Slow Down!

Within a Budding Grove Vol 2 of In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust

Is life too quick? I don't mean, "Is life too brief?", I mean, "do things happen before you realise they've happened?" Blink and you'll miss it. Maybe it's better to miss things? Marcel Proust would not have agreed.

As far as I can work out - I have just finished the second of the seven novels in Proust's In Search of Lost Time (Within a Budding Grove) - Proust is trying, through the all-devouring consciousness of his narrator (Marcel) to arrest time. It all happens in slow motion. The thing is, life just passes too quickly to notice the things that he notices, to think the things he thinks and to feel the things he feels. Because his descriptions are so exhaustive and exhausting and because his prose is the most complex I have ever read (Henry James included) the slow motion has to be reciprocated in reading. This is a very slow dance.

One or two examples will have to suffice:

In the second half of Within a Budding Grove the narrator describes his extended holiday at the seaside in the fictional town of Balbec. Every conceivable detail of the place is forensically examined over and over again. For instance, sitting in a train carriage on the way to Balbec his attention is taken by a blue blind on the window:

But the contemplation of this blind appeared to me an admirable thing, and I should not have troubled to answer anyone who might have sought to distract me from contemplating it. The blue colour of this blind seemed to me, not perhaps by its beauty but by its intense vivacity, to efface so completely all the colours that had passed before my eyes from the day of my birth up to the moment in which I had gulped down the last of my drink and it had begun to take effect, that when compared with this blue they were as drab, as void as must be retrospectively the darkness in which he has lived to a man born blind whom a subsequent operation has at length enabled to see and to distinguish colours.
 (265)

I chose this example because it is, believe it or not, very short.

Another, extremely convoluted passage that slows time to a trickle is when he first sees the 'little band' of girls passing the sea front. "Never, among actresses or peasants or convent girls, had I seen anything so beautiful, impregnated with so much that was unknown, so inestimably precious, so apparently inaccessible". Fair enough; the standard lament of the adolescent pedant. However, he goes on to speculate that such voyeurism on his part is "no more than a projection, a mirage of desire". From this point on, after giving himself license to write about the girls and his desire in the most elaborate terms, the beauty of the writing itself becomes the end. He compares the girls to 'a bower of Pennsylvania roses' which, together with a flitting butterfly, frame the ocean and the slow passage of a ship.

For it was the one that I would have chosen above all others, convinced as I was, with a botanist’s satisfaction, that it was not possible to find gathered together rarer specimens than these young flowers that at this moment before my eyes were breaking the line of the sea with their slender heads, like a bower of Pennsylvania roses adorned a Cliffside garden, between whose blooms is contained the whole tract of ocean crossed by some steamer, so slow in gliding along the blue, horizontal line that stretches from one stem to the next that an idle butterfly, dawdling in the cup of a flower which the ship’s hull has long since passed, can wait, before flying off in time to arrive before it, until nothing by the tiniest chink of blue still separates the prow from the first petal of the flower towards which it is steering.
(437)

Who has time to think, feel, remember, observe in this way? And yet, the descriptions are for me accurate and beguiling. The effect of passages like these is just that one of slowing time down; of taking a moment and stretching it out to its limits, or rather since Proust is very much in control, it's better to say that he stretches time out to his limits. Of course, in a very real sense, all of this stretching time business is just an illusion and time will get us all in the end but what a way to make the most of whatever time there is! The question could just as easily be "Who can afford not to slow time down?"

But still I have been asking myself: why bother? What is to be gained by slowing down perception? What is to be gained by indiscriminately taking pains to represent every detail of perception? What is to be gained by describing trains of thought and exploring nuance upon nuance of feeling in such a complex way?

I try to put it in simple terms: Is Proust is trying to capture every single moment of consciousness because so much of what goes on in people's heads is disregarded, ignored, silenced? Maybe, just maybe, so much of immense value would not be lost if others learned how to see, how to listen and how to remember in the ways described in In Search of Lost Time. So is Proust a kind of people's avenger - helping the weak and powerless to find their voices in a hostile and indifferent world? A three thousand page version of Whitman's

"I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world"?

