Two Novels

Let us go back to the year 1922 – perhaps the year that was to change the course of world literature more decisively than any other in the entire twentieth century – and to the publication of the complete version of a novel that had appeared in part over the immediately preceding years, a novel written on a vast scale and remarkable both for its minute reconstruction of the mundane realities of day-to-day life in an earlier period and for its depiction of the most intimate psychological currents, especially those that swirl around the vortex of sexual desire – offering, in this respect at least, one of the fullest portraits of a marriage ever to have been written. The author of the novel I have in mind was not, as might be assumed, an Irish expatriate in Paris but a woman who lived most of her life in Norway and set her fiction in that country: Sigrid Undset, whose three-volume novel Kristin Lavransdatter was published between 1920 and 1922. The historical world she recreated was as far from early twentieth-century Dublin as one could imagine: it was that of fourteenth-century Norway, seen primarily through the eyes of a girl, and then woman, of strong passions and equally strong moral sentiments. Although this work gained international esteem between the wars – Undset received the Nobel Prize in 1928 – and remains both highly regarded and immensely popular in the Scandinavian countries, it has had nothing like the world-wide success of the other work which my first sentence could equally well have been describing.

Why these very different fates for Ulysses and for Kristin Lavransdatter, appearing in full as they did in the same year (the year, incidentally, that both authors turned forty)? The simplest explanation would be just that one is a better work than the other, but any such judgement of quality presupposes a cultural basis for the criteria being applied, and it's that basis for judgement in which I’m interested. Readers who don't know Undset's novel will have to take my word for it that it's not in any obvious way a markedly inferior aesthetic production – it's huge in extent (its three volumes total well over a thousand pages in the Penguin translation), meticulously detailed, strongly yet intricately plotted, and, as many readers have testified, powerfully moving in its depiction of human characters and their relations.

INTRODUCTION

The Scottish Borders stretches from the environs of Edinburgh in the north to the English border to the south and from the rolling Tweedsmuir Hills in the west to the rocky North Sea coast in the east; an area of 1,820 square miles (4,714 square km). Through it, the River Tweed flows for 90 miles (145 km) from its headwaters near Tweedsmuir, through Peebles, Galashiels, Kelso and Coldstream to the sea at Berwick-upon-Tweed in neighbouring Northumberland. ‘The Borders’ is a long-established entity, epitomised in the Border Ballads and the writings of Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg (the Ettrick Shepherd) and John Buchan.

The Scottish Borders, as an administrative unit, was created when the Borders Regional Council (BRC) was established with the reorganisation of local government in Scotland in 1975. It is one of the most sparsely populated regions of Scotland, with an estimated population of 115,000 persons in 2020. The region comprises the historic counties of Peeblesshire, Selkirkshire, Roxburghshire and Berwickshire (and a small area of Midlothian), traditionally an area synonymous with woven cloth (tweed), high quality knitwear and agriculture. It is an area with a rich past as evidenced by its ruined towers, castles, abbeys and historic houses, and remembered in its common riding ceremonies.

The peaceful tranquillity of its landscape, however, gives little indication of the challenges faced by this area during the twentieth century as a result of the decline in its traditional industries and the loss of population (from a peak of 130,000 in 1881–1891 to less than 100,000 in 1971). Rural depopulation over a prolonged period of time resulted in a shortage of labour for traditional industries and the loss of young people led to an ageing population with its own demands on services and facilities. Furthermore, the region's population is dispersed throughout the area with no single town providing a focus for industry and commerce. The largest towns of Hawick, Galashiels, Peebles, Selkirk, Jedburgh and Kelso have their own hinterlands, but the lack of a dominant centre and a history of strong, independent Border burghs has been a hindrance to the development of the region.

