At the Movies

by Michael Wood

Can you die in a synecdoche and would it be a good thing if you could? Would it be like dying in a parenthesis, as Mrs Ramsay does in To The Lighthouse, or would it be entirely different? At the end of Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman’s first film as a director, Caden Cotard seems to die as a theatrical version of himself inside a replica of Manhattan in a warehouse in Manhattan. A voice that reaches him by wire and microphone has for some time been telling him what to do and what to say. Now it says quite gently, `Die,’ and he does. Or does he? Perhaps this is the dream death he awards himself. The voice is that of the actor playing Cotard as the director of his vast autobiographical extravaganza, a woman who has sought out the part and taken over. Is there another Cotard somewhere writing these lines for her? All this comes after most of Cotard’s friends and associates have seen themselves represented by actors in his ongoing work, and after the actor who used to play Cotard, tiring of subterfuge or failing to understand the nature of artifice, has flung himself from a parapet to his death.
Let’s consider something easier but not unrelated. You can certainly die in Schenectady, in reality and in this movie, since that’s what our hero’s parents do. He lives there himself at the start of the film, directing plays at the local playhouse, caught between his mounting, inventive hypochondria and his possibly real ailments. There is definitely something wrong with the plumbing in his house, since a tap explodes and gashes his head while he is shaving. But that’s the least of it.
The signs are all bad for Cotard (played with an amazing mixture of grace and doom by Philip Seymour Hoffman), and not just the signs. A professor on the local radio reads a bleak poem by Rilke, Cotard sees the news of Harold Pinter’s death in the paper, Asian flu is spreading, the first black graduate of the University of Mississippi has just died. Cotard’s wife is about to leave him, taking their little girl with her. The play he is currently directing is Death of a Salesman, and his gimmick is to have young actors take the roles of older people - because they will, if they don’t die first, become older people, and the audience is to feel this in the performance. Nice idea, but Cotard has become a little obsessive about it. Before his wife (Catherine Keener) leaves he asks her if he has disappointed her. She says, too weary even to be unkind, everyone is disappointing once you get to know them. She doesn’t say we’re all just synecdoches for some large, recurring failure, but that’s what she means.
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The other memorable conversation Cotard has at this stage is more fun. His daughter asks him what those things are on his face. Pustules, he says. They are caused by sychosis, which is different from psychosis. The little girl, clearly her father’s daughter in this respect, says: `You could have both, though.’ You could. He does. Or if he doesn’t have a psychosis he has something just as good - good for the film, that is. He knows what every character in a Charlie Kaufman movie knows, whether it’s Being John Malkovich, Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He knows that reality puts up scarcely any resistance to fear or fantasy, and that inside every head is a cast of thousands ready to misrepresent the owner.
This is essentially a comic idea - more precisely it’s a possibility of desolation that has immense comic mileage - and the film is very funny as well as very grim, often funniest when it’s grimmest. Sometimes it’s just grim and lingering, allowing Cotard to wallow in his not very interesting angst, as if Woody Allen had visited us with one of his earnest moments. You have to wonder whether there is a virus that makes witty American moviemakers want to be Ingmar Bergman at least once in their lives. This is it for Kaufman: Wild Raspberries.
But only some of the time; only when Kaufman’s ironies slow down into bare regret. And the restless cleverness of the film, which has bothered many viewers, is on the side of lightness in the end. When I said there was a replica of Manhattan in a warehouse in Manhattan, I was simplifying wildly. There is a replica of the warehouse in the warehouse, and perhaps another one inside that. Within the warehouses are rooms that simulate the real rooms in which the actual lives of characters are being lived. Outside the warehouses are New York streets full of litter and human debris, although of course you have to go through a simulation of those streets to get there, and even then you’re still only in a movie. When Cotard wants to know why an old girlfriend (Samantha Morton), now working as his assistant, fancies the actor playing Cotard, she says: `He reminds me of you.’ He says, although by this time he should know better: `I’m me. You don’t need someone to remind you of me.’
What has happened, it seems, is that Cotard, deprived of his wife and health and confidence, had been given a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius award, which in his case appears to mean infinite amounts of money to do what you like with over an infinite amount of time. It may be that everything that follows from his getting the grant is a dream - it may be that his getting the award is a dream - but it scarcely matters, since this is a dream he never leaves, and we never see its outside. His grand plan is to make a play out of his whole life, and once he has rented or bought the warehouse in Manhattan, of course the warehouse is part of the play as well as the place where it will be performed. If it is performed. This play looks more and more like fragments from a film about a film that will never be finished. At one point an actor complains they have been rehearsing for 17 years: when are they going to work before an audience? Cotard says not yet. More time passes, and indeed time itself has started to stretch: there are weeks that feel like years, and years that literally turn into decades. Before Cotard dies he manages to become a very old man, surviving his wife and daughter and mistresses. His refrain is `I know how to do this play.’
All this keeps us guessing and helpfully puts over-solemn thought at risk. Cotard decides to give his actors brief notes each day, news of some calamity they are to react to in their next scene: death, desertion, disease, rape, bereavement. This follows much bogus talk about the unheard-of authenticity of the play he wants to mount, the deep, pure, powerful truth lurking inside all of us, the real story of real life. It’s like a delusional version of method acting, and it’s brilliantly punctured within the play by a character who says to her daughter: `Daddy can’t be with us right now, he’s finding his inner self.’ Kaufman has plenty of satirical lines in this vein. An actress trying to cheer Cotard up with a bit of profound intellectual comfort says: `Knowing that you don’t know is the first essential step to knowing.’ Cotard, not intending any kind of comment on the remark, perhaps not even hearing it, says: `I don’t know.’
The notes for the actors are sensationalist, of course, shreds of melodrama rather than echoes of daily living, but Cotard doesn’t see this - and perhaps we don’t see it fully - until Kaufman gives us a marvellous shot over Cotard’s shoulder as he sits at a table covered with these notes, beautifully, symmetrically arranged. No, not a table. Dozens of tables stacked tightly together, hundreds of notes, stretching out as far as the screen can see. It’s the sort of Bergman frame that might also have been devised by Orson Welles.
And when the cleverness and the desolation work together the results are magnificent. Cotard goes to Germany to see his daughter, who left England with her mother for a couple of weeks when she was four, and is now in her thirties and dying. She can no longer speak English, and communicates with Cotard from her bed by means of a simultaneous translation system. She needs him to beg her forgiveness for abandoning her, although he didn’t, and for various sexual offences which he hasn’t committed. In what is probably his finest moral moment - there aren’t a lot to choose from - the stricken Cotard admits to everything and asks the dying woman if she can forgive him. She weeps and says . . . she can’t, she just can’t. End of scene. He has confessed to a pack of lies in vain. Everything Kaufman does well is here: communication of a failure of communication, shifting levels of language and reality, a significant sadness that has the form of an intricate joke.
There are many remarkable small touches in the film too. When Cotard discovers his long-estranged wife has returned to New York, he goes to the address he has been given. It’s a non-existent number on an actual street: 1045 West 37th. The apartment is 31Y and the tenant from whom the wife is borrowing it is called Capgrass. Capgras syndrome is a condition in which you are convinced that your familiars have been replaced by look-alike impostors - or shall we say actors.

From the LRB letters page: [ 25 June 2009 ] Ealasaid Munro.

Michael Wood teaches at Princeton. Literature and the Taste of Knowledge came out in 2005.

Other articles by this contributor:
After the Movies · Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma
At the Movies · Marlon Brando
At the Movies · Michael Wood goes to see The Da Vinci Code
Memories of a Skinny Girl · Mario Vargas Llosa
At the Movies · Michael Wood goes to see Babel
Impossible Wishes · Thomas Mann
At the Movies · Almodóvar
Eskapizm · Oblomov

TLS on Iranian Elections

on Iran

Iran votes again

by Rosemary Richter

What is happening in Iran now, after the election, should indelibly change external perceptions of the country and its discontentsRosemary Righter Recommend? (2) Whether or not “revolutionary” enforcers at the command of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei bludgeon to a halt the protests against a blatantly falsified election “result”, there is no way that the extraordinary Iranian presidential election campaign of 2009, or its still more extraordinary aftermath, can be made unreal by mere fascists. Thirty years after the Shah’s overthrow, the revolutionary façade has cracked, exposing chasms within the establishment between those who, like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, insist that Iran is still not Islamic enough and those who, while not questioning the system of rule by divine law, unwittingly put the revolution in question by seeking to move on to something more closely resembling a “normal” state.

As in previous elections, Khamenei, wali e faqih of the Islamic Republic since Khomeini’s death twenty years ago and thus theoretically above politics, had taken due precautions to secure the right result before a single vote was cast. Before campaigning could begin, the twelve handpicked revolutionary zealots who form the Council of Guardians, currently dominated by radical supporters of Ahmadinejad, had disqualified all but four of 475 would-be candidates. As in previous elections, only trusted male stalwarts of the regime survived the cull.

Three of the four, so the script ran, were to act as foils to the favoured son, President Ahmadinejad. On parade were the mullah Mehdi Karoubi, a former Speaker of the Majlis, Iran’s equally well-vetted parliament, who is close to ex-President Muhammad Khatami, the mild-mannered but ultimately “reliable” cleric who a decade ago embodied but ultimately betrayed reformist aspirations; also General Mohsen Rezai, who commanded the Revolutionary Guards from 1981 to 1997 and has an Interpol warrant against him for the 1994 Hezbollah suicide bombing that killed eighty-six people at a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires; and Mir-Hussein Mousavi, in his youth a leftist who, like many others in 1979, flocked to Khomeini’s banner because he knew that the “street” could be mobilized only in the name of religion. Mousavi earned a reputation for competence as prime minister during the 1980–88 Iraq–Iran war (but not for tolerating dissent – at the war’s end an estimated 30,000 political prisoners were massacred by the regime he served), and subsequently became a leader of the Holy Warriors of the Islamic Revolution, a small but influential faction on the Khomeinist Left.
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“Not exactly a list”, observed Con Coughlin, the author of Khomeini’s Ghost, as the line-up was announced, “that will give Iranians a chance to vote for change they can believe in.” In any event, Tehran wits joked, Ahmadinejad’s campaign slogan, “We can” (note to Barack Obama: having already used it in the 2005 Iranian elections, Ahmadinejad holds the political copyright), meant simply Yes, We Can tear up your votes. With characteristically elegant understatement, Amir Taheri points out, in The Persian Night, that “in Khomeinist Iran, voters form only part of a more complex mix that produces the results”. If necessary, “ballot boxes could be filled or emptied, and even the dead could be made to vote in thousands”, and the announcement of results postponed until the Supreme Guide had decided how big a margin “divine assessment” would award the victor.

