If Men Could Get Pregnant . . .

If Men could get pregnant . . .

It is my counterfactual conviction (meaning it is what I absolutely believe but as a hypothetical cannot be proven with evidence) that if men could become pregnant, the question of abortion would never have arisen.  If men were capable of giving birth, it never would have crossed anyone's mind that the termination of a pregnancy needed to be governed by legislation, let alone criminalized.  Conversely, the termination of a pregnancy is a question because of the inferior status assigned to women throughout Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman history and culture.  Only in the 20th century have women been grudgingly assigned the status of "personhood," and we continue to struggle with the implications of that assignment.

Women Are to blame . . . men say so . . .

Woman have hard lives.  Men justify the suffering of women through mythology.  In the Christian tradition, Eve brought evil into the world and is therefore responsible for the suffering of all women.  In Greek tradition, Pandora opened the box which released evil into the world.  In Aeschylus' ancient Greek trilogy, The Oresteia, Orestes is put on trial by the gods for murdering his mother, Aegistheus, after she killed his father, King Agamemnon.  The conclusion of the trial is that Orestes is not guilty of a crime because his first loyalty was to his father.  Orestes was, first and foremost, the son of his father and his mother was simply the vessel of his birth.  Three thousand years later, that verdict is still being debated.

Tremblay v. Daigle (1989)

In 1989, the Supreme Court of Canada, in Tremblay v. Daigle, ruled that "a father has no right to veto a woman's abortion decision."  However, Daigle had already gone to the US to terminate the pregnancy before the Supreme Court ruled. Why are the courts, the judiciary branches of government in both Canada and the USA, which can interpret but have no power to create or change the law, being left to decide the abortion question?  The simple answer is that the executive branch, the men we elect (and yes the executive branch is dominated by men), has no interest in passing laws that would give individual women the power to decide to terminate a pregnancy.

 Roe v. Wade (1973)

No new laws were passed, but abortions became legal when the Supreme Courts in Canada and the USA (re)interpreted their respective constitutions as giving women the right to terminate a pregnancy.  In Roe v Wade (1973), the US Supreme Court heard the case of Jane Roe (a play on Jane Doe) against Henry Wade, Attorney General of Texas.  Roe's complaint was that the laws of Texas prevented her from terminating her pregnancy by forcing her to travel to another state and pay for an abortion.  Roe was accompanied in her petition by another Texas couple and a doctor who had already been convicted of performing abortions and had two more accusations pending.  In the end, the Supreme Court accepted to hear only Jane Roe's case.  Allowing Roe's case to even be heard was challenged because she became pregnant in 1970 and by the time her case was before the Court she had already given birth.  Nonetheless, the Court heard her petition and ruled that preventing her from having an abortion was unconstitutional based on various clauses of the US constitution relating to "privacy" and "liberty of the person."  Consequently, the laws of Texas and, by extension, the laws of any state which attempted to curtail a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy were determined to be unconstitutional. 

R. v. Morgentaler (1988)

A similar scenario unfolded much later in Canada. The Canadian Constitution and Charter of Rights and Freedoms were enacted in 1982.  In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled, in R. v. Morgentaler, that abortion laws were unconstitutional, according to the 1982 constitution, because they "infringed upon a woman's right to 'life, liberty and security of person'."  Since that time, in Canada, a woman's right to an abortion has been unrestricted.  The Mulroney Conservative government attempted to pass a law in 1992 which would impose a two-year prison sentence on doctors performing abortions, but the bill died in the Senate.

Justice Alito's majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade

 The abortion question is very much back in the legacy media since Politico published a leaked draft of Supreme Court Justice Alito's majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.  This year, the case of the Mississippi State Health Officer v. Jackson Women's Health Organization was brought before the Supreme Court.  The State of Mississippi is proposing a prohibition on non-therapeutic abortions after sixteen weeks of pregnancy.  At first glance, the proposal might not seem unreasonable.  However, some states are proposing to ban abortion after six weeks which would effectively ban most if not all abortions.  If Roe v. Wade is overturned, these various state bills prohibiting abortion would almost immediately become law.

What the Bible says about abortion

Despite US claims of separation between church and state, it is obvious that anti-abortion, pro-life movements are underpinned by powerful evangelical lobbies.  I remain dumbfounded that at this point in human history, evangelism, the literal interpretation of the Bible, can still have a profound influence on American politics.  (See How Many Americans Think Planet Earth Is 6000 Years Old?)  Moreover, even if we accept literal interpretations of the Bible, as I have pointed out previously (see What Bible Translation Says about People Who Oppose Abortion), despite attempts by Thomas Nelson Publishers to rewrite the Bible in the 1970s, Exodus 21:22 is explicit that a fetus is not equivalent to a human life.

When Life begins

Much of the debate concerning abortion, including in Roe v. Wade and the Alito opinion, eventually turns to the question of at what point a fetus is considered equivalent to a human person or, more abstractly, at what point life begins.  Typically, pro-life arguments contend that life begins at conception. In Western practice, life is taken to begin at birth.  We measure age by and celebrate birthdays not conception-days.

When Life begins according to the Bible

If we turn to the Bible to determine when life begins then the story of Onan becomes relevant.  These days, "onanism" is a synonym for masturbation.  However, what exactly Onan's sin was and how the biblical story should be interpreted are much debated.  When Onan's older brother died, Onan was, according to old-testament law, required to conceive a child with his brother's widow.  He went to his sister-in-law but, instead of completing the sex act as required, he "spilled it [his seed] on the ground."  If we want to take the Bible literally, one possible interpretation is that life begins with a man's seed and Onan's sin, wasting his seed, was equivalent to terminating a human life.  If you kill the seed, you kill the flower. God's punishment for Onan was death. If we want to base modern laws on Bible stories, then any man who masturbates, scratches his testicles carelessly, uses a condom or does anything to interfere with his own semen is guilty of the same crime as a woman who terminates a pregnancy. Needless to say, no government has ever considered legislating, let alone criminalizing, how a man treats his own semen.  

Alito's Argument overturning Roe v. Wade

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, according to various commentators, tends toward hyperbole and arrogance.  His draft majority opinion shows evidence of both, especially when we consider that he is critiquing the work of his predecessors and two decisions of past Supreme Courts:  Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).  Alito's argument, in contradiction to earlier Supreme Court decisions, can be boiled down to:

1. "The Constitution makes no reference to abortion [. . . .]"
   
2. Abortion is not equivalent to any of the various rights and freedoms that are claimed as implicit under the constitution.  
3. "Liberty of the person" does not include the right to an abortion because of the moral issue and debate concerning the rights of the fetus as a "living person."
   
4. In the absence of implicit or explicit coverage in the constitution, the Court must turn to US history, custom, tradition and precedent to determine its judgment.  Alito asserts, in contradiction to the Court in 1973, that US history shows no openness to granting abortion rights.
   

Alito's conclusion:

We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.   Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives.

Are Women's rights human rights?

 Reading Alito's conclusion I am reminded of  the refrain in Hilary Clinton's address to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing:  "Women's rights are human rights."  Now we know the response:  "Not in the USA."

Imagine that the Supreme Court ruled that whether or not a man could get a vasectomy would be determined by "elected representatives."  Unimaginable . . . which is exactly the point.