Hardly: I think Proust's concerns are primarily aesthetic; not ethical.

He may be an avenger of sorts but I think his mission is to see to it that wherever a ten page description of a bouquet of flowers goes unwritten Proust will come to rescue with one twice as long.

This book reads to me like a Noah's Ark of human consciousness. So much is included that it is hard to imagine that anything has been left out. The sheer weight of observation and thought, feeling and memory loaded into the hold of this vessel makes it hard to imagine that anything has been left behind.

This makes me think of the example (given by Baudrillard at the start of his Simulacra and Simulation) of “a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly”. Baudrillard's argument is of course, that the map is no longer a second order reality – today, models, simulacra are the real.

I think Proust would agree with this. He is the most radical of aesthetes. Who needs the real world if you have Proust?

At every point Proust rejects mimetic art. Or, more exactly, he rejects any tendency towards naive mimesis. For him, the world beyond representation is like a magnet of opposing polarity to that representation.

And so, In Search of Lost Time is a novel about artifice. It is a novel that makes visible the work of memory and imagination, prejudice and desire and shows how these always interpose themselves between the human subject and the world outside that person.

In addition it is a novel about representation itself; Proust was quite deliberate about this, telling a friend "My book is a painting".

There is no such thing as a direct experience of anything in Proust. Nothing appears in In Search of Lost Time as a simple unmediated fact. Everything - architecture, fashion, decoration, music, painting, conversations, the personalities of the men and women at all levels of society – is connected to everything else, there is no moment when Proust does not turn and face, turn and immerse himself into the entangled and entangling web formed by all of these aspects of human consciousness.

It did occur to me that this novel might well have been entitled In Flight from Lost Time because there never is a moment when some 'lost time' or other is not playing on the perception or thoughts of the present moment.

And yet, this is to misunderstand Proust. Proust is not in flight from mediated thinking or perception; he really does seem to be searching for it. That is why, I suppose, it seems that his descriptions of what takes place in the mind, body and outside world of his narrator are inventions rather than discoveries – he is describing incredibly complex experiences that could not conceivably appear in Nineteenth Century realism.

In fact, Proust is so consistent, so determined, so voracious that in the end what he reveals is the greater inauthenticity of realism. His descriptions, while they are incredibly complex, they are nonetheless, convincing. After reading Proust it is easy to be aware of how much is suppressed in order for realist fiction to be possible.

Just as abstract art reminds the observer that it is an artwork and thus gives the lie to the tendency to view representational art as a mirror onto the world, Proust never lets up with the exploration of the artifice standing between the person and the world, between fiction and experience; he never stops exposing precisely what realist fiction needs to hide.

For Proust there is so much going on in human consciousness, so much artifice between the person and the world, to say nothing of the relationships a person may have with herself that he more or less redefines literature. Of course, he didn't do this singlehandedly; Modernism does not equal Proust. And yet, while Joyce, for example, spent the first chapter of Ulysses parodying nineteenth century realism before launching into high modernism and therefore traced the same evolution followed by Proust, Proust's work is far, far more extreme.

It seems to me that the scope of Proust's work is in some ways wider, and in others, narrower than Ulysses. Proust's narrator is an exploration of the capacity of human consciousness to elaborate the aesthetic experience of reality.

Is there anything at all that Proust's narrator cannot experience in terms of art? Is there anything at all that does not involve labyrinths of thought, feeling, memory, ideals and ideas, fears and desires? So far, having read two of the seven novels, I don't think so.

So for me, Proust's work reads like a radical and prescriptive agenda for not only how literature should be written, but almost, for how life should be lived. Ulysses does not support such a radical view of art, literature or life. And yet, taking his previous novel,  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  and the first three chapters of Ulysses as one work – the Bildungsroman of Stephan Dedalus – Joyce seemed to building towards a crescendo similar to Proust's. However, the narrower focus given by Leopold Bloom's 'everyman' view of the world means that Joyce's version of modernism has, in a different way, a much wider scope than Proust. Taxi drivers may laugh to hear that Joyce intended his work to be read by them, but there is not the remotest hope that Proust intended In Search of Lost Time to be read by people in such 'lowly' walks of life!

