Postwar, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Ferrante: Women and Work in Postwar Europe

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been rewatching Miyazaki movies, most recently My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989). I’m also currently reading two books that tie in to the themes of those two movies to a surprising extent: Postwar by Tony Judt (2005), and The Story of the Lost Child (2014), the fourth and last book in Elena’s Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. All of these books deal with the crucial period of economic growth and cultural change following World War II, drawing inspiration from the creators’ own baby-boomer childhoods. Kiki and Ferrante specifically use the changing place of women in the workforce as a key aspect of the time period. 

Postwar is historian Tony Judt’s survey of European history from 1945 to 2005, when the book was published. So far I’ve gotten about halfway through, to the mid-sixties, which is right before the cultural rupture of the late sixties and the economic slowdown of the seventies, both of which ended the postwar boom years (the ‘trente glorieuses’). Judt clearly admires what he calls the ‘social democratic moment’ of the fifties and sixties, where Western European governments invested in the economy and built large-scale social support systems. I hadn’t realized how much state economic intervention was involved; depending on the country, industries were nationalized, economic planning boards were setup, or public companies were built up out of whole cloth. Judt so clearly admires these public policies that he only somewhat addresses the concurrent decolonization conflicts, and when he needs to find flaws goes all in on how much he hates Brutalist architecture. As the book gets into the late sixties, it’ll be interesting how he deals with the new critics of the system that pop up. He’s unforgiving towards post-war leftists who were apologists for Stalin and the USSR, but later radicals were more interested in anti-colonialism and third-world politics. Judt has suggested that these activists took what they had for granted which is somewhat annoying so hopefully the actual discussion will be more nuanced.

In any case, what Judt’s book makes clear is that the decades immediately following WW2 were ones of exceptional growth and development in Western Europe. Economic growth led to exceptional wage growth; the increased social safety net and social insurance programs protected people from penury. This was accompanied with increased material possessions: cars, fridges, and televisions went from rare to ubiquitous. Poor and rural areas in Italy, France, and Germany got electricity and water for the first time. Meanwhile, economic transitions from agriculture and industry to the service sector led to rapid urbanization. All this was accompanied by political stability not seen since before WW1. The Cold War did start, but as Judt notes, once the Berlin issue was settled the USSR’s and the US’s attentions were turned to other continents. Ok this is somewhat an exaggeration, but there were no wars in Europe, which was a big change. Meanwhile, high birth rates produced the Baby Boomer generation, which experienced this period and now has dominated recent cultural production. Both Hayao Miyazaki and Elena Greco, Ferrante’s main character in the Neapolitan Novels, are born in the early 40s, during the war, so their formative experiences are of this early period, rather than the more fraught 70s as for the later boomers. 

Ferrante’s novels work the most hand-in-hand with Judt’s history. The story starts in the 50s and goes all the way to the present, through the friendship of two girls from a poor neighborhood in Naples. Where Judt’s book treats Europe as a whole, Ferrante focuses on the experiences of Southern Italy, a region which is much poorer than the rest of Italy but before the 50s hadn’t changed much since the 19th century. This is the region that Judt notes was basically unelectrified before post-war development. In Ferrante, we see this development through the eyes of a young girl growing up, as people in her neighborhood get cars and telephones, as the successful grocery store owner makes enough that he can open another store due to economic growth, and as a new neighborhood opens next door with fancy new apartments. We also see the fascists and mafia members retain the place atop the local hierarchy that they had during the Mussolini era. As Judt explains, the success and stability of post-war Europe was paid for by large-scale forgiveness of those involved in fascism and war crimes; those at the top were tried, but the masses of bureaucrats complicit were mostly left in place since there was no one to replace them with and the new leaders didn’t want to tear apart political wounds. Ferrante’s close examination of this period lets her examine the fissures more than Judt can or wants to: as Elena grows up, she experiences radical politics, the street fights between Communists and Fascists, and the differences between the way the bourgeois and the working-class experienced this time period. But despite the somewhat different ideological viewpoint (both Judt and Ferrante write from the left but they have very different view on the Italian Communist Party), it’s remarkable how the narratives of societal change in Judt and Ferrante reflect and enforce each other. 

Miyazaki’s film Kiki’s Delivery Service also deals with the same period and themes in its own way, surprisingly enough. Despite being a Japanese film, Kiki is clearly set in a European county: the text on buildings is in latin script, and the architectural style is distinctively western. The town Kiki settles in is next to the sea, and is relatively warm, suggesting the Mediterranean. So the setting could very well be Italy, or maybe Austria if it had access to the coast. In terms of time period, Kiki clearly is in an alternate timeline with witches and massive airships (a Miyazaki trademark), but there are some details that make it feel like the post-war period. Kiki moves from her small rural village to a bustling big city, something that many people did during that time period. The technology level is roughly correct, with cars being semi-common and the radio and television spreading. The city is clearly prosperous and bustling. The key is the fashion level. Most of the women are wearing skirts or dresses, while the older men have suits and the younger ones shirts and jeans. But Kiki meets an artist who lives in the woods, and she wears jeans, something which is commented on. This signals that story is set in a period where cultural change is coming, where the younger post-war generation is starting to throw out the social mores of their parents. Kiki’s friend Tombo and his group of friends, who pile up in one car and drive out to the beach, could be Elena and her neighborhood friends. All in all, there is an energy and optimism to the world of Kiki that just feels like postwar Europe. 