Women Don't have rights because, in the eyes of the law, women don't exist

There is a slippery, slight-of-hand argument running throughout Alito's opinion.  Alito claims that removing the right to decide the termination of a pregnancy does not discriminate against women.  Citing early court cases, Alito argues there are precedents which establish that women are not a group being discriminated against.  The dividing line created by an earlier court case is between  "two groups -- pregnant women and nonpregnant persons. While the first group is exclusively female, the second includes members of both sexes."  In this perspective, since women do not exist as group, it is not possible to claim that restricting abortions discriminates against them.   Therefore, state laws prohibiting abortions would only discriminate against "pregnant women," and it would be left to individual states to balance the rights of pregnant women and those of "unborn living persons."  In this latter case, curtailing the rights of pregnant women would be justified if state legislators believe that a fetus is a living person with equal rights.  What this slippery argument willfully ignores is that what is being taken away is not just the right of some women to a medical procedure; what is being taken away from all women is the right to decide.

 So What!?

The Supreme Court decision will be a victory for evangelicals, 80% of whom voted for Donald Trump knowing he would appoint conservative justices and predicting that this day would come.  Justice Alito is obviously right that US history does not provide precedents for allowing individual women to decide what happens to their own bodies for the obvious reason that American history is a history of discrimination against women.  Arguing that the future must be a continuation of the past is, more or less, a definition of "being conservative."

In practical terms, the new laws will force some woman (in southern states) to face the cost and inconvenience of traveling out of state to terminate a pregnancy.  Consequently, the greatest burden will be borne by the poorest of women.  In the abstract, women's rights and sovereignty over their own bodies will revert to 1970. We might hope that since the majority of Americans support a woman's right to decide, they will elect representatives who will legislate this right.  But, somehow, despite the promises of democracy, the will of the majority rarely succeeds against the power of lobbies and interest groups.

What about Canada?

Could the same happen in Canada?  The mechanisms are exactly the same.  Supreme Court Justices are appointed by the government.  Five of the nine current members of the Supreme Court were appointed by the Conservative government.  These days, various Conservative politicians promise that they will not introduce abortion legislation.  Such promises are irrelevant.  If someone brings a case to the Supreme Court tomorrow, the Court could overrule R. v. Morgentaler (1988) and abortion law would revert to 1969.  Abortion would become illegal in Canada unless a committee of doctors decide it was necessary to save a woman's life or health.

Transtextuality in Film Adaptation: Fidelity Revisited

Presentation to a Joint session of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures and the Film Studies Association of Canada, Monday, May 30, 2005; University of Western Ontario

In a course on American literature, I typically showed students scenes from Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, The Age of Innocence. The Scorsese film is what one would commonly describe as a  faithful adaptation of the novel–a Visconti-style film fitting to the turn-of-the-century splendour and mannerisms which Wharton describes. Most of the film’s dialogue and narration are pulled directly from the novel. The scene from the film which I presented to students is the major turning point of the narrative in which May Archer, the novel’s most conspicuous symbol of innocence announces to her husband, Newland, that Countess Olenska, her cousin who was about to become Newland’s mistress, had decided to leave New York and return to Europe. In this scene, the novel announces to us May’s loss of innocence. She has lied to her cousin, claiming to be pregnant and thereby putting a stop to the affair which was about to take place and, in the same manoeuver, taking control of her husband. This episode is the turning point of the novel, and Wharton signals May’s loss of innocence by having her wearing her wedding dress on this occasion, which May has just torn and muddied while getting out of a carriage. At the very end of this crucial “loss of innocence” chapter, Wharton presents us with the image of May turning to exit “her torn and muddy wedding dress dragging after her across the room."

This scene in the novel is markedly filmic, in that May’s loss of innocence is principally and forcefully signaled to us through the visual image of the “torn and muddy wedding dress.” The scene in Scorsese's film is as described in the novel, except that May’s dress is spotlessly clean and without a sign of a tear. How can we talk about this difference between film and novel, this absence of the “torn and muddy wedding dress”? I call it a mistake. An inexplicable oversight. An unaccounted-for error. 

I begin with this example, simple to signal that there are cases in which we can discuss the relationship between a literary work and a film in these terms. The director missed something or something went wrong somewhere. Once we admit this possibility we can begin to look at those changes which are matters of interpretation or intentional shifts from the themes and ideology of the literary work. An obvious example of the latter would be Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The novel is a series of stories of women striving for and achieving independence from patriarchy. The novel’s heroine, the blues singer Shug Avery, resists all domination by men, most especially her own father who is an evangelical preacher. However, in the musical climax of Spielberg’s film, Shug Avery spontaneously and inexplicably decides to go to her father’s church and ask for his forgiveness, thereby contradicting not only the plot but the central theme and ideology of the novel. Spielberg’s attempts to privilege male-female relationships and male characters become laughably obvious in the conclusion of the film as Spielberg makes the character identified as "Mister ---" the hero of the film through changes to the plot and then desperately reinforces this point through a series of shots and slow dissolve superimpositions not only intertextually connected to the film cliché of the hero riding off into the sunset but graphically reminding us that there is a man behind this film’s happy ending.

 

 

                           
My sense of outrage at the Spielberg film is somewhat tempered when I come to consider the Milos Forman adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoos’ Nest. There is a parallel in the cases in that the Kesey novel is an explicit defense of masculinity to the point of suggesting that mental illness and male suicides are a direct result of emasculation and the suppression of masculine sexuality, desires and values, which the Forman film significantly under-plays.

In an essay entitled “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” Robert Stam argues:

The concept of intertextual dialogism suggests that every text forms an intersection of textual surfaces. All texts are tissues of anonymous formulae, variations on those formulae, conscious and unconscious quotations, and conflations and inversions of other texts. In the broadest sense, intertextual dialogism refers to the infinite and open-ended possibilities generated by all the discursive practices of a culture, the entire matrix of communicative utterances within which the artistic text is situated, which reach the text not only through recognizable influences, but also through a subtle process of dissemination.

Intertextuality, then, helps us to transcend the aporias of “fidelity.”

Although I agree with Stam in general terms, the question which his claim gives rise to in my mind is: Can the concept of adaptation survive in any meaningful or practical sense if “intertextual dialogism” generates “infinite and open-ended possibilities”?

If we cannot find and argue for at least some meaningful, definite, assured points of contact and closure in the comparison of film and literary work, then what is it that prevents us from simply bracketing the concept of adaptation and completely divorcing novel from film in order to treat, analyze and interpret each independently. Despite the temptations of such a divorce, however, it seems clear that there will always be some sort of relationship between the film and the literary work upon which it is based. In fact, Stam goes on to argue for a defined set of relationships between film and novel by invoking Gerard Genette’s concept and taxonomy of transtextual relationships.

That relationship between film and literary work might be characterized as hypertext to hypotext, using Genette’s terms as Stam suggests; that is, the film hypertext could not exist as it is without the earlier existence of the literary hypotext. However, framed this way the relationship remains vague and ambiguous. In individual cases, the relationship could be one of agreement and mutual support, of premise and extrapolation, or the relationship could be antagonistic and critical. Whatever kind of relationship might exist between a film and the work from which it is adapted they fall within and can be judged and understood within some framework of coherence.

In making this claim I am very much influenced by what Bertrand Russell among others calls a “coherence theory of truth”–which is to say that statements, signs, and semiotic units cannot be judged true or false through their correspondence to objects in the world. The only way we have available to us to judge truth is by verifying the degree to which a particular statement is coherent in relation to other statements, signs, events, objects and so on. I agree with Stam’s conclusion that

[. . .] to look at adaptation is to see it as a matter of a source novel hypotext’s being transformed by a complex series of operations: selections, amplification, concretization, actualization, critique, extrapolation, analogization, popularization, and reculturalization. The source novel, in this sense, can be seen as a situated utterance produced in one medium and in one historical context, then transformed into another equally situated utterance that is produced in a different context and in a different medium.