Where Joyce might be praised for his democratic impulse, rather than ridiculed for his vanity,  Proust should be admired for his commitment rather than scorned for his elitism.

I mentioned above that Proust rejected mimesis. This is not quite accurate. Within a Budding Grove is full of references to representational art. Some examples:

Detail from Botticelli's Trial of Moses - Jethro's daughter (to whom Swann had compared Odette)

Manet's Woman with Fans: one example "of the countless portraits that Manet or Whistler had painted of all those vanished models, models who already belonged to oblivion or history" that the narrator had used to show how Odette's beauty as captured by the fictional artist, Elstir would fade.

In each of these examples the narrator's experience of reality (in particular with Odette De Crecy/Swann) is had through the medium of artworks. This foregrounding of art as the antecedent of experience occurs throughout the novel.

As Eric Karpeles points out in the introduction to his brilliant book,  Paintings in Proust: a Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time, "In the novel, over one hundred artists are named, spanning the history of art". Art seems to be licensing medium of what is to be included in this novel. This has a kind of double exposure or extended 'dissolve' effect that makes the reader aware of the work of mediation in perception and thought, feeling and memory. Proust puts it in this way:

"Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists"

This constant sequencing of one artwork after another, filtering and, indeed constructing reality itself is the literary equivalent of Magritte's landscapes:

                              

The ability to stand back from one's experience of the immediate moment, to slow down time, to reflect on what one is experiencing, why and how it is being experienced is not a trivial one.

In one passage of Within a Budding Grove the narrator looks around at the other people in the hotel restaurant; none of whom is capable of standing back from the flux of the immediate moment and understanding more deeply what is going on. His key concept here is 'analogy':

"And I rather pitied the diners because...they had not cut through the scheme of things in such a way as to be delivered from the bondage of habitual appearances and enabled to perceive analogies"
(451)

What conclusions are to be drawn from the fact that most people do not live and love, see, hear, feel and remember with the ability to reflect deeply, to arrest time and see past the surface of things?

As I pointed out, Proust's concerns are not ethical. He is not saying that these are bad people. Neither are his concerns epistemic. He's not saying that they're stupid. His concerns are aesthetic and as such I think he's saying nothing more than life is a whole lot less pleasant, without these moments of deep perception, without the ability to slow time down to a trickle.

Of course, Proust's concerns are not everyone else's. His insights do have profound effects on how life can be lived in so many more ways than the purely aesthetic: "the bondage of habitual appearances" exists in more ways and for more people than even Proust could have imagined.

Cutting "through the scheme of things", slowing time down, perceiving analogies, searching, finding and engaging with lost time, exploring the mediation that is always the way in which anything is perceived, thought, remembered, produced is hard work but I think it's worth it.

Actually, when I think about it now I haven't really moved on from what I wrote last year after reading Volume 1 of In Search of Lost Time:

The lesson I’m taking from Proust brings me back to the reason for starting this blog. Life is infinitesimally short yet each second; each millisecond is full of meaning, full of life, full of pain and pleasure. How can I go on, dimly plodding on towards my ever approaching demise without opening my eyes, without trying to notice what is in front of me, without trying to remember?  I will be dead for a long, long time – I must try not to lose time.

 

The Epitaph of the Human Race: tl;dr?

Maybe the label tl;dr is an example of what Hegel meant when he wrote “The owl of minerva flies only at dusk” - knowledge of what is taking place in history only becomes visible when events or trends have already finished. Tl;dr. Ironically, mass literacy has been achieved at the very point at which reading is becoming obsolete.
 

Tl;dr. It is not an apology. It is not an explanation. I don't think it's a boast, either. I think it is writing on a gravestone. Tl;dr is the epitaph of curiosity and patience, of determination and concentration. The letters have been chiseled into the stone by google.
 

None of this is new. In 2008, Nicholas Carr, described how google was making us stupid. He described how reading is becoming more and more difficult because of how google has changed our brains. Google gives us so many shortcuts around the effort involved in opening a book and keeping it open while we give it our undivided attention and this has a direct effect on thinking:
 

“Deep reading.....is indistinguishable from deep thinking....as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence”
 

None of it is new but it is accelerating.
 