What ties Ferrante’s novels and Kiki’s Delivery Service together in how they deal with their time setting is how they’re concerned with the changing relationship of women to work. The fifties and sixties were a time when women had expanded opportunities to join the workforce and changing social expectations. Women were allowed to vote for the first time in Italy and France after the war, and divorced was legalized in many European countries in the same period (though not in Italy until the 70s). This led to more women working for themselves or for their family, rather than supporting their husbands. We see this in both novels. Kiki is part of a family of witches, who are all women who provide services for their towns/villages: potion making, divination, charms. Witches are therefore already working women, but in a traditional mode. When Kiki leaves to train herself in the city as a witch rite of passage, she also has to work for a living. But Kiki’s doesn’t have skills in the traditional disciplines, and so, in addition to working in a bakery, she decides on a non-traditional occupation: opening a delivery service. She therefore is pushing boundaries in terms of how she as a (soon-to-be) woman is performing work in a changing society. Interestingly, the world Kiki encounters while doing her deliveries is full of women: the bakery owner, the fashion designer neighbor, the hermit artist who wears pants, the old lady and her elderly servant who loves tv. All these women have money that they use to help and encourage Kiki in her new business. It’s thanks to this network of women that Kiki is successful. The movie doesn’t spell it out, but it clearly presents Kiki’s world as one where women are able to work for themselves, and create new economic spaces for themselves.

In Ferrante’s novels, Elena also works to support herself, though Ferrante’s concern with the societal dominance of men means that she struggles much more against societal restrictions. Elena’s world is one where society is newly open to women’s work, but where women have to fight every day to make it. The novels are too permeated with this to go into comprehensively — one of the fundamental themes of the series is that the societal power and brutality of men is too strong to really escape — but Elena’s friend Lila’s story can be a representative example. Lila doesn’t get an education like Elena does, and spends her whole life working once she leaves school. Early on she works in her family businesses, first in her father’s shoe shop, then in her husband’s grocery store. This kind of work is more traditional, where small businesses require the whole family to chip in. However, once Lila leaves her husband, her lack of opportunities force her to push boundaries in terms of what work she takes. She spends years working in a sausage factory under awful conditions. The fact that she’s working while also raising a child shocks her family and neighbors. Finally, Lila and her partner Enzo take correspondence courses in programming and find jobs as computer operators. In this Lila is truly innovative and taking advantage of societal change: she brings in new technology to her city and takes a dominant role in inaugurating a new employment category. This combines different threads of post-war society: economic development allows her employers to buy a computer; technological investment allowed it to be developed; and increased roles for women let Lila get the job. In typical Ferrante fashion, though, Lila has to compromise with male power in order to achieve this progress: the computer is owned by the Solaras, who lead the local mafia and who Lila despises. So in contrast with Kiki’s world, where networks of women can power an expansion of the economic role of other women, in Ferrante’s Italy any advancement is tainted by and conditioned on the involvement of men who won’t let go of their power. 

It’s also interesting to compare Miyazaki’s pseudo-post-war-Europe in Kiki’s Delivery Service to his post-war Japan as seen in his earlier film, My Neighbor Totoro. The setting in Totoro is a realistic one: it’s actually set in Japan, and in a time period where Miyazaki would have been a kid himself. What sticks out to me as a key difference between the two is the direction of movement the characters undertake, and how this relates to the specific post-war stories of the two settings, even as both Europe and Japan developed rapidly post-war. As mentioned earlier, Kiki moves from her village to a big city: this represents the urbanization of Europe in the 50s and 60s. In Totoro, Satsuki, Mei, and their dad make an opposite journey: they move out of Tokyo into an old house in the countryside. The house is in ruins, the village they’re in has a one-room school and is surrounded by forest. This may make it look like this is a story of de-urbanization, where modernity is too much and has to be escaped. And yet, in the context of post-war Japan, this actually represents the Japanese post-war expansion just like Kiki’s journey does Europe’s. The village Satsuki and her family isn’t an isolated village: her dad can move there because he can take a bus into Tokyo where he works as a university professor. After the war, Tokyo and started gobbling up the surrounding area as people moved out of the inner cities. The family in Totoro is just on the edge of that expansion. Japan was already urbanized before the war, so the economic boom allowed it suburbanize earlier than European countries. The rural setting of Totoro is not isolated but connected to urban Japan. Both Kiki and Totoro are cognizant of the changing world they’re depicting, but Toroto’s choice to depict a place that’s starting to disappear makes it more bittersweet.

The couple of decades following World War 2 were very good for Western Europe due to the enormous economic growth it experienced. Today this period is often looked back at as a ‘golden age’ whose betrayal in the 1980-90s set the stage for the rise of the far-right in the last ten years. This conception is of course extremely reductive, but it means the 50s and 60s are a good setting in the popular imagination for stories about faith in human advancement and progress. Tony Judt clearly believes that there was a lot of good done during this time, and depicts it that way even as he understands the complexities in Postwar. Kiki’s Delivery Service captures the spirit of the times and avoids the nuances by placing it in a fantasy setting. It’s Elena Ferrante, in the Neapolitan Novels, that manages to be the most critical while still understanding how growth changed the world of Southern Italy: all the growth doesn’t do much to change the already-existing male power structures. The third novel takes place in the late 60s and early 70s, when the culture changes led to movements that challenged the status quo in new ways. Ferrante depicts the resulting clashes as violent and passionate. These clashes took place all over Europe, challenging the idea of a European golden age. I’m about to start that section of Judt’s book, I’ll have to report back on how he deals with it.