In the programme for her 2006 Kneehigh/Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production of Cymbeline, Emma Rice wrote, ‘I want this production to celebrate the child in all of us.’ Cymbeline's affinity with children's stories has long been rec-ognised by theatre professionals and scholars alike. Peter Hall's 1957 RSC production adopted a fairy-tale aesthetic which Kennan Tynan praised as ‘a Grimm fable transmuted by the Cocteau of La Belle et la Bête’. This is consistent with Catherine Belsey's recognition of the play's Snow White motif, involving a wicked stepmother (the Queen), a reluctant hit man (Pisanio), and the poison-induced, death-like sleep of the heroine (Imogen). In addition to the fairy-tale pattern, the plot is rooted in a number of incidents going back to the protagonists’ childhoods. Imogen is heiress to the throne of Britain because her brothers, Guiderius and Arviragus, were kidnapped as toddlers. Her status as heiress is the main reason why her stepbrother, Cloten, covets her and will eventually be killed in pursuit of her. Also part of the backstory is the idyllic childhood friendship of Imogen and Posthumus, a court-raised orphan, which has blossomed into love, leading to a clandestine marriage. Posthumus's low birth is responsible for his banishment, and for the insecurity that leads him to lend his ear to slanderous accusations of his wife, and eventually to order her murder at the hands of his servant, Pisanio. Underscoring these plot features, the play has a pantomime quality, with an emphasis on gestures of approaching, giving and taking away, combined with a curious stylistic reliance on the rhetorical figure of apostrophe, involving addresses to absent people or abstract notions that are reminiscent of a child chatting with an imaginary friend.

It is partly through apostrophe that Cymbeline's fairy-tale aesthetic dovetails with more properly allegorical modes of storytelling. With their vocative addresses to ‘sleep’, ‘boldness’ or ‘Nature’, characters are shown grappling with forces unseen, giving verbal shape to numinous experience. Symbolic objects such as rings, bracelets and handkerchiefs may find themselves on the receiving end of such apostrophes, in a way that connects the magic objects of fairy tale to the symbolic signifiers of allegory. The line between fairy tale and allegory is also straddled by the play's dream sequence (5.4.29–92), which includes a mythological masque featuring Jupiter swooping down on an eagle and delivering an allegorical prophecy involving lions, trees and eagles.

Summary of Study

Today many humanitarian and human rights organisations project their ethical ideals through colonial models of development and protection. A more critical strand of human rights discourse responds to acknowledged global injustices with minimal demands that are simply not enough to challenge capitalism and coloniality. In light of this context, Choose Your Bearing has argued that if theorists of rights discourse are to take decolonial concerns seriously, we will both recognise the nation state as a generally predatory entity (against minorities and immigrants) and move from a model of minimal advocacy for the downtrodden to a model of maximal activism. In this way, we would make demands on the institutions and actors that keep a majority of people across the world down in the first place. Conversely, this book has also suggested that decolonial theory should reconsider its critique of human rights. The primary and secondary duties that third-generation (solidarity) rights claims entail provide a way for people to connect to decolonial work through the terms that are already the most important to them. More specifically, the duties of Glissant's right to opacity fall on elite actors in the West. Standing with others is a primary duty that supports the right to opacity in an age of colonial resource extraction and blatant violations of land rights across the planet. Enacting the secondary duties around the right to opacity could look like attending to what we purchase or boycott, where we live, to what we belong, whom we consider kin, and what risks we are willing to take in our personal and professional lives. As opposed to the position- and career-maintaining efforts of professional reforms, this is ethical work found in much more banal, much less prestigious disengagements from professional spaces as they are. But this is not a withdrawal in the sense of denying the world. Like a boycott, this is an action verified by a community, and this community can be organised by rights claims made in different parts of the world. Its collective actions aim to uphold political, economic and cultural rights internationally. In this way, the local mode of engagement that lives out the primary and secondary duties of a right to opacity embodies a provincial bearing that does not become a provincialism, but that instead participates in a radical internationalism (DA 438/CD 146).