So confident this year were the established powers that they allowed unprecedented live debates between the chosen four on Iran’s unendurably dull state television. That prime-time battle of ideas was a miscalculation that may yet prove to be historic.Ahmadinejad is a populist demagogue who does a passable imitation of a fundamentalist warrior, the “outsider” son of a poor (in fact, well-to-do) blacksmith battling on behalf of the “dispossessed” against the Islamic Republic’s corrupt and profiteering ruling caste. Better known abroad for demanding the excision of the “cancerous tumour” Israel and announcing imminent Islamic victory over the “Great Satan”, his domestic pitch relies on projecting himself as the pious servant of Allah dedicated to relieving the sufferings of the devout poor. It is a great act, but one difficult to square with his persecution of trade unionists, his hostility to the minimum wage, paid holidays and other “infidel” relics of unIslamic class warfare, as well as the spreading poverty, unemployment and inflation attributable to his reckless mishandling of what should be a rich economy. For a few brief hours, he now had to share the stage, in exchanges that gave him a taste of his own blistering rhetoric. Iranians witnessed, electrified, a regime at loggerheads, openly trading blame for its loss of credibility.

Karoubi rebuked Ahmadinejad’s vehement denials of the Holocaust, saying that it was “not an issue for Iran”. Rezai not only poured scorn on wastrel economic policies, but laid out a detailed plan for détente with the West. From left field, the stolid Mousavi unexpectedly became the voice of millions of Iranians as he accused Ahmadinejad of “adventurism, illusionism, exhibitionism, extremism and superficiality” in dealing with the world, conduct that had, he contemptuously asserted, reduced the standing of an Iranian passport to that of Somalia. An election that had been deliberately engineered to bore came abruptly alive.

Iran’s voters, suddenly daring to hope, headed to the booths in huge numbers – certainly far larger than in 2005, even if the official 84 per cent all-time record is no more to be trusted than the result. And that is all, at the time of writing, we know for certain about the June 12 election. That, and the fact that the Ministry of the Interior sent many of its counters home that night, yet managed the unprecedented feat of totting up a decisive portion of almost 39 million votes, by hand, in just three hours – less than the time required to open all the ballot boxes.

“No one in their right mind”, as the greatly revered Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri observed from the holy city of Qom, could believe results that, for example, swelled the Ahmadinejad first-round vote from 198,417 in 2005 to 1,113,111 in East Azerbaijan, where he comfortably outpolled Mousavi, an Azeri from Khamein; and from 69,710 to 677,829 in Karoubi’s home province of Lorestan (where the popular native son’s vote shrivelled from 55.5 per cent to 4.6 per cent and the 14,920 who voted for him were fewer, he complained, than the volunteers in his campaign). In Isfahan and Tehran itself, Ahmadinejad more than doubled his support. Most suspect of all was the 113 per cent swing to Ahmadinejad in rural provinces. Contrary to Western assumptions, Ahmedinejad’s base is in cities and their poorer suburbs; in the countryside, voters have a history of going against hardliners.

Khamenei had not merely stolen the election; he had engineered a coup against the “republican” element of the Islamic Republic. It was maybe a misreading of a national mood that sought greater personal freedoms within but not, as yet, in opposition to the Islamic regime; or it was an intriguer’s intuitive judgement that any relaxation of Khomeinist rigour would be fatal and that it was time to crack heads. Whichever is closer to the truth, the display of contempt for the electoral process aroused near universal disgust, split the establishment as never before and brought millions on to the streets, this time in open defiance of the regime. Khamenei dug in, hailing trickery as a “triumph for Islam” and ordering Iranians to unite under the man who, the Supreme Guide in effect confirmed ex cathedra in Friday prayers a week after the election, “won” because his views were “closer to mine than the views of others”.

The contrast between the insults, clubs and bullets flying within Iran itself, and the tones of sweet reason that Western politicians have for years thought wisest to adopt with the Islamic Republic, illustrate how far adrift is what passes for Western policy from Iran’s grim but far from monolithic reality. American leaders nervously stammered their hopes that Ahmadinejad’s “landslide victory” was a true reflection of the will of the Iranian people well after the streets of Tehran and other cities had filled with hundreds of thousands from all walks of life brandishing “Where is my vote?” placards, who knew full well that it was nothing of the kind.

The fervour of those protests and the despotic malevolence with which Ayatollah Khamenei girded himself to snuff it out, are the reference points in a fight that has finally burst into the open between two Irans: one obscurantist, undeniably oppressive, and intrinsically belligerent, the other a proud, culturally sophisticated and overwhelmingly youthful Islamic nation that, now if not before, yearns to be delivered from the “Persian night” of Khomeinism.

What is happening should indelibly change external perceptions of Iran and its multiple discontents. In the overdue and necessary departure from diplomatic clichés, Amir Taheri’s many-layered exposition of the origins, goals and nature of a messianic regime that he convincingly dismisses as “neither Islamic, nor republican, and . . . certainly not Iranian” is an indispensable guide.

The Islamic label, he argues, “has impeded a proper understanding of what has happened to Iran”. There has never been an “Islamic model of government”; not in the Koran, which deals mostly with ritual and personal conduct and contains “not a single mention of such terms as ‘government’”; not in the notion of rule by the clergy, which is alien to a religion that dispenses with a clerical hierarchy; and not in Khomeini’s inchoate writings, for all their insistence on “contamination” by the West as the cause of Islam’s decline. In 1979, Taheri points out, three of the six Grand Ayatollahs of Iranian Shiism openly rejected as “unIslamic” Khomeini’s claim to be Allah’s all-powerful regent, and his adoption of the title Imam did indeed play fast and loose with the core Shiite belief in the “Hidden” twelfth Imam, the Lord of Time who went into “occlusion” in the tenth century and whose return will usher in “the end of days”. Khomeinist Iran may be a theocracy, in the sense that all power is avowedly of divine source: he quotes Khomeini that “all international laws are the produce of the syphilitic minds of a handful of idiots. And Islam has obliterated all of them”. But it is best seen as a messianic mixture of elements of Islam, half-understood ideas drawn from Western radicalism and fascism, and a dose of “tiermondiste rage”.

Khomeinism’s appeal to fellow Muslims, initially including the Sunni majority, is associated with the fundamentalist rejection of modernity as a Judaeo-Christian conspiracy (the supposedly moderate Khatami, speaking at the University of Florence in 1998, described the Renaissance as the starting point of “human decline into barbarity”). But that, Taheri asserts, makes “republic” also a misnomer, despite an elected legislature and president, and references in the 1979 constitution – which harks back to the “modern” Iranian constitution of 1906 and which may now assume greater significance – to a “people-based” form of government.

“To understand a civilisation,” Taheri writes, “it is important to understand its vocabulary; if it was not on their tongues, it was not likely to have been on their minds either.” Taheri points out that until the end of the nineteenth century neither Farsi nor any of the other main Muslim languages had words for republic, let alone democracy. That is true but relevant only up to a point: it was once also true of many other cultures, and millions of Iranians, bellowing defiance from rooftops and dodging thuggish Baseej militias and live fire on the streets, most decidedly have democracy “on their minds” today.

Taheri is on firmer ground when he asserts that Khomeinism is by definition “not Iranian”. As Khomeini’s chartered Air France plane from Paris touched down in Tehran in February 1979 – in safety, since the Shah had fled the previous month, and to a tumultuous welcome from millions of his countrymen – an eager journalist asked the old exile how he felt about coming home. Khomeini, as Con Coughlin reminds us, notoriously responded: “Nothing”. The self-styled Imam derided patriotism as unIslamic. Undaunted by the sectarian arithmetic – Shiites account for no more than 15 per cent of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims – he aspired to lead the entire Islamic ummah. And he explicitly stated the goal of his Islamic revolution in global terms, pitching the Muslim City of God against the infidel City of War led by the Great Satan and its Zionist agents. His successors have not substantially deviated from these core tenets of Khomeinism; not, at least, until now.

Khomeinist Iran’s obsessive demonizing of the United States and the Jews is, Taheri argues, born of calculation rather than of emotion or Iranian experience. The Khomeinist dream of conquering the world for Islam is obstructed even within the Islamic ummah by Shia–Sunni antagonism and deep-rooted Arab distrust of Iran, obstacles that can be overcome only by creating an Islamist movement united by the only things capable of uniting it, resentment of the alleged Judaeo-Christian conspiracy symbolized by US support for Israel, and the claim that (although it did not get far along the road to Jerusalem in the Iran–Iraq war) the Islamic Republic is the only power that can destroy Israel. Hence the billions lavished on Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Syria and Palestine; and hence in large part Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Much of this goes against the Iranian grain; Jews were a large and generally tolerated minority in Iran and the US was seen by Iranians as a friend. Washington came to Iran’s aid in 1945 when the historically meddlesome British, “up to their old tricks”, were scheming to hive off oil-rich Khuzestan into a separate emirate, and when Stalin, instead of withdrawing the Red Army as agreed, was busy setting up breakaway Soviet republics in Iran’s Azeri and Kurdish provinces.

In a pointedly revisionist account of the Mossadeq years, Taheri records that US aid to Iran rose from $5 million to more than $23 million during Mossadeq’s premiership; that both directly and at the UN, the US sided with Iran against Britain in support of his campaign to nationalize Iran’s oil; and that Washington tried for two years to broker an agreement, only for Mossadeq to reject every offer, including a 50:50 profit-sharing deal the US considered to be fair. By 1953, he writes, the great democrat Mossadeq had quarrelled with the Shah, dissolved the Majlis, postponed elections, declared martial law and was governing by decree. With some difficulty, the Shah obtained a guarantee of US support should he dismiss Mossadeq; but then fled the country when Mossadeq rejected as a forgery the firman dismissing him. By this time, Taheri writes, the CIA, working with British agents, was without doubt “engaged in a number of dirty tricks designed to incite public opinion against the prime minister by creating the impression that the Communists were about to seize power”. But, as Pravda gleefully reported at the time, the US botched the job because its plans hinged on Mossadeq’s dismissal and fell apart when he refused to go. The CIA cable to Washington read: “The operation has been tried and failed”.