Novel and film are separated and connected through these various transformative processes. There is a connection, a relationship between them which can be judged within an inclusive pattern of coherence. This relationship between literary work and film, which is one of mutual, connected coherence, allows us to talk about adaptations in terms of something like fidelity. Films can be judged to be mistaken, false, “in bad faith,” reduced and inferior; or apt interpretations, honest, “true to the original” and even superior works of art, as well as critiques, rebuttals and parodies in relation to a literary hypotext. We can legitimately note a mistake in Scorsese’s film, claim that Spielberg’s film is a betrayal of the feminist ideology of The Color Purple and that Milos Forman’s film is a softening of the masculinist ideology of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

 

As we move from literary work to a commercial film for a mass audience there is typically a softening and watering down of themes and ideological implications of the literary work accompanied by a shifting down of architextuality to reduce the perlocutionary or affective impact on the audience. When transferred to film, tragedies become satires and thrillers, satires become melodramas, romances and comedies. A classic example of this shifting down would be Elia Kazan’s film version of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. In Kazan’s version, for example, the audience is prevented, by the sound of a passing train, from hearing Blanch Dubois’s speech in which she makes the metaphorical connection between raw sexual desire and the streetcar named Desire. More strikingly, although the play ends as a tragedy with a dark and seemingly omnipotent fate looming in the figure of Stanley Kowalski, the sexy gorilla, who as indicated in the stage directions: “kneels beside Stella [who is sobbing] and his fingers find the opening of her blouse.” The final line of the play is Steve the poker player’s announcement: “The name of the game is seven-card stud.” It is no accident that the last word of this play is “stud.” In the film version, Stella takes her baby upstairs to escape Stanley, promising in muttering tones that “he will never have the baby or touch me again.” The tragic drama thus becomes a satiric melodrama, with the villain Stanley being defeated in a last-minute reversal.

The shift of narratological structure and architextuality though significant does not yet approach the complexity of a comparison of film hypertext and literary hypotext which Stam has suggested. As every text is a collection, a tapestry of interwoven intertextual references, quotations, allusions and so on, a key to comparing film and literary work is through this intertextuality. Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Who am I this time?” offers a clear example of what I wish to suggest because the story depends so heavily upon on intertextuality to get its satiric point across. In Vonnegut’s story, the small town of North Crawford’s theatre club decides to produce A Streetcar Named Desire. The play having been chosen, the director discovers that the town has a surplus of older, faded ladies who could play the role of Blanche Dubois, but no-one who could play her sister, the young and passionate Stella. The choice of this particular intertext, A Streetcar Named Desire, allows Vonnegut to display, in a particularly effective way, the malaise associated with the aging and near disappearance of small-town America. A second, significant intertext in Vonnegut’s story is Shakespeare’s tragedy of passionate young lovers, Romeo and Juliet.

In the made-for-television film based on this short story, the intertextual references; ie, Streetcar and Romeo and Juliet, are maintained. In the film, the satire of the short story is reduced and the narratological structure is transformed into romantic comedy in two obvious ways. The first is that the director fills street scenes with young women who are supposedly residents of the town. The film then introduces a third major intertext; the proposal scene from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being
Earnest.

A key to understanding any text is how it uses and/or transforms an intertext. Oscar Wilde’s play is a satire. The proposal scene, in which Earnest Worthing proposes to his love, Gwendolyn, is a parody of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare’s Juliet is willing to be frank, throws the rules of courtly love out the window and dares to ask: “What’s in a name?” And answer: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Oscar Wilde’s Gwendolyn, in contrast, is a dogmatic believer in the rules of propriety and has always dreamed of marrying and will only accept to marry a man named Earnest. Knowing about Juliet is the key to understanding Gwendolyn’s fetish for the name Earnest, and essential to getting Wilde’s irony and satire.

In the made-for-television version of “Who am I this time?” the scene from Earnest is flattened of its satiric import. The scene becomes a lighthearted but sincere proposal of marriage, reiterating rather than parodying the romantic and passionate love already echoed in the Romeo and Juliet and Streetcar Named Desire intertexts. It would be tempting to suggest that, in the adaptation process, if the intertext is transformed from satire to romantic comedy, then the film as a whole will perform the same transformation. Although I think such a claim would warrant investigation, I am not prepared to go quite that far at this point. What I am prepared to suggest is that we should pay particular attention to what happens to transtextual elements as we move from literary work to film and that these elements can become the concrete evidence of the transformation that has taken place in the process of adaptation. Both film and literary work are coherent structures and a change in the intertext must be accompanied by other transtextual and textual adjustments in order to maintain some sort of overall coherence in the film hypertext. With this in mind, I would like to consider two Canadian examples: The Handmaid’s Tale and Anne of Green Gables.

Peter Dickenson has already pointed out that

[. . .] the 1990 film of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale [. . .] turned Atwood’s dark dystopian and ironic feminist text into a stock Hollywood romance, complete with a traditional happy ending in which the boy presumably gets the girl.

Although I agree in general terms with this description of the adaptation process, I would like to offer a slight variation by focusing on the transformations of the transtextuality from novel to film.

 

Atwood’s novel opens with three paratextual citations: a quotation from the Bible which is the core of the novel and justifies the existence of the handmaid function, an epigrammatic quote from Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” which clearly signals that what we are about to read is a satire, and a Sufi proverb. The film does away with these epigrams and substitutes a new paratext which establishes a new intertextual allusion to children's fairy tales. The film begins with a paragraph-long summary/comment projected on the screen: “One upon a time there existed a country called Gilead [and so on].” Rather than using any of the novel’s literary intertexts, such as the references to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the film opens with a series of filmic allusions: a James-Bondish gun battle on a snow-covered mountain, a repeated fairy-tale-like image of a female child wandering lost in the mountains, scenes of a train station and a military occupation alluding to the Holocaust, and scenes of the handmaids which give a nod to the genre of prison film. In my reading of the film, the adaptation begins to make sense as an adaptation at a very precise moment. In the film, as in the novel, the Handmaid is brought to meet Serena Joy, the Wife of the Commander whose child she will be expected to conceive. In the dialogue between Handmaid and Wife, in the film, Serena Joy pointedly mentions: “This is your first time.”

In the novel, however, Serena Joy says: “This is your third time.” Why does the film shift the situation from the Handmaid’s third to her first experience as a commander’s handmaid? In answering this question we discover the coherence of the adaptation process. The overall effect of the numerous changes made in the adaptation process are designed to transform the novel from a satire into a melodrama. In addition to its play on heightened emotions, what defines melodrama is its strict adherence to moral justice. In a melodrama, we are invariably presented with good and innocent characters threatened by conspicuous evil, a villain. The melodrama guarantees us a build-up of suspense through a predictable series of surprises and reversals leading to the last-minute rescue of an innocent victim by a good hero and in the denouement the assurance that justice has unquestionably been served. Atwood’s novel in addition to being a dystopian satire is the first-person narration of a woman’s internal struggle to survive. In the course of the novel, the Handmaid’s conscious decision to survive also implies that she must not only co-operate in her role as a handmaid but she chooses to play the role of a prostitute with her commander and then to be unfaithful to both her commander and her husband, Luc, by having an affair with Nic, the commander’s driver. The novel suggests to us that with time this handmaid might and future handmaids definitely will become adjusted and accepting of their roles and duties.