In 2011 researchers showed how the work of social 'transactive memory' was increasingly being done by google: participants in the research experiments performed badly on memory tests when they believed that the facts in question would be stored for them anyway on computers; participants performed better when they believed that the information would not be stored for retrieval.

Why bother reading? Why bother remembering? If google knows we don't have to know.

I'm criticising google in this way because I believe it is leaching away layers upon layers of what it is to be a person; what it is to be in a society.

If memory is outsourced then personal identity through time is compromised.

If reading becomes a flitting and flighty reflex, then thinking will be replaced by a kind of intellectual Tourette's that can't focus for long enough for understanding to emerge.

Fifty years from now will the kind of literacy needed to read a novel or a poem of any length or substance have completely disappeared?
 

What difference will it make if, as seems likely, by the year 2055 google translate will have taken away the necessity of learning other languages?
 

How will people be able to perform tasks of any complexity – in science, engineering, art, parenting – if human intellect, memory, imagination have been deprived of opportunities to hone themselves?

If I sound like a reactionary or a Luddite then so be it. There have been many advances in the ways human beings communicate. There were similar reactions against the invention of writing (what is Derrida's notion of 'phonocentrism' if it is not a vestige and revival of this counter – revolution?), printing, the telephone, the radio and the TV but google is very different.

 

It seeks to match, exceed and replace a range of human faculties that are so comprehensive and fundamental to what it means to be a human being and to live a decent life with others: memory, curiosity, determination, intelligence, imagination, patience, failure. Without these things what will remain of people and their societies?
 

Tl;dr? Switch off google before it's too l....

Beauty is Costly

A friend of mine once pointed out that Ireland does not have a well developed culture of appreciation of visual art and architecture. We don't do paintings and buildings. The weather is too poor, the light too grey and, besides Irish people have been too busy getting on with the business of trying to survive poverty, famine and emigration to develop great art. The weight of time has been too great for the timelessness of great art to rise. Beauty is costly.

But then again, this week I went to Handel's Apollo e Dafne in the Neo-Palladian palace, Castletown House. Beautiful music in a beautiful room in a beautiful house.

Still, beautiful rooms in beautiful houses are exceptions that prove the rule that I mentioned in the first paragraph. Ireland does not have a well developed culture of the appreciation of visual arts and architecture because art is costly. The evidence for this in Castletown was obvious. During the interval I looked out the sash windows of the The Long Gallery, over the broad meadows and saw in the distance Conolly's Folly - built in the 1740s to give work to the local poor who'd been devastated by famine in 1740 - 41.

The walls of the corridors were covered by portraits of the aristocrats who'd lived in the house over the centuries but the images that stood out for me were photographs of the labourers whose work created and sustained the wealth and position of their supposed betters. Castletown house is a beautiful place but at what cost?

Handel's cantata, as well as the myth of Apollo and Daphne as it is told in Ovid's Metamorphoses is a reminder of the same point - beauty is costly.

The story of Apollo and Daphne is a refusal, followed by a change, followed by another refusal. Each part proves this point.

First, Daphne refuses Apollo's sexual advances.  For Daphne, bearing Apollo's beautiful child would be too costly.

The myth begins with Apollo's return from battling the Python. Walking through the woods he has just one thing on his mind and the sight of the beautiful Daphne is the very thing he needs.

Thanks to Cupid, however, Apollo is the last thing Daphne needs. While Apollo has been pierced by Cupid's love inducing arrow, Daphne has been pierced by one that makes her feel only contempt for Apollo. Naturally, she scorns and rejects him. From Handel's libretto:

"Sempre t'adorero....Sempre t'aborriro!" (I will always love you...I will always hate you!)

Why does Daphne refuse him? Well, there would be very little for her in a coupling with Apollo.

