E X P OS ITI O N An Oxford University magazine
Issue 5, Michaelmas 2010
AUTHENTIC TRAVEL film tourism and our sense of place
CHILD SOLDIERS
what became of Liberia’s lost generation
THE POLITICS OF SCANDAL sex and truth in the Tory party
PLAYING GAMES
the moral wasteland of the console
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FROM THE EDITOR
T
he search for truth has always driven mankind. Religion, philosophy and literature are all to some extent motivated by the quest to find meaning where there would otherwise be none. Even our everyday academic pursuits see us dive into texts and equations in search of meaning. We are lucky enough to be able to examine these pursuits in every issue of Exposition, and more than ever in this fifth issue we can see it laid bare. Yet not only does the notion of ‘truth’ drive the writing, it manifests itself in some of the subjects studied in this issue. Verisimilitude has long been a fixture in literature, and in Nisha Manocha’s piece (Fact or Fiction, p.25), she explores the role of documents in blurring the divides between fact and fiction in literature. If you can deceive the reader into thinking that what he or she is reading is true, your text is all the more valuable. Andrew Littlejohn looks at a similar idea in the booming film tourism industry (The Quest for Authenticity, p.6), where film scenery becomes a very real holiday destination. Yet what is ‘true’ when reality and fiction collide, and why does it matter? In Helena See’s exploration of the role of scandal in the downfall of the Tory government in the nineties (Notoryous, p. 28), she discusses our Freudian preoccupation with sex as key to the truth about an individual’s identity. In several high-profile sex scandals involving senior members of the Tory party, the credibility of a government which had promoted this link between sexual morality and legitimacy was destroyed. Elsewhere in this issue, Cara George’s photo sequences document the miniscule facial changes in video-gamers; changes which normally happen too quickly for the eye to perceive. Alongside her photo essay, Paul Martin looks at our reactions to games in a slightly different way, questioning the moral narratives that are incorporated into increasingly complex games (Games of Life, p.16). Finally, we must express our thanks to our sponsor, Blackwell’s, whose Norrington Room will provide the setting for an innovative production of Doctor Faustus in February. Bronwyn Johnston examines the power of the Faust story in its own time and in ours (The tragical history of Dr Faustus, p.22). Robbie Spargo
WORK FOR EXPOSITION If you are interested in working for Exposition in any capacity, visit www.expositionmagazine.com to find out what positions are available and how to get involved. The deadline for applications for Hilary term 2011 is midnight on Friday of 7th week this term (Friday 26 November). As well as contributors we are looking for good writers who can edit text creatively, design enthusiasts and people looking to do some marketing and finance related work.
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CONTENTS
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ANTHROPOLOGY Is film tourism an expression of ruthless Western cultural imperialism, or a simple redefinition of the meaning of place?
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SOCIOLOGY
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PHOTO ESSAY
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LITERATURE
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LITERATURE
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The child soldiers of Liberia’s civil conflict face a change of identity in peacetime, but the transition to civilian life is not straightforward
Video games constantly present the gamer with moral dilemmas, but are they ultimately indicative of moral bankruptcy?
The Faustian pact has resonated throughout literature for over four centuries. But what is it that makes it so captivating?
Documents claim to be objective, official and true, but literature has long incorporated them, blurring the line between fact and fiction
POLITICS Thatcher’s moral crusade against sexual deviancy was central to Conservative success, but paved the way for an orgy of Tory sex scandals
IMAGE | NOEL QUIDU COURTESY OF WAR PHOTO LTD.
The quest for
authenticity ANTHROPOLOGY | The phenomenon of film tourism is a new area of study, but one which could lead us to a new understanding of why we travel and its impact globally
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he question lies in every traffic jam on melting roads, in the limbo zone that is every airport, on every Breton beach in the pouring rain: why do we travel and why to the places we go? Although tourists have long been an ubiquitous feature of even the most remote field sights, only recently have the insecurities of globalization led social scientists to turn their gaze towards them. The picture they paint is far from charming. The increasing sense that globalization has disturbed the previously stable boundaries of places – an idea implicit in phrases such as the ‘global village’ - has created a sense of crisis; a profound unease as to how, to quote the geographer Doreen Massey, ‘in the face of all this movement and intermixing, can we retain any sense of a local place and its particularity?’ The question of authenticity – for ‘real’ food, crafts and people – has obsessed millennial scholars of tourism. Unlike primitive societies, where solidarity depends upon every individual’s keeping his place, nowadays individual morality is only tenuously linked with community. In ‘modern’ societies, they claim, the emphasis has shifted from traditional relationships between people to fantastic relationships between institutions. As a result, tourism today appears to be part of a search by alienated moderns to fill this gap by seeking out ‘primitive’ visions of life, mainly through travelling to places where the individual seems more wholly integrated into his or her society. However, this ‘quest for authenticity’ is always frustrated, because the staged experiences created by locals and the tourist industry – what some scholars call ‘staged authenticity’ – deceive the unwary traveller. More seriously, by transforming local cultures into commodities, tourism can also rob them of their meaning, and destroy
their ‘authenticity’ for the residents themselves. But we should not take this depressing view of tourism as read. In the last few years, anthropologists have begun to query these academic projections of globetrotters. There are, after all, many different kinds of tourist cultures, from backpacking to package holidaying to cycle clubs, and the motivations of these diverse travellers cannot be easily pigeonholed. How, for example, can the idea of a tourist’s ‘search for authenticity’ be squared with the world of filmlocation touring? Film tourism Perhaps it was posing as Harry Potter in the Oxford Bodleian’s ‘sick wing’, or even sitting on the famous bench graced by Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting – chances are, you will know somebody who has experienced the phenomenon of movie tourism firsthand. The industry’s credentials go back a long way. The film which, inadvertently, kick-started film location tourism was Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), whose release saw enchanted viewers flocking to the pristine shores of Tahiti. Today, movie tourism has grown to occupy a significant portion of regional economies. An amazing 300,000 people a year visit Salzburg as film location tourists, and in the UK the Harry Potter films alone heralded a 120% rise in visitors to Northumberland’s Alnwick Castle, bringing some nine million pounds into the regional economy. With figures this large, it is hardly surprising that movie tourism can crop up in the most unexpected places – not least the deserts of South Tunisia, home to numerous sites from George Lucas’s Star Wars films. In one tour, guests can visit a converted Berber granary, Ksar Ouled Soltane, >>
IMAGE | © ULRICH MÜNSTERMANN WWW.MUNSTERMANN .NET
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If Star Wars is a form of imperialism, why is it any different to that of the Romans, or the Arabs, or Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any of the other historical disturbances that have shaped the various societies of North Africa?