The film eliminates these sources of internal conflict and moral ambiguity by making the Handmaid a figure of innocence and restructuring the storyline around the only conflict that melodrama permits: good and innocence versus evil. The once-upon-a-time epigraph and opening images of innocence (a child wondering lost) and evil (the Holocaust) suggestively reinforce the style and structure of the melodrama. In addition, in the film, the Handmaid’s husband is explicitly shown to have been killed whereas in the novel he is thought to still be alive. Nic is unquestionably heroic and an object of love, rather than the ambiguous, ultimately unknown, target of lascivious desire and source of the Handmaid’s infidelity to her husband, Luc. The film goes on to complete the Handmaid’s story in keeping with the structure of melodrama. She defeats evil by murdering the commander and is unequivocally rescued by her lover/hero in the nick of time (no pun intended). The film's denouement confirms her goodness, innocence and the happy ending of a victory over evil. The relationship between novel and film is the relationship between a satiric hypotext with undertones of tragedy and a melodramatic hypertext with undertones of romance.

In his essay “Stand by Your Man: Adapting L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables,” Benjamin Lefebvre describes the television mini-series produced by Kevin Sullivan as transforming Montgomery’s novel from a satire of “the conventions of patriarchal romance” into “a conventional
romance." As Lefebvre points out, in the novel Anne and her friends attempt to act out Tennyson’s epic poem “Elaine and Lancelot”; however, the poem which Anne recites, in the miniseries, while floating down the river in imitation of Elaine’s funereal voyage to Camelot is Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallot.” Lefebvre concludes that while “it would be worthwhile to consider the shift from Anne reenacting Elaine [. . .] to the Lady of Shallot, my point is that the intertextual referent for this scene in the 1985 miniseries is not Montgomery’s novel but the 1934 film."

I have a strong hunch that the intertexts for this scene in both audiovisual productions were the numerous paintings done of “The Lady of Shallot,” the most popular of which was painted in Gothic style by Waterhouse in 1883. Montgomery seems to assume that her readers will be well acquainted with the Elaine poem and is quite clear that Anne and her friends are. Sullivan’s production conflates the Elaine poem and “The Lady of Shallot” such that if we didn’t know better we would assume that “The Lady of Shallot” is the Elaine poem. Anyone familiar with the Elaine poem would know that Elaine is a beautiful young woman who is so stubbornly romantic that no-one can dissuade her from her decision to die of unrequited love–not her brothers, nor her father, nor Launcelot himself (the object of her unrequited love). “The Lady of Shallot” is a much more enigmatic and Gothic poem, and the Lady herself could not be connected to Anne. The Sullivan production uses the scene to promote a romance between Gilbert Blythe and Anne. In the novel, the scene between them concludes with Anne’s firm rejection of Gilbert’s offer of friendship. In the conclusion of this chapter of the novel, Anne announces to Marilla that “today’s mistake is going to cure me of being too romantic." In other words, Anne’s playing Elaine, the “lily maid,” has cured her of being like Elaine. If Anne plays the Lady of Shallot as she does in the film and miniseries she cannot be cured of the romanticism specifically associated with Elaine.

When we observe “Elaine and Lancelot” in relation to the other explicitly quoted intertexts of the novel such as “Pippa Passes” and “The Maiden’s Vow” we discover a common thread of women who remain single and chaste but have a profound effect on other people’s lives. This motif is carried forward in Anne’s life models and mentors: Old Mrs. Barry, Miss Stacy and Marilla. It also reminds us that all the male-female relationships of the novel involve strong women--Marilla, Mrs. Allen, Rachel Lind, and Mrs. Barry--and muted or absent men.

In the TV version, Pippa and the poet Browning disappear. Elaine is erased by the Lady of Shallot, “The Maiden’s Vow” in which a woman simply prays to honour her lost courtier is replaced by a historical anachronism, “The Highwayman,” in which a barmaid commits suicide to warn her American lover that the British have set a trap for him. The television miniseries transforms Montgomery’s meliorist satire on the dialectic of Romanticism and Victorianism into a romantic comedy in which young lovers must overcome the blockage of an older character, Marilla. My suggestion is that these and other film adaptations of Canadian literary works can and should be read in the context of a coherent transtextual relationship which can be analyzed, perhaps judged, and certainly better understood when we closely attend to the intertextual and textual shifts which have taken place.

The Concept Formerly Known as Nationalism: Canadian Theatre in Theory and Practice

(This post is a repurposing of a conference presentation from 2002.)

Plenary Panel with respondents Djanet Sears, Richard Rose, Ker Welles and John Mighton, Association for Canadian Theatre Research (ACTR), 25 May 2002, University of Toronto

                                                            Professor Jay Sour, PhD, GDCS, MA, BA

In 1975, the theme for the newly-founded Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures at the  Learned Societies’ Conference in Edmonton was Canadian and Quebec theatre.  Although the conference programme was designed as a series of  “Confrontations” between French and English Canadian presenters, what emerged was a schism between academics, on one side,  and theatre practitioners, led by George Ryga, on the other.  Ryga would later write that the conference 

. . . left this observer with some critical questions about the role of universities as a supportive force in developments of Canadian drama in both languages.  Well-intentioned and vigorous statements were made about critical study and publication of papers on our dramas.  No doubt, these enquiries will have their effect.  I am in agreement with the sardonic comment by Jean-Claude Germain that more young Canadians are now studying Canadian drama that will ever see it as a living art in our theatres. 1 

The first question I would like to put before the panel is: Has the situation improved since 1975?  In 1975,  I fully agreed with Ryga that the academy did not seem willing to fulfill its moral obligations to promote Canadian theatre.  Today as a university professor I find Canadian theatre the most difficult subject matter I am required to teach.  Despite the existence of organizations like the Association for Canadian Theatre Research, my impression is that the gap between the academy and the theatre, between theory and practice, has grown over the postmodern period.  Is there reason, hope or even a desire to establish a framework for understanding the common ground of mutual interests among Canadian theatre practitioners and scholars? 

In the '70s my answer to this question would have been, without hesitation, “yes,” but its justification would have been couched in terms of Canadian nationalism. The concept of nationalism seems to have proven endlessly problematic and, in the end, perhaps even a liability in this country.  So, how do we get beyond the myths and negative stereotypes of Canadian nationalism?  How do we get beyond what John Ralston Sal calls the “negative nationalism” of fear and panic leading to conformity, ethnocentrism and xenophobia?  How do we steer clear of the pitfalls of essentialism and identity, as well as liberal-humanist illusions of universality?  How do we get beyond that nationalism which has been so readily labelled as zealous, jingoistic, militant and even racist, or condescending multicultural pigeon-holing, imposed bi-culturalism, or hegemonic harmonization?  How do we move toward an embracing and celebration of transculturalism and post-nationalism?  How do we take advantage of what Robert Wallace calls “the opportunities [which indeterminacy] provides for social justice” and begin to imagine the as yet “unimagined” alliances he alludes to ( Theatre and Transformation in Contemporary Canada 52)?     The objective of my presentation is to open reflection on how to continue the process of both theorizing and practising Canadian theatre as part of an  “imagined community” or at least as a crossroads of many “imagined communities,” as part of  what Denis Salter describes as  “an ideological complex which to function completely must always subject its premises and methods to rigorous re-examination” and Richard Knowles calls the cultivation of  “concerted difference and radical contingency.”  How can we participate in what Charles Taylor characterizes as  “deep diversity in which a plurality of ways of belonging would also be acknowledged and accepted” and  Sal calls the “positive nationalism of an open debate”? 

