Monthly Archives: October 2013

history and fiction in Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety

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A passerby hesitated, stared. “Excuse me–” he said. “Good citizen–are you Robespierre?
Robespierre didn’t look at the man. “Do you understand what I say about heroes? There is no place for them. Resistance to tyrants means oblivion. I will embrace that oblivion. My name will vanish from the page.”
“Good citizen, forgive me,” the patriot said doggedly.
Eyes rested on him briefly. “Yes, I’m Robespierre,” he said. He put his hand on Citizen Desmoulin’s arm, “Camille, history is fiction.”
—Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

Like her Booker-Prize-winning books Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, A Place of Greater Safety is a historical novel in which lawyers best known for beheading tragic heroines (Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette) are among the protagonists. In its form, its topic, and even its quality, A Place of Greater Safety also bears comparison to War and Peace, although Mantel does not advocate an elaborate conceptual scheme comparable to Tolstoy’s. In the afterword, she writes, “I am not trying to persuade my reader to view events in a particular way, or to draw any particular lessons from them. I have tried to write a novel that gives the reader scope to change opinions: a book that one can think and live inside.” Until I finished the novel on Saturday, I was so deeply inside it that now I mourn the characters, even Robespierre.

As the quotation cited above suggests, Mantel is interested in the relationship between history and fiction. The most obvious difference is that history is true and fiction is false. But even if one insists on facts (as I do), the distinction is more complicated than that. Robespierre really walked down the streets of Paris. The passage above is fiction because Mantel has imagined the scene. (However, Mantel frequently has the characters state real quotations from their works, on the theory that “what goes onto the record is often tried out earlier, off the record.”) Within the fiction of the book, it really is Robespierre whom the patriot recognizes: that is a fact, not a mistake.

But what does it mean to say “Robespierre”? Does one mean The Incorruptible, the great civic republican moralist and statesman? Does one mean the villainous author of the Terror? Historians still debate who Robespierre was, even given the vast evidence that survives. And, according to Mantel, Robespierre wasn’t sure himself. Not only is the truth perspectival in the sense that each of us observes from a distant and limited vantage-point, but we are not even sure how to view ourselves. The meaning of the word “Robespierre” changes for Robespierre from minute to minute. His name did not vanish from the page, as he predicts above, but the fullness of his experience did.

It’s worth comparing the actual French Revolution to the contents of this novel. One difference is scale. Twenty-eight million people were alive in France in 1792. Each lived a continuous stream of consciousness and formed passionate, complex, incomplete, and often invalid views of scores of other people, for a total of billions of relationships. The scale of a novel is necessarily much smaller. I count roughly 136 named characters in A Place of Greater Safety, not counting crowds and generic figures like “the patriot” (above).

In real life, the action was continuous and simultaneous, all those millions acting and thinking at once. In contrast, Mantel writes almost entirely in set-pieces. Each scene takes place at a geographical location and involves between one and a dozen named people. Each scene is set after the previous one in chronological order, but usually after a gap of hours, days, or even months. So, whereas history flowed smoothly and simultaneously, the novel jumps from set-piece to set-piece.

Reality has no narrator. Mantel narrates in a supple, subtle, deliberate style. For instance, consider this sentence: “He put his hand on Citizen Desmoulin’s arm, ‘Camille, history is fiction.'” Since Robespierre was a boyhood friend of Demoulin’s, he never addresses him as “Citizen Desmoulin.” The title “Citizen” enters the narration here because “the patriot” has been addressing strangers that way, and Robespierre sees his friend from the patriot’s perspective at that moment. But he begins is sentence with the name “Camille …,” and within three words, we are back to a more intimate view. The title “Citizen” evokes layers of irony as we read Mantel’s narration of Robespierre’s thoughts in reaction to a nameless patriot who is using terminology invented by men like Robespierre.

As Mantel writes in the afterword, “I am very conscious that a novel is a cooperative effort, a joint venture between writer and reader. I purvey my own version of events, but facts change according to your viewpoint. Of course, my characters did not have the blessing of hindsight; they lived from day to day, as best they could.” To imagine their experience sympathetically (when the characters in question include Danton, Demoulins, and Robespierre) is a great achievement of sympathy. But the book is not devoid of judgment, on the false theory that “tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.” Like Cromwell at the end of Bring up the Bodies, Robespierre in the last chapter of A Place of Greater Safety is a chilling figure, all the more frightening because Mantel has made him so human until then.

talking about the Pledge of Allegiance on “Tell Me More”

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On NPR’s “Tell Me More” recently, I discussed the Pledge of Allegiance with host Michel Martin and reporter Mary Plummer from KPCC in Pasadena. At one point, Martin asked me whether I would replace the Pledge with something “better.” I replied that I am not necessarily against it, “but I do think there is something more important, which is actually to have a conversation, an appreciative conversation but a thoughtful conversation, about what ‘liberty and justice for all’ means–to actually take some of those words like ‘liberty’ and ‘justice,’ which are very complicated and controversial, and talk about them and understand them.”

Albert Dzur and democracy inside institutions

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Albert Dzur, author of Democratic Professionalism and Punishment, Participatory Democracy, and the Jury, is writing a series in the Boston Review entitled “Trench Democracy: Participatory Innovation in Unlikely Places.”

When we think of democratic reform, our minds usually turn to explicitly political upheavals: the Civil Rights Movement, the Arab Spring. In such cases, masses of people put aside their ordinary lives of family and work to press for a new government–or at least for new laws.

That definition of reform hides a different kind of democratic politics that is more sustained, less state-centric, and less obvious to reporters and average citizens. It is what Dzur calls “the public work of self-directing community groups that band together to secure affordable housing, welcome new immigrant groups, and repair common areas like parks and playgrounds.”