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which served as the spaceport Mos Espa; another fortified granary, used for pick-up shots of the slave quarters; and the hotel Sidi Driss, which was used for interior shots of Luke Skywalker’s home. As part of the attraction, one can even sit down and eat a meal in the very spot that Luke Skywalker did in the film. How is one to understand this intrusion of American cinema into the landscape of Tunisia? It is hard to see the desire to visit a Star Wars set as the search for authentic local culture. Tourists are well aware that Star Wars is not ‘real’, just as the many Tolkien tourists who flock to the Tongariro Crossing, New Zealand, do not believe they are seeing the real Mordor. On the contrary, tourists appear to be consuming their ‘own’ culture, ‘abroad’. Clearly then, not all tourists are motivated by the desire to seek an ‘authentic’ foreign experience. But if not, then what is it they are after? A postmodernist might say that the Star Wars movies have reconfigured and replaced the landscape of Tunisia for American viewers, and have become more ‘real’ than the Berber granaries: the simulation has replaced the original. At first glance, this interpretation certainly seems to fit. Simulation is certainly an important aspect of the entire experience. Surveys conducted with participants of Lord of the Rings tours, New Zealand, concluded that the more perfect the presentation of hyper-reality in the tour, the higher the satisfaction. Cultural geographer Stefan Roesch has written about how tourists seek to imaginatively immerse themselves in the space of the film, often through re-experiencing and re-constructing scenes. He describes how in Salzburg, couples frantically competed with each other to pose ‘romantically’ in front of the gazebo used for the ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen’ and ‘Something Good’ scenes in The Sound of Music. On Star Wars and Lord of the Rings tours guides often assist tourists, where possible, in recreating the exact angle and poses from the movie for their photographs. Listening to music from the film whilst exploring the sites is also a common experience. These examples point to a form of ‘immersive’ film tourism, where the drive is to insert oneself into the space created by the movie. Some of Roesch’s informants described how they wished to deepen their emotional attachment to the characters and story through experiencing its physical space. Film location tourism appears in these examples as seeking to recapture a certain psychological or emotional state: an aim far removed from
any supposed ‘quest for authenticity.’ The anthropologist Christoph Brumann sees in the background of touristic practice a different motive: the personalization of the landscape, or its incorporation into narratives where the tourists themselves are the heroes. For all the imitation that is involved in film location tourism, one can still understand its connection to a particularly modern notion of the autonomous, reflexive self, where tourism is a means of self-creation through the careful building and layering of ego-centred stories and experiences. They are inserting themselves into the film, and consequently making it their own. This new consensus should not be taken at face value. Research into the causes behind tourism is still in its infancy. However, new anthropological research does posit an appealing alternative to the millennial idea of a ‘quest for the authentic’, and blurs the boundaries between the global and the local. You are where you go. Cultural imperialism? Aside from finding out what it is that motivates us to travel, one overriding question remains: what effect does film location tourism, indeed tourism in general, have on the places visited? Does the overlaying of an American fictional narrative, and subsequent efforts to realize it for profit, denude the place of meaning for local people? The problem with the classic sociological perspective on tourism as ‘contemporary cultural imperialism’, the postmodernist reading as ‘simulation’, and the ‘quest for authenticity’ question, is that all assume there is a real, original culture whose integrity tourism threatens. The notion that Star Wars tourism is degrading Berber culture, for example, is problematic. If Star Wars is a form of imperialism, why is it any different to that of the Romans, or the Arabs, or Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any of the other historical disturbances that have shaped the various societies of North Africa? The name Berber is itself an outside imposition, probably borrowed from Arabic or Greek, and dating back to the time of the Vandal invasions. From a historical perspective that sees North African culture as shifting and changing, and North African people as constantly in the process of making themselves and being made by others, Star Wars appears as another stage in a history of interpenetration. The definition of what constitutes a place >>
IMAGE | HOTEL SIDI DRISS © ULRICH MÜNSTERMANN/WWW.MUNSTERMANN.NET
IMAGE | THE LARS HOMESTEAD
© LUCASFILM LTD. & T.M.
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IMAGE | HOBBITON, NEW ZEALAND, IGNACIO IZQUIERDO
>> does not have to be through simple counterposition to the outside; rather, it can come through linkage to that ‘outside.’ A perspective which sees the meaning of a place emerging at the intersection of multiple, sometimes contradictory, practices and discourses implicitly rejects the idea that tourists are replacing a unique, original culture with inauthentic, ‘simulated’ experiences: there is no simulacra, because there is no original. Seen from this perspective, places such as Ksar Ouled Soltane are no longer seen as having some essential ‘meaning’ or character, but as being constructed out of the interactions between people IMAGE |
ALNWICK CASTLE, OR ‘HOGWARTS’, ROMAN JOWANOWITSCH
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holding different understandings. For the tourists, it is Star Wars; for the Berbers, a granary and meeting place. Thus the tourist narratives of Tunisia as Star Wars, or New Zealand as Middle Earth may be viewed as no less fictional than Aboriginal Australian song-lines, or any other myth which gives colour and meaning to the landscape. Even more pertinent to the debate is how locals can incorporate films, film sets and the tourists that follow into their own sense of place and cultural identity. There is evidence that, far from destroying local heritage, the money brought in by tourism may help preserve sites (such as the Hotel Sidi Driss in Tunisia), by making them economically viable – and publicise little-known beauty spots, as hobbit hype has done for New Zealand’s national parks. All sociological research shows an awareness of film as the medium which bridges the gap between people, places and the imagination, constituting localities as loci of international renown, concern and contestation: global spaces. Commodification may actually facilitate the preservation of a culture in decline. At the outset, authenticity was the primary concern for sociologists of tourism, who took as their starting point a number of problematic, postmodernist assumptions about the contemporary world, and projected these insecurities onto their subjects. However, anthropology has called into question the rationales behind this. If people are constantly making and re-making themselves at the centre of innumerable interconnections, some of which extend beyond local boundaries, then to try and identify which parts of culture are ‘authentic’ is an exercise in futility. Tourist cultures are as authentic as any other. A N D R E W L I T T L E J O H N recently completed an M.Phil in Social Anthropology at St Antony’s College. Before coming to Oxford, he spent two years living in Japan, one as an M.E.X.T. Scholar.
WHEN THE WAR IS OVER SOCIOLOGY | Ravaged by years of civil war, what hopes do Liberia’s youth have for the future?