The premise of my argument is simply this:  No thing means anything by itself.   In my thinking, meaning derives from one thing’s connections and relationships to other things, to the world around it.   A text means something because it has a context.  A sign, a gesture, a word, a phrase, a play, a performance, a life–each has the potential to mean something because it can be connected and related to some other matrix of signs, gestures, objects, ideas, lives.  “Meaning,” in my thinking, is never sure, never guaranteed, never absolutely accurate or controllable.  Meaning is an endless process with infinite potential.  Conscious effort is required to grasp particular, specific meanings once the conditions are in place,  but ultimately, I suspect, most meanings simply happen.  We all do it, but I take artists in particular–such as playwrights, directors, designers and actors–to be in the business of putting things together in new and original ways and thus creating new meanings.  Readers, audiences, critics, scholars, teachers and students engage in the process which the artist unleashes.  Sometimes they “get” an intended meaning; sometimes they miss or misconstrue meanings; sometimes they add, transform and even enrich meanings.  Most of the time they do all of the above.   I take theatre artists and theatre scholars to be deeply and actively involved in this meaning-making process.  We have a mutual vested interest in making meanings as full and rich as possible. 

When I make the leap of speaking of Canadian theatre, Canadian playwrights, Canadian audiences, I do so, not to impose a restriction, not to suggest a requirement or even an objective.  I think it is a sound, logical assumption that the meanings circulating through and around plays written and performed by Canadians and viewed by a Canadian public should be particularly rich, full, vigorous and apparent.  If this is not the case, we need to wonder and ask why?   

To begin to illustrate my thinking in concrete terms I will have to outline where it and I came from. My first encounter with what might be called a nationalist issue was as a high school debater in a tournament at the University of Ottawa being asked to debate Mathews and Steele’s proposition that ‘two-thirds of Canadian university professors should be Canadian educated.’  I was opposed.  When I was an undergraduate at Carleton University, Robin Mathews created a stir by publicly complaining that there was not a single Canadian literary work in the required first-year survey for English Majors.  I was not impressed.  Although I knew the lyrics of  Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot,  could recite poems by Robert Service, had read a number of Pierre Burton’s Klondike books and had seen all the episodes of The Whiteoaks of Jalna on TV, I felt an unmitigated pride in the superiority of my honours BA degree in English because I had been able to complete the first three years of it without ever being required to study a single piece of literature written by a Canadian.  To add to my cynicism about a nationalist agenda, one summer of my undergraduate years  I was part of a theatre troop which garnered an Opportunities for Youth grant by unabashedly claiming that we were going to spread the good news of national unity across the Maritimes.  When a graduate student named Terry Goldie was invited to give a presentation on the history of Canadian theatre in one of my classes, I was honestly surprised to discover that some people thought there was such a thing as Canadian theatre, all the more so that it had a history.  It was at this same moment that I happened to befriend Bill Law, a fellow student who shared my interest in theatre but who was, much to my discomfort, tightly connected with the Can Lit cabal at Carleton University. In 1974 when (my friend) Bill Law and I had taken over the leadership of Sock ‘n Buskin, the Carleton University Drama Society,  I was shocked and dismayed by Bill’s stubborn insistence that we were going to do a complete season of Canadian plays.  I decided to follow along with Bill’s plan because I was convinced that he would see the folly of his aspirations as soon as we tried to put them into action.  I thought I had proven my case when I checked out all the Canadian plays I could find in the Carleton University library–there were eight. 

     Bill Law remained undaunted and in the next twelve months Sock 'n' Buskin produced six plays including the premiere of Robin Mathew’s problem drama, A Woman is Dying, Mavor Moore’s musical Sunshine Town based on the Leacock sketches and Gerry Potter’s collective creation Chaudiere Strike.  The success of this season inspired us to join with Lois Shannon, Robin Mathews and Larry McDonald to form the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa with the continuing mandate of producing Canadian plays.  Although I remained the token liberal in the years I served on the company’s board of management, this period of nationalist awareness left me with the clear impression that nationalism was an obvious and appropriate response to the kinds of events and situations I found myself facing in the mid to late '70s. 

“Nationalist awareness” sounds terribly significant and expansive, but what I mean is simply that once the idea that Canada was a sovereign nation and, as such, should logically be promoting its own growth and development was in my head, I began to notice and question those times when it became obvious that this was not happening.  For example, I discovered that in 1974 there was considered to be an appropriate language for doing theatre in English in Canada.  When I called the Ottawa Little Theatre looking for a lead actor,  I was surprised that the very first question I was asked was would I accept an actor with a Canadian accent.  Thus, in a single moment, I discovered that there was such a thing as a Canadian accent (and, it slowly dawned on me that I must speak with this accent) and that it was not apt for the theatre. I found poetic justice in the fact that the first hit of The Great Canadian Theatre Company was an original play called Yonder Lies the Valley which required that the actors speak a broad Ottawa valley brogue and learn to step dance and appreciate the virtuosity of fiddle music. 

At the 1975 Learneds, I was sitting beside Robin Mathews listening to A.J.M Smith present a paper on Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.  When Smith concluded his paper with the comment that the play demonstrated that Canada didn’t have the kind of heroes which could be successfully dramatized on stage, Robin Mathews began to boo loudly.  The room cleared quickly, everyone trying to get away, as fast and as far as possible, from Mathews.  It probably didn’t help that someone had salted the rumour that I was Mathews’ bodyguard. 

When I became involved in the process of trying to raise funds for the newly formed company, I quickly discovered that the most common reason given by granting institutions, various levels of government and individuals for not supporting the GCTC was that they already supported The Ottawa Little Theatre or The National Art Centre.  When I pointed out that neither of these institutions produced Canadian plays, the argument had little purchase.  In fact, despite my earlier impressions that a nationalist agenda was a guarantee of funding, I began to realize that almost the opposite was the case.  The company’s mission to produce plays by Canadians seemed to put its credibility in question.    

Even after leaving the theatre company and beginning studies in film and television, I seemed condemned to nationalist epiphanies.  I remember a university professor who was giving a course on Canadian film being asked why Don Shebib who had directed Going Down the Road had used only American actors for the leading roles in his film Second Wind.  The professor’s answer was that “there are no Canadian actors.”  When pressed, he allowed that there were three or four significant Canadian actors, but if Donald Sutherland, Genevieve Bujold, Christopher Plummer and John Collicos were busy then a director would have to use American actors. 

When I canvassed my fellow students in this course, I discovered that I alone preferred Shebib’s Canadian classic over his later work.  As one of my fellow students so aptly explained to me, “it makes perfect sense that people would prefer the later film because it looked more like what they already knew and considered ‘good’; that is, an American film.” 

In 1979 I happened to be in the control room in Toronto where CBC producers were receiving the feeds for the National News.  Most of the footage for the Canadian news was being fed to us from American sources.  The control room which was usually a somewhat noisy, bustling place went completely silent as everyone stopped to watch a series of scenes from David Fennario’s Balconville being broadcast to us from Montreal. When the sequence finished, the noise returned and the decision was quickly made not to include it in the National News.  Instead of the scenes from Balconville, there was an announcement that after three days in hospital John Wayne was resting comfortably.     