The theory of organology, relating biological (organised organic), technical (organised inorganic) and cybernetic (organising inorganic) beings, leads to a more general methodological question: how can these different levels of organisation be combined with each other? How can we imagine and explain their interactions on a planetary scale? Gaia theory is one of the attempts to reconcile different kinds of organological development into a consistent whole. However, the Gaia theory itself was developing and changing in trying to explain these planetary interactions either in terms of a superorganism, or as a cybernetic machine. In this chapter I will discuss the development of the Gaia hypothesis as it was defined by James Lovelock in the 1970s and later elaborated in his collaboration with biologist Lynn Margulis. Margulis’s research in symbiogenesis and her interest in Maturana and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis helped to reshape Gaia theory from first-order systems theory to second-order systems theory. In contrast to a first-order systems theory which is concerned with the processes of homeostasis, second-order systems incorporate emergence, complexity and contingency.

The recent discontent with the conceptualisation of the Anthropocene has forced many contemporary philosophers and theorists to return to the notion of Gaia. In recent years many thinkers, such as Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers and Donna J. Haraway, have addressed Gaia theory in one or another respect. In this chapter I want to compare the original Gaia theory with these new interpretations, which come from different backgrounds and employ different methodologies. Gaia is interpreted either as an autopoietic or sympoietic system, or, by contrast, as an ‘outlaw’, an anti-system. Despite these different interpretations, the recent theoretical interventions can be read as various versions of second-order systems theory. In this respect, even Latour’s and Stengers’s takes on Gaia, defining it as an ‘outlaw’ or an anti-system, can be interpreted as a specific kind of systems thinking.

The Gaia Hypothesis

The Gaia hypothesis was formulated by the chemist James Lovelock in the 1970s and was later significantly remodelled through Lovelock’s collaboration with biologist Lynn Margulis. The first insights of the Gaia hypothesis emerged during the 1960s in a NASA laboratory, where Lovelock was assigned to examine the physical and chemical properties of Mars and determine the planet’s suitability for life.

Sick and Tired

Mississippian and Civil Rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer, knows the heavy burdens Black people face in America and her long-used idiom to describe the injustices of the Jim Crow South, in which, she remarks that she's ‘sick and tired of being sick and tired’ is enduringly relevant in the US today. Not only are Black people ‘sick and tired of being sick and tired’ but we are also tired of dying in record numbers to endemic poverty, overlooked health disparities, police brutality and drug-related deaths. While Jim Crow may seem like it absolved itself from any further reckoning in the South after the civil rights era, it simply dons a new set of masks in present-day America to punish, penalise and criminalise Black men and women. And though chattel slavery no longer remains, due to the 13th Amendment, and frees Black people from such physical harm, it does not mean that systemic and institutional racism and white supremacy in the US have continued to uphold practices, policies and procedures that exert power, create fear and choke the life out of its Black citizens. Let's not forget that this fear is most realised in the US South, and even more so in rural and poorer neighbourhoods.

The fear is something Black people have carried for generations and passed on reluctantly to their children like thick cough syrup, hoping their throats would regurgitate it, but it goes down a bit too smoothly instead, settling to find a snug place to hinder their children's futures. When the fear rises and bubbles though, it turns into a palpable kind of anger that consumes most Black people when they feel that first moment of nothingness – that sting and betrayal of their own skin. In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin cautioned us with his raw depiction of race relations in 1960s America. Penning a letter to his 14-year-old nephew, Baldwin writes, ‘You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity’ (Baldwin 1993, 7). Confronting the reality of white supremacy as a Black man is as traumatic in 1963 when Baldwin pens these words as it is today in 2022.