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Many small children were drafted into the war with no socio-political perspective of why it was even happening. Kill or be killed; live by the gun, die by the gun
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heir appearance is just so different” one man remarked in a thick, Liberian accent. “They have no regard for hygiene and that kind of thing. And [when] you see them you fear them. If you get to interact with them, even then not too freely. But even here in their midst, you gotta be afraid for your things to be stolen. You get what I’m saying?” Former combatants are notoriously dangerous, violent, and untrustworthy. The sight of so many young men on motorbikes, street corners and curbsides in Liberia’s capital city was one that made me tighten the straps on my backpack and keep my white face set, my searching eyes firmly concealed behind my sunglasses. Liberia was racked by 14 years of civil unrest as part of a brutal power struggle between President Charles Taylor and a myriad of rebel groups. The intermittent conflict was waged throughout the country, including in the capital city of Monrovia. The conflict officially began in 1989, and concluded in 2003. Since then, the United Nations reports, over 100,000 combatants have been disarmed, more than 10,000 of whom were children, girls as well as boys. But for many of them, the conflict will never fully end. They find themselves in a challenging socio-economic landscape, in which over half the national population is below the age of 35. Unemployment is over 80% and shows no sign of decline any time soon. The road networks have deteriorated or been destroyed by years of neglect and abuse during the conflict. Young people flock to the city looking for work, education, the hope of something better. For many, urban life becomes a fight for survival, one with few comforts or conveniences. Seven years after the ceasefire, running water and city power remain intermittent luxuries, gracing only parts of the capital. I spent six months in Monrovia conducting field research for my thesis, a project to consider the life chances of ex-combatants and war-affected youth in Monrovia. Academic and humanitarian literature often focus on the negative impacts of trauma and social stigma experienced by former combatants and it is an obvious truism that both can have an enormous impact on a person’s life. However, what is often forgotten is that trauma is not specific to those who actively participated in combat. Civilians have seen and heard and experienced violence that leaves them traumatised as well. Such trauma is then accompanied by prejudice against former combatants, though its effects are more often assumed than clearly substantiated. It is all too easy to say that ex-combatants can’t find jobs because people don’t like them,
but is that the whole story? It is important to fully account how young people perceive their position in post-war society, and how they intend to chart their own trajectories into adulthood. In other words, are the life chances and trajectories of ex-combatants markedly different from those of other young people? The Ex-Combatant Identity Ask the average ex-combatant what they had been fighting for and they won’t be able to tell you. Some could answer that they fought for freedom, or for peace — the promise being that once their army took over, things would be different in the country. They existed to “take President Doe out of the chair,” or to “remove Charles Taylor.” These represent some of the more politically informed answers. Many said that their faction’s sole objective was to keep the other rebel group out of the city, or out of a particular territory. One very honest young man grinned and said “maximum death and destruction in minimum time”, a slogan of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia. Others merely responded that they didn’t know why their group had gone to war. What the political or socio-economic circumstances may have contributed to the war, or to a faction’s involvement in the war, was often entirely removed from their own experience. What they could tell me was why they were fighting. In the majority of cases, reasons were proximate and dire. Many small children were drafted into the war with no socio-political perspective of why the war was even happening. Kill or be killed; live by the gun, die by the gun. For many, it was their only source of livelihood, and one that afforded great power and status. They achieved rank and wealth. They remember with pride the manoeuvres that led to promotion, the power of the gun in their hands, and the luxury of money and material goods that they looted from banks, stores and homes. They took on sensational war-time identities like “General Dirty Water”, “General Next to God”, “General Kill the Bitch”. These are names that some still go by. It’s as though their lives advanced in an alternative social world that crumbled at the conclusion of the war, leaving many homeless and directionless. The 2003 cease-fire was the end of an era, and heralded their demotion. While it signalled the beginning of something new and good for so many civilians, disarming and demobilizing meant disempowerment and loss to many soldiers. >>
PREVIOUS PAGE | NOEL QUIDU COURTESY OF WAR PHOTO LTD. IMAGE | A FORMER CHILD SOLDIER
ABBY HARDGROVE
IMAGE | A GROUP OF YOUTHS GATHER TO PLAY POOL
ABBY HARDGROVE
>> It is in situations like these that the role of stigma becomes clearer. With no family attachment, ex-combatants often band together. If you stop a man on the sidewalk in Monrovia, chances are he can tell you where the ex-combatants live. There are ghettos and neighbourhoods sprinkled throughout the city that are known as hubs for ex-combatants. They congregate in their own communities, where there are others with a common experience. Sometimes they form gangs that provide a social network and a way of life in the absence of their own family systems. A social identity is formed and reinforced. The war remains present in the lives of ex-combatants, even after seven years of peace. The Trajectory towards Deviancy
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The social system that was created and sustained during war supported and empowered young men in very particular ways. For some, the war was a good time to began families, paradoxical though that might seem. They had wives and children that they could support either from their pay as government soldiers, or from the looting that took place during the conflict. As one young man explained to me: “The gun, that money in your hand. You got a gun, you and two or three brothers, you go house to house, and it’s all yours.” Post-war society simply doesn’t support that way of life. Suddenly “big” men are no longer powerful. Their pockets are not lined with “easy money.” They lose the status they held because they were fighters, ranked officers. Much of the respect they commanded from others was commanded at the tip of a gun barrel, and without it, they are far less
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significant. For them, peace destroyed a comfortable way of life that they are unable to achieve in peace-time society. From there, it is but one small step into deviancy; after all, ex-fighters are prime candidates for criminal activity and violence. It’s what they know. Though a blanket assumption that all ex-combatants are prone to violence and crime is entirely unfair, tales of armed robbery, hijacking, rampant drug use, gang violence, and murder are common among former combatants. Their involvement in these activities usually stemmed from their relationships with family. Some had been refused by their families, a devastating but common occurrence. Others simply refused to go home. One young man explained to me, “When we had arm (guns) we feel we had power that we carry. So we felt that we were mature. So when the war subsided, and they took the arm from us, we felt shame. We felt too big to return to our parent’ houses, to be called ‘baby.’” Symbols of adulthood are vital among the former child soldiers. The war provided rites of passage and symbols of advanced social status that instilled feelings of pride and accomplishment. For example, one such symbol of adulthood — particularly for men — is owning a car of your own. When the war ended, the new administration took back all of the government vehicles that had been used by Taylor’s military. A very important status symbol was yanked from very proud young men. They could support themselves and their families during the war. Without the vehicles, and no consistent income, their peace-time lives are accompanied by deep feelings of humiliation. There are no hard and fast statistics on the numbers of former combatants living lives
IMAGE | A STREET IN MONROVIA
STEPHEN VAN DER MARK
of crime, but it is not hard to understand why such an existence would appeal. The Straight and Narrow This is, however, by no means the universal reality. Prospects seem to have genuinely improved for ex-fighters who have a family system to receive them. This is one reason that Dennis’ story is so different from so many others I heard. His family has the means and the willingness to incorporate him, to support him, and he in turn, is helping to support their business on the beach. Dennis’ demeanour exudes the grace and confidence of someone at ease with himself and the world. Had his friend not mentioned to me that Dennis fought the war, I never would have identified him as an “ex-combatant.” Clean and well dressed, he leads a peaceful life and runs a successful business as a proprietor of an entertainment center.His business attracts a mix of ex-combatants, Liberians deported from the U.S., and others who simply had nothing else to do. As life chances go in Monrovia, they are fortunate. At bare minimum, most have families or extended kin who can afford to feed and clothe them. Or like Dennis, they have found an occupation that gets them through consistently. Washington’s story offers another clear illustration. He was displaced during the war. His father is dead. His mother became unable to feed and clothe him. He left for the street. With no job market to speak of, and few skills of his own, to support himself he stood by the road to help unload cars and trucks bringing goods into the city. As he explained, many still uneasily walk the line between legitimate and illegal work.
“The money I used to get unloading truck – it was very little. Yeah, it was very little. There are more than 500 bags of coal and four men. They give us 300 dollars [less than 5 US dollars]. Four persons, 300 dollars. So that money was not really enough to sustain me for the day. Do you understand? I can’t lie, I did plenty of bad, bad things then. I did plenty of bad, bad things.” As Washington’s story illustrates, even those who have not been “socialized” into criminal activity and violence find it difficult to avoid in such reduced socio-economic conditions. Where Next? The effect of 14 years of civil war on a nation are simply unquantifiable. No hard and fast statistics exist to demonstrate what the war and its aftermath mean for the life chances of these young people. For my part, I am at the beginning of my data analysis. Despite several months living alongside former soldiers, it is hard to draw definitive conclusions. A number of people such as Dennis have apparently managed to make something of themselves, despite the displacement, disruption and destruction the war and the subsequent outbreak of peace brought. For many others, though, the path of deviancy, of drug-use, of violence and crime, appears to be the only viable path their socio-economic landscape can afford them. A B BY H A R D G R OV E is a DPhil student at Exeter College based at the Department of International Development. She majored in Psychology at Lee University, Tennesse, and took a MSc in Child and Family Development from the University of Georgia.
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PHOTO ESSAY | With videogames increasingly viewed as sophisticated storytelling devices, is it time to reconsider our reactions to them in light of their moral narratives?