And so in the 70s, nationalism, to me,  seemed like the right answer, a logical corrective response to what seemed to me obvious errors and oversights.  Nationalism meant that Canadian theatres should be presenting plays written and produced by Canadians, and theatres which took the extra risk of presenting new and original Canadian works should be funded.  It meant that theatre in Canada should be allowed to be done in whatever languages, dialects or accents Canadians happened to speak.  To me, nationalism also meant that Canadians should be cognizant of the fact that there was an overabundance of talent in the country.  Canada had the good luck and grace of attracting talented immigrants from around the world.  Talented people were born and developed here.  Canada had talent enough to export endlessly into the USA and still have enough left at home to keep life interesting.   Nationalism meant recognizing that Canadians were as fit subjects for drama as the peoples of any other nation.  Nationalism also meant educating audiences to an openness to new, original and different styles of performing art, and it meant that when a play came along that was of obvious interest and significance, the national media had an obligation to tell people about it. 

But of course, nationalism was also the wrong response.  Even within the Great Canadian Theatre Company, we talked about how we were a vanguard movement, a radical response to a temporary situation.  When a hundred theatre companies started doing Canadian plays we would be happy to be put out of business.  However, in the years that followed I discovered a heartfelt animosity toward nationalist agendas in the Canadian public–people telling me that they would never accept having Canadian theatre shoved down their throats.  People who had never seen a Canadian play, couldn’t name a Canadian playwright and would be perfectly open to Italian theatre or German, or British or American theatre, still maintained that their liberty would be threatened by Canadian theatre.   There was clearly a mythology of nationalism in Canada; and here I mean "mythology" in the terms used by Roland Barthes; that is, a connection of one word to others that did not derive from its denotation.  The GCTC never seemed to be identified as simply a group of nationalists, but always as rabid, ranting, foaming-at-the-mouth nationalists in addition to being narrow, provincial, parochial and tribal. 

Of course, I understood the objections to nationalism in conceptual terms and from world history, but I still had trouble making sense of the objections in the Canadian context.   Every textbook on the subject of Canada rehearses the same basic set of facts.  At first glance, Canada doesn’t make sense as a country.  Everything about the country’s social and physical geography suggests that it should not exist.  We live in a country that is three thousand miles long, in which 90% of the population lives within a hundred miles of the American border; the vast territories to the north remain largely unknown to the majority of the population.   We are divided by language, race, ethnicity, gender, by sexual and political orientation, province, region and class.  The urban centres are growing, largely in isolation from one another, while every place else stagnates and shrinks.   Such a place can only be held together through conscious and considerable human effort.  Yet, nationalism seems to be a minor and extremely weak force in Canadian life.  I grew up being told that this country was held together by a railway.  The railway was sold because the truth was that in an age of communications the country was really tied together through its public broadcasting system.  As soon as this notion had installed itself, the budgets of the CBC were massively slashed.  Most recently the truism has become that Canada is held together by its distinctive network of social programmes: no sooner said than those programmes are under attack at every level of government in the country.  On the basis of recent history, I am not about to propose that the theatre is or should be a means of holding the country together. 

Of course, I have often wondered about the distinct antipathy of Canadians toward nationalism.  1970s notions of colonial mentalities and inferiority complexes have never rung completely true for me.  The idea of a capitalist conspiracy has at times seemed to supply at least the beginnings of an answer but, these days, the intentions of a globalized economy, though carried out behind closed doors, seem too apparent to be called a conspiracy. To me, Canadians seem quietly conceited about their nationality. 

For the sake of the discussion–because I think the discussion is all–let us bracket nationalism as an impediment and an attack on individual liberty. Let us remove Canadian nationalism from the discussion because of its potential associations with imperialism, racism, fascism, essentialism, patriarchalism, and xenophobia.  But at the same time let us embrace this other thing that celebrates difference and the ex-centric, that takes into account the rights of individuals and the legitimacy of self-interest, as well as justice and reason, tolerance and openness, creativity and imagination, pleasure and play, and critical and aesthetic judgment but which, in the end, allows us to remain net promoters of Canadian theatre and the theatre in Canada.  I am prepared to be unsentimental about the destiny of the Canadian nation, but I would consider it a tragedy if Canadians did not participate fully in the exchange and debate and decision-making process that determined its future and if theatre practitioners and admirers, teachers and critics were not part of that process.   Let us resurrect the lost art of “conversation” (297) which Richard Gwyn alludes to in Nationalism Without Walls and recognize, as Ramsay Cook underlines, that the basic obligation of the nation is “peace, order and good government” and the provision of a structure to “protect cultural pluralism.”  Then let us talk in and about a framework, a forum, an open debate, an encadrement , and recognize that it is time to prioritize problem-solving and construction.  Perhaps we find a hint of the beginnings of what we might be looking for in Alain Filewod’s observation of the documentary theatre’s impulse to “accommodate rapid social change” (qtd in Wallace, 24). 

I speak most humbly in the shadow of great projects and works on Canadian theatre that have been undertaken and completed by scholars in recent years.  My sentiment is that this work has not been celebrated sufficiently and widely enough.   I was also motivated to open this discussion after witnessing the presentations of Guillermo Verdecchia,  Rahul Varma, Michel Marc Bouchard and Aviva Ravel at the Laval conference last year, and recognizing how much they had contributed to the vitality and the validity of the association’s meeting and wanting to encourage more of the same. 

My remarks have been intended to create an opening where I perceived an impasse, a hesitance, a reluctance to discuss.  It is an impasse which I see as having an effect on me as both as an amateur (I like the French word because it implies a lover) of the theatre in Canada and as a teacher.   Last year I taught a course I had created called Anglo-Québécois Literature.  As I told my students, I really didn’t know if there was such a thing as Anglo-Québécois literature and the course title should have ended in a question mark.  However, the course gave me the excuse to present works by David Fennario, Vittorio Rossi and Colleen Curran, and to invite each of these playwrights to speak to the class.  The students’ attitudes toward the concept of anything Anglo-Québécois ranged from chauvinistic attachment to pronounced antagonism, and there was little harmony in the writers’ responses to the expression. Nonetheless, the students’ awareness of the issues in question gave meaning to the works of these writers and significance to their presence. 

During the same period, I led a graduate seminar on Comparative Canadian Drama, a course which I regularly and apologetically describe to students as a study of forensics because although I intend that we should study the theatre, by which I mean the performance of plays, we, in fact, could only study history, biography, theory, and scripts together with our own readings, improvisations and background knowledge of performance.  When I had the opportunity to invite David French, a playwright I have long admired, to this seminar, I realized that the students had very little means through which to relate to French and his work.  The students had read Salt-Water Moon and Antonine Maillet’s much-praised translation of the same play, La Lune Salé, but French was not really a Newfoundland writer although his play is set there, nor could he say very much about the business of translation.  When asked about being a Canadian playwright, French’s answer was an icy “If I was being produced just because I was a Canadian; I’d rather not be produced.”  Immediately, I thought, ‘what a typically Canadian answer!’    What Italian, Swedish, German, Japanese, English, French, Ethiopian, American, Moroccan or Iranian writer would answer the question “what does it mean to be a playwright of your nationality?”  this way?   I am in agreement with Filewod’s observation that “‘true Canadianism . . . can never be achieved” (“Between Empires” 14).    I am not interested in a list of immortal features or a defined and regulated culture or an identity to call Canadian, but I would like to be able to have a conversation on the topic of  “Canadian theatre” and  “theatre in Canada,” whatever these expressions might mean,  just to see where the conversation takes us. 

