Articles with the Tag pompous gits

Howard Jacobson’s pathological need to be persecuted

"Literature", Islamophobia, Israel/Palestine
Published on

There’s a disease that strikes English novelists of a certain age and fame, that makes them think whatever small talent they have at creating Times reviewed stories means they have an unique insight into human nature and the political realities of 21st century Britain. This usually manifest in rightwing babble about the problems of the day, as exclusively revealed to whichever newspaper with spare column inches to fill, as well as through novels that suddenly tackle big political issues in the way literary writers normally reserve for dabbling in science fiction: naively and ploddingly reinventing cliches better writers had long since abandoned and being proud of it. Martin Amis and Ian McEwan are the best examples of this disease, but Howard Jacobson seems determined to join them.

Jacobson is “best known for writing comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters” as Wikipedia puts it. Not one to hide his Jewishness under a bushell and keen to let you know how his background makes him uniquely able to provide insights into the Israel/Palestinian conflict, he has been making a nuisance of himself for years in opinion pieces. As with Amis and McEwan, his politics also infected his fiction, metastasising in The Finkler Question, made unreadable by his politics.

So it comes as no surprise that when he saw the images of Asian shopkeepers defending their communities against the riots in London two weeks ago he saw something quite different from the rest of us:

The good thing that came out of the riots was a renewed sense of community. “How does one put this without sounding gross … it was terrific to see the Asian communities on telly and not to have to think about terrorism, and not to have to think about the thing I’m always thinking about… do they want to kill Jews?”

A remark on par with Amis’ similar ones on wanting to make Muslims suffer for 9/11. But there seems to be more going on with Jacobson, he seems convinced that pogroms could break out in London any minute and that like any good Jew he needs to be prepared. It’s not a mindset that’s not unique to him; I’ve stopped being surprised at the number of middleclass Jewish people living in England or America, never having suffered any discrimination in their lifetimes, convinced that it’s only a matter of time before the killings start again. If the most important event in your history is the Holocaust, it’s not surprising some people get a bit paranoid.

With Jacobson however it almost seems as if he would welcome persecution, that he feels agrieved that there are no pogroms in England and the number of real anti-semitic incidents (as opposed to people being accused of anti-semitism because they disagree with Israeli policies) is low and has remained low for decades. Hence remarks like the above, as to him it’s inconcievable that Asian people would not want to oppress him. Call it victim envy.

Amis and 9/11

"Literature", Numpties
Published on

I remember back in early 2002 or so reading a Guardian(?) interview with Martin Amis, in which he posed dramatically as The Novelist Who Had Lost His Faith in Novels Due to the Horrors of 9/11 and even then I thought he was a wanker. Since then he has only confirmed my opinion of him, as he has gone on his own peculiar little crusade against the Muslim menace, revealing himself as yet another bedwetter.

Now Ellis Sharp was so kind as to draw our attention to a Guardian Books article by Pankaj Mishra, which looks at how Martin Amis and other writers of his generation like Ian McEwan or Don DeLillo, have made of the September 11 attacks and its repercussions. These are writers who have said that they have been shocked awake by 9/11 into an uncertain world where what they used to believe in no longer seems relevant and who have written novels exploring this new post-9/11 world. Mishra doesn’t think they have succeeded in doing so, in honestly appreciating the effects of the September 11 attacks; comparing them unfavourably to what happened in European fiction after World War One. An interesting article. Not so much interesting, as appalling, are the quotes used at the start of the article, for their sheer pomposity and cluelessness:

Reflecting on the attacks on the twin towers in 2001, Don DeLillo seemed to speak for many Americans when he admitted that “We like to think that America invented the future. We are comfortable with the future, intimate with it. But there are disturbances now, in large and small ways, a chain of reconsiderations.” On September 11, terrorists from the Middle East who destroyed American immunity to large-scale violence and chaos also forced many American and British novelists to reconsider the value of their work and its relation to the history of the present. “Most novelists I know,” Jay McInerney wrote in these pages, “went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.” Ian McEwan claimed in a later interview to have found it “wearisome to confront invented characters”. “I wanted to be told about the world. I wanted to be informed. I felt that we had gone through great changes and now was the time to just go back to school, as it were, and start to learn.” “The so-called work in progress,” Martin Amis confessed, “had been reduced, overnight, to a blue streak of pitiable babble. But then, too, a feeling of gangrenous futility had infected the whole corpus.”

Amis went on to claim that “after a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation.” This is, of course, an exaggeration. Many writers had intuited that religious and political extremism, which had ravaged large parts of the world, would eventually be unleashed upon the west’s rich, more protected societies.

It’s the rampant narcissism on display here that appalls me. Amis and McEwans generation of writers rose to prominence in the eighties and nineties, when there were quite a few outrages far worse than the September 11 attacks. Yet it was because the latter happened on their doorsteps so to speak that they were finally forced to pay attention, so it galls to see Amis and McEwan hold themselves up as arbiters of moral worthiness now.