What actually happened, Taheri asserts, is that having got rid of the Shah, “Mossadeq appeared to be paralysed, spending most of the day in bed in his pajamas and refusing to see his ministers”. Momentum was lost, the crowds’ mood turned, and as pro-Shah demonstrators headed towards his home “he climbed his wall with a ladder, still in his trademark pajamas, to seek refuge in the headquarters of the American Point Four [Aid Programme] next door”. Mossadeq, he adds, never himself blamed his fall on the US.

It is a hilarious account, extensively documented, and is highlighted here not only because it will sharply be contested but because the CIA’s “overthrow” of Mossadeq is a central myth informing, and inhibiting, modern American policy on Iran. Hence there came a sequence of American official mea culpas and hands outstretched to the Ayatollah, beginning with Carter’s letter to Khomeini as one “man of God” to another, including the farcical Iran–Contra business under Reagan, George W. Bush’s pledge that a law-abiding Iran would have “no better friend than the United States”, and the apologies for past American misconduct in Obama’s Cairo speech. Then there was Bill Clinton’s extraordinary public depiction, soon after leaving office, of Khomeinist Iran as a place “where the ideas that I subscribe to are defended by a majority” and “the guys I identify with” get most of the votes. These are “Guys”, Taheri notes, like Ayatollah Ali-Akhbar Mohtashami-Pour, creator of Lebanese Hezbollah.

An equally misleading myth is the notion that Khomeini created a homogeneous Islamic system. He certainly had no time for the Pahlavi dynasty’s “inherited Satanic state” and set out to replace the cabinet with an Islamic Revolution Council answerable to him alone as chief priest of the revolution; and to supplant the armed forces with the Islamic Republican Guard Corps (IRGC), one of his first creations. But, not least thanks to Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade when the revolution was only eighteen months old, much of the state apparatus survived.

The resulting dual system, Taheri shows, is riven by contradictions – not between moderates and hardliners, as the West tends to frame them, but between “revolutionary organs, state organs, hybrid organs . . . secret societies operating in parallel with both state and revolution [and] para-revolutionary and para-state organs”. Parallel sharia and Roman law courts are forever overturning the rival legal system’s verdicts. So constant are the struggles between the regime’s various power centres that even the absolutist Khomeini found it necessary to create an “expediency council” to adjudicate in “the Interests of the Established Order”. A nation divided against itself emerges from Taheri’s detailed description of the multiple interlocking institutional wheels within wheels that drive on and drag back the Khomeinist juggernaut.

Con Coughlin’s crisp account of Khomeini’s Islamic revolution is more successful at explaining why and how it came about, and why it took the form it did, than it is when he examines the man himself, or when he turns to the assessment of Khomeini’s legacy. He has a journalist’s sure feel for what it is that most non-Iranian readers will not know, how the land reforms of the Shah’s White Revolution menaced the clerics’ wealth, for example, or why the outcry over the Shah’s first attempt to give women as well as non-Muslims votes in local elections (Khomeini denounced the move as a Zionist plot “to corrupt our chaste women”) was so strident that the Shah thought it best to beat a tactical retreat. He gives a good summary of the Shah’s sins of commission and, not least, omission – in particular, his failure to see that rapid modernization minus accountability or open debate equals trouble. His account of the revolution’s birth and Khomeini’s seizure of absolute power is fast-moving yet gratifyingly detailed, not least on the first grim show trials at Khomeini’s temporary revolutionary headquarters at Refah school, and on the making of the revolutionary constitution, a moment of truth for the revolution’s Kerensky figures, who only then realized that the dour curmudgeon they had hailed as Iran’s deliverer held liberal democracy in odium and was bent on a totalitarian theocracy. He reminds us how the revolution then turned on its own, in “a ruthless reign of terror that would have done the Jacobins proud”, with revolutionary courts ordering the execution of 8,500 and the imprisonment of many thousands more.

But who was Khomeini? Despite drawing much useful material from Baquer Moin’s authoritative 1999 biography (Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah), Coughlin himself seems unsure. By the mid-1940s, he writes, Khomeini was “one of the country’s leading Islamic figures”; yet the 1953 Mossadeq crisis, he writes a few pages later, demonstrated “the limits of Khomeini’s authority . . . his views were of little consequence”. In 1961, Coughlin is again describing him as one of “the country’s top twelve clerics”; yet in the following paragraph he writes, accurately, that “what Khomeini lacked in religious stature was more than compensated for by his militant political agenda”. Coughlin presents Khomeini as a serious student of Islamic mysticism in both Persian and Arabic, and a poet of talent; whereas Taheri gives examples of the Ayatollah’s poor Arabic, ungrammatical Persian, and the swift pulping by the regime of a volume of his poems, published just after the revolution, because people were poking fun at them.

More seriously, it is surely an overstatement to claim that, even within Iran, the revolution’s legacy is “as powerful today” as it was either in 1979, or at the Imam’s death in 1989 when 2 million mourners mobbed his funeral and those who got near the coffin tore his shroud into reliquary strips. Recent events throw doubt, to put it mildly, on the “uncompromising devotion to . . . revolutionary Islam” which Coughlin ascribes to Iran’s people. Islam yes, revolution no, would be more like it; born after 1979, Khomeini’s multitudinous great-grandchildren have grown sick of corrupt mullahs spouting stale ideology, getting overexcited about a strand of hair floating free from the compulsory Islamic headscarf and messing up the economy. In the name of Islam, they seek a return to a distinction between the source of law (divine) and its exercise (temporal), returning theologians to the seminaries and leaving governing to governments. As for the revolution’s continued prowess “in holding up the banner of radical Islam” abroad, its reach has always exceeded its grasp. Khomeinism was and is an inspiration to radical Islamists, and the regime is a major paymaster and trainer of terrorist groups in the Middle East and beyond; but Coughlin almost certainly overstates the multiplier effect of the links he alleges between the Islamic Republic and (Sunni) al-Qaeda. Iran will work with any enemy of America, infidel North Korea, heretic (Alawite) Syria, or Communist Cuba; and there is evidence of Iranian support for Sunni as well as Shia insurgents in Iraq and more recently of weapons shipments to the Taliban. But in the pursuit of an Islamic millennium, al-Qaeda is more rival than ally.

More doubtful still is Coughlin’s insistence that Iran’s “quest for the atom bomb” is “a central part of Khomeini’s legacy”. In evidence, he presents, “published here for the first time”, a letter from Khomeini to Mohsen Rezai in 1988 – a letter written four days before, in a decision that Khomeini described as more bitter to him than drinking poison, he accepted the UN resolution that halted the Iran–Iraq war. The letter (available on the BBC website since 2006) does indeed mention “atomic weapons which are the requirements of war in this day and age”; but Coughlin could usefully have added that the letter was in response to one from Rezai, who, as Commander of the Guards, was trying to get into the old man’s head just how desperate Iran’s military situation then was by listing the hardware Iran would need to prevail. Khomeini was throwing Rezai’s words back in his face, with the comment, “this is nothing but sloganeering”. That does not mean that we should believe Iran’s rulers when they insist that they are bound by religious fatwa not to build nuclear weapons; not even Mohammed el-Baradei, the cheek-turning head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is so naive. But for smoking guns, look elsewhere.

A useful starting point is Emanuele Ottolenghi’s Under a Mushroom Cloud: Europe, Iran and the bomb. This in many ways admirable essay is somewhat broken-backed. At one level, it is a primer on Iran’s nuclear research centres, uranium mines and uranium enrichment activity, heavy water plant, nuclear reactor and other suspect facilities. There are twenty-five separate sites and centres. Not all are acknowledged; the purpose of some has not been ascertained; and some are legitimate nuclear research centres that may have dual use. Unfortunately without documentary references, Dr Ottolenghi brings together a considerable body of IAEA pronouncements that gives a good idea of what we know so far. This is not an alarmist book. Ottolenghi observes that even when Iran succeeds in enriching uranium to weapons grade, it must still turn that material into metal, shape the metal into hemispheres and fit these into a device that will trigger a nuclear chain reaction, fit that device into a missile warhead and ensure that it can reach the target before exploding. Iran, he says, is still at the dough-making stage of producing bread. At the same time, he makes a persuasive case that as a revolutionary power, missile-launched nuclear weapons would be Iran’s logical “instruments of ideological coercion and intimidation”; and that because Arab governments understand this perfectly, “the face of the Middle East will change well before Iran actually proves to the world it has a bomb”.

Ottolenghi’s second and less than wholly convincing theme concerns what, “if diplomacy does not work and war is considered to carry an unacceptably high risk”, can be done to stop Iran getting that far. In essence, this boils down to sanctions, mainly European sanctions. His case is that, short of invasion, military action is “extremely problematic”: there are too many installations, and they are too well hidden or well protected, for bombing to be militarily feasible, even disregarding the risks of political collateral damage. Talk of “regime change” might convince the mullahs that continued pursuit of nuclear weapons would precipitate the regime’s fall. But it could equally spur them to go full speed ahead to “protect the revolution”. How then to convince the regime that the nuclear game is not worth the candle? His argument for sanctions is that Iran is hugely dependent on trade with Europe, that the regime controls around 70 per cent of the economy, and that trade sanctions could damage the business empires of the religious foundations, the oil and petrochemicals sectors and Iranian banks and cut off the petrol that Iran imports for lack of sufficient refinery capacity. Taking into account “spare parts and equipment for everything European companies have sold to, and built in, Iran over the past 30 years, imports are so critical that the sudden cessation of European supplies would have a devastating effect on the Iranian economy”. Although Iran would turn to Russia and China, it could not, he argues, switch suppliers in a trice. And although it would threaten to cut oil sales to the West, it could not afford the loss of revenue.

