Author: Andrew Sullivan

That’s how Sam Kriss interprets the latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s signature publication:

This is a story without any of the elements that are traditionally held to constitute a setting or a plot. A few characters make an appearance, but they are nameless, spectral shapes, ones that wander in and out of view as the story progresses, briefly embodying their various illnesses before vanishing as quickly as they came – figures comparable to the cacophony of voices in The Waste Land or the anonymously universal figures of Jose Saramago’s Blindness. A sufferer of major depression and of hyperchondriasis might eventually be revealed to be the same person, but for the most part the boundaries between diagnoses keep the characters apart from one another, and there are only flashes. On one page we meet a hoarder, on the next a trichotillomaniac; he builds enormous “stacks of worthless objects,” she idly pulls out her pubic hairs while watching television. But the two are never allowed to meet and see if they can work through their problems together.

This is not to say that there is no setting, no plot, and no characterization. These elements are woven into the encyclopedia-form with extraordinary subtlety. The setting of the novel isn’t a physical landscape but a conceptual one. Unusually for what purports to be a dictionary of madness, the story proper begins with a discussion of neurological impairments: autism, Rett’s disorder, “intellectual disability”. The scene this prologue sets is one of a profoundly bleak view of human beings; one in which we hobble across an empty field, crippled by blind and mechanical forces whose workings are entirely beyond any understanding. This vision of humanity’s predicament has echoes of Samuel Beckett at some of his more nihilistic moments – except that Beckett allows his tramps to speak for themselves, and when they do they’re often quite cheerful. The sufferers of DSM-5, meanwhile, have no voice; they’re only interrogated by a pitiless system of categorizations with no ability to speak back. As you read, you slowly grow aware that the book’s real object of fascination isn’t the various sicknesses described in its pages, but the sickness inherent in their arrangement.

Ingrid D. Rowland remarks that “Pompeii is not only the graveyard of an ancient Roman city; it is also, and especially, the graveyard of modern good intentions” due to lack of funding for site preservation and maintenance:

Some of this destruction is inevitable. Pompeii was so well preserved because it lay buried for seventeen centuries. Having its extraordinary ruins unearthed has meant exposing them to the normal processes of aging that all cities face—wind, rain, plants, animals, gravity, entropy, chaos—without the normal defenses that homeowners provide by caring for the places they inhabit. Furthermore, Pompeii was not by any means an intact city when Vesuvius destroyed it in the year 79. A devastating earthquake had already struck the region in 62, and many of its buildings were still under reconstruction when the volcano erupted in a rain of pumice pebbles. There were earthquakes after the eruption, too, as the emptied mountain settled back down for another few centuries of inactivity. Thus the soil of Pompeii has preserved not a city interrupted in the course of normal life, but one caught in a state of total panic, and whose buildings had already been severely damaged.

What can be done to stop this decay?

On a geological time scale, not much. On a human scale, a great deal. In Massimo Bray, Italy finally has a Minister of Culture and Tourism who means business (one of his predecessors, Sandro Bondi, was mostly known for his soupy poems in praise of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi). There is reason to hope that the waste and neglect that have brought the buried city to its present calamity will stop, at least to some extent, with a more responsible Italian government in charge and a new preservation law on the books.

(Photo of excavation of plaster casts of bodies at Pompeii by Flickr user TyB)

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As the British Film Institute heads into its season of Gothic fiction, Roger Luckhurst wonders what keeps the genre so fresh in pop culture:

The gothic has offered a sinuous line of cultural commentary since Horace Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto in 1764. It falls in and out of favour, but never quite goes away, because its metaphors of haunting and the undead prove so adaptable. Today, horror seems urgent again in an era of profound insecurity. George Romero updated the zombie as an emblem of consumption. The metaphor has now moved back closer to its slave plantation origins, imagining modern masses sapped of every ounce of living labour. Zombie contagion, despite Brad Pitt’s best efforts to ruin the genre in World War Z, remains an effective way of thinking about global interdependence and fragility.

It doesn’t take much to see aristocratic vampires as pulp versions of plutocrats supping on the blood of the merely-human, parasites hoarding wealth across the centuries. The Occupy movement even had a cross-over with the imagery of monstrous horror: Octopi Wall Street was a slogan and internet meme. Elsewhere, nasty and demonic things crawl out of war zones in the films Outpost or even Iraq in Adam Baker’s undead shocker, Juggernaut. But then the gothic, right from its nightmare beginnings, was about colonial anxiety and fears of what comes back to haunt from nefarious doings overseas.