Nausicaa and Laputa

I’ve been taking advantage of the Stanford library’s film section to watch a bunch of movies this month. Some of them have been classic films that I hadn’t seen before, but I’ve also been rewatching Miyazaki’s films in order. So far I’ve seen Nausicaa and Castle in the Sky, and I have THOUGHTS. Seeing these two back-to-back as Miyazaki’s second and third films (the first is a Lupin III movie that fits into someone else’s continuity), I noticed that the two movies have a lot in similar, in terms of both register and themes. His subsequent films move more into kid’s material for a while, and the themes from Nausicaa and Laputa don’t come back with this strength until Mononoke. So I mostly have been thinking about how those three films work together.

Nausicaa is interesting because it’s different from Miyazaki’s subsequent films in two key ways: it’s explicitly a science fiction story, and it’s adapted from the first part of a manga Miyazaki wrote. The rest of his films are mostly set in fantasy settings, with some in set in our world. Nausicaa has the same steampunk flavors that Miyazaki uses as his calling card, but they are place in a world that’s far in the future after an ecological apocalypse. This has the immediate effect of making the movie much more pessimistic. Miyazaki’s movies are always concerned about the effects that humans have on their environment, and how the clashes between humans and the forces of nature can lead to the destruction of both. In Nausicaa, that destruction has already happened. Nature has struck back against the destruction wreaked by human technology, and humanity is hanging on by a thread from the backblow. This means that instead of focusing on how to stop the destruction, Nausicaa is focused on how to recover from it. This makes the film very melancholy. 

The melancholy tone of the film is enhanced by the fact that it only covers the first part of Miyazaki’s Nausicaa manga. This means that the movie itself end with all the problems it sets up fixed. That’s not to say that the narrative arc isn’t complete; the movie is very satisfying as a narrative. It just is more open ended than Miyazaki’s other movies. They key resolution is that Nausicaa manages to save her village; the key revelation that the deadly forests are actually purifying the soil and water from centuries of human pollution is something that Nausicaa will have to pursue further in her future adventures. I actually think that narrative strategy works well, and it’s interesting Miyazaki decided on more closed narrative in his next films. And we don’t need to know what happens next in the manga to appreciate the movie on its own.

In general the setting and atmosphere of the movie are very good. The aforementioned melancholy feel of the post-apocalyptic world matches well with the art direction. The world looks desolate, but there are pockets of life and beauty in surprising places. The war and monster scenes are appropriately horrifying. I was thinking throughout the movie about how much of the design reminded me of early Final Fantasy games, and reading wikipedia, it turns out that the art of early Final Fantasy games was copied off the manga! Complete with taking the birds Yupa rides as the design for chocobos. This makes sense since there’s a lot of setting synchronicity between Miyazaki and Final Fantasy, including the steampunk aspects and the obsession with airships. This movie features a lot of Miyazaki’s obsession with flying, centered as it is on a valley dependent on wind power and featuring a heroine with her own air glider.

I’d say the biggest issue with the film is how fast it ends. I remember reading an interview with Miyazaki where he said part of his approach to Mononoke was to fix the problems with Nausicaa, and this included the ending, which in Nausicaa is too much of a deus ex machina. Basically Nausicaa is presented as the only person who can bridge the human and natural worlds, because unlike the other humans wants to understand the Ohmu and the forest. At the end, in order to save her village, she offers herself as a sacrifice to the Ohmu, and somehow she survives and stops the Ohmu, somewhat because she sheltered an Ohmu when she was a kid. It’s a little Jesus-y. And after that the movie basically ends, with a few scenes playing over the credits. There’s not much resolution, and not much cost. I’ll have more to say on this when I watch Mononoke, but in that movie there’s more weight to the ending. Somehow Nausicaa sacrificing herself convinces the invading army to leave too, though it was helped by the fact that they lost their super-soldier to waking him up too early. Part of it is that Nausicaa is not quite a well rounded character. It’s fine to have her as super-human, but I don’t think Jesus works quite well in a doomed post-apocalypse. Though I guess these characters do show up a lot.

Moving on to Laputa/Castle in the Sky. I watched this movie a lot as a kid, and I think I had reduced it in my memories as being overly simplistic, but I actually enjoyed it a lot. Compared to Nausicaa, it’s clearly written more for kids, in a progression that Miyazaki would continue (his next movie is Totoro): the moral lines are clearly drawn and the story’s implications are clearly laid out and less delicate. But the central characters are super charming, and the movie relies a lot more on humor, which helps make it engaging when the plot is a little too obvious.