If only this were true. Even supposing that sanctions worked better in Iran than they did in Iraq, there is an acknowledged mismatch of time frames here. Sanctions notoriously take time: much time. And time, on the nuclear front, is running out. Regime change, Taheri acknowledges, is a term that “drives some people up the wall”; but there are plenty of Iranians who may themselves now see that as their only hope. “Successive Khomeinist administrations”, he writes, “have systematically dismantled the vast multiform coalition that made the [1979] revolution possible.” The 2009 election campaign has revealed just how rancorous the divisions now are. The campaign pitched the 1979 generation against what it sees as the dangerous adventurism of Ahmadinejad, adventurism with which, stepping vengefully from his pedestal, the Supreme Guide has explicitly associated himself. Some key requirements of regime change exist within Iran: a sense of betrayal by the powers that be; the outline of a political alternative; social discontents, not least among educated but thwarted women; economic hardship; weariness of isolation; and finally, the circumvention of censorship by a computer-savvy new generation.

The contest between Khomeinism and Iran’s constituencies for change is certainly an unequal one. In law and in despotic fact, Khamenei has unlimited powers. The only constraint is that he is elected and can in theory be removed by the Assembly of Experts, an elected body of ninety-two mullahs. But that previously hypothetical proposition has suddenly become thinkable. The Assembly is headed by the billionaire ex-President Hashemi Rafsanjani, Ayatollah Khomeini’s éminence grise and the man who, in exchange for the presidency for himself, engineered Khamenei’s elevation to Supreme Guide. Nicknamed “The Shark”, Rafsanjani is the closest Iran comes to a political “godfather”. He has been circling his rival Khamenei for decades; and he is now up against Ahmadinejad, who has publicly accused him of corruption, in a fight for survival. At the command-performance Khamenei sermon a week after the election, Rafsanjani and many other Assembly figures were conspicuously absent; he was widely rumoured to be in Qom counting heads.

The determining voice, however, is likely to be the Revolutionary Guards, the dominant force at the command of the Supreme Guide. And on June 22, the day the Guardian Council affirmed Ahmadinejad’s victory to be beyond doubt, the IRGC declared for Khamenei. Protest rallies were, it announced, a “conspiracy” against Iran that would be met with “a resolution and revolutionary confrontation with the Guards, Baseej and other security and disciplinary forces”.

The IRGC is a state within a state that, in addition to its responsibilities for Iran’s nuclear programme, for exporting the revolution through its terrorist Quds (Jerusalem) corps, and for crushing dissent with the fearsome Karbala brigades, has accumulated a vast business empire and holds a third of the seats in the Majlis along with two-thirds of provincial governorships. Ahmedinejad joined the Baseej Mustadafeen (the paramilitary wing of the IRGC with an active strength today of 400,000) in the war with Iraq, was seconded to the IRGC’s Ramadan brigade and other Guards units, and has, as president, lodged his own men in key commands and transferred $18 billion worth of “privatised” state enterprises to the IRGC. His strategy appears to have paid off – for now.

The unknown factor is how the “revolutionary” IRGC, in reality a hugely wealthy power with assets to protect, would act were its commanders to conclude that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad had split the elite, paralysed the state and damaged the regime’s cohesiveness as well as its legitimacy. To save the system that created them, praetorian guards have been known to turn against the ruler of the day. Repression, at the time of writing, is pervasive and ferocious. But on June 21, Taheri reported this Twitter to Iranians from Professor Zahra Rahnavard, Mousavi’s dauntless wife:

Let the wolves know that in our tribe
If the father dies, his gun will remain.
Even if all the men of the tribe are killed
A baby son will remain in the wooden cradle.

The battle for the future of Iran has only just been joined.



Amir Taheri
THE PERSIAN NIGHT
Iran under the Khomeinist Revolution
414pp. Encounter Books. $25.95.
978 1 59403 240 0

Con Coughlin
KHOMEINI’S GHOST
370pp. Pan Macmillan. £25.
978 0 230 71454 0

Emanuele Ottolenghi
UNDER A MUSHROOM CLOUD
Europe, Iran and the bomb
278pp. Profile Books. Paperback, £9.99.
978 1 84668 282 7



Rosemary Righter is an Associate Editor of The Times. She has worked for the Far Eastern Economic Review and Newsweek in Asia, as development and diplomatic correspondent of The Sunday Times and as chief leader writer at The Times. She has written four books, including Utopia Lost: United Nations and world order, 1999.

TLS on Atoms and all that

I see no atoms
by DAVID PAPINEAU

a review of

Bradley Monton, editor IMAGES OF EMPIRICISM Essays on science and stances with a reply from Bas C. van Fraassen 300pp. Oxford University Press. ¿60 (US $110). 978 0 19 921884 4
Bas C. van F r a a s s e n SCIENTIFIC REPRESENTATION Paradoxes of perspective 408pp. Clarendon Press. ¿30 (US $50). 978 0 19 927822 0