1. qtd. in Rota Herzberg Lister’s  “Constructing a Canadian Theatrical Culture: The 1975 Conference of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures in Historical and Personal Perspective,”   Textual Studies in Canada/ Études textuelles au Canada , 6 (1995): 22-32. 

Foreign Policy Realism: Can an Agreement on Ukrainian Neutrality End the War?

The USA and NATO are to blame . . .

In his 2015 lecture at the University of Chicago, Professor John Mearsheimer argued that expanding NATO  to Russia's borders was a mistake.  In 2022, Mearsheimer has continued to reiterate his position that a neutral Ukraine serving as a bridge between Russia and Europe would serve everyone's best interests:  the Russians', the EU's, the USA's, the West's and especially and most importantly, the Ukranians'. As early as 1998, George Kennan, author of "The Long Telegram" and "architect of America's successful containment of the Soviet Union" also decried the reckless and ill-advised expansion of NATO to Russia's borders. The expansion of NATO was a mistake, they argued, for two basic reasons:  1) it would eventually goad Russia into a hostile response and 2) it offered a false promise of military intervention to new member states (the USA was highly unlikely to engage in a nuclear war with Russia in defence of Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia, for example, when they had no strategic or economic value for the Americans).  

 

The "Historical pattern" counterargument

In a New Yorker interview, Stephen Kotkin, a scholar of Russian history, declares:

I have only the greatest respect for George Kennan. John Mearsheimer is a giant of a scholar. But I respectfully disagree. The problem with their argument is that it assumes that, had NATO not expanded, Russia wouldn’t be the same or very likely close to what it is today. What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern.

In a Globe and Mail article entitled "To understand why Ukraine is under attack today, we need to look at Russia's actions over the last 70 years," Michael Ignatieff adopts a similar "historical pattern" argument.  Ignatieff writes:  "This story of four Eastern European capitals, all under attack from Russia, over the past 70 years makes nonsense of the claim that NATO expansion eastward caused this crisis." 

 

 Foreign Policy Realism

Perhaps because I have become so familiar with the aphorism which always accompanies financial advice--"Past performance is no guarantee of future results"--I find the "historical pattern" argument unconvincing.  Additionally, a close focus on Russia's historical pattern of behaviour tells, at best, only half the story.  Any attempt to analyze a global conflict would, logically, have to consider the American historical pattern of behaviour over the last 70 years:  a 20-year war in Afghanistan, two wars in Iraq, the war in Yugoslavia, bombings in Syria, targeted assignations throughout the Middle East, interventions in Granada, Panama, Chile, Nicaragua, etc, etc, all the way back to the Vietnam War. Imagining, on behalf of the Russians, that they had nothing to fear from the US expansion of NATO and that what is happening can be completely explained by Russian imperialism and nostalgia for the Soviet Union strikes me as willful blindness. 

Reading Ezra Klein's NYT interview with defence and foreign policy analyst Emma Ashford, I discovered that my thinking had a name:  "foreign policy realism."  As Klein explains:

Realism is a political framework that understands international relations as a contest between relatively rational states for power and security. It’s pretty structural in that way. It sees the actions and activities of states as quite predictable, given their role and needs in the international security hierarchy.

[ . . . .]  It wants to be structural, not personal or individualistic.

In this case, there’s a particular realist analysis that has caught a lot of people’s attention, which is John Mearsheimer’s model of the conflict.

Realism, Neo-classical realism, game theory and chaos theory

Emma Ashford is, according to Klein, "what’s called a neo-classical realist. She begins with a structural, state-based, power-based analysis of realism, but then opens it up to more influence from domestic politics — the psychology of individual leaders, the messiness of reality."  We've been here before in another context.  My post "The Market, the State and the Monkey in the Middle" highlighted economist Jean Tirol's "game theory" which, like neo-classical realism in strategic studies, proposed that the traditional models based on the assumption that all agents would act in rational self-interest were inadequate because they failed to take into account the cognitive bias and ideology of individuals.  I must also admit that I believe in "chaos theory" (see "The Chaos Theory of International Trade"), the idea that individual actions can unleash global consequences, as in the case of Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian teenager whose assassination of Archduke Ferdinand is said to have started World War I. 

 

The Danger of melodrama

In the current crisis, I retreat to realism because being rational and crediting our enemies with being rational is the only way to de-escalate and to avoid the worst possible of all catastrophes.  As I have reviewed Western media coverage of the war, I have noted the high frequency of images of desperate women and children.  The intent is to call upon our compassion and, of course, compassion is called for.  But compassion over time and with increased intensity can become simply passion, overwhelming emotions which have no real objective but create an irrational antagonism towards Russia, Russians and all things Russian.

I have long observed that a story "has legs" in Western media if it manages to copy the structure of melodrama:  strict moral justice,  a courageous hero, an evil villain, innocent victims,  suspense, and surprising happy ending--all the features which dominate our TV and film entertainment.  The word "melodrama" is synonymous with heightened emotions and derives from the practice of playing music during a character's speech to raise the emotional intensity.  An emotional response to the war in Ukraine is appropriate but the substitution of a melodramatic narrative for a clearheaded, rational awareness of what is going on is dangerous.

Consider Michael Ignatieff's recent article in the Globe and Mail ( O1, 06, 9 March 2022).  Ignatieff writes:

The Russians need to understand that if they stage a military incursion across the NATO border--Lenin's bayonet probing--they will be met by force, and if that fails to hold them, they will be met with nuclear weapons, at first tactical, and then as necessary, strategic, too.

As a Harvard University professor, Ignatieff was a supporter of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.  He was leader of the federal Liberal Party and, were it not for his impatience, forcing an early election that no one wanted, he might have become Prime Minister of Canada.  In case you missed the gist of his halting prose, he is advocating a nuclear war against the country which holds the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons on the planet.  

 

Claims of Putin's insanity make him more dangerous not less

Ashford, like Mearsheimer, is categorical that "Putin is a rational person [and] that he’s making rational decisions."  However, Ashford contends that Putin is being ill-advised because he is surrounded by sycophants determined to tell him what they think he wants to hear.  Western foreign policy and strategic analyses all too often prove to be pseudo-psychological speculations on Putin's innermost dreams, fears and ambitions.  Ruthless, autocratic and amoral as Putin might be, melodramatic depictions of him as an insane, evil villain, protagonist to courageous, heroic Zelensky, the movie star who became president of Ukraine in fiction before he became President of Ukraine in fact, move us in only one possible direction:  escalation, with the hope that the hero will save the day as he always does in the movies.  If Putin really is the mad megalomaniac we have been encouraged to believe he is, then we should be showing much greater fear of him than we have so far.

 

Are We the centre of the universe?

The Globe and Mail article entitled "UN General Assembly deals Russia overwhelming diplomatic defeat over Ukraine invasion" displayed this map:

Blue indicates the 141 countries which voted in favour of the resolution condemning the Russian invasion.  Red indicates the 5 countries which voted against the resolution.  Yellow and grey indicate the 35 countries which abstained and 12 which did not vote, respectively.  Considering, as a block, the 52 countries which failed to condemn the invasion, including China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan and 17 African countries, a division of the globe between East and West begins to appear.