Revisiting the works of Edgar Allen Poe, Sam Jordison pushes back against all the goth-love, finding the genre too moody and meandering:

Even the most famous stories, such as The Fall of the House Of Usher, left me cold. And not cold in a chills-up-the-spine sense: just a bit bored.

The image of the house reflected in the black tarn is admittedly impressive. So too is the description of the crumbling house itself, and the “minute fungi” that cover its exterior. But the symbolism quickly becomes overbearing: the pathetic fallacy of the awful weather, the gothic archways, the wild guitar playing, the gloom, the doom, the adjectives pertaining to gloom and doom, the decayed trees. Too much! And that’s before we get to the dialogue: “‘I shall perish!'” said he. ‘I must perish in this deplorable folly.'” You said it.

It’s possible to defend Poe as a pioneer. Here we can see the model of haunted houses ever since. Generations of writers, not to mention special effects teams and film directors, have been inspired by him. Then again, his scary buildings and emotional weather patterns aren’t a patch on those described by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights, while his gothic excesses don’t compete with those conjured by writers such as Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe half a century earlier.

So why do we still read Poe? Is he simply a curio – an early American writer with a crazy personal life? I hesitate to say that, for I still haven’t read enough, for a start. And even though I’ve frequently been bored, I’ve found odd moments fascinating, and gloriously weird. What is this thing about female corpses, for instance? Good job he was born before psychotherapy.

Previous Dish on gothic appeal here and here.

Milton Ezrati claims that the French economy is in “profound decline”:

French authorities mostly have either denied the situation’s severity or blamed it on Germany’s push for budget austerity throughout the euro zone. There is no shortage of critical remarks to make about the German approach, but it can hardly explain France’s economic problems. France, after all, hardly has imposed much austerity. It has promised to do so but otherwise has asked of itself none of the sharp government spending cuts evident elsewhere in Europe’s periphery. On the contrary, French government spending has continued to grow, rising almost 4 percent during the last two years. Government in France now constitutes some 57 percent of the entire economy, well above the euro zone’s average. Meanwhile, Paris recently sidestepped the need for more strictures, receiving permission from the EU bureaucracy to continue wider budget deficits than EU rules allow until 2015 at the earliest. Nor can French officials honestly blame German austerity when their nation’s economic slide has beginnings long before the current crisis or Berlin’s response to it. France, quite simply, has been underperforming the rest of Europe for over a decade.

He blames “ill-conceived policies that have hamstrung business with oppressive taxes, stultifying labor regulations, and a raft of product and production controls”:

Taxes are the most straightforward and immediate economic burden. Payroll levies in France amount to 38.8 percent, and with the added burden of business income taxes and the value-added tax (VAT), employers in France pay the government the equivalent of almost 64 percent of their payrolls. This is a much heavier weight than firms in other countries must bear. Germany, for instance, imposes a tax wedge on its business of about 53 percent, high compared to the 38.5 percent imposed by the United States, but still more than 10 full percentage points less than France. Harder to quantify but no less a burden on French business is the notorious complexity of the French tax code, which, business surveys indicate, rivals even that of the United States. Its myriad loopholes, set against the high statutory tax rates, tempt managers to divert time to tax planning that they might better dedicate to production and sales.

Joe Winkler observes the fallout from Banksy’s month-long New York campaign and argues those attempting to preserve or restore the art are missing the point:

In the last two weeks, owners of buildings with Banksy art have taken to hiring guards, putting up plexiglass, rolling gates, and ropes to create lines, all of which is practical and perhaps understandable but undermines much of the purpose of these 30 days. All of these protections simply turn these outdoors, public pieces into indoor museum pieces, introducing a sterility that subverts the spirit of the project. These tactics isolate the art from the bustling environment. The viewer becomes passive, just another viewer waiting in line, no longer a participant. From a theoretical perspective, this all seems backwards. The owners of the building, from the perspective of the actual graffiti art, ought to hold no more rights than the community in deciding what to do with the graffiti.

Meanwhile, NPR interviewed a woman whose building in Williamsburg was tagged by Banksy. Her thoughts:

It leaves us in a sticky place … he’s putting artwork on our wall that now we’re expected either to protect or let it be destroyed, and we can’t sell it. And we don’t necessarily want to sell it; we don’t know yet. But I have been approached by a gallerist, and this is something that this gallery specializes in. They could come, take down the wall, put it up for auction … and that could be the route that we go. It puts us in a conundrum, I mean, we believe — I think we truly believe — that this art is for the public. But we’re also not equipped to serve the public’s needs.

Recent Dish on Banksy’s New York adventure here and here.