Despite being pretty different films on paper, when you watch Nausicaa and Laputa back-to-back they have a lot of similarities. Laputa has a fantasy setting with magic crystals but also coal miners, but there still are the same gears and windmills and military airships from Nausicaa. Both movies have a military government threatening our heroes’ small village, and the militaries both are pursuing superweapons in ways reminiscent of the atomic bomb program (it’s a Japanese movie!). The design of the Laputan robots is similar to that of the super-soldier in Nausicaa, and Pazu looks a lot like a younger version of Nausicaa’s love interest Asbel. Some of the shots even are similar: Sheeta in the airship at the start of the movie looks a lot like the Pejite princess who’s been captured on the airship that crashes in the valley of the wind; both movies have a scene with airships chasing each other through clouds and lightning storms. So it’s clear that both films were borrowing from the same creative drawer!

Laputa is clearly shifted towards the positive from Nausicaa, though, and it’s reflected in most of the movie. The animation uses a color palette with more color saturation, whereas everything in Nausicaa is washes out. In Nausicaa the night is pitch-black; in Laputa, even the dark is softly lit. Pazu’s village is suffering from economic decline due to exhaustion of the mine, but the world itself still has hope and prospects. The pirate gang seems threatening but they’re really adorable softies. And the ending is more conclusive: once Pazu and Sheeta destroy Laputa, they can go off and live happily every after without having to worry about the ongoing extinction of humanity. 

It’s the relationship between Pazu and Sheeta that makes the movie work. As two people they just click. From the first, they’re partners who work together. If this were an American movie or a modern anime, they would start out awkwardly denying that they like each other, and go through some phase where one of them thinks the other has betrayed them, and Pazu would be a teenage boy who thinks touching a girl is weird. But instead trust each other and are instinctively close with no hesitation about it. Sheeta believes Pazu about his dad and Laputa, and she trusts him to be with her when she needs him. Pazu listens to what Sheeta wants and figures out how to deal with Laputa in a way that fits her values. They’re so cute together I love them, and so does basically everyone else in the movie who’s rooting for them. 

The strength of the relationship makes up for the lack of imagination in terms of gender roles. Miyazaki is known for centering young girls in his movies, and giving them roles they wouldn’t have in most kid’s movies. However, here Pazu and Sheeta settle in a stereotypical division of labor, with Pazu having to save Sheeta multiple times and taking charge of the action stuff, and Sheeta being the moral center and doing domestic chores. Some of this is remedied by the head pirate Dola, who is a great character. For me some of the discomfort at how Pazu and Sheeta are presented is remedied by how clearly they are partners and how the power dynamic between them is as equals, but it does make the film less boundary-pushing. The movie as a whole feels like a classic adventure story — it draws inspiration from Gulliver’s Travels and Treasure Island — which means that it settles more into the boy-meets-girl-and-goes-on-adventure-with-her groove, but there’s no reason that couldn’t be pushed against more.

In general the adventure story feel works really well for the film, which feels familiar in a comforting way. There are a couple a incredibly beautiful sequences where Pazu and Sheeta discover new places, including the cave scene and the sequence where they first arrive on Laputa and visit the garden. These scenes capture the sense of the wonder of exploration and discovery that is important to adventure stories and that Miyazaki loves. This kind of scene also appears in Nausicaa when Nausicaa and Asbel discover the caves under the death forest. The animation and art in Laputa really focus on this discovery of beauty aspect though. 

And that’s all I have! There’s of course a lot of to say about the nature vs human theme of both movies, and how the film uses visual language the emphasize that idea (the overgrown tree roots on Laputa save Pazu and hinder Muska!) but most of it has been written about already. I’ll have more to say when I see Princess Mononoke, which uses a lot of the same themes and plot structures (Mononoke has basically the same plot as Nausicaa but the character of Nausicaa gets split into the characters of Ashitaka and San, which works better because those two aspects of her are more interesting as characters who can be in conflict), but that will have to wait!

Technology in Fantasy

So I’m currently reading The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin and it reminds me in some way of Mistborn in terms of the ways both novels represent a current development in terms of fantasy settings (TFS does have the added presence of a hot bisexual pirate character who gets into a three-way relationship with the main characters, not quite something BS would write about). Classic fantasy has stuck to limited types of setting, basically either feudal or renaissance alt-Europe. These settings heavily limit the features of the settings that are available to the author — all governments are monarchies, main characters must start as farmboys or street urchins, and guns are strictly banned. For all of this early fantasy, this wasn’t too much of a problem, since that playground provided plenty of themes to explore, especially those around the Campbellian hero. By the time everyone had copied Tolkien one too many times over in the 80s, though, the basic forms of these settings were pretty tired. There was some pushing of these boundaries in the big fantasy series of the 90s: WoT is more early modern than medieval, and technologies such as guns and motors are developed in their early stages during the series; ASoIaF hews closely to lords-and-castles, however, though it does critique that setting more than other books have. But despite these small pushes, fantasy has remained closely associated with the pre-modern and pre-industrial revolution, especially the big popular books.

Meanwhile, science fiction has basically never had setting restrictions. A science fiction book can be set on earth with robots, set far away with aliens, or even be in the past with time travel, and no one bats an eye. This has let science fiction explore a much broader set of themes than fantasy. As a result fantasy has been often left as a backwater, or as pseudo-fascist, since often the conclusion of the story is that the restoration of an absolute benign monarchy is best for everyone. The euro-centricity of the typical fantasy setting is also clear. And all this for not much more reason than tradition: there’s no reason stories about magic in invented worlds should only exist within copies of medieval Europe. 