 

Noting this division reminded me of Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. For me, the book was, in fact, a "new history of the world." Throughout my studies and my career as a professor, the world began in Greece, spread to Europe and the UK, and eventually crossed the Atlantic to the USA and Canada--there was barely anything else worth knowing about. Awareness of the East changes the entire world narrative that we call history. Western imaginings that the West is the centre of the world are not unlike that time before Galileo when we thought the Earth was the centre of the universe. Our imaginings are not easy to give up. When the Inquisition showed Galileo the instruments of torture he recanted his claims that the earth and planets revolved around the sun. It would take the Catholic Church 350 years to admit, in 1992, that Galileo was right all along while absolving the Inquisition of any blame for their justified, well-intentioned error.

We, in the West, imagine that "we are the world" at our peril.  Without paying much attention, our self-absorption has made enemies and forged alliances against us among countries that have been erstwhile enemies to one another:  Russia and China, India and Pakistan, China and India, Iraq and Iran.  For much of recorded history, the East (not the West), as Frankopan elaborates, has been the centre of wealth, progress, civilization and empires.  It is Western orientalist folly to imagine that the East can never rise again.

The USA sanctions China and Russia at the same time

In his 2015 lecture, Meirsheimer argued that the USA would need Russia, as an ally, to compete against the growing power and influence of China.  The opposite has, of course, been happening, as the USA practically forces Russia and China to ally with one another by imposing sanctions on both countries at the same time.  Only a few short weeks ago, the USA was accusing China of genocide and passed into law the Uyghur Forced Labor Act which, if Border Security Agents enforced the letter of the law, would ban virtually all imports from China. The Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement free trade agreement would compel Canada and Mexico to do the same. (See What if China Isn't Using Forced Labour?)

Joe Biden's recent State of the Union, which focused on Russia, Ukraine, and NATO adopted a distinctly different tone toward China.  In fact, China was only mentioned in the context in the new US infrastructure bill:

It is going to transform America, to put us on a path to win the economic competition of the 21st century that we face with the rest of the world — particularly China.

I’ve told Xi Jinping, it is never a good bet to bet against the American people.

In tone, this State of the Union downgrades China from "evil empire" to one of many friendly competitors and Xi from an aggressive dictator to a "good ol' boy" confident.  

However, as reported in Politico, the more recent two-hour-long call between Xi and Biden indicated that the China-US relationship had turned "profoundly negative."  As reported in Politico:

The key U.S. position that Biden articulated in his call with Xi was the U.S. expectation that China deny any assistance to Putin’s war machine. Those concerns have been heightened by revelations Friday that EU leaders are in possession of “very reliable evidence” that China is considering military assistance to Russia. The White House has threatened Beijing with sanctions if it agrees to Russia’s request, prompting a sharp rebuke from Xi in the call with Biden.

 Russian Tanks versus a weaponized US dollar

Since President Biden has already signed into law a ban on the importation of goods from China, further sanctions would have to be the kind of weaponized financial sanctions that the USA has already imposed on Russia, Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela.  Weaponizing the USD (US dollar) against China has been much discussed in recent years. (See Analyzing the Discourse.) Canadians got a small taste of how that process functions when we were called upon to arrest the Huawei CFO on a charge of bank fraud for allegedly misleading HSBC about Huawei's financial transactions in Iran. The current American weaponization of the dollar against Russia is of such a scale that in addition to claims that it will destroy the Russian economy, it is raising questions about the survival of the USD as the highly privileged global reserve currency.

In "Ukraine and Dollar Weaponization," George Pearkes writes: "America has responded by threatening Russia with an unconventional weapon: the dollar. However, deploying the dollar may actually undermine its power, and hasten its departure from the US arsenal."  Discussions of how long the USD can remain the global reserve currency and what might happen as it declines have been around for a long time.  Historically, six countries--Portugal, Spain, France, Netherlands, Britain and now the USA--have held the coveted status of "global reserve currency" (i.e., being the country which produces the money that other countries must use for international trade).  On average, countries have maintained the privilege of being the global reserve currency for 94 years.  The USD has been the global reserve currency for 101 years.  Both the Chinese yuan and Bitcoin have been discussed as candidates to replace the USD as the dominant global reserve currency.

 

What Happens next?

To state the obvious, we have never been here before.  Many may predict but no one knows how these never-before-seen variables will play out.  For those who might have thought of the "weaponized dollar" as an esoteric myth, the current circumstances make plain that a weaponized dollar is a real-world strategy.  The question remains as to how strong and effective a weapon it is.  David Frum, in The Atlantic, claims that financial sanctions will cause the collapse of the Russian economy.  In the State of the Union, President Biden announced that 

The United States Department of Justice is assembling a dedicated task force to go after the crimes of the Russian oligarchs.  We’re joining with European allies to find and seize their yachts, their luxury apartments, their private jets. We are coming for your ill-begotten gains.

Some commentators have pointed out that the sanctions and seizures might be largely symbolic.  Seized yachts, planes and apartments remain the property of the Russian oligarchs until such time as it can be proved in court that they are connected to criminal activity or support for the Ukrainian invasion.  Many of the Russian oligarchs are finding sanctuary in Israel which has shown muted support for Ukraine's Jewish president.

 

Of the states which have been the target of US financial sanctions:

• On Thursday, North Korea launched its largest and longest-range intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) ever

• US representatives are in discussion with Venezuela on lifting sanctions in exchange for oil.

• Iran continues to develop its nuclear problem and a deal with the USA is "neither imminent nor certain"

• Putin has announced that "unfriendly countries" will have to pay for gas in rubles, causing an immediate rise in the value of the ruble.  (For elaboration on what this might mean, consider Petrodollar Warfare.)

• Cuba blames the USA for the Ukrainian crisis.  Russia agrees to postpone debt payments owed to it by Cuba until 2027. Cuba's foreign ministry said last week the two countries would deepen ties and explore collaboration in transportation, energy, industry and banking . . . . .

Can an Agreement on Ukrainian Neutrality End the War?

In recent days, President Zelensky has announced that Ukraine will not join NATO.  Ezra Klein cites this fact as evidence that NATO expansion was not the cause of the invasion.  History has proven over and over again that wars are easier to start than to end. For those who embrace a melodramatic vision of the war in Ukraine, Zelensky's declaration might seem a setback for the hero and a victory for the villain, but it is also a step toward ending the war without escalating the destruction and bloodshed.  At least one of Putin's claimed justifications for the invasion has been removed.  We might ask why it took twenty days of warfare to get to this point.  Putin's other conditions, sovereignty over Crimea, which he has held since 2014 and is dominantly Russian in terms of ethnicity and language, and the lifting of sanctions, seem not unreasonable concessions compared to the risk of a nuclear war.  It might grate that we would be rewarding Putin's bad behaviour but this isn't kindergarten; it's the real world with lives at stake.

 

Interviewed on "Going Underground," John Bolton claimed that Putin's real interest in Ukraine is the eastern and southern provinces--sites of the Ukrainian civil war and ports on the Black Sea, respectively.  (I cannot link to the interview because internet access to Russia Today is now being blocked.)  The hard negotiations will likely centre on these territories. 

Russian forces overrunning Ukraine sites where the USA has established bio-weapons labs have sparked new areas of concern.  The claims of US bio-weapons labs in Ukraine have been broadly dismissed, but Glenn Greenwald offers a convincing argument that such facilities do exist even as US officials manage to deny their existence.  However unsavoury and unpalatable a negotiated peace might seem, it pales in comparison to the alternatives.  Consider: What would a Ukrainian victory look like?  What would a Russian victory look like?  In the end, there isn't much difference between the two:  everyone loses in a lengthy war of attrition--likely lasting longer than the major players will be alive--guaranteeing more destruction and loss of life, and the potential escalation and expansion of the war beyond any measurable limit.