GAMES OF LIFE Y
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ou are Sam Fisher and you have a dilemma on your hands. As a National Intelligence Agency operative you have spent the last several weeks deep under cover in the hideout of a terrorist militia group. Thanks largely to the intelligence you have gathered the Feds are closing in and the group is running on borrowed time. Inside, the leader of the group introduces you to a suspicious character caught snooping around nearby. Unbeknownst to the terrorist it is your long-time colleague, friend, and operations coordinator of the current assignment, Irving Lambert. They hand you a gun and order you to do what is necessary. Do you sacrifice your friend for the greater good or jeopardise the mission by blowing your cover? Of course you are not really Sam Fisher. You are just playing Ubisoft’s 2008 videogame, Splinter Cell: Double Agent, and while both you and Sam face the same decision, this decision presents itself very differently to player and character. As so often with moral decisions in games, what pricks the character’s conscience piques the player’s curiosity, and the relationship between player and character rarely involves a direct mapping of emotional states. Sam’s dilemma is that of countless spy thrillers and action movies, framing a satisfying, if not terribly complex, moral predicament in which a clear moral principle on a personal level is in conflict with an equally clear moral principle on
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a societal level. The dime-a-dozen cartoon villains of comic books and Bond films take a particular thrill in this kind of thing; imperilling the lives of millions of innocents on the one hand and the hero’s love interest on the other, leaving just enough time to save one but not both sets of victims. But what’s the attraction for an audience? Traditional media leaves a gap between the audience and the hero, whose handwringing bespeaks a moral turmoil independent of the audience. There is room here to be surprised by the hero’s decision, to know and judge him by it, and it is in this surprise that much of our interest in the hero lies. But the dramatic possibility of this familiar situation is undermined in videogames, where it is the audience who dictate the protagonist’s decisions. Our understanding of comic book heroes is determined by the decisions they make, but how can I judge Fisher when he is merely following my lead? To the extent that Fisher’s decisions are delegated to the player, situations of this kind are neither surprising nor revelatory of character. Of more relevance to the player are the strategic implications of Fisher’s actions, and in this regard, the choice would seem to be a simple one. I take the easy option, killing Lambert and ensuring that for the rest of the level I remain undercover, completing the level easily and mourning Lambert no more than a chess player would mourn the queen that has been sacrificed for a quick check-mate.
But it is not that simple. Videogames have been doing a lot of growing up lately, and this is reflected in the crop of games over the last ten years that have attempted to include moral choice as a central game mechanic. At their best these games provide a forum for the exploration of morality in the face of abstract scenarios, posing questions as to the very nature of our own personal moral motivations: why do we act in the way that we do? In role-paying games like Knights of the Old Republic or the Fable series these mechanics often take the form of moral metres, developing the main character over time into a beacon of virtue or a wretched sinner depending on the player’s choices. More sophisticated games may probe deeper, refusing to judge the rightness of an action and forc-
ing the player to reflect on the situation long after the decision has been made. Fantasy role-playing game The Witcher put the player in the role of a troubled demon-hunter whose every decision affects the lives of those around him. To add flavour into the mixture, no decision has a clear ‘good’ option: do you kill the vampire, knowing that she is an essentially evil creature that will do harm to the local citizenry, or does the moral character of the situation change when you learn that she volunteered to be sired to escape an oppressive family? In a film, a novel, a play, this decision is always predetermined, regardless of the opaqueness of the moral tableau, revealing something of a particular character: with The Witcher, we make the best choice we can within the constraints of the game. >>
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>> But what if we go one step further, offering in-game incentives for particular moral choices? Returning to the example of Splinter Cell, we find morality more subtly expressed: it is a game in which the moral tone is established through an aesthetic that makes clear the appropriate way of playing, and is reinforced through the game’s scoring system. If I must traverse Fisher across a room full of enemies, I score highest if I remain undetected and the enemies remain unharmed. Knocking out or killing enemies may be the quickest way across the room, but if I rely too much on this brutish tactic I score low and may lose out on endof-level rewards such as special equipment and weapons. The message is quickly reinforced and soon despatching a guard becomes an innately unsatisfying tactic, lacking the grace and elegance that is central to the game’s aesthetic. The tactic is not just wrong because it scores low – it feels bad. Playing with the grain of the game’s aesthetic is more satisfying, neater than playing against it. Resisting it is not exactly cheating, but it leaves the same sour taste; the same sense that the easy victory is a hollow one. Perhaps this sense of the expedient as negative and the hard-won as positive is fundamental to games. According to Bernard Suits, author of Grasshopper: Games, Life and
Utopia, a major feature of games is the preference of ‘less efficient means’ towards the accomplishment of an objective. Such a way of conceptualising morality is not new: it is even tempting in this context to make the analogy with the ‘straight and narrow’ of the good life in the Christian moral tradition. Of course, the ‘bad feeling’ experienced when playing against that aesthetic which Splinter Cell establishes is not in itself moral. It only becomes moral through the clarifying effect of those dramatic elements that imbue the game’s ‘tokens’ and objectives with human and social characteristics, with virtual life and death. By overlaying these two aspects of the game – the ludic and the dramatic – the game can make use of the emotional impact of the aesthetics of gameplay – its joys, its frustrations, its satisfactions – in the service of its story. For Sam, killing Lambert is bad because it is evil. For the player, it is bad because it is easy. PAUL MARTIN studied Psychology at University College Dublin and 20th century English Literature at University College London. He is currently a PhD student at Brunel University researching the aesthetics of space in videogames. His other research interests include the history of videogames, morality and games and game aesthetics.
MODEL S | PHOTOGR APHY |
EDWARD AND ETHAN GEORGE CARA GEORGE is an undergraduate at Christ Church College studying Fine Art at Ruskin, School of Drawing and Fine Art. She works diversely in many forms, including sculpture, using steel, acrylic and even creating smaller, temporary sculptures of ice and ink. Photography is a way for Cara to document her work and has also become a way for her to pursue a fascination with the body. Further and expanded photo essays at www.expositionmagazine.com
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The
tragical history of DR FAUSTUS
LITERATURE | The Faustian pact and the debt that must be repaid is one of the seven archetypal stories of the world. What is it about the iconic German academic that so captivates us even now?
E
asily one of the most popular and celebrated plays of its time, Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus dramatises the story of an academic whose thirst for learning leads him to strike an infernal bargain. Yearning to uncover the secrets of the universe, John Faustus exchanges his soul for twenty-four years of seemingly unrestricted knowledge and power, only to discover that the devil too has his limits. As compelling as it is devastating, the Faustian theme has resonated throughout some of the best Western literature of the last four centuries. It is perhaps surprising then to learn that the origins of the famed Doctor Faustus lie in fact rather than fiction. Stories of a Johann or Georg Faust appeared in print as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century. The original Faust was a German scholar who acquired a reputation for black magic. Legends of the cursed necromancer circulated around central Europe during his lifetime, and from about 1570 onwards, tales of the doomed doctor began to appear in manuscript form. In 1587 the first Faustbook, a chapbook detailing the supernatural and often comical exploits of Faustus and his demon familiar, Mephistopheles, was printed in German. From its very beginning, this book exerted an incalculable, and almost incomparable, influence on European literature: the speed of its dissemination across Europe from the printing of the first Faustbook is astonishing. Within a few short years the story had been translated into English, Dutch and French, and by 1592, Marlowe’s rendering of the fiendish tale had made its debut on the Elizabethan stage. Marlowe’s play opens with Faustus frustrated by the limits of different academic disciplines, tossing books aside and declaring that: Philosophy is odious and obscure; Both law and physic are for petty wits; Divinity is the basest of the three, Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vile ‘Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me.