Luckily, there seems to be some progress being made on these fronts. The old settings have gotten just too tired, and the political atmosphere is more interested in non-monarchical Eurocentric settings. Mistborn and The Fifth Season are two examples of this in very successful novels. Both are set in invented worlds that are clearly industrial. In Mistborn, there are big cities and canning and genetic engineering. The bad guy has limited the range of technology available in order to better control the population, and things like the electric grid and gas engines are clearly existent. The sequels, which are set after a time jump, are set in a world that’s clearly closer to the 1920s and have magical aircraft. Sanderson, in his usual style, goes in-depth into how his magic system interacts with the technology and creates or expands it. But the important thing is that he’s not scared that having technology disqualifies him from writing fantasy; instead, it enriches it. Similarly, in terms of forms of government, some of the Mistborn books deal with establishing constitutional modes of government and the difficulties with deliberative parliaments. There are lords, but they’re clearly not feudal. And Sanderson’s overall inter-series world concept, the Cosmere, deals with gods traveling between planets in one galaxy (maybe it’s far far away?), furthering the different from other fantasy novels that might as well take place on a flat earth.

The same is the case in the Fifth Season, where the novel takes place in a world that has exhausted its supply of coal and is harnessing geothermal and hydro energy sources for energy generation. The constant disasters central to Jemisin’s story mean that not all tech is able to last — there are no fast transport methods, for example — but in some cases their technology seems even more advanced than ours. And the eugenics programs operated are clearly highly developed in a way that thankfully was never sustained in our world. The government of her world is also administratively developed, with regional networks of cities overseen by appointed governors and bureaucrats. Even more so than Sanderson, Jemisin blurs the boundary between contemporary fantasy and soft scifi. A geologically active planet inhabited with humans who have evolved special sensors that detect earthquakes — it could as well be somewhere a space adventurer could land. There is clearly magic going on, so it does stick to being fantasy, but clearly not a fantasy that’s interesting in building boundaries. 

Fantasy was pretty stagnant for a long time, so it’s good to see popular novels redefining what fantasy can be. Freeing itself from the bounds of swords and kings lets fantasy be more creative and concern itself with more than just 

The main French Parliamentary elections are next Sunday the 10th, but the first round for the constituencies for French citizens living abroad takes place this weekend. This includes the 1st constituency for French citizens abroad, covering the US and Canada. They were having a hard time finding volunteers to run the polling places here in the Bay Area, so I ended up signing up to help, which will be interesting. I’ve been an election worker four times for US elections, so it’ll be interesting to compare the procedures.

Background: In 2012, French MPs were elected representing 11 constituencies of French citizens living abroad for the first time. These constituencies were created by Sarkozy’s government because they expected to win most of the seats — expats tend to wealthier and vote for the right. But this backfired because the Socialists chose better candidates and won most of the seats. This time around, Macron did extremely well with French citizens abroad (more than 50% in the first round in most of the constituencies) and so expect to pick up a bunch of these seats.  

For the 1st constituency (US/Canada) the Socialist candidate Corinne Narassiguin won the seat in 2012, but the election was invalidated because she violated campaign finance laws, and the UMP/Republican candidate Frederic Lefebvre won the re-run in 2013. The first round vote in 2017 in this constituency was 51% Macron, 24% Fillon. 

Here are the main candidates in 2017:

Frederic Lefebvre (LR/center-right): The incumbent, had previously served as a suppleant (replacement) for an MP from the Paris area following the 2007 election. He lost in 2012 because he was a carpetbagger (the winning Socialist candidate actually lived in the US), but by the re-run in 2013 Hollande was unpopular and so Lefebvre won easily. However, he’s now in a very pro-Macron constituency and so has been trying to portray himself as pro-Macron. His election material has a picture of him with Macron on the back and he’s saying he’s ‘of the right but progressive.’ 

Roland Lescure (LREM - Macronist): The actual Macron candidate, he quit his job as a pension fund investor in Montreal to work for Macron’s campaign. Seems to very into Macronism and so would be a pretty loyal MP to Macron if he wins. Has a big picture of Macron on his poster to clearly convey that.

Clementine Langlois (France Insoumise - Melenchonist): She’s an entrepreneur from Ottawa. Has Melenchon in big on her poster. 

Yan Chantrel (Socialist Party): He lives in Montreal and is elected to the ‘assembly of french citizens abroad,’ an official body I didn’t realize existed. Looks to be more on the left/Hamon wing of the socialist party, judging by his list of endorsements, though unlike Lescure or Langlois, he doesn’t have a big picture of his presidential candidate — Hamon is probably more of a drag than a boost at this point. Has been sending out emails since last summer, earlier and more than any of the other candidates, but it’s probably not enough to save him.

Then there are 9 other candidates, including some who are trying to play the ‘we’re actually interested in local issues’ card, but I don’t think they’ll do very well. 

Prediction: Unlike the presidential election, the parliamentary elections aren’t a top-2. Instead, all candidates who get at least 12.5% of registered voters get to the second round. However, turnout in the US/Canada will be low and only two candidates will make the second round. Most likely it’ll be Lescure (LREM) and Lefebvre (LR), with Lescure winning in the second round as the real Macron candidate.