The architects of the scientific revolution shared a vision. According to Galileo, Descartes, Gassendi and Boyle, the natural world is nothing but a giant machine with microscopic parts. At bottom there is only cold matter in motion, and all the beauties of nature arise from the many ways the tiny pieces can be arranged into intricate patterns. This vision has since been amply confirmed. We may now give a slightly different account of the underlying components, but modern science has no doubt that everything is determined by basic physics. Contemporary biochemistry and computer technology are just two of the spin-offs that testify to the validity of the mechanical vision.
The funny thing is that it took over two centuries for the fathers of the scientific revolution to be proved right. It is one of the great curiosities of modern intellectual life that the vision which so inspired the scientific revolution was emphatically rejected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and only fully resurrected in the twentieth. The trouble was that the scientific revolution wasn't much good at microscopic science. The natural philosophers of the time gained a great deal of precise mathematical knowledge about the gross behaviour of observable phenomena like planets, projectiles and gases, and the newly invented microscope lifted one small corner of the veil covering the microscopic world. But when it came to identifying the hidden mechanisms responsible for the general run of observable phenomena, the seventeenth century got nowhere. To take one example, the seventeenth-century scientists knew that air exerts pressure. But what was responsible for the "spring of the air" as they termed it? Was the air packed with bouncy particles like coiled-up pieces of wool, as Boyle supposed? Was it simply some kind of porous fluid? Or did it consist of scattered particles in rapid motion, as we now believe? In the seventeenth century all these hypotheses were consistent with the macroscopic data and there seemed little hope of telling them apart. And so it went, across the board.
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Plenty of microscopic theories were entertained, but none graduated beyond the status of speculation, and it came to seem that the scientific method was impotent to penetrate beneath the surface of things As a result the whole idea of microscopic theorizing fell into disrepute. "Hypotheses non fingo" declared Newton, by which he meant that hypothetical speculation about underlying mechanisms was unnecessary for his precise mathematical descriptions of gravitational motion. "No science of bodies [is] within our reach" echoed his acolyte Locke, explaining that "whilst we are destitute of senses acute enough to discover the minute particles of bodies, and to give us ideas of their mechanical affections, we must be content to be ignorant of their properties and ways of operation". The upshot was that ideas about "minute particles" ceased to be part of science. Both Newton and Locke allowed that speculation had some utility as a source of intellectual stimulation. But it had no place in experimental philosophy. Proper science should chart the behaviour of observable phenomena and not waste time on hidden mechanisms.
Part of the issue for Newton and his contemporaries was how to determine the appropriate standards for scientific knowledge. Should science satisfy the same requirements of demonstrative certainty as mathematics and logic? Or were lower standards of everyday proof enough, as when we require criminal verdicts to be established "beyond a reasonable doubt"? At first the pioneers of the scientific revolution aimed high. Descartes's first foray into public life was a vehement attack in a prominent Parisian salon on the modish sceptical view that there can be no demonstrative knowledge of nature. And much of Descartes's mature philosophy was designed to show how science could be placed on absolutely secure foundations. However, by the end of his life, Descartes realized that micromechanical theories posed a problem. No matter how much the evidence supported some specific hypothesis, alternatives could not be conclusively eliminated. Even so, Descartes felt that once the evidence for a given theory piled up, we could at least be "morally certain" of its truth, even if not absolutely certain, in the way that we are morally certain, for example, that the Romans once ruled England. Except that the evidence never did pile up in the seventeenth century, and so Newton and Locke gave the whole thing up as a bad job. One upshot of banishing micromechanical theorizing from science was to allow a reaffirmation of absolute certainty. Knowledge could once more mean demonstrative know-ledgeinformation produced by methods that leave no logical room for error. Of course absolute certainty isn't really possible even for the kind of science Newton and Locke approved of, since we can't even be completely sure that the observable patterns we observe today will continue tomorrow. But it was easy enough to sweep this philosophical quibble under the carpet once blatant speculation about hidden mechanisms had been eliminated from science.
Throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century successful science conformed to the Newtonian model. Scientists stuck to the surface of things, systematizing and cataloging the observable world. Important advances were made in mechanics, hydrodynamics, thermodynamics and biological classification. But none of this hinged on any ideas about unobservable machinery. It was only with the development of atomic chemistry that the Newtonian suspicion of hypotheses was called into question. In the early years of the nineteenth century the English chemist John Dalton conjectured that chemical elements are made of characteristic atoms which stick together in fixed ways. This offered a natural explanation of the way elements combine in fixed proportions and of a number of other chemical facts. However, the theory was by no means an immediate success. At first it was hard to make the numbers add up. Doubters took this as further evidence for the futility of hypothetical speculation. It was only with the mid-century advent of the kinetic theory of gases that things began to fall into place. The kinetic theory corroborated Dalton's ideas and allowed the details to be filled in. Many different ways of calculating the properties of the posited atoms turned out to give the same answers. By the end of the century most workaday scientists were convinced that the atomic theory was effectively established.
But there remained plenty of hold-outs.
The French were particularly sticky. Curiously, the French were far more committed to the Newtonian rejection of mechanical hypotheses than the English. The philosophes of the Enlightenment viewed Descartes as a malign influence and had elevated Newton to the apex of their philosophical pantheon.
Descartes's enthusiasm for mechanical hypotheses was associated with the ancien régime, whereas Newton's focus on the observable world was seen as the path to the future. There is of course some irony here: we now know Newton was a secret occultist obsessed with alchemy and biblical numerology, while Descartes was as close to a progressive friend of scientific reason as you could hope to find in the seventeenth century. Still, however misplaced the Enlightenment sentiments, they meant that the high priests of French nineteenth-century science were very slow to come round to the atomic view. Figures like Pierre Duhem (1861-1916) and Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) were highly dismissive of "the atomic hypothesis". Duhem attributed the cross-Channel enthusiasm for atomism to the crude "English mind". As he saw it, the nineteenth-century English were limited to concrete thinking - he cited Dickens - and so could only understand scientific processes with the help of mechanical models. The English "have little liking for more abstract reasoning and do it poorly". The German Ernst Mach (1838-1916) was even more dismissive. The atomic hypothesis merely added "childish and superfluous accompanying pictures" to a proper understanding of chemistry. Both Duhem and Mach continued to reject the atomic theory until the end of their lives.
Once this old guard had died off, however, scientific resistance crumbled. By this stage atoms were not the only well-established unobservable entities. Maxwell's mathematical taming of the electromagnetic field was beginning to manifest itself publicly in radio technology. The germ theory of diseases had been extended to cover a range of sub-microscopic viruses. In these and other cases, many lines of independent evidence left no room for reasonable doubt about the reality of these hidden entities. Of course, the evidence was all circumstantial - there was no question of observing atoms, radio waves or viruses directly. But it came to seem silly to continue demanding some higher standard of proof. Why would such a wealth of evidence keep pointing in the same direction, if the posited entities didn't exist? Along with the scientists, most mainstream philosophers were persuaded too, and drew the obvious moral that even in science there can be firmly established knowledge even without absolutely conclusive proof.
Only among one last group did the old Newtonian suspicions linger on. Somewhat oddly, it was the specialist philosophers of science who continued to have doubts about the unobservable world. During the first half of the twentieth century philosophy of science was much influenced by the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and its attempt to discredit the florid metaphysics of the idealist tradition as "meaningless". It was difficult to prevent these arguments against metaphysical speculation from spilling over to theories about unobservables. As a result, many philosophers of science found themselves arguing that claims about atoms, viruses and radio waves must be meaningless too. If such claims have any virtue, they argued, it is not because they portray some unobservable realm, but because they are useful "instruments" for keeping track of the familiar observable world.
Once the influence of the Vienna Circle waned, however, it became difficult to take this "instrumentalist" doctrine seriously. If someone maintains that it is meaningless nonsense to assert that "matter is made of tiny particles, too small to see, one kind for each element", the natural response is "which bit don't you understand?" By the second half of the twentieth century instrumentalism had fallen into disrepute even among philosophers of science. But the Newtonian tradition is nothing if not resilient. In 1980 the philosopher Bas van Fraassen gave it a new lease of life with his publication of The Scientific Image. Van Fraassen's first move was to distance himself from the semantic doctrines of the Vienna Circle. Far from being meaningless, scientific theories mean just what they seem to mean - that there are unobservable entities of specified sorts, responsible for such-and-such observable effects. And these theories will therefore be straightforwardly true or false, depending on whether the unobservable world is as they say. But - and here is the Newtonian twist - nothing in science requires us to believe these theories. Since they take us beyond what we experience directly, argued van Fraassen, there is no rational compulsion for us to embrace them. Moreover, science can manage perfectly well without any such commitment. Theorizing about the unobservable world no doubt plays an important part in directing scientific research. But such theorizing is not aimed at the truth. The real job of science is only to "save the phenomena" by accurately antici-patinobservable happenings. Whether or not scientific theories also get the unobservable world right is neither here nor there.
The strength of van Fraassen's position was that he separated Newtonian scepticism from the obscurities of the Vienna Circle. He agreed that there was nothing incoherent about the idea of unobservable mechanisms. His complaint was simply that we can't find out about them, given that our limited human constitution leaves us "destitute of senses acute enough to discover the minute particles of bodies". Still, van Fraassen was quickly challenged on this central point. Is it really too hard to find out about atoms and radio waves? They may not be immediately visible, but surely by now we have more than enough evidence to believe in them.
Some of van Fraassen's arguments made it seem that he was objecting to scientific theories on the traditional grounds that we can never be absolutely secure when making inferences to hidden mechanisms. But this line, as critics were not slow to point out, threatens too much. In particular, it threatens to rule out any knowledge of the future. Since Einstein's overthrow of classical mechanics, philosophers have been acutely aware that, even when we are dealing with purely observable matters, "inductive" inferences from past to future patterns are never absolutely foolproof either. Karl Popper was prepared to bite this bullet, and so ended up with the absurd view that it is irrational to believe, say, that birds will continue to fly or that the next bottle of whisky will make you drunk. But everybody else could see there must be some room for genuine knowledge that is less than absolutely secure. Van Fraassen was no exception. He soon made it clear that he was no Popperian, and that a lack of absolute certainty was not his problem. He had no complaint against future predictions, provided they were restricted to the familiar observable world.
Indeed, it turned out that van Fraassen had no definite complaint against unobservables either. In a series of subsequent writings, especially The Empirical Stance (2002), he insisted that rationality is a matter of choice rather than compulsion. He contrasted the "Prussian" view of rationality - everything is forbidden that is not explicitly permitted - with the "English" one - everything is permitted that is not explicitly forbidden. In line with the English view, van Fraassen explained that his aim was merely to show that it is permissible to be agnostic about unobservables, not that it is forbidden to believe in them. Epistemology requires commitment. Some may favour a realist stance and embrace belief in scientific unobservables. Others will prefer the "empiricist" stance and avoid any such allegiance. We can of course discuss the relative merits of these options. But there is no neutral ground, prior to any commitment, from which we can definitely show that one is right and the other wrong.
Van Fraassen may be right that the requirements of rationality leave room for different commitments. But this still leaves plenty of room to query his own specific stance.
Why exactly is it reasonable to withhold belief from scientific unobservables? After all, claims about unobservable mechanisms are interesting, useful and - crucially - massively evidenced by modern scientific research. Given all this, it seems little more than stubborn to doubt their existence. Van Fraassen's response was to associate his realist opponents with "metaphysics". The "empiricist" is satisfied with the world as it appears, but the realist hopes to plumb its inner nature. Van Fraassen placed himself in a long tradition of doubts about the power of human reason to penetrate metaphysical secrets, going back to Kant and beyond. He is particularly dubious about the claims of many contemporary metaphysicians to have established a "materialist" or "naturalist" world view. Van Fraassen has an enviable familiarity with many byways in the history of thought, and he used this effectively to disparage the more extreme metaphysical ambitions of philosophy.
Still, metaphysics is one thing, science another. Perhaps van Fraassen is right that human reason often overreaches itself when it lays claim to general metaphysical insights (though his attacks on current metaphysical views would carry more weight if he paid as much attention to the details of contemporary debate as to their historical antecedents).
But it scarcely follows that reason is overreaching itself when it lays claim to atoms. It is striking that van Fraassen never tries to undermine any specific scientific claims, in the way he does metaphysical ones. Plenty of other philosophers of science do just that, suggesting for example that the poor record of past scientific theories should make us doubtful about present ones. But van Fraassen has always stayed clear of this "pessimistic" line of argument, no doubt because of its limited effectiveness: by no means all areas of science have poor past records. Whatever his real complaint about unobservables, then, it seems clear that it must rest on something more generic than worries about particular scientific claims.
Images of Empiricism is a collection of essays on van Fraassen, published together with his replies. Most of the pieces involve relatively detailed points of critical interpretation, but two in particular are suggestive about possible motivations for van Fraassen's scepticism. Nancy Cartwright focuses on van Fraassen's oft-quoted dictum that "it is not an epistemological principle that one might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb". Van Fraassen's thought here is that beliefs about unobservables aren't worth the candle, since they bring no benefits to compensate the risk of error. But this thought scarcely wears its justi-ficatioon its sleeve. Why aren't truths about unobservables just as beneficial as any other truths? They certainly seem to give us very useful information about all manner of important things. But Cartwright points out that van Fraassen's position would make sense if we supposed that our experiences matter to us in a way that other things do not. Given this assumption, beliefs about what we will observe will play a special role in our practical deliberations. At first sight this may look unattractive - to privilege experience in this way smacks of crude hedonism. But interestingly van Fraassen does not demur. In his reply to Cartwright he agrees that his episte-mologhinges essentially on the distinguished way that experience matters to us.
Ernan McMullin attends to the religious dimension of van Fraassen's writings. It is well known that van Fraassen is an adult convert to Catholicism, and reflections on the nature of religious thought appear in the last chapter of The Empirical Stance. In particular, van Fraassen there emphasizes the importance of "encounters" with God. McMullin, himself a Catholic priest, wants to know how far such encounters involve some specific mode of experience. In the end, both he and van Fraassen agree that academic discussion can take us only so far with such questions. Even so, it is hard to avoid the impression that for van Fraassen it is only in lived experience, whether of nature or of something possibly transcendent, that we make contact with reality, and that other modes of intellectual access are impotent to latch on to anything substantial. If this is right, it would explain why van Fraassen is so down on beliefs about unobservables. He simply isn't convinced that there is any unobservable realm for them to be true about. This is further confirmed by some of the other things that van Fraassen says in The Empirical Stance. At one point he associates his "antirealism" with the sense of loss that comes with secular "objectification", and explains how from his point of view "a theory can at best replace real life by a phantasm". A few lines later he credits the antirealist with "a continuing sense of wonder not alleviated" by the successes of any new scientific theory.
This is a far cry from the position originally on offer in The Scientific Image. In the earlier book, unobservables were perfectly respectable denizens of reality, just rather hard to find out about. But now it turns out that for van Fraassen they are "at best ... a phantasm". This looks more like the old Vienna accusation of meaninglessness than a simple lack of good evidence about microscopic structures. This change of direction is confirmed by van Fraassen's latest book, Scientific Representation. Based on the John Locke lectures he gave in Oxford in 2001, it is a typically erudite survey of many kinds of representation both outside science and within, ranging from portraits and perspective to maps and measurement. But the account of scientific theories that emerges is unfamiliar and austere. Theories are abstract mathematical structures, not literal descriptions of hidden mechanisms; they are constrained only by the need to accommodate the summaries that scientists make of their observational activities; and even at this level it can be misplaced to ask whether or not those summaries get the facts right.
Van Fraassen's focus here is on actual scientific practice, on the complex and littleunderstood ways in which scientists go about their esoteric business. But one can acquiesce in his insistence that this practice is not to be taken for granted without agreeing that the theories that emerge are merely mathematical devices for regimenting observational databases. At the beginning of the book he says that he is aiming for an account of representation that will be of interest to his realist opponents as well as his empiricist friends. But any realists worth their salt will object that his many admittedly interesting insights into scientific practice fail to discredit the natural view that science is offering a literal story about what lies behind the appearances.
More generally, there seems to be little in van Fraassen's overall view of science to shake his opponents out of their realism. Maybe this wouldn't worry him. As he repeatedly avers, his aim is not to show that realism is wrong, but simply to make rational space for his sceptical alternative. But perhaps it should worry his readers. There are many incidental pleasures to be gained from van Fraassen's writings. But on the central issue of belief in unobservables he offers no positive inducement to adopt his strange sceptical stance. He is an ingenious thinker, and has taken many pains to render his position consistent. But beyond that he does nothing to recommend it to those who do not already share an existential commitment that he scarcely ever discusses.