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Ravished by magic, or the idea of magic, what drives Faustus’ desire is the need to know more: he suffers from an insatiable curiosity. He desires to travel to the furthest corners of the globe, to gain knowledge of the workings of Heaven and Hell, gain control over the elements, and have the characters of a mythological past materialise in front of him: to hear “blind Homer sing”, to summon apparitions of Alexander the Great and his paramour, and for his own personal pleasure, to lie with Helen of Troy. To do so he turns to supernatural sources, bargaining his immortal soul in order to become, for a short time, a superior mortal. Perhaps the most intriguing character in Doctor Faustus is not the Doctor himself, however, but his devil, who, through his promise of servitude and supernatural obedience, ultimately accedes to a position of dominance. Mephistopheles appears in the earliest of the Faust legends: he is a devil whose express purpose is to appeal to the chronically curious, as the source of forbidden knowledge and temptation. Faustus’ devil is a truly Renaissance creation: a product of the humanist desire to embrace knowledge and discover the full potential of man. Like Faustus, Mephistopheles is a fallen being. Indeed, the parallels between the two characters are striking. Marlowe’s devil will give only teasing hints about his own tragic demise. Whilst we are told that he fell with Lucifer for defying God, Mephistopheles refuses his magician the information he so desires about Heaven because of his own sorry banishment: “Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God and tasted the eternal joys of heaven am not tormented with 10,000 hells in being deprived of everlasting bliss?” This is where the beautiful symmetry of Marlowe’s play lies: we see the humanisation of the devil as well as the demonisation of the human. Faustus’s first request of Mephistopheles is that the devil return in the guise of a Franciscan friar because “that holy shape becomes a devil best”. From the very beginning of their partnership then, both man and demon appear as human. The fallen doctor and the fallen devil even occupy the same spatial realm: the boundaries between earth and hell are difficult to detect for “hell hath >>
FAR LEFT | SIR IAN MCKELLEN AS DR FAUSTUS IN A RSC 1974 PRODUCTION, EMBRACING A LIFE -SIZED PUPPET OF HELEN OF TROY. LEFT | HILMIR SNAER GUÐNASON PLAYING
MEFISTO IN A 2010 YOUNG VIC
PRODUCTION OF FAUST. PHOTOGRAPHER:
GRIMUR BJARNASON.
BELOW | PUNCHDRUNK: FAUST © 2006. FERNANDA PRATA AND GEIR HYTTEN. IMAGE: STEPHEN DOBBIE.
FAUST
for our times
Since the start of the twentieth century, Marlowe’s Faustus has been eagerly sought after by both directors and actors alike, regarded by all as a play with great theatrical promise. This must be, at least in part, because the play abounds with such fantastical and extravagant visuals. The Minions of Hell that Faustus summons, and the central section of the play where we see Faustus playing practical jokes on the pope, a sceptical knight and a horse dealer all present opportunities for vivid dramatisation. But theatre critic Michael Billington of The Guardian has pointed out that the appeal of the play goes deeper: “Modern directors have grasped the point that Marlowe’s play is much more than a Hieronymus Bosch floor show book ended by great poetic passages of desire and damnation.” Billigton identifies a 1974 RSC
production, directed by John Barton and starring Ian McKellen as Faustus, as the turning point. That production attempted to evoke the feeling that all the action was taking place inside Faustus’ head, using life-sized puppets to render the infernal illusions that appeared on stage. Since then dramatic reinventions of the Faust myth have been plentiful. A recently announced collaboration to take place next February in Oxford, has been a source of particular excitement. That collaboration is between the acclaimed Creation Theatre Company and Blackwell Bookshop. The company intends to stage a production of Doctor Faustus in Blackwell’s Norrington Room. With its three miles’ worth of bookshelves, director Charlotte Conquest hopes that the Norrington Room will provide the perfect backdrop for the drama of the scholar with the insatiable appetite for learning to unfold.
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>> no limits, nor is circumscribed in one self place.” Yet can we believe everything Mephistopheles says? Neither Faustus nor the audience can ever quite trust the charismatic devil’s words and sentiment. Mephistopheles is tainted by the same suspicion that dogs his elaborate tricks, performed solely to gain the sympathy and trust of his spectators. In subsequent manifestations of the Faust story, the Mephistopheles figure is frequently internalised within Faust’s mind, representing the aspect of the human psyche that gravitates towards the forbidden. The immediate influence of Marlowe’s Faustus is readily detectable in the multitude of devil plays that appeared in its wake. The Faustian pact, this complex and often ambiguous relationship between human and devil, was staged repeatedly in stories of magicians, witches, and other supernatural entities, both as tragedy and comedy. In two other early modern incarnations, Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c.1592) and the anonymous play The Merry Devil of Edmonton (c1608), the central characters are both academics who, like Faust, fall victim to the slippery slope of curiosity yet succeed in evading the conditions of their respective Faustian pacts. However, neither play has enjoyed the enduring popularity of Marlowe’s drama. This is precisely because it is the tragedy, the inescapable consequences of the pact, and the discovery of its emptiness that makes the play so captivating.
Herein lies the beautiful symmetry of Marlowe’s play: we see the humanisation of the devil as well as the demonisation of the human
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Indeed, Faustus has exercised an influence that extends far beyond the subsequent drama of the Renaissance; it has spawned a wealth of artistic adaptations that continue to examine the Faustian character who challenges the boundaries of his own nature through an innumerable variety of contexts and cultural media, from opera and farce to puppet shows and film. The story has been addressed in music by everyone from Wagner to Radiohead. In more recent times, the Faustian theme has received increasingly secular treatments as the religious conflicts of the original tale are sidelined in favour of exploring attempts to negotiate seemingly irreconcilable ideologies. The Faustian theme has often been used as a rhetorical device, a vehicle for political and social commentary. In the early-to-mid twentieth century, the Faust character was adopted by National Socialists and incorporated into Nazi ideology. Their portrayal of Faust was as a courageous soul, righteously pursuing knowledge and ready to challenge authority. Written between the two world wars, Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947) exposes the falsities of the Nazi myth by juxtaposing the decline of the Faust figure against the devastating consequences of fascist delusion. Abandoning theology for music, Mann’s Faustus, Dr. Adrian Leverkhun, is a struggling artist whose infernal bargain sees him contract syphilis in a bid to enhance his artistic genius. The resulting madness leads Leverkhun to believe he has exchanged his soul for musical brilliance. Mann shows the reality of the Faustian character; neither a brave nor commendable icon but rather a sick, misguided man who destroys himself. Leverkuhn’s own degeneration is set against the demise of Nazi power as Germany faces the consequences of its own Faustian pact.