The Golden Compass

Last year they announced that Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials would be adapted into a new miniseries, because everything has to be a TV show nowadays. In fact, The Underground Railroad, which I read last month, is also being adapted into a miniseries, which, actually, I think will be interesting because the book has well-contained episodes and I think could have really striking visuals if adapted. In any case, I’d been thinking of re-reading the Pullman books since the adaptation was announced. So far I’ve reread the first book, the Golden Compass. 

I’ve always liked these books, but on the reread I was especially impressed by how well the book was written. It’s set in an alternate earth that’s pretty substantially different, and Pullman chooses to switch up terms (anbaric for electric, Muscovites for Russians, coal-silk for nylon), but he has absolute trust in the reader and never condescendingly explains how his world is set up or all the clever substitutions he came up with. Instead, he lets the reader discover the world as it unfolds and figure out the tricks on their own. For a kid’s book, this is impressive but also smart: as a fan of these books as a kid, I loved being able to put together the hints and also being taken seriously enough to leave those hints as hints. There are some infodumps, of course, mostly around what daemons are, but most of those are spaced out through the book, because Lyra is discovering them with us. But these explanations make sense — after the basic rules are set out at the start, the book dabbles out the further details as they come into the plot, and every bit is exciting because we want to know how the world works. In this book at least, the real explanations for what is happening remain elusive, but the outline is traced out enough to give a good idea of where the series is headed. And the world building engages the reader emotionally, setting them up for the proper emotional impact in the sequels.

The writing is strong beyond just the way the world building is conveyed. Pullman has a good sense of character and setting description. The characters are all distinctive — and he does a good job of conveying their complex motivations, but does so lightly, without defining any character too tightly. The central conflict set up appears to be simply good vs evil for most of the book, but at the end is revealed to be multipolar, with different groups acting perpendicularly to each other, some of which we understand, and some of which we don’t. This is complex, let alone for a children’s book. The characters’ positioning among the different factions is uncertain, because they are themselves uncertain. But Lyra acts as the moral center: when Lee Scoresby asks Serafina Pekkala, “would you mind telling me whose side I’m on in this invisible war?” she answers “We are both on Lyra’s side.” Lyra tries to find her own moral path among all the adults trying to use and control her. 

Best of all, there aren’t any big villain monologues about how they can see the truth about the world no one else can’t, even though a few characters are well-positioned to do so. 

I think some of this good writing will be less crisp in the later books, where Pullman’s ambition means he spends more time explaining what his series is about, and there are a few too many characters to keep them all so sharply drawn in just a few paragraphs, but in the first book at least the balance of simplicity and hinting at hidden complexities is really on point. I think I’ve realized this is one of the things I really like in fiction: good writing that lets the reader understand the implications and subtexts in the story. Pullman does this partially through the behavior of the daemons, which throughout reflect the inner feelings and emotions of the characters but in a way that isn’t underlined explicitly most times it happens. 

I think the other appeal is the basic theme of the book. At it’s base the idea is ‘the original sin is good.’ At the end of the book Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon decide that if all the adults think Dust (which is associated with puberty/knowledge) is bad, and all the adults are people who try to control Lyra and do atrocious things in order to make Dust go away, then Dust must actually be good. This is great! For one thing, sin is a terrible concept and sex and such are actually good things. And then, it’s also about questioning authority figures — in this case Lyra’s parents. Lyra doesn’t want to accept handed down conceits, and decides instead to figure out what’s right for herself. And then goes on adventure where she ends up recreating the original sin, which saves the world. Pretty great stuff. 

The Underground Railroad

Note: This contains spoilers for the first half of the book. I was surprised by some of the developments, which was enjoyable and fun! So I'd recommend reading the book first.

I’m about halfway through The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, which recently won the Pullitzer Prize and basically has been the most critically acclaimed book that came out in 2016. It’s also our next book for my book club, which I’ll be missing since I’m going to my 5-year college reunion, but wanted to read the book for anyway. So far the book is pretty interesting. It’s going to be adapted into a miniseries by Barry Jenkins (who made Moonlight) and the choice to make it a tv show makes complete sense. The structure is episodic: the main character, Cora, travels from state to state on the Underground Railroad, and lives there a few months, discovering what’s going on in each place she visits.

This is where the central conceit of the book steps in: the US states that Cora travels through are not the historical US states, but mirror-universe versions that reflect the ways white people have tried to control black people in the US. This setting is revealed slowly. The first segment takes place in Georgia on the plantation where Cora is a slave. I’m not an expert on historical accuracy in how slavery is portrayed, but the portrayal is within the range of slavery narratives I’ve seen. The plantation is extremely violent — runaways are publicly tortured before being killed. This sets up the themes the book uses in terms of white control of black bodies and also the ideas it draws from horror; the plantation owner is sadistic and comes up with different creative ways to make recaptured runaways suffer. The first sign that Cora isn’t quite living in our world is when she escapes and gets taken to the underground railroad, which in the novel has recently extended a spur into the deep south. Here it is revealed that ‘underground railroad’ is not a metaphor: actual tunnels underground linking stations throughout the south have been built, and Cora escapes Georgia on a one-wagon train.