LRB on Oresteia

Let’s Cut to the Wail

Michael Wood

• An Oresteia translated by Anne Carson  Buy this book

Some time ago the scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant reminded us that Greek gods are not persons but forces; and in Anne Carson’s Oresteia, her sharp, sceptical, often laconic version of three plays about the legacy of Atreus, one each by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, as well as in her translations of four other plays by Euripides,[*] I kept hearing an invitation to extend and refine the thought. These gods are the names of forces humans cannot otherwise name and must still name somehow.Do you belong to a group of persons like the old men left behind in Argos during the Trojan War, eager to believe in some sort of universal justice, however often it lies in abeyance?

Do you think the gods ignore a man who
steps on holy things?

Of course they don’t; or at least they shouldn’t: Zeus is the god who punishes excess and impiety. Are you anxious, as those same old men are, to assume that suffering brings wisdom? Then you will call on Zeus again, although perhaps not with all the confidence you would like.

Zeus! whoever Zeus is -
if he likes this name I’ll use it -
measuring everything that exists I can
compare with Zeus nothing
except Zeus.
May he take this weight from my heart . . .

Zeus put mortals on the road to wisdom
when he laid down this law:
By suffering we learn . . .

‘Whoever Zeus is’; ‘I can/compare with Zeus nothing/except Zeus.’ Elsewhere the same chorus says, ‘Zeus acts as Zeus ordains,’ and these tautologies and open-ended provisions suggest that even for pious persons Zeus is the name for what order would look like if there was an order. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, in the notes to his translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, says it is important for ancient Greek worshippers to get the name of the god right, ‘otherwise he may not hear or may not listen.’ And Lloyd-Jones’s phrasing - ‘if this name is pleasing to him’ - clearly strikes a less sceptical or less breezy note than Carson’s ‘if he likes this name I’ll use it.’ But Lloyd-Jones does recall in this context Heraclitus’ wonderfully cryptic ‘One thing, the only truly wise, does not and does consent to be called by the name of Zeus.’These old men - they appear in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon - think of justice as some sort of ultimate moral balance. But when other characters in the same play speak of justice they generally mean vengeance or retaliation or the satisfaction of old grudges. Klytaimestra (I’m going to follow Carson’s spelling) explicitly associates the term with what she calls her two other gods, Ruin and Revenge. No aspiration to order there. In her introduction Carson finely says: ‘Almost everyone in the play claims to know what justice is and to have it on their side . . . The many meanings of the word justice have shaped the history of the house of Atreus into a gigantic double bind.’ She even goes so far as to doubt whether Aeschylus ‘wants to clarify the concept of justice in any final way’. He may of course want to clarify the sheer difficulty of the notion.If we turn to the other plays in the volume, we find that characters in Sophocles’ Elektra pray to Apollo as if he were the name of whatever there might be in the universe that could help them get their way; and in Euripides’ Orestes they wax openly sarcastic about the same god’s moral interests. ‘There ought to be a law against a mother like that,’ Elektra says of Klytaimestra. ‘Turns out there is: Apollo.’ When Apollo himself appears at the end of the play to sort everything out, the effect is frankly burlesque. Carson writes of ‘moments . . . where exasperation verges on farce’, and in Grief Lessons sees Euripides more generally as caught ‘between resignation and satire’. In her translation, Apollo and Orestes talk to each other as if they were a couple of good old boys rearranging the collateral damage from a wild night on the town. ‘I’ll fix up Orestes’ relations with Argos,’ Apollo says. ‘It was me made him murder his mother.’ Orestes is grateful but curiously unsurprised. ‘Apollo of oracles!’ he says. ‘So you were no false prophet!/But I admit I was getting nervous.’ ‘Getting nervous’: this is a man who in other plays is driven mad by the Furies, and even in this play has said: ‘My mind is gone.’Of the goddess who dominates Euripides’ Hippolytos (one of the plays in Grief Lessons), Carson says: ‘Aphrodite is the name for all that Hippolytos wants to edit out of his view of reality.’ Edit out or edit in: there is always some sort of editorial action in relation to the gods. They are figures for what humans want or don’t want, and also of what is beyond their reach or control; images of agency scrawled on the face of chance. I don’t mean to blur the distinctions among the three dramatists, as if all three (and all Greeks) had the same view of the gods, and I don’t want to turn them all into atheists. I want only to suggest that there is plenty of room for scepticism even in the loftiest of these writers, and that the distance between those who believe there must be a divine order (because there absolutely must be) and those who believe there can’t be (because they see no evidence of one) is not as large as it may at first look, since it rests on a shared absence of hard knowledge and on a range of estimations of desire. Carson says Euripides was interested in ‘what it’s like to be a human being in a family, in a fantasy, in a longing, in a mistake’. The terms are a little casual for the grandeur of the situations in Aeschylus and Sophocles but they are not inaccurate. It’s true that characters in Aeschylus inhabit their mistakes with tremendous horror or relish, while those in Euripides mainly contemplate the mess they have made or inherited. In Sophocles they cultivate their difficult obsessions and seek scraps of moral dignity in a context that hardly seems to have heard of the idea.This is familiar ground, though, and Carson’s book suggests we go on to think about something rather different: the immense familiarity of the ancient Greek stories themselves, the sense of déjà vu haunting even the first performance of any of these great plays. Déjà vu and not quite déjà vu. Every story was known before its first telling - or if not literally before its first telling, before any particular recorded telling - and every telling was slightly different. It’s not just that all interpretations of a myth are instances of the myth, as Lévi-Strauss said (Freud and Sophocles are both dramatists of the tale of Oedipus): it’s that all instances of the myth are interpretations of it, as if they were played from a musical score that everyone knows but no one possesses. It is in this sense that there can be such a thing as what Carson calls ‘an’ Oresteia.The Oresteia, of course, is Aeschylus’ trilogy: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides. But once Carson has replaced, so to speak, the second play with Sophocles’ Elektra and the third with Euripides’ Orestes, we can dream of four other plays in two other trilogies and, more immediately, we can see what happens when different musicians play the same score. In any version, of course, certain things will happen. Before the play opens, in a previous generation, Atreus will have cooked and served his brother Thyestes’ children to him, sliced them into soup, as Carson has a character say in Orestes, although the reference in Agamemnon suggests something more like a stew. As if to generalise this story, or to make sure it never leaves our minds, other cooked children keep coming up in the allusions characters make in the plays: to Tantalos, who offered his son as a meal to the gods; to the nightingale who used to be Prokne before she fed her son to her rapist husband. Agamemnon will have sacrificed his and Klytaimestra’s daughter in return for a favourable wind on the way to Troy.The Trojan War will have been fought. Then, within the performed sequence, Agamemnon will return from Troy, bringing with him Kassandra as his princess-slave. Klytaimestra will kill him, with or without the assistance of Aigisthos, Thyestes’ remaining son. Elektra, the child of Klytaimestra and Agamemnon, will mourn her father and keen for vengeance. Her brother Orestes will return to Argos and pretend to be dead. Then he will kill his mother and her lover. He will go mad after the event, and be pursued by the Furies, who in Aeschylus, with some reluctance, after Orestes’ acquittal by a divinely constituted human court in Athens, finally become the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones. In Euripides, as we shall see, something else happens, although Orestes is still absolved.Even in this bald and compressed form the story can be seen as offering an extraordinary combination of hereditary curse and multiple motivation. Could anyone survive unharmed in a domain where all-out war seems to be the natural climate of both family and marriage? Does Klytaimestra kill Agamemnon as an act of long-planned revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter to his war aims? Or because she has taken her husband’s family enemy as her lover? Is this affair part of her revenge or just a sideline? Can Orestes not avenge the death of his father? Should he kill his mother? If he asks the advice of a god, what moral status does that advice have? When he is acquitted in Aeschylus, it is because Apollo pleads for him and Athene decides the case, casting the deciding vote when the jury stalls at six voices for acquittal and six for condemnation. Zeus doesn’t appear, and Athene, curiously, makes her tie-breaking move before she knows there is a tie - that is, before the votes are counted. It’s true that any goddess, and many a human, can tell when a hung jury is in the offing, but the procedure is curious all the same. The ancient curse seems inescapable, but doesn’t relieve anyone from blame - or from the feeling or accusation of blame.In this framework the variants on the story become inordinately interesting. They can’t change any major event or moral dilemma, but they can move events around, add or subtract them, and shift whole swathes of atmosphere. And since Carson starts with Aeschylus, whose other plays we have, we can watch the roads diverge. In The Libation Bearers, Orestes returns, meets up with Elektra, and the two spend a good portion of the play invoking the help of the powers of darkness in the killing they have to do. ‘Two murderous children,’ Carson says, ‘are (arguably) redeemed by mutual love’; and certainly their need of so much prayer makes them anything but unreflective killers. ‘You lords of the underworld,’ Orestes says (in Ted Hughes’s translation),

You crowned and enthroned curses,
Look at us.
The last shreds of the house of Atreus -
Bereft of all but bare life,
Benighted in this darkest pit of our fate -
Lead us. Guide us.

And a little later Elektra prays:

Persephone, Queen of the Underworld,
Direct our steps.