In Ovid's version of the story Daphne's refusal of childbearing and rearing is an absolute one: When her father, Peneus, tells her “You owe me a son, my daughter....Now when, my child will you give me grandson?”she replies: “Darling father, I want to remain a virgin forever. Please let me, Diana's father allowed her that”.

Daphne has everything to lose. Sure, Apollo is a god but why should she have anything to do with this guy? For all his fine talk about love and the like when you strip it down he's basically a soldier coming back from the war looking to get laid.

She'd probably end up looking after the child of their union while Apollo would surely go off on his merry way.

In Handel's version, Dafne's refusal to enter into this reproductive contract with Apollo is a commonsense one: “Il ragion frena t'amor” (Reason arrests love) “Piu tosto morire che perder l'onor” (It's better to die than to lose one's honour). Why should I submit to this 'love' – it's neither reasonable nor honourable.

So while Apollo sings from the outset that “La terra e liberta” (the land is free) what he has to offer Daphne is not freedom. She already has freedom. She knows its importance. She too sings about it at the start: “Felicissima quest'alma Ch'ama sol la liberta/Non v'è pace, non v'è calma Per chi sciolto il cor non ha” (Most blest is this soul, that loves only freedom. There is not peace, there is no calm if the heart is not unfettered)

Second, Daphne changes into a laurel tree, arresting forever Apollo's pursuit and her flight.

"Tu non mi fuggirai!...Si, che ti fuggiro!" (You can't get away from me, yes I will get away from you!)

In this way they create a union that outlasts any possible physical union they might have had. In other words, they re-create themselves as timeless symbols of art.

What happens is a kind of sublation of the proposed relationship (sex and reproduction) into another kind of relationship (the production of art). Daphne refuses Apollo's invitation to join together and produce a child. And yet, her transformation is actually a kind of acceptance that they will always be together in that moment of suspended pursuit.

"It is you who will always be twined in my hair, on my tuneful lyre...with your glory and praise everlasting"

In Ovid's version of the myth Apollo had claimed from the beginning that he was the god of art: “I am the lord of the lyre and song”. But it is only when Daphne is changed into a laurel tree that this is proven. He is only the lord of lyre and song because Daphne's transformation changes him just as much as it changes her.

Before this episode, Apollo had been arrogant and rapacious; arguing with Cupid and lusting after Daphne's beauty. It is only after the chastening experience of his failure in love that he can truly claim to be the lord of the lyre and song.

Together, Apollo and Daphne create a beautiful representation. The cost for Apollo is that he must forgo his previous incarnation as a vain, lustful, arrogant god.

What about the cost for Daphne? Well, ending up as a tree is hardly the kind of outcome that most people look forward to. In fact, Daphne's transformation is actually a better outcome for her. I will explain this in a moment.

But what does it mean to say that Apollo and Daphne end up as art? How does the metamorphosis resulting in a stasis of never - ending, never - fulfilled pursuit and flight add up to art?

I am about as far away from an expert on what defines art as you are likely to meet, so I don't mind - since it's unavoidable - being wrong. A definition that I like is that outlined by Kant in his Critique of Judgement.

For Kant, art is “a kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication”

Well, Apollo and Daphne's arrested embrace is 'purposive in itself' - in that its energies are forever in motion and yet are not directed beyond itself. It is immanent. Unlike a 'real' embrace which can have extrinsic purposes; pleasure, reproduction, this embrace has no other purpose than to remain forever unfulfilled.

Similarly, their embrace is timeless - "without an end" in Kant's formulation - and so contrasts once again with the real life moment of which it is ostensibly a representation. In time, all things pass away, in time, lovers consummate their love, in time, lovers grow tired of love. In art, there is no consummation, no weariness, no death, embraces go on forever.

In this way, the metamorphosis of Apollo and Daphne into this frozen moment always reminds me of Keats' representation of a similar moment in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Because Apollo's and Daphne's coupling becomes an eternal reminder of the transitory nature of love and desire it satisfies the third criterion in Kant's formulation in that it "promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication".

In other words, the sublation of human desire into the production of a symbol reflects back into the the imperfect, inescapable human world.
   
What "mental powers" can be "cultivated for the purposes of sociable communication" by thinking about Apollo and Daphne are anyone's guess.