The train is an element of alternate reality and anachronism (I think the technology described, e.g. ventilation for a steam engine underground, would not be realistic for the 1840s-1850s), but it could fit in as an add-on to a realistic historical narrative: all along there was a hidden train conveying slaves from the deep south to freedom in the north. It’s when Cora arrives in South Carolina, however, that the novel reveals its true mode. The South Carolina in the book comes straight out of early 20th century progressivism and organization theory: workers (here slaves purchased by the government) are assigned to the jobs that fit them best and treated well, factories operate on assembly-line principles, and doctors examine and treat everyone, all the while controlling fertility for selective breeding of the black population. In terms of a historical setting contemporary with slavery, this is wholly anachronistic (the city is centered on a 12 story skyscraper serviced by an elevator, neither of which would have been invented yet, and the industrial efficiency paradigm would have been wholly foreign to the agricultural south at the very least). But the purpose of the book is not to be historical fiction. Both the book’s South Carolina, where efficiency and comfort are used to lull the black population into being victims of scientific experimentation (in addition to the use to sterilization to control for desired traits in the black population, this section also features a syphilis experiment reminiscent of Tuskegee), and in it’s North Carolina, where the white population has decided the solution is to expel its black population and now publicly kills and displays any black people found in the state, represent ways in which white americans have tried to control and repress black americans. The book presents chattel slavery (Georgia), technocratic scientific racism (South Carolina), and outright eliminationism (North Carolina) side by side as different facets of American institutional racist violence.

This violence is so far particularly focused on the black body. The Georgia and North Carolina sections of the book feature gruesome torture methods inflicted on slaves and freemen who violate the laws and customs imposed on them by the white authorities. The white characters who are not involved in the underground railroad relish this violence. In South Carolina, the violence is clinical instead of gruesome. All the black workers are subjected to regular medical exams. These are supposed to help them, but some of the men are being injected with syphilis, while most of the women are pressured to undergo sterilization so that the government can do population control. There is even an interlude set in Boston where a medical student goes hunting for bodies to dissect and specifically targets black cemetaries; even after death the black bodies belong to the whites. All these measures taken to control black people and their bodies are framed in the novel as ways to protect white bodies. The white characters voice the classic white supremacist fears of black people raping and killing them. Cora is specifically pursued because she killed a white boy during her escape. In the Boston segment, the city has cracked down on grave-robbing of white cadavers following a moral panic, making only the black ones available. The novel takes all these undercurrents of American society and  luridly makes them literal.

In doing so, the novel uses some literary techniques out of horror fiction. Cora is like a horror heroine trapped in slavery who has to escape but finds the slave catcher pursuing her at every turn. When she thinks she is safe — as in South Carolina — there is a sinister conspiracy lurking under the surface. I’d be interested if someone has written a comparison of this book and the movie Get Out, which from what I’ve read also makes literal the horror aspects of American racism. The use of different states as different episodes lets Whitehead use different types of storytelling — the North Carolina section has aspects of ‘The Lottery,’ where the whole village comes together for a public lynching — as well as ways that both legal and extra-legal violence participates in this horror.

So far I’m only halfway through, so we’ll see what the other parts of the US are like. The remaining segments are called ‘Tennessee,’ ‘Indiana,’ and ‘The North.’ I do think that Whitehead is (understandably) very excited by his worldbuilding, which means that he does spend a lot of time explaining it to us. The book doesn’t leave much of the subtext implied rather than explained. For example, in the South Carolina section, Cora is happy and thinks everything is fine until BOOM it’s revealed they’re all medical subjects and then Cora narrates how awful that is. Cora in general learns a lot of the customs of the places she visits in explanations and then narrates others to us. So I think the book could have been more reticent with the details and left more to subtext. But overall so far it’s very inventive and I am continually anxious about what horrors await Cora next. 

Australian politics is cutthroat!

So I'm reading this article and I have some thoughts, so I'll write them out here so that I won't bore Lydia and Spencer with them.

Australia has a very accelerated election cycle -- parliamentary elections are held every 3 years. The US election cycle is faster, with the House being up every 2 years, but the President is the main focus of the government and has 4 years between elections. Also, separation of the legislative and executive means the President can't get dumped by the legislative caucus and is also somewhat isolated from the political jockeying in the legislature.

In Australia, the power plays and the business of governing are thrown together and linked with a need to maintain political popularity in the short term, which seems to have lead to instability in leadership in the last 8 years. Three prime ministers have been overthrown by their party in the middle of their terms, and it looks like it might happen again despite the fact that an election was held just last month. What's up with that?

Here's the background: Australia has a weird mix of a strong two-party system in the lower house and a multi-party system in the Senate. The House chooses the Prime Minister but the Senate still needs to pass any legislation (like in the US but unlike the UK or Canada). The House is elected via ranked-choice voting in single member districts (hence the two-party dominance), while the Senate elects 6 members from each state by ranking either party lists or individual candidates and then distributing the votes. This makes for a roughly proportional seat assignment but the way minor parties can accumulate votes for the last few seats make the end process a little wacky. More on that later.

The main party on the center-left is the Labor Party (spelled the American way because apparently at some point Australia had a fad for 'modernizing' spelling). They're pretty much what you'd expect, with strong ties to labor unions and strength in the inner cities. As far as I can tell, Labor seems to have held up better with what in the US we'd call the 'white working class' vote than equivalent parties in Europe or the US. I'm not sure why, though it may just be that immigration and racial dynamics are different in Australia, or that the outlets for anti-partyism are different. Maybe compulsory voting also plays a role -- since everyone legally has to vote, people who might feel left behind and stay home instead still vote Labor or at least pick them as their second choice.

