moment there is little the American Congress can do to stop such revisitings from moving up the legal system ladder and potentially being overturned in the courts. Needless to say, the strategy of the nationalist right to use the courts, which they increasingly dominate, to chip away at rights and then, when the time is ripe, eliminate them has been around for some time now, has been successful as last weeks events show, and is likely to continue to be successful in the near future.

What to do? For those fearful of their rights being increasingly chipped away and undermined by the American courts and the US Supreme Court have, it seems to me, few options available to them. They can wait and hope that the Democrats gain enough power to protect them. The Democrats, or at least the saner elements amongst them, however, have proven again and again to be as weak as proverbial water when it comes to protecting the rights of Americans. They aren't even able to protect the reasonable regulation of guns or the right to an abortion, let alone enact them. They can follow the increasingly underground railroad to Canada (where I want to go) or Ireland, the latter which has moved from the stone age into the modern world recently while the US keeps moving in the other direction. That, however, is beyond the financial capabilities of many Americans including many American seniors like myself who are trapped in the American Medicare system and in the cage of their meagre pensions. Or they can urge their states to secede, which is what I think those states which continue to allow abortions need to think about. Or finally they can simply sit around hoping that it, whatever it is, never happens here.

The Books of My Life: Doctor Who (Newman)

I didn't really start watching the BBC television programme Doctor Who until the 1970s. I had seen a few of the Doctor Who serials when William Hartnell was the Doctor from 1963 to 1966, but had only a vague memory of those that I had watched. These were the days, after all, when TV repeats were limited, when the Beatles were popular, and when video cassette recorders and DVD players did not exist. I was unable to see any of the Doctor Who serials from the years when Patrick Troughton was the regenerated Doctor beginning in 1966 and when Jon Pertwee assumed the role of the Doctor beginning in 1970. 

It really wasn't until the Tom Baker years, from 1974 to 1981, that I really started watching Doctor Who religiously, mostly in omnibus form. By that time I much preferred Who's genre blending (science fiction meets horror meets comedy), whimsy, wit, and referentiality to self-important American science fiction TV programmes like Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969). I continued watching Doctor Who through the years when Peter Davison (1982-1984), Colin Baker (1984-1986), and Sylverster McCoy (1987-1989) assumed the mantle of the Doctor and enjoyed it despite the negative folklore that grew up around the show--of which I was unaware--about its poor special effects, its obvious rubber monsters, and its flimsy sets. I focused my attention more on story than on the visual spectacles associated with the show. 

I was saddened when Doctor Who went into hiatus in 1989 at the insistence, at least in the fan demonology of the show, of Sir Michael Grade, the controller of the BBC at the time. I did not see the Anglo-American Doctor Who television movie in 1996 (BBC/Fox) with Paul McGann as the eighth doctor. I was not even aware of its existence as I didn't watch much television at the time involved as I was in the academic world. I did not initially watch the revival of the show under much heralded writer Russell T. Davies in 2005, but once I did, I must admit, after some initial hesitation--I questioned whether it would ever be the Who of my memories--I grew to like it very very much and contine to watch the show when I can.

Given my interest in Doctor Who it should not be surprising that I have, on occasion, read several non-fiction books on the show. I read, for instance, John Tulloch's and Manuel Alverado's Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text from 1983 with its emphasis on semiotic, narratological, and production aspects of the show, in the late 1980s. I took occasional excursions into David Howe's and Stephen James Walker's excellent, authoritative, and opinionated scholar fan episode guide The Television Companion: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide Doctor Who from 2003 particularly after I acquired a number of the DVD's of the show. I read the revised edition of James Chapman's excellent cultural history of Doctor Who, Inside the Tardis: The Worlds of Doctor Who from 2013, which had extensive discussion of the Christopher Eccleston (2005), David Tennant (2005-2010), and Matt Smith (2010-2013) years of the revived Doctor Who in 2018. And recently I read Kim Newman's brief monograph on what is now generally referred to as Classic Who (1963-1989), Doctor Who: A Critical Reading of the Series (London: BFI, TV Classics series, 2005).

Newman, a longtime critic for the British Film Institute's (BFI) magazine Sight and Sound, has written a monograph on Doctor Who that is similar to other entries in the BFI TV Classics series including Ann Billson's on the superb American television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Newman's longish essay on Who, like Billson's on Buffy, takes a chronological approach to Doctor Who providing readers with a brief history of the series from its birth in 1963 with its mysterious and alien Doctor, to its regeneration under the cosmic hobo Doctor in 1966, to its zenith under the swinging sixties Bondish Doctor beginning in 1970 and its Gothic Doctor beginning in during the years Philip Hinchcliffe was producer of the show (1974 to 1977), to its increasingly pantomime or "panto" Doctor during the years Graham Williams produced the show (1977 to 1981) when ratings began to decline, and finally to its slow death from 1982 to 1989.