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These ideas of political turmoil and sacrifice for creative genius stand in opposition to each other in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1947), which transposes the Faustian theme to Stalinist Moscow. In a rather ironic treatment, Bulgakov paints the ‘pact’ in a far more sympathetic light, as a means of supporting the individual spirit struggling against the austere and repressive governmental control of Communist Russia. Distanced from the notion of evil, the devil provides a means of ensuring the titular characters’ happiness and rescuing creative enterprise. Similarly Václav Havel’s drama Temptation (1986) makes a social comment on the absurdly rationalist ethos enforced by the communist regime during normalization in Czechoslovakia. Havel’s treatment of the Faust theme is darkly comic. The Mephistopheles figure, Fistula, is a repulsive vagrant, and his necromantic temptations serve as a cure for the boredom induced by the unimaginative day-to-day life of a scientist, Foustka. Both Bulgakov’s and Havel’s treatment of the Faustian pact emphasise then the shortcomings of rationality in its failure to acknowledge the human need for curiosity, creativity, and desire. After five hundred years of retelling, what is it about the Faust myth that continues to captivate us? In part its appeal must lie in that age-old fascination with forbidden knowledge, and the burden of an obsessive need to define – and defy – human limitations. Whether it be the dangers of an inquiring mind and intellectual obsession, or simply wanting more – eternal youth, wealth, power – the Faustian pact promises a shortcut to such desires, and we can understand its drawing power irrespective of era or treatment. Yet we cannot escape that nagging sense of poetic justice that makes us all too aware that the debt, no matter how terrible, must be repaid. The real power of the Faustus story lies in the way we find ourselves caught up in the unsettling ambiguity that arises from the knowledge of the necessity of that repayment. We are certain of the diabolical consequences of Faustus’ bargain, and yet we understand the intense need he feels to satisfy his curiosity, and so even we will the Doctor to yield to temptation. These conflicting responses to the drama cannot, of course, be reconciled, and this is the tragedy of the story: we cannot escape the moral framework, the consequences of the pact. It is this dissonance that gives rise to the haunting uneasiness that continues to fascinate. And haunt Faustus certainly does. In the first Faustbook the spirit of the ill-fated doctor returns as a ghost, his students “certain which saw Doctor Faustus look out of his window by night as they passed the house”, as mesmerising in death as he was in life. And so too the Doctor’s story lingers. Repeatedly used as a framework through which to explore irreconcilable convictions, from crises of faith and curiosity, to the clash of reason and desire and the consequences of repressive ideologies, the hellish covenant between human and devil finds a new incarnation in every age. The Faust story, it seems, will continue to haunt us. is a second year DPhil student at Keble College researching demonology and science on the early modern English stage. BRONWYN JOHNSTON
Doctor Faustus runs at Blackwell’s Bookshop from 4 Feb – 26 March 2011. Box Office: 01865 766266 or online at www. creationtheatre.co.uk. Booking opens 4 October
IMAGE | MAN SOLL NICHT
ASEN MIT PHRASEN, 1930, KURT SCHWITTERS
Fact or fiction?
LITERATURE Documents fill our day to day lives. But what is it about reports, diaries, letters and the like that profess to be true, objective, and official which make them a perennial concern for literary representation?
“
As the novel sought credibility in the literary marketplace, writers incorporated documents like letters and journals in their stories. The invocation of the document was a claim to historicity
”
26 EXPOSITION Michaelmas 2010
I
t is 13 September 2006 and what seems like the entire blogosphere is discussing one person –Bree Avery. Under the username ‘lonelygirl15’, Avery had posted hundreds of video-blogs on Youtube, ostensibly sharing her life story with legions of subscribers. Except that none of it was true. Avery was, in reality, a New Zealand actress called Jessica Rose; her blogs had been scripted; the entire lonelygirl15 Youtube channel was an experiment in online entertainment that aimed to tell a completely fictional story under the guise of a confessional video-blog. Of course, lonelygirl15 was not the first to present a work of fiction as the biographical story of a bona fide person. Nearly 300 years ago, Robinson Crusoe was written in exactly the same vein, with Daniel Defoe presenting himself as the editor of Crusoe’s memoirs, rather than the book’s author. Defoe’s maintained the pretence, writing: “The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it.” The ‘memoir’ detailing Crusoe’s adventures from being shipwrecked to living as a castaway for years on an island, also includes excerpts from a journal apparently written by Crusoe while on the island, complete with dated entries. By posing as the mere editor of Robinson Crusoe’s firsthand account, Defoe intended that Robinson Crusoe would be read as the truthful document of a true survivor rather than as his own fictional creation. For a time, it worked. Robinson Crusoe was largely accepted as a memoir, until a search for further evidence about the man Robinson Crusoe revealed Defoe’s work to be fiction. Defoe was obliged to defend himself against claims from the public that he was a disseminator of lies — a charge he seemed to anticipate in the preface to his later novel Moll Flanders, which awkwardly oscillates between insisting it is a genuine “History” written by the protagonist, and acknowledging that the language has been modified and portions excised by a discerning editor so as not to offend the “chastest Reader.” Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is just one of many stories from the early eighteenth century to pretend to the form of a factual document. Yet the use of documents in literature does not end with the eighteenth century: it extends far into the twentieth century and, in the age of mass media, is being reinvented yet again. Documents can even be found in the works of modernist authors who dramatically challenged traditional aspects of the novel, including James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. More often associated with the banalities of daily life, documents are usually characterised by their predictability: set styles and forms, and composed in bureaucratic or impersonal language. Although the creation of virtual file-storage and the delete button may have recently abated the output of documents, their paper counterparts have certainly not disap-
peared. We see them as a necessary evil, inextricable from the processes and practices of contemporary existence. “We can lick gravity,” rocket scientist Wernher von Braun once complained, “but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming”. In this view, the commonplace document is the antithesis of the imaginative act that is fiction. So what is it about documents such as newspapers, reports, letters and telegrams that makes them an irresistible literary device for so many authors? Like Defoe, Samuel Richardson presented his epistolary novel Pamela as a document. The author’s note to the novel famously claims that the novel, a collection of letters, is founded upon “truth and nature.” Not only did the success of Pamela incite a series of literary responses that were also composed of epistles, but other writers, attempting to capitalise on the novel’s popularity, claimed they, too, had access to Pamela’s letters. Richardson, entangled in a legal dilemma, was forced finally to drop the guise of editor and claim authorial ownership of the narrative. Robinson Crusoe and Pamela were products of the disputes over fiction in seventeenth-century England. For fiction to be taken seriously, it could not be a ‘romance’. Romances, typically extravagant, consisted of recycled classical plots and fables. ‘Romance’ was therefore a derogatory term, used to denote history without truth, or a falsehood. In the early eighteenth century, the problem of the association between romance and falsehood plagued the new kind of writing, known as ‘the novel’. As the novel sought credibility in the literary marketplace and in reaction to the problem of inauthenticity that romance posed, writers incorporated documents like letters and journals in their stories. The invocation of the document was a claim to historicity. Documents have indeed been perceived as tools for conveying true and factual information since the fifteenth century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the ‘document’ was first defined as a piece of legal writing, while a later definition in 1459 added that it could furnish ‘evidence or information upon any subject.’ The official character of the document’s legal uses as well as its evidentiary status infused it with the dual qualities of authority and authenticity, undoubtedly concepts underlying Defoe’s and Richardson’s decisions to emulate these forms in their writing. However, in the late eighteenth century hundreds of epistolary novels were published, and yet were not censured by the public for feigning fact like Robinson Crusoe or Pamela had been. According to one comprehensive survey of epistolary fiction in the late 1700s, one out of every three novels published was written as a collection of letters. In other words, that prose fiction might take the form of letters was no longer considered exceptional. Once the novel developed as a genre, and fiction was no thought of as a synonym
IMAGE | THE INCORPORATION OF DOCUMENTS IN ART :
PICASSO’S GLASS AND A BOTTLE OF SUZE