For me, Daphne has rejected sexual union with Apollo because the costs are too high. What woman in her right mind would get mixed up a promiscuous thug like Apollo?

On a more serious note, Daphne's ambition was greater than to be Apollo's plaything and to suffer the trauma of bearing his child. As I said before, the production of that kind of beauty was too costly.

It seems to me that Daphne's ambition was greater than this.

Third, Daphne's second refusal is a refusal to be an object in art. She refuses the default position of women in art. As John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing "A woman in the culture of privileged Europeans is first and foremost a sight to be looked at".

Daphne refuses to be looked at.

Unlike her heroine, Diana, who when she was looked at by Acteon, had the voyeur transformed into a stag and devoured by his own dogs, Daphne's gift is actually art. In becoming a tree - in reproducing herself in this form she is visible in what she creates; not in what she is.

And what she has made of herself, what she has produced is, according to Ovid's telling of the tale, a beautiful object:

"The feet that had run so nimbly were sunk into sluggish roots; her head was confined in a treetop, all that remained was her beauty"

So, was this metamorphosis too great a cost for Daphne? Remember how important freedom was to her. It depends on whether the transformation was her decision: She has escaped from the suffering of bearing and rearing Apollo's child. She has not been trapped and exhibited as an object. Maybe her metamorphosis was a decision to choose a life devoted to art similar to that celebrated in Yeats' poem Sailing to Byzantium.

And yet I can't help but think of the arms and legs that had 'run so nimbly' and worked so hard over the centuries to produce and maintain the conditions that made beautiful things like Castletown House, Handel's Apollo e Dafne or Bernini's sculpture of Apollo and Daphne possible. On a literal reading Daphne ends up dead at the end of this story, despite the fact that at the end of Ovid's account she seems to be pleased enough:

"With a wave of her new formed branches the laurel agreed [with Apollo's praise of her] and seemed to be nodding her head in the treetop"

At the end of Handel's cantata, Dafne has even less to say.  Alongside her muteness is the fact that she has sacrificed her life, for who can live as a tree? It's possible to interpret her sacrifice as a change for the better - and that is exactly what I have done!

However, no reading of her metamorphosis as a change for the better can erase the fact that she has lost a great deal too. This is to say nothing more than what Kant sees as definitive of art in general that it "promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication". Art is not art if it does not in some way make you think and feel differently about the world that it comes from and the world that you live in.

Castletown House, as a condition of being a beautiful Palladian mansion has to bear the marks of the countless, anonymous lives of labourers, peasants and servants that were given to produce and maintain its beauty. The story of Apollo and Daphne has to bear the marks of the silencing and sacrificing of women that have always been a condition for the production of beautiful things - paintings, sculpture, literature and, maybe most of all, children.

The production of beautiful things is costly.

Violence

Sparta  -  Roxana Robinson (2013)

 

 

Violence is a part of every society. Usually it remains hidden but it's never that far away from the surface of things. When it happens it happens as crime or illness; it happens, too by official design in the forms of punishment and war. Of course there are more or less violent societies; Norway is a a more peaceful country than Iraq, but does this mean that Scandinavians are less violent than Arabs? Surely not; human beings seem to be born with the same stuff in their heads and bodies the world over. The potential for violence is universal but its activation is not.

Roxana Robinson's novel Sparta is about the violence of contemporary America. On any measure the US is a violent country. According to the UN the US has the highest rate of private gun ownership in the world and the 28^th highest rate of homicides by firearm per capita. Historically, the United States has spent 218 of the 239 years of its existence at war. If an alien species were to land in the US tomorrow they would be very foolish little green men indeed to turn up un-armed (untentacled?).