Newman's monograph, as the subtitle of the book makes clear, is more than simply a historical analysis of Classic Who with brief discussions of the TV movie and revived series thrown in for good measure. It is also a critical analysis of the show from the perspective of a scholar fan. Newman makes clear that he was, from the first episode he saw, "The Dalek Invasion of Space", the second episode in the second series of Doctor Who from 1964 that "starred" what have become the most famous villains in Doctor Who, the Daleks, a fan of the show. He remained, he writes, a devoted fan through the years when Who became something more than what he calls a kiddie Quatermass, Nigel Kneale's famous three part BBC series (1953, 1955, 1959), thanks to its Gothic horror, its humour, its conspiracy tales, its futurism, and its philosophising, but started to waver with the introduction of K-9, the computer/dog that was the Doctor's first non-human companion in 1977, and thanks to the years that Douglas Adams served as script editor of the show between 1979 and 1980. 

As a critic, an inherently normative enterprise, Newman makes no bones about disliking K-9, the "piss-take" Adams years, the fundamentalist theocritism of fans who demanded continuity, and Mary Whitehouse, the doyen of British moral guardians, whose organisation complained about violence in the Gothic horror era early during Tom Baker's reign as the Doctor (1974-1977) leading, though Newman doesn't really explore this in any detail, the BBC to tone down the horror changing Doctor Who in the process. As a critic Newman admits that he liked some episodes and did not like others.

Thanks to its largely normative approach to Doctor Who Newman's monograph is characterised by a  problem associated with all such criticism, its notion of value and beauty is ultimately grounded in the eye of the beholder regardless of how sophisticated the eye of the particular beholder is. Additionally, Newman's Doctor Who suffers, largely because of its monographic nature, from lack. Newman does not, for instance, mention Verity Lambert, the first producer of Doctor Who who helped establish the narrative, mythological, and visual nature of the show. He does little with the production contexts of the show. His contextualisation of Doctor Who in broader economic, political, and cultural contexts is limited to generalisations. Despite such issues, which may be a problem for some, I still highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of British television, British science fiction television, and British culture since Doctor Who became and remains, thanks to its Britishness, something of a British cultural institution.

 

The Books of My Life: North America

 

The edited collection North America: The Historical Geography of a Changing Continent (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, second edition, 2001) edited by Thomas McIlwraith and Edward Muller, is an exemplary geographical history of Canada and the United States. The book and its essays, written mostly by historical geographers with a historian and a sociologist thrown in, is a superb introduction to the economic, geographic, demographic, and, if to a much lesser extent, cultural and political histories of Canada and the United States from the colonial era to the early twenty-first century.

McIlwraith's and Muller's North America should be standard and fundamental reading in advanced introductory history, historical geography, historical sociology, and historical ethnography courses. Essays explore European imperialism and colonisation, adaptations to the environment and the remaking of the environment, the development of Canadian and American cities, the development of the Canadian and American wheat belts, corn belts, and cotton belts and the relation of these to labour needs and technological changes, and the development of industrial Canada and the United States, all essential information for the budding historian, historical geographer, historical sociologist, and ethnohistorian.

My only slight complaints about the book, beyond its limited attention to culture and politics, revolve around the fact that the historical geography of Canada is slighted in comparison to the historical geography of the United States as is explicit comparative analysis of both nation-states. I really would like to have seen more on the historical geography of the true North and the comparative history of these two British settler societies which share much not to mention more comparison with two other British settler societies, Australia and New Zealand, which also, for example, had frontiers, indigeneous peoples, gold rushes, industrialisation, modernity, and postmodernity. The one explicitly comparative essay in the book, Richard Harris's "Canadian Cities in a North American Context", is a superb exploration of the approaches to Canadian cities relative to US cities--the same, different, regionally similar, convergent. Such comparative analysis is essential if we are to understand the similarities and differences between modern and postmodern British settler societies. Highly recommended.