for lies, dissembling, or counterfeit, it was no longer necessary to invoke factual records as a source of legitimacy. Despite this altered conception of prose fiction, documents did not disappear from literature. Rather, invoking records, letters and journals became accepted as a strategy to convey verisimilitude. In the case of the epistolary novel for example, letters are used as tools to access the innermost thoughts of a character and capture their particular voice without the mediation of a narrator. As technological innovation and socio-political change altered the types of documents available and in popular use, novels began to represent a wider variety of documentation in different ways. The literary response to the nineteenth century proliferation of newspapers included both a sense of scepticism about the journalistic enterprise and an abundance of textual references to existing newspaper articles. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton portrays the newspaper as a pernicious social force, making public Mary’s private horror over her lover having been unfairly accused of murdering the son of a factory owner - a crime Mary’s father John committed. Once the story is circulated in print, there is no turning back for Mary. By the early twentieth century the novel had long since been a legitimate genre in its own right; it was taken seriously as more than pure diversion or art for art’s sake. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for example, did not need to invoke the newspaper narrative or the official report to lend authority to the text, neither was there any doubt as to its status as fiction. Yet, in using fictionalised ‘official’ reports and newspapers in Heart of Darkness, Conrad invoked the supposedly ‘factual’ document as part of a powerful critique of the way in which institutional texts overtly prioritised imperialist aims at the cost of the truth. The official reports of the civilizing mission taking place in the Congo portray European colonizers as emissaries of light and progress. However the protagonist Marlow’s visit to the Congo reveals the opposite: that Europeans are to blame for senseless acts of violence and exploitation. Heart of Darkness was acknowledged as one of the most powerful written indictments of European imperialism in the
Congo in fiction or nonfiction. E.D. Morel, founder of the Congo Reform association, praised Heart of Darkness as a work that exposed the reality of colonialism, calling it “the most powerful thing ever written on the subject.” That Conrad’s novel might be hailed as a force against social injustice and a veracious document in its own right indicates that by the turn of the century, the relationship between documents and the novel had changed. Documents were no longer necessary to lend authority to a work as they seemed to have been for Defoe or Richardson. Conrad’s insistence on including documents in his novels might be better understood as part of a preoccupation with affirming and yet undoing the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, proving the fallibility of ‘truthful’ documents. Conrad achieved this by highlighting the way in which items like official reports could abuse the claim to truth made by nonfictional documents. The relationship between fiction and nonfiction in literature continues to evoke ambiguity today. Quite apart from the blog fiction of lonelygirl15, let us take the popular example of James Frey. We only need think back five years ago to the James Frey/ Oprah Winfrey face-off that featured Frey admitting that elements of his ‘autobiographical’ book had actually been fictional. Frey and his publisher packaged his story about his battle with drug addiction and alcoholism, A Million Little Pieces, as a memoir. After several details in the book could not be corroborated and Frey revealed that he altered events for the purpose of his telling, the book was branded a “fictional memoir”. It would be near impossible to argue for the absolute truth of any document. Furthermore, the very concept of truth or the capacity of language to describe reality at all is increasingly questioned. However, it is clear that the professed distinction between fiction and nonfiction, between the novel and the document, are of the utmost importance to us, not only conceptually, but in their practical application. Telegrams, newspapers and the memoir will continue to be documents by virtue of their generic claim to truth and we will continue to be dissatisfied with them so long as they do not fulfil this expectation. Traditionally evoked as an appeal to the authoritative and the authentic, or as a strategy to give the appearance of truth to the narrative, the document in fiction also becomes a tool in negociating the borders between fiction and nonfiction. Yet in the hands of authors, documents—professedly objective and true—are subjective and imaginative constructions. Thus, concomitantly, and, at times, inadvertently, the limits of the document are revealed. The underlying tensions that arise between the proximity of fiction and nonfiction forms prove most enduring and compelling. How do we read fiction and nonfiction differently and why are we consumed by maintaining their divide? Literature does not try to answer these questions and perhaps only implicitly phrases them in the first place. However, the document’s persistence in literature is, at least, a healthy reminder to keep asking these questions as we read, whether it be ‘fact’ or ‘fiction’. NISHA MANOCHA is a doctoral student in the Department of English Language and Literature. Her thesis considers the interrelationship between early Modernism, documents, and imperialism. She is co-convenor of “Texts and Contexts: Interdisciplinary Seminar on Postcoloniality and Empire” at Wolfson College.
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28 EXPOSITION Michaelmas 2010
POLITICS | From Thatcher’s ally to Major’s nemesis; the tabloid press was fundamental both to Conservative populism and to its scandalous decline
O
n 8 February 1994, the Conservative MP Stephen Milligan was found dead inside his London home. The cause of death was autoerotic asphyxiation; he was discovered wearing stockings and suspenders with an orange in his mouth, a plastic bag over his head and a piece of flex around his throat. This was the fifth in the series of sexual and financial scandals that cumulatively played a significant role in the fall of the Major government in 1997. Among those to take up the Conservative beacon of notoriety were Richard Spring, whose threesome with a Sunday school teacher was exposed by the News of the World, and Piers Merchant, whose affair with a 17-year-old nightclub ‘hostess’ marred the 1997 general election right up until the bitter end, as well as the more well-known Conservative fiascos involving Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken. Tory ‘sleaze’ has long been part of the narrative of Conservative decline and fall to New Labour. But how exactly scandal came to be a mechanism powerful enough to play a part in bringing down an entire government, is not something that is ever really interrogated. The ruling class have been having illicit affairs and engaging in unorthodox sexual practices since time immemorial, yet it is only relatively recently that the private lives of political figures have come to be seen as central to their public functions. In his History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that from the nineteenth century onwards, Western society has increasingly regarded sexuality as the key to the essential truth about an individual’s identity. ‘For us’, he said, ‘it is in the confession that truth and sex are joined, through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of an individual secret.’ As a kind of forced confession, scandal and our obsession with it is the modern expression of the trend that Foucault identified. Foucault’s observation underpins much of the tabloid coverage of Conservative scandal in the eighties and nineties. On the disclosure of Tim Yeo’s first love-child in early 1994, The Sun proclaimed that ‘A man’s private life is the most reliable guide to his character… People have the right to know the TRUTH so they can decide whether a man can be trusted with their vote.’ Similarly, tabloid coverage of Milligan’s death effectively identified his sexual proclivities as the central, monolithic truth about his identity, >>
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>> dismissing all other elements of his life as a sham façade, designed merely to disguise his guilty secret. The Mirror proclaimed that Milligan’s ‘glittering career’ had been exposed as ‘a tragic charade.’ The Sun, meanwhile, presented his relationships with various girlfriends as ‘all a front’ to conceal his ‘solitary vices’. Yet the centrality of private life to modern British politics had even more powerful and immediate causes than this broad cultural trend. Taken as a whole, Britain in 1980 was a profoundly socially conservative place. The British Social Attitudes Survey found that in 1987, the proportion of respondents who believed homosexual relations to be ‘wrong’ was 74%. In the same year, the figure for those who believed extra-marital sexual relations to be ‘wrong’ was 88%. These strikingly high figures reflect the widespread sense of anxiety among the British population in the eighties regarding the recent advances of ‘permissiveness’, especially in the form of radical sexual liberation movements and the advance of feminism – an anxiety later exacerbated by the AIDS epidemic. The permissive reforms of the 1960s had been moved well in advance of popular opinion, which lagged in particular on the issues of homosexuality and capital punishment. As one Sun editorial read, as late as 1994, ‘It doesn’t bother MPs that a consistent 75% of the British people want vicious killers to be hanged. It doesn’t impress them that most of us feel deeply uneasy with condoning acts of teenage homosexuality. Parliamentarians prefer to rely on their own consciences.’ In the context of such endemic popular conservatism, there were substantial electoral benefits to be reaped. Both in policy and rhetoric, the Conservative presentation of homosexuals and feminists relentlessly positioned these agents of permissiveness as threatening to the family, and ultimately to the entire social order. As Thatcher said in 1982, the family was the bedrock of ‘a nation of free people’, which could ‘only continue to be great if family life continues and the structure of that nation is a family one.’ The Conservative vilification of homosexuals and feminists was therefore couched in terms of a defence of the very nation itself. A number of Thatcherite policies represented an overt attempt to cash in on the groundswell of popular moralism and anti-homosexual feeling that disgorged itself throughout the eighties. Section 28 famously banned the teaching of homosexuality in schools as a ‘pretended family relationship’, presenting it as something that
1983 Cecil Parkinson resigned from the cabinet after it was revealed that his former secretary Sara Keays was carrying his child. Keays claimed the Tory party later sabotaged her own political career to minimise the scandal.