So, then, Roxanna Robinson's novel, Sparta. The novel tells the story of Conrad Farrell, a US Marine who, on his return from the war in Iraq to civilian life struggles to cope with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Robinson's choice of title makes explicit the inherently violent nature of the America. Conrad is a student of the classical civilisation who appalls his family and girlfriend by choosing to join the military. His reasoning is based on his study of ancient Greece and Rome. For Conrad, as for the ancients, war was an inherently good activity:

“Conrad talked about Homer. War was his great subject, how it shaped history, affected families, changed young men. War was the route to nobility”.  Indeed, Conrad writes his thesis on the social conventions and culture of ancient Sparta: “The business of Sparta was war and all else was subjugated to that”.  On the basis of these insights, Conrad joins the Marines. He serves two tours of duty in Iraq, witnesses and carries out horrific, obscene acts of violence and when he eventually returns to the US he is catastrophically marked by what has happened to him. 

Surely, relentlessly, Conrad's life starts to implode.

Abbreviations abbreviate. Robinson's novel – itself a story about anger – seems to have been written in outrage about this fact. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD. An abbreviation that she almost completely avoids using. Towards the end of the novel she has a military doctor use the term but she does so in order to mark this official out as part of the problem, part of the silencing and abbreviation of this illness.

Over the course of the novel Conrad's mental state deteriorates and one by one his relationships fall to pieces. He cannot cope with civilian life. As he walks the streets, sits in a restaurant or drives a car he is constantly on edge. At all times he is a heartbeat away from a state of terrible rage that, in Iraq, would have kept him alive, but back in the US cripples his thoughts and emotions.

There's something hypnotic about the way that Robinson tells the story of what's going on inside Conrad's head. She swoops again and again to sketch aspects of the character, amplifying a previously described thought or emotion or illuminating some previously hidden aspect of the illness.

The episodes themselves seem relatively minor. He has a moment of road rage where he tries to out manoeuver another vehicle that reminds him of being on the road in Iraq. He almost gets into a fist fight with a man on a beach. He reacts with reflexive aggression to being bumped into on the street. He stares intimidatingly at another commuter on a train. He argues with his sister and her boyfriend, his girlfriend, brother, parents and so on. Yet the aggregate effect is of a deeply troubled person, and gradually, inevitably his thoughts become more and more suicidal.

There is a sense, too, of the narrative itself being drawn down into the terminal vortex of Conrad's illness. His obsessive thoughts, his compulsive behaviours, the constant torment of being on an adrenaline saturated state of alert, the insomnia and growing isolation and alcoholism, all seem to create a kind of momentum that draws the story towards an obvious conclusion. Robinson's description of this movement is so vivid that she reveals a kind of seduction that can easily be understood as operating at a fictional and an existential plane. If suicide seems like the obvious way to finish this novel, then can anyone doubt that suicide would be just as appealing a way out in real life?

On the terms set by this novel, Conrad's military training may have kept him alive in Iraq but it is very nearly the death of him on his return to civilian life. He cannot ask for help; to do so would be a dangerous weakness. He describes this bind to his parents as follows:

"The whole Marine ethic is that you're tough. You can take anything. You don't ask for emotional help. That's the one place you're on your own...Marines can't say they're in trouble. Not if they still think of themselves as Marines" 

Towards the end of the novel, one of the men from his platoon, Anderson, shoots himself in the head and Conrad seems destined to follow suit.

Robinson manages to arrest the seemingly inevitable but right up until the last page this outcome was very much unclear. She manages to convey a  sense of crisis that is both personal and general, and also, convincing. Conrad could so easily have killed himself - he was a hair's breadth from doing so and the reader is left with the conviction that others have and will do so.

This is a political novel but its great strength - the characterisation of Conrad - means that it never becomes sententious. Robinson concludes with noting that:

"Sparta failed, in the end, because the energies of the state were directed only toward war. Robbed of its young men, the country became hollowed out from within, and what remained was a hard, burnished carapace"

The message for the Unites States is clear enough here.

Sparta may be a novel directed at a contemporary American audience but its observations about violence and the crisis of masculinity are relevant in Ireland too. 

In this country, men are violent towards women, other men and themselves. Far more men than women are domestic abusers. The overwhelming majority of violent crimes in Ireland are committed by men.  Eight out of every ten suicides are by men. 

This novel is not going to solve these problems but its mapping out of what it is like to be a man, what it is like to be taught to act violently, shows how narrow, how cruel and inadequate such lessons are.