Then Orestes, having prayed for good measure to Hermes, ‘God of the dark pathways’, pretends to be a foreigner arriving with the news of Orestes’ death.In Sophocles’ Elektra, Orestes’ pretence of death starts earlier, and is inflicted on Elektra too. Why does he do this? And why does he wait so long to relieve her of her pain? It is indeed ‘deeply odd’, as Carson says, ‘that Elektra’s profoundest emotional outpouring . . . should be evoked by a fake object’. She speaks one of the world’s great laments to an urn that does not contain the ashes of her brother. She asks to hold the object - ‘I have tears to keep,’ she says, ‘I have ashes to weep’ - and Orestes, still pretending to be a stranger, brutally says to his friend Pylades, who is carrying the thing: ‘Bring it here, give it to her, whoever she is.’ She says:

If this were all you were, Orestes,
how could your memory
fill my memory . . .
Look!
You are nothing at all.
Just a crack where the light slipped through . . .
Now our enemies rock with laughter.
And she runs mad for joy -
that creature
in the shape of your mother -
how often you said you would come
one secret evening and cut her throat!
But our luck cancelled that,
whatever luck is.
And instead my beloved,
luck sent you back to me
colder than ashes,
later than shadow.

This fake death is so real that it’s not at all clear Orestes can get over it, whatever he does. Earlier in the play, considering his stratagem (technically just a scheme to come close to Klytaimestra and Aigisthos without causing any suspicion), he says: ‘What harm can it do/to die in words?’ Presumably everyone who has ever watched or read this work has groaned at this moment, even without knowing how long he will keep up the act or with what results. There can scarcely have been a rhetorical question that was less rhetorical. The play ends as it has to, with corpses offstage, and a chorus (of local women) speaking blindly of freedom for the ‘seed of Atreus’.David Kovacs, another recent translator of Euripides’ Orestes, tells us the play was ‘immensely popular in antiquity’, but this fact only increases his puzzlement, which he shares with Carson. ‘This most baffling play,’ Kovacs says, ‘has a plot that seems to be the poet’s free invention.’ An invention within the narrative limits I’ve sketched above, of course, but we scarcely feel any restriction as we read, and Carson wonders whether we can detect any purpose. The play ‘seems to unfold’, she says, ‘like a bolt of cloth falling down stairs, spilling itself, random’. She goes on to wonder whether randomness is not perhaps the play’s point, but her version of the text suggests the idea may take one more twist.Here Orestes has not gone off to Delphi to throw himself on the mercy of the god whose advice he took: he is still in Argos, asleep, delirious, and then rather suddenly scheming again. He and Elektra are about to be condemned by the people of Argos to death by stoning. Helen is here to grieve for her sister Klytaimestra, and so are her prevaricating husband Menelaos, and her angry father Tyndareus: quite a gathering. Orestes hopes Menelaos will support him in the assembly, but there is no chance of that - it’s quite possible that Menelaos has a cautious eye on the throne and certainly knows there is no political mileage in supporting a matricide. Orestes and Elektra are about to give up the fight and accept their sentence - they will be allowed to kill themselves, it turns out, rather than have to submit to stoning - when Pylades has an idea: they could murder Helen; that would be popular. They set out to do this, kidnapping Helen’s daughter Hermione on the way, but Apollo (or Euripides) has finally had enough. The god descends, whisks Helen away into some sort of transubstantiation (‘She will sit in the folds of the sky beside Kastor and Pollux’), marries Elektra to Pylades, tells Orestes to go to Athens and stand trial - to rejoin the plot of The Eumenides, in other words - and after that he can marry Hermione. Orestes accepts the deal, as Menelaos superfluously reminds him he must, and wryly says: ‘I make my peace with circumstances, Menelaos,/and also with your oracles, Apollo.’ Apollo says Peace is the ‘most beautiful of gods’, and they all live happily ever after.We seem to have shifted into Shakespearean romance or even Hollywood screwball comedy. And in one sense we have. Carson reminds us that Aristotle thought that Euripides, ‘whatever the ineptitudes of his stagecraft’, was ‘the most tragic’ of the tragic poets. Here, I think, is where her idea that there is ‘something terrible in randomness’ is trumped by the dramatist himself. There is something even more terrible in the blatant, cynical, impossible taming of randomness, in the assertion of an order which even its architect does not believe in, and there are many milder works, including some fairy tales, where the happy ending can only be a desperate irony, precisely what’s available only in words, as Orestes might say.I’m basing these suggestions on Anne Carson’s words rather than those of Euripides, which I can’t read - to be precise, I can read a few famous words, but not sentences or tone. And it’s important to understand what her consistent and at times apparently frivolous modernising (or Americanising) of idiom is doing. ‘So you got good news?’ people say. ‘You’re optimistic?’ And ‘I’ll be okay,’ and ‘Oh come on, relax your principles.’ They say ‘No kidding’ and ‘Let’s cut to the wail.’ Helen, the woman who in other translations is said to have killed off so many of the Achaeans, is called ‘that weapon of mass destruction’. At the end of Klytaimestra’s grand false welcome home speech, Agamemnon says (in Hughes’s translation), ‘Your eulogies are like my absence:/Too long, too much,’ and (in Lloyd-Jones’s version): ‘Your speech matches my absence;/for you have drawn it out at length.’ Carson has him say: ‘You have made a speech to match my absence -/ long.’ There is no great difference in meaning, but Agamemnon begins to sound like a comedian, and we haven’t even got to Euripides yet. However, Carson’s strategy is not, as it may seem, to bring these old Greeks up to date, to make them our contemporaries. It is to remind us that we are their contemporaries, that we have not left the violent domain they so fiercely drew for us. She makes us at home in their language so that we can more thoroughly understand their vision of how not at home in the world we are.

*Grief Lessons (NYRB, 312 pp., £7.99, February 2006, 978 1 590 17180 6).

From the LRB letters page: [ 25 June 2009 ] Leo Robson [ 23 July 2009 ] Frederick Sweet.

Michael Wood teaches at Princeton. Literature and the Taste of Knowledge came out in 2005.

Other articles by this contributor:Why praise Astaire? · Stanley CavellAt the Movies · Michael Wood goes to see The Da Vinci CodeAt the Movies · ‘North by Northwest’At the Movies · the gangster movieAt the Movies · ‘Lust, Caution’At the Movies · Michael Wood sees 300At the Movies · The Lives of OthersWhat Henry didn’t do · ‘The Master’

TLS on Social Amoebae

The perfection of slugs

by Laurence D. Hurst



The humble cellular slime mould can tell us why slugs move their tails to their heads – and how altruism pays Laurence D. Hurst 1 Comment
Recommend? (16) How evolution by natural selection could give rise to the specialist morphology of worker ants, when these leave no offspring, was a problem for Darwin. He might as well have been worried about his own body. Like sterile workers, each cell in the body specializes to do its own thing, be it brain, bone, kidney or colon. With one exception, the cells of your body are as genetically dead as a sterile worker. Just as the queen ant is the only female in the colony with a genetic future, so too it is uniquely sperm or eggs that contribute directly to the next generation. So how come we have sterile worker ants and sterile worker cells?

Part of the answer to both of these problems was provided by W. D. Hamilton’s theory of altruism mediated by kin selection. He argued that helping makes evolutionary sense if the beneficiary is a relative: their genetic future is, in part, your genetic future. Ant hills are one large family. The cells of your body are even more closely related: they are identical clones, all derived from the same fertilized egg. So multicellular beings are utopian aggregates of cells all cooperating to promote the chances of their clonally related sex cells. Well, not always. The cellular slime moulds are a case in point.
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Take a microscope to damp autumnal leaf litter and there you can find certain amoeboid cells grubbing for bacteria. But when nutrients become depleted, one cell sends out a chemical call to initiate the aggregation of the local flock. This aggregate becomes a multicellular mass, a motile slug-like being. When the slug has migrated to the surface, it changes into a delicate arboreal structure, reaching out from the decaying leaf mass so as best to ensure the dispersion of the tip-borne spores.

The key difference between them and us is that, in slime moulds, the cells that make up the body are not necessarily derivatives of the same initial cell. This lack of perfect genetic identity defines the central problem of the slime mould. For a cell within the slug, it is of critical importance whether it makes it into the spore or not. If it does, it gets the chance to genetically live another day in valleys greener. A cell not in the spore, however, is at a genetic dead-end. If the spore cells are not relatives, why would cells be part of the supporting cast? For a cell in the slug mass to commit to a dead-end future is as great an act of altruism as you will find anywhere. Why do they do it?

The answer comes back to who is in the spore. The cellular slime moulds go some way to try and ensure that only related cells can join their multicellular party. The molecular mechanisms by which they achieve this have only recently been unveiled. They employ proteins that participate in both cell adhesion and signalling. Importantly, the proteins show many differences between strains from the same species, so employing the rule that you should only aggregate with cells with the same version ensures the aggregates are largely kin groups. But this is never guaranteed. Sometimes, as John Tyler Bonner, the grand old man of slime mould research, notes, things don’t go to plan. There are “cheats”. These cheats will join unrelated cells, refuse to be supporters and force themselves to be spore: what in the business world might be considered an aggressive takeover. Interestingly, as Bonner relates in The Social Amoebae, a colony made up just of cheats can be rather well-behaved and produce both spore and support.

The humble cellular slime mould thus presents a model system for understanding how conflicts are resolved and how and when altruism pays. Can we then, from an understanding of when potential conflicting interests are or are not likely, understand the behaviour of the slug and its constituent cells? It is a pity that Bonner doesn’t delve into this issue in much detail, but we can speculate. Compare, for example, the problem of how a slug turns around, with the problem of attraction to heat and light.

To investigate how slugs go in reverse, Bonner relates how researchers have studied what happens when a slug slimes its way up a cul-de-sac so narrow that the only way out is to retreat the way it came in. This might be accomplished by instructing the tail end to become the head end and so move backwards. In practice, the answer is rather more baroque: the cells in the head migrate all the way to the rear, making the rear the head. It is not immediately obvious why this would be the optimal solution.

When moving towards light and heat, by contrast, the slugs show the most exquisite perfection. Sometimes, we learn, a slug prefers to move towards the warmth. Remarkably, a difference of just 0.0005°C between the two sides of a small slug is a sufficient cue. Even though they lack eyes, the slugs also move towards the light. Arrive in the lab in the morning and, like lavender desperate for the rays of the sun, they are all inclined to the window. Incredibly, just a minuscule spot of low-intensity light is enough to draw the slugs’ attention. How such feats of sensitivity are achieved is unknown. Why they might be so sensitive is easier to gauge. The important process for the slug is probably getting out from under the leaf litter, so the spores are delivered at the surface. Moving towards light is a good cue for this. Moving towards heat is less obvious. During the day this would typically send the slug towards the surface. But at night the soil retains its heat and the temperature gradient is reversed. Interestingly, however, if the heat experiment takes place when it is relatively cold (mimicking nocturnal conditions), the slugs’ preferences change: now they migrate away from warmth. As Bonner observes, day or night their temperature preferences drive them to the surface.