The Books of My Life: Fathers and Children/Fathers and Sons

I read Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev's Ottsy i deti (1862) literally Fathers and Children, but often translated as Fathers and Sons, for the first time, if memory serves, probably in Rosemary Edmonds's fine translation for Penguin, when I was a teenager. Unfortunately, a lot of Turgenev's tale about generations--literal and symbolic fathers or father figures and mothers and mother figures like Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov, Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov, Vasily Ivanovich Bazarov, Arina Vlasyevna Bazarova; the liminal figures of Anna Sergeyevna Odintsova, Yevgeny Vasilievich Bazarov, the Princess Kh, and Yevdoksya Nikitishina Kukshina; and children or surrogate children like Arkady Nikolayavich Kirsanov, Mitya, and Yekaterina Sergeyevna Lokteva, some of them locked in generational battles, some of these ideological--went right over my head as classics tend to do when you are young and you are really not given or don't quite grasp much of the historical, social, and cultural context to understand them in. I recently read Fathers and Children again and, thanks to the education that comes with schooling and with growing up and growing older, an education that hopefully makes one wiser, I think I grasped the book, and particularly the historical social and cultural context of Turgenev's classic work, much better than I did as a child.

This time I read two translations of Fathers and Children, one, an extensively revised version of Constance Garnett's translation by Elizabeth Cheresh Allen contained in Alllen's extensive The Essential Turgenev (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994), the other a translation by Michael Pursglove published by Alma Classics (Richmond, Surrey, 2010). The former was translated from the complete works of Turgenev published between 1978 and 1986 while the latter was translated from the OGIZ edition of 1948. Both, as a result, seemed to contain variations of Turgenev's text presumably because they were translated from two different editions of Turgenev's classic.

As is always the case with translations, I was somewhat annoyed by a few of the choices the translators made. I really didn't like Allen's decision to translate Odintsova as Mrs. Odintsov (Garnett apparently translated it as Madam Odintsov) and to leave the last names of the males the same, Bazarov, for instance, as they are in Russian. I didn't like Pursglove's decision to translate Kirsanov as Mr. Kirsanov while translating Odintsova as Odintsova and leaving the other male names as they are in the original Russian text. Both decisions, to me, were unnecessary because the intelligent reader would eventually grasp how Russian name forms work as they were reading the book, just as one grasps the hybrid language of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange as one reads through that book. Or the editor of the translation could, as often happens with translations of Russian classics or translations of contemporary works from the Russian, put a note on how Russian names work in the translation itself.

Do I have a slight favourite among the translations I read? I really don't. The two I read closely and others by Peter Carson (Penguin), Bernard Guilbert Guerney (Modern Library), Richard Freeborn (Oxford World Classics), Bernard Isaacs (Progress), Michael Katz (Norton Critical Editions), and Avril Pyman (Everyman's Library), I randomly checked them against, were excellent if sometimes annoying because of their anglicisation of Russian names (Peter for Pyotr or Petr, for instance). What tips the balance in favour of Pursglove for me is the fact that it, like Carson's, Freeborn's, and Pyman's translations, contains excellent historical and cultural notes, which are necessary if one is to grasp the social and cultural context of the great works of literature, and it contains, like many of the Alma Classics releases, an excellent twenty-four page biography and summary of Turgenev and his works which is almost worth the price of the book alone. 

Speaking of supplementary material, I very much like the Norton Critical Edition of Fathers and Children edited by Michael Katz (Father and Children (New York: Norton, Norton Critical Edition series, second edition, 2009). Like all the publications in that series Katz's edition of Fathers and Children contains extensive primary material on the book, including letters and essays from Turgenev on Fathers and Children, and enlightening essays by a host of scholars which put the book in political (Fathers and Children as reflective of mid-19th century Russian and European politics) economic (Fathers and Children and economic radicalism in 19th century Russia), and cultural (Fathers and Children as centred around generational conflicts; Fathers and Children as a pastoral/courtly/picaresque book; Fathers and Children as an updated version of the Biblical tale of the prodigal son; Fathers and Children as reworking of the Greek myth of Actaeon and Artemis; the impact of Pushkin on Fathers and Children; Fathers and Children as influenced by Hegelian dialectics, the role of women and daughters in Fathers and Children; Bazarov as inherently ambiguous) contexts.

By the way, translations of Turgenev's Fathers and Children just keep on coming in the twenty-first century. In 2022 the New York Review Books published a new translation of the work by retired haematologist Nicolas Pasternak Slater, the son of Lydia Pasternak Slater, chemist, translator, and sister of the famous poet, memoirist, and fiction writer Boris Pasternak, and his wife Maya Slater, retired teacher of French literature at Queen Mary University in London University, both of whom have extensive translation experience. I look forward to taking a look at it.