Consistent with its epic theme, Troilus and Cressida begins in medias res. Instead of immediately identifying the cause of the Trojan war – the rape of Helen by Paris – the ‘Speaker of the Prologue’ opens with a description of the Greek princes’ angry reaction:

The antiquated ‘orgulous’ primes the audience to pay special attention to the second half of line 2, which identifies the ‘chaf[ing]’ of ‘high blood’ as the trigger of the war. The explanation is a socio-humoral one: ‘high blood’ means aristocratic blood, which in proud warriors is quick to react to a provocation. The ‘chafed blood’ image is allegorically amplified in the second half of the sentence, as the ‘fraught’ ships gathering around Athens recall Galen's description of anger as blood boiling around the heart. Allegorical echoes may also be detected in the reference to ‘the ministers and instruments’ of war, terms that in Galenic treatises often refer to the brain's faculties. With these opening lines, the Prologue is not only setting the stage for the upcoming action but also establishing the Trojan War as a reservoir of metaphors for characters’ emotions and states of mind in the play about to unfold. This reservoir is tapped into a mere thirty lines later, when Troilus sighs over the ‘cruel battle’ (1.1.3) between his heart and his will. On a more heroic scale, Hector describes Achilles's ‘hot blood’ (2.3.173) as the grounds of a battle between ‘his mental and active parts’ (174), in which the Greek hero ‘batters down himself’ (176).

The use of war as a metaphor for the struggle between the passions and reason is a commonplace of both classical and medieval thought. In Shakespeare's own time, it was a staple of both neo-Petrarchan love poetry and body politic imagery. It is thus not surprising to find Troilus and Cressida, a play about love, politics and war, making use of the convention. What is perhaps more striking is the way the Prologue's opening lines also set the stage for a more theatrically grounded way of allegorising the confrontation between blood and mind, one that is to be found in the play's many occurrences of blushing characters.

Dubliners: On the Way to Modernist style

On September 10, 1904, readers of the Irish Homestead turning to the weekly story found a short work titled ‘Eveline’, published under the name ‘Stephen Daedalus’ and beginning as follows:

This opening shows Joyce, even at the start of his career, at his characteristic best, achieving immense richness with the utmost economy of means. While the technique here is that of finely honed realism rather than anything we could call modernism, the attention to the verbal surface already suggests a writer who has an unusual capacity to make the most of the words of the English language. (Eugene Jolas was later to report Joyce's boast, ‘I can do anything with language.’) The second sentence, in particular, seems to me to epitomise his extraordinary skill. Eveline does not lean her head, but her head is leaned; she does not actively smell, but an odour is present in her nostrils. The syntax conveys a draining away of agency, her body parts functioning like independent, mechanical objects as her thoughts pursue a track they have pursued many times before.

Above all, it's ‘the odour of dusty cretonne’ that has the distinctive Joycean signature on it. Cretonne is striking in its specificity: it names an eminently practical fabric (the OED calls it ‘stout’) that nevertheless suggests an awareness of fashion, indicative of Eveline's experience at ‘the stores’. The word isn't recorded as an English import until 1887, and its evident Frenchness gives it a slightly exotic air. The adjective dusty, too, is redolent of a housekeeper's pride, already hinting at a weariness with the daily grind of maintaining cleanliness, while providing the reader, whose consciousness of the sense of smell is already alert thanks to the slightly surprising word nostrils, with a vivid sensory image. Whereas the first sentence clearly gives us the words of an observing narrator, and we seem to remain with this narrator for a word like odour, the phrase dusty cretonne begins to reflect Eveline's thought processes, which will soon take over the narrative.

On 1 September 2020, Jesmyn Ward's essay ‘On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by a Pandemic’ was published in a special issue of Vanity Fair. It was not Ward's first personal essay, and it is not an entirely unusual example of this increasingly popular form, either. However, this moving account of loss and grief in the contexts of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the global protests against systemic racism that followed the murder of George Floyd, is a vivid example of Ward's unique voice. The craft and clarity of the prose, the balance between control and urgency, and the restless, searching range of its social vision are redolent of the qualities that make the two-time National Book Award-winning author's work so important. Over three short pages, ‘On Witness and Respair’ also exemplifies the generosity of Ward's writing, in its sharing of the most intimate and private of experiences in order to help better understand and better resist America's present and deep history of systemic racism and state neglect. And, as in Ward's long-form fiction and non-fiction, it connects the imperative to challenge and resist endemic white supremacism in America, to global anti-racist and anti-colonial currents. Indeed, as in her three novels and memoir, ‘On Witness and Respair’ depicts traumas private and public occurring in the contexts of the slow violence of historic and institutional prejudice. Yet, reading Ward's writing strictly as trauma fiction, or poverty realism would be a mistake and the chapters in this volume focus variously on her depictions of community and kinship, her engagements with the natural world, the historical and intertextual dimensions of her work, and crucially, the possibilities for hope that emerge via gestures of solidarity and care. Trauma is undoubtedly a component of Ward's writing, but the essays here consider a broader matrix of public and private forms of memory, systemic violence and unyielding hope – and show how Ward's writing brings the intersections of these phenomena uniquely into focus.