Can we, however, understand why the slug is so perfect in orienting to heat, but comes to a strange solution for turning around? I would conjecture that, as the spore cells will all be derived from the end that functions as the head, when it comes to turning around, the head cells have everything to lose if they simply instruct the tail to take over control. By contrast, it is in the best interests of all cells in the slug to make sure the spores disperse, so here they can all agree to reach for the skies. The head cells maintaining their hold on their reproductive future while turning around represents an alternative solution, a sort of benign dictatorship. If you ask why the tail cells don’t try and take the opportunity to become head cells, and hence become the future reproductives, the answer is not that this isn’t in their best interests, but rather that they are not given the option. The evolutionary biology of this class of solution – for want of a better term, “power” – is one waiting to be written.

How are decisions made, such as which cells become spores, or how do they become part of the slug-mass in the first place? Recounting delightfully simple experiments, Bonner details what we know about the communication between cells and how slugs develop. Given how much we still don’t know about slime mould biology, it is no surprise that he raises more questions than he answers. However, Bonner’s repeated emphasis of the unknowns is, I suspect, quite deliberate. This small book is an attempt to put down for posterity his enthusiasm and knowledge. He is here to hand over the baton, and hope that somewhere there are interested young biologists struck by the beauty of the unanswered simple questions about beautiful, apparently simple organisms.

In his search for someone to carry on the slime mould’s cause, I hope he succeeds, but have doubts. In the final chapter of The Social Amoebae, a view to the future of slime mould research, it is strikingly peculiar that nowhere does Bonner mention the fact that his beloved species is one of few organisms to have had all of its DNA, its genome, sequenced. Maybe this was because such genomic biology could not be more antithetical to the tradition exemplified by Bonner himself. This new genomic science is high on data, but often light on the questions. Discovery via high-throughput data generation is now the order of the day, however, and it looks set to soak up the big research money for a while yet. But with this approach, carefully considered hypotheses, simple elegant experiments and a feel for the organism tend to be lost by the wayside. The old-school classical biologists, such as Bonner, who really understand their organisms may well, like the slime mould’s supporting cells, find themselves without a future.



John Tyler Bonner
THE SOCIAL AMOEBAE
The biology of cellular slime molds
144pp. Princeton University Press. $19.95;distributed in the UK by Wiley. £13.95.
978 0 691 13939 5




Laurence D. Hurst is Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at the University of Bath.

LRB on Synecdoche

At the Movies

by Michael Wood
Can you die in a synecdoche and would it be a good thing if you could? Would it be like dying in a parenthesis, as Mrs Ramsay does in To The Lighthouse, or would it be entirely different? At the end of Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman’s first film as a director, Caden Cotard seems to die as a theatrical version of himself inside a replica of Manhattan in a warehouse in Manhattan. A voice that reaches him by wire and microphone has for some time been telling him what to do and what to say. Now it says quite gently, `Die,’ and he does. Or does he? Perhaps this is the dream death he awards himself. The voice is that of the actor playing Cotard as the director of his vast autobiographical extravaganza, a woman who has sought out the part and taken over. Is there another Cotard somewhere writing these lines for her? All this comes after most of Cotard’s friends and associates have seen themselves represented by actors in his ongoing work, and after the actor who used to play Cotard, tiring of subterfuge or failing to understand the nature of artifice, has flung himself from a parapet to his death.
Let’s consider something easier but not unrelated. You can certainly die in Schenectady, in reality and in this movie, since that’s what our hero’s parents do. He lives there himself at the start of the film, directing plays at the local playhouse, caught between his mounting, inventive hypochondria and his possibly real ailments. There is definitely something wrong with the plumbing in his house, since a tap explodes and gashes his head while he is shaving. But that’s the least of it.
The signs are all bad for Cotard (played with an amazing mixture of grace and doom by Philip Seymour Hoffman), and not just the signs. A professor on the local radio reads a bleak poem by Rilke, Cotard sees the news of Harold Pinter’s death in the paper, Asian flu is spreading, the first black graduate of the University of Mississippi has just died. Cotard’s wife is about to leave him, taking their little girl with her. The play he is currently directing is Death of a Salesman, and his gimmick is to have young actors take the roles of older people - because they will, if they don’t die first, become older people, and the audience is to feel this in the performance. Nice idea, but Cotard has become a little obsessive about it. Before his wife (Catherine Keener) leaves he asks her if he has disappointed her. She says, too weary even to be unkind, everyone is disappointing once you get to know them. She doesn’t say we’re all just synecdoches for some large, recurring failure, but that’s what she means.
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The other memorable conversation Cotard has at this stage is more fun. His daughter asks him what those things are on his face. Pustules, he says. They are caused by sychosis, which is different from psychosis. The little girl, clearly her father’s daughter in this respect, says: `You could have both, though.’ You could. He does. Or if he doesn’t have a psychosis he has something just as good - good for the film, that is. He knows what every character in a Charlie Kaufman movie knows, whether it’s Being John Malkovich, Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He knows that reality puts up scarcely any resistance to fear or fantasy, and that inside every head is a cast of thousands ready to misrepresent the owner.
This is essentially a comic idea - more precisely it’s a possibility of desolation that has immense comic mileage - and the film is very funny as well as very grim, often funniest when it’s grimmest. Sometimes it’s just grim and lingering, allowing Cotard to wallow in his not very interesting angst, as if Woody Allen had visited us with one of his earnest moments. You have to wonder whether there is a virus that makes witty American moviemakers want to be Ingmar Bergman at least once in their lives. This is it for Kaufman: Wild Raspberries.
But only some of the time; only when Kaufman’s ironies slow down into bare regret. And the restless cleverness of the film, which has bothered many viewers, is on the side of lightness in the end. When I said there was a replica of Manhattan in a warehouse in Manhattan, I was simplifying wildly. There is a replica of the warehouse in the warehouse, and perhaps another one inside that. Within the warehouses are rooms that simulate the real rooms in which the actual lives of characters are being lived. Outside the warehouses are New York streets full of litter and human debris, although of course you have to go through a simulation of those streets to get there, and even then you’re still only in a movie. When Cotard wants to know why an old girlfriend (Samantha Morton), now working as his assistant, fancies the actor playing Cotard, she says: `He reminds me of you.’ He says, although by this time he should know better: `I’m me. You don’t need someone to remind you of me.’
What has happened, it seems, is that Cotard, deprived of his wife and health and confidence, had been given a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius award, which in his case appears to mean infinite amounts of money to do what you like with over an infinite amount of time. It may be that everything that follows from his getting the grant is a dream - it may be that his getting the award is a dream - but it scarcely matters, since this is a dream he never leaves, and we never see its outside. His grand plan is to make a play out of his whole life, and once he has rented or bought the warehouse in Manhattan, of course the warehouse is part of the play as well as the place where it will be performed. If it is performed. This play looks more and more like fragments from a film about a film that will never be finished. At one point an actor complains they have been rehearsing for 17 years: when are they going to work before an audience? Cotard says not yet. More time passes, and indeed time itself has started to stretch: there are weeks that feel like years, and years that literally turn into decades. Before Cotard dies he manages to become a very old man, surviving his wife and daughter and mistresses. His refrain is `I know how to do this play.’
All this keeps us guessing and helpfully puts over-solemn thought at risk. Cotard decides to give his actors brief notes each day, news of some calamity they are to react to in their next scene: death, desertion, disease, rape, bereavement. This follows much bogus talk about the unheard-of authenticity of the play he wants to mount, the deep, pure, powerful truth lurking inside all of us, the real story of real life. It’s like a delusional version of method acting, and it’s brilliantly punctured within the play by a character who says to her daughter: `Daddy can’t be with us right now, he’s finding his inner self.’ Kaufman has plenty of satirical lines in this vein. An actress trying to cheer Cotard up with a bit of profound intellectual comfort says: `Knowing that you don’t know is the first essential step to knowing.’ Cotard, not intending any kind of comment on the remark, perhaps not even hearing it, says: `I don’t know.’
The notes for the actors are sensationalist, of course, shreds of melodrama rather than echoes of daily living, but Cotard doesn’t see this - and perhaps we don’t see it fully - until Kaufman gives us a marvellous shot over Cotard’s shoulder as he sits at a table covered with these notes, beautifully, symmetrically arranged. No, not a table. Dozens of tables stacked tightly together, hundreds of notes, stretching out as far as the screen can see. It’s the sort of Bergman frame that might also have been devised by Orson Welles.
And when the cleverness and the desolation work together the results are magnificent. Cotard goes to Germany to see his daughter, who left England with her mother for a couple of weeks when she was four, and is now in her thirties and dying. She can no longer speak English, and communicates with Cotard from her bed by means of a simultaneous translation system. She needs him to beg her forgiveness for abandoning her, although he didn’t, and for various sexual offences which he hasn’t committed. In what is probably his finest moral moment - there aren’t a lot to choose from - the stricken Cotard admits to everything and asks the dying woman if she can forgive him. She weeps and says . . . she can’t, she just can’t. End of scene. He has confessed to a pack of lies in vain. Everything Kaufman does well is here: communication of a failure of communication, shifting levels of language and reality, a significant sadness that has the form of an intricate joke.
There are many remarkable small touches in the film too. When Cotard discovers his long-estranged wife has returned to New York, he goes to the address he has been given. It’s a non-existent number on an actual street: 1045 West 37th. The apartment is 31Y and the tenant from whom the wife is borrowing it is called Capgrass. Capgras syndrome is a condition in which you are convinced that your familiars have been replaced by look-alike impostors - or shall we say actors.

From the LRB letters page: [ 25 June 2009 ] Ealasaid Munro.

Michael Wood teaches at Princeton. Literature and the Taste of Knowledge came out in 2005.

Other articles by this contributor:
After the Movies · Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma
At the Movies · Marlon Brando
At the Movies · Michael Wood goes to see The Da Vinci Code
Memories of a Skinny Girl · Mario Vargas Llosa
At the Movies · Michael Wood goes to see Babel
Impossible Wishes · Thomas Mann
At the Movies · Almodóvar
Eskapizm · Oblomov