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1987 Jeffrey Archer was exposed for sleeping with a prostitute and paying her to keep quiet. Archer successfully sued the Daily Star for libel, but was later imprisoned for perjury and perverting the course of justice.
Paradoxically, the Tories had themselves increased the severity of the sexual and social conservatism that they later fell foul of would multiply through propagation, and destroy familial society from the bottom up. Similarly, feminism and what were perceived to be its associated ills of illegitimacy, divorce and single parenthood, were attributed to the permissive society by Thatcher and her ministers throughout the 1980s, and vilified for its destructive effect on the patriarchal nuclear family. The Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990 restricted the access of unmarried women, including lesbians, to artificial insemination; like Section 28, it presented single mothers as ‘pretended’ parental figures, given too much free reign by the advances of feminism. As such, the rhetoric of the Thatcher administration constructed a model of normative sexuality against which sexual deviancy could be defined and marginalised. The extraordinary extent to which its resulting discourse was shared by the tabloid press is apparent from the intricate level of discursive features common to both government rhetoric and the tabloid narrative on scandal. Just like Section 28, the News of the World’s exposure of MP Michael Brown’s affair with a 20-year-old (then underage) man deliberately conflated homosexuality and paedophilia in order to frame the former as a threat to the family. It focused on evidence provided by another man involved with Brown’s underage lover, described as ‘a promiscuous homosexual who prowls sleazy gay leather clubs… “I love strapping 14-year-old blonds, but any pretty young boys will do me,” he admitted.’ As part of its coverage of the Milligan scandal, The Sun ran a piece on homosexuality in the Commons, which claimed that: ‘Quite a few gays are believed to have sham marriages… One senior minister said: “Parliament is the perfect cover for a homosexual. The hours mean MPs only see their families at weekends. That is no loss to a gay.”’ Thus, a scandal involving a single, by all accounts heterosexual, man was used to generate a discourse which not only dichotomised homosexuality and family values, but presented the former as a threat to the latter. Similarly, discussion in the tabloid press of the pregnancy of Cecil Parkinson’s mistress Sara Keays in 1983 echoed government
1992 David Mellor was eventually forced to resign from the cabinet after the People tapped and published his phone conversations with his mistress, actress Antonia de Sancha.
1994 Tim Yeo was discovered to be the father of not one, but two love-children, just months after several Tory ministers launched a vocal attack on single mothers at the launch of the ‘Back to Basics’ campaign.
discourse in its treatment of the ‘negative’ trends associated with feminism. The Sun lamented the fact that illegitimacy no longer seemed to be considered immoral, and argued that feminists were contributing to this disturbing social trend by actively choosing to raise children as single mothers. Indeed, it was repeatedly suggested that this is what Sara Keays herself had chosen to do: ‘In the era of the birth pill,’ commented The Sun blithely, ‘an intelligent mature lady of 36 does not often become pregnant by accident.’ On issues of sexual morality and the family, the tabloid press acted as the crucial link between the Conservative government and its vast populist constituency, not only consolidating, but also constituting the Thatcherite model of patriarchal sexual normalcy. In 1994, 80% of voters read a tabloid, compared with less than 50% in 1970. As The Sun famously claimed after the 1992 general election, ‘IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT’ – a claim which the then leader of the opposition, Neil Kinnock, notably echoed. In this respect, the new dynamic between government and press was politically and electorally beneficial in the age of Thatcher herself. It was no doubt on this basis that Major attempted to capitalise on these political benefits by continuing Thatcher’s legacy with the ‘Back to Basics’ campaign of 1993. As Thatcher had done before him, Major continued to posit national crisis as the result of permissiveness, presenting crime as a consequence of family breakdown, and zealously announcing a clampdown on child pornography. At the same Party Conference, several Cabinet ministers launched vehement attacks on single mothers as the unifying emblem of family breakdown and welfare dependency. As is well known, the string of Tory sex scandals that came hot on the heels of ‘Back to Basics’ made a political mockery of its message. Yet what was being undermined was more than just this specific anti-permissiveness campaign – this was more than just hypocrisy. In attempting to deny the relevance of his ministers’ private behaviour to the politics of ‘Back to Basics’, Major was effectively denying the very mechanism that had served to mobilise the popular support which the Conservative party had thrived on for over a decade. It displayed a fundamental failure to grasp the nature of the relationship between government, public, and press, and the profound way in which that relationship had changed under Thatcher.
1994 Stephen Milligan was found dead in his London home. He died of autoerotic asphyxiation. He was discovered wearing stockings and suspenders with an orange in his mouth.
1995 Richard Spring was exposed by the News of the World for having had a ‘three-in-a-bed romp’ with a Sunday school teacher.
Ultimately, the tabloid discourses that so successfully brought down Tory after Tory in the 1990s were the very same ones that had thrived, to the government’s advantage, in the 1980s. In the run-up to Major’s catastrophic defeat in the 1997 general election, sleaze dominated the political agenda to saturation point, denying him the chance to set out his party’s stance on any other issue. The Sun gleefully described how Tory MP Piers Merchant ‘WHIMPERED with excitement as [his 17-year-old mistress] stripped him naked. She BOUND his hands with her stockings. Then they had a night of TORRID sex – as Merchant’s wife and family slept at their home in his Kent constituency of Beckenham.’ In a companion piece entitled ‘Voters blast his porkies’, ‘Jo, 43, said: “I was a Tory voter but now I’m not sure”’ whilst, ‘Housewife Lynn Bickerson, 30, said: “Thank God The Sun is prepared to expose scandals like this.”’ Ironically, the evidence indicates that it was the very popularity of the Back to Basics message that heightened this public disillusionment and outrage at the behaviour of Major’s ministers. The revelation of Environment Minister Tim Yeo’s love-child an embarrassing three months after the launch of ‘Back to Basics’ and its attendant criticisms of single mothers triggered a grassroots revolt against Yeo by his own constituents, in flagrant disregard of Major’s own backing – the first occasion of its kind in living memory. In an interview for the Mail on Sunday Yeo was asked, ‘Are you a victim of the popularity of the Government’s policy?’ to which he replied, ‘The level of shock that [my constituents] have experienced may have been in some way increased by the success of the government’s message. Yes that’s possible.’ Paradoxically, the Tories had themselves increased the severity of the sexual and social conservatism that they later fell foul of. By capitalising on the popular homophobia and reactionism of the British public through campaigns like ‘Back to Basics’, Thatcher and Major had effectively colluded in the creation of a new political culture which returned to haunt them. Major was ultimately Thatcher’s heir, but he was also the victim of her success. is one of the founding editors of Exposition. She was awarded the Gibbs prize on completing her BA in History in 2010. Her undergraduate thesis, on which this article is based, was entitled, Guardians of the public sphere? Scandal and the press, 1979-1997. HELENA SEE
1995 Jonathan Aitken publicly vowed to ‘cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism with the simple sword of truth’ following Guardian allegations of corruption. He was later imprisoned for perjury.
1997 Piers Merchant was exposed by the Sun as having had an affair with a 17-year-old nightclub ‘hostess’, whom he took canvassing with him at the 1997 general election.
31 EXPOSITION Michaelmas 2010