For the main center-right party it gets a little more complicated. It turns out there are two main center right parties, the Liberals and the Nationals, but they're in a permanent coalition called, appropriately the Coalition. There's some history there where the Liberals were big in the suburbs and the Nationals formed in rural areas because they felt neglected. The Liberals are mostly in charge and provide the PM but the Nationals control some rural seats and ministries have their own priorities. And they can run in the same seats without splitting the vote thanks to ranked-choice!

There's a fourth important party, the Greens, that have a consistent presence in Parliament. They only have one seat in the House, but get ~8% of the primary vote, most of which gets transferred to Labor. They also control the third largest block in the Senate. They're pretty much what you'd expect, to the left of Labor notably on refugee issues. The rest of the House is a couple of independents.

Then there's the mess of 'minor parties' in the Senate. Unlike other countries with multi-party systems, the extra minor parties are not so much ideological as personality-based. Basically in any country there are going to be people who vote for major, organized parties and then people who vote for anti-establishment candidates. In Australia that vote gets concentrated in Senate elections. Since votes get transferred, all the tiny vote percentages that in other countries would get wasted due to PR thresholds gets accumulated. This means wacky candidates with low ties to any real 'party' organization get elected to senate seats, while they get blocked from House seats, which makes for a strange dynamic. Since neither main party has a majority in the Senate, usually, they have to make deals with the assorted essentially independent Senators to pass legislation.

Anyway, back to cutthroatedness. Here are the main players: for the Labor Party, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard; for the Liberal Party, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull. These four politicans have been the last four Prime Ministers and yet all four have been deposed by revolts within their party.
It started in 2007, when Rudd let Labor to victory over John Howard's 11-year Coalition government. In 2008, Turnbull was chosen as the leader of the opposition. However, Turnbull soon got into trouble. The problem was that Turnbull came from a business background and was a moderate. His big sin was supporting the Labor government's cap-and-trade proposal. So the climate change denier faction of the party revolted and installed Abbott, a conservative, instead.

Then in 2010, three years into the Labor government and as an election was coming due, Labor MPs had their own turn to be restive. Some faction of the Labor party (which is very factional -- there's some stuff with left and right factions of the party in the various states conspiring against each other) decided they didn't like Rudd's leadership style and thought his polling numbers were too low, so they held a leadership election and replaced him with his deputy, Gillard. She then had to call an election and managed to use the fact that Abbott was very very conservative to squeak into a victory.

This worked ok for the next few years but the Labor government's popularity kept sliding (I think sexism didn't help Gillard, she had some of the public opinion problems Hillary has), and by 2013 even Abbott wasn't scary enough to keep Labor in government for the looming election. Therefore the Labor MPs decided Gillard was no good and held a coup to put Rudd back in power in hopes to bounce up the poll numbers (they always are watching the poll numbers). By then all this drama was a bit much for voters and when Rudd held an election, Abbott won in a landslide.

Of course now that the Coalition was in power they were ready for their own backstabbing! Abbott, being very weird as well as very conservative, had a very short honeymoon and saw his popularity slide. A year into his term, the Liberals were losing state elections they had won in landslides three years earlier, presaging a defeat after just one term, a rare occurrence. Abbott survived for two years, but by 2015 rumors of a coup by his caucus abounded. Finally, in September, his deputy Julie Bishop turned on him and Abbott was replaced by Turnbull. The hope was that his non-partisan moderate image would fix things, and he did get a massive poll bounce for the Coalition. However, by the time he had to call an election in 2016 his popularity slid, and in July he won a bare majority in the House, a big loss from the 2013 landslide.

And now we get to the article. Turnbull's underperformance in the election means that the conservative wing of his party are using the occasion to get restive again. He's having a hard time balancing his ideological moderateness and desire to implement popular policies (e.g. gay marriage) with his need for support from conservative party members. The article suggests that Abbott may attempt to lead a comeback. This is hilarious because in 2013 the Liberals ran against Labor dysfunction and coups, and now are embroiled in their own identical disputes.

As for Labor, they dumped both Gillard and Rudd after 2013 and Bill Shorten has been leader since then. He's relatively successful, especially with his overperformance in the 2016 election. However, right after the election, there were already articles about how the guy he beat, Anthony Albanese, was considering a challenge! In then end he didn't go for it, but we'll see what the future holds ... Though they did add a membership vote component to the leader selection, so it'll be harder to change leaders than the purely caucus-based old method.

Its hard to tell if fatigue with the major parties is causing constant leadership turnover, or if the coups are themselves causing voter fatigue. Anyway it sounds like this period of drama and caucus rebellions is far from over in Australia. As an observer from afar its pretty fun to watch, though maybe not so much for Australians themselves.

For the article, this was the paragraph I found most descriptive: "Ideally, a leader enjoys the support of caucus colleagues and the voters. Some, like Julia Gillard, get by with just the former. Others, like Kevin Rudd, seize office relying on the latter. Turnbull is losing in both groups, and without the support of the electorate or his party room, he can’t survive."