In this chapter I will discuss the theory of organology, which examines the interaction between an organism and a machine. We can argue that organology appears as an attempt to overcome the opposition between mechanism and vitalism: mechanism explains living beings according to the laws of physics and chemistry, whereas vitalists argue that to understand living beings we have to presume the existence of some non-physical force. In the first part of the twentieth century we can see an attempt to overcome this opposition – this is the theory of organicism. Both vitalists and organicists stress the teleological behaviour of organisms; however, they differ in how they explain the organising principle of organisms: vitalists assert some non-physical entity, a vital force, whereas organicists insist that wholeness and organisation can be explained without such notions (Haraway 2004: 34). Organismic biologists assert that to understand the phenomenon of life we have to explain its ‘organisation’ or ‘organising relations’. These organising relations are immanent in the physical structure of the organism, therefore living beings can be defined in terms of ‘self-organisation’ (Capra 1997: 25). This attention to the patterns of organisation, which was implicit in living beings, became the main question of cybernetics, which examines the self-organising functioning of a new generation of machines. Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics as the science of ‘control and communication in the animal and the machine’ (Wiener 1985). Cybernetics overcomes the opposition between mechanism and vitalism by analysing both living and non-living beings as self-organising structures supported by information and feedback.

Besides these influential theoretical stances, we can discern another current named ‘organology’. The term ‘organology’ was proposed by Georges Canguilhem in his text ‘Machine and Organism’. Canguilhem traces the term to Bergson's Creative Evolution, saying that it is a treatise on organology, although Bergson never used the term. Thus, organology not only examines the relationships between machines and organisms, but also treats machines as an extension of the human organism and its organs. Referring to his predecessors, such as Ernst Kapp, Alfred Espinas and André Leroi-Gourhan, Canguilhem argues that tools and technologies can be understood as extensions of biological organisms.

INTRODUCTION

Chapter One explores the origins of town and country planning in the UK and describes how planning was put into practice in the Scottish Borders in the 1940s and 1950s. Planning committees were established in the 1940s and were advised by the county clerk assisted by the county surveyor or county architect supported by technical staff. In the 1950s, most staff in Scottish county planning departments was unqualified in planning, or architects who might have taken an addi-tional course in ‘Town Planning’. Sir Frank Mears was responsible for Scotland's first Town Planning course, introduced at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1932. Architecture students successfully completing the one-year course were awarded the Diploma in Town Planning and exempt from the final examinations of the Town Planning Institute (TPI). It would be 1948 before a separate School of Town Planning was established at the College of Art, awarding diplomas in town planning similar to the schools of town planning in the universities of Liverpool, London, Manchester and Durham.