I am aware of this kind of public work and have put it at the center of my book We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For. I argue that about one million Americans are engaged in “self-directing community groups” in particular places and issue areas. But they do not yet see themselves as part of a civic movement that is larger than their particular projects and causes. So we must organize them to advocate in their common interest–for funds to support civic processes, rights to public participation, education policies that support high-quality civic education, and news coverage of citizens’ work.

In developing this strategy and counting my one million civic activists, I did not pay sufficient attention to the layer of politics and reform that Dzur investigates. I describe leaders and members of civic groups, but his main topic is the everyday pro-democratic work of professionals within mainstream organizations:

[T]hey take their public responsibilities seriously and listen carefully to those outside their walls and those at all levels of their internal hierarchy in order to foster physical proximity between formerly separated individuals, encourage co-ownership of problems previously seen as beyond laypeople’s ability or realm of responsibility, and seek out opportunities for collaborative work between laypeople and professionals.We fail to see these activities as politically significant because they do not fit our conventional picture of democratic change. As if to repay the compliment, the democratic professionals I have interviewed in fields such as criminal justice, public administration, and K-12 education rarely use the concepts employed by social scientists and political theorists. Lacking an overarching ideology, they make it up as they go along, developing roles, attitudes, habits, and practices that open calcified structures up to greater participation. Their democratic action is thus endogenous to their occupational routine, often involving those who would not consider themselves activists or even engaged citizens.

Though they belong to practitioner networks and engage in ongoing streams of print, online, and face-to-face dialogue, the democratic professionals I have met do not form a typical social movement. Rather than mobilizing fellow travelers and putting pressure on government office holders to make new laws or rules, or convening temporary participatory processes such as citizens’ juries, deliberative polls, and citizens’ assemblies, democratic professionals are making real-world changes in their domains piece by piece, practice by practice. In the trenches all around us they are renovating and reconstructing schools, clinics, prisons, and other seemingly inert bodies.

The rest of Dzur’s series will explore examples of this work, using his own interviews with committed democratic professionals. These professionals must be part of a movement for civic reform. The first step is to learn who they are and what they are striving for. Dzur’s work is indispensable for that purpose.

six types of freedom

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(Ft. Lauderdale, FL, en route to Austin, TX) Here are six types of freedom. Isaiah Berlin cited the first two as part of his argument for pluralism. He believed that genuine goods were distinct and incommensurable. For instance, a reasonable person could value two types of freedom, but no social order could maximize both simultaneously. We would have to choose, not only between the two types of freedom that he described, but also among freedom, happiness, equality, and other worthy goods.

Much in the spirit of his work, I extend the list of freedoms to six:

1. Negative liberty: freedom from constraint in the form of tangible action against the person or her property or (much more commonly) the threat or fear of such. Because fellow human beings can threaten violence, anarchy poses dangers to negative liberty. (Think of failed states flooded with AK-47s.) Although parents must constrain the negative liberty of their children, they can abuse that power. To combat anarchy, intra-family abuse, and other forms of violence among citizens, states are probably necessary. Yet in most of the world, it is the state that can threaten violence most effectively and pervasively. It must be curtailed in the interest of negative liberty.

2. Positive liberty: the freedom to do something. You are not free to travel, for example, unless you can afford a fare. Positive liberty is a matter of degree, since human beings are simply not able to do everything we want. But there may be a list of fundamental capabilities that everyone should be able to exhibit, and they require external support. You can’t learn to read unless someone teaches you. If one has a meaningful right to a positive liberty (e.g., the right to read), then some other person or community has a duty to provide it; and the state may be the best means to enforce that duty. But if I must pay taxes for your kid’s education or face imprisonment, then my negative liberty has been curbed in the interest of her positive liberty.

3. Individuality: the freedom to develop and express a unique personality and life-story in both the public and private spheres. Individuality may require a degree of negative and positive liberty, but it also faces threats not yet mentioned. The social norms that are strongest in tight, traditional communities and the mass culture that dominates today’s global society both inhibit individuality. Mass culture already worried de Tocqueville, but it has been hypercharged by advertising and technology. The global mass exercises its power less through majority rule at the ballot box than through search algorithms, trendy catchphrases, and addictive tunes.

4. Freedom from manipulation: I am treated as a means to someone else’s ends when the other person sways, threatens, or pays me to do what he wants. I am treated as an end when the other person tries to decide with me what we should do. States and markets arrange people as means to each others’ ends, perhaps unavoidably. Freedom (in this fourth sense) exists in ethical communities whose members treat each other as ends in themselves. Neither positive nor negative liberty guarantees such communities.

5. Freedom to make the world (or to live in a world that we make). Society is an artifact. We are born into the society of our ancestors, with all its flaws. But we are not compelled to replicate it. We become freer in this fifth sense the more that we design and fashion the world that we inhabit. That is a collaborative task, so it requires some limitations on negative liberty. But it is also not the positive liberty of being given an education or an airplane ticket. It is a matter of active co-creation.

6. Equanimity: freedom from the dread, doubt, disquiet, and sorrow that are consequences of being vulnerable and mortal creatures who care about other fragile living things. Although it is harder to achieve equanimity under conditions of extreme duress (e.g., given a complete lack of negative or positive liberty), and although mass culture threatens equanimity, inner peace seems to have different conditions. Indeed, when positive liberty means incessantly choosing consumer goods, it is incompatible with equanimity, as is individuality when it turns into narcissism, or co-creation when it becomes a vain yearning to build wholly new and permanent things.