There were only eighteen qualified town planners working in Scotland at this time, most of whom were in the Department of Health for Scotland (DHS). Local government had been slow to appoint ‘Planners’ to head their new Planning Departments; instead, entrusting the task to their road surveyors or architect's departments. John Somerville (Jack) Baillie, appointed County Planning Officer of Midlothian County Council in 1948 and Frank Tindall, appointed County Planning Officer of neighbouring East Lothian County Council in 1950, would be two of the first fully qualified county planning officers in Scotland. John C. Hall, and subsequently his son John B. Hall, trading as J & J Hall, Architects of Galashiels, would act as county planning officer for Selkirk County Council (SCC) providing planning advice to the county clerk. Peebles County Council (PCC) would be advised by Jack Baillie and Assistant County Planning Officer, Charles Ross (Charlie) Mackenzie, of Midlothian County Planning Department. In Roxburghshire the county architect provided advice to the county clerk, and in Berwickshire the county surveyor was appointed county planning officer. It would be the late 1960s before Roxburgh and Berwickshire County Councils appointed qualified county planning officers.

Towards the end of Jesmyn Ward's grief-soaked memoir Men We Reaped, the author accompanies her beloved brother, Joshua, on a final car ride. Joshua's car, like the many featured in Ward's book, is a sacred space of intimacy and freedom, operating as ‘a church can function, or has functioned in the past, in the community’ (quoted in Hartnell 214). As Mimi (the young Ward) and Joshua cruise both from and towards the nothingness of their fragile internal/external worlds, they repeatedly listen to the track ‘All That I Got is You’ by Ghostface Killah. It is the soundtrack of their last moments together, the soundtrack of their family, the soundtrack of their community and the soundtrack of their collective longing. When listening to the lyrics, ‘To all the families that went through the struggle’, Mimi's face is covered in tears of grief, lament and confusion: ‘We rode like we could drive far and long enough to outrun our story … But in the end, we could not’ (249). Although the car is the siblings’ ‘church’, it is also a moving target. There is no safe space for the poor, Black, Southern men of this memoir, nor for the women that love them; they are pursued by the police, by death, by the haunting of both the past and their own impending stories. Just hours after Mimi's sacred ride with her brother, he is in a collision with a drunk driver that ends his life.

As Ward reflects on the life and death of her brother, the painful emotional ‘heart’ of the story, one of her most compelling and tragic descriptions of Joshua is that he ‘wanted meaning’ (213, 244). She remembers her brother confronting a street evangelist/ street vendor selling ‘crucifixes’ fashioned from ‘plastic and string’ with questions erupting from his core: ‘What do you know about God? Why are we here?’ (244–5). These sorts of questions are also echoed in his favourite Ghostface Killah song, a narrative of devastating poverty that sidesteps nihilism because of its thirst for sense-making: ‘Sometimes I look up at the stars and analyze the sky/ And ask myself was I meant to be here … why?’ The final short narrative of Joshua's life, coupled with the questions he raises, are perhaps the existential underpinning of the book itself.

In a 2020 op-ed in The Guardian, Nemonte Nenquimo, a leader of the Waorani people, an Indigenous nation whose home is the Amazon rainforest, stated: ‘This is my message to the western world – your civilization is killing life on earth.’ Could this be true? Could a way of life in one place not only harm people and damage environments in other places, but also destroy life itself across the planet? If this is true, then do those in the West have a duty to change their way of life? How could this change occur across societies? Are the concepts and ideas we currently use to speak about social justice, such as human rights, sufficient to bring about this needed social change, change that would honour and preserve life on earth?

This book's argument rests on the following premises: as a result of European colonisation, the way of life in any Western country today relies on resource extraction and commodity production in other countries it thereby renders poor. This international division of labour involves practices that deny the human rights – the political, economic and cultural rights – of the workers who mine the minerals, sew the clothes, and otherwise provide the basic substances for life in the West. Fair trade programmes and wage increases do not change the fact that some spend their days hunched over sewing machines while others continually update their wardrobes.

Even a cursory reading of international news, or literature from a variety of places, makes clear that the West's way of life depends on resource extraction that violates human rights in different parts of the planet. Poor people the world over often make ethical appeals asking people in the West to change their basic habits of living in order to allow for others to live, to live with dignity, and to live amidst sustaining land and water. By leveraging rights claims in pronouncing what dominant powers have tried to silence, philosophers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Édouard Glissant have also called for the West to change